An American senator observes, with some perplexity, English country life in the late 1800's in all of its social echelons, and we follow the romances and intrigues of the flirtatious Arabella Trefoil. Thirteen 90-minute cassettes.
To be an American is, as Henry James famously observed, a "complex fate." But complexity was that rococo master's stock-in-trade, which may explain why he returned to his native country in 1904 after an absence of more than 20 years. To be sure, he was interested in a Jamesian walk down memory lane, with its full quota of meditative hairsplitting. Yet he also meant to take advantage of his hybrid status as a Europeanized American. "I made no scruple," James explains in his introduction, "of my conviction that I should understand and should care better and more than the most earnest of visitors, and yet that I should vibrate with more curiosity ... than the pilgrim with the longest list of questions." Vibrate he did, in the ornate and extraordinary periods of his late phase, and the result was a one-of-a-kind travel book, The American Scene.
James opens his book with an impressionistic overture, which can be slightly off-putting: he seems too intent on leaping beyond the dry donnée of American life into pure abstraction. But readers shouldn't be discouraged. Even in the opening pages the author manages some brilliant snapshots, like this description of New Hampshire's Saco River: "The rich, full lapse of the river, the perfect brownness, clear and deep, as of liquid agate, in its wide swirl, the large indifferent ease in its pace and motion, as of some great benevolent institution smoothly working; all this, with the sense of the deepening autumn about, gave I scarce know what pastoral nobleness to the scene, something raising it out of the reach of even the most restless of analysts." And once James begins his journey proper up and down the Eastern seaboard, he delivers one amazing page after another. He doesn't, of course, care for everything he sees--the skyscrapers of Manhattan strike him as vertical monstrosities, and he lets loose with more than one politically incorrect shaft at the minority population.
What appalls him the most, though, is the Almighty Dollar, which he perceives as "the preliminary American postulate," the very bedrock of New World life: "This basis is that of active pecuniary gain and of active pecuniary gain only--that of one's making the conditions so triumphantly pay that the prices, the manners, the other inconveniences, take their place as a friction it is comparatively easy to salve, wounds directly treatable with the wash of gold." Some will argue that the fussbudget author had spent too much time in England, where money remained a dirty word until after the Second World War. Others may find his diagnosis eerily prescient. In any case, The American Scene remains required reading for anybody interested in U.S. history, Henry James, or the incredible evolution of the compound sentence. --James Marcus

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 3.0 / 5.0

A Great Sensibility:

One of the great sensibilities of American Literature, self-exiled to the Continent, returns to peruse the great naturalistic theater of his nativity, conversing with apples, musing on the Civil War, and wondering where he would be if he had exiled himself in his own native land... had remained to register the Civilization of the Adolescence of the United States. This is the perfect bookend to "The Education of Henry Adams".
Great passages and moments abound. This is prose of such beauty and delicacy... more info

One terrible passage ruins this book for me:

James is a great literary virtuoso, in certain ways the most sophisticated and complex America has had. His intricate intelligence is complemented by an unequaled descriptive power, and a mastery of language, second to none. How difficult then to come across the passage which ruins this book for me. This is James description of the immigrant Jews on the East Side.It is the observation of the sterile aristrocatic owner of Anglo-Saxon civilization who looks with contempt and horror at the poor swarming... more info

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