The American Read Free

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 wasat 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 theoccasion. 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