Making American Tradition: Visions and Revisions from Ben Franklin to Alice Walker (review)

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 of Du Côté de chez Swann in early 1914, James apparently neither read it nor discussed it in his letters to her (277,278,282). Thackeray, TroUope, Tennyson, Balzac, Flaubert, Emerson, Hawthorne, Clemens, and Whitman are not referred to at all, and Dickens, Daudet, Mérimée, Turgenev, and Wilde are alluded to only once. Nevertheless, James's letters are quite literary and quintessentially Jamesian, even when he is describing his latest illness, as, for example, from the "most beautiful & vast old 'Jacobean'" home of the Charles Hunters in Epping Forest in May 1910: I am having much of a devil of a time, through the formidable nervous aggravations which are with me more often than not—& with me here most direfully. Mrs. CH. is divinely kind—& such a nice & wondrous woman, & I suffered myself to be urged by my advisers (Dr. mainly) to come away from home "easily" for the vital test of "change of scene," air, diet &c. It has worked with painful complications—I haven't responded &c; but I hang on till Monday, when I probably seek my lair again with a drooping wing & much uncertainty for the future. I cling hard—utterly—to my blest sister-in-law (my brother is at Nauheim) & have a term of solitude while utterly unfit for society. Adventures of any kind terrify me—& the future looks uncertain. There is a plan of our joining William at Nauheim, but that undertaking fairly appals me. So everything is mixed & dark! (160) Such depression underscores William James's characterization of his brother's condition subsequently as that of a "nervous breakdown" (letter to Edmund Gosse, 14 June 1910, Brotherton Collection, The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds). Yet, despite the stress, the style is "utterly" inimitable. It is good to have these letters and the few extant ones from Wharton together at last. Granted that Lubbock, Edel, and the Lewises have hitherto published over fifty of the letters included herein, the present collection still prints more than a hundred James letters for the first time and three more by Wharton—not an immense treasure-trove in terms of epistolary exchange, but in terms of Jamesian linguistic facility and eloquence, more than enough to treasure, surely. Rayburn S. Moore University of Georgia Cushing Strout. Making American Tradition: Visions and Revisions from Ben Franklin to Alice Walker. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 1990. 252 pp. $38.00. pb $15.00 In Making American Tradition, using the insight of a "critical historian," Professor Strout attempts to construct an American literary tradition, or canon, by linking American works of prose "to some envisaged common theme or technique" that does not subordinate the works of the past to the "critical categories" of the present. Professor 94 The Henry James Review Strout's "more modest and historical way" of defining a tradition is "to see how writers themselves make it come alive whenever they respond in their work to previous writers." Professor Strout notes that his "selection" of writers will undoubtedly upset some of the "dominant social historians" since his "subjects ... are well known, in contrast to the recent forays into the unfamiliar literature of minorities, and their intellectual and artistic level is high, in contrast to much of more popular culture." O^egrettably, he never discusses how his subjects got to be well known or what he means by the categories minority literature, intellectual, or artistic.) His methodology, to use his words again, "points to the noncausal relationships between them [writers] and their works, the vibrations in meaning between them that follow from looking at them in pairing relation to each other, especially when a later writer has taken an earlier text or writer as a selfconscious point of departure." Indeed, Professor Strout's "comparisons of prose writers and texts make them march in pairs, two by two, into the ark of the American covenant, but in doing...