The American (2 page)

The idea does seem altogether American, an evocation of America’s perennial love-hate relation with Europe and all its attendant feelings of cultural inferiority and moral superiority, of parricidal guilt and newborn innocence, of nostalgia for the old home and the urge to destroy it.

The question cannot be answered quite so easily, however. James may have set out to celebrate “the large and easy impulses” that are
“generally
characteristic” of Americans, but the characters and the action he devised to express this idea have led many of his readers to wonder whether Newman’s type, far from being celebrated in the novel, is not in fact satirized or even morally condemned. Certainly, there is something a little foolish in Newman’s social
gaucherie
, his sublime and largely ungrounded self-confidence; something ill-natured in his inability to sympathize with Claire’s feelings of familial obligation; and something downright vicious in his influence upon the lives of Noémie and Valentin. James’s attitudes toward his characters are by no means easy to sort out. As a sturdy republican who yet admired the European way of ordering society, who resented the steep condescensions of pretentiously superior Europeans and yet lamented the commercial vulgarization of his “sweet old Anglo-Saxon” America, James found his sympathies sharply divided between the sustaining traditions of the Old World and the unfettered dynamism of the New. From an American point of view, Newman’s
assumption that he is at the very least the Bellegardes’ equal seems perfectly justified. But when the Bellegardes reject him, they do so on ancient, anticommercial principles of the very sort that James missed in America and hoped to recover by moving to Europe. Looked at this way, there is no great mystery in the fact that the silliness of Lord Deepmere and the fat Duchess, and even the crimes of the Bellegardes, are treated far less harshly in the novel than are the social ambitions of Noémie, Stanislas Kapp, and even the American hero himself.

Is
The American
, then, an American novel by virtue of its genre, as has sometimes been asserted? That, of course, depends first of all on the sort of novel one considers characteristically American and, second, on the sort of novel one takes
The American
to be. Have Americans typically written realistic novels, while their European colleagues have wallowed in romanticism, as some theorists have maintained? Or is the realistic novel of manners, rather, an English tradition and the American novel a romance, as we have so often been advised? Whichever line of argument we take,
The American
will both support and refute it. Newman is at once a more or less plausible type of the self-made American millionaire and a knight of chivalric romance in quest of his feminine ideal. The other characters are drawn both from James’s own acquaintances in Paris and from books: legends, medieval romances, novels, and plays. The action in which these characters are engaged is both timelessly literary and historically topical. While almost everyone in the novel finds some occasion to remark upon the resemblance of the action to that of a play, a romance, or a poem, the story also reflects the rapidly changing conditions of political and social life in Europe: the deposing of the hereditary landed nobility by the new aristocracy of industrial wealth; the increased social mobility of
petites bourgeoises
like Noémie and
commerçants
like Stanislas Kapp and Christopher Newman;
the movement of Parisian life from the medieval city on the Left Bank across the Seine to the new boulevards, the new commercial districts, and the
Colonie Américaine
near the Arc de Triomphe; and, most importantly, the much larger shift, of which these others are only symptoms, of the center of Western civilization from the Old World to the New.

The setting of the novel is replete with verifiably accurate detail. Almost every building, street, and park that Newman visits can be found either in a copy of the guide book that lies by his side on the divan of the Salon Carré or in the travel sketches James wrote for the
New York Tribune
during his stay in France. But in those moments when James manages to get inside the skin of his hero and see the world through his eyes, Paris becomes the landscape of Newman’s evolving consciousness. These moments occur more and more frequently as the novel progresses and Newman begins to see in his surroundings not just an alien way of life but a projection of his own deepest desires and fears. And when the tone of the novel darkens with the frustration of his hopes, the open, luminous city of his original ambitions becomes a crepuscular gothic dungeon, the dark place in his own soul to which his attention is directed by the seemingly diabolical bafflement of his once boundless and unreflective self-confidence. In thus confounding the supposedly distinct realms of life and literature, the novel is neither simply realistic nor romantic but a “neutral territory,” as Hawthorne said, “where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”

Not even the theme of
The American
—the collision of disruptive American energy with repressive European tradition—can be called distinctively American. In the first place, the novel seems to be as interested in the differences between the Anglo-Saxon and Gallic “races” or between British moralism and French aestheticism as
it. is in the relative values of American and European culture and character. But even more importantly, the same thematic contest between energy and form that is enacted in
The American
can be found in nearly every literary work of consequence written in English in the nineteenth century. On this level of abstraction, the conflict between Newman’s revolutionary ambitions and the Bellegardes’ conservative formality is not fundamentally different from the contests between Blake’s Orc and Urizen, Scott’s Highlanders and Englishmen, Keats’s Lamia and Appolonius, Hawthorne’s Hester and Dimmesdale, Dickens’s Dombey and Floy, Henry Adams’s Dynamo and Virgin, and countless other literary versions of the great nineteenth-century debate concerning the relative value of permanence and change. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that James was more concerned with this fundamental conflict than he was with the particular metaphors in which it is expressed in
The American.
At the time that he wrote the novel, America stood in his mind not as a realm of possibility but as the locus of his constrained and dependent youth. Europe was the open field, the land of opportunity where he hoped to achieve his own personal and artistic identity. In
The Europeans
, written only a year after
The American
, it is the English visitors who are easygoing and morally elastic, while their American hosts are locked in the rigidities of New England tradition. Even in
The American
itself, the debate between energy and form has a way of detaching itself from its transatlantic geography and settling wherever James directs his attention. To Newman, Valentin’s duel seems an image of European life in general: both barbarous and corrupt, a blend of brutal, mindless passions and heartless social forms.

As an American novel that is not immediately distinguishable, on the basis of subject, style, argument, genre, or theme, from many of its European counterparts,
The American
calls into question the very idea of
American literature. Although that idea has assumed various shapes over the years since Americans first decided tha they should have their own literature as well as their own politics, it has always been an idea of
difference.
For all the nineteenth-century journalists who, in calling upon their countrymen to create a truly American literature, tried to explain what it
should
be, and for all the twentieth-century scholars and critics who have since tried to explain what it
is
, the aim has always been to establish between Europe and America a literary boundary as distinct as the Atlantic Ocean. This task has been both necessary and impossible for the same reason: what we call American literature simply does not have the sort of
prima facie
identity that the North American continent and the United States do. Even the most original and idiosyncratic works of American literature were written in a European language by persons steeped in transatlantic culture and whose idea of literature itself was based primarily upon European poetry, fiction, and drama. To be sure, the great American writers are unique. But great writing is unique by definition. Like writers everywhere, these Americans have cultivated uniqueness not so much to isolate themselves from the rest of the literary world, past and present, as to earn a place in that world by adding something new to it. Even Mark Twain and Whitman wanted seats in the literary pantheon, alongside Cervantes and Shakespeare, far more than they wanted a chapter in some future anthology of American literature. What is more, whenever some American has managed to do something unprecedented, something that might set American literature apart, their European colleagues have immediately incorporated this new development into their own work, thereby erasing the difference the moment it appeared.

The more logical question to ask about American literature, then, is not “What makes it
different
?” but “What
difference
has it made?” How has it affected the
course of modern literary history, of which it has always been, willy-nilly, an inextricable part?
The American
is especially well suited to the study of this question by virtue of the work’s peculiarly intimate connection with the personal life and artistic development of the first American to be generally recognized as a major figure in a major international literary movement. the development of modern fiction. The idea for the novel came to James (very much as the idea of quitting business and going to Europe comes to Newman) while he was riding down Broadway in a horse-car one day in the winter of 1874. James had recently returned from one of the several extended tours that had already occupied more than a quarter of his peripatetic youth. Not long after he was born, in 1843, his father, the Swedenborgian theologian for whom Henry was named, took him and his older brother William, who was to become the great American pragmatic philosopher, abroad to escape the limitations of provincial culture and education. For the next thirty years, James divided his time between Europe, where he traveled at first with his family and then alone, and such American bastions of Old World culture as Washington Place and Newport, where he changed schools and tutors repeatedly, and Cambridge, where he studied the law and began, in 1864, to publish reviews, stories, and critical essays in the literary quarterlies.

Having just completed
Roderick Hudson
, his second novel and the first to employ the international theme essayed in such earlier tales as “A Passionate Pilgrim” and “An International Episode,” James was determined to make his living as a writer. For the time being, that meant hack work for the journals and newspapers, but he longed for the day when, like Newman, he could give up the commercial life and seek a richer fortune in Europe. After many delays, that day finally came in the fall of 1875, when James left New York for an indefinite stay in Paris. By the following April he was
at work on
The American
, the character of Christopher Newman having arisen in his mind exactly as that personage first appears in the novel, “on a perfect day of the divine Paris spring, in the great gilded Salon Carré of the Louvre.”

Although James later remembered writing the novel “off the top of his head,” the period of composition appears to have been a particularly anxious time for him. To cover the expense of his European venture, the novel would have to be a popular success. To justify his contention that he could do better work by leaving America, it would have to be a critical success as well. The rightness of the most difficult and ultimately controversial decision he would ever make hung on the outcome of
The American.
Little wonder, then, that the novel reflects some of these anxieties. When the first installment appeared, in the June 1876 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly
, the later chapters were not yet written, and James and his hero were both beginning to feel very much at home in Paris. But by the time the last installment came out, twelve months later, Newman had been rejected by the Bellegardes, and James had come to realize that he, too, would never be admitted into what he considered real Parisian society. The first American edition of the novel was hardly in the reviewers’ hands when James abandoned the “detestable American Paris” to settle in London.

With
The American
and his Parisian difficulties behind him, James began the literary career that was initially to bring him the popularity and critical esteem he longed for and then to carry him far beyond his readers and reviewers alike into an unmapped region of novelistic art that would remain largely unsettled well into the present century. In a very important sense, however,
The American
was not behind him at all, for at each major stage of that increasingly lonely career, Newman’s story would reappear in a guise appropriate to the
occasion. Just as the conception, composition, and serial publication of the novel had accompanied the anxious process of expatriation, the generally favorable reception of its first American edition started James on his brief rise to popularity. The first English edition appeared in 1879, alongside the hugely successful
Daisy Miller
, which made him famous by making his American heroine notorious, and his critical biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which announced James’s literary farewell to America and his entry into London society. The inclusion of
The American
in the first uniform edition of his fiction, printed in London in 1883, marks his arrival at artistic and personal maturity following the completion of his first acknowledged masterpiece,
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881) and his long-postponed decision, upon the death of his parents in 1882, to reside abroad permanently.