The American Read Free Page A

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.
    A decade later, when James turned from fiction to the drama in hopes of securing both his reputation and his finances with a great theatrical success, he began by turning
The American
into a play. And as the novel had heralded his rise to popularity and critical reputation, the play signaled a decline that would continue virtually unchecked until more than a decade after his death in 1916. The novels of the 1890s—
The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Sacred Fount
—repelled readers because of their forbidding “scenic” style, which James had learned in the theatre and would combine with the international theme of
The American
to produce the three great novels of his last, “major” phase—
The Wings of the Dove
(1902),
The Ambassadors
(1903), and
The Golden Bowl
(1904). In 1905, after revisiting America for the first time in over twenty years, James rewrote
The American
one last time, revising it extensively in the style of these masterpieces for inclusion in the New York Edition of his works, his final attempt to regain the American reading public he had long since left behind.
    At each of these crucial stages of his progress, James appears to have felt the need to rescue
The American
from the receding past by bringing it abreast of the latest development in his art and to renew his contacts with his American beginnings. It is as if each new departure revealed a new significance in this early novel, uncovering a new debt that increasing artistic mastery owed to an American apprenticeship. Although James paid the debt promptly each time it came due, the sense of continuing obligation clearly puzzled him, for to each reworking of the novel he attached a condescending, sometimes openly contemptuous, account of what seemed to him its artistic weaknesses. What could the infinitely delicate maneuverings of Lambert Strether’s moral consciousness owe to the bold strokes of Newman’s impulsive good nature, or the rich ambiguities of
The Golden Bowl
to the melodramatic simplicities of
The American?
How could this vindication of American generosity have set James on the path to Europe, and how could that path, from the New World to the Old, have led him to the future of the novel rather than back into its romantic past?
    To retrace this journey is to negotiate the passage from the idea of America as something necessarily
different
from the rest of the world to that of its having made a
difference
in the whole world. Although the contest between Newman’s modern energies and the Bellegardes’ ancient formality does not distinguish James’s novel from most of the important fiction and poetry written in England throughout the nineteenth century, the theme is nevertheless American in that the debate over the relative primacy and value of these two opposed ideas was precipitated by the discovery of America. It arose in the Renaissance as a quarrel between the “ancients” and the “moderns” concerning the ability of established forms of knowledge to accommodate this new and original discovery, and it grew increasingly urgent throughout theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the tide of revolutionary energies loosed by the discovery gradually undermined the structures of knowledge and belief that had sustained Western civilization for nearly two thousand years. By the time James arrived