Traveling in Italy with Henry James: Essays (review)

Book Reviews Henry James. Traveling in Italy with Henry James: Essays. Ed. Fred Kaplan. New York: William Morrow, 1994. 413 pp. $27.50. By Marc Bousquet, City University of New York Fred Kaplan's edition of James's Italian travel writing combines those essays for the first time with substantial excerpts from James's correspondence. Included are selections from letters to William and Alice, to James's mother and Henry Sr., and to other frequent epistolary partners such as Elizabeth Boott, Edith Wharton, Charles and Grace Norton, Ellen and Edmund Gosse, and Katherine De Kay Bronson (mistress of Casa Alvisi, the Venice residence serving as the topic of one of the essays). Traveling in Italy with Henry James includes all twenty-two of the essays from Italian Hours (except the lengthy "Italy Revisited," from which only the section dealing with Florence is presented) as well as two short excerpts ("The Spirit of Rome" and "Siena Early and Late") from William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903) and an introductory essay by Kaplan. This collection regularizes the loosely geographical organization of Italian Hours (1909) into five sections ("Venice," "Rome," "Florence," "Bay of Naples," "On the Road To and Within Italy") within which James's essays (and excerpts from his correspondence ) are offered in chronological procession. The reading experience thus differs from that of Italian Hours, emphasizing the sense of James's changing response to the Italian scene over time (in some sections as much as forty years). This editorial scheme acknowledges that the continuing appeal of these essays for scholars and James enthusiasts alike has as much to do with what they say about their author (and his specular practices) as what they say about Italy. The advantages of this recognition emerge prominently in the first section, "Venice," which spans the period 1869-1902. Typical of the essays written between 1872 and 1874, "Venice: An Early Impression" (1872) often appears unembarrassed by the touristic posture, even to the point of consuming picturesque squalor (beggar children suggesting "forcibly that the best assurance of happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of innocence and minimum of wealth" [36]). In the introduction, Kaplan remarks on the importance of seeing The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 219-30. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 220 The Henry James Review these essays as the production of a professional writer, and it seems possible that startling statements of this kind are due in part to James's response to the demands of the genre to which he addressed himself for money at an insecure phase of his career. In fact, James's early letters privately bring out some of the ethical and phenomenological complexities of seeing as a traveler. "I feel sadly as if I had done [Venice] wrong," he confessed to Alice in October 1869. "With more of selfoblivion I might have known her better and loved her more. Wherever we go we carry this heavy burden of our personal consciousness & wherever we stop we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton umbrella, to obstruct the prospect & obscure the light of heaven" (29). James was early concerned with the potential for the egoistic ideological baggage brought to the scene by the "personal consciousness" of the traveling subject to do violence to the object of its vision, as in the 1882 Venice essay where he scruples to point out that the specular structures of tourism are mutually embarrassing to the city "reduced to earning a living as a curiousity-shop" (53) and the vestry-gazer who treats "the place like an orifice in the peep-show" (52). He develops an openly embarrassed meditation on the traveler's ideology of vision: "The sentimental tourist's only quarrel with his Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries" (47). Acknowledging the guilty appeal of tourism, James nonetheless pits the museum-view of the traveler-discoverer (much like the museum-view of the solitary speculator Adam Verver) against the collective "family party" of the actual life of the city, which is auditory...