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The Late, Unlamented Henry James
And Why He Still Belongs in the Classroom
By Dan Sanders
To many educators, The American
is the classroom equivalent of jungle warfare. Its prose is dense and lush, and makes for slow, arduous going. Many teachers can't so much as say "Henry James" without their lips curling up, for there is nothing easy about teaching psyche-driven art in a sensation-driven world. Selling James' writing to modern, Nintendo-callused kids seemingly approaches a divine act, like making water run uphill.
Yet there is more behind this distaste than James' literary complexity. Christopher Newman, "our hero," is rich, white, and lucky—all diminishing characteristics in the America we know. Not
only is it permissible to look askance at men like this in our day, it's downright fashionable. Newman belongs to one of the last American demographics that is fair game for ridicule, and today's media, running
out of permissible targets, has taken eager aim. In television commercials depicting a husband and wife disagreeing with each other, the man is always wrong. Fathers on sitcoms are portrayed as either weak
or stupid—Ward Cleaver is dead and Al Bundy is alive and well. It's okay to make sport of a man like this.
Perhaps if the plot of The American
commenced a few years earlier, Christopher Newman might elicit more affection from a modern day reader. In introducing Newman to the reader as an established, successful man, James does not allow us to see Newman struggling to make his fortune. Instead, in the opening scene, we find Newman lounging about Paris trying to think of ways to spend his money. Without knowing how Newman made it, we are suspicious of his character. After all, people who manage to glide above storms vaguely trouble us. If a man with hard-won millions quit the treadmill so easily today, others would think him strange. In our work-mad society, where a man is defined all but exclusively by how he makes a buck, where the mere admission that he likes an afternoon nap draws fishy looks, the message is: you quit when you die.
Christopher Newman would have been an aberration in his own day as well. How could he be so unscathed, just three years removed from the pandemic horror of the Civil War? The answer, of course, is
that he was the invention of a novelist who spent the war years snug at Harvard. One of James' classmates there was Abraham Lincoln's eldest son, who drew wide criticism for his less-than-martial ways.
Failing to "do your bit" in America's great conflicts does not sit well with its modern citizens, either: Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra and Bill Clinton each found this out, and in his day Henry James
might well have, too. In a deeply patriotic time, patriotism was lost on him. By the time James' first novel saw print he didn't want to live in America, and he died not an American at all, becoming a
British citizen in 1915.
All this makes for a glibness of tone that makes James' work a little hard for us to take, and it may explain his inability to infiltrate French high society in the 1870s as well.
Newman manages to steer clear of many qualities that make Europeans loathe Americans, but condescension is not one of them. There is something uneasily grating about the vast sums that he tosses to the old Nioche
and his empty-headed, empty-hearted daughter as casually as an orange. Even when a man like Newman is kind, he can be aggravating. Today, we can stand guys like that only in small doses, such as those that
the movies offer us; and even then, it is only when we know that they're about to sail on a big ship without enough lifeboats—that we all go to see it eight times.
An American in Paris
At the book's end, when Tom Tristram gushes to Newman about Paris, "You know it's really the only place for a white man to live," how can anyone else feel welcome there? The answer, of
course, is that many of us do not: the Paris of The American is a hostile, alien world to many a contemporary student.
By the novel's midpoint, the Parisian aristocracy begins to chafe our American
ideals: how dare they sit around, carping about nothing at all. By the time Claire rejects Newman's suit for her hand, it is plain that the Bellegardes never intended for the marriage to take place.
It's their idea of fun to toy with Newman, fattening him up for the slaughter. Bright as he is, Newman is the last to see the closing jaws. At the Bellegarde's party, James warns us that "Everyone
looked at him with that soft hardness of good society which puts out its hand but keeps its fingers closed over the coin." The coin in question, needless to say, is Claire. The French elite's victim is
an American, and their brutal joke almost seems as if it is on all of us.
Yet the very point where the French turn their ugliest is when the novel's most profound observations begin. Yes, the Bellegardes
are perfect bastards, but if they weren't, they wouldn't survive in their urban jungle. Their effete ghoulishness might repel us, but to them it is an essential occupational skill. Even though the battle
sites of the Bellegardes are Paris' plush drawing rooms and opera boxes, the stakes are life and death nonetheless. To James' aristocrats, a shunned life is death, and hence, the contestants behave
accordingly. These people live in a world without therapy, fair courts of law, Welfare, drug rehab, cosmetic surgery, the insanity defense, Amnesty International, Judge Judy, or any of our other refuges. The
hapless Valentin's death by duel is as savage as any drive-by in our own urban nightmares. For all its machinations to put up genteel appearances, there is nothing gentle about this Paris and these people.
The crime of Valentin's mother is a stupendous one: she visits death upon a man she once stood with before family and friends inside the Lord's House, vowing before all to honor and cherish him.
Modern Messages
In The American, James shows us the
inherent, inexorable corruption of nobility, and makes it plain that it is part of every era, including our own. Look at the behavior of the Royals we know today; the proof of his wisdom is omnipresent. We
can, in fact, look within our shores and find pertinence, for this most democratic of nations has a royal class of its own: celebrity. Entire television channels and magazines slavishly obsess over their
behavior. It has even increasingly become a hereditary circumstance—as exemplified by the offspring of Bob Dylan, Kirk Douglas, John F. Kennedy, and scores of others who enjoy celebrity status, however slender
their talent. Writing of a Paris gripped by nobility behaving ignobly, James is presciently imparting the early symptoms of a dying culture that is decreasingly able to bear its own weight. Seventy years
after the novel's publication, France would be a thoroughly marginalized nation, twice forced to come hat in hand to ask the detested Americans to bail them out. In our middle class, who takes the time to learn
France's language, go to their films, or pay attention to their fashions anymore? Forty years ago, it seemed everyone did. Ironically, by the time James finished The American
in 1876, he had given up on Paris too, abandoning it for London.
The novel offers other lessons of immense value to a classroom—in particular to those students whose classroom days are drawing to a close.
Above all is the work's consummate moral problem: should Christopher Newman take revenge on those who have so grievously wronged him? Newman finally discerns that the ministration of such justice is beyond
his ken, something best left to another. When he burns the evidence of murder he bests the Bellegardes, all the vindication one should need. Along the story's way, he also learns that some men, such as sad
old Nioche, are poor for very good reasons. And James writes of Newman, "He believed that Europe was made for him, and not he for Europe," warning other Yanks against seeing the world "across the
pond" as a mere franchise of America's National Park system. Finally, Newman discovers what almost everyone does at great cost: just how dangerous falling in love can be.
All of this is very hard
to squash onto celluloid of course, and the list of successful attempts is short. It is no less difficult to bring to life in a classroom. But we must try. Like most writers in the centuries before our
own, Henry James asked much more of his audience than our writers do. His readers were captives to their times. Lacking our myriad "conveniences" and distractions, they were more suited for
patiently observing, more free to go poring over details of place and personality. Today, The American
seems passé, a baseball consciousness in a football age. Our dominant medium of cinema coaxes its writers to describe every character, even "leads," in five lines or less. Henry James, though, was hunting bigger game. What he does with even his most fleeting players constitutes highly precise character engineering, and it demands an attention span our species has largely lost. Our modern cast of characters has been no less rich, but how could one reduce the epic essence of Martin Luther King into five lines? Or Richard Nixon, or Pete Rose, or Marilyn Monroe, or Albert Einstein, or Orenthal Simpson, or Mahatma Gandhi?
James is utterly patient in his people-watching, seeking to know everything about his characters while making sure the reader does, too. In a disposable culture, this is literature of eminent
durability. If readers will only sit still and watch, a rare thing will alight on their shoulders—and it will bestow deeply penetrating, timeless insights into human nature. It's not just what The American
tells us about ourselves, it's what James asks us to do in order to grasp it. The treasure hunt eclipses the treasure.
Classroom Activities
Class Discussion Questions
1. Why does Newman destroy the evidence of the
Bellegarde's murder at the end of the book? Is he doing the right thing? What are the specific advantages of what he does when he destroys the evidence, and of what he chooses not to do—making their crime
public?
2. Why does Valentin choose to risk his life by dueling Stanislas Kapp? Compare and contrast it to disputes you have witnessed at school and elsewhere. Consider both in light of the
following observation that James makes about the party in the novel: "Everyone looked at him with that soft hardness of good society which puts out its hand but keeps its fingers closed over the coin."
3. Consider the party that the Bellegardes throw for Newman and the Parisian nobility. In what ways is it like parties you have attended with acquaintances from your school? In what ways is it
different?
4. Why does Claire enter the convent? What are some of the problems from which she is fleeing? Specify examples from her family life, Newman's wishes for her, and how she views
herself.
Other Activities
Essay – Ask students to answer the following: If you were to be given the dilemma facing Newman, of deciding whether or not to make the Bellegardes accountable for
the murder, what would you have done, and why?
Presentation – Have teams composed of 6-8 students research the following topics and relate their findings to the class:
1. Historical events in Europe in the 1860s
2. Historical events in the United States in the same decade
3. Function of dueling in 19th century European society
4.
Louvre artworks specified in the text, in particular those that Newman hires Noémi Nioche to copy
5. Function and power of one society figure to attack another by use of purchased newspaper advertisements
and notices in the era
6. Convents in 19th century Europe
Artwork
– Assign students to use a medium of their choice to reproduce one of the Louvre artworks that are specified in the novel. Have the students present their work to the class, commenting on what aspects of such work are particularly difficult to copy, as does Noémie Nioche in the book.
Improvisation –
Have several students take the roles of Christopher and Claire. Imagine Newman is able to break into the convent and find Claire. In improvisational form, "reenact" their conversation. Newman's "superobjective" is to convince Claire to leave the convent with him; Claire's is to find peace with herself.
Dan Sanders is a writer living in Santa Monica, California. |
