persuaded Jack to settle instead on the name Astoria, after their ancestorâs fur-trading post on the Columbia River. For the opening of the new hotel on November 1, 1897, Boldt staged another extravaganza that went on from noon to midnight, mixed charity, wealth, fashion, and entertainment, and generated columns of news coverage.
By the terms of a painfully hashed-out contract, corridors connecting the two buildings could be sealed off if the fragile truce, uncomfortable for both parties, failed to hold. The great double building was a house divided, like the Astor dynasty itself, which was riven by old resentments ripening into flagrant insults. * But the house stood nonetheless and even flourished. The two buildings, married in name by a hyphen and known thereafter as the Waldorf-Astoria, opened for combined business in 1897 as the worldâs largest and most luxurious hotel. âLike New York itself,â the historian Lloyd Morris wrote, âthe Waldorf-Astoria crystallized the improbable and fabulous. It was more than a mere hotel. It was a vast, glittering, iridescent fantasy that had been conjured up to infect millions of plain Americans with a new ideaâthe aspiration to lead an expensive, gregarious life as publicly as possible.â Combining forces and fortunes in their double hotel, the two otherwise warring Astor cousins created what Henry James was to describe as âa new thing under the sunâ that gave him a glimpse of âperfect human felicity.â
FIVE
âA New Thing Under the Sunâ
i.
I N THE LATE SUMMER OF 1904 Henry James came home from England for a ten-month visit. He had been gone for over twenty years, as long an absence as the sleep from which Rip Van Winkle, born a subject of King George III, awakened to find himself citizen of a new nation, the United States. Measured by the changes Henry James saw in the pace, feel, and institutions of daily life, a second American Revolution might as well have run its course since he had left.
Three recent novelsâ The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl âcertified him, at least in the view of a handful of critics and readers, as master in the house of fiction, just as he was, but without any doubt this time, master in his fastidiously regulated bachelor establishment, Lamb House, at Rye on the Sussex coast. A subtenant now occupied the property and enjoyed the sea air, garden study, flowering peach trees, and companionship of a ruby-colored dachshund, Maximilian, whose pedigree, James said, was as long as a typewriter ribbon. Maximilianâs absent owner, meanwhile, was in transit, visiting a dozen and more American cities as he traveled from New England to Florida and from New York and Washington to California and the Pacific Northwest. He had gone on the lecture circuit, a routine occupation for many other literary celebrities and entertainers, but not something comfortable for this fierce exquisite who yearned for perfection but also needed to cover the expenses of his trip. Weaving seamless sentences that drifted like cigar smoke in the somnolent air of the lecture hall, he articulated the art of fiction to audiences in half a dozen American cities.
He extracted from his travels what he called âfeatures of the human sceneâ and âproperties of the social air.â The self-styled âvisionary tourist,â ârestless analyst,â and âirrepressible story seekerâ planned to study âthe working of democratic institutionsâ as they âdetermine and qualify manners, feelings, communications, modes of contact, and conceptions of life.â Three years later, with his gathered impressions plucked, cleaned, trussed, and done to a turn, he served them up, sauced with his celebrated qualifiers and discriminations, in a travel book The American Scene . If the title had not already been taken, he said, he could have called his book âThe Return of the
By the terms of a painfully hashed-out contract, corridors connecting the two buildings could be sealed off if the fragile truce, uncomfortable for both parties, failed to hold. The great double building was a house divided, like the Astor dynasty itself, which was riven by old resentments ripening into flagrant insults. * But the house stood nonetheless and even flourished. The two buildings, married in name by a hyphen and known thereafter as the Waldorf-Astoria, opened for combined business in 1897 as the worldâs largest and most luxurious hotel. âLike New York itself,â the historian Lloyd Morris wrote, âthe Waldorf-Astoria crystallized the improbable and fabulous. It was more than a mere hotel. It was a vast, glittering, iridescent fantasy that had been conjured up to infect millions of plain Americans with a new ideaâthe aspiration to lead an expensive, gregarious life as publicly as possible.â Combining forces and fortunes in their double hotel, the two otherwise warring Astor cousins created what Henry James was to describe as âa new thing under the sunâ that gave him a glimpse of âperfect human felicity.â
FIVE
âA New Thing Under the Sunâ
i.
I N THE LATE SUMMER OF 1904 Henry James came home from England for a ten-month visit. He had been gone for over twenty years, as long an absence as the sleep from which Rip Van Winkle, born a subject of King George III, awakened to find himself citizen of a new nation, the United States. Measured by the changes Henry James saw in the pace, feel, and institutions of daily life, a second American Revolution might as well have run its course since he had left.
Three recent novelsâ The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl âcertified him, at least in the view of a handful of critics and readers, as master in the house of fiction, just as he was, but without any doubt this time, master in his fastidiously regulated bachelor establishment, Lamb House, at Rye on the Sussex coast. A subtenant now occupied the property and enjoyed the sea air, garden study, flowering peach trees, and companionship of a ruby-colored dachshund, Maximilian, whose pedigree, James said, was as long as a typewriter ribbon. Maximilianâs absent owner, meanwhile, was in transit, visiting a dozen and more American cities as he traveled from New England to Florida and from New York and Washington to California and the Pacific Northwest. He had gone on the lecture circuit, a routine occupation for many other literary celebrities and entertainers, but not something comfortable for this fierce exquisite who yearned for perfection but also needed to cover the expenses of his trip. Weaving seamless sentences that drifted like cigar smoke in the somnolent air of the lecture hall, he articulated the art of fiction to audiences in half a dozen American cities.
He extracted from his travels what he called âfeatures of the human sceneâ and âproperties of the social air.â The self-styled âvisionary tourist,â ârestless analyst,â and âirrepressible story seekerâ planned to study âthe working of democratic institutionsâ as they âdetermine and qualify manners, feelings, communications, modes of contact, and conceptions of life.â Three years later, with his gathered impressions plucked, cleaned, trussed, and done to a turn, he served them up, sauced with his celebrated qualifiers and discriminations, in a travel book The American Scene . If the title had not already been taken, he said, he could have called his book âThe Return of the
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