Henry James

The year he chose Paris

James was born on 15 April 1843 at 2 Washington Place in New York, the second of five children; his elder brother by a year was William James, who became America's most famous philosopher and psychologist. After an itinerant, half-European education and a first novel at twenty-eight, he crossed to Europe again in 1875 with the clear intention of staying for good — and his first idea, the only one that occurred to him at the time, was to settle in Paris. It was where he thought the literary world he had the strongest affinity with actually lived.

He took rooms at 29 rue du Luxembourg — a Right Bank street running north from the Tuileries gardens, renamed rue Cambon a few years later — in the autumn of 1875, and set to work. He began The American — the novel about Christopher Newman, a rich, plain-spoken Californian businessman who comes to Paris to buy himself a wife and runs into the closed ranks of an old aristocratic family — and it started appearing in instalments in the Boston magazine The Atlantic Monthly in June 1876. To keep himself, he wrote regular Parisian letters for the New York Tribune, then one of the most widely read newspapers in America. He came to find the job humiliating: he told his editor at the Atlantic that the vulgarity of the Tribune, whenever he saw it, struck him so violently he was tempted to stop writing for it.

Turgenev's charades and Flaubert's Sundays

The friendship that mattered was with Ivan Turgenev, the Russian novelist then living in Paris — the author of Fathers and Sons, the 1862 novel of a generation quarrel in provincial Russia, and the writer James admired above every other man in the city. He saw Turgenev at his rooms and at the house of the singer Pauline Viardot, Turgenev's lifelong companion, who invited James to her Thursday musical evenings and her Sunday family afternoons. He found the Thursdays a trial: three hours on his feet in a suffocating room listening to interminable fiddling, with the illustrator Gustave Doré standing beside him looking every bit as bored. The Sundays produced one of the great images in his letters: Turgenev, 'at his age and with his glories', playing charades in old shawls and masks and going about on all fours, in perfect good faith, every Sunday evening.

Through Turgenev he was brought into the group around Gustave Flaubert — the author of Madame Bovary, the 1857 novel about a country doctor's wife ruined by her own romantic appetites, and the most exacting prose stylist in France — who received visitors in his Paris apartment on Sunday afternoons. The regulars were Edmond de Goncourt, the diarist whose journal is the fullest record of literary Paris in these years; Alphonse Daudet, the novelist of Provençal life; the young Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert's pupil and soon the most famous short-story writer in the language; and Émile Zola, then in the middle of Les Rougon-Macquart, the twenty-novel sequence following one family through the Second Empire that would make him the leader of French naturalism — the literary movement that treated a novel as a clinical study of heredity and environment. James liked Flaubert personally more each time he called — 'wonderfully simple, honest, kindly, and touchingly inarticulate', he told his father, after an hour alone with him in which Flaubert recited sonnets by the French poet Théophile Gautier in a way that made them seem the most beautiful things in the world.

He met Zola in the most novelistic way possible. Coming down the stairs from one of Flaubert's Sunday afternoons — where the talk had been of Zola's latest novel being cut off mid-serialisation because provincial subscribers of the paper printing it had complained of its indecency — James passed Zola climbing up, pale and sombre, and saluted him as one magazine contributor to another: James, whose own serial had just been asked to run a good deal longer, greeting a man whose serial had just been stopped.

A door that would not open

The trouble was that admission to the room was not the same as membership. James found the French literary world sealed against anything from outside it — it seemed to him to exclude every culture but its own — and the exclusion worked in a direction that touched him personally. He watched Turgenev and Flaubert gravely discussing Daudet's novel Jack, and reflected that not one of the three had read Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's new novel, or knew enough English to. His own verdict on the group, written in May 1876 to William Dean Howells — the American novelist who edited The Atlantic Monthly and was about to begin serialising The American in it — was blunt: he had seen almost nothing of the literary fraternity and had fifty reasons not to become intimate with them, because he did not like their wares and they did not like anyone else's, and because they were not accueillants — welcoming. Turgenev, he added, was worth the whole heap of them.

In the same letter he could still call himself an old and very contented Parisian who felt his roots going into Parisian soil. Two months later, writing from a summer stay at Etretat on the Normandy coast, he had reversed the verdict completely.

My last layers of resistance to a long-encroaching weariness and satiety with the French mind and its utterance has fallen from me like a garment. I have done with 'em, forever, and am turning English all over.

He returned to Paris that autumn already pulled towards London; his brother William supplied the final push; and before the end of 1876 he had crossed the Channel and taken rooms at 3 Bolton Street, just off Piccadilly in the middle of fashionable London. At first he found the exchange of 'glittering, charming, civilised Paris' for London rather rude. Within weeks he was inside London society and had decided that this, not Paris, was the city he could take possession of. Daisy Miller, The Europeans, Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady all came out of his first five London years.

The Paris he kept writing

Losing Paris as a home did not cost him Paris as a subject; it may have secured it. The American, finished in the rue du Luxembourg rooms and published as a book in 1877, is packed with the city — the expatriate American tourist world, and the shut door of an old family that will not let an outsider in, which was also the year James had just lived. He went on writing about the city for thirty years, from The American at the start of his career to The Ambassadors in 1903, the late novel in which a middle-aged New Englander sent to Paris to retrieve a young man discovers that the young man is right to stay.

He also came back. His closest friendship of the later years was with the American novelist Edith Wharton, author of The House of Mirth and nearly twenty years his junior, who kept an apartment on the rue de Varenne in the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain quarter of the 7th arrondissement; his letters to her run through the whole second half of his published correspondence. In the spring of 1907 he allowed himself a real holiday for the first time in years, and began it with a stay with Wharton and her husband in Paris, followed by a long motor tour with them across western and southern France. He was sixty-four and had been writing about Paris since he was thirty-two, and it was, Percy Lubbock — the editor who published his letters after his death — noted, essentially a new city to him: the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the deep French countryside were both places he had written about far more than he had ever seen them.

The last act was English. When the First World War began he threw himself into relief work for Belgian refugees and wounded soldiers, and on 26 July 1915, after nearly forty years of living in England, he became a British subject — his sponsors included the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith. He had a stroke on 2 December, and in the New Year honours was given the Order of Merit — the highest British civil honour, in the sovereign's personal gift and limited to twenty-four living holders — the insignia brought to his bedside. He died at 21 Carlyle Mansions, his flat on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, on 28 February 1916, seven weeks short of his seventy-third birthday; the funeral was at Chelsea Old Church, a few yards from his door.