James's The American: The Novel and the Play

112 The Henry James Review James W. Ttittleton—James's The American: The Novel and the Play The idea of his novel The American (1877) came to Henry James, he later said, in the Preface to the novel, as he was seated in a horsecar in Cambridge, Massachusetts: "I found myself, of a sudden, considering with enthusiasm, as the theme of a 'story,' the situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some crueUy wronged, compatriot: the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible civiUsation and to be of an order in every way superior to his own. What would he 'do' in that predicament, how would he right himself, or how, failing a remedy, would he conduct himself under his wrong?" Yet when James sat down to write the novel, in Paris in the mid-1870s, he had in mind a social comedy in which a vulgar and mannerless Western mUlionaire, a commercial manufacturer of wash tubs and leather goods, would expose his gaucherie in the effort to win the hand of a French Countess, Madame de Cintré, daughter of the aristocratic De BeUegarde family in the Faubourg St. Germain. The early chapters of the novel are rich in social comedy. The comic American, making the obhgatory Baedeker visit to the Louvre, finds himself utterly baffled on the question of art and suffers from an "aesthetic headache" in trying to determine how France could present to him such a world of beauty and order not aU made by sharp railroad men and stockbrokers. Christopher Newman, the protagonist, is meant to be a Christopher Columbus in reverse, discovering the aristocratic culture and society of the Old World. He is also the New Man produced by wide-open American entrepreneurial enterprise. With more money than he knows what do do with, why shouldn't he marry the most exalted woman of the Parisian crème de la crème"} During the months in Paris in 1875, when James composed The American, he had the pleasant habit of going to the theater in the evenings, especiaUy treasuring the comedies at the Théâtre Française. Of the playwrights performed on the Boulevarde, James developed a special fondness for aesthetic problems posed in the well-made plays of Scribe, Sardou, Augier, and Dennery. Augier's Lions et Renards and L'Aventurière, Alexandre Dumas fils' Le Demi-Monde, and Charles Lomon's Jean Dacier posed to young James aesthetic questions of the highest interest and formal importance. Also infinitely enjoyable was the superb acting of the great Coquelin, whom he caUed the "most joyous and exuberant of pure comedians." Coquelin had been his boyhood schoolmate at the Collège Impérial in Boulogne years before. As James later remarked, "Far away and unspeakably regretted the days, alas, or, more exactly the nights, on which one could walk away from the Français under the speU of such fond convictions and such deep and agitating problems." In the dramas of these playwrights, he found, he said, "an ideal and exemplary world" on the stage, a "world that has managed to attain aU the felicities that the world we live in misses." Meanwhile, he worked on his serialized novel, The American, which began to appear in the Atlantic Monthly before he had even finished it, and the young noveUst suffered a great deal of anxiety that something might go wrong—that he might for example break his arm—and so not be able to finish it, leaving his readers, as it were, hanging in mid-installment. Something did go wrong, Selected Papers on Henry James 113 or at least something occurred, to affect the continuation of the novel. While he was quite prepared to have a tittle fun with his traveling American, ironizing Newman's vulgarity, his materialism, his ignorance of art and etiquette, he was not prepared for the satirical portrait of an American he saw on the French stage. The play was L'Etrangère by Alexandre Dumas fils. As Oscar Cargill has remarked, Dumas' satire on the American character roused James's...