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Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 20 Article 38 Issue 2 Spring-Summer

1990 Henry James's Boston Alexander Theroux

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Recommended Citation Theroux, Alexander. "Henry James's Boston." The Iowa Review 20.2 (1990): 158-165. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.3902

This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Henry James's Boston Alexander Theroux

IN SEPTEMBER 1862 Henry James journeyed from Newport to Cam as a at was bridge and registered student the Harvard Law School. He an nineteen years old. He took lodgings inWinthrop Square, old market area near now between Winthrop and Mt. Auburn Sts., what is Grendel's was new to was not Den. Boston, the famous old Puritan cap?tol, him. It center only the of culture, "the concentrated Boston of history, the Bos ton of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Ticknor, Motley, Prescott, and Parkman," but at the time the focus of American industrial fortunes in the nineteenth century?overseas trade, was banking and investments, railroads, real estate, and textiles. It also, in narrow to spite of its refinements, and provincial. According his biog never to rapher, Leon Edel, James could "reconcile himself the gentility of or manner to the Brahmins, the inwhich New England considered culture an a be arduous duty rather than joy of life and civilization." at His brother, William, studying medicine the Lawrence Scientific was at at corner School, living Miss Upham's boarding house the of Kirk was a land and Oxford Sts. Cambridge small, village of leafy elms, solitary on cows on commons. was a houses long slopes, grazing the Harvard itself college of only 1000 students and thirty teachers. James considered himself a "singularly alien member" of the law school. The subject bored him. Lowell's literary lectures were of much greater interest. next For the six years he stayed on, becoming fully acquainted with life was in Back Bay and Cambridge. The Civil War raging, and Boston was at the height of Abolition fever, fueled by local firebrands like Thoreau, LydiaMaria Child, andWendell Phillips. Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, was minister of the Park St. Church where Sen. Charles Sumner earlier had given his great oration, "The War Systems of a Nations." On New Year's Day James joined multitude at the Boston Music Hall celebrating Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. On the was crowded platform reading his "Boston Hymn" Ralph Waldo Emer once met as son, held in esteem by young James, who'd him in New York, one "the first, and the really rare, American spirit in letters." At 22, Henry James moved to 13 Ashburton Place?behind the State now House?where his parents lived, having themselves traveled to Bos

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University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org ton was a by way of Albany, Europe, and Newport. It here in house of red brick that he began his writing apprenticeship, setting up "the small ink at to pot," he later wrote, "in which I seemed last destined dip." His first signed tale, "The Story of aYear," appeared in theMarch 1865 issue of the Atlantic editor was the T. But Monthly, whose illustrious James Fields. part must to of 1863 have been given writing "A Tragedy of Error," his first which was in The Continental for story, published anonymously Monthly, soon February 1864. In any case, the young writer found himself in the most as company of distinguished literary lions, of them middle aged, such Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Julia Ward Howe, the "Boston Muse," a at who in house 241 Beacon St. wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Repub lic," the official song of the fighting Union troops. never an Young James, incidentally, fought in the Civil War because of ?some a "obscure hurt" think sexually crippling one?which he suffered at some a eighteen helping volunteer firemen fight fire. In 1866 the James family made a final move to 20 Quincy St. in Cam a bridge, large comfortable house facing the Harvard Yard, just about now where the Harvard faculty club stands. And here for the next three years he worked, writing book reviews, travel sketches, and art notices for over the Atlantic, since taken by William Dean Howells, and the North American Review, edited by Charles Eliot Norton who lived at ShadyHill. was a on as It restless period for James. He describes life Quincy St. being as as "about lively the inner sepulchre." Friends had gone away. New were to a friends hard find. And Minny Temple, close cousin he adored, had moved away to Pelham, New York for her health. Cambridge to James seemed tiny and pinched. It hadn't the magnitude was no means or he would have liked. It by destitute of culture institu tions or a sense of civilization. There could be found then the identifiable we Victorian ramparts know today?the Harvard Yard, the Avon Hill at section off Linnaen St., the Public Library 449 Broadway, and the Old Cambridge City Hall inCentral Sq., and so forth?but feeling hemmed in contacts. he yearned for wider was a At the time Boston busy and venerable old city. James could write admiringly of its "famous old-world crookedness." There were hotels were with marble-paved lobbies and the glare of white gaslight. There museums. Trinity Church. The Public Library, completed in 1895, James as nor on didn't like and described "neither exquisite the way to become

159 was a course were to seen so." It fairly cosmopolitan city. And of there be everywhere vast irregular buildings, browns tones, for the most part, with towers bays, turrets, and of elaborate decorations, imposing facades, and slate roofs with all sorts of turns and effects. were new But there and rather undefined outreaches, especially facing west. In James's youth about the only building visible, looking in that di was steam en rection from the Common, the Arlington St. Church. The we were gine had been invented, mustn't forget, and excavations being was to made in the Back Bay. What later become Dartmouth St. and Cop was one vast a ley Sq., that whole area, in fact, construction site, landscape gutted like amoonscape with fill being carted in day and night and emp to tied into the mephitic tidal flats. James would often walk Boston from mean Cambridge. He describes crossing "the long bridge that spans the ?a a mouth of the Charles mile of wooden piles supporting brick pave a a over ment, roadway deep in mire, and rough timber fence, which the a new pedestrian enjoys view of the frozen bay, the backs of many houses, a and big brown marsh." was to use as Henry James Cambridge and Boston the setting for several - of his short stories "Europe" (1899), "Four Meetings" (1877), "The Point of View" (1882), to name a few. "The Ghostly Rental" (1876) deals with a haunted house inMedford ?the Hillside area, I believe? where a man now demented having cursed his daughter receives rent from her an ghost. And his first short novel, Watch and Ward (1878), is the story of effete Bostonian who wears lavender gloves and consoles himself for fail ure a in love by adopting 12-year-old girl. The title of the novel, which to so to makes reference the well-known reform society, alludes by doing Boston's stuffiness and rectitude. a Boston, in many ways, amused James. It was city of blue-nosed pro ? roast as once vincials "cold Boston," T. G. Appleton described his birth was a one in place. It place with foot Europe, big snows, and everyone mum on sex. the sentiment of People reputedly married only their was a cousins. It tight little world of old ways and regimen and formality. even Behind lofty windows, where rich velvet drapes hung tight with fu men ate nereal gloom, unimaginative every day got up and their oatmeal, were although they hated it. Its citizens fierce sectionalists and often meant suffered from acute over-refinement, what James usually by the was word "genteel." There social arrogance and intellectual snobbery.

160 "At Boston, you know," says Mrs. Westgate in the story, "An Inter to an at national Episode," "you have pass examination the city limits." Much of what he found in Boston embodied for James?who had lived for periods in Paris and London by then ?the parochialism of America. He was on on bitterly attacked in Boston for emphasis in his book Hawthorne the provincial quality of New England life. In his stories he gave characters names like Roger Lawrence, Louis Leverett, and Harvard Tremont! And course of there's Mrs. Nettlepoint in the story, "The Patagonia." She lives an on out on arm sea in elegant house Beacon St., "looking the little of the which is so pretty at night reflecting the lights of Cambridgeport and Charlestown." She has opinions and condescends to tell the narrator of the to a note story of her willingness travel, striking "more specifically Bos as to tonian," however, she points her fan the Back Bay and adds, "I shall see more over ?a nothing charming than that there, you know" remark once echoing the Boston lady of legend who said, "Why should I travel? I am already here." Jamesian Boston is located in, but not limited to, the area around Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and the "recreative expanse" of the Common and Public Garden. Winslow Homer's evocative painting, The Boston Common (1858), with its girls-with-hoops and fountains and Victorian families holding must a parasols, captures the way it have looked. Mrs. Lucretia Daintry, on wonderful old stick in the story, "A New England Winter," lives New bury Street?what James would have called "a picturesque address" ?and to an has eminent degree "the physiognomy, the accent, the costume, the conscience, and the little eyeglass of her native place." She can't imagine ever how her son, the priggish painter Florimund, could prefer the conti nent to Boston. "The upper part of Beacon St. seemed to Florimund uneven charming?the long, wide, sunny slope, the line of the older houses, the contrasted, differing, bulging fronts, the painted bricks, the tidy facings, the immaculate doors, and burnished silver plates." Even to to tually he decides leave and return Europe, however, and, it turns out, so. delights everyone by doing In 1869 James himself left for Europe and, but for a short spell living in return to New York in 1875, wouldn't America for twelve long years. The on seat. come to house Quincy St. remained the family He did back Boston a to to inOctober 1881 for month, but left almost immediately travel New York andWashington. His mother died in January, unfortunately before

161 he could get back toCambridge. He proceeded to sail for England and then was once more in 1882 called home by the illness of his father, who died in within eleven months of his wife December 1882 ?again, strangely enough, just before James could reach home. He left for England again in 1883. a set The Europeans (1878), second novel in Boston of the 1840s, ad dresses the taboos and sociabilities of the city, portraying it again as a was spare, straight-backed "little Puritan metropolis." But it in The Bos tonians (1885) that James dealt firsthand with the somewhat ambivalent feelings he had for Boston and the complicated, often dedicated, but meddlesome character of too many of its reformers. The novel was re not as a on as a on garded only satire Boston culture but libel certain recog nizable figures (James vigorously denied it) and in the end received a cold was not so as response in Boston, where it much attacked ignored. a The focus of the story is struggle for possession, the battle for young a Verena Tarrant between Basil Ransom, young southern lawyer, and the hysterical spinster and women's-rights advocate, Olive Chancellor?a caricature, it was said, of Katharine Loring, Alice James's friend and to nursemaid?who tries desperately bring the hapless girl into the ranks mor of her feminist crusade. Much of the kind of unnatural passion and can a bidity of temperament that James loved be found here. It's novel that seems to ex consist of nothing but hands, reproving, pushing, pulling, a ploiting. There is great deal of hysteria in it. There is also much of one on a Boston. And Cambridge. Verena at point takes Basil tour of Har to vard's Memorial Hall, "a kind of temple youth, manhood, generosity." are scenes on And there memorable Cape Cod. ?a Unforgettable is the portrait of Miss Birdseye character supposedly on based Elizabeth Peabody, sister-in-law of Hawthorne and Horace Mann, William Ellery Channing's literary assistant, Bronson Alcott's aide ? at the Temple School, and founder of the first American kindergarten one of those eternal radical and superannuated fire-eaters who carried Bibles to slaves and statute-books to women. She is the kind of woman made only in Boston, the type who lived "during the heroic age of New an England life," age, James wrote, "of plain living and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion and noble experiment." He speaks of the "unquenched flame of her transcendentalism" and the eleva tion of people whose crusading zeal could be fired "by the reading of

162 Emerson and the fr?quentation of Tremont Temple." to Henry James returned America in 1904 after an absence of twenty one He was years. sixty, bald, and corpulent. He spent the autumn in New England, and would stay in the States for a year. He landed at Hobo took a train to on a warm ken, N.J., South Station, and rode by buggy to September night through Boston Cambridge. Neither city was the same. was more streets. more There lamplight. Different And buildings. And newer and even stranger architecture. He spent his first night home at 95 Irving St., the large shingled house his brotherWilliam had built ten years before. next The day he visited Chocorua in theWhite Mountains. James was anxious to look around. Returning after three days, he took the train to Cape Cod where he wandered about admiring "the little white houses, the ocean feathery elms, the band of blue, the strip of sandy yellow, the tufted in across pines angular silhouette, the cranberry swamps, stringed for the picking, like the ruled pages of ledgers." He took time to visit "Mrs. Jack" a at in a Gardner, good friend, Green Hill Brookline and made special trip to see the was widely discussed, all-but-completed Florentine palazzo she on having built the marshes of the Fenway. to He took time reacquaint himself with various places in Boston. He a strolled at leisurely pace around that part of the city where he had first to to begun write. He makes mention in The American Scene of stopping admire Saint-Gaudens's "noble and exquisite monument" to Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the 54th Mass. Infantry (a black contingent) was on who slain leading the attack Fort Wayne, South Carolina in 1863. The monument, which is opposite the State House, still stands. He paused at most the Atheneum, the "honoured haunt of all the civilized?library, was to at as gallery, temple of culture, the place that Boston large Boston at was to large the rest of New England." came to Continuing along he again "the perfectly felicitous" Park St. on Church "Brimstone Corner," probably the best remaining example of Boston's early nineteenth century architecture. James called it "the most mass interesting of brick and mortar in America." Here "America the was Beautiful" first sung in public, and William Lloyd Garrison gave his in first public address Boston against slavery. "It is admirably placed," on one James said, "quite peculiarly present, the Boston scene, and thus, for reason as and another, points its moral not even the State House does."

163 But he turned to look back. And seeing the State House he described the as as a seen across a gilded dome perfectly "fresh Christmas toy the floor of large salubrious nursery." one own some But Henry James, rather like of his characters in dilemma or sure so a other, wasn't exactly what he felt after being away long. Only serene few years later, H. G. Wells, visiting in Boston, would find the city as as rose but barren the Common when the dawn and filtered the light of over day the deserted area, and he might have been speaking for James when he wrote,

over an There broods the real Boston immense effect of finality. The no capacity of Boston, it would seem, was just sufficient but more to than sufficient, comprehend the whole achievement of the human us to A.D. an intellect up, let say, the year 1875 Then equilibrium was established. At or about that year Boston filled up.

as a James perhaps felt stasis condition virtually defined Boston. But now he was dissatisfied with the new manners, or lack of them ?and the was absence of form. He appalled by slovenly dress everywhere. Lack of servants. civic pride. Overpaid Too many roads being built. There had so been many changes. Streets gone. Houses razed. The mayor of the city was an Irishman. Old ways had disappeared. New wealth sought expres sion in unbridled ostentation in architecture. And visiting Harvard he on re commented the "pampered state" of the students, the "multiplied . . . sources, facilities, museums and pompous little club-houses." Beacon St. was full of memories. There was Mt. Vernon St. where his

father had died and where he had stayed, in the house of mourning, through the spring of 1883with his invalid sister,Alice. InCharles St. he now ? passed the house of James T. Fields ?Sarah Orne Jewett lived there once saw where Dickens and Thackeray had been entertained. And he again the home of Oliver Wendell Holmes. That autumn most of what he saw was the long past. Old secrets, old stories, "a saturation of life," he as scent a wrote, "as closed together and preserved in it the lingering in folded pocket handkerchief." to ?now And finally he built up enough courage visit the Cambridge a Mt. Auburn ?Cemetery. On little ridge stood the family plot, the graves of his mother, father, his sister, and one ofWilliam's children who

164 with merciless memo had died young. The place, he later wrote, "bristled last off toward the ries." Henry James paid his respects, tearfully, looking some once more to Charles River. He lingered time. Then he returned was to twelve a few weeks England, where he live another years, dying was and the ashes before his seventy-third birthday. The body cremated, a brought back for burialwith his family, inCambridge, part of theworld he knew well.

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