NONFICTION - June 12, 1994

TRAVELING IN ITALY WITH HENRY JAMES edited by Fred Kaplan (William Morrow: $27.50; 413 pp.) Henry James, sower of wanderlust, patron saint of bons vivants , is collected here in a tincture of Italy, his voluminous travel essays boiled down to a manageable book of letters and essays from his travels there between 1869 and 1907. This allows the reader to compare James’ first impressions with those supposedly more somber later reflections on Venice, Rome, Florence, the Bay of Naples, Siena, Ravenna, etc. And I am happy to report that, if anything, James gets progressively less somber, goes off the impressionistic deep end--his observations less detailed, less place-specific, less helpful to the practical traveler and more helpful to the armchair traveler. Exploring in the shadow of Ruskin, James is determined to tell us something new about Italy and repeatedly despairs with the phrase: “Everything has been said.” But his sheer enthusiasm, in “hours of expansion and those of contraction,” for the “bosky byways,” “adorable strangeness” and “unanalysable loveableness of Italy” sets him apart from Ruskin, even as he apologizes for that enthusiasm profusely. On Venice: “It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little strenuous thinking,” and later: “These steps are cool in the morning, yet I don’t know that I can justify my excessive fondness for them any better than I can explain a hundred of the other vague infatuations with which Venice sophisticates the spirit.” Florence, in his first impressions, is “the sanest of cities,” with a “temperate joy” that in later years becomes a “grave brilliance.” In Rome he writes to Alice James: “The excitement of the first hour has passed away & I have recovered the healthy mental equilibrium of the sober practical tourist.” Never! Not for Henry James in Italy!