The drunken boat on vacation

 

Leon Edel makes a shrewd juxtaposition between the fate of Charlotte Verver in the Golden Bowl and the consequent voyage to America of the hero of his biographical trifecta,  Henry James, quoting Fanny Assingham: “I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country. State after State – which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible.”

Henry James’s travels in the U.S. in 1904, 21 years after he’d been there last, make up that bundle of impressions, The American Scene. James is the Silenus of expatriates – we all bow down to his altar, sooner of later. State after State – this was the great “subject” he was after, another writer – like Kerouac or Whitman, Mailer or, why not, Jane Smiley – in search of the real American thing, a story to pull out of the terrible vastness. On his first day, disembarked in New Jersey, James could already feel it:

Nothing was left, for the rest of the episode, but a kind of fluidity of appreciation a mild, warm wave that broke over the succession of aspects and objects according to some odd inward rhythm, and often, no doubt, with a violence that there was little in the phenomena themselves flagrantly to justify. It floated me, my wave, all that day and the next ; so that I still think tenderly for the short backward view is already a distance with "tone" of the service it rendered me and of the various perceptive penetrations, charming coves of still blue water, that carried me up into the subject, so to speak, and enabled me to step ashore.”

What expat come home has not surfed on that wave? Has not felt some lost familiarity in its motion and temperature? Some intervening distance that puts one on one side, the stranger at the party?

But Charlotte Verver and Henry James came home from a Europe that was truly distant – when distance was the experience of days and tossing currents, not of today’s menu of movies and tv shows and jet lag – an utterly new experience of time. I arrived in Atlanta a little sick, but soon cast off the threatened cold and plunged as directly as I could, with a casting off of newspaper headlines, into the “subject”. It is a plunging that requires cars, and getting used to vast, cathedral like grocery stores all over again. For Adam, the New Jerusalem is all about his bucket list of fast food places, as well as going, in Atlanta (and Athens, visiting his cousins), to comic book stores and parks and even visiting the King memorial down on Auburn Street. We are in Iowa now, and the bucket list consists of  swimming for three hours a day in Lake Boji  and amusement park rides in Arnold’s Park.

Myself, I am pretty amazed by the unconscious affluence here, the cheapness in the Walmart and the expensiveness of the restaurants; I’m tickled by the voices, by the way that the grocery store clerk can decide to tell you the story of her dog’s funny habits while ringing you up, just because; and I’m amazed at feeling so very American myself, as through bursting through the thin layer of the French quotidian.

Feeling American does not mean feeling kin to the official face America shows the world, or the unofficial American buzz on social media. I know that’s there. That’s always there. But that is not the wave. The wave is what I am interested in, more, at the moment.