Expatriate in the Abbey

How perfectly ironic that this writer, having emigrated from America to England as a young man and spent his last 40 years there as an expatriate, should have had to wait so long for an honor accorded to so many who came long after him (W.H. Auden and T.S.Eliot, to name but two), largely because his popularity had declined before he had, a circumstance that occurred mainly as a result of his later novels, featuring what one critic described as "this very complex style . . . really quite tough going, with very long sentences," exemplified in books such as The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, and others; and how splendid that the honor was accorded him in a city (London) which had first repelled him as a raw, Hogarthian place, and more precisely, in a cathedral (Westminster Abbey) from which he had once fled because the crowds emitted an odor that "was not that of incense," and that he eventually came to love both places; and how quite exquisitely appropriate that last week, finally, he was recognized with a marble plaque placed in the floor of Poets' Corner, near where Eliot and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are also memorialized, and reading simply:"Henry James. O.M./ for Order of Merit/ Novelist New York 1843. London 1916."

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