Nina's Blog - Friday 25th April 2025

The U.S. had become a largely unfamiliar country filled with strange new architectures and foreign voices. And while James had hoped to rediscover his homeland with freshly scrubbed perceptions (much as, when a young man, he first discovered his love for Italy, France, and London), he soon found himself just as “lost in America” as Albert Brooks would a century later. “The very sign of its energy,” he went on to write in his late, impressive, and often complexly difficult travel memoir, The American Scene, in 1907:

is that it doesn’t believe in itself: it fails to succeed, even at a cost of millions, in persuading you that it does. Its mission would appear to be, exactly, to gild the temporary, with its gold, as many inches thick as may be, and then, with a fresh shrug, a shrug of its splendid cynicism for its freshly detected inability to convince, give up its actual work, however exorbitant, as the merest of stop-gaps. The difficulty with the compromised charmer is just this constant inability to convince; to convince ever, I mean, that she is serious, serious about any form whatever, or about anything but that perpetual passionate pecuniary purpose which plays with all forms, which derides and devours them, though it may pile up the cost of them in order to rest a while, spent and haggard, in the illusion of their finality.