LITERARY REVIEW (April 1, 2025) by Peter Rose:
In 1904, Henry James decided to return to America. He was feeling isolated at Lamb House in Rye. In a letter to Grace Norton, he wrote: ‘The days depart and pass, laden somehow like processional camels – across the desert of one’s solitude.’ Since the flop of Guy Domville, his dreams of success as a dramatist had been dashed. The Wings of the Dove had been published in 1902, followed by The Ambassadors in 1903, in serial form. The Golden Bowl – written in little more than a year and, for many, his sovereign achievement – was almost finished. Now, after this awesome outpouring, he was ready to review his homeland, last visited in 1882.
James’s reasons for returning were complex, some obvious and professional, others psychological and obscure. Family drew him back, just as it had subtly hurried him on his way in 1875, when he left America, first for Paris, then for London. Planning his itinerary, James wrote to his nephew Harry: ‘I can’t tell you how I thank you for offering me your manly breast to hurl myself upon in the event of my alighting on the New York dock, four or five weeks hence, in abject and craven terror.’ (One can only imagine the tremulations this caused in young Harry’s manly breast.)
He also began work on what he pointedly called the New York Edition of his preferred writings. The commercial failure of this work, with its ruminative prefaces and startling omissions, led to years of clinical depression. In a letter to Morton Fullerton, one of his late passions, James wrote: ‘The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life … This loneliness (since I mention it!) – what is it still but the deepest thing about one?’ For this noblest of modernists, it was the saddest confession.