'You Show Vhat It Is to Be a Human Being'

In June 1905, Henry James visited the Lower East Side of New York City, the neighborhood he calls “the dense Yiddish quarter.” The novelist has returned to his homeland for the first time in twenty years and recounts the experience in The American Scene (1906). James has dinner with a Jewish family and afterwards visits “beer-houses and cafés” in the company of Jewish acquaintances. He speaks with Yiddish writers and in a theater sees part of a Yiddish comedy. He visits Ellis Island. He praises the Jewish “reverence for intellect.” James had always been pro-Dreyfus (and pro-Zola) and was no anti-Semite, unlike his friend Henry Adams. And yet, in Chap. III, “New York and the Hudson,” he writes:

 “It was as if we had been thus, in the crowded, hustled roadway, where multiplication, multiplication of everything, was the dominant note, at the bottom of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of over-developed proboscis, were to bump together, for ever, amid heaped spoils of the sea.”

 

The crude caricature is jolting from so fine a mind as James’, and might have found a home in Der Stürmer a few years later. James is overwhelmed by the crowds. Between 1890 and 1900, New York’s population had grown from 1.5 million to 3.5 million, 330,000 of whom were Jews. By 1910, immigrants made up forty-one percent of the city’s population. Most came from Germany, Ireland, Russia (many of whom were Jewish) and Italy. Though the Lower East Side was densely crowded, James contrasts it with Europe, the “dark, foul, stifling Ghettos of other remembered cities.” He is impressed by so much activity and enterprise: “What struck me in the flaring streets . . . was the blaze of the shops addressed to the New Jerusalem’s wants and the splendour with which these were taken for granted.”

 

In Unsettled Subjects: New Poems on Classic American Literature (Broadstone, 2020), Allen Stein, who has taught American literature at North Carolina State University since 1968, indulges a reader’s fantasy: What might happen when American writers of the nineteenth century, and some of the characters they created, lived an independent existence outside their known biographies? Stein introduces us to James Watson (Nigger Jim) at Huckleberry Finn’s funeral and shares the final thoughts of Malcolm Melville, Herman’s son, before he commits suicide. He devotes three poems to Henry James or characters in his fiction, including “Henry James Strolls the Lower East Side.” It begins with a paraphrase of the passage quoted above (“It was as if . . .”). Stein echoes James: “This place was for them, at last, / the New Jerusalem.”

 

The seventy-nine-line poem concludes with an encounter James has in a café where he stops for tea. A young man holding a book approaches and asks, “’‘Are you Mr. Henry James? / I haf seen a picture of you.’” James, we are told, senses “immediately that the moment bristled / with possibilities for wry anecdote.” The young man says:

 

“‘This I cannot believe,’ the fellow said,

‘for only today I finished your Vings of the Dove,

vhich I haf here in mine hand.

I read it late into the nights after mine vork

and at lunchtimes beside mine sewing machine.

Vhen that Mr. Densher and Miss Croy,

gave up everything

because they vas so ashamed over vhat they had done,

I just shook mine head

At how vell you show vhat it is to be a human being.’”

 

The man asks James to sign his copy of The Wings of the Dove (1902). Stein concludes the poem with these lines:

 

“James signed,

then watched as the fellow,

after bowing once more, walked off.

Seeing how close to himself

the fellow held the book,

James shook his own head,

removed his pince nez

and wiped his  eyes.”

 

James writes in The American Scene:

 

“So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle, his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel.”