Henry James, Washington Square and Cervantes

Like many 19th c. Americans, Henry James (1843 -1916) grew up with that feeling that culture, beauty and sophistication lay on the other side of the Atlantic. Living in a country with no antiquity or mystery, but only with commonplace prosperity, class distinction involved travelling to the Old World to imbibe all its art and elegance; probably, just a question of snobbery. He could afford doing so and so could and did many of the upper-middle class characters in his novels.

He anchored most of his cosmopolitan writings in an idealised aristocratic Europe, focusing on personal relationships and aiming at a kind of psychological realism: The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, The Turns of the Screw... Although Washington Square is mainly set in the New York quarter where he was born, describing his maternal grandmother's house, Austin Sloper and his daughter also cross the ocean. It is something brief, but "she failed to gather animation from the mountains of Switzerland or the monuments of Italy". A wicked father, an unscrupulous suitor and a virtuous and wronged heroine were familiar types from Victorian melodramas. This novel, which defies a happy end, was turned into the unforgettable The Heiress, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift; a film I watched a long time ago, and before reading the book, probably too young to understand how Catherine could resign herself to a lonely future, locking the door against the man who had once betrayed her love.

In a recent trip to New York City, I wanted to visit the place. Nowadays there is a residential neighbourhood which has developed around Washington Square Park, a green space to hang out and stage demonstrations, a park adored by the locals and a kind of sanctuary for the Beat Generation of the 40s and 50s. Strolling around, just a few metres away from the park arch, we arrived at NY University campus where, at the end of a courtyard just off the 5th Avenue, we unexpectedly met... a statue of Cervantes.

We could read it had been a present to the city from the mayor of Madrid in 1989 and, first intended to be located in the middle of Washington Square Park, the statue had been considered too fragile and they had opted for this charming alley instead. Surfing the net, we also learnt that at the end of the 19th century the small Spanish colony in New York had already made an unsuccessful proposal to raise money to donate the city a statue of Cervantes in order to improve the hostile image of Spain at that time due to the war in Cuba. The statue would finally manage to turn up a century later, but by other means and for other reasons.