Civilization and Its Contents: Henry James's Return to New York, 1904

166 The Henry James Review essay on Honoré de Balzac that he published in 1902, James positively gushed about the "old—that is [die] young—feelings" that "page after page" of Balzac evoked. "Without having abandoned or denied our author," he admitted, "we yet come expressly back to him, and if not quite in tatters and in penitence like tiie Prodigal Son, [then] with something at aU events of the tenderness witii which we revert to the parental threshold and hearthstone, if not, more fortunately, to the parental presence." Balzac, James observed, was one of those authors who have been "inteUectuaUy so swaUowed, digested and assimUated that we take their general use and suggestion for granted, cease to be aware of them because they have passed out of sight. But they have passed out of sight simply by having passed into our lives. They have become a part of our personal history, a part of ourselves, very often, so far as we may have succeeded in best expressing ourselves." The three papers we have just heard, not to mention their own precursory promoters of the James-Hawtiiorne relationship, certainly warrant the claim that Hawthome, too, was one of the writers whom James had "swaUowed" and "digested." But James's prodigal enthusiasm for Balzac also warrants another claim, if I may recaU the quotation from James's Hawthorne with which I began. James's return to Balzac as a Prodigal Son suggests that, in becoming "more cultivated," "more Europeanised," and "more cosmopolitan"—in pointed contrast to die provincial Hawthome—James had not escaped a precursory paternal influence so much as he had substituted one father for another and made himself, as it were, a son twice removed. Looked at another way, however, James occupies another (and famUiar) position, for in the JamesBalzac relationship, as he defines it, he occupies a subordinate position much like the one he leaves for Hawthome in the Hawthome-James relationship—just one more example, in other words, of James ironicaUy finding himself in Hawthorne's place. Beverley Haviland—Civilization and Its Contents: Henry James's Return to New York, 1904 We can only hold fast to die fact that it is rather die rule than me exception for die past to be preserved in mental life. —Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents When Henry James returned to America in 1904 after a more than twentyyear absence, he wanted to see whether his native land had succeeded in becoming interesting or only very wealthy. Writing in The American Scene of a "delightful old piUared and porticoed house" near Washington Irving's Sunnyside , he explains the principle of his hope and die extent of his disappointment: "There we catch the golden truth which so much of the American world strikes us as positively organized to gainsay, the truth that production takes time, and tiiat the production of interest, in particular, takes most time." The American world seemed "to gainsay" the production of this kind of interest by, among other things, its relentless destruction of many of the cultural signs it had already created. James laments, for example, die "extinction, in their prime" of many new mansions along Fifth Avenue. Very Uttle of the architectural landscape he (cont. on p. 168) Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 167 The John Jacob Astor and other mansions, 1901. Fifth Avenue below 65th Street looking northeast: "... the constant shocked sense of houses and rows, of recent expensive construction . . . marked for removal, for extinction, in their prime."—The American Scene Photograph by Byron, 1281. The J. Clarence Davies CoUection, Museum of the City of New York. 168 The Henry James Review had known in his youtii had survived: tiie original New York University built in the Gothic style was gone; the old Metropolitan Museum on Fourteenth Street had vanished "as utterly as the Assyrian Empire"; the spire of Trinity Church was dwarfed by WaU Street skyscrapers. Even the birthplace of WiUiam and Henry James off Washington Square had been obliterated. The usual cause of New York's constant reconstruction was, James discovered again and again, die pursuit of profit: old buildings were torn down to make way for more lucrative and taUer arrangements...