Henry James was not at home in America

a gigantic and elaborate … monument to all that isn’t socially possible there. It’s, in effect, like a gorgeous practical joke—but at one’s own expense, after all, if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls, & sit in alternate Gothic and Palladian cathedrals, as it were—where now only the temperature stalks about—with the “regrets,” sighing along the wind, of those who have declined.… I feel that in speaking of it as I have, I don’t do justice to the house as a phenomenon (of brute achievement). But that truly wd. take me too far! It’s only as a place to live in, & in the conditions fatally imposed, that I, before it, threw up my hands—! The problem with the grotesquely wealthy is similar to that of the impoverished—they are people who fail to mix with, move into, and maintain those common, well-mannered social spaces that preceded them. On the one hand, there was the Yiddish theater district, which made the New York streets “unspeakable” with their “bacchanal, s ... Read full article.