Henry James in the Nineties

...James has, to be sure, influenced his style, his imagination, and the very form that this immense chronicle has assumed...

...Professor Edel, who has been at work on this material for as long as anyone can remember, has shown himself to be both a formidable scholar and—what is so much rarer in the annals of literary biography—a first-rate literary artist, a writer perfectly attuned to every nuance of James' life and work and perfectly equipped with a style appropriate to such a labyrinthine subject...

...in fact, a kind of diptych of moral risk, with the first panel—his experience in the theater, which represented a kind of esthetic hubris—counterpoised by a second that probes an even more critical episode in James' life...

...James could never quite make his peace with the certain knowledge that the story of his life would not be exempted from the juggernaut of modern biographical exposure...

...The result was an episode that has long been famous in literary and theatrical history...

...They take their place beside the even more poignant details of James' aborted romance with Constance Fenimore Woolson, who took her own life out of despair at James' indifference and yet whose portrait occupied the central place of honor at Lamb House...

...I doubt if there is another residence in the entire history of literature that is so brilliantly illuminated, so totally and intelligently transformed into a significant literary datum...

...For James himself was deeply conscious of the attempts that would sooner or later be made to turn his life into a subject of biographical inquiry, and he regarded the prospect with that mixture of dread, resentment and stoic fascination that colored his whole outlook on life—and not only his own life—in his later years...

...When such revelations are made, however, they are made," he conceded, "and the generous attitude is doubtless at that stage to catch them in sensitive hands...

...In speaking of James* labors at self-analysis, Professor Edel refers to both Freud and Proust, and his own scrupulous analysis of James and his work clearly reflects careful attention to their precepts and their wisdom...

...The result is not only a masterly biography, but a deeply moving act of literary faith...

...On the level of social history, one is given vivid glimpses of the way James entertained his friends at Lamb House...

...It is not, however, the acquisition of Lamb House and all that it represented for James—significant though that was—that constitutes the most dramatic sequel to his disaster in the theater...

...Edel is at his best in tracing the ramifications of this grim episode on James' emotional life and on the changed conception of the novel which later emerged from James' extended reflections on his experience in the theater...

...There is a good deal of dramatic incident, to be sure, especially in the account of James' attempt to write for the London stage and the public humiliation which this misguided aspiration brought down on him...

...It will come as no surprise to the modern reader, perhaps, that this fate involved James in an intense, though apparently unconsummated, homosexual attachment...

...His motives were, as usual, complex...

...Yet the book is extremely moving...

...A DIPTYCH OF MORAL RISK Henry James in the Nineties By Hilton Kramer There is, as Henry James would have been the first to appreciate, a marvelous symmetry to be found in the fact that the greatest of American writers has inspired the greatest American achievement in the art of literary biography...

...But he has influenced it in the direction of truth and taste and moral complexity...

...But he was too wise a man and too keen a student of modern literary culture to believe that such an ideal would be respected for very long...

...But on every aspect of the event, Edel is nothing less than superb...

...Deeper, about me, at any rate, than anything else...

...From all accounts, it is clear that his own appetite for gossip and ancedote was large, but even larger was his contempt for the kind of literary mind which mistook such gossip for the "truth"—the truth that, in James' view, required the mediation of a fine artistic intelligence...

...In lieu of that relation—the sexual love he had never permitted himself to pursue—he had to admit that "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...

...There was always an air of condescension attached to this ambition...

...But while his venture into the theater had shattered James' confidence and composure, another crucial development in this period signaled the beginning of his recovery...

...But even this extraordinary detail of self-revelation does not exhaust the drama that Edel unfolds for us, for James, despite his imperious command on his own consciousness, could not be completely aware of the fate to which his own sexual equivocations had condemned him...

...we may ask ourselves if the time has not come when it may well cease to be a leading feature of our homage to a distinguished man that we shall sacrifice him with sanguinary rites on the altar of our curiosity," James wrote, though he knew well enough that these rites would continue to be observed...

...This loneliness . . . what is it but the deepest thing about one...

...A great deal of literary history is compressed in this episode, and given its due weight in James' personal crisis...

...In bringing us these revelations—and so many more...

...It was one thing to swear an oath and reaffirm his commitment to the art of literature...

...Despite the obvious "vulgarities" that had to be faced in writing for the stage, James was determined to enter "the horrid theatric trade" and win a place for himself as a playwright...

...The fourth and penultimate volume of his life of James, entitled The Treacherous Years (Lippincott, 384 pp., $10), confirms that Edel's long and patient labors have indeed produced a masterpiece...

...and then, on the deeper level of literary analysis, one is given some remarkable insights into the way this house figured in the metaphorical conception of several of James' most compelling fictional accomplishments...

...He felt a profound distrust for the biographical mode, but it was a distrust that was compromised—or at least complicated—by his own unappeasible addiction to its revelations...

...The theatrical bubble in which he had lived a tormented existence for five years was wholly and finally broken," Edmund Gosse observed, and James himself later recalled: "I swore to myself an oath never again to have anything to do with a business which lets one into such traps, abysses and heartbreak...

...The young man in question was a sculptor of dubious gifts—Hendrik Andersen—but marvelous good looks, and the passionate appeals that James directed to this shadowy figure comprise the saddest and most poignant passages in Edel's melancholy chronicle...

...The Treacherous Years is...

...And James is by no means the only influence to be discerned in either the style of this investigation or in the substance of its narrative...

...James could scarcely have hoped for a more acute and judicious biographer—nor could we...

...What gives The Treacherous Years a tragic weight not to be found in the earlier volumes of this biography is the revelation of his sexual crisis—or rather, since it is virtually certain that James never had an actual physical affair with anyone, the crisis that followed upon his realization of the supreme importance of sexual love...

...The artistic challenge clearly excited his imagination, but more worldly considerations also exerted a powerful influence...

...This was his acquisition of Lamb House in Rye, where, except for his travels abroad, he lived out the rest of his life...

...James was desperate for a large financial success—larger, anyway, than he was able to realize from his fiction—and his assault on the theater was, in part, an attempt to exploit a new and lucrative market for his talents...

...On the evening of January 5, 1895, his play Guy Domville opened, and Henry James was hooted off the stage by a hostile audience...

...Edel does not hesitate to speak of a "nervous breakdown...

...His ideal of dignity, of honor and renown, was that nothing should be known of him but that he had been an impeccable writer...

...There is also, in that fact, a marvelous irony...

...deeper than my 'genius,' deeper than my 'discipline,' deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art...

...Wilde was the popular success of the moment, and Ibsen the intellectual success, while Shaw was just emerging as the critical arbiter of the London theatrical scene...

...Yet the distance separating the writer from his public image, the often oblique and hidden relations that obtained between a writer's work and his life, and the extent to which "facts themselves are often falsifying," as he said in his essay on Flaubert's Correspondance, became a recurrent—almost an obsessive—theme of numerous tales and critical essays...

...Yet he managed to stifle this feeling long enough to become deeply immersed in a medium and a milieu that proved to be completely alien to his sensibilities...

...he said of Flaubert, and no doubt James shared in that ideal...

...If, in speaking of the theater, James vowed never again to be involved in an enterprise that threatened "traps, abysses and heartbreak," in confronting his own sexual evasions he came to feel something close to the very opposite: an immeasurable regret at having successfully avoided such "traps," and a profound yearning for the kind of attachment that was only to be found in "the great relation," as he called it, between man and woman-the constant world renewal...

...Edel displays an almost indescribable tact, a literary and critical tact that has nothing to do with facile piety or philistine moralism...

...namely, his belated awareness of what sexual love really signified in human affairs...

...The '90s were a time of deep crisis for James...

...In the case of James' own life, no hands have been more sensitive than those of Leon Edel, who has at once been the source of so many revelations about James and a most delicate and astute judge of their importance for an understanding of the master's work...

...But the main focus of the drama is on less accessible terrain: on James' internal struggle with his own demons and ambitions, with the reexamination of his own life and the materials and techniques of his art, with the burden of failure that haunted him not only in the details of his literary career but in his innermost sense of himself as a man...

...There was always the feeling, on James' part, that his gifts and his standards were, after all, too fine for the theater to accommodate...

...The whole theatrical milieu of London in the '90s is beautifully rendered, with brilliant vignettes of Shaw, Wilde, Wells, and Arnold Bennett, and with a deeply illuminating account of James' ambivalent attitude toward Ibsen...

...Edel takes us on an extraordinary tour of this property, articulating its architectural elements, its geographical situation, its social identity, its exact place in James' emotional economy and in his literary imagination, and establishing beyond question its immensely fecund role in James' repossession of his own moral and esthetic identity...

...This volume, which covers the period of the 1890s, is the saddest and most troubled installment in the biographical saga, and for this very reason perhaps it does not quite achieve the narrative flow of the earlier volumes...

...It was a shattering experience...

...The book opens with James' tragic misadventure in the London theater...

...it was quite another to assimilate the shock of such a patent failure and the display of violence against himself that accompanied the failure...