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192 c o d a Modernism, Multiculturalism, and the Legacy of the Mediating Nation I n the years following the First World War, as American literary critics began to assess the career of the recently deceased Henry James, the author ’s decades-long expatriation surfaced as a major problem—what, in The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925), Van Wyck Brooks called “the problem of his own deracination.”1 Critics as different from one another as Brooks, H. L. Mencken, and Vernon Parrington apparently could not forgive James for officially becoming a British subject at the end of his life, an action they seemed to view as James’s final betrayal of his homeland. In the November 1920 issue of Smart Set, one of the “little magazines” that had replaced William Dean Howells’s Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s as the gatekeepers of U.S. high literary culture, Mencken wryly suggested that James had “made the mistake of going in the wrong direction. . . . Chicago would have developed him. What he needed was intimate contact with the life of his own country. . . . He would have been a great artist in his own country.”2 At the close of the 1920s, Vernon Parrington’s opinion was virtually the same as that of Mencken and Brooks. Extending the negative connotations of the word “cosmopolitanism” into the era of modernism, Parrington argued that James “suffered the common fate of the déraciné; wandering between worlds, he found a home nowhere. It is not well for the artist to turn cosmopolitan , for the flavor of the fruit comes from the soil and sunshine of its native fields.”3 For Brooks, Mencken, and Parrington, Henry James, the author who had long been cited in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere as the most cosmopolitan of his generation, served as a cautionary tale of the dangers of deracination, exemplifying what artists might lose or leave unfulfilled if they uprooted themselves from their national culture. It is tempting, within the context of this coda, to allow these evaluations of Henry James’s career to represent the point of view of all modernists after the First World War. The logic that enabled such dismissals of James simply because of his cosmopolitanism certainly resembles the nativist literary Coda 193 aesthetic that Walter Benn Michaels has identified in the modernist fiction of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Just as Michaels argues of those novelists, Brooks, Mencken, and Parrington seem to engage in a nativist “reassertion of the distinction between American and un-American” as well as the “transformation of identity into an object of desire.”4 Moreover, the suspicion of foreign ideas and influence that registers in the three critics’ evaluations of James’s time abroad also found expression more overtly in the Red Scare of 1919–20 and in Congress’s rejection of the League of Nations and passage of the immigration quota acts of the 1920s, events that figure prominently in many accounts of the end of the Progressive era. Characterizing the debate over the League of Nations as a clash between “unilateralist [and] internationalist” attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy, for example, Thomas Bender suggests that “the spirit of nationalism [that the First World War] enhanced, partly through the repression of dissent, may have reinforced conservative unilateralism.”5 Yet the shortsighted dismissals of James as a “déraciné” do not reflect a wholesale disengagement from the global concerns that shaped late realism during the Progressive era. Such modernists as Gertrude Stein, who explicitly called Henry James her “forerunner,” and those associated with the Harlem Renaissance, whose early work often appeared in The Crisis, the journal edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, complicate the notion of a decisive break between late realism and modernism.6 Similarly, historian Emily S. Rosenberg’s depiction of the 1920s as the era of the “cooperative state,” in which successive Republican administrations encouraged private enterprise to carry out U.S. economic and cultural expansion, is more nuanced than simply labeling the politics of the period isolationist.7 In order to gesture toward the continuing legacy of the mediating nation , this coda briefly considers a critical tradition that emerged during the modernist era but which differed significantly from the one represented by Brooks, Mencken, and Parrington. Thus having opened this book with a reading of Woodrow Wilson’s April 20, 1915, speech, with its celebratory depiction of the United States as...

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