Henry James: The Triumph of Leon Edel
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing HENRY JAMES: THE TRIUMP OF LEON EDEL BY PEARL K. BELL when The Treacherous Years, the fourth volume of Leon Edel's majestic biography of Henry James, appeared in England three...
...Writers & Writing HENRY JAMES: THE TRIUMP OF LEON EDEL BY PEARL K. BELL when The Treacherous Years, the fourth volume of Leon Edel's majestic biography of Henry James, appeared in England three years ago, a long-suffering reviewer groaned: "How long, Leon, how long...
...The genius of this biography is the living wholeness of its portraiture, the subtle and lively order of continuity and inevitability that Edel's imaginative structure imposes on even the most mundane details...
...It is no accident that Edel calls James "Henry" throughout the first two volumes, then shifts to "James" when the writer turned 40...
...More than 20 years in the making, Edel's intricate and engrossing edifice is now complete, and it is a measure of his art that I was so willingly drawn to rereading the preceding volumes in preparation for The Master...
...In place of that image of the remote and sexless instrument of consciousness churning out tales and novels of icy stylized perfection, Edel presents the truth of a living and credible man of society, whose energy was formidable enough to combine assiduous devotion to his work and a dizzyingly active social calendar in London, Paris, Rome, and Venice...
...And if Edel's jaded critics keep insisting that James, their lonely snob, is hardly worth all this time and trouble, all these pages, it is well to remember James' own definition of experience, in his essay, "The Art of Fiction": "Experience is never limited and it is never complete...
...it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue...
...He then undertook an exhausting trip to America, his first visit in over two decades, and devoted four back-breaking years to the revisions and prefaces incorporated in the great New York edition of his work...
...This would be a strange injunction indeed from a man who consistently kept his distance from experience...
...Where did the dense psychological and worldly texture of his fiction come from, if not from his deep engagement in the worlds he knew and was part of with such singularly observant ease and grace...
...On the contrary, as Edel shows us, James' boyhood was a restless shuttling between Europe and America, a constant changing within Europe of schools, houses, hotels, and this wandering early life led inevitably to a "cosmopolitan" adulthood...
...deeply affectionate and enduring friendships with men as dissimilar as James Russell Lowell and Tur-genev, Hugh Walpole and Flaubert, Leslie Stephen and Kipling, and women as different as George Eliot and Edith Wharton...
...Among many riches, it included the tensions and pleasures of a brilliantly intellectual, if neurotically demanding, family...
...In this account of the 15 years prior to James' death in 1916, we never lose sight of the poignant process of aging that inexorably accompanied his final burst of achievement...
...Precisely because James did not, Edel's biography is far more absorbing than most contemporary novels...
...of whom it cannot be said that he really 'lived...
...Though every page of every volume of Henry James testifies irrefutably to the nonsense of this dementedly literary fantasy, myths die hard...
...Yet if one expands the word to include more of existence than the erotic, James' life was anything but exiguous...
...By this criterion, of course, James was hardly a man of experience...
...The] great thing is to be saturated with something????that is, in one way or another, with life, and I chose the form of my saturation...
...In The Treacherous Years, Edel had already persuaded us of the incontrovertible Tightness of this view by tracing how James "wrote himself out" of the breakdown he suffered following his debut as a London playwright, when he was hooted and hissed off the stage after the disastrous premiere of Guy Domville...
...and when the mind is imaginative????much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius - it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations...
...And Edel thus marvelously fulfills the difficult challenge he set himself at the start, "of making the reader feel the passage of the years in the life of my subject...
...Despite a mind capable of such astonishing historical insight, for decades after his death James was little known or attended to...
...In 1902-04, James wrote the ornately architectured novels of his "major phase"????the Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl...
...In the phantasmagoric and evil-obsessed novels and stories about children that James wrote during this black period?What Maisie Knew, "In the Cage," The A wkward Age, "The Turn of the Screw"-he learned how to cope with middle-age despair, at least for a while, by digging into the buried reality of his own childhood...
...but one can mingle in the world with fresh perceptions only when one is young...
...It has remained for Edel finally to consign to dust that stubbornly long-lived myth, perpetrated by Van Wyck Brooks and dogmatically compounded by V. L. Parrington, that James betrayed his native American talent by choosing to live abroad...
...The outbreak of war in 1914 was an even more shattering blow, for unlike most of the literary eminences of Edwardian London, James understood, in every aching fiber of his famous "consciousness," that it was nothing less than the "crash of our civilisation...
...As he remarks in his introduction to The Master, with commendably controlled exasperation: "I have been . . . scolded by other biographers for regarding the works of the imagination as possible 'life' material????as if in literature imagination could belong to a disembodied mind...
...In 1888 James wrote to his brother William that he did not read much: "One can read when one is middle-aged or old...
...Edel never makes this seem a glib application to literary criticism of a facile psychoanalytic device, but rather the shrewd and watchful pursuit of insight from the work to the life and back again...
...This war, he wrote with tragic eloquence to a British friend, "seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way...
...Even more illuminating is Edel's correction of the wilder libel that James the lifelong bachelor was "a purely cerebrating genius," all art and no life - or, as James wrote of his protagonist, John Marcher, in "The Beast in the Jungle," "the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened...
...In his recent review of The Master, no less a former James partisan than Philip Rahv can still insist, in the face of the towering objective evidence Edel provides of the opposite, that James was "a writer...
...he "rid himself of his private demons by writing about them...
...But instead of providing him with the security of income and reputation he had hoped for, the edition was a financial and critical failure that seemed to James, during his second breakdown, an incomprehensibly cruel rejection of his 50-years' labor...
...Parrington, that indefatigable organic gardener of American literary history, declared with his characteristic thump of aggressive simplicity: "It is not well for the artist to turn cosmopolitan, for the flavor of the fruit comes from the soil and sunshine of its native fields...
...Unlike Carlos Baker's anesthetic biography of Hemingway, which omits any critical scrutiny of his work because Baker "had already made an intensive examination of Hemingway's fiction" in another volume, Edel's study makes the fullest possible use of James' writing in chronicling the life, for he knows that they are inseparable...
...The extraordinary panorama of James' life until 1901 was even more absorbing the second time around, and downing it as 1 was in one heady gulp, I could appreciate the indivisibility of the story as Edel has conceived and told it...
...In so doing he bestows upon the reader a more profound grasp of both than has ever been attempted before...
...With so exiguous a life, what James mostly did was to spend his time alone in a room writing, subsisting on impressions and perceptions which he insisted, with a fervor all too plainly defensive, on equating with what most of us mean by 'experience.' " Now, most people mean many different things by that shapeless laundry-bag of a word, experience, but Rahv seems to mean only an active sexual life????what James with incurable euphemism, though not without irony, called "the great relation...
...There are more unobtrusive ingenuities to Edel's method, which arranges and unfolds the events of James' life scenically and logically instead of linking them only chronologically...
...It is the very atmosphere of the mind...
...This makes us aware, as no steady march of dates and ringing of changes could do, of the complex heart of James' emotional and professional life without sacrificing its busy external context...
...The triumph of Leon Edel's Henry James is his demonstration, at a level of critical intelligence and narrative skill at once superlatively high and highly accessible, that such revelations can emerge from biography as well as from fiction????that James is indeed worth it all, and more than all...
...Now, with the publication of the fifth and final volume, Henry James: The Master, 1901-1916 (Lip-pincott, 591 pp., $12.95), we know: well over 2,000 pages or, as Edel stated it more pointedly, "as long as was necessary...
Vol. 55 • April 1972 • No. 7
