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.)

On learning of Henry’s plans to spend a year in America, his brother, William James, had been typically ‘dissuasive’, as Henry put it. William warned him about the way Americans ate their boiled eggs, ‘bro’t to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter’. He lamented ‘the vocalization of our countrymen … so ignobly awful’. 

Sail, though, James did, on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, one of the new ‘five-day’ boats. He arrived in Hoboken on 30 August and seems to have been constantly on the move. He stayed with William and his wife, Alice, at their new house in Cambridge. He travelled everywhere by train, the ‘missionary Pullman’ (this was the great age of American railways). He spent a fortnight at the Mount, the glorious country house in Massachusetts that Edith Wharton had just built. One evening both novelists recited poetry to each other. When James read Walt Whitman’s verse, ‘his voice filled the hushed room like an organ adagio’.

Thus began an odyssey of ‘continental dimensions’, as Peter Brooks calls it in Henry James Comes Home. It took James from Cape Cod to Philadelphia and Baltimore, and then on to the Carolinas and Chicago, before he embarked on an epic trip to California. He wanted badly to see Cuba, but this proved impossible. The ten-month trip culminated in Florida.

James proposed to write two books about his travels (only one, The American Scene, eventuated). His renown was at its height, though his sales were waning. Wherever he went he was feted by the great and the good. In Washington, DC, he lunched and dined with the president, Theodore Roosevelt, on the same day. Roosevelt disapproved of James and called him ‘a miserable little snob’, while James dismissed Roosevelt as ‘the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise’.

Ever frugal and worried about income, James funded his extensive travels by giving public lectures. He did so right across America. One thousand people attended his Harvard lecture, and he repeated it four times in Chicago. The Midwest tour alone earned him $1,350. James limited himself to one lecture, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’. We may wonder, like Brooks, why he restricted himself to a French novelist who had been dead for half a century, but then, for James, Balzac was always ‘the master of us all’. James devoted no fewer than five essays to Balzac over the course of his life. One of these, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, is included in On Writers and Writing. Edited by Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel (2012), a masterly study of The Portrait of a Lady, On Writers and Writing contains twenty of James’s essays on literature, as well as his seminal piece ‘The Art of Fiction’.

James had many names for his mobile persona – ‘the restless analyst’, ‘the lone visionary’, ‘the visionary tourist’, ‘the palpitating pilgrim’. But what was he to make of the country he had fled in 1875, deeming it insufficiently rich and textured to fire his imagination? Brooks sees James as an anthropologist and likens him to Alexis de Tocqueville. With the assumptive omniscience of the biographer, Brooks writes that James recognised ‘the ineradicable depth of his American roots. In returning to the United States he was obeying some almost primal drive.’

James was shocked by the squalor in the South. He lamented the ostentatious wealth and was cutting about America’s new ‘hotel-civilization’. America was not dedicated to equality but to what he called ‘eligibility’ through accumulated wealth. Adrift in the ‘unservanted state’, with its shrill accents and breezy manners, James missed the European class distinctions and observances. He complained that women had been left in charge of culture and the arts while men were solely interested in making money.

New York, where he had been born in 1843, drew James back more than once. With a mixture of nostalgia and ambivalence, he roamed around the city, trying not to be run down by the murderous trolley cars. He detested the skyscrapers that were disfiguring New York (‘giants of the mere market’). He ended the chapter in The American Scene on the city with the words ‘Remarkable, unspeakable New York!’

Brooks describes his new book as a pendant to his Henry James Goes to Paris (2007), which concerned James’s first year in Paris. Much of the information is by now very familiar. James must be one of the most biographised of modern writers – few writers have been better served by biographers and critics, beginning with Leon Edel, author of a magisterial five-volume life. Rather too often, Brooks apologises for James’s ‘aesthetic snobbery’. As is the case with so many biographers, he wearies of his fastidious subject. He begins to find The American Scene ‘too prissy and prejudiced to be worth our attention as a serious piece of sociology’, and expresses impatience with James’s ‘high metaphoricity’. 

The book livens up when Brooks turns to the eternal tensions between William and Henry. While he was in America, Henry learned that he had been elected a member of the new American Academy of Arts and Letters in the second round. When William was elected in the subsequent round, he rejected the offer in the most spiteful manner, his letter reeking with disdain: ‘I am encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy, and that if I were there too, the other families represented might think the James influence too rank and strong.’ Around this time, William read The Golden Bowl. He sent Henry yet another scornful letter. Henry’s reply was witty and emollient. Finally, after a lifetime of fraternal rebuffs, he prevailed.

On 5 July 1905, James returned to Europe – back to Rye, back to his epistolary passions for mostly unavailable young men, back to his ‘beastly solitudinous life’. He wrote The American Scene, the most perceptive passages of which come towards the end. Here, he imagines Native Americans’ distress at the settlers’ ‘every disfigurement and every violence’. He writes: ‘You touch the great lonely land – as one feels it still to be – only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own.’ Unsurprisingly, this timeless indictment was removed from the American edition.

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.