The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 1877-1914 (review)

Book Reviews 229 after Kate Croy has first called her a 'dove,' she begins to play, in the recesses of her soul, with the tonal complications ofthat metaphor: "That was what was the matter with her. She was a dove. Oh, wasn't she?' Frustrated of final answers to our (as we think!) most demanding questions, we may still hear with the greatest of pleasure the tones of voice through which a text by Henry James gets itself constituted." What a beautiful sentence! What an eerie echo of Jamesian style! Although I would have liked a more playful—or theorectical—attempt to come to grips with James's love-hate relationship with language as religion (or vice versa), I believe that Fussell's book is "a turn of the screw"; he makes us aware that perhaps all lasting texts are shadowy attempts to get at "final" answers. Perhaps the "sacred fount" of James's masterpieces is the depiction of the presence of unseen forces, of the miraculous, paradoxical marriage of presence and absence in earthly words. Irving Malin City College of New York George Monteiro, ed. The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 1877-1914. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1992. xxiii, 107 pp. $20.00. The continuity of correspondence between Henry Adams and Henry James over nearly forty years testifies to the importance of the form itself among the turn-of-the-century American elite as a means of preserving both the intimacy and the insularity of privileged "circles." Yet these letters also dramatize the range of elite responses to cultural change, for in them the differences between James and Adams emerge with at least as much strength as the commonalities. Much of Adams's and James's correspondence, especially during the early years, is dominated by the exchange of social news and by the mutual favor-doing characteristic of two acquaintances who were friendly rather than intimate, thrown together by their connection to Adams's wife Marian Hooper Adams and to a set of peers, on both sides of the Atlantic, of similarly privileged background. James's second letter to Adams, for example, from London in May of 1877, ticked off a list of the British contacts that Adams had provided him: "Your introductions rendered me excellent service. ... I am an old friend of the Cunliffes [Sir Robert Alfred Cunliffe and Eleanor Sophia Egerton Leigh]... . Lord Houghton [Richard Monckton Milnes, Baron Houghton] has been my guide, philosopher & friend___[Francis Turner] Palgrave I have not seen so often___[Thomas] Woolner & his picturesque, amiable wife I have seen three or four times" (35-36). Adams and James were close to many of the same American writers, statesmen, artists and scientists—John Hay, John LaFarge, Clarence King, William James—and both of them paid frequent attention in their letters to acknowledging those relationships and the network among them: "I had heard, from my brother Wm, of your ceasing your Cambridge work, & of the sort of labor & reputation that you are, as you say, going in for" (43), James wrote to Adams from Shropshire in July of 1877; and, from his Rye house in July of 1906, "I grieve to read what you tell me of John LaFarge, & ask myself why, in such conditions, he wanders over the globe—neglecting his vine and fig tree" (69). The exchange of letters enabled Henry Adams and Henry James not only privately to express but also actively to nourish their loyalty to these friends. Thus reading James's and Adams's letters to one another collected in a single volume confirms the neatness of the fit between the privacy of the form and the elitism of the exchange networks that the form often served. Yet if these letters maintained a set of common roots and social values, 230 The Henry James Review reading the letters together also reveals some of the limits of the relationship between James and Adams as their common past came to mean different things to each of them. These differences surface most dramatically in the relatively few—some six—pairs of letters in the volume that were sequentially exchanged between James and Adams. In virtually all these pairs of letters, Adams constructed...