“don’t say, now, you don’t know me—if I have not got a white parasol!”

This post is about Henry James' novel The American (1877). Spoilers will follow immediately!

Matthew Modine as Christopher Newman

[Image source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215514/ . From the TV Movie The American (1998), directed by Paul Unwin. Matthew Modine looks fantastic, but the adaptation defuses the story into genre fluff. You can watch it on YouTube.]

To give due credit, the TV movie was funded by ExxonMobil.  

It's impossible now, I think, to read The American without feeling that the book is as much about the good-natured hero's economic aggressiveness as about the sinister emptiness of the old culture figured by the Bellegardes. The latter, so to speak, can only destroy each other. Christopher Newman can destroy the planet. 

The title pitches it in nationalistic terms. But then James himself rather complicates things by making his Bellegardes both French and English. In fact they aren't an expression of a single nation's essence; the ruling class has always been international in its marriages, connections and transactions. The novel confronts, not so much nations with each other, as an old ruling class with a new ruling class. The Bellegardes, it turns out, can't bring themselves to extend their international connection to merge with the new power that Newman has acquired. Newman finds it ridiculously easy to see all that is wrong with the Bellegardes, and he feels it strongly, as a desperate waste of life and potential; that is, as an offence against economy or productivity. At his own position, however, he doesn't look too closely or ask too many questions. That kind of self-consciousness would be a handicap in business. And his success, with clean hands so far as criminality is concerned, may feel as if it sanctifies him. To have started from so little and been so conspicuously prosperous. Doesn't that economic triumph sound like it has a kind of moral aspect, too? Compared e.g. with those whose wealth hasn't been worked so hard for?

“Since you ask me,” said Newman, “I will say frankly that I want extremely to marry. It is time, to begin with: before I know it I shall be forty. And then I’m lonely and helpless and dull. But if I marry now, so long as I didn’t do it in hot haste when I was twenty, I must do it with my eyes open. I want to do the thing in handsome style. I do not only want to make no mistakes, but I want to make a great hit. I want to take my pick. My wife must be a magnificent woman.”

“Voilà ce qui s’appelle parler!” cried Mrs. Tristram.

“Oh, I have thought an immense deal about it.”

“Perhaps you think too much. The best thing is simply to fall in love.”

“When I find the woman who pleases me, I shall love her enough. My wife shall be very comfortable.”

...

“Present me to a woman who comes up to my notions,” said Newman, “and I will marry her tomorrow.”

“You have a strange tone about it, and I don’t quite understand you. I didn’t suppose you would be so coldblooded and calculating.”

Newman was silent a while. “Well,” he said, at last, “I want a great woman. I stick to that. That’s one thing I can treat myself to, and if it is to be had I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and struggled for, all these years? I have succeeded, and now what am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a beautiful woman perched on the pile, like a statue on a monument. She must be as good as she is beautiful, and as clever as she is good. I can give my wife a good deal, so I am not afraid to ask a good deal myself. She shall have everything a woman can desire; I shall not even object to her being too good for me; she may be cleverer and wiser than I can understand, and I shall only be the better pleased. I want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market.” ...

 “ ... I made up my mind tolerably early in life that a beautiful wife was the thing best worth having, here below. It is the greatest victory over circumstances. When I say beautiful, I mean beautiful in mind and in manners, as well as in person. It is a thing every man has an equal right to; he may get it if he can. He doesn’t have to be born with certain faculties, on purpose; he needs only to be a man. Then he needs only to use his will, and such wits as he has, and to try.”

“It strikes me that your marriage is to be rather a matter of vanity.”

“Well, it is certain,” said Newman, “that if people notice my wife and admire her, I shall be mightily tickled.”

...  

“And you have seen nothing that satisfied you?”

“No,” said Newman, half reluctantly, “I am bound to say in honesty that I have seen nothing that really satisfied me.”

...

“She is perfect! I won’t say more than that. When you are praising a person to another who is to know her, it is bad policy to go into details. I won’t exaggerate. I simply recommend her. Among all women I have known she stands alone; she is of a different clay.”

“I should like to see her,” said Newman, simply.

...

(from The American, Chapter III)

The reader is evidently to understand in what ways Newman is not cold or calculating or driven by vanity. 

But at any rate he is quite explicit about marrying "with my eyes open". Not in the blindness of love that discovers new values. Here the substantive value comes first, and then "I shall love her enough".

I suppose the expression "trophy-wife" didn't exist in those days. But after all, the trophy idea is embedded deep in Newman's outlook. He applies it, for instance, to the business of choosing lodgings; or rather, of allowing someone else to choose his lodgings.

He had a relish for luxury and splendor, but it was satisfied by rather gross contrivances. He scarcely knew a hard chair from a soft one, and he possessed a talent for stretching his legs which quite dispensed with adventitious facilities. His idea of comfort was to inhabit very large rooms, have a great many of them, and be conscious of their possessing a number of patented mechanical devices—half of which he should never have occasion to use. The apartments should be light and brilliant and lofty; he had once said that he liked rooms in which you wanted to keep your hat on. For the rest, he was satisfied with the assurance of any respectable person that everything was “handsome.” Tristram accordingly secured for him an apartment to which this epithet might be lavishly applied. It was situated on the Boulevard Haussmann, on the first floor, and consisted of a series of rooms, gilded from floor to ceiling a foot thick, draped in various light shades of satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors and clocks. Newman thought them magnificent, thanked Tristram heartily, immediately took possession, and had one of his trunks standing for three months in his drawing-room.

(from Chapter VI)

When it comes to a wife Newman is choosy: "I have seen nothing that really satisfied me". 

And in Chapter V, on his travels, he makes "a point of looking" at women as well as churches, and reports to Mrs Tristram: "I am more than ever in the state of mind I told you about that evening; I want a first-class wife. I have kept an eye on all the pretty girls I have come across this summer, but none of them came up to my notion, or anywhere near it."

And a little later, to Valentin:

" . . . If I get hold of a woman that comes up to my standard, I shall think nothing too good for her. I have been a long time looking, and I find such women are rare. To combine the qualities I require seems to be difficult, but when the difficulty is vanquished it deserves a reward. My wife shall have a good position, and I’m not afraid to say that I shall be a good husband.”

“And these qualities that you require—what are they?”

“Goodness, beauty, intelligence, a fine education, personal elegance—everything, in a word, that makes a splendid woman.”

“And noble birth, evidently,” said Bellegarde.

“Oh, throw that in, by all means, if it’s there. The more the better!”

(The American, Chapter VIII)

Well, why is Newman so choosy?  Given his own history and its inspiring evidence of the potential in ordinary human beings, why not find an ordinary woman, uneducated as he is perhaps, why is her potential not good enough? 

Unlike all those others that Newman rejects, there is value attached to Claire de Cintré, not in his own eyes but (more objectively, from his point of view) in the eyes of others. Mrs Tristram identifies her as "of a different clay". Newman trusts that endorsement more than he trusts his own heart. It's enough to start his imagination spinning romantic ideas around her. That Mme. de Cintré is also difficult to obtain adds another incentive. That she is also "of noble birth" is, we sense, much more than something merely "thrown in". Newman likes a challenge. His own sense of honour, that of an outstanding businessman who gets what he wants, is provoked into play. It's different from Valentin's idea of honour, but only extrinsically. 

The thought that Claire is a trophy is enhanced by the book's striking occlusion of this heroine and her relations with its hero, our lack of a sense of the couple getting to know each other, of whether Newman does in fact love her and of what there might be, in Claire's own personality, that he might love. Our increased acquaintance with her, anticipated since Chapter IV, is endlessly deferred. At first there are appreciable reasons, the barriers put up by her family and so on. But eventually those explanations are no longer adequate. There's a void here, most obtrusive (as James admits in his 1907 Preface) straight after the engagement when we meet the hero, not spending time with his intended, but attending the opera on his own. Reading the book without knowing the story in advance, I found the thought crossing my mind that he might back out; for what lay behind his stated commitment other than a demonstration of good business conduct? 

 James wrote:

I have been stupefied, in so thoroughly revising the book, to find, on turning a page, that the light in which he is presented immediately after Madame de Bellegarde has conspicuously introduced him to all her circle as her daughter's husband-to-be is that of an evening at the opera quite alone; as if he would n't surely spend his leisure, and especially those hours of it, with his intended. Instinctively, from that moment, one would have seen them intimately and, for one's interest, beautifully together; with some illustration of the beauty incumbent on the author. The truth was that at this point the author, all gracelessly, could but hold his breath and pass; lingering was too difficult—he had made for himself a crushing complication. Since Madame de Cintré was after all to "back out" every touch in the picture of her apparent loyalty would add to her eventual shame. She had acted in clear good faith, but how could I give the detail of an attitude, on her part, of which the foundation was yet so weak? I preferred, as the minor evil, to shirk the attempt—at the cost evidently of a signal loss of "charm"; and with this lady, altogether, I recognise, a light plank, too light a plank, is laid for the reader over a dark "psychological" abyss. 

(1907 Preface)

But isn't there a dark psychological abyss, too, in a man who so "knows his own mind"? Perhaps a more intimate portrait of their relationship would necessarily expose not just the lady but the gentleman too to the "shame" of, well, being rather less than impeccable?  But in The American James was, as he felt in retrospect, engaged in writing a kind of romance; a cutting of the balloon cable holding his vision to reality, more or less subtly managed. It was essential to his conception that Newman was understood to have been thoroughly wronged, but that judgement, on the part of the reader, might have been complicated by too much of the real. 

*

In Brussels (Chapter V)

He stood for half an hour in the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he wrote the names of these gentlemen—for reasons best known to himself—on the back of an old letter.

We can make a guess at those reasons, though. The history does not redound to the credit of the Catholic church. It's also an important preliminary to the founding of the Dutch Republic, the world's first real democracy and as such an honoured forerunner of America. Two things we know about Newman, by the end, are that he is proud of being an American and that he doesn't like the Catholic church. Until the end, however, this latter view is well concealed, perhaps even from himself. 

For instance, during his first visit to Mme de Cintré:

“Your house is of a very curious style of architecture,” he said.

“Are you interested in architecture?” asked the young man at the chimney-piece.

“Well, I took the trouble, this summer,” said Newman, “to examine—as well as I can calculate—some four hundred and seventy churches. Do you call that interested?”

“Perhaps you are interested in theology,” said the young man.

“Not particularly. Are you a Roman Catholic, madam?” And he turned to Madame de Cintré.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, gravely.

Newman was struck with the gravity of her tone; he threw back his head and began to look round the room again. 

(from Chapter VI)

Newman begins the novel by trying to buy a copy of a Madonna. He doesn't seem to have felt that his church inspections entailed a question about the faith that built them. Babcock was troubled by his lack of seriousness on such matters. Nor, it seems, is Newman dismayed that the woman he wants to know is a Catholic. He finds it surprising that she should be grave about it. 

He had never let the fact of her Catholicism trouble him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express a mistrust of the form in which her religious feelings had moulded themselves would have seemed to him on his own part a rather pretentious affectation of Protestant zeal. If such superb white flowers as that could bloom in Catholic soil, the soil was not insalubrious. But it was one thing to be a Catholic, and another to turn nun ....

(from Chapter XXI)

When Newman is baulked from his trophy, he sees that this cultural relativism has gone quite far enough.

*

In a strange way The American is an early prefiguration of one of James' obsessions: not marrying. ("The Lesson of the Master", The Ambassadors, "The Beast in the Jungle" . . .). It becomes a great and prescient theme: these non-marrying individuals and their inability to form the kind of open personality that can admit someone else on equal and permanent terms. 

In Newman's case the conscious will is there, the passion is there (he says so, anyway), but his conception of marriage is too like a business transaction, and his pursuit of the most unobtainable bride has something perverse about it. His egotism is not so far from John Marcher's, in the end; both men are over-committed to a story about themselves. 

*

In the 1907 Preface James reflects on this romance that, at the time, he did not even know he was writing. "I must decidedly have supposed, all the while, that I was acutely observing—and with a blest absence of wonder at its being so easy." 

As he points out, writing romantically or realistically is often not a conscious choice:

Of the men of largest responding imagination before the human scene, of Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious Zola, we feel, I think, that the deflexion toward either quarter has never taken place; that neither the nature of the man's faculty nor the nature of his experience has ever quite determined it. His current remains therefore extraordinarily rich and mixed, washing us successively with the warm wave of the near and familiar and the tonic shock, as may be, of the far and strange. 

As someone who is far more simply a fan of Scott and Balzac and Zola than I am of James, I must say I warmed to The American. I thoroughly enjoyed the very un-Jamesian experience of finding myself whisked off to Switzerland to attend the outcome of a fatal duel, or hearing dark secrets in a ruined chapel. 

But such-like things are only trappings of the romantic. Its essence, James thought,

is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals—experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities.

Newman, we remember, is abroad and has no family. His wealth is a more double-edged thing. After all, there are many romances in which the disengagement from community arises from being poor, or apparently so (e.g. "lost heir" plots). But there certainly is a strong economic element in all the authors that James refers to. The American feels particularly close to the Scott model, not only in its exposure of different cultures to each other but also in its central consciousness; I'm thinking especially of Frank Osbaldistone (in Rob Roy), another hero of the new ruling-class.

Diana Rigg as Madame de Bellegarde (Claire's implacable mother)

[Image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJdR48AFQE . From the TV Movie The American (1998), directed by Paul Unwin.]

The American, 1877 version:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/177/177-h/177-h.htm

The American: James' revised 1907 text and his interesting Preface. 

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_American_(New_York:_Charles_Scribner%27s_Sons,_1907)

Stanley Tick. "Henry James's The American: Voyons", Studies in the Novel Vol 2 No 3 (Fall 1970), pp. 276-291. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29531399

"The theme of the novel is pressed in epistemological rather than ethical forms." It concerns Newman's difficulty with seeing, that is, discerning. In a note, Tick points out that Newman's self-knowledge is less than perfect; for instance, he never admits his own sexual attraction to Noémie Nioche. 

"The American (1877): Life and Form", a chapter in Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, Henry James: The Vision of France, Presses universitaires de Liège, 1970. https://books.openedition.org/pulg/933?lang=en

A chapter from an excellent book about James' tussle with the problem of French culture through his career. The American represents one pole, The Ambassadors another.

Enrico Brotta. "The Wavering Ruins of The American", in Henry James's Europe: Heritage and Transfer, ed. Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding (2011), pp. 113-120.  https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0013.pdf .

"the idea of ruins -- which oscillates throughout the novel between the emblem of an artistic and cultural past to be achieved, and the tragic witness of the decline of Western civilisation --"