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  • Vagaries of Place: Buoyed by Memory, Betrayed by History
  • Martha Banta

Henry James had ever a keen sense of place. He actively cultivated his awareness of how, through memory’s recall, places fed his comprehension of what had happened, is happening, and might yet happen. Specific sites gave him confidence that the look of the landscape offered continuity and grace, notwithstanding dramatic breaks in the social scene. Summers in Newport in the 1850s let him absorb “the shine and surge of the ocean” and the “wonderful sky” (PP 347), just as Italy’s “spell” of “youth, freshness, hope” prior to the ’60s would permeate his imagination (WWS 11). As for the historical events that intruded upon his young life, the American Civil War “cut from beneath the feet” all that was “familiar” and “firm,” yet there was good in it (HA 116). If it portended a “future more treacherous, success more difficult,” it also signaled the coming to knowledge that brought a rude but necessary conclusion to adolescent dreams (117).

James felt that he, as the Master, was ahead of the game, one of “the moderns” through his ability to reassess the simplicities of Newport, the primitivism of New England’s cultural landscape, and the innocent delights of Italy. So armed, he could confront alterations in the local scene during his visit to the States in 1904. He also believed he was up to the task of dealing with whatever lay ahead upon his return to his home-perch in Rye. That is, until August of 1914 when “the huge shining indifference of Nature” was revealed to be in league with the “unthinkable massacre and misery” of Europe’s war-ravaged landscape (LHJ 404). Thus he discovered that he had been fooling himself all along.

James had trusted the coherence of the narratives he fashioned from the convergence of places, memory, and history’s passage to withstand the complexities that overlaid revisited sites. Proud (arrogant, perhaps), he held to the faith that, however unsettling, “modern civilization” was manageable within the remembering mind. But then, on a languid summer day in 1914, as he looked out over the English Channel, [End Page 75] he faced the shock of “the wreck of our belief that through the long years we hadseen civilization grow and the worst become impossible” (403).

I shall touch on a series of James’s reflections upon “the sweet, superior beauty of the natural things that surround[ed]” the “gaieties and vanities of Newport” in the late 1850s and his re-entrance in 1904 into the gently feminine landscape of New England (PP 339–40). Up to this point, James’s memory-world was inevitably complicated and sometimes disturbing yet still within the imaginative grasp of the restless analyst who made careful distinctions between the functions of history and of places. But then came World War I and the betrayal by history of human hopes.

James’s first Newport experiences came, at fifteen, when he returned from Europe in 1858 with the family that was always on the search for pleasant and inexpensive places of residence. He would spend two lazy summers and an intervening year at this small, insular town, enjoying long walks with his friend Thomas Sergeant Perry, interspersed with sketching lessons with William Morris Hunt, before returning to the cheaper climes of Europe in October of 1859. It was a good time, one whose special qualities he recalled in an essay for Portraits of Places in 1870. However, as he freely admitted in the note he appended in 1884, the years that intervened between the boy’s experiences and the portrait conjured up by the publishing writer meant that his little essay “can now have (in some slight degree) only the value of history. The lapse of thirteen years will have brought many changes to . . . Newport” (n. p.). Within the essay he lightly protests that “I suffer from knowing the natural elements of Newport too well to attempt to describe them. I have known them so long that I hardly know what I can think of them” (344). Nonetheless, he liked to think that his recollections captured the timeless truths of this valued landscape.

James glances...

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