Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [117]
One reason for his involvement was the carnage, the death of so many young men, and the dislocation and destruction. While he mourned the mutilation of existence, he had endless admiration for the simple courage he encountered, both in the many young men who went to war and in those they left behind. In September, James moved to London. “I can hear and see and have informational contact,” he wrote; “I eat my heart out alone.” He lobbied the U.S. ambassador to Britain and other high American officials and reproached them for their neutrality. And he wrote pamphlets in defense of Britain and her allies.
James emphasized in his many letters one important resource to counter the senselessness of the war. He was aware, as many were not, of the toll such cruelty takes on emotions and of the resistance to compassion that such events engender. In fact, this insensitivity becomes a way of survival. As in his novels, he insisted on the most important of all human attributes—feeling—and railed against “the paralysis of my own powers to do anything but increasingly and inordinately feel.”
Years later, on a pink index card I carried across the oceans from Tehran to Washington, D.C., I found two quotations about James’s wartime experiences. I had written them out for Nassrin, but I never showed them to her. The first was from a letter he wrote to Clare Sheridan, a friend whose husband—they were newly married—had gone to war and been killed. “I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel,” he wrote, “because I have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say—feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.” In letters to friends, again and again he urges them to feel. Feeling would stir up empathy and would remind them that life was worth living.
One of the peculiarities of James’s reaction to the war was the fact that his feelings and emotions were not aroused for patriotic reasons. His own country, America, was not at war. Britain, the country where he had lived for forty years, was, but in all those forty years he had not asked for British citizenship. Now, he finally did. In June 1915, a few months before his death, Henry James was granted British nationality. He had written to his nephew Harry that he wished to make his civil status compatible with his moral and material status. “Hadn’t it been for the War, I should certainly have gone on as I was, taking it as the simplest and easiest and even friendliest thing; but the circumstances are utterly altered now.”
His more immediate reason for this sudden reversal was that, because of wartime conditions, he had been categorized as a “friendly alien” and needed police permission every time he traveled from London to his home in Sussex. But the more important and symbolic reason was his disenchantment with America’s distance from the war. He wrote to a friend, Lilly Perry, that “the immediate presence of the Enemy transforms it from head to foot when one’s own nationality does nothing for one that keeps pace with transformation.”
The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination. “Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers,” he wrote to his old friend Rhoda Broughton, “and I am sick beyond cure to have lived to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that these long years we had