American Designs: The Late Novels of James and Faulkner (review)

B ook Reviews 231 between two engaging correspondents' ' (xii), so many letters have not survived that only in a few cases has the editor managed to preserve the "active" thread of "exchange." James's letters to Marian Hooper, also collected here, further pique one's interest and compound one's frustration. Their spontaneity and flirtatious pleasure come much closer to genuine intimacy than virtually anything in James's letters to Adams, and these letters serve as a reminder that Clover Adams was quite possibly the only emotional link between them that either of these two men cared deeply about, especially after Clover Adams's 1885 suicide: "I remember so well your last charming words to me [ in England]: 'it will be over there [in the United States] that we shall really meetfamiliarlyl ' ' ' James wrote to her in November of 1881 from Cambridge, ' Ί must tell you that I am prepared to be intensely familiar! ' ' (48). James's infinitely less spirited letter to Clover's husband from New York the next month evidences the imbalance between these two relationships—"[Edwin Lawrence] Godkin spoke to me the other day of having got a letter from you in which you asked of news of me & expressed a kindly interest in the question of my arrival in Washington. I have meant ever since to send you a personal answer to this inquiry' ' (49)—and makes the absence of Marian Hooper's letters feel all the more like another void, and a source of a certain thinness, in the volume. Both Henry James and Henry Adams clearly turned self-consciously to correspondence with high expectations, for the form proved uniquely able to sustain the viability of private exchange and love of language without obligation to an emergent mass audience and mass market. The distance that survived the long exchange of letters between James and Adams suggests that this was not the correspondence to which either writer brought his highest expectations of the form. Still, as Adams's ending to his final letter to James suggests, letter writing clearly also made it possible for James and Adams to exploit that distance and to use it to preserve a kind of continuity that may well have transcended intimacy: ' 'As for me, I care only for my friends. Write again soon" (88). Joanne Jacobson Yeshiva University Jeanne Campbell Reesman. American Designs: The Late Novels of James and Faulkner. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. 229 + xxpp. $26.95. Professor Reesman positions her unexpected pairing of James and Faulkner—indeed "it is hard to imagine [them] .. . even speaking to each other had they ever met"—within a very familiar dynamic of American literature: the conflict, now centuries old, between the dual desires for freedom and for community, for an unbounded openness to "the territories"—some version of Emerson's "original relation to the universe' '—and an abiding connection to the social context. Reesman brings this concern to bear on her chosen writers by focussing on the problem of ' 'design,' ' both as a quality of the American novel and of individual characters within it. On the one hand, novels and characters (and readers) seek to create their own signifying orders that resist or revise all others—social, institutional, and cultural, as well as the orders of other creators—that would limit them. On the other hand, these same novels and characters fear too radical a freedom: the risk of becoming utterly isolated, removed in the autonomy of creation to a world outside the community. In the language of contemporary theory, the name of reconciliation of that paradoxical quest, according to Reesman, is hermeneutics. For Richard Rorty, upon whose work Reesman usefully relies, hermeneutics is the necessary alternative to epistemology as the act of knowing. Instead of a "search for the immutable structures within which 232 The Henry James Review knowledge, life, and culture must be contained," philosophical argument must focus on a process of "conversations between persons,' ' emphasizing interpretation rather than arrival at objective truth: a community of opinion rather than the certainty of single belief. Hermeneutics, in other words, joins together the communal and the creative, the collective and the new, in the form of a continuing dialogue. In four...