Writing the Self: Henry James and America (review)

In Writing the Self: Henry James and America, Peter Collister takes his reader on a decidedly leisurely but not unpleasant stroll through what one might call the “American” texts of the last decade of James’s life. Both challenged and invigorated by America’s overwhelming modernity in the early twentieth century, James, according to Collister, found in America “an appropriate location for his late exploration of male subjectivity” (12). More particularly, Collister argues that during his 1904–05 tour and afterward James discovered in America a space in which he could pursue more overtly and with greater intensity his interest in pushing the boundaries of male homosocial relations and in articulating the revised definitions of masculinity that had always been latent in his fiction.

That James’s return to America after a twenty-year absence was at once “destabilizing” and a “release . . . allowing a franker expression of the self in both his personal and professional writing” (26) seems a distinctly familiar argument, coming as it does so many years after Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity (1991) and the numerous re-evaluations of The American Scene that it inspired, such as Sara Blair’s Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (1996) or Gert Buelens’s Henry James and the “Aliens”: In Possession of the American Scene (2002). Nor is Collister’s claim that in the later work James more directly and more subversively expresses his interest in homosocial and homoerotic encounters likely to raise many eyebrows among the current generation of James scholars. What is most original about Collister’s claim is precisely the linkage of the two arguments—that in late James America is most especially the place where women are marginalized and men encounter one another with a new intensity and with a wider variety of relations. That thesis, when it emerges, is carefully articulated and subtly nuanced, so that Collister convincingly elucidates the subversively homoerotic nature of James’s late American texts while still seeming to describe a James who does not seem out of place among the Edwardians.

Unfortunately, however, Collister’s carefully articulated thesis is diffused throughout 255 closely printed pages and emerges only intermittently, so that the volume more often reads like a highly detailed guided tour of James’s texts than a thesis-driven interpretation of them. Glancing at the table of contents, one begins to apprehend Collister’s relaxed pace, as he devotes the first four chapters after his introduction entirely to consideration of The American Scene (1907). These chapters make enjoyable reading, provided one has the patience for Collister’s highly associative and allusive, one might even say Jamesian, method. The first of them focuses on James’s response to New York, showing how the profligacy of the city in 1904 reduced the ambivalent James to a homoerotically charged state of “pleasurable, sensation-filled submission, a condition of surrender and of being possessed” (14). In one of his frequent asides, Collister reflects that James’s account of a ferry ride and his appreciation of a crowd of young men are such that “James might have been the speaker in Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,’” which poem Collister then quotes liberally (29). Other allusions, however, seem superfluous to the chapter’s ostensible thesis: “Like Fanny Kemble, who generations earlier (in the 1830s) had been surprised ‘in this land of contemptuous youth,’ [James] is shocked at the rows of houses ‘with their handsome faces so fresh and yet so wan and so anxious’” (17). Even if the comparison were not irrelevant to Collister’s focus on the Jamesian homoerotic, Fanny Kemble’s general response to the society of 1830s New York would appear to have little bearing on James’s disappointment with architectural trends seventy-five years later. In such instances, Collister seems less interested in advancing his argument than he does in making use of all that he knows and has read (which is admittedly a great deal).

Further chapters on The American Scene examine James’s...