James, Trauma, and America

Abstract

Returned to Boston in 1881, after seven years of being in Europe, Henry James wrote of a dilemma he faced that there was nothing he could do with it:

With this vast new world, je n’ai que faire. One can’t do both—one must choose. No European writer is called upon to assume that terrible burden … The burden is necessarily greater for an American—for he must deal, more or less, if only by implication, with Europe: whereas no European is obliged to deal in the least with America. No one dreams of calling him less complete for not doing so. (I speak of course of people who do the sort of work that I do; not of economists, of social science people). The painter of manners who neglects America is not thereby incomplete as yet; but a hundred years hence—fifty years hence perhaps—he will doubtless be accounted so. (Notebooks, 5.214)