Henry James: A Life

...And has it been noted that the indirections of speech in the work of modern playwrights like Harold Pinter, with their subtle omissions and veiled allusions, closely resemble the pattern of dialogue in James's late novels, writ-ten when the plays of Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero dominated the boards...

...everything was open to question...

...Like his brother William before him, Henry James first visited Europe on his own in 1869 to recover from an illness...

...He was trying to explain the nature of faith, whereas Baldwin is perverting the quotation in order to moot a conspiracy against Wayne Williams and all other blacks by all American whites...

...Henry's eventual choice of Europe as his residence was for a long time regarded as a criminal act by America's literary politicians...

...By the late forties, however, James had achieved the widespread critical appreciation he had craved during his lifetime and never received...

...Henry and his four siblings were the ultimate "hotel children...

...We wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions," Henry • re-marked of his childhood...

...Withthe publication of the first volume of Leon Edel's magisterial biography in 1953, however, whose five large volumes have now been compressed and to some extent rewritten, James emerged as a fascinating personality in his own right, a large-souled man whose career was one of the noblest and most courageous of any American...

...None, so far as I know, has noticed that several lines of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock were almost directly lifted from James's tale "In the Cage,'" or that the eerie lines about the formal garden in Burnt Norton derive from "The Turn of the Screw...

...This classic Soviet "disinformation" network and Its effects on Congress and American pubic opinion are exposed In two important publcations now avdlable from the Council for Inter-American Security...

...His influence on the course of English and American poetry has never been sufficiently appreciated...

...The writer who had once been dismissed as an elegant trifle became the measure of the literary genre of modern times...

...Paul de Vence to write up the case—that is, to write it up black...

...In 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia, Leopold and Loeb were reincarnated, doubled, and redoubled in the person of one Wayne Bertram Williams...

...In Europe he availed himself of an astonishing education...

...It is incredible that the longest entry in the index under "Henry James" is "Psychosexual Problems...

...Academic scribblers have spent decades tracing antecedents and allusions in Eliot's poetry...

...This time he seems to have done a modicum of prowling about, had sundry inter-views, not in great depth, and engaged in what might be called a deal of brown study...

...But how much more noble was James's course than the absurd posturing of his successors...

...Edel has discovered nothing new about James that is important...

...Paul...

...I suggest that those who have trouble with James's late novels try reading them to someone the next time the VCR breaks down...

...Erik Erikson, writing about William's prolonged identity crisis, once referred to Henry Senior's method of bringing up his children as a "tyranny of liberalism...

...if he had stayed he perhaps would have kept writing the crude melodramas with which he began...

...Both father and children were participants in the epidemic of invalidism which broke out in the cultured environs of Boston after the Civil War...

...His independent perspective bores right through the bureaucratic bungling and sentimental idealism that has characterized so much of our approach to nature in re-cent years...

...The debate over whether James took a wrong turn later in his career will never be resolved, because one's judgment of the late James is primarily a matter of temperament...

...And he brought to his travels through France and Italy a generosity of impression which would have startled Goethe...

...In any event, the results were dramatic...

...Both of these men would not have written as they did if it were not for the example of James's art...

...There is no evidence that James was anything but celibate, or that his relationship with people like Hendrik Andersen and Hugh Walpole was any-thing but platonic...

...He made his early prose crisper, more colloquial, more highly charged...

...This has been changed to: "He was much taken with his sincerity, his seriousness—and his handsome blond countenance...

...tionist, and his demands for the park systems are high...

...But if you cannot read James for his own sake, or for the sake of his influence, you should read him for the sake of reading Leon Edel's biography—just as a good reason to read Proust is to read Painter's biography...

...The American writer] must deal, more or less, even if only by implication, with Europe...

...English poetry, despite Thomas Hardy, had softened to the consistency of bread pudding by the early twentieth century...

...In other words, there are only James and Eliot himself in the inner circle . . . everyone else, you see, being a trifle gauche...

...There are those like F. R. Leavis and Van Wyck Brooks who consider his late manner to be nothing more than the blowing of baroque air bubbles...

...and second, that, along with Walter Jackson Bates's biography of Samuel Johnson, Edel's work seems to prove that the most satisfactory modern biographies are written about good men...

...Van Wyck Brooks and V. L. Parrington seemed downright embarrassed by James in their influential (and facile) George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...Howard Fein-stein, in his brilliant Becoming William James (1984), thinks that this plague of neurasthenic disorders was related to the problem of vocation...

...For those who did not know what to do with themselves in work-oriented America, invalidism "provided social definition, sanctioned pleasure, and protected from premature responsibility...

...Actually Baldwin shows very little THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 43...

...E R. Leavis, Philp Rahv, F. O. Matthiessen, Stephen Spender, and R. P. Blackmur were among the many who became card-carrying Jamesians...

...It is not too much to say that T.S...

...Judging from the text, remarkably little research went into this remarkably large theme...

...His nervous system was not wired for the America of Mark Twain and Frank Norris...

...The dust jacket of the Library of America's edition of Faulkner reads, "Here for the first time are the novels as Faulkner wanted you to read them...

...The one major find—and it is interesting—is the literary source of "The Turn of the Screw," which turns out to be an 1855 serialization in a middlebrow New York journal which James must have read as a young boy...

...Still, Edel has written the literary biography of our age...

...In fact it is Hebrews Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright living in England...

...The Marxist Sanclnlsta government of Nicaragua and Its ales are con-ducting an Intense propaganda campaign In the United States in an effort to discredit President Reagan's foreign polcy htiatives in Central America...

...The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life—and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course again finally directs itself," James wrote to a friend at the end of his life...

...Baldwin has been to Atlanta before to write about racism...

...abridgement of the original five volumes...

...In the six to eight hours a day he spent at his writing desk, James transfigured this life of observation into art...

...It is an inestimable blessing to me...

...Eliot's two essays on James, written in 1918, are the most snobbish ever written by a major American critic...

...He has mastered an enormous archive and treated his subject with exquisite literary tact...

...My work lies there...

...and then there are those like Percy Lubbock, Louis Auchincloss, and Graham Greene (all practicing novelists) who feel that novels like The Golden Bowl represent the summit of James's art...

...It so happened that Williams was black...

...he certainly would never have written anything like The Portrait of a Lady—or, for that matter, Washington Square...

...of the five children, three cracked up and two became geniuses (not a bad average, when you think about it...

...Family life was an ongoing pedagogical experiment...

...He submitted to the rigors of the London "Season" and found his way into the penetralia of English society...

...James dictated these books, and the serpentine sentences become remarkably lucid when read aloud.' James is the only American writer whose work as a whole gives the impression of an imperium in the manner of great European writers like WHO DO YOU TRUST...

...The other major change is the franker discussion of the psychosexual side of James and some of his friends like Morton Fullerton...

...But the image of the man himself remained incomplete...

...DC 20001 Price includes shipping and handing...

...His influence has been enormous...

...Given Epstein's first point, it may be asked why we now have this 'May I here make a protest against the editors of the Library of America who, in their estimable reissuance of the American classics, have...

...His early stories were derivative and melodramatic...

...He met everybody: Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Turgenev, Browning—as well as public figures like Gladstone and Rosebery...

...whereas no European is obliged to deal in the least with America...

...James, of course, always had his champions, but their writings only seemed to play into the hands of his detractors...

...There are not only the novels and tales, but superb travel-writing, biography, criticism, memoirs and epistolary remains...

...The words are by St...

...He asserts that the prosecution case has a great hole in it, but since he gives no comprehensive ac-count of that case, and almost none at all of the defense, it is impossible to gauge what he says with any precision...

...Rahv later turned in his card for political reasons...

...surveys of American letters...

...A year or so ago, Joseph Epstein made two points about Edel's biography in the New Criterion that are worth repeating: first, that, despite its enormous length, it is the only modern literary biography that we might wish longer...

...His subject was one of the most charming of men, both in his writing and in his delicate personal relations, and Edel lets this quality infuse the en-tire work...

...H. L. Mencken dismissed him as an overly fastidious gentleman who, instead of going to Europe, should have traveled in the opposite direction and taken a good whiff of the stock yards...

...There is a common impression in academia that James rewrote his early works in his late, difficult style...

...The product of Baldwin's labor was published last year under the title of The Evidence of Things Not Seen...

...As is often the case, his reputation reached its nadir around the time of his death in 1916...

...So were his victims...

...His native country was slow to appreciate him on both counts...

...It took two Americans, Pound and Eliot, to put some fiber back into it...

...11:1, and the words are apt enough for both title and epigraph, though not in the sense given them by St...

...By the time he came to write The Portrait of a Lady, however, he had found his way into the company of the greatest...

...This seems to have given Walter Lowe of Playboy the idea of calling in James Baldwin from his expatriate eyrie in St...

...Once the revival got going, criticism of the novel in general came to be dominated by a Jamesian calculus...

...He did nothing of the sort...

...He was convicted on an indictment that did not technically cover all the child and teenage bodies (there were twenty-eight of them) in the case...

...The iron will that William and Henry displayed throughout their lives—William in pursuit of his sanity, and Henry in pursuit of his art—was a necessary propellant to free themselves of their background...

...James was always the over-refined, baffled aesthete whose quiet life, apart from the "pilgrimage" to Europe, had no intrinsic interest...

...It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become...

...Martin's Press/$29.95 THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN James Baldwin/Holt, Rinehart and Winston/$11.95 Herb Greer Goethe...

...Paul, but the book's epigraph does not specify where the quote comes from...

...Edel nevertheless spends too much time in this new edition plying his Freud...

...His direct effect on writers like Conrad, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Daisy Miller begetting Daisy Buchanan), and thus on later writers like Cheever, Updike, Naipaul, and Salinger is obvious...

...But what most comes through is the courage with which James pursued his vocation in spite of the indifference of the public and the bafflement of critics...

...James lived in Europe—felt, thought, learned, produced—to a degree that would have been impossible for him in post-Civil War America...

...But no one reading Edel's account of James's astonishing career there can argue with James's own account of his decision in 1881: My choice is the old world—my choice, my need, my life...

...Unfortunately, discussion of this find meant cutting much of Edel's intelligent criticism of this baffling novella in the earlier edition...

...Many of these critics were on the political left, and, as Leon Edel has pointed out in an introduction to a collection of essays about James, the fact that the Hitler-Stalin pact preceded the James centenary by a few years may have contributed to the revival...

...There is something to Eliot's remarks about James, in that by becoming so saturated with Europe, James was able to see America in novels like The Bostonians in a way that no American writer of that age could, just as, as an outsider, he was able to understand England (and not just its upper classes) in a way that eluded English writers of the time...

...There are slight changes in emphasis in this new edition which are not corroborated by anything new Edel has dug up...

...He has found what James himself, in refer-ring to Saint-Beuve, called "the seam as it were between the talent and the soul...

...Might they not have given us James's novels as James wanted us to read them...

...but a hundred years hence—fifty years hence—perhaps he will doubtless be accounted so...

...His development was not rapid...

...Apparently Baldwin did not at-tend the trial, and gives no sign that he asked Wayne Williams whether or not he was guilty...

...decided to print James's novels as they were originally printed and not as he revised them late in life for the New York Edition of his works...

...The Revolution Lobby by Alan C. Brownfeld and J. Michael Waller Consolidating the Revolution by J. Michael Waller Both can be ordered by sending a check or money order for $10 payable to: Council for Inter-American Security 122 C Street, NW Suite 330 WasNngtor...

...The alienation of the artist was to come into fashion a few years after James's death and still remains with us...

...James was born in 1843, nominally in New York City, but actually in "the country of the James family," as his brother William once put it...

...Chase himself is a strong preservaHenry James is the only great American writer who was also a great man...

...In any event, a lot of Marxist critics suddenly had no quarrel with a novelist who could write of the "black and merciless things that are behind great possessions...

...and, in a manner of speaking, so was the administration of Atlanta where he was caught and tried...

...But he has pierced the shrouds of superstition that now surround much of the environmental movement...

...Edel has not found the smoking gun people like Gore Vidal probably hoped he would...

...Their father, an amateur theologian of independent means, shuttled them all over Europe and the Eastern seaboard to expose them to as many cultures and ideas as possible...

...They prefer to see nature, Chase concludes, as "too complex and too sacred to be defiled by manipulation or analysis...

...HENRY JAMES: A LIFE Leon Edel/Harper & Row/$24.95 George Sim Johnston 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 THE PRICE OF THE TICKET: COLLECTED NONFICTION 1948-1985 James Baldwin/St...

...For example, in describing James's first meeting with the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, Edel wrote in the first edition, "He [James] was much taken with his ingenuity, his sincerity, his seriousness, and his hand-some blond countenance...

...The painter of manners who neglects America is not thereby incomplete as yet...