Wine, No Cork
Edel, Leon
Wine, No Cork HENRY JAMES: A Life by Leon Edel Harper & Row. 740 pp. $24.95. Leon Edel's widely acclaimed five-volume biography of Henry James, published during the years 1953 to 1972, has now...
...And now because of changes that have occurred in biographical writing and in attitudes toward sexual matters, he feels freer than in his original volumes to speak out...
...Biographer Edel examined the manners of James's period with great diligence and sensitivity...
...He has devoted more than fifty years of study to Henry James, but his life has not been that of a "sullen, sedentary scholar...
...But James was confidently aware that there was an abundance of excellent, free-flowing wine in his bottles and no pieces of cork...
...Called "the Master" by his contemporaries, James continues to have an elevated reputation...
...He left law school to pursue a literary career that continued for more than fifty years...
...Thomas Hardy wrote in his diary that James had "a ponderous manner of saying little in infinite sentences...
...But finally he felt compelled to suggest that James send him dispatches that were shorter, more newsy, more folksy...
...His final novels, those of his "major phase"-7V!e Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904)—are rich in symbolism and allusive imagery...
...His prose reminded H.G...
...James, who died in London in 1916, has been the only major American writer to devote himself for half a century to his art...
...Say it out, for God's sake,' they cry, 'and have done with it'" James was fully aware of the ambiguities of his style and the impeachments of the critics...
...infantry during World War II, earning five battle stars and a decoration for bravery under fire...
...He was educated in New York and abroad before entering Harvard Law School in 1862...
...which is but the case of the bottle too full for the wine to start...
...And even the author's brother William James protested the length and involutions of Henry's sentences...
...The animosity that once prevailed in this country (because James was an expatriate who abandoned his citizenship to become a British subject during World War I) has dissipated...
...Born in Pittsburgh in 1907 and educated in Canada and France, Edel fought in the U.S...
...They were literary and embellished...
...No admirer of James and his work is likely to wish that Leon Edel had written less extensively in his original five volumes...
...Not all readers and critics, of course, have found James's style to their liking...
...Wells of "a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even the cost of dignity, upon picking up a pea...
...James replied: "If my reports have been 'too good' I am honestly afraid that they are the poorest I can do, especially for the money...
...In 1875, James was supplying the New York Tribune with articles from Paris...
...This is especially true of a man of letters, for manners lie very close to literature...
...In this crowded and hurried reading age," he told him, "pages that require such close attention remain unread...
...James was born in New York City on April 15,1843, the son of a Swedenborgian philosopher and younger brother of William James, the philosopher and psychologist...
...Leon Edel's widely acclaimed five-volume biography of Henry James, published during the years 1953 to 1972, has now been condensed and, in some parts, rewritten in this thick and altogether satisfying book...
...The abridgment was done by Catherine Carver, an accomplished editor, whose performance Edel praises highly...
...Stone and the late Seymour Peck...
...correspondent, and was a colleague of I.F...
...He produced twenty novels, more than a hundred tales, a dozen plays, and many articles and reviews...
...Edel has a powerful, creative intelligence, clearly demonstrated in the original volumes and reaffirmed in this one...
...As a one-time journalist, Edel must have relished narrating in his book the story of James's experience as a newspaper correspondent...
...Edel himself is a master of psychological biography and uses "personal memories, inference, evocations, and imagination" brilliantly, to portray a man who led a private life that was surrounded by an aura of mystery...
...It sometimes uncomfortably happens," he once said, "for a writer, consulting his remembrance, that he remembers too much and finds himself knowing his subject too well...
...The method seems perverse...
...But in this shortened and updated book he puts James's life and accomplishments in sharper focus...
...Nineteen out of twenty readers grow intolerant...
...William McCann (William McCann is a free-lance writer and critic...
...After the war, he worked on the staff of a New York City daily as its U.N...
...Edel reminds us that his subject thoroughly understood human motives and behavior and was "the first of the modern psychological novelists...
...Editor Whitelaw Reid, a literate man, appreciated James's pieces and told him so...
...We know a man imperfectly," James declared in an essay on Emerson, "until we know his society, and but half know his society until we know its manners...
...During the past forty years, scores of extended studies of him have been published...
Vol. 50 • July 1986 • No. 7
