As a former lit major, I spent most of my twenties reading “the classics,” especially American novelists of the 19th & 20th centuries. Then I turned thirty and stopped reading fiction, preferring for years almost exclusively history and biography. This New Year’s Day, on a whim I picked up a volume of Henry James, specifically his earliest novels: Watch and Ward (1871), Roderick Hudson (1875), and The Americans (1877).
Truth be told, James was always a bit of a slog and I barely remember anything I read of him all those decades ago. This time, it’s different: wordy, yes, and difficult to tackle in large chunks, but if one sets aside a few minutes for a chapter or two a day (as they would have been read when originally serialized in magazines), they are worth the effort. He paints on a broad canvas, or perhaps more accurately he sculpts from a large chunk of marble. The formative chapters are expansive, and it isn’t until midway through that the subject really begins to take form, and by the final chapters the exquisite details come into focus and one sees what the whole point has been.
The theme uniting all three is the coming of age of particular Americans, the expectation that they do so by continental standards, and the impatience of each with those standards that are obsolete. Americans are ugly, vulgar and uncouth, treating Europe like a playground with their newfound inelegantly-gained wealth. On the other side of the equation are the Europeans who live in dark gloomy halls, often with little money, but trading on pride and familial history as a form of currency. At one point in The American, our hero Christopher Newman (get it?) is so frustrated with the baroque system of “honor” that he “uttered an imprecation which, though brief— it consisted simply of the interjection ‘Oh!’ followed by a geographical, or more correctly, perhaps, a theological noun in four letters— had better not be transferred to these pages.” Ha!
What is wonderful about nineteenth century literature and James in particular is that the novels provide a careful study of people as individuals who reveal universal traits and impulses, without tipping into psudo-psychology or amateur social science or political water-bearing. At the time of James’ writing, the novel as popular art was still relatively, well, novel. It carried through most of the twentieth century, through Hemingway and Faulkner and O’Connor, James Jones and Michener, Updike and Walker, but it has largely disappeared. Sure, there are plenty of writers of genre fiction, but quick: whose the greatest living active writer, let alone the top five?
It’s a shame that literature has all but vanished (along with poetry) as a popular art form, as it is a valuable tool for reflection and self-observation, both personally and culturally.
I am looking forward to the next in the series: The Europeans (1880).