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Henry James was not at home in America

Contra Thomas Wolfe, you actually can go home again—but once you see how much it’s changed, you may want to leave just as quickly. When Henry James, after spending most of his adult life abroad, returned in 1904 for a 10-month-long tour of the United States, he was dismayed to find that many of the old buildings and spaces he once cherished had been obliterated—such as his childhood homes in Boston and Manhattan’s Washington Square or the “dusky lecture halls” of Copley Square, where his father (a theosophy-leaning lover of Swedenborg) had once given talks, along with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips.

It’s, in effect, like a gorgeous practical joke—but at one’s own expense, after all, if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls, & sit in alternate Gothic and Palladian cathedrals, as it were—where now only the temperature stalks about—with the “regrets,” sighing along the wind, of those who have declined.… I feel that in speaking of it as I have, I don’t do justice to the house as a phenomenon (of brute achievement). On the one hand, there was the Yiddish theater district, which made the New York streets “unspeakable” with their “bacchanal, so hugely hatted and feathered and flounced”; on the other, there were those “white elephants” James drives past in Newport, which he describes as “vast and blank, for reminder to those concerned of the prohibited degrees of witlessness, and of the peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion. the consummate monotonous commonness, of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass—with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights.

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