Henry James

                                  The American

                     Preface to the New York Edition (1907)

The American, which I had begun in Paris early in the winter of 1875-76, made
its first appearance in The Atlantic Monthly in June of the latter year and
continued there, from month to month, till May of the next. It started on its
course while much was still unwritten, and there again come back to me, with
this remembrance, the frequent hauntings and alarms of that comparatively early
time; the habit of wondering what would happen if anything should happen, if one
should break one's arm by an accident or make a long illness or suffer, in body,
mind, fortune, any other visitation involving a loss of time. The habit of
apprehension became of course in some degree the habit of confidence that one
would pull through, that, with opportunity enough, grave interruption never yet
had descended, and that a special Providence, in short, despite the sad warning
of Thackeray's Denis Duval and of Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (that of
Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston was yet to come) watches over anxious novelists
condemned to the economy of serialisation. I make myself out in memory as having
at least for many months and in many places given my Providence much to do: so
great a variety of scenes of labour, implying all so much renewal of
application, glimmer out of the book as I now read it over. And yet as the faded
interest of the whole episode becomes again mildly vivid what I seem most to
recover is, in its pale spectrality, a degree of joy, an eagerness on behalf of
my recital, that must recklessly enough have overridden anxieties of every sort,
including any view of inherent difficulties.
    I seem to recall no other like connexion in which the case was met, to my
measure, by so fond a complacency, in which my subject can have appeared so apt
to take care of itself. I see now that I might all the while have taken much
better care of it; yet, as I had at the time no sense of neglecting it, neither
acute nor rueful solicitude, I can but speculate all vainly to-day on the oddity
of my composure. I ask myself indeed if, possibly, recognising after I was
launched the danger of an inordinate leak - since the ship has truly a hole in
its side more than sufficient to have sunk it - I may not have managed, as a
counsel of mere despair, to stop my ears against the noise of waters and pretend
to myself I was afloat;