Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984
Return to 'The Golden Bowl'
By Gore Vidal
In the spring of 1880 Mrs. Henry Adams confided to her diary: 'It is high time Harry James was ordered home by his family. He is too good a fellow to be spoiled by injudicious old ladies in London—and in the long run they would like him all the better for knowing and living in his own country. He had better go to Cheyenne and run a hog ranch. The savage notices of his Hawthorne in American papers, all of which he brings me to read, are silly and overshoot the mark in their bitterness, but for all that he had better not hang around Europe much longer if he wants to make a lasting literary reputation.' That same year the egregious Bret Harte observed, sadly, that Henry James 'looks, acts, thinks like an Englishman and writes like an Englishman.'
Feature, 4475 words
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