Image: Mike Baird

The American Scene, that itinerary of his brilliantly melancholy return to America, took Henry James through New York and New England, down into the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, and as far as Palm Beach. He left the journey where in a sense it left him:

There was no doubt, under the influence of this last look, that Florida still had, in her ingenuous, not at all insidious way, the secret of pleasing, and that even round about me the vagueness was still an appeal. The vagueness was warm, the vagueness was bright, the vagueness was sweet, being scented and flowered and fruited; above all, the vagueness was somehow consciously and confessedly weak. I made out in it something of the look of the charming shy face that desires to communicate and that yet has just too little expression.

In his fiction, James was the master of such characterization, captured almost in the act of becoming present and vivid to his own imagination, “vague” because the impressions from which character might be “built up” had not coalesced, or solidified, or congealed. (That the character is here the state of Florida suggests how far toward fiction James’s journey had taken him.) The passage is a reminder that James’s style itself depends on a beguiling, willful vagueness, one extraordinary in how much it reveals while seeming to wind candy floss around a paper core.

There, a sentence or two later, The American Scene