Commemorating the Lost City

New York in Henry James’s “A Small Boy and Others”

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which James, in A Small Boy and Others (1913), the first part of his three-volume autobiography, commemorated his birthplace New York City, and in so doing reflected on his national and cultural identity. James had originally intended A Small Boy to be a tribute to his recently deceased older brother William. Even though William, and indeed the whole James clan, loom large in the memoir, what James eventually crafted might be better described as a portrait of the artist as a young boy. Still smarting from the painfully disappointing reception of The American Scene, as well as of the New York edition of his works, James returned with A Small Boy to the scene of the crime, namely his native country. Feeling rejected by, and hence alienated from, the United States, he revisited and lovingly recreated through the medium of memory the warm, welcoming, and simpler scenes of his childhood and boyhood. He conjured up with particular (and unusual) tenderness New York as he remembered it, a city which bore but scant resemblance to the twentieth century metropolis of that name (the “terrible city” of The American Scene). Unable to find his bearings in the latter, expanded and changed almost beyond recognition, James returned to the familiar, cozy streets and houses of his early years. Significantly interspersed with references to food, A Small Boy poignantly conveys the flavor of a time and place, indeed of a whole way of life, that James mourned as lost while simultaneously acknowledging it as having made him what he had become.