In
the last month we have watched the annual progression of autumn in
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia and here in Texas. Viewed across the weeks
and latitudes, the effect has been of a jumbled time-lapse film of the season. In
New England we saw the gaudier reds and oranges. In Houston, most of the leaves
are still green, shading to a duller green, and still on the trees. Every autumn,
this native Northerner recalls a sentence from The American Scene by Henry James:
“.
. . the way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and
there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet,
recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a
fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she
goes.”
James
speaks throughout the book as “the restless analyst,” the persona he adopts
when visiting his native land for the first time in twenty years. The passage
is recognizably Jamesian. “Dabbed” signals his painterly touch. No nature
enthusiast, even in the tree-covered mountains of New Hampshire, he deploys a social
and familial metaphor.
If
the set-up – context, rhythm, word choice -- weren’t so witty and right, we
might suspect parody, though it’s never a good idea to underestimate James’
sense of the comic. Even his prettiest
purple set-pieces he imbues with a twist, a hint of piquancy, elegy or satire. The American Scene (1905), closer to
autobiography than documentary, is the country’s essential guide book, along
with Moby-Dick.
The
unjustly neglected novelist Wright Morris (1910-1998) judged James’ volume “one
of the gifts of life.” He discovered The American Scene in the nineteen-forties
when it was still out of print and hard to find. He was no admirer of James’
fiction: “the refinement of his style was a contradiction of what was vital and
unique in the American vernacular,” he writes in the third volume of his
memoirs, A Cloak of Light: Writing My
Life (1985). Morris captures the seductive and utterly uncontemporary charm
of James and Jamesian prose:
“There
is no question in my mind that the mind of Henry James is matchless in the many
forms in which it is revealed. His effortless power of association, in which
one apercu leads to another, then another, then another—an open-ended series of
parenthetical relations—makes it both annoying and exhausting to follow the
darts and flashes of his mind, but this experience is simply not to be found
elsewhere.”
Reading
James, Morris says, is “a challenge and an aggravation.” True, but one’s
efforts are rewarded. One can’t skim or speed-read. When reading late-period
James, my mind splits in half. I’m attending, word by word, and phrase by
phrase, to the road in front of me, while simultaneously plotting my route on
the map, wary of detours and cul-de-sacs. Some readers find the endless
qualifications, the miles of dependent clauses, too much to bear, but James isn’t
stuttering. He’s revising, clarifying and footnoting the contents of his
consciousness on the page. Part of the pleasure of reading James is watching him
work. Where’s he going with this? Did I miss something? When we can align
ourselves with his rhythms, we can start dancing. Morris is fond of James’
set-piece devoted to the hotel in the final chapter, “Florida.” Here is James
on the hotel lobby, which Morris describes as “that stakeout of mine” (the
ellipses are Morris’):
“.
. . It lies there waiting, pleading from all its pores, to be occupied—the lonely
waste, the boundless, gaping void of `society’; which is but a name for all the
other so numerous relations with the world he lives in that are imputable to
the civilized human being.
“.
. . one is verily tempted to ask if the hotel spirit may not just be the
American spirit most seeking and finding itself. . . . .
“.
. . One was in the presence, as never before, of a realized ideal of that
childish rush and surrender to it and clutch at it which one was so repeatedly
to recognize, in America, as the note of the supremely gregarious state. It
made the whole vision unforgettable, and I am now carried back to it, I
confess, in musing hours, as to one of my few glimpses of perfect human
felicity.”
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