DAN McCALL
CITIZENS OF SOMEWHERE ELSE
Inside Jacket
“I am a citizen of somewhere else,” proclaimed Nathaniel Hawthorne in his preface to The Scarlet Letter. In many ways, Henry James shared that citizenship. Intrigued by their resolute stance as outsiders, Dan McCall here reassesses these two quintessentially American writers. He focuses on their works and on their connections to American history and culture.
Adopting an informal, conversational tone, McCall invites us to join him in a reading of some of Hawthorne’s and James’s masterpieces—not only The Scarlet Letter and The Portrait of a Lady but their great short stories, extensive notebooks, and other novels as well. He explains the significance of James’s book Hawthorne, shows the influence of Emerson on both writers, and conveys throughout James’s imaginative debt to Hawthorne. He concludes by comparing their views on what it means to be an American writer.
More than a knowledgeable and sensitive guide to two great American literary figures, Citizens of Somewhere Else offers keen observations about reading in general and the way literature is taught in colleges and universities today—suggesting that modern critics are often more concerned with their own agendas than with the substance of the works they analyze. Through McCall’s eyes we gain a renewed appreciation both of James and Hawthorne and of the insights that criticism can bring to literature. McCall addresses the specialist and the “common reader” alike.
Publisher: Hardcover edition, Congdon and Weed, New York
Praise
“An engaging, penetrating, and utterly original contribution to our understanding not only of Hawthorne and James but also of American civilization and of what it means to be an American writer. Dan McCall combines astonishing erudition with an easy personal style and a lucid wit fired with intense intellectual passion. He discusses these two writers as only a fellow artist might do, for Dan McCall is an outstanding novelist as well as an accomplished student of literature, and his intimacy with the creative process is a key to his success in this always stimulating tour de force. – Daniel Mark Fogel, Founding Editor, The Henry James Review
“Reminding us of the pleasures literary criticism can provide, McCall's splendid new book on Hawthorne and James demonstrates a passion for literature, not politics. In conversational but elegant prose, McCall explores how his subjects navigated "the relationship between the lived life and the achieved art."… A professor at Cornell, McCall admires early 20th-century critics F.W. Dupee and F.O. Matthiessen, but he also gives a nod to more contemporary critics, including "queer," postmodern and post-Freudian theorists, acknowledging their successes, failures and limitations, providing, in the end, a salutary balance between traditional and innovative approaches to literature.”— Publisher’s Weekly
Excerpt - Chapter 10, The Americana
I often begin classroom discussion of [The Portrait of a Lady] by having the students read and commit to memory the first sentence: “Under certain circumstances, there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” When I challenge anyone to quote the sentence word perfect, the usual mistakes include “hours in the day” and “pleasurable” for “hour in life” and “agreeable.” I ask the class, “How old is the speaker?’ “Is he American or British?” Is it a comic voice or a tragic voice?” I confess I think the first page of the novel is the most perfect page in our literature. The students call it “witty,” but I caution them that it’s clearly not witty in the manner of Oscar Wilde—there are no aphorisms, no epigrams, no particularly quotable lines. The pace is supremely assured. Twenty-five years later, James made several big changes on the closing pages, his description of Isabel’s first and only kiss, but in the beginning, on the first page, he changed not a word.
For its tone alone the passage is remarkable; it conveys ease, warmth, great good humor. It is mock heroic in the conversation of three gentlemen taking their tea: they make mountains out of molehills; the smaller the molehill, the bigger the mountain. The appeal is to intelligence, leisure, clear seeing, grace. It is Olympian fun; Lord Warburton was sick only once, “in the Persian Gulf.” This is true freedom. As Richard Poirier has pointed out, there is an “elegant prissiness” about it: the speaker is indeed American, but he has defected to “the other side.” It is a voice of pure joy and careful mischief.