'Voices In The Air' in Henry James' The American Scene

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In the above quotation, James had been pleased to discover that two Fifth Avenue churches that he remembered were still intact and, crucially, yet to lose their sacred dignity through being over-towered by skyscrapers. While he is happy that the churches survive, he nonetheless notes that he finds nothing in them of “architectural importance” and he probably likes them only because they are survivors from his childhood epoch. The voice in the air tells James that something will probably happen to them soon (or may have happened already) since they are “probably menaced”. The voice then becomes more “sinister”:

The deeply pictorial windows, in which clearness of picture and fullness of expression consort so successfully with a tone as of magnified gems, did not strike one as looking into a yellow l ittle square of the south - they put forth a different implication; but the flaw in the harmony was, more than anything else, that sinister voice of the air of which I have spoken, the fact that one could stand there, vibrating to such impressions, only to remember the suspended danger, the possibility of the doom. (72-73)

By contrasting a glowing, flowing tribute to his friend John La Farge, the creator of the mural of New York City’s Church of the Ascension, with the “sinister voice of the air”, James shows us the readers just how deeply he fears the “possibility of the doom”. The voice begins to attain a ghostly, supernatural nature and it is interesting to see that within a few pages of The American Scene the voice of the wind seems to have metamorphosed into a “florid ghost” (76).

This supernatural aspect is explored later in this paper.

The voice of the air appears at other key moments in The American Scene. It reminds Henry James of how desperately “interested” he is in just what he “criticizes,” that he is even a “victim” of his interest. “You can’t escape from it” nor can he escape his “special responsibility” as an American, his ability to see both “its genius and its shame ” (83). The voice reminds him that he knows full well that New York is a “bad, bold beauty” (84).

As Henry James walks by Central Park (near the homes of the wealthy who have gone away for the season), he is led by the voice of the air around him to a small contemplation of history. He notes that “history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what ‘happens,’ but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think in connection with it” (136-137). The voice is now leading Henry James towards what he analyses.

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The voice in the air serves as an effective image to readers to convey the thoughts of Henry James and also a useful literary device. It breaks the repetitiveness of readers always having to listen to what the “restless analyst” is saying and introduces in a sense a new character into the work. Thus, some of its value lies in it being novel. This new character can, of course, also see things from a different perspective to James. It can see things that James cannot or will not. It can also try to predict the future, something that James does not perhaps wi sh to do so directly by himself, at least not when under the scrutiny of readers. Since the voice is not human, let alone in the state of emotional turmoil that James is in, it is emotionless, passionless and reasonable.

However, the voice’s value lies not only in its novelty and perspective. Since James’ emotions were undoubtedly quite turbulent at that moment after having discovered the loss of his childhood haunts, the voice of the air instead takes over the narrative. It is sure, purposeful and can speak only the truth. It details what it has to rationally and with unclouded judgment. It is speaking not what James wishes to speak but nevertheless ultimately what must be said. In essence, James needs the voice of the air.

When it is not the voice of the wind that consoles and reassures James about the restless modernity of America, that occasions such inevitable forgiveness, he either “hears” something in the atmosphere around him, as if the very buildings speak to him, or he divides himself, creates a persona that reassures him, a voice that can see the “benediction of the future” and so “grant permission not to worry anymore”. ¹ These auditory images are similar to the voice of the air in perhaps everything except form and occur throughout The American Scene.

As stated earlier, James employed the use of various supernatural and ghostly images in The American Scene. Indeed, critics have tended to underplay or even ignore the extent to which they occur in the works of Henry James. Strongly influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and, in particular, Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, James has quite an extensive array of supernatural and ghostly phenomena in his works. He began writing ghost stories in the 1860s when Dickens and Le Fanu were still alive, and continued experimenting with them for nearly half a century up until his death. His first two “ghost stories”, The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868) and De Grey; A Romance (1868), both showed Hawthorne’s influence. Later, among others,

¹ Pippin 43.

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supernatural influences can be found in Owen Wingrave , Sir Edmund Orme, A Passionate Pilgrim, The Jolly Corner (1908) and, perhaps his most acclaimed in the genre, Turn of the Screw (1898).

What is interesting to note in the use of ghost images in The American Scene is the context in which they occur, i.e. in a non-fictional work. This differs from all of the aforementioned titles, which are fictional. Indeed, one image of “a ghost in his supposedly safe old house” (66) is extended from The American Scene to The Jolly Corner. So why did Henry James use such images

in The American Scene ? The answer can be found by looking directly at the surrounding text of

ghost images.

The florid ghosts look out from their exceedingly gilded frames - all that that can do is bravely done for them - with the frankest responsibility for everything; their collective presence becomes a kind of copious tell-tale document signed with a hundred names. There are few of these that at this hour, I think, we particularly desire to repeat; but the place where they may be read is, all the way from river to river and from the Battery to Harlem, the place in which there is most of the terrible town. (76)

In this instance, the “florid ghosts” are pictures of people who are immortalized in New York’s City Hall. These people include “past worthies, past celebrities and city fathers, Mayors, Bosses, Presidents, Governors, Statesmen at large, Generals and Commodores” (76). By using the adjective florid along with ghost, James is able to capture precisely what he is looking to describe. Thus, we can say, at least in this case, that his use of ghost images is merely to aid his descriptions of people and places.

Another example of this can be found when James is exploring New York and describes “a ghostly tread”. The quote at the start of this paper shows the quietness of the area in view of the fact that everybody had left it for the season. It continues:

An approach to peace and harmony might have been, in a manner, promised, and the sense of other days took advantage of it to steal abroad with a ghostly tread. It kept meeting, half the time, to its discomfiture, the lamentable little Arch of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington Square - lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unsupported and unaffiliated state. (70)