The Fresh Start and the Broken Link: Henry James’s The Ivory Tower

"THE FRESH START AND THE BROKEN LINK": HENRY JAMES'S THE IVORY TOWER PETER BUITENHUIS The American Scene (1907) reveals how little the United States in the early twentieth century appealed to the visiting expatriate Henry James. It was his conclusion that the "money-passion," as he called it, ruled the nation and was blighting much of its life. According to James, most Americans wanted to make vast sums of money so that they didn't have to "mind" the inconvenience, the desperate pace, and the bad manners of the country.' As a relief from witnessing this obsession James turned to places where the remains of a less materialistic past still lingered: to the woods and fields of New Hampshire, to Concord, to the Hudson Valley of Washington Irving, and to Newport. His return to the Rhode Island resort made him recall his earlier days there right after the Civil War, when he was a member of a little band "who confessed brazenly to not being in business," and who sacrificed openly to "the ivory idol whose name is leisure," It did not take him long to realize, however, that Newport could nevermore be the home of such a group of "detached and delightfully mild cosmopolites." Since his last visit, over twenty years before, the new wealth had invaded the little town and put up those monstrous mansions along Ocean Drive: "white elephants," he called them, "all cry and no wool, all house and no garden." 'What an idea," he wistfully remarked, "originally, to have seen this miniature spot of earth, where the seanymphs on the curved sands, at the worst, might have chanted back to the shepherds, as a mere breecling-ground for white elephants."2 He returned to England after his travels with huge relief and settled down in his "little downward burrow," as he called it, Lamb House, Rye. He was, he reported to Edmund Gosse, like a "saturated sponge.'" One of the projects on which he wished to wring himself out was a big American novel, but before he could begin there were many prior tasks to complete, including the revision and preface-writing for the New York edition of his fiction. Free of these at last, he was plagued by illness for a time and then hit hard by his brother William's death. As it turned out, it was not until the early summer of 1914 that he could really settle down to his long-delayed novel.' He was, of course, too late. What he Volume XXXIII, Number 4, July, 1964 left of the novel, The Ivory Tower, is merely a fragment, an incomplete construction of three and a part books of the ten which James intended to make up the whole. He did leave, however, in addition, the blueprint for the rest, the long scenario that James always drew up for his novels. The notes to The Ivory Tower are printed at the end of the text, but it is better to start with them, for they reveal the structure and part of the meaning of the intended whole. Moreover, by comparing these notes with the completed part of the novel, the reader can watch a great artist in the very process of shaping his work from an outline, bowing to the necessities of his form and to the demands of his creative imagination. The notes reveal how strongly many aspects of twentieth-century America had acted as a spur to James's energy, although they had at the same time galled his sensibilities. "Well before me ..." he wrote, "the fact that my whole action does, can only, take place in the air of the last actuality; which supports so, and plays into its sense and its portee. Therefore it's a question of all the intensest modernity of every American description; cars and telephones and facilities and machineries and resources of certain sorts not to be exaggerated; which I can't not take account of" (355-6)' What modern America, with its power, its pressures , and its gadgets was making of its people was to be the basis of the story. The structure of the novel was carefully planned. Like The Awkward...