Henry James Was Not at Home in America

Contra Thomas Wolfe, you actually can go home again—but once you see how much it’s changed, you may want to leave just as quickly. When Henry James, after spending most of his adult life abroad, returned in 1904 for a 10-month-long tour of the United States, he was dismayed to find that many of the old buildings and spaces he once cherished had been obliterated—such as his childhood homes in Boston and Manhattan’s Washington Square or the “dusky lecture halls” of Copley Square, where his father (a theosophy-leaning lover of Swedenborg) had once given talks, along with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Even worse: In their places had risen implacable monuments and skyscrapers that stood unassailable to James’s nightly flaneur-ish ramblings; they no longer reverberated with his fading memories of youth but only testified to America’s “power of the purse.”