Composing America

In its ambitious incompleteness, The American Scene is Henry James’s loose baggy monster, his own central consciousness finally unable to corral the multitude of his impressions of the United States into a form commensurate with anything other than disappointment, if disappointment can be said to have a shape. Though James had initial confidence in the success of his project—writing to his publisher that “I shall be able not only to write the best book … ever devoted to this country, but … frankly the best—ever devoted to any country at all” (HJL 4: 327)—his trip results in an accumulation of experience at the expense of comprehension. As the meaning of America slips away into the “fine blank space” (AS 381) of the country’s seemingly endless making and remaking of itself, so too does James’s ability to manage what he sees of his former homeland.

In the early sections of the work, James is at times reminiscent of the Cheshire cat, fading from a scene in which he walks through the fields of North Conway, only to suddenly reappear in another a few sentences later, this time in the top of a coach in Jackson, New Hampshire, overhearing the too-loud talk of boisterous young passengers who thoughtlessly share their intimacies with everyone else onboard. As he moves farther south, though, James no longer pops magically in and out of the landscape. Instead, we become aware of the long distances he travels between one city and the next and the varieties of discomfort engendered by bad weather and jostling transport. He is disciplined by his circumstance, most infamously by the “criminal continuity” of the Pullman that not only restricts his vantage on the landscape but also punishes him for having resisted the “mockery” of its buffet car by delivering him to his hotel too late to partake of the sumptuous meal he has been anticipating all evening long (AS 437). Out for a smoke at the southernmost edge of America, and contemplating the “hot-looking stars” of the Jacksonville night, James is mystified and dismayed by what his country has become.

But as Robin Hoople reminds us in Inexorable Yankeehood: Henry James Rediscovers America, 1904–1905, James was only six months into his trip to the United States by the time he reached Florida. There were still months of traveling and lecturing ahead of him and many more occasions for him to register the dismal differences between the America he had left behind and the one that made him gasp as he stepped off the ferry in Hoboken. Hoople died before Inexorable Yankeehood was published, and the book came to press with the editorial assistance of Isobel Waters, who contributes an analytical coda to the book as well. Robin was also my thesis supervisor and a friend, so writing about this study of “the reciprocating collision between Henry James and the United States” (9) is not the usual intellectual task of a distanced scholar.

Inexorable Yankeehood is a study of The American Scene as James’s “theory of America,” spelled out in an “alphabet of impressions” (12). It is also an analysis of James’s reception by the journalists who anticipated, recorded, and commented upon the American sojourn that resulted in The American Scene. The book’s goal is to track the mutual observation of America by James, and of James by the American press during the writer’s ten-month visit to his homeland, a trip Hoople describes as James’s “most prolonged publicity stunt” (11). The originality of this work is its painstaking research into the press response to James’s self-appointed assessment of the new world. Hoople uncovers a shift in tone from self-conscious apprehension of James...