Review-Essay—Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life

Review-Essay—Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life by Alfred Habegger, University of Kansas If one considers the processes by which the life and letters of eminent nineteenth-century American writers have entered the public domain, one notices a glaring difference between Henry James and the others. The facts, documents, connections for Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, and Mark Twain have been brought to light by many different hands, so that what we now know about these authors, and particularly about the seam between their life and work (to use James's good metaphor), is the result of productive collaboration and disagreement. But for James there is only one biographer and sifter and editor of letters. The many excellent and sophisticated critics this author has attracted have not for thirty years included a single independent biographical researcher. Now that Leon Edel has brought out a one-volume updated abridgment of his magisterial life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985; 740 pp.; $24.95), making it "available to a new generation of readers" (xiv) and also consolidating his own imperium, it is time to reflect on some of the disadvantages of this anomalous one-man rule. The abridgment is based on the two-volume English version of Edel's biography , published in 1977. Catharine Carver, an editor at Lippincott's who had formerly worked with Edel, performed the labor of abridging, and he then accepted , revised, or added to her text. Because the present volume contains some new facts and interpretations, James scholars will want to consult it, but because it is essentially a digest, we will also have to continue to make use of the five-volume and two-volume versions. Those already familiar with one or both of these may feel reluctant to read the full seven hundred page abridgment; if so they should turn first of all to Edel's footnotes, which identify much of the new material. In most respects the James we meet here is obviously identical with the five-volume James and the two-volume James. He still struggles against his domineering mother and strong, critical older brother, he does not register Constance Fenimore Woolson's love for him until after her suicide; he lavishes physical affection on Hendrik Andersen; and so forth. But there are changes, especially in the approach to the old problem of James's sexuality, presumably the topic Edel feels the new generation of readers wants to hear about. Here he has wisely drawn on Richard Hall's and Howard M. Feinstein's insights into the Henry/William relationship , and hence the old Jacob/Esau interpretation has been modified by a Review of Edel, Henry James: A Life 201 new stress on quasi-incestuous brotherly love, which complicated the younger brother's need for individuation. Thus, "A Light Man" now reveals "the deeper realm of the homoerotic feeling that Henry must have had for his brother William" (82). In 1962 Edel's brief discussion of Confidence appeared to call off any toothorough analysis: "One would have to go very deeply indeed into Henry's inner life to unravel so intricate a series of fantasies" {Conquest of London, 385-86). Now, discarding "former reticences" (xi) and drawing on others' work, Edel is able to show much more convincingly how the novel expressed Henry's sense of rending separation after William married Alice Howe Gibbens. There is a great deal of new material in Feinstein's and Jean Strouse's biographies of William and Alice, however, that Edel does not work in, particularly concerning the senior Henry. All in all, it must be said that the abridgment makes slender use of the secondary literature and in this respect does not seem addressed to the modern reader. James's homoeroticism (or androgyny—Edel wavers here) now comes in for much more emphasis even though little new information is presented. In dealing with James's obscure 1880 experience in Posillipo, for instance, Edel adds a conjecture that he "perhaps became aware" that Paul Zhukovski "was homosexual" (253)—but to what end it is hard to say. Edel is on firmer ground in dealing with James's much later friendships with young Jocelyn Persse and Hugh Walpole, and of...