Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915 (review)

Book Reviews Lyall H. Powers, ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915. New York: Scribner's, 1990. 412 + xv pp. $29.95. In this collection of correspondence, the letters of James are preponderant. The editor includes one hundred sixty-seven items from James's contribution to the exchange—one hundred sixty-three letters, one fragment of a letter, one telegram, and two postcards—and only thirteen from Wharton's—eight letters and five postcards, four of which postals are cosigned by Walter Berry (27). The chief reasons for this lack of proportion are James's well-known bonfires of 1909 and 1915, though Powers suspects that Wharton may also have "destroyed" a "number" of letters "which she felt contained matter too private to risk keeping" (26). There are also several appendices of letters, including the four postcards from Wharton and Berry to James and a group of letters between Wharton (sixteen of the twenty-two written) and Theodora Bosanquet (all of the fourteen available). Many of these deal with James's illnesses after 1910, focus especially on his condition after his strokes in December 1915, and reveal Mrs. Wharton's concern and discretion about James's circumstances. The editorial apparatus includes an introductory essay that considers the individual situations of the two writers during 1900-1915 and the friendship between them as it develops, with appropriate attention to the cultural and intellectual history of the period as context. The introductions to periods of correspondence ("Slings and Arrows: January-August 1910," for example) and the notes to each letter provide general reader and scholar alike with necessary background and answers to questions that may arise from the text. Finally, nineteen illustrations demonstrate character, scene, and manuscript from the life and work of the two authors. Editorial practice is essentially standard in approach—the correspondence is arranged in chronological order, locations of manuscripts are given in the Introduction, and texts are based upon "the original holographs and typescripts" with minimal editorial change (26-29). One caveat, however, should be noted. Although, according to Powers's account, at least forty-seven of James's letters have been printed by Lubbock and Edel and five of Wharton's by R. W. B. and Nancy Lewis, no effort has been made to inform the reader about differences between the present texts and those printed by previous editors except to note that Edel has published complete texts of sixteen of the twentyseven incomplete ones printed by Lubbock (27). Yet there are substantive differences in certain letters: to mention only a few from Edel's Henry James Letters: 26 October 1900, 17 August 1902, and 25 February 1914. Some editorial comment on such matters would be both pertinent and helpful. The letters themselves are eminently worthy. They exhibit James in his major phase and cumulatively demonstrate anew his stature as a major writer of letters in English. The soupçon of Wharton prose helps to suggest, as James put it, the "free & easy postal relation" between the two writers. James's letters, indeed, illustrate his mastery of style and form (all the more remarkable when the reader remembers that many of them were written late at night). Peppered throughout with French phrase and idiom (at times with sentences and paragraphs in the language of culture and civilization), the periods flow here and there, interrupted by addition or aside, and growing by accretion of fact, fiction, and fancy in a language wittily and ironically composed of diction from Anglo-American colloquialism and slang as well as from the more formal parlance of education. He describes his own work and reacts to Wharton's. He gossips about mutual friends—Walter Berry, Morton Fullerton, Gaillard Lapsley, Percy Lubbock, Howard Sturgis, among others. He discusses The Henry James Review 13 (1992): 92-113 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Book Reviews 93 Bourget, George Sand, and Sargent, but Barrie, Browning, Conrad, George Eliot, Gide, Gosse, Howells, Meredith, Proust, and Wells are only mentioned on occasion, despite the fact that, save for Proust, James knew all these writers personally. Indeed, there is less exchange on important literary contemporaries than one might suppose. Take Proust, for example. Despite Wharton's gift...