My native land, which time, absence and change have, in a funny sort of way, made almost as romantic to me as “Europe,” in dreams or in my earlier time here, used to be—the actual bristling (as fearfully bristling as you like) U.S.A. have the merit and the precious property that they meet and fit into my (“creative”) preoccupations…
This passage from Henry James’s The American Scene tells you, in many ways, all you need to know about this rather strange outlier in the James canon. Wry, backward-and-forward looking (a shade obtuse upon first reading), with deft mingling of the ideal, the imaginative, and the “bristling” real, James’s travelogue, as in virtually every one of his fiction or nonfiction narratives, compels one to strain toward the same sophisticated heights upon which the author luxuriates.
Yet Henry James did not seek out complexity for complexity’s sake. He found it, more than plentifully, in the clotted associations between the sexes, and in strained family relationships, including his own. A notoriously private person, clothed in a well-lined suit of sophistication and seduction (many said he was the most charming man they had ever met), James desired to uncover the psychology behind the American naïf in Europe, to lay bare the strings controlling puppets unawares, and by doing so claimed a position as one of America’s finest literary artists. (For proof of his artistry, read his most popular and, perhaps, his best novel, The Portrait of a Lady.)
And then, in 1904, having lived comfortably abroad in England for two decades, James decided upon a most important adventure: to travel the United States he had left behind. Once entirely too provincial, now a country rubbing broad shoulders and newly-minted coin with the Old Country, America was grown up, important, influential. James, after some initial hesitation, plunged into a ten-month tour of the States, visiting New England, Florida, key cities of the Midwest (including Chicago!), California, and eventually Seattle and Portland. Something of a 20th-century Alexis de Tocqueville, James watched, listened, spoke, and shook hands all over the country, writing down his observations, arriving at judgements, and marveling at what the nation of his birth and its democracy had become.
Literary critic, professor emeritus at Yale, and author of such influential works as The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, and Seduced by Story, Peter Brooks traces James’s journey with a fine-toothed comb and smart touches of perceptive, knowing humor. I had the great pleasure recently to interview him over Zoom about his new work, Henry James Comes Home, a work that will delight both the James enthusiast as well as the newcomer. The interview has been edited for length.
Ryan Asmussen
This must have been such an enjoyable project for you, but probably also a little daunting, given the character of Henry James, which, as you well know, is not famed for being the most open and inviting.
Peter Brooks
(laughs) It was fun to write, and, absolutely, it was tricky. I mean, he doesn’t give himself away much. One of the reasons that James’s The American Scene is so difficult to come to grips with is that it’s got this elaborate, metaphorical texture you have to read through and recognize as a part of his analytic style. So, there was that challenge, but then there was also the fun of reconstructing his tour, which I don’t think anyone has ever done in so much detail, and that involved reading his correspondence, journals, and so on. Reading James’s correspondence is always such a joy. I mean, he is so smart. His letters to Edith Wharton, I think, are the prized ones. They get each other going. Such fun.
Ryan Asmussen
As you also well know, James is a greatly-respected figure in American higher literary studies. But, commercially-speaking, if average readers have even heard of James, they might only associate him with, say, The Turn of the Screw, if anything. For example, one isn’t going to get on the subway and see many people reading The Golden Bowl. What would be a strong reason for a reader to pick up James today, considering his level of difficulty?
Peter Brooks
He’s someone who addresses the profound emotional and moral issues still very much with us. At the moment, it seems to me that one of the great issues in James’s writing, all his writing, is how people treat one another, how they interfere in each other’s lives, and the necessity to grant everyone a measure of freedom to work out his or her own destiny. It comes through very strongly in James if you take him in a leisurely fashion, and particularly if you read him aloud. When you do that, very often the complications of his style resolve themselves. The sentences fall into place, and you understand them better as oral productions than as written ones. Then, he becomes a joy.
Ryan Asmussen
What was your favorite stage of his travels to write about?
Peter Brooks
That stage he wrote about the least, California, which he said was a revelation. He wrote to his sister-in-law something to the extent that nobody ever told me that California was so wonderful. I should have left more time for this part of my journey. He went from Chicago to Los Angeles by train, and then he traveled up the California coast, up to Monterey, then up to San Francisco, and then later up to Portland and Seattle. And he found the coast absolutely stunning, as it still is. Of course, he found the California social scene inane, but he said California was like a primitive Italy before civilization came along, that it could have been as beautiful and significant a landscape as Italy, if people had implanted their towns the way the Italians did centuries ago.
Ryan Asmussen
James gets to the heart of very true things, in my opinion and yours, most notably in this book about America at that time, and what he supposes its future will be. What would be some of the takeaways from the deep insights he had into the American scene?
Peter Brooks
He’s been absent from his native country for 22 years, off in Europe, living in England, and he’s trying to come to terms with what he sometimes calls “the bloated present,” as opposed to his homespun, frugal New England, a place he knew well in his youth. He knew Emerson, for instance. What does he come up with? New York is particularly important to him: four chapters of the book are dedicated to New York, where he was born and spent some of his childhood, and parts of it are hard reading because he’s a snob. When he goes and visits the Lower East Side, he’s appalled by what he sees. I mean, this is the most densely inhabited part of the world at this point, all those tenements containing recently arrived immigrants, and the kind of unreflective anti-Semitism which he displays at times is painful reading, common to his caste at the time, but nevertheless inexcusable. And yet, when he’s dealing with all of this, he doesn’t simply reject the immigrants and argue for a more pure America, as some people do today, as many people did at the time, but says we have to realize that the older families hold the land in unsettled possession, that we were once immigrants, and that the new immigrants are just as much at home in New York as we are. And I think this is quite a remarkable progress in his thinking. He’s not going to condemn what he sees the way his contemporary and friend Henry Adams did. He’s going to try and come to terms with it. He’s very much interested in the children of the immigrants and their future.
Ryan Asmussen
James at one point writes that in New York, even in America in general, “the will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price” seems to be the point of everything, the point of this American future. An energy of what Henry Adams would call ‘the dynamo,’ carrying on, pushing forward, defying meaning…
Peter Brooks
Yes, indeed, he finds the energy and dynamism of New York exhilarating, but he finds it all taking place in a void. There’s a great deal of talk about America pushing out and developing its civilization in a void, and he’s always trying to read what this void may mean, and it’s partly a lack of established manners. Just as in the New England landscape, he talks about the lack of order that you would find in the English landscape, brought by the squire and the parson, traditional feudalism. America has never had feudalism, and, as a result, things seem disorganized and scrappy. James is always looking for principles of order. He spent one year [1862] as a student at Harvard Law School—hard to imagine, but he’s pleased to see that Harvard Yard now has a fence around it, a recent acquisition, and he says that the fencing-in will give form to anything of interest. America doesn’t have enough form, you see. He’s talking esthetically, in terms of appearance, but also in terms of the way people interact, what he calls manners. There are not enough forms, and that leaves Americans adrift. He’s particularly sensitive to the young American woman whom he finds has no guidance in how to relate to people. James thinks that the male side of the American family has given up and simply turned to making money as businessmen, leaving all social organization and all cultural projects to women. When he lectured in the Midwest, his audiences were mainly women. They were carrying the cultural burden of America at the time.
Ryan Asmussen
It’s not that James bemoaned the fact that people didn’t “know their place.” He bemoaned the fact that, to a very real extent, they didn’t have a place. That in this democracy there existed a swirling social chaos.
Peter Brooks
Really, it is a chaos, and it gives the advantage to things like the hotel industry, which James sees as essentially oppressive organizations, because they tell Americans what you’re allowed to have and what you’re supposed to value as luxury. There’s one point where he invents a really interesting monologue for a young woman. He’s sitting in the train car at a station looking out at a bunch of young women on the platform, and he has this young woman say to herself, What do I know? A helpless chit I am because the male members of my family have never instructed me in the proper forms of young womanhood. It sounds a bit snobbish, like he wants American girls to be proper English or French girls. He appreciates the freedom and maturity of the young American Girl, yet he finds that she lacks the kind of structure of manners that she could be given by a mature society, which he finds lacking everywhere in America.
Ryan Asmussen
It is fair to say, I think, that there’s at least something of a proto-feminism in The American Scene.
Peter Brooks
I think that’s absolutely true, and in his novels, too. I mean, I don’t think he would have recognized himself as a proto-feminist, but it’s very true that women’s sensibility interests him more than anything else. I think there’s certainly a compassion in the tone of his writing.
Ryan Asmussen
Let’s shift to family. For me, and I’m sure for you, the relationship between William and Henry was such a sad one. It could have been quite wonderful. They were never going to be a team, personally and professionally, as it were, but if they had just been able to be more emotionally available to one other, to really encourage each other…
Peter Brooks
It’s one of the more interesting cases of sibling rivalry you’ll ever encounter. It does not die. Here they are, both in their 60s and still duking it out, in a way. When Henry says he wants to come to the States, William says, don’t, and gives weird reasons why he shouldn’t come over. Yet Henry persists and comes over. There’s always this sense that he has to justify himself to his older brother. William is the older one, the head of the family, but it must have something to do with Henry’s putative gayness. I mean, he’s not uncloseted by any means. And no one knows anything about his sexuality, really, because he covers his tracks so much. But William belonged to a Harvard group that was a part of a revival of the classical idea of manhood after the Civil War. William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Teddy Roosevelt and so on. And Henry James is very much a Harvard dropout, not anyone’s idea of a manly man. That’s part of it, but also William is often really quite cruel about his brother’s novels. The letter he writes to Henry about The Golden Bowl is a model of total misreading and misunderstanding, though William is one of the most intelligent people you’ll ever come across. It’s not lack of intelligence; he really must put him down. And then there’s that funny incident with the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Henry was elected, I think, on the second ballot, if I’ve got that right—I’d have to refer back to my text— and William on the fifth. William writes a letter declining the invitation, saying, because you offered this to my younger and vainer and shallower brother, I’ll decline. Totally unnecessary. It’s something that Henry had nothing to be blamed for except being elected before him. And then, there’s the funniest fact that, suddenly, William departs for Greece, which is something he had not planned to do while Henry was still in the United States, and he stays there for three months. It’s almost as if the American continent is too small for them. But, I have to say that there’s also a great deal of true affection between the brothers, even love. And Henry is a very good uncle to William’s children and very close to William’s wife. It’s a deeply complex relationship that we’ll never truly sort out.
Ryan Asmussen
I can never get over William’s blinkered, pragmatic attitude towards Henry’s style. He doesn’t come right out and say Henry should commercialize, but it’s essentially what he’s saying. ‘You just don’t need this drapery.’ He writes his brother, “[Why] won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style? Publish it in my name, I will acknowledge it, and give you half the proceeds.”
Peter Brooks
If you write a simple, straightforward book, I’ll put my own name on it and split the profits! None of this psychological fooling around and analysis, please, which truly is odd for William. After all, he is the author of The Principles of Psychology, very much interested in consciousness, same as Henry. There’s some kind of blinders he puts on when he’s dealing with his brother’s writing. It’s remarkable.
Ryan Asmussen
And ultimately Henry is forced to say, I really wish you wouldn’t read my books. You’re incapable of appreciating them.
Peter Brooks
Then Henry tells William, it’s as if you judged everything in the context of the manners of Cambridge, Massachusetts, you’re unable to get out of that mindset, which is a covert dig at his brother for being an American provincial.
Ryan Asmussen
Henry moves amongst the American aristocracy of the time, the tycoons and the politicians. He spends some of his touring time in Washington, D.C. It seems as if, from your perspective, Henry isn’t a political animal; it’s not really what he’s interested in. There’s a great bit about his relationship, or lack thereof, with President Teddy Roosevelt, the whole ‘manliness at Harvard’ thing, how Roosevelt feels that Henry isn’t quite his sort of man. But what is Henry’s attitude towards American government, as such? What was his position on that dense, complicated political scene?
Peter Brooks
That’s a very interesting question. Like his brother William, Henry is quite anti-imperialist. This is one thing they completely agree on. He doesn’t like the ‘big stick’ policy associated with Roosevelt after the Spanish-American War, the annexation of territories, and so on. He’s very Northern. I guess you’d call him a liberal in the classic sense. I mean, he’s very anti-slavery. He finds the South still very much compromised by its history of enslavement. But he likes Washington because people aren’t in business there. He calls it “the city of conversation.” He’s right next to Henry Adams; they had their houses built at the same time, designed by H. H. Richardson. He’s friends, too, with John Hay, at this point Secretary of State. He’s immediately connected to the highest circles of government. He gets invited twice to the White House, dines with Roosevelt and charms Roosevelt’s wife. By the way, she thinks he’s absolutely the most charming man she’s ever met. Henry is kind of amused by Teddy Roosevelt, but doesn’t really approve of him. He writes to Edith Wharton that he finds Roosevelt a performance, like something on Broadway. The last pages of his chapter on Washington are really interesting. He chooses to end the chapter on visiting a practically deserted Capitol one morning and finding there three visiting Native Americans, dressed in pot-hats and suits. And he thinks of James Fenimore Cooper, one of the great loves of his childhood reading and sees what he’s called “the bloody footsteps of history” reduced to this beautiful marble capital, effaced by Washington architecture, and you realize that he’s very much in tune with the genocide of the Native American peoples, how it isn’t recognized in the official American state version of things. It’s the excluded and the have-nots of American civilization who are of interest to him, as well as the ones who are in power.
Ryan Asmussen
I should ask you about his mission, what James wants to accomplish during this tour. Of course, like all writers, James wants material, but he also wants to investigate what America has become in his absence. Would you talk about the impetus, what finally gets him on the boat? He says in his letters to William that he feels he’s exhausted travel writing in Europe.
Peter Brooks
He’s done sketches of Italy and France and England, and there’s nothing more to be said about that, whereas American civilization and the American people now seem to him exotic, like Europe was when he was a kid in New York and Cambridge. Everything seems new in America, now a global power. He wants to explore that, not to write ‘scenery’ but to write about the people. He’s worried about the cost of the trip to himself, staying in hotels and traveling on trains, but he soon discovers he can sell articles about his travels. Many chapters of The American Scene appeared originally in the North American Review or Atlantic Monthly as essays. He realizes he can make a lot of money lecturing, too. This is the golden age of American lecturing; there are cultural clubs in any American city with a claim to culture at this time. When he goes to the Midwest, he starts out in St. Louis, which is a burgeoning city at the time, just after the famous St. Louis World’s Fair. He travels to South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago, of course, and Indianapolis, and he lectures in all these places for a hefty fee, surprised he can make so much money. He lectures on, of all strange things, Balzac, which always seemed to me a crazy choice, but there we are. The reports on his speaking we have are all over the place. Some say it was really wonderful and poetic and eloquent, which I’m sure it was; other people say it was totally incomprehensible, that patrons fell asleep. I think it depended on the audience. The essay which appeared in print under the title “The Lesson of Balzac,” based on the lecture, is pretty dense. It must have required an act of considerable attention to listen to the talk. He’s not coddling his audience, that’s for sure.
Ryan Asmussen
I’d like to go back to his understanding of capitalism and the American financial scene. He had some harsh words for it.
Peter Brooks
He’s not a big fan of capitalism. He doesn’t really analyze capitalism as capitalism, but he does note a number of its manifestations: one being what I referred to earlier as hotel civilization, of luxury, which he finds in the Waldorf Astoria in New York and then in the big resort hotels in Florida and elsewhere. He sees this as a version of enjoyment dictated by hotel management—essentially dictated by capitalism. Then there’s the Pullman car, first-class train travel. He’s very much aware that there’s a class distinction there, and he refers to himself as seated as in a theater box, watching some very poor towns outside go by when he’s traveling in the South. He’s uncomfortable with that, as well as with the vast differences in wealth created by American capitalism. The poverty he sees among both Blacks and whites in the South he finds very distressing. He’s no fan of what American capitalism has done in the South or the North. He’s not fond of the unchecked growth of Manhattan skyscrapers going up with no regard for the overall landscape or the Gilded Age mansions he sees in New York and Newport. He calls them “white elephants” and asks what’s to be done about them. He answers with, nothing, nothing is to be done, we should leave them there as an example of conspicuous consumption. There’s a wonderful passage where he’s walking down the street, and he can feel these skyscrapers close in on him. There’s a sense of New York becoming an oppressive canyon. The visibility is now gone for the urban walker, the flâneur.
Ryan Asmussen
Despite his tough exterior, James does allow himself and his readers a few tender moments on the trip. The most significant would be his visit to his family’s gravestones in Cambridge Cemetery. His guard comes all the way down amidst “that unspeakable group of graves.”
Peter Brooks
Yes, an amazing moment, and actually the more amazing written version of it is not in The American Scene but in his journal where he lets himself go even more. It’s twilight and there’s this awful, terrifying pink of a winter sky, everything is quiet, and he reads the inscription from Dante that William has put on the grave of his sister, Alice. Then comes what he calls the “divine relief of tears.” At the end of the passage he writes, Why do I dwell on this awful, unspeakable moment? Why did the pen not drop from my hand? And then he writes, Basta! Basta!
Ryan Asmussen
The line by Dante took him “so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as if one sank down on one’s knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache.”
Peter Brooks
It’s a deeply moving passage. He seemed to know then why he had come to the graves, and how not to have done so would have been to miss something important. You almost wonder if maybe in some deeper, psychological way that part of the reason for coming back was to make a sort of pilgrimage. Something I would describe as a nostos in terms of Homer’s Odyssey. A drive to come back after all this time. He has put off visiting the graves for quite a while. Finally, he chooses this specific evening, and he goes alone.
NON-FICTION
Henry James Comes Home
By Peter Brooks
New York Review Books
Published April 15, 2025
