From Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent
Interesting Links
“Henry James Becomes a British Subject” (from the Guardian archive)
“Henry James and the American Idea” (Susan Goodman, Humanities)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Brooksmith,” Henry James
• “Writing a War Story,” Edith Wharton
• “In Another Country,” Ernest Hemingway
• “Roll Call on the Prairies,” Willa Cather
Buy the book
Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent
A Little Tour in France | Italian Hours | other travels | 845 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $20.00
“Henry James Becomes a British Subject” (from the Guardian archive)
“Henry James and the American Idea” (Susan Goodman, Humanities)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Brooksmith,” Henry James
• “Writing a War Story,” Edith Wharton
• “In Another Country,” Ernest Hemingway
• “Roll Call on the Prairies,” Willa Cather
Buy the book
Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The ContinentA Little Tour in France | Italian Hours | other travels | 845 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $20.00
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| An American ambulance in the commune of Sacy, south of Reims, France, c. 1914–17, by Parisian photographer J. Patras (about whom little is known). Courtesy University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries. |
After several months in London, he was back at Lamb House, his home in the East Sussex village of Rye, where he fretted over the events on the Continent. Germany had declared war on France on August 3 and invaded Belgium the next day. In response, Great Britain, which had guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality by treaty, declared war on Germany and sent 75,000 soldiers to France. On August 23, the British Expeditionary Force fought its first battle alongside the French army in the coal-mining region around Mons, Belgium. “Never has England in all her time, gone at anything with cleaner hands or a cleaner mind and slate,” James wrote to a friend two weeks later. At month’s end, James updated his nephew William James Jr. by telling him the Allies had thwarted the quick, decisive conquest the invaders had expected: “Roughly speaking, Germany, immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or on having done it as she first designed. . . . But it is all for the moment tremendously dark and awful.”
The truth was more complicated; when James wrote his nephew the British forces were in full retreat and a halt to the seemingly unstoppable German offensive was still more than a week in the future. After initially repulsing several attacks by the much larger German army, the B.E.F. was forced to withdraw as the Allied armies fell back before the offensive. By September 5, the British had lost 15,000 men and had retreated more than 200 miles to a position southeast of Paris. The Allies regrouped and on September 6 the B.E.F. began advancing north toward the Marne River. The Allied success in the first battle of the Marne caused the Germans to halt their offensive on September, fall back northward to the Aisne River, and dig into defensive positions.
To James, now 71 years old, wartime jitters brought back memories of his late teen years. “I felt in the air the recall of our Civil War shocks and anxieties, and hurryings and doings, of 1861,” he wrote to the American painter Helena de Kay Gilder on September 2. “The pressure in question has already become a much nearer and bigger thing, and a more formidable and tragic one, than anything we of the North in those years had to face.” While dreading and decrying the futility and destruction, James idolized the young men willing to fight. “Ever since his visit to a Civil War camp , where he had gone to see his younger brothers, he had had an image of men committed to heroism and to death,” noted Leon Edel, in his biography of James. “The sense of power and glory in James made him an admirer always of the soldier.” When 29-year-old Burgess Coakes, James’s servant for the previous fifteen years, decided to enlist, James offered his full support, both emotional and material—despite his own dependence on assistance during his frequent illnesses and attacks of angina. (Worried for her friend’s well-being, Edith Wharton lent James one of her own servants.)
After two months in Rye, James found the news of the war so distracting and upsetting that he returned to London, where he could “feel a little less finished & useless & doddering.” Almost immediately, he began raising money for Belgian refugees and visiting the wounded soldiers flooding the city’s hospitals. Even these acts recalled the Civil War to him; in his memoir Notes of a Son and Brother (published later that year) he compared his bedside visits to those of Walt Whitman: “Yet again, as I indulge this memory, do I feel that I might if pushed a little rejoice in having to such an extent coincided with, not to say perhaps positively anticipated, dear old Walt—even if I hadn’t come armed like him with oranges and peppermints.” His notebook reveals, however, that he arranged for the delivery of notable quantities of chocolate for recovering soldiers.
In October, in a letter to his nephew Henry, James voiced his concern for the Belgian soldiers who, in addition to recovering from their wounds, worried over the fate of their families in their conquered homeland. “Not one of those with whom I talked the last time had yet come by the shadow of a clue or trace of any creature belonging to him, young wife or child or parent or brother, in all the thick obscurity of their scatterment.” His charitable impulses extended beyond the many days he spent visiting hospitals and refugee centers; he was known to offer assistance and comfort to wounded soldiers he encountered on the street. He described one such incident to Edith Wharton:
The thing that most assuages me continues to be dealing with the wounded in such scant measure as I may; such, e.g., as my having turned into Victoria Station, yesterday afternoon, to buy an evening paper and there been so struck with the bad lameness of a poor hobbling khaki convalescent that I inquired of him to such sympathetic effect that, by what I can make out, I must have committed myself to the support of him for the remainder of his days—a trifle on account having sealed the compact on the spot. It all helps, however—helps me; which is so much what I do it for.The archaeologist Richard Norton, whose family James had known for decades, arrived in London soon after the declaration of war, traveled onward to France, and realized quickly that the French and British armies alike were ill-prepared to transport the wounded from battlefield to hospital. Using his own funds, Norton purchased ten ambulances, gathered a group of mostly American volunteers, and requested approval from the London War Office to travel to France. By October, the new American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in its first week transported 500 wounded soldiers from the frontlines, and the effort grew from that auspicious start.
James offered his support early on and in December accepted the position of honorary chairman, in which capacity he raised funds and organized publicity efforts. Within a week he issued a pamphlet containing an open letter to the American press, reprinted below, in which he described the work of the corps, solicited donations for its efforts, and encouraged young men, particularly American undergraduates or recent graduates, to volunteer. An abridged version of the document appeared first in the United States in the January 4 issue of The New York World. He even broke a self-imposed rule and met with a reporter; “I can’t put my devotion and sympathy for the cause of our corps more strongly than in permitting it thus to overcome my dread of the assault of the interviewer,” he told New York Times journalist Preston Lockwood in March. One of the most unexpected outcomes of the Corps and various subsequent wartime ambulance services was the number of American drivers who later became well-known writers, including Louis Bromfield, Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Charles Nordhoff, and Gertrude Stein. The critic Alfred Kazin later called the Corps “the most distinguished of the lost generation’s finishing schools.”
When James attempted to return to Lamb House, situated near the coast of the English Channel, he learned that, even as an American who had lived in England for forty years, he was still considered an alien and had to report to the police. His fealty to Britain and the war effort, combined with his disappointment over American neutrality, compelled him to apply for British citizenship. James had known Herbert Henry Asquith since the 1890s, and after Asquith became prime minister in 1908, James would occasionally dine with him at 10 Downing Street. So James requested that Asquith and three other friends (as required by law) “bear witness to their kind acquaintance with me, to my apparent respectability, and to my speaking and writing English with an approach of propriety.” On July 26, 1915, seven months before his death, Henry James became a British citizen.
Notes: Among the French terms used by James are postes de secours (first-aid stations), blessés assis (wounded men who can be seated), and villageoises (villagers). Eliot Norton was the brother of Richard Norton; both were sons of Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton.
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SIR,—Several of us Americans in London are so interested in the excellent work of this body, lately organised by Mr. Richard Norton and now in active operation at the rear of a considerable part of the longest line of battle known to history, . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.