Plumbing Writers' Depths

...It is too bad that he felt compelled to bring together psychological studies already sufficiently available in contexts where their common weakness is less evident...

...Characters in fiction "are but figments of a creative imagination," and "it is in the imagination that the real encounter occurs...

...A long essay on Eliot's "abulia" and The Waste Land goes extensively into Eliot's family history, his marriage and his treatment at a clinic in Lausanne, yet says practically nothing about World War I, or the general postwar mood, which found such perfect expression in that poem...

...We keep wondering what the Woolf of the Journals or the James of A Small Boy and Others would have made of these experiences...

...The secret confession that Edel discerns in these works does not elucidate why they seized the imaginations of an overwhelming number of readers in their own day and since...

...And in his earlier psychographic studies of Mark Twain and Henry James, Brooks dealt with writers' problems as simplistically as Edel does in The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams, except that Brooks tended to blame American culture along with Papa and Momma...

...The word "real" is the giveaway...

...The artist must also have genius, and no psychologist can explain that...

...In 1930, as a naive, excited Canadian student traveling abroad for the first time, Edel had brief, close contacts with Alfred Adler in Vienna and James Joyce in Paris...

...In both cases Edel can illumine their defects by referring to motives that the writers could not admit to...

...Wilson's youthful psyche, Edel tells us, was formed by a "brilliant, moody, melancholy father" and a"gruff, brusque," deaf mother...

...Edel devotes an essay, "The Killer and the Slain," to a novel of the same title by Walpole in which, without realizing it, he murders Henry James: "Although the fantasy was Oedipal, its principal component was homosexual...

...In biographical research Edel is endlessly industrious (he read 7,000 letters by Henry James alone...

...Leon Edel's reputation is amply secured by his many high academic and literary offices, by a shelf of resourceful editions of the Jameses (he edited Alice's journal, too), by his tribute to Blooms-bury achievement in A House of Lions, and supremely by the massive biography of Henry James—a beauti fully composed book that is inexhaustible in sug-gestiveness...

...Invoking Sherlock Holmes on the first page, Edel boldly lays bare the souls of 14 writers with flourishes of his scalpel...

...In Walpole's unconscious the relationship was not so easy...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University THE COURSE of history, public or private, is notoriously unpredictable...

...in every other paragraph a gossipy anecdote brought to a high polish at innumerable Edwardian dinner parties...

...The feelings account for Wilson's choosing (on a hint from Andre Gide) the homoerotic myth of Phil-octetes and Neoptolemus as the governing archetype for his study of the painful psychogenesis of art, The Wound and the Bow...

...Edel told the experts on aging that Anna Karenina "has been read as a novel of a grand passion, of a love that transcends social boundaries," but "its real subject is depression...

...Despite his subject matter, Edel shows no interest in the philosophers, anthropologists and psychoanalysts who havecontribut-ed to this body of work, among them Ernst Cassirer, Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Northrop Frye...

...The most successful author is one whose own tumultuous inner history has best prepared him to meet those demands...

...Latent homosexual feelings" ensued, "carefully hidden from himself yet plain to Edel when he compared Wilson's wartime wound-dressing experiences with those of Walt Whitman, and when he heard "the voice that was almost a caress" with which Wilson once addressed an agitated John Ber-ryman...

...Since Edel's psychic Sherlock Holmes knows in advance what he is going to find (dead or troublesome parental figures and a split soul in the child), his detection seldom takes much legwork or ingenuity...

...Why, for example, was Edmund Wilson such a difficult, driven, productive character...

...Edel notwithstanding, individual psychic histories do not determine literary events, such as the brief emergence of tragedy in Greece or the shifts from Elizabethan to Jacobean to metaphysical to Restoration styles in English literature...

...James was diverted sexually, Edel believes, because his bemused, permissive, Swedenborgian father "was the more motherly...

...The flaws in his personality," Edel maintains, "are the flaws in his art...

...But once everything is over, it is easy enough—according to our temperaments and schemes of value—to single out certain facts from all that went before and say, "There, there are the causes...

...The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams begins with personal recollections...

...Literature is a form of hypocrisy: "We must seek the 'why' of a story or poem, and remain aware of self-delusion and rationalization...

...Moreover, Edel never refers to the very considerable body of writing that has emerged on the relation of social repression and sexual repression, and on how the unconscious is a social construct that has changed with the changes in the nature of the family authority—for instance, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari...

...The only book of Freud's he specifically cites is The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900...

...Edel does not worry that this pat opposition hardly does justice to the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychic researcher and the discoverer of the "stream of consciousness...

...The two novels that Edel analyzes in greatest detail, The Professor's House by Willa Cather and Walpole's The Killer and the Slain, are admittedly defective...

...If a biograph-er can tap the unconscious myth of a subject," he says, "the battle is more than half won...

...What of James Joyce, whose work and person Edel has come to regard with increasing distaste over the years...

...Nor is Anna Kareni-na's suicide most truly described by saying that what Tolstoy really sends under the train wheels is the feminine-esthetic side of his own psyche...

...As a result, Edel's scanty theoretical discussions in The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams have an antique air...

...In this century a vast literature has accrued on the archetypes common to writers and their audiences, and apparent in myth, religion, fairy tales, dreams, and the unconscious...

...Yet this method does not work with creations that succeed, that strike exactly the right note for their time and place...

...Watson almost could have done it unassisted...

...All of this leaves Edel little room for art as such...

...Thoreau's mother was not the necessary and sufficient cause of Walden, any more than Vivien Haigh-Wood (Eliot's first wife) compelled The Waste Land to be what it was...

...Her stories put the hysterical child "into a fright so great" that he had to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses as "elaborate modes of defense" against her...

...Again that word "real...

...As soon as one describes Edel's usual biographic mode—its mosaic of quotations, its romantic sense of place and time, of families and friendships, not to mention its reluctance to impose ideas, its subservience to materials created by others, its art primarily of selection and placing—one sees how closely it resembles the work of the later Van Wyck Brooks, the Brooks of The Flowering of New England and The World of Washington Irving...

...He allowed Hugh Walpole to write to him as "Dear Master," and for his part replied with "dearest, dearest, darlingest Hugh...

...And what of Henry James, whose psyche Edel understandably never tires of exploring...

...In his magisterial five-volume James biography and in his summing up of Bloomsbury in A House of Lions, Edel has accustomed us to expect in every other linea bon mot from a genius who coins metaphors as naturally as he breathes...

...In James' last phase, with his mastery of his art assured and celebrated, he became more and more expansively homosexual...

...Edel was Wilson's friend, literary executor and the editor of Wilson's journals for the '20s and '30s, so he is in a good position to know...

...He is still defending himself against the valid charges of reductionism brought by long-dead New Critics, and he remains marvelously and nostalgically loyal to the kind of Freudianism popularized in this country over a half century ago by Susan Glaspell's Suppressed Desires and Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra...

...This new-old book is a collection of what used to be called "psychographs...

...When read one after another in The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams, they underline the extreme limitations of Edel's approach and his dependence as a writer on the skillful presentation of sensibilities greater than his own...

...Even more stangely, Edel ignores the development of psychoanalysis itself...

...This contrast did not affect William the same way because the two brothers split their father between them: "Henry the novelist wholly took possession of the esthetic," the feminine side of Henry James Senior, and William took possession of the masculine, "which leans toward hard reason and logical inquiry...

...he finds no such scholarship necessary in psychology, although he presents himself here as primarily a practitioner in the field...

...As might be expected of an academic loaded with distinctions, most were initially presented in varying versions on honorific occasions...

...Aristotle taught us in his theory of purgation that literary forms are molded by the psychic demands of the audience...

...Edel is well aware of the contradictions in the individual, but not in society...

...Edel also alludes to everything that has been happening in French psychoanalytic theory, with its heavy literary and linguistic emphasis, in one dismissive phrase: "the divagations of Lacan...

...his mother, on the other hand, was paternal...

...That psychopathic and (in Edel's eyes) overrated Irish genius, with "oneof the saddest histories in modern criticism," was burdened with a Micawberish father and a madcap religious fanatic of an aunt...

...In addition, throughout his career Brooks was political, unlike the author of the present volume...

...Only five of the 14 pieces here were written for this volume...

...Thus he devotes a couple of pages to the forest fire Thoreau carelessly set, without saying a word anywhere about Thoreau's championship of John Brown...

...Several of the others have been published in the author's previous books, spaced over a quarter of a century...

...For all that Edel is at his best in analyzing James' stories of the occult, there is no evidence that he has ever read Freud's essay on "The Uncanny...

...One was delivered before a gerontological conference—not surprisingly, for death, depression and despair are recurrent themes in this collection...

...His reminiscences are perfectly competent, yet the prose seems so flat, so unreverberant, because the phrases originate with Leon Edel and not with Henry James and Virginia Woolf and their brilliant friends...

...Edel is unsympathetic to Thoreau's stand on civil disobedience and to the "gesture" of the night in jail, the kind of act (Edel claims) that leads to "unreason and anarchy...

...Under unacknowledged compulsions of his own, Leon Edel does such singling out with zest and methodological abandon in The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams...