Close by were members of James’s extended family, including his mother’s cousin Helen. “I see in her strong simplicity,” he wrote, “that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs.” James saw that “her goodness somehow testifies for the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies.” Thus his book became an elegy not only to a lost childhood, but a set of values which began to erode as soon as the village James could wander in freely was replaced by a great city. “Character,” he wrote about the changing city, “is so lost in quantity.”

As James grew older he was allowed to wander farther. He remembered

hard by the Fourteenth Street home...the poplars, the pigs, the poultry, and the “Irish houses,” two or three in number, exclusive of a very fine Dutch one, seated then, this last, almost as among gardens and groves—a breadth of territory still apparent, on the spot, in that marginal ease, that spread of occupation, to the nearly complete absence of which New York aspects owe their general failure of “style.”

He and his brother wandered up and down Broadway “like perfect little men of the world; we must have been let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming... Broadway must have been then as one of the alleys of Eden.”

In this city which was a mixture of a remembered Eden and a failed style, James set eight stories and one novel; he also devoted considerable space to New York in his book The American Scene, written several years before his autobiography. In his fiction, he did not set out to chart the history of the city or the emotion surrounding its growth. What he disclosed about his attitude towards the city he did in passing. In the foreground were his characters, more real and more pressing in their needs than mere bricks and mortar.

As his own scope as a writer widened and his ambition hardened Henry James became, at times, acutely alert to the thinness of the American experience. In his book on Hawthorne, written in 1879, he famously listed what was absent in American life:

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities, nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class.

Eight years earlier, however, in a letter to Charles Norton Eliot, he had written: “It’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.”

He worked then in the interstices between American as a wasteland, untouched by tradition, and America as a golden opportunity for a novelist interested in complexity. Thus in his first New York story, “The Story of a Masterpiece,” published in the magazine Galaxy in 1868, when James was twenty-five, his hero can be a man of taste and the city a place where such a man will rub shoulders with artists, one of whom will paint “the best portrait that has yet been painted in America.” He will also begin to display in some of his stories a view of women as somehow untrustworthy and of love as a loss of balance. In this story, the painter manages to catch the true nature of Marian Everett and it for this reason that John Lennox, her suitor, must destroy the painting. This story was welcomed by The Nation, who wrote, “within the narrow limits to which he confines himself Mr James is...the best writer of short stories in America.”

By this time James had only written six short stories. The two most substantial of these, “The Story of a Year” and “Poor Richard,” concerned the aftermath of the Civil War, more precisely the relationship between the men who had fought in the war and the women who stayed at home. James’s ninth story, “A Most Extraordinary Case,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1868, dramatized that same subject.

The story opens in “one of the uppermost chambers of one of the great New York hotels.” Mason, whose injuries in the war, while grave, remain unspecified, is living in an “ugly little hotel chamber.” This is one of James’s New York stories in which it is imperative for the protagonist to leave the city, which is too lonely or unhealthy, or just too hot. It would be impossible for James to imagine anyone recovering from anything in the city he had lost; thus he moves Mason to a house on the Hudson River. Miss Hofmann, his hostess’s niece, someone remarks, “looks as if she had come out of an American novel, I don’t know that that’s great praise,” to which Mason replies: “You are bound in honor, then...to put her into another.” The heroine in question is notable because she inspired the most un-American sentence in James’s career thus far: “She was now twenty-six years of age, beautiful, accomplished, and au mieux with her bankers.”

James, as he developed as a novelist, became seriously au mieux with the recognition scene, in which a character watches a scene between two people from a distance and, by their gestures and movements and silences, realizes what is between them. This offers us the central drama of both The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors. In “A Most Extraordinary Case,” written when he was twenty-five, he tries it out for the first time. Mason, now recovering with the help of a talented young doctor, notices, on entering the room as Miss Hofmann sits at the piano, “A gentleman was leaning on the instrument with his back toward the window, intercepting her face... The silence was unnatural, or, at the least, disagreeable.” It is the doctor who will eventually win Miss Hofmann’s hand. Later, towards the end of the story, Mason will catch a “glance of intelligence” between the two, and the knowledge of their deep bond will hasten his decline.

In this story, as in “The Story of a Year,” the business of injury and illness interests James. It will surface in a great deal of his work, in the cases of Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove. Although Mason’s wounds were caused by the Civil War, and resemble those of Oliver Wendell Holmes to some extent, his recovery depends on his happiness and his decline will be caused by unrequited love. In James’s early world, it was still possible to die of a broken heart. “A Most Extraordinary Case” won the approval of James’s harshest critic throughout his career, his brother William. “Your style grows easier, firmer,” he wrote, “and more concise as you go on writing...the face of the whole story is bright and sparkling.”

“Crawford’s Consistency,” James’s next New York story, was published in Scribner’s Monthly in August 1876, a few months before he moved from Paris to London. For that and the story “The Ghostly Rental” he was paid three hundred dollars. “I have lately sent two short tales to Scribner,” he wrote to his father in April 1876 from his address at the rue du Luxembourg, “which you will see when they are printed, and I trust judge according to their pretensions, which are very small.” James did not include the story in any single volume in his lifetime. In this story, as in his memoir, he plays the elegiac note, making it clear that the story is set in the 1840s. When Crawford and the narrator take a walk into the countryside, the narrator remarks, for example, “for in those days New Yorkers could walk out into the country.”

In those days Crawford was a man with a fortune about to marry the beautiful but penniless Miss Ingram, who has always inspired the narrator “with a vague mistrust.” Miss Ingram finally jilts him and then comes down with smallpox whereupon James allows his narrator one of his most distasteful observations. “Several months afterward,” he wrote, “I saw the young girl, shrouded in a thick veil, beneath which I could just distinguish her absolutely blasted face.