American exes: Henry James

The ones that got away

The migration of peoples has been a central thread of the American story from the beginning. Anthropologists continue to find new evidence of first arrivals in America, from Asia amid the last ice age. The migration was cut off when the ice melted and sea levels rose, but it resumed in the second millennium of the modern era, and it continues in the third.

In America, the story of migration is told almost exclusively as a matter of people coming to America: from Europe, Africa and Asia. The flip side of that tale — of people moving from America to other countries and continents — has gone largely unnoticed.

This isn't surprising. Many more people moved to America from abroad than moved abroad from America. The arrivers became part of the American story. The departers became part of somebody else's story.

There's another thing. Although Americans have long argued over allowing more or fewer immigrants, they have almost universally taken pride that so many foreigners want to come. America must be a wonderful place if so many people want in.

By the same token, the idea that people want to leave can be disturbing. Why would anyone want to move elsewhere? Is there another country better than the United States?

For whatever reasons, people have indeed relocated from America to foreign countries. Some have gone on to great things in their adopted homes. This essay and subsequent ones in the series “American exes” will introduce readers to a roster of prominent America-leavers.

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Henry James was born in a house on Washington Square in New York in 1843. His family had wealth, his paternal grandfather having immigrated from Ireland and grown wealthy in real estate. His older brother William, the namesake of his father and grandfather, was the golden child of the family. Henry felt permanently inferior to William — “as if he had gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months’ experience of the world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him.” William James would go on to become one of the foremost scientists and philosophers in America. The catching up never got easier for Henry.

At an early age he developed a fascination for things foreign. Decades later he remembered a schoolmate showing him “a beautiful colored, a positively iridescent and gilded card representing the first of all of the great exhibitions of our age, the London Crystal Palace of 1851, his father having lately gone out to it and sent him the dazzling memento.”

Another lad evoked France and the European continent. “Louis De Coppet, though theoretically American and domiciled, was naturally French, and so pressed further home to me that sense of Europe to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness waked.”

Wealth freed the family to travel. They took extended tours of Europe. James's father enlisted tutors, including one who taught French to Henry and William. Henry had a stutter when speaking English. It went away when he spoke French.

The family moved to Boston so that William could study at Harvard. Boston then was the epicenter of American literature, and Henry met editors who encouraged his emerging interest in writing. The Atlantic Monthly serialized his first novel.

Writing didn't preclude travel, and he returned to Europe. “Here I am then in the Eternal City,” Henry wrote to William from Rome. “From midday to dusk I have been roaming the streets.” It was significant that William wasn't with him. “At last — for the first time — I live!”

He never went back to America except to visit. He lived in Rome for a time. He moved to Paris and got work as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. In 1876 he moved to London. He lived the rest of his life in England.

From his foreign perch he wrote novels about the country of his birth: Washington Square, The Bostonians. He wrote about Americans in Europe: The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors. He wrote about relationships: all of the above and several more. His women were more convincing than his men, which was reflected in the fact that his work appealed more to women than to men.

Some of his themes suggested another reason why he was more comfortable in Europe than in America. He described himself as a bachelor, which in those days indicated a man who not only had not been married but intended not to marry. The term was often applied to men who at a later date would be identified as gay. Whatever romances Henry James may have had, he was sufficiently discreet that they have defied the efforts of nosy biographers to ferret them out.

Yet it appears likely that living far from home enabled him to be more himself than he thought he could be under the gaze of people who had known him since birth. He wouldn't have been the first to move away for such reason.

In 1915, Henry James relinquished his United States citizenship and became a British subject. He died in 1916.