So you see we’ll always have a new house; it’s a great advantage to have a new house; you get all the latest improvements. They invent everything all over again about every five years, and it’s a great thing to keep up with the new things.

It is easy to feel James’s rage and exasperation at the new ethos of easy and quick change which has eaten up his city of old values, destroyed the few buildings and streets with many rich old associations for him. Like the passage quoted above about Washington Square itself, however, this long speech by the young man seems forced and makes its point rather too heavily. These two passages stand out in a novel which is otherwise compact and tightly constructed. They are part of James’s deeply irrational response to the New York he had known and what had replaced it; his emotions about the city, as about no other place, moved at times slowly and strangely out of his control.

Three years later, after the death of his parents and a return to the United States, James wrote another story set in New York, “The Impressions of a Cousin,” one of his slackest and weakest stories but interesting nonetheless for the further light it shines on his attitude to New York. The story opens as the narrator wonders how she can inhabit Fifty-third Street:

When I turn into it from Fifth Avenue the vista seems too hideous: the narrow, impersonal houses, with the dry, hard tone of their brown-stone, a surface as uninteresting as that of sandpaper; their steep stiff stoops, giving you such a climb to the door; their lumpish balustrades, porticoes, and cornices, turned out by the hundred and adorned with heavy excrescences—such an eruption of ornament and such a poverty of effect!

The narrator is a painter, returned from Italy, who remarks in the early pages that there is nothing to sketch in the city, not even the people. “What people? the people in the Fifth Avenue? They are even less pictorial than their houses. I don’t perceive that those in the Sixth are any better, or those in the Fourth and Third, or in the Seventh and Eighth. Good heavens! What a nomenclature! The city of New York is like a tall sum in addition, and the streets are like columns of figures.”

Later, she will see the stoops “as ugly as a bad dream,” as earlier she has seen the sky over New York as seeming “part of the world at large; in Europe it’s part of the particular place.” This echoes James’s assertion in his Hawthorne book of four years earlier that in the United States, in Hawthorne’s day, “there were no great things to look at (save forests and rivers).”

For the next twenty years and more, as he wrote increasingly about England and the English, James remained silent on the subject of New York. His bad dreams of the city seemed to be over. He had other places, such as Paris and Rome and Florence, to remember and note as they changed. But nothing in James’s most complex personality was ever that simple. The city of New York, in all its unresolved power, remained like an undertow in his consciousness for all the years. In 1906, in his book The American Scene, he devoted three chapters to the city, having kept in reserve, during his long exile, a body of adjectives which he now heaped down on the teeming metropolis like a plague of locusts.

James began by disliking New York Harbor: “The shores are low and for the most part depressingly furnished and prosaically peopled; the islands, though numerous, have not a grace to exhibit.” He admits to “the beauty of light and air,” which is like admitting that the United States has forests and rivers to look at. Soon, however, James, using a peculiarly fervid tone, was writing about power, about which he was both uneasy and oddly thrilled:

The aspect of power...is indescribable; it is the power of the most extravagant of cities, rejoicing as with the voice of the morning, in its might, its fortune, its unsurpassable conditions, and imparting to every object and element, to the motion and expression of every floating, hurrying, panting thing, to the throb of ferries and tugs...something of its sharp free accent.

He writes about “the bigness and bravery and insolence, especially, of everything that rushed and shrieked.”

The city’s skyscrapers struck him as

impudently new and still more impudently “novel”—this in common with so many other terrible things in America —and they are triumphant payers of dividends... Crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost, they are simply the most piercing notes in the concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself.

It gets worse, as James, visiting the business quarter, notes “the consummate monotonous commonness...of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass.” He is appalled by the disappearance of buildings and the dwarfing of others. He is, he admits, “haunted” by a “sense of dispossession.” He revisits his old city: “The precious stretch of space between Washington Square and Fourteenth Street had a value, had even a charm, for the revisiting spirit—a mild and melancholy glamour which I am conscious of the difficulty of ‘rendering’ for new and heedless generations.” The demolition of his birthplace at Washington Place had the effect, James wrote, “of having amputated of half my history.” He realizes that the building which could have sported a tablet announcing the author’s very birthplace had been destroyed.

As he rails against the city, James finds astonishing images for the levels of distress he detects in the natives:

Free existence and good manners, in New York, are too much brought down to a bare rigour of marginal relations to the endless electric coil, the monstrous chain that winds around the general neck and body, the general middle and legs, very much as the boa-constrictor winds around the group of the Laocoon. It struck me that when these folds are tightened in the terrible stricture of the snow-smothered months of the year, the New York predicament leaves far behind the anguish represented in the Vatican figures.”

Nothing pleases him. “This original sin,” he writes,

of the longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet meanly intersected, and of the organised sacrifice of the indicated alternative, the great perspectives from East to West, might still have earned forgiveness by some occasional departure from its pettifogging consistency. But, thank to this consistency, the city is, of all great cities, the least endowed with any blest item of stately square or goodly garden, with any happy accident or surprise, any fortunate nook or casual corner, any deviation, in fine, into the liberal or the charming.

Even the city’s energy appalls him: “The very sign of its energy is that it doesn’t believe in itself; it fails to succeed, even at a cost of millions, in persuading you that it does.”

James’s horror of the new arrivals in the city and his use of animal imagery to evoke them make for some of the most uncomfortable reading in his entire opus. The immigrant in New York “resembles for the time the dog who sniffs round the freshly-acquired bone, giving it a push and a lick, betraying a sense of its possibilities, but not—and quite as from a positive deep tremor of consciousness—directly attacking it.” Of the Jewish population, he wrote: “There are small strange animals, known to natural history, snakes or worms I believe, who, when cut into pieces, wriggle away contentedly and live in the snippet as completely as in the whole. So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle, his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter or Israel.” The fire escapes, “omnipresent in the ‘poor’ regions” of the city, remind James “of the speciously organised cage for the nimbler class of animals in some great zoological garden. This general analogy is irresistible—it seems to offer, in each district, a little world of bars and perches and swings for human squirrels and monkeys.” He watched, from a window in the Ghetto, on “a swarming little square in which an ant-like population darted to and fro.”

It is hard to be precise about what exactly is biting Henry James as he wanders the streets of New York, “this terrible town,” as he puts it, hating the voices and the accents he heard in the cafés, “the torture rooms of the living idiom,” disliking even Central Park, comparing it “to an actress in a company destitute, through an epidemic or some other stress, of all feminine talent; so that she assumes on successive nights the most dissimilar parts and ranges in the course of a week from the tragedy queen to the singing chambermaid.”

It is as though something has been stolen from James, as indeed it has, and it is not something ordinary. For certain writers, both places long abandoned and experiences that might just as well have been forgotten continue to exist in the present tense. They can be conjured up at will, and sometimes they come unwilled. They live lives of their own in the mind. They are like rooms whose electric lights cannot be dimmed or switched off. For James, the New York of 1848 to 1855 was such a place and his experiences there, so happy with the innocence of prepuberty and full of ease, did not fade in his memory, as they must have done in his brother’s memory. They remained living presences. He was moving now fifty years later in a city which tried, in name of novelty, to prevent him re-inhabiting his lighted rooms.