"Strange Deserts": Hotels, Hospitals, Country Clubs, Prisons, and the City of Brotherly Love

Let us think hard about Henry James thinking hard in The American Scene about enclaves of quietness, exclusivity, and style set in the midst of “the herded and driven state” of the national culture that fell under his analyzing eye upon his return to the States in 1904 (187). Now, for us to catch James in the act of pondering the conflicted relations that pit the individual’s craving for privacy against the demands of the social collective, and that set both against an artist’s needs, leads to the likelihood of, once again, laying charges against the man on the score of elitism, sexism, and racism. But we should press on nonetheless in order to ask the really interesting question whether James had any grounds for exacting “rights of privacy” from a democratic society dead-set against disallowing (to quote James) “the famous freedom of the cat to look at the king” (10).

The list of scholars currently engaged in evaluating James’s credibility as an effective social critic is lengthy; some of their appraisals—intricate and comprehensive—have advanced the general debate in admirable ways. My modest intention is to call attention to certain items of evidence concerning various social institutions that are strewn across the pages of The American Scene as James treks through the “strange deserts” of his native, yet alien land (170). I shall argue that these institutions elicited different reactions to matters of inside and outside, us and them, depending upon whether it is James the private individual who is affected, or James the eager craftsman.

It is no surprise that, “the impressions of the very first hours” James gathered upon his arrival in the States came from “the air of unmitigated publicity,” publicity as a “doom” that hung over the villas lining the New Jersey shore—villas erected, as it were, at Thorsten Veblen’s behest (AS 1, 9). The “barbaric” look of conspicuous consumption that opens The American Scene prompts reactions familiar to all Jamesians: “the expensive as a power by itself” that—“exerting itself in a void”—disregards the fact that the “highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted privacy” (9, 11). Without delay, we get one of James’s famous lists of absent things; in this instance, the qualities necessary for privileged privacies: “no achieved protection, no constituted mystery of retreat, no saving complexity, not so much as might be presented by a foot of garden wall” (10). But this is only the coast of New Jersey, that bland homogeneous blur where houses conduct themselves like hotels. Wait until James arrives in the bristling heterogeneity of New York City, the first best testing ground for determining whether hotels can serve as homes.

The Waldorf-Astoria, James’s elected place of safe haven, is wedged into the City that projects “the visitor with force upon the spectacle prepared for him.” The front of the great hotel is placed directly in the path of all the “violence outside,” “exposed to the vulgar assault of the street” (100). In order to enter, “the survivor scrambling out of the current” must make a “dash” through the swinging-door before the “amazing hotel world quickly closes round him” (101–02). Inside, the breathless James is confronted by the incarnation of “the hotel-spirit”; this in turn offers itself as the “American spirit” one that obliges the bedazzled guest “to unlearn” any previous “discrimination in favour of the private life” (102–03).

Like any hotel, the American hotel is a public place in the guise of a private enclave, but one which offers a different kind of social exclusivity than that found in Continental hotels. The “machinery” of Europe’s establishments runs according to “a smaller, stiffer way” for the sake of “only certain people who are in anything”; but American hotels, in keeping with the looseness that characterizes the nation’s social relations, see to it that “every one is, for the lubrication of the general machinery, practically in everything” (103).

Not that the Waldorf-Astoria fails to...