'The Grim Tracery of November'

“It was late in the autumn and in the day almost evening; with a wintry pink light in the west, the special shade, fading into a heartless prettiness of grey, that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November.”

Who wrote this? Word choice is a clue, especially tracery, borrowed from architecture. Read it superficially – skim it – and you might mistake the passage for prose poetry, the adolescent gush of adjectives cavalierly linked by sense. The first time I saw my name in print was in a junior high school literary magazine. My contribution was a prose petit four titled “November.” It was composed during my mercifully brief infatuation with Thomas Wolfe. The only specific I remember is comparing the color of the sky to pewter, and being exceedingly pleased with the metaphor.

A more revealing clue to the passage’s authorship is the halting cadence, pausing to clarify meaning. Some writers lay down thick slabs of reality-prose, as hard and final as concrete. Others, like our man above, let us in on the process, generously sharing the cliché-resisting process of articulation.

        

The author is Henry James. The source is Chap 1, “New England: An Autumn Impression,” in The American Scene (1907). There’s no work of American nonfiction I love so much. It’s made for revisiting, like a lakeside week in the Adirondacks, a summer vacation spot. November recurs in Chap. VIII, “Concord and Salem,” where James revisits his past and the nation’s:

“I remember indeed putting it to myself on the November Sunday morning, tepid and bright and perfect for its use, through which I walked from the station under the constant archway of the elms, as yet but indulgently thinned: would one know, for one's self, what had formerly been the matter here, if one hadn’t happened to be able to get round behind, in the past, as it were, and more or less understand?”