A few days before his sixtieth birthday, in 1903, Henry James wrote to his brother William of his desire to return to his native land after twenty-some years of self-exile. William quickly responded that the trip was a bad idea; he could imagine “the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you,” including “the vocalization of our countrymen…. It is simply incredibly loathsome.” Henry was undeterred:
Simply and supinely to shrink—on mere grounds of general fear and encouraged shockability has to me all the air of giving up, chucking away without a struggle, the one chance that remains to me in life of anything that can be called a movement: my one little ewe-lamb of possible exotic experience, such experience as may convert itself, through the senses, through observation, imagination and reflection now at their maturity, into vivid and solid material, into a general renovation of one’s too monotonised grab-bag.
A slightly campy challenge to his older brother this was, joined to the claim that he would gain material for his writing from a return to his beginnings. He wanted the shocks that William mentioned, wanted also the “exotic experience” of traveling beyond New York and New England to see the entire country: the South and the Midwest and the Far West all the way to California.
Henry did, of course, experience the horrors predicted by William, including the “slovenly” use of “vocal sound, in men and women alike…a mere helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises,” as he put it in “The Question of Our Speech,” a commencement address he gave at Bryn Mawr. But his essay-travelogue about the trip, The American Scene, which features as narrator-protagonist a self that James calls “the restless analyst,” is complex, nuanced, and brilliant as well as exasperating, one of the great works of American sociology, and an enduring indictment of what Americans had made of their land.
Between August 1904 and July 1905 James traveled: south to Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, Palm Beach, and St. Augustine—despite frequent returns to Boston for bouts of dentistry—then west to St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee, then on to Los Angeles and San Diego and up to San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. It was all done by train: even Chocorua, New Hampshire, where William had a summer house, could be reached by train—it then was close to the apogee of the American rail network. The trip also turned out to be profitable, since James soon was commanding $500 to present a lecture, on the French novelist Balzac of all improbable subjects, to audiences not only in Philadelphia and Chicago but also St. Louis and Indianapolis. The American Scene ends following the trip to Florida; a projected second volume on the trail west never was written.