“Henry James, Photography, and New York”
Raritan (Fall 2015)
Early in The American Scene, his 1907 travelogue about revisiting the United States after an absence of many years, Henry James describes his “state of mind” on a spring day as he approached New York City from the west. Riding on a “train-bearing barge,” a boat, rendered obsolete only a few years later by the construction of tunnels under the Hudson River to the new Pennsylvania Station, which allowed railroad passengers to arrive on the island of Manhattan from New Jersey without ever leaving their seats, James beheld “the happily-excited and amused view of the great face of New York.” It evoked in him the sensation of “dauntless power.” James calls New York as “the most extravagant of cities,” with a bay to rival those of other great port cities around the world despite its possessing “no one item of the romantic, or even of the picturesque.” He complains of the bay’s low-lying shores, “depressingly furnished and prosaically peopled.”
Yet it is the new skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan that command James’s attention and his scorn. “Standing up to the view, from the water, like extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted,” they seem “stuck in as in the dark, anywhere and anyhow.” This is the view from the Hudson River near Twenty-Third Street. Another spot offers an even more profound impression. “You get it broadside on, this loose nosegay of architectural flowers, if you skirt the Battery, well out, and embrace the whole plantation,” James writes. From that angle, the grouping of new buildings “becomes the token of the cluster at large,” the signature of the American scene itself.
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 that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself. They never begin to speak to you, in the manner of the builded majesties of the world as we have heretofore known such—towers or temples or fortresses or palaces—with the authority of things of permanence or even of things of long duration…[T]he consciousness of the finite, the menaced, the essentially invented state, twinkles ever, to my perception, in the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere market. Such a structure as the comparatively window-less bell-tower of Giotto, in Florence, looks supremely serene in its beauty. You don’t feel it to have risen by the breath of an interested passion that, restless beyond all passions, is for ever seeking more pliable forms.
When James looks at the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan from just south of the Battery, he sees impermanence, the triumph of money, the antithesis of history and art, the ugly issue of an agitated, egotistical impulse seeking to imprint itself on the physical city, but one which does so by taking a short-cut: while the great “builded majesties of the world as we have heretofore known such” invested in permanence, serenity and beauty, the skyscrapers of New York are for James utterly transient and will eventually be destroyed by very same unending drive, “restless beyond all passions,” that constructed them in the first place.
Five years later, Alfred Stieglitz stood in nearly the same spot, pointed his camera at the same buildings, and snapped the shutter closed. In the foreground is the water of the bay, between the photographer—evidently standing on a pier—and the ferry terminal. Hulking above all is the skyline, belching, along with the ferry in the slip, plumes of steam into a hazy, moodily luminescent atmosphere. The strip of dark, softly-focused buildings seems to step out of and almost eclipse the background of water and sky. Construction on the Singer Building, which dominates the photograph, began only after James had returned to Europe, but Stieglitz’s photograph seems almost intended to name the “interested passion” the author of The American Scene had identified as responsible for those architectural mortifications. The lead photograph in the October 1911 issue of Camera Work, Stieglitz’s groundbreaking journal, it was titled “The City of Ambition.”
It is a commonplace among Jamesians that in his later years the author became more amenable to the idea of art photography, the primary evidence for such an argument being his collaboration with the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn to produce frontispieces for the New York Edition, a twenty-four volume series of the author’s collected works published between 1907 and 1909. Stieglitz, for his part, pushed the boundaries of his medium—and modern art generally—by pioneering and promoting a photography committed to individual expression and formal experimentation. What has passed unnoticed is how each of these developments—James’s liberalizing attitudes towards photography and Stieglitz’s innovations in it—were related both to New York City and to each other in a complex tangle of history, aesthetics and commerce. Which is to say, of influence.
*
In A Small Boy and Others, the first volume of the autobiographical project James began writing after his brother William died in 1910, the author describes a recent dream in which he found himself chased by a ghost in the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, which he had first visited as a thirteen-year-old boy. In the dream, which James calls the “most admirable nightmare of my life,” he summons the courage to confront the ghost and causes it to flee; this gives James a glimpse of “my young imaginative life in it of long before.” The literary critic F.W. Dupee once wrote that the passage is the climax of the autobiography, because it “reveals the extent to which his feeling of personal power was rooted in his affinity for Europe and art.”
Another passage in A Small Boy reveals the obverse: James’s feelings of personal impotence as rooted, to a certain extent, in his distaste for America and photography. Presented amidst a longer recollection of one of William Makepeace Thackeray’s visits to New York in the mid-1850s, James shares the “quite sharp reminiscence of my first sitting for my daguerreotype,” in Mathew Brady’s Broadway studio. Shortly before the sitting, the English novelist, a friend of Henry James Sr., spotted young Henry at the end of a hallway in the James residence. The child was wearing, in his reminiscence more than a half-century later, a “little sheath-like jacket, tight to the body, closed to the neck and adorned in front with a single row of brass buttons—a garment of scarce grace assuredly.” It was the same he would soon wear for the daguerreotype at Brady’s. Thackeray gibed the young American about it, telling him that if he were in England he would be known as Buttons. “It had been revealed to me thus in a flash,” James recalls, “that we were somehow queer, and though never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least felt so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady’s vise.” (Because of the long time required to capture an image with such rudimentary equipment, Brady firmly clamped his subjects’ heads to keep them still.) The daguerreotype, then, captured James at a moment he felt markedly and dismally American. The “exposure,” he reports in the memoir, scare-quoting the term, was “interminably long.”
A lingering resentment toward the medium is evident in much of James’s early commentary on the art of photography, or, rather, its impossibility. The earliest example is an 1865 essay in the North American Review on Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: “There is the same difference between [Goethe’s men and women] and the figures of last month’s successful novel, as there is between a portrait by Velasquez and a photograph by Brady. Which of these creations will live longest in your memory?” Brady’s work, James continues, “tells you everything except the very thing you want to know.”
James’s early opinion of photography was related to his denunciations of two other forms of visual art: first, Impressionist painting, and second, the illustrations which, due to developments in printing technology, increasingly accompanied short fiction in popular periodicals. His objections to the former were most explicitly stated in a review of an Impressionist exhibit in Paris, published in the New York Tribune of May 13, 1876. James reported the pictures “decidedly interesting,” but added that
the effect of it was to make me think better than ever of all the good old rules which decree that beauty is beauty and ugliness ugliness. The young contributors to the exhibition of which I speak are partisans of unadorned reality and absolute foes to arrangement, embellishment, selection, to the artist’s allowing himself, as he has hitherto, since art began, found his best account in doing, to be preoccupied with the idea of the beautiful…[To the Impressionists,] the painter’s proper field is simply the actual, and to give a vivid impression of how a thing happens to look, at a particular moment, is the essence of his mission.
Impressionism, James felt, did not do enough to artistically represent, rather than merely reproduce, its subjects.
He had previously evoked a similar argument in fiction. In “The Story of a Masterpiece”—his earliest New York tale, from 1868—the painter Stephen Baxter tells his friend and unsatisfied patron, John Lennox, “I go in for reality; you must have seen that.” Lennox replies: “I approve you…but you can be real without being brutal—without attempting, as one may say, to be actual.” This was still eight years before James became acquainted with the work of the Impressionists and denounced them as concerned with “simply the actual,” and almost fifty years before the autobiography in which James recalled of his development as an artist that while “the picture, the representative design, directly and strongly appealed to me, and was to appeal all my days,” he gradually became more inclined to evoke pictures through words, not images.
My face was turned from the first to the idea of representation—that of the gain of charm, interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, on the part of the represented thing (over the thing of accident, of mere actuality, still unappropriated;) but in the house of representation there were many chambers, each with its own lock, and long was to be the business of sorting and trying the keys. When I at last found deep in my pocket the one I could more or less work, it was to feel, with reassurance, that the picture was still after all in essence one’s aim (italics added).
It is an unmistakable echo of the “house of fiction” metaphor from his New York Edition preface to The Portrait of a Lady—the house with a million windows, or, as he alters it in the subsequent sentence, “apertures,” which represent different ways of looking at the world and correspondingly distinct literary forms. The third volume of the New York Edition, which contains the Portrait preface, was published in 1908, and A Small Boy in 1913. Something in the intervening years seems to have prompted James to amend his famous conceit, as if acknowledging the house of fiction to be only one building in a much vaster complex—a veritable compound, perhaps, of representation.
*
The first of James’s stories to enjoy or endure illustration was Washington Square, serialized in England’s Cornhill Magazine in 1880, and accompanied by the drawings of George Du Maurier, the author’s friend. The black-and-white etchings closely imitated the narrative—employing quotations from the novel as captions for the pictures—and greatly displeased James. In an 1897 tribute to Du Maurier published in Harper’s, James called the episode “a small disaster,” sarcastically referring to the “short novel that I had constructed in a crude defiance of the illustrator.” Beginning with this first collaboration between image and word, there was always to be an evident tension, even a “jealousy,” as he would later phrase it, on the part of the novelist whenever compelled to join his prose with visual representation.
His were not purely aesthetic objections. Couched within many of James’s anxious remarks on illustration is an essentially pecuniary concern with the future of the written word in the age of the image. When James visited the painter Edwin Austin Abbey, who was working on a series of scenes from Shakespeare, the novelist reported that he “came away biting my thumb, of course, and with my ears burning with the sense of how it’s not the age of my dim trade.” James wrote to an editor of Century magazine in the 1880s: “Ah, your illustrations—your illustrations; how as a writer one hates ‘em, and how their being as good as they are makes one hate ‘em more! What one writes suffers essentially, as literature, from going with them, and the two things ought to stand alone.”
The overlapping of James’s artistic and financial worries about the competition between image and word is dramatically evident in “The Real Thing” (1893), his most direct fictional approach to the theme. The narrator of the story is a painter, down on his luck, approached by a recently-dispossessed aristocratic couple seeking employment as the painter’s new models. Mr. and Mrs. Monarch have been tipped off that the narrator is being considered for the job of providing the illustrations for “the projected édition de luxe of one of the writers of our day—the rarest of the novelists—who, long neglected by the multitudinous vulgar and dearly prized by the attentive…had had the happy fortune of seeing, late in life, the dawn and the full light of a higher criticism”—anticipating, to an eerie extent, the circumstances which more than a decade later prodded James to produce the New York Edition—and they wish to benefit from his good fortune. The narrator indulges them for a time, until he realizes that they are such poor models for painting that they are putting his career and reputation at risk. Though the aptly-named Monarchs are, by birth at least, genuine members of the respectable classes, the painter’s other models—the humble but malleable Miss Chum, and Oronte, a passionate, obsequious Italian man—are more useful for his depiction of the aristocratic characters in the unnamed author’s collected works. Anticipating the passage in A Small Boy and Others, where James says he long understood the artistic limitations of “mere actuality,” the narrator of “The Real Thing” describes his “innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation.” The story is a meditation on the nature and use of “the real thing” in art: Miss Chum “was only a freckled cockney, but she could represent everything,” while Mrs. Monarch too fully embodies the sought-after finished product to allow any space for the artist to create something new. The Monarchs are “simply the actual,” as James had put it in his review of the Impressionist exhibit. Even as early as 1893, when he was still dismissive of both photography and Impressionism, the two were clearly joined in James’s mind. “I could see she had been photographed often,” the painter says of the too-realistic Mrs. Monarch, “but somehow the very habit that made her good for that purpose unfitted her for mine.” The narrator considers photography to be opposed to his work as a painter for precisely the same reasons James had earlier given for considering Impressionism opposed to his work as a writer.
There are several hints in the narrator’s description of his encounter with the Monarchs that reveal his objections to their modeling abilities—and, by extension, his objections to photography—as rooted in commercial self-interest as much as in principled aesthetic disagreement. “I liked things that appeared; then one was sure,” the narrator asserts. “Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.” Profitless: there is no money to be had in the representation “of mere actuality,” no future for the artist in merely realistic, quasi-photographic documentation. The painter cuts the Monarchs loose once he realizes how severely his business has suffered: “After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur.” For a struggling professional painter, toiling unsatisfyingly, as he is, “for magazines, for story-books, for sketches of contemporary life,” the sentiment is understandable; so, too, perhaps, for a novelist “burning with the sense of how it’s not the age of my dim trade.” At the end of the story, the Monarchs, with nowhere else to go, return to the painter’s studio, and condescend themselves to performing the humdrum household tasks he had previously given to Oronte and Miss Chum. It is a pathetic sight: “They had bowed their heads in bewilderment to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal.”
*
In 1859, two writers offered two very different assessments of the possibility of photography as art. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—whose son, the future Supreme Court justice, was a close friend to William and Henry James—wrote an essay in the Atlantic Monthly arguing that the invention of photography inaugurated “a new epoch in the history of human progress.” Yet nearly until the end of the century, as the scholar Miles Orvell has written, photography presented only “a facsimile of reality, an imitation founded on typological representation.” It was precisely that sort of imitative photography that James indirectly critiqued in “The Real Thing,” and in terms remarkably similar to those used by Charles Baudelaire in his review of the Paris Salon of 1859. Art, Baudelaire had argued, requires “the addition of something of a man’s soul.” He thought it “obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled.” Baudelaire’s objections, like James’s many decades later, were explicitly stated in competitive terms. “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions,” he wrote, “it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.”
But nearly three decades later, no photographer had yet found a way to equal or even approach the achievements of the written word or the painted canvas, and in 1888, when George Eastman and his Kodak company began promoting a new handheld camera with advertisements promising, “No knowledge of photography necessary,” it likely seemed as if deliverance would never come.
Yet the introduction of the Kodak triggered a backlash among professional photographers anxious rescue the medium from vulgarization. They began to manipulate images during and after production to make them less like “facsimiles of reality” and, supposedly, more painterly—more like a “picture,” a word previously reserved for actual canvases. Thus the name for the new photography movement: “pictorialism.” Its chief proponent in America was Alfred Stieglitz, a New Jersey native who discovered photography during his family’s nearly decade-long sojourn in Europe and returned home, reluctantly, in 1890 at the age of 26. He was disgusted and depressed by New York, which he thought a dirty and money-hungry city—an exile’s return very like another’s—and was frustrated by the Kodak-dominated photography scene in the city, with everyone, he recalled later, “shooting away at random.” Stieglitz adopted the pictorialist method and aesthetic as a way of challenging both the vulgarization of photography and the contention that mechanical images could not be art. He rose quickly in the esteem of the city’s nascent photography movement, winning awards, exhibiting his work and securing the co-editorship of a prestigious trade publication. His first manifesto, “A Plea for Art Photography in America,” written in response to a major 1891 exhibition, granted the technical abilities of American photographers but lamented that “what we lack is that taste and sense for composition and for tone” so prevalent in Europe. Those values, he thought, were produced through the skillful cultivation of a sense of atmosphere, accomplished through dulling, softening, smoothing and shading, with a result visually similar to Impressionistic painting, if achieved through opposite means: the retroactive erasure of too “realistic” detail rather than the intentional withholding of it in the first place.
Pictorialism arose in the 1890s as if in direct response to James’s objections both to photography and to Impressionist painting. It deliberately sought the “variety and range,” the “illustrative note,” that the painter-narrator of “The Real Thing” described as necessary conditions for art, and it shunned as mechanical and common the “unadorned reality” James had assailed in his 1876 essay on the Impressionists. If nothing else, pictorialism was devoted to the adornment and even concealment of reality in the service of what James had described as “the good old rules which decree that beauty is beauty and ugliness ugliness.” It was also a counter-revolution against the Kodak-wielding hordes, echoing the narrator of “The Real Thing” in his “detestation of the amateur.”
In an age when representation came cheaply, art—to be both meaningful and commercially viable—had to be about selection and composition, about adorned rather than “unadorned reality.” Even more than its floridity, the singular feature of James’s later prose is its pictorialistic quality: a series of mental snapshots later worked over and developed into blurry, faux-Impressionistic records of time and place. It was a style perfectly suited to the non-fictional nature of the various projects—travelogues, autobiographies, self-critical prefaces—which almost exclusively consumed James’s literary attentions in the final decade of his life.
*
In the first chapter of The American Scene, “New England: An Autumn Impression,” James describes a visit to Hill-Stead, the Farmington, Connecticut, estate of the industrialist Alfred Pope, who had amassed a large (and today still extant) collection of Impressionist paintings. Seen in this new context nearly thirty years after he had disparaged the style as the enemy of “arrangement, embellishment, selection,” Impressionism now produced a very different reaction from James. While admiring the quaint village, James says, “you keep on asking, from the force of acquired habit, what may be behind, what beneath, what within, what may represent, in such conditions, the appeal of the sense or the tribute to them; what, in such a show of life, may take the place (to put it as simply as possible) of amusement, of social and sensual margin, overflow and by-play.” James, like Stieglitz, found the United States lacking a sense of composition and selection, cultivation and distinction; nothing seemed worthy of or respected as art. In the Impressionist collection, however, he found “the momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition. One hadn’t quite known one was starved, but the morsel went down by the mere authority of the thing consummately prepared…[N]o proof of the sovereign power of art could have been, for the moment, sharper.”
It was a dramatic reversal for a writer who had previously objected to Impressionism precisely on the grounds that it lacked preparation or composition, that the style was intrinsically opposed to traditional conceptions of the beautiful, here presented as the sweet. While James is quick to note that “it happened to be that particular art—it might as well, no doubt, have been another” which produced the effect, the fact remains that early in his American journey, before he had spent more than a few hours in New York City, James was already reconsidering some of his most lasting aesthetic commitments. Adeline Tintner, the late James scholar, once described this as among the major artistic revelations of the author’s life.
The Hill-Stead exception aside, James’s questioning of the American scene for “what may be behind, what beneath, what within,” was frustrated almost everywhere. Throughout the work, James assails buildings and public spaces for lacking a sense of physical interiority, a metaphor for the country’s active suppression of inner life. In a later chapter, James laments “the inveterate suppression of almost every outward exclusory arrangement” in the layout of homes and hotels. “The custom rages like a conspiracy for nipping the interior in the bud, for denying its right to exist, for ignoring and defeating it in every possible way, for wiping out successively each sign by which it may be known from an exterior,” James wrote. “Thus we see systematized the indefinite extension of all spaces and the definite merging of all functions.” Nothing could be more opposed to the author’s affinity for endless analysis and discrimination. To banish interiority, for James, is to risk an invitation to chaos and meaninglessness; it is ultimately a failure of selection and the antithesis of the artistic impulse. Exceptions only prove the rule. In a new fence around Harvard Yard, for example, James finds “an admirably interesting example of the way in which the formal enclosure of objects at all interesting immediately refines upon their interest, immediately establishes values.” James is surprised to find it in a country he had thought incapable of such selection, in what he calls “the land of the ‘open door.’”
In James’s description, the fence frames Harvard Yard much as a photograph or a certain style of painting frames one’s impression of a scene. Indeed, the author’s discovery of the artistic value of Impressionism acts as a reflection of his increasing appreciation for composition and selection—the creation of and respect for interiority—as inviolable principles of not only art but also life. Just as the narrator of “The Real Thing” concludes there is no future for the artist in confinement to mere representation of the actual, the “restless analyst” of The American Scene, as James regularly describes himself, argues that a society addicted to what he varyingly calls “gregariousness” or “publicity” is fundamentally hollow at its core. One way to recapture the value of selection in such an environment is to focus on recording and reproducing one’s own everyday noticings, as subjective and arbitrary as they may be. The scholar Daniel Hannah, author of a recent monograph on James and Impressionism, suggests that the author’s revised appraisal of the school “probably owes something to his growing sense of a shared aesthetic enterprise, a joint investment in the ‘impression’ as a critical, creative moment.”
Hannah’s use of commercial terminology—“enterprise,” “investment”—to describe the James of The American Scene is apt. Even in a work critical on almost every page of the American obsession with money, James’s financial and artistic concerns were mutually reinforcing and intertwined—both in the beginning and middle of his career, when he rejected photography and Impressionism, and later, when he modified his opinions of both. Indeed, the very impetus for his return to the United States was pecuniary. James had in recent years—due to failures in the theater and his increasingly difficult prose—suffered a seriously declining readership, especially in America, and embarked on his trip to gin up enthusiasm in advance of the collected edition of his works he was already discussing with Scribner’s before he left England. “It is more & more important I should go,” he wrote to William, “to look after my material (literary) interests in person, & quicken & improve them, after so endless an absence.” After his brother warned him about “the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you,” Henry assured William that his “primary idea in the matter is absolutely economic.”
Scholars have long recognized the style of The American Scene as Impressionistic. In 1955, the scholar Joseph Firebaugh wrote that the book modulates “between exposition of things seen and confession of things felt.” But it is also fundamentally photographic. The language of the camera, Ralph Bogardus writes, “appears on nearly every page of the book.” And according to Wendy Graham, The American Scene’s “shifting vignettes and oscillating attention of the narrator…produce a kaleidoscopic impression and a cinematographical illusion of realness.” Though photographs had played a minor, mostly plot-driving role in previous James tales, it is quite impossible to imagine anyone describing as “cinematographical” any of James’s writings prior to The American Scene. Suddenly, just as he returned to New York, just as he finally saw the merit in Impressionist painting, James began to employ a distinctly photographic mode of observation and description.
Even if the book is a literary achievement, The American Scene is, to its author at least, an imaginative failure. In the preface, James says that he had always been “artistically concerned…with the human subject, with the appreciation of life itself, and with the consequent question of literary representation.” The book itself is preoccupied with that question. Referring to a phrase used in the description of the downtown skyscrapers two pages previously in The American Scene (and quoted above), James candidly discloses his anxieties:
Yet was it after all that those monsters of the mere market, as I have called them, had more to say, on the question of “effect,” than I had at first allowed?—since they are the element that looms largest for me through a particular impression, with remembered parts and pieces melting together rather richly now, of “downtown” seen and felt from the inside. “Felt”—I use that word, I dare say, all presumptuously, for a relation to matters of magnitude and mystery that I could begin neither to measure nor to penetrate, hovering about them only in magnanimous wonder, staring at them as at a world of immovably-closed doors behind which immense “material” lurked, material for the artist, the painter of life, as we say, who shouldn’t have begun so early and so fatally to fall away from possible initiations.
By leaving New York, by renouncing his native land so violently, by generally being a Europhile snob, James acknowledges, he forever lost access to American reality, to New York, blooming into modernity before his very eyes. The “magnitude and mystery” of the scene, James confesses, he could “neither…measure nor penetrate.” There indeed were interiors in America, beyond “immovably closed doors,” and James sensed that they did offer material for art; but he could no longer gain entry.
This sense of a baffled curiosity, an intellectual adventure forever renounced, was surely enough a state of feeling, and indeed in presence of the different half-hours, as memory presents them, at which I gave myself up both to the thrill of Wall Street (by which I mean that of the whole wide edge of the whirlpool) and the too accepted, too irredeemable ignorance, I am at a loss to see what intensity of response was wanting. The imagination might have responded more if there had been a less settled inability to understand what every one, what any one, was really doing.
He had lost the key to his chosen chamber in the house of representation. “The painter of life,” the novelist, had removed himself forever from the sources of his art. The skyscrapers of New York were too much for Henry James.
But no matter, he quickly adds, for “the picture, as it comes back to me, is, for all this foolish subjective poverty, so crowded with its features that I rejoice, I confess, in not having more of them to handle.” This is the closing of the Jamesian mind: after acknowledging that he has lost touch with American life as it is actually lived, he immediately returns to offering an opinion of it. “The mouth of Wall Street proclaimed it, for one’s private ear, distinctly enough; the breath of existence being taken, wherever one turned, as that of youth on the run and with the prize of the race in sight, and the new landmarks crushing the old quite as violent children stamp on snails and caterpillars.” James hasn’t forgotten those “material (literary) interests” he had mentioned in the letter to his brother; he has a book to produce, after all.
After acknowledging, in that sober moment, that he is not the man for the job, James offers an alternative nomination—an artist committed to cataloguing “simply the actual,” a writer perfectly suited to describing life among skyscrapers, “these huge constructed and compressed communities, throbbing, through its myriad arteries and pores, with a single passion.” It is perhaps not much of a compliment when James recalls that
from the first, on all such ground, my thought went straight to poor great wonder-working Émile Zola and his love of the human aggregation, the artificial microcosm, which had to spend itself on great shops, great businesses, great “apartment-houses,” of inferior, of mere Parisian scale. His image, it seemed to me, really asked for compassion—in the presence of this material that his energy of evocation, his alone, would have been of a stature to meddle with.
James, faced with bustling modern New York, says that the city requires the treatment of a naturalist like Zola; for a moment at least, he yields the field, deferring to the style of representation which elicited from William Dean Howells the ambiguous praise for Frank Norris that “by and by, he will achieve something of the impartial fidelity of the photograph.” The skyscrapers posed a question to which the only answer could be provided by a documentary, and not a truly representational, style. If James soon modified his earlier distaste for competition between image and word, it likely had something to do with this realization, while watching the birth of modernity in New York, that he had lost.
*
On July 30, 1905, less than one month after returning to England, James wrote a memorandum to Scribner’s outlining his vision for the proposed collected edition of his novels. After explaining his plans to revise some of the early books extensively and to provide autobiographical prefaces to each volume, James proposed a title for the final product. “[T]he New York Edition,” he wrote, “refers the whole enterprise explicitly to my native city—to which I have had no great opportunity of rendering that sort of homage.” Just returned from the city and already at work on The American Scene—quite far from an homage” to New York—James decided that his other major project of the period should be dedicated to it. Something in his still-inchoate conception of the monumental Edition must have signaled to James that it had a vague relation to New York, and he likely already sensed that his forthcoming travelogue would not adequately express his feelings what he would describe in the book as that “terrible town.” He also suggested in the letter that, despite his earlier misgivings, space be set aside for illustrations. “I should particularly appreciate a single very good plate in each volume, only one, but of thoroughly fine quality,” James wrote. “I seem to make out (though I have not been able yet to go into the whole of the question) that there would not be an insuperable difficulty in finding for each book, or rather for each volume, some sufficiently interesting illustrative subject.” So at the same time that James sought to tribute New York by naming his collected works after it, he also volunteered the suggestion that the novels be accompanied by some kind of illustration. Perhaps he intended to make amends for his acknowledged failure to represent modern New York in prose by conceding his previous aversion to photography.
The previous year, before sailing to New York, James had to decide whether to use illustrations in the American travel book he hoped the trip would produce. The London-based American artist Joseph Pennell had illustrated James’s Italian Hours, to be published in 1905, with traditional black-and-white etchings, and he offered to provide the same treatment for James’s next volume. But in a letter to Pennell in June 1904, James demurred. He could “imagine a (pictorial) New York, and a ditto Chicago, and in a manner, a ditto South; but a pictorial Boston eludes, defies, almost infuriates me—and I’m afraid I shan’t rise, or fall, to that.” This was written before his arrival in New York and his violent impressions of how it had changed. The American Scene was eventually published without illustration, and the passage citing Zola makes it seem likely that it was not Boston, but New York, which eluded James’s “pictorial” imagination.
It is interesting to note that Pennell was one of the most rabid critics of photography at the turn of the twentieth century. In an 1897 essay, “Is Photography Among the Fine Arts?” Pennell dismissed it as merely an “amusement” and a “relaxation,” and did so in terms which James would probably have endorsed before his trip to America, but almost certainly not after it. “What a farce it is to think of Titian and Velasquez and Rembrandt actually studying and working, puzzling their brains over subtleties of drawing and modelling, of light and atmosphere and colour, when the modern master has but to step into a shop, buy a camera, play a few tricks with gum chromate—I believe it is called—to turn you out a finished masterpiece which is far more like the real thing, he says, than any mere hand-made picture ever could be.” Pennell’s invocation of Velasquez and the equation of photography with “the real thing” link Pennell’s essay both to James’s dismissal of Mathew Brady in the 1865 essay on Goethe and to his story about the Monarchs. Though Pennell may not have been familiar with those writings, the parallels are striking. Pennell’s opinions of photography represent the reflexively anti-photographic position from which James was soon to pivot, and James’s rejection of Pennell’s offer to illustrate the American book is possibly evidence that when James sailed to the States he was already reconsidering his views of illustration and distancing himself from one of photography’s most vociferous critics. Pennell’s obloquy, moreover, is all the more notable in that the particular process he ridicules—it is actually called gum bichromate—was, when printed over a platinum plate, the specialized technique of a young photographer in the Stieglitz circle. The effect—soft luminescence applied to rich darkness—was also that of James’s prose.
*
Alvin Langdon Coburn was given a Kodak camera in 1890, at just eight years old, and swiftly developed a level of interest and skill that endeared him to a cousin, F. Holland Day, already a renowned professional photographer. A rival of Stieglitz, Day helped his young ward gain entry to the most prominent photography circles in America. He was soon repaid by Coburn’s joining Stieglitz’s rebellious Photo-Secession, a redoubt of the pictorialists. Coburn studied in Paris with Edward Steichen and upon returning to New York in 1902 opened a studio not far from Stieglitz’s. The following year Stieglitz published Coburn’s moody “Winter Shadows” in the third issue of his new independent magazine Camera Work. His technique was the epitome of pictorialist representation, and it was perhaps for that reason that he was prepared, as James might have seen, to move beyond it. Coburn won renown for what the early photography critic Sadakichi Hartmann described as his “peculiar method of portraying celebrities,” and received a commission from Century magazine to photograph Henry James during his return to New York in the spring of 1905. When they met on April 26th, the novelist was sixty-two years old and the photographer only twenty-two.
The print from that sitting was never used, but James either liked it enough or felt obligated to invite Coburn, who had just moved to London, to visit him a year later. They met at the Reform Club in Pall Mall in May 1906, and James reported to Scribner’s the next day that he had been photographed “by a American operator here, for a frontispiece (very well, artistically, and suitably, as I believe).” But he wasn’t entirely satisfied, and Coburn accepted James’s request the following month to visit and photograph him at his Lamb House residence in Rye. James evidently approved of the result and soon invited Coburn back to photograph the front door of Lamb House for eventual inclusion as the frontispiece for the ninth volume of the New York Edition, which included The Awkward Age. “What does loom a little formidable to me,” James wrote to his publishers on June 12th, “is the question of the ‘illustrations.’” He then mentioned his sitting with Coburn. One month later, James’s agent, James B. Pinker, informed Scribner’s that “Mr. James thinks these [prints] so highly successful that he is anxious that Mr. Coburn should do as much more of the work as is possible.” In his photography, then, Coburn—Stieglitz’s disciple—managed to accomplish what the narrator in “The Real Thing,” using the too-photographed Monarchs as his models, had been unable to: an artistic and independently worthy illustration for the collected edition of this “long neglected” novelist’s works.
Throughout the fall of 1906, James tendered careful instructions to Coburn for what to photograph on trips the younger man took to France and Italy for the rest of the Edition’s frontispieces, even suggesting specific locations and subjects and ideal angles, assuming the role of artistic director or curator of the project. He even accompanied the photographer on his searches throughout London. Coburn recalled later that they once “stopped at a baker’s shop,—the same shop, I was told by my companion, that he had known as a youth,—and went on down the street munching Bath buns from a paper bag.” James, who would later write in A Small Boy and Others about his childhood “New York flâneries and contemplations,” proved an amenable companion to Coburn in his search. “Although not literally a photographer,” Coburn recalled years later, “Henry James must have had sensitive plates in his brain on which to record his impressions!”
The frontispieces James chose were often only tangentially related to the specific work they illustrated, and often not at all. In addition to the teasing sense of mystery and loose relation to accompanying stories, the pictures reflected James’s aesthetic concerns of the moment. In “The Jolly Corner,” written in 1908, James’s narrator has returned to New York after many decades in Europe . Considering the mid-19th century city as he knew it growing up, the narrator refers fondly to “the native architecture of the particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of doors—the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost complete proscription of them.” It is a fictionalization of James’s complaints in The American Scene about a lack of interiority, spatially and spiritually, in the United States. Adeline Tintner notes that nearly half of Coburn’s frontispieces present photographs of doors. Seen from the outside, the doors signify exteriority—and, therefore, interiority. The proliferation of them in the frontispieces suggests that James felt Coburn, using a modern medium, had breached those “immovably-closed doors,” or at least been able to represent that there was something to breach. In capturing that meaning—as James, looking at and writing about the New York skyscrapers, had been unable to do—photography could redeem not only itself, but maybe even the modern condition more generally.
Most of the volumes of the New York Edition had been published before Coburn’s name appeared anywhere connected with them. After epistolary complaints from the photographer, James finally acknowledged Coburn’s contributions in his preface to The Golden Bowl, the last novel in the series. The preface is a rich demonstration of the author’s long anxiety over illustration, but it also gives hints as to why he confronted and overcame those concerns in the most important and all-encompassing project of his career, one directed explicitly at posterity. “Any text putting forward illustrative claims,” when accompanied by images, “find[s] itself elbowed, on that ground, by another and a competitive process,” James wrote. “The essence of any representational work is of course to bristle with immediate images; and I, for one, should have looked much askance at the proposal, on the part of my associates in the whole business, to graft or ‘grow,’ at whatever point, a picture by another hand on my own picture—this being always, to my sense, a lawless incident.” It is a reiteration of his instinctive and long-lasting skepticism of the mingling of picture and text, most directly evocative of the “small disaster” of Du Maurier’s illustrations for Washington Square (his only novel set in New York City, but excised from the New York Edition, perhaps because, after his recent immersion in modern New York, James felt the novel failed to grasp something vital about the city). He notes that the “remark reflects heavily, of course, on the ‘picture-book’ quality that contemporary English and American prose appears more and more destined, by the conditions of publication, to consent, however grudgingly, to see imputed to it.” Not for late James the photographic naturalism of Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser, a friend and early supporter of Stieglitz. While in The American Scene, James had suggested Zola might be able to do justice to the New York skyscrapers, now he implicitly praises Coburn for moving beyond the limitations of “picture-book” naturalism. As James, late in his career, turned away from mere depiction of the actual or “the real thing,” and toward more modernist, self-critical, frequently autobiographical works, he began to recognize that the visual arts, especially Impressionist painting and the new photography, had been making a similar move. In the Golden Bowl preface, he reiterates in newer terms Baudelaire’s argument that pairing text and picture tends to corrupt both, but he implies that because Coburn’s photographs do not directly refer to the fiction, much less pretend, in the style of Du Maurier, to be visual depictions of specific scenes or characters—there are almost no people at all in Coburn’s photographs of empty streets and the exteriors of homes—they complement but do not compete with the written word. As Stieglitz had granted Baudelaire’s argument about the artlessness of mechanical reproduction, only to move beyond it with pictorialism, so James reiterates his previous objections to images competing with words while asserting that Coburn’s did not attempt to do so.
One welcomes illustration, in other words, with pride and joy; but also with the emphatic view that, might one’s “literary jealousy” be duly deferred to, it would quite stand off and on its own feet and thus, as a separate and independent subject of publication, carrying its text in its spirit, just as that text correspondingly carries the plastic possibility, become a still more glorious tribute.
James praises Coburn—and, implicitly, photography, which, he insists, is “as different a ‘medium’ as possible”—to the extent that his “fellow artist” managed to accomplish the careful balancing act required.
[T]he proposed photographic studies were to seek the way, which they have happily found, I think, not to keep, or to pretend to keep, anything like dramatic step with their suggestive matter. This would quite have disqualified them, to my rigor; but they were “all right,” in the so analytic modern critical phrase, through their discreetly disavowing emulation. Nothing in fact could more have amused the author than the opportunity of a hunt for a series of reproducible subjects—such moreover as might best consort with photography—the reference of which to Novel or Tale should exactly be not competitive and obvious, should on the contrary plead its case with some shyness, that of images always confessing themselves mere optical symbols or echoes, expressions of no particular thing in the text, but only of the type or idea of this or that thing. They were to remain at the most small pictures of our “set” stage with the actors left out; and what was above all interesting was that they were first to be constituted.
Only because the photographer willingly subjugated his images to the novelist’s words did James concede to their inclusion. It was precisely Coburn’s emphasis on principles of composition and selection—those James had found lacking in photography, in Impressionism and in New York City—that drew the writer to the collaboration. He had written in the preface to Volume I of the Edition, containing Roderick Hudson: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they will happily appear to do so.” Suggestive of his praise for the new fence around Harvard Yard, it is an aesthetics of selection—or, in the parlance, of cropping.
In the Golden Bowl preface, James implies that the days of searching around London for the right image profoundly affected his artistic imagination in ways that went beyond the immediate project with Coburn. “It wasn’t always that I straightway found, with my fellow searcher, what we were looking for, but that the looking itself so flooded with light the question of what a ‘subject,’ what ‘character,’ what a saving sense in things, is and isn’t; and that when our quest was rewarded, it was, I make bold to say, rewarded in perfection.” This is high praise. Are there more important questions for a novelist than those related to subject and character, to “a saving sense in things”? If his encounter with the new photography, as practiced by Coburn, helped him to reconsider those questions—to see the world anew—their collaboration on the New York Edition should be considered, with the Farmington episode, as another, and perhaps even the last, major artistic revelation of James’s life.
*
“Photography is the most modern of the arts,” Coburn declares in his essay contribution to the October 1911 issue of Camera Work—otherwise entirely devoted to Stieglitz’s photographs of New York, “The City of Ambition” first among them. “Its development and practical usefulness extends back only into the memory of living men; in fact, it is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific advancement than any other.” The essay, “The Relation of Time to Art,” was prompted, the author says, by recently returning from several years “in the quiet and seclusion of a London suburb, and then suddenly being plunged into the rush and turmoil of New York, where time and space are of more value than in any other part of the world.”
After his collaboration with James wound down at the end of the decade, Coburn spent some time in New York City, exhibiting one-man shows at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery on Fifth Avenue above 30th Street, and traveling around the country producing astonishingly expressive photographs of the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Niagara Falls—this at a time when Ansel Adams was still a toddler in San Francisco. During the same period, he began photographing New York City in ways starkly different from his earlier pictorialist London work. The new images were sharply focused and thoughtfully angled, impossible to mistake for paintings. Whereas Coburn previously sought to manipulate the print to produce a vague and gauzy Impressionist-like effect, the new images sought to capture the immediate experience of modern urban consciousness itself. Joseph Firebaugh wrote of Coburn’s aesthetic innovations:
These notions of the infinite fragmentation of nature, the isolation of suitable aspects of it—of analysis in time as well as in space—show a marked similarity to the practice of the Impressionist painters: Monet’s cathedrals and haystacks, varying according to the hour of the day, come to mind. Nor are these ideas lacking in similarity to Henry James’s infinitely painstaking analysis of fleeting instants of consciousness, an analysis which endeavored to fix a passing state of mind as a photographer’s shutter fixes an instant of the phenomenal world.
The practice, but not the technique of the Impressionists: Coburn realized that making photography more Impressionistic did not require the pictorialists’ application of elaborate technical alterations; rather, revealing the consciousness behind the camera, meant stripping the picture down to its barest essentials. Coburn even took to calling modernist photographers like himself “Whistlers of photography,” because of their “fidelity to chosen essential nature.”
Though the change is evident in some of Coburn’s prints for the New York Edition, Stieglitz was again the leader of this new revolution. From roughly 1909 to 1913, Stieglitz completely transformed art photography. Realizing that photographs could represent external reality in a way that paintings could not, and that paintings could represent the artist’s emotions and personal feelings in a way that photographs could not, Stieglitz concluded that it was therefore foolish for photography to imitate painting (or for painting to imitate photography). “Photography as a medium of expression has its own specific virtues,” Stieglitz wrote in a magazine article in 1913. “Why is it that so many photographers endeavor, through every possible trick, to eliminate this? Why will they insist on trying to imitate other mediums of expression? Why do they pride themselves when their photographs are supposed to look like paintings?...Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.” James himself could hardly have put it better.
For Coburn, photography had to adopt some of the aesthetic ideas, not simply the gauzy appearance, of Impressionist painting because of representational problems posed by the modern city. “Photography born of this age of steel seems to have naturally adapted itself to the necessarily unusual requirements of an art that must live in skyscrapers,” he wrote in the 1911 essay, “and it is because she has become so much at home in these gigantic structures that the Americans undoubtedly are the recognized leaders in the world movement of pictorial photography.” One wonders how strenuously James, by 1911, would have disagreed. The following year Coburn would produce “The House of a Thousand Windows,” which showed a skyscraper seen from above and across the street with countless “apertures,” to quote James’s phrase in the “house of fiction” metaphor, tapering down to the street—a visual accompaniment to James’s description in The American Scene of “the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere market.” While for many years James disparaged photography and skyscrapers in almost exactly the same terms—as detrimental to art, individuality and society, as a short-cut to things which ought to be properly earned—Coburn, too, equated his medium and his subject, but sooner recognized and celebrated what they had in common. It is not surprising that he expresses the sentiment in a passage about viewing New York City from the same place James and Stieglitz had. In a November 1911 Harper’s Weekly essay, Coburn describes arriving in the city on a steamship and finally comprehending “the kinship of the mind that could produce those magnificent, martian-like monsters, the suspension-bridges, with that of the photographers of the new school. The one uses his brain to fashion a thing of steel girders, a spider’s web of beauty to glisten in the sun, the other blends chemistry and optics with personality in such a way as to produce a lasting impression of a beautiful fragment of nature.”
In 1921, the critic Paul Rosenfeld credited Stieglitz with using the machine to reveal “the unmechanicalness of the human spirit,” but Coburn was as deeply involved in that innovation, and in some ways even got there first. Though Coburn owed his career to him, Stieglitz was a famously difficult person to work with, and when Coburn, upon returning to New York, sided with Stieglitz’s rival Max Weber in an intragroup squabble, the two parted ways. In his recent dissertation on early modern photography, Anthony Kinik asserts that Stieglitz, whose efforts in recent years had largely focused on editing, curating and promoting the work of others, began photographing New York in late 1910 in part because he felt “challenged” by Coburn’s work in the city. Coburn’s book New York was published in 1912, but many of the photos were taken and probably even exhibited well before that. If working with James influenced Coburn to train his camera on New York City, and Coburn provoked Stieglitz into doing the same, then the correspondence between The American Scene and “The City of Ambition” is less a coincidence than it is evidence of hidden relations between two seemingly unrelated episodes in a single history.
*
Two more pieces complete the puzzle. In October 1904, James wrote to his friend, the English writer Edmund Gosse, complaining that he had not been able to write anything at all in America, because “the conditions of life, time, space, movement etc. (really to see, to get one’s material,) are such as to threaten utterly to frustrate for me any prospect of simultaneous work…wherefore my alarm is great and my project much disconcerted.” As he later confessed, in the book, to a “baffled curiosity” in observing his native country, James’s ability to channel those observations into art was similarly confounded. “I may have to return to England,” he continued, “only as a saturated sponge and wring myself out there.”
Seven years later, in his October 1911 Camera Work essay, Coburn defended himself against the charge that “I work too quickly, and that I attempt to photograph all New York in a week.” It is partly true, he acknowledges, in a passage that echoes Stieglitz’s “The City of Ambition,” printed only a few pages earlier:
Now to me New York is a vision that rises out of the sea as I come up the harbor on my Atlantic liner, and which glimmers for a while in the sun for the first of my stay amidst its pinnacles; but which vanishes, but for fragmentary glimpses, as I become one of the grey creatures that crawl about like ants, at the bottom of its gloomy caverns. My apparently unseemly hurry has for its object my burning desire to record, translate, create if you like, these visions of mine before they fade. I can do only the creative part of photography, the making of the negative, with the fire of enthusiasm burning at the white heat; but the final stage, the print, requires quiet contemplation, time, in fact, for its fullest expression. That is why my best work is from American negatives printed in England.
The second concurrence is even more striking. Twenty-four volumes of the New York Edition were published in James’s lifetime, and two more were published after his death in 1916. But even earlier, in 1913, Scribner’s considered a twenty-fifth volume. After hearing rumors of it, Coburn wrote to James offering his services for the frontispiece. The author wrote back to his young friend and suggested he would consider the offer. He had two ideas for subjects that might do. The first was something in Paris, which James did not think quite possible. The second was a New York skyscraper.