Henry James (public domain photograph)
After living abroad for three decades, novelist Henry James returned to the United States in 1904 and 1905 to to be “a restless analyst” of all he saw in an ascendant America, which had changed greatly since he had left for Paris and London. The nonfiction book that came of the trip was The American Scene, published in 1907, about James’ travel on the Eastern Seaboard. A second volume was planned on his completed trip to “the West” (to include the Midwest, California, Portland, and Seattle) but was never written.
Peter Brooks’ Henry James Comes Home (NYRB 2025) also pieces together that western trip, including a visit to St. Louis. The challenge for James, who said he wanted to write of the American character—and by extension his own, even as absentee—was that he traveled mostly by train, often watching the landscape pass as if on a screen, and stayed in fine clubs and hotels and with well-to-do, even famous, friends.
The trip was also an opportunity to make money on the lecture circuit, which kept him busy with a narrow slice of American society—audiences of mostly White women who had time, education, and money, and were the readers of his serialized novels. (It was one of James’ critiques of the United States in general that culture had been left to women by absconding businessmen, leaving the country unfinished and graceless.) The writing from such a trip, focusing on a “human Anglo-Saxondom, with the American extension,” would get read more, he thought, than a European travelogue, which had been done many times, including by him in books published in 1875, 1883, 1884, and 1905.
James’ first stop heading west was St. Louis, then the country’s fourth-largest city. The World’s Fair had just ended. WashU had its new Gothic campus. Brooks reports that James thought the last part of his 40-hour train ride to the city was an “empty platitude.” He spoke at what was then the Washington Hotel (still there, as the Washington Apartments) on “The Lesson of Balzac.”
Brooks himself calls St. Louis then “in large part a fairly dreary city,” though he admits it had “a strain of New England transcendentalism, married to a burgeoning local Hegelianism that sought to reconcile the antagonisms fought over in the Civil War in a new synthesis of a moral nation,” and “that there was a self-consciously cultural elite.”
James, for his part, said, “This vast grey, smoky, extraordinary bourgeois place seems to offer in a ceaseless mild soft rain, no interest and no feature whatever.” The Missouri Historical Society, for their part, has nothing tagged in their online collection for “Henry James.” Touché, maître.
Brooks’ book reminds us that Henry James and Mark Twain met more than once, including on the American trip, which always feels a bit startling. They did not meet in St. Louis, but Twain was, after all, from modest Hannibal, just up the river, easily juxtaposed to James’ upbringing in a famous family that lived in New York City, Newport, Boston, and Europe.
In fact James and Twain were long considered opposing lodestars of American literature—so much so that The Nation’s obituary of Twain in 1910 is primarily a comparison with James, who survived Twain by only six years. By some critical estimations, Twain loses in the comparison, his lifetime of work more uneven than James’, more comic (which is often not taken seriously), lacking in interiority, and tending to grimness in the end.
But in 1901, about the time James began to consider returning to the United States to have a peek through the lens of a Pullman window, Twain wrote (but did not publish in his lifetime) an essay titled, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” a polemic occasioned by the mass lynchings of three Black men in southwest Missouri. He extends the essay to consider the rest of the United States, where at the start of the century some 100 lynchings were perpetrated each year, another matter of national character.
Twain says that “from the beginning of the world no revolt against a public infamy or oppression has ever been begun but by the one daring man in the 10,000, the rest timidly waiting, and slowly and reluctantly joining, under the influence of that man and his fellows from the other ten thousands. The abolitionists remember.”
One of the lessons of power and wealth is that it foreshortens the gaze and creates disinterest. James complains in The American Scene that “an African type or two” and “a group of tatterdemalion darkies” failed to jump to retrieve his baggage; his explication of the former Confederate situation leads him to “tiptoe” around the question of race in the South, since the image of such Black men was enough “to disabuse a tactful mind of the urgency of preaching, southward, a sweet reasonableness about him. [T]he non-resident might well feel themselves indeed, after a little, appointed to silence, and, with any delicacy, see their duty quite elsewhere.”
All that Twain knew of Missouri—and much more—could have been accessible to James, but for James’ rapidity, interests, and vision.
