Shaping and Telling: The Biographer at Work

Shaping and Telling: The Biographer at Work by Leon Edel [What follows is the text of a lecture delivered by Leon Edel as a Distinguished Visting Humanist at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, April 29, 1982—the editor]. I am deeply touched by my visit here, a part of the United States that is entirely new to me. I am touched by the circumstances and generosities that have brought me here as a Visiting Humanist, to this campus that I believe is fast becoming the center of Henry James studies in America. I have felt for a long time—as I said at the first meeting of the Henry James Society and the Henry James Review—that Professor Fogel and his associates have found the right moment to create such a journal and such a society. There are many journals in academe centering around minor figures; they tend to yield in the end trivia, gossip and anecdote. But Henry James is America's great world-figure in the novel—Whitman occupies that place in poetry—and Faulkner might have a claim. James reaches out to human relations and the cultural relations between nations; his work is a large inquiry into the very nature of Western Civilization . And we have yet to do him full justice. In earlier years the enthusiasts of the present James review and society might have found themselves called "cultists." We remember that an entire volume was written to prove James simply an inept cult figure and to imply that he was launched by a conspiracy, some said of the right, for they considered James a snob and an aristocrat; others said the conspiracy was of the left, since James was so critical of American modes and manners. He was once damned in the United States pretty much all round—mainly during the earlier part of our century. Today he remains the artist of a minority: he doesn't have the following of a minor talent like Fitzgerald or the accolades of a Hemingway—two writers James would have considered immature and unproductive, for their total work could be fitted into one tiny corner of the Jamesian bookshelves. A great artist, James believed, gives his art to the world in abundance: he doesn't have to squeeze it out as from narrow paint tubes. And he justified this claim by seeing a hundred volumes of his works through the press during his lifetime—none of them of the pot-boiling kind. The high style—the belief in form, art, manner —was always there. Some day we may examine ourselves and wonder at our downgrading in the past so great an achievement, so remarkable a career. He was practically our only novelist to reach old age; the others, to speak plainly , drank too much. He built his career not by writing a sensational book at the start and then burning himself out, as happens so often here, but by slowly adding to the richness of his work and to his authority and power. To be sure, he had limitations. I would say they are principally the result not of the society for which he wrote, or of his own secretive nature. He worked by indirection; he had a need to conceal and control the physical—by which I mean the sexual—behind Victorian trappings (very much the product of his time) and behind his own reticences and distances from the physical part of being. And yet if the winds of passion are never at tempest height in his work, they are there, concealed behind the controls of civilization. For James is the great artist of control—control of his art and life—the controls that THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 165 SPRING, 1982 proclaim us civilized beings and a part of civilization and the controls that also make for our discontents (to use the language of Freud). James's supremacy lies above all in the enchantment of his prose—before the time that he became a slave of dictated baroque. The public today, however, wants pageturners ; the twentieth century wants speed, not slowness, and James is never in a hurry. He knew that if one takes things on the...