Henry James' Inner Yokel

I offer the snippet below as pretty good evidence of what a yokel Henry James can be. But first, to clarify. I don't mean to question that Henry James is a great novelist, perhaps the greatest American novelist, perhaps, as Joseph Epstein says (and he does not bandy words lightly) a "genius."

But even a genius can have blind spots and the number of things that James does not know is quite as impressive as the list of things that he does. He doesn't know the first thing about money, for example. He doesn't seem to know how babies to made.

And then there is the whole Americans-in-Europe thing. James is actually pretty good at the "innocence" theme, or at any rate its close cousin, "innocence corrupted." And he uses the American in Europe as a pretty good (though far from the only, and perhaps not the best) vehicle for its exploration. But when it comes to Europe, the irony is that James himself is just as slack-jawed and wide-eyed as meanest young Smithie on her first solo foray.

As Exhibit "A," consider the scene in The Ambassadors where Lambert goes to pay his first call on Madame de Vionnet. He, of course, is the American in Paris, confused and disoriented by his first encounter with the great city. She is most emphatically European: cultured and cosmopolitan with just a dash of naughtiness to spice the brew. Lambert encounters her in her apartment on the Rue de la Bellechasse. James is careful to use the names of real streets in Paris, but from the tone of it all, you'd think Lambert had gone to visit Hitler at Bechtesgarten:

She occupied...the first floor of an old house to which our visitor had had access from an old clean court. The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was always looking for--sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more acutely missed--was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings, mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish-whtie salon into which he had been shown. He seemed at the very outset to see her in the midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary cherished charming.

And she (or it) has a past:

[H]e found himself making out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperiity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements clinging still to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes' heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk.

Say again, First Empire? That would be Napoleon, yes, 1804-14? My memory is that was a period of almost inconceivable carnage and bloodshed but let that be, it doesn't end there:

The place itself went further back--that he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Châteaubriand, of Madame de Staël, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stm;p of harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small object, ornaments and relics.

Yes, that's it: at the end of the day, it is pretty much about things:

He had never before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private order--little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged, together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of brass-mounted cabients. His attention took all them tenderly into account.

I'm searching my mind to find out what is the best point of contact here. Pooh Bear, admiring a tea party with honey and cream? Or Daisy in Great Gatsby, having a conniption fit over the wonders of the shirts? Or perhaps Proust-but, specifically, the child Proust, lost in magic-lantern fantasies about the antiquity of the House of Guermants (indeed, the best I can figure is that the Guermants must have been living just over the road), and the heroic memories of Genevieve de Brabant. The point being Proust treats it all with irony; you could say that the other six volumes of Proust are an extended ironic commentary on what the child Marcel misunderstands in the first. In the passage above (he is better elsewhere) James doesn't seem to recognize that the joke is on him.