The American (3 page)

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 the
seventeenth 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 on the scene, in the 1870s, the struggle had reached its crisis. In Europe and in America alike, the forces of reaction had retired behind the barricades of traditional belief, while the modern barbarians proceeded to sack the palaces of government, religion, and art.

Given the historical origins of James’s theme, his dramatization of it as the invasion of a feudal barony by a democratic American adventurer seems wonderfully appropriate. What keeps it from seeming peculiarly American is that the contest between Old World forms and New World energies is resolved in the novel entirely on Old World terms. If the Bellegardes wrong Newman by reverting to their ancient principles, he triumphs over them by refusing to pursue his ambition beyond the bounds of his conscience. American “good nature” manifests itself not in a decisive action that creates its own moral value but in a refusal to act, and it is no accident that Newman’s decision is wholly agreeable to the Bellegardes. The resolution is Old Worldly in a structural sense as well. In surrendering his power over the Bellegardes to the moral form of his “good nature,” Newman shapes his actions to the moral form that James imposed upon the novel long before he wrote it. Although Newman discovers the limits of his good nature in his desire for revenge, he cannot overstep those limits if the novel is to arrive at its conclusion with its moral, the superiority of American conscience, still in hand.

That James should have conceived his American tale in this Old World form is perfectly understandable. At that moment, he was preparing to flee America for Europe, a place that held powerful and complex associations for him. Like most of his American and European
contemporaries, James thought of the Old World and the New as essentially different places: the Old World as the unaltered past, the world as it was before the discovery of America, and the New World as a radical departure from that past, with no ties to it. According to this geography, Europe might provide either a fixed point from which to measure modern progress or a place to escape the drift of modern history. In either case, it constituted a timeless standard against which the history of the New World could be judged. What is more, having been taught from infancy to identify America with commerce and Europe with art, James quite naturally associated art more closely with traditional forms than with energetic actions. Ideally, he knew, art should achieve a perfect fusion of form and action, a marriage of the Old and New worlds. But since the proof of Newman’s character depends on his losing Claire, and since James knew from the beginning that they would make “an impossible couple,” Newman must achieve that reconciliation on his own, by showing that his conscience restrains evil actions even more effectively than do the traditions of the Bellegardes.

At the same time, there runs throughout the controlling form of
The American
a powerfully subversive energy that continually threatens to do what James would one day insist a novel
should
do: burst the settled bounds of the author’s prior intentions and propel the action beyond the well-kept paths of literary convention into the unpredictable, morally ambiguous world we actually inhabit. Although Newman manages to retain the good nature required by the foreordained outcome and moral of the story, James would never forget the effort this consistency had cost him. For Newman is by his very nature inconsistent. As Claire tells him, “You were born—you were trained to changes.” Like Christopher Columbus, for whom he is named, and the Elizabethan merchant-adventurers, to whom he is often compared,
Newman is one of those daring entrepreneurs whose ambition is to change the world and his own place in it. Like them, he does not conform to the world. He invents and perpetually reinvents it in the process of exploring it, inventing and reinventing himself with each new discovery, until he comes at last to see that this unfolding world is both the cause and adequate symbol of his own evolving soul. As an agent of change, Newman is less a static type of American character than an enaction of the American consciousness, that curious, energetic, ambitious, and infinitely elastic spirit of moral originality that was loosed upon the Old World by the discovery of the New.

The result of this conflict between the static moral form of the novel and its energetic moral action is a measure of confusion about Newman’s true nature and what he is supposed to represent. On the one hand, we can only commend his refusal to blackmail the Bellegardes. The national reputation for fair play is perfectly safe in his keeping. On the other hand, we may feel that his “good nature” is also his greatest weakness. Newman makes his final pilgrimage from the new, American Paris on the Right Bank, across the dark river, and into the underworld of the medieval city where his Ideal lies entombed because he desired her. But he returns empty-handed because he cannot violate his good nature to save her. The modern reader will not easily forgive Newman the precious “good nature” that is so necessary to his opinion of himself as a “good fellow wronged.” Instead of insisting, against all evidence to the contrary, that he is “not wicked,” he might better say, as does the American heroine of James’s “Madame de Mauves": “I believe that if my conscience will prevent me from doing anything very base, it will effectually prevent me from doing anything very fine.” The “fine” thing for Newman to do, surely, would be to acknowledge the baneful effect of his “good nature” on the lives of Noémie, Valentin,
and Claire, and to sacrifice his good opinion of himself in order to repair some of the damage he has done. If he had used the letter, Mrs. Tristram assures him in the final scene, the Bellegardes would have capitulated and Claire might have been saved. That would not have been “good-natured,” which is to say morally consistent, but it would have been “fine,” which is to say morally beautiful. Above all, it would also be truer to Newman’s actual “type,” since no real American entrepreneur would hesitate for an instant to use his competitors’ own weapons against them.

Looking back on
The American
from the end of his career, James saw that in making Newman consistent he had made the novel untrue, and that in excluding all those interesting complications upon which, he said, the art of the novel depends, he had made it inartistic. Far from reverting to their ancient principles, a real family of impoverished nineteenth-century aristocrats, he came to see, would have welcomed the rich American aboard with his gold. But that, James said, “wouldn’t have been the theme of ‘The American’…to which I was from so early pledged.” If the Bellegardes gave in, they would not be “Europeans,” living embodiments of that Old World from which America had departed and to which both Newman and James sought to return. The old home, from which the Americans fell of their own accord (to paraphrase St. Augustine), would be seen to have fallen down while they were away from it. And if Newman blackmailed the Bellegardes, he would not be “good-natured.” Instead of having produced a superior conscience, New World history would be seen to have departed from moral principle altogether. If the novel were true, in sum, there would be no moral forms at all, neither Old World traditions nor New World conscience, just selfish expediency on one side of the Atlantic and rapacious appetite on the other.

It is hardly surprising that
The American
cannot admit
what it discovers, let alone explain it. James left America to escape the consequences of modern history, and the novel was written to justify his flight by demonstrating his American loyalty through European artistry. How could the novel tell this literally earth-shaking truth: that the Old World of timeless forms is gone, swept away by the tide of modern history? The Old World is unrecoverable because we have destroyed it and inescapable because we are forever to blame. The New Adam can neither redeem the past by harrowing hell, nor recover his original estate, nor escape the consequences of his willful fall, nor, by pursuing the course of his desires, arrive at that “New Heaven and New Earth” which is the old home in its final, perfect form. The Old World and the New are not different places—the one forever old and forever available, the other progressing toward moral perfection. There is only one world, forever new and forever old, a world of vagrant human energies without a source, a direction, or a destination to justify them.

The new world that
The American
helped James to discover would require a new conception of artistic form. Reflecting upon the novel when he turned it into a play, James said, “I will never again move in the strait-jacket of a novel conceived from a point wholly non-scenic…forcing one into a corner of forever keeping to it…and yet violating it at every step.” Whereas Newman can “close the book” of his experience “and put it away,” a fictive action that is true to life can never achieve its final form. “Really, universally,” James came to see, “relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” This new form, in turn, would require a new conception of character—not an unchanging conscience opposed to action but an evolving consciousness inseparable from action. And the depiction of this consciousness would
require a new kind of language, not a description of actions in moral terms, but a symbolic action moral in its own right.
The American
had begun with a “non-scenic” moral plot that produced a necessarily consistent character.
The Portrait of a Lady
would begin with an unformed character whose life, unfolding out of her desires, would create the novel’s plot. And
The Ambassadors
would begin with an imaginative consciousness, whose changes “from hour to hour” would constitute its action and its meaning, its energy and its form, at once. Although each of these developments would carry James further away from
The American
, he would describe the xperience of writing these novels as the pursuit of “unforeseen developments” by a “rash adventurer” who has the necessary “courage” to face each “cruel crisis” in history, “from the moment that he sees it grimly loom”—words that go a long way toward explaining his sense of continuing obligation to the problematic energies of Christopher Newman.

When James was virtually unknown, at work on his very first novel, he hoped it might become “the great American novel” his countrymen were looking for. In the 1880s, at the peak of his popularity, he reaffirmed his ambition “to do something great,” to “prove that I
can
write an American novel.” And at the end of his life, with
The Ambassadors
behind him and his popularity beyond recall, he was still planning to write his “American novel.” Since nothing he produced seems to have quite satisfied his idea of this national masterpiece, it is impossible to know exactly what he had in mind. We can be sure that he was not thinking of something like
Huckleberry Finn
, for he once stated his desire “to write in such a way that it would be impossible to say whether I am at any given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America.” In James’s view, a true American novelist would be one who could stand in “the company of Balzac or
Thackeray”—although he did not mean, of course, that Americans should try to imitate these writers. He did not believe that this great American novel had ever been written. But when it did appear, he was sure, it would do more than satisfy America’s craving for a national literature. It would contribute significantly to the art of the novel in general. “I think it not unlikely,” he said at the very beginning of his career, “that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen. We must of course have something of our own—something distinctive and homogeneous—and I take it that we shall find it in our moral consciousness, our unprecedented spiritual lightness and vigour.”