In an 1877 essay, "Italy Revisited," Henry James compared traveling to attending a play or seeing a spectacle. "There is something heartless," James wrote, "in stepping forth into foreign streets to feast on character when character consists simply of the slightly different costume in which labour and want present themselves." Despite such misgivings, however, James wrote several books of travel writing and often incorporated his travel accounts into his short stories and fiction. In these accounts James sets up his own narrative voice and those of his characters as audience members watching the people and scenery of Europe unfold before them. His morally-charged plots often begin when Americans and Europeans disrupt the spectator/audience breach and begin to interact.
My paper argues that James created in his travel accounts and his fiction a mode of travel that he believed critiqued more vulgar styles of travel writing. James's preferred style of travel almost amounted to a way of perceiving. His travel writing about Europe avoids capturing its "character" and "charm" and shies away from details of its complex and troubling history. The proper way for a traveler to interact with a foreign place, James wrote of Siena in 1909, was "to cultivate a relation to the oracle--after the fashion that suits yourself: so that if the general aftertaste of experience, experience at large, the fine distilled essence of the matter, seems to breathe, in such a case, from the very stones and to make a thick strong liquor of the air, you may thus gather as you pass what is most to your purpose; which is the more indestructible mixture of lived things, with its concentrated odour, than any interminable list of numbered chapters and verses."
Such a mode of travel and perception, James believed, was reserved for the traveler who had the refinement, the means, and the leisure to seek out relations, places, and lodging outside the popular haunts of less privileged tourists. My paper will reveal how James's travel writing was first a response and imitation of more popular journalistic travel accounts such as Sarah Jane Lippincott's and then gradually developed its more elite tones in his late non-fiction and fiction. Drawing on James's travel writing from the 1870s through the 1900s, particularly his writing about Italy and his two accounts of Siena, I will conclude that James's foreign correspondence is also an attempt to create an audience for them and for his short stories and novels.
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