The Late James

104 The Henry James Review Leon Edel—The Late James I am not sure that I should say more than I have already said here today, save that once again we have been given further insights, this time into darker late James as weU as the James family—that is, into the extraordinarily intricate world of James's imagination. In the examination of Henry James's fantasy of himself as orphan, in the attempt to look at James's psychological defenses (a very important look that could be extensively amplified) or the famUy politics and the famUy romance, we push much closer, and closer to familial truths and their metamorphosis into Jamesian fiction. EquaUy important, we have had further exploration of the often subterranean relation of the two brothers. In the notebooks there is a note for a story never written about a brother and sister, "two lives, two beings and one experience." Henry was probably thinking of Alice, but tangentiaUy we may apply the remark to WiUiam. "Experience" of course has to be read in unUteral meaning and relates to the education of the emotions, the realm of famUial and sibUng feelings. The hour is late and I do not propose to go into specifications, and, as with Professor Fogel's generous summary, I bypass the charming essay about myself as a critic, malgré moi. However, I do want to add a brief postscript to what I said earlier about the use of psychoanalytical psychology in literary studies. I have always argued that in this century we can no longer shrug our shoulders at psychologizing or dismiss as Freudian such explorations—such dismissals usuaUy indicating that the writer has not taken the trouble to learn and understand Freud and his foUowers. I have in particular argued that the use of psychoanalytical psychology in criticism and biography cannot be avoided because Freud showed us the nature of dream and fantasy and the role of the unconscious. It is that part of Freud—cognition, imagining, dreaming and fantasy—that is relevant, and critics who avoid this place themselves in other centuries. The particular distinction we must make is between dream and fancy and psychoanalytical therapy. We are not concerned with therapy. That is where the entanglement has come. Too many of the critical writings have drawn on the therapeutic model, too many biographers have sought to put on the doctor's white coat. There is current in these haUs a caricature showing me sitting in my Hawaiian clothes, but wearing a beret, taking notes while I have Henry James and his pot-beUy stretched out on Freud's couch; the cartoonist's fidelity to the photos of Freud's actual couch is significant. Another way in which that caricature might have been drawn, and perhaps just as wittily and effectively, would have been to put me on the couch, with my embonpoint, and have Henry James in the role of the restiess analyst. In our work, it is our subjects who put us on the couch, and we reveal ourselves by our treatment of our subjects. Artists can never be therapeutic patients of biographers, if the biography deals with the dead; as for the living, I am sure they would not submit to that ordeal. But it is the artists who are our teachers or models or substance, and as we understand them we can function in a scholarly as weU as critical and biographical way. I have already said more than I should at his hour, and I wiU stop right here, though there is so much more to be said. Henry James is inexhaustible. ...