The Sweetest Impression of Life: The James Family and Italy (review)

Book Reviews 219 unique literary sensibility. Fogel scrutinizes virtually every word Woolf wrote about James with the alert attentiveness of a highly trained close reader. Here he does not have to rely on speculation or on die dubious theory of "significant absences"; he is a splendid guide to the massive available evidence, not only to each of the separate pieces, but to the way they fit together. He notes the gap between Woolf's private thoughts (often irreverent) and her published remarks (largely laudatory), attributing them both to patriarchal pressure and to her own divided state of mind. Despite her impatience widi various aspects of James's work, she felt they were kindred spirits: both "outsiders" (he as an American, she as a woman), both committed to a strenuously uncommercial form of fiction, both deeply interested in psychological process, both seeing the novel as a densely saturated, controlled medium rather than a "loose and baggy monster." At the same time, their divergences mirrored her resistance to his influence: her heroines so much less selfconfident dian James's; her deliberately rapid shifts in point of view a necessary departure from his idealized continuity in order to mirror her own fragmented age; her uneasiness about what she calls James's "remorseless analysis" as a sign of her own (and modernism's) rejection of epistemological certainty. In these ways, as Fogel clearly shows, Woolf used James's transitional work as (in her words) "the bridge upon which we cross from the classic novel which is perfect of its kind to tiiat odier form of literature which if names have any importance should be christened anew—the modem novel, die novel of the twentieth century." In such passages, influence theory merges with literary history to illuminate the writer's own sense of periodization. Fogel's meticulous analysis of how two major modernists moved beyond the rich legacy they inherited from James helps us to understand the urgency behind Pound's injunction to his contemporaries to "make it new." Alex Zwerdling University of California, Berkeley James W. Tuttleton and Agostino Lombardo, eds. The Sweetest Impression of Life: The James Family and Italy. New York: New York U P and Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. 250 pp. This fine volume collects the papers delivered at the conference "The James Family and Italy," held at New York University in April, 1988. As the title of the conference and tiie subtitle of the book indicate the aim of these essays is to throw light on the reactions to Italy among tiie various formidable James family members: not only the novelist, to whom half of the volume is necessarily dedicated, but also William, die philosopher, Alice, their invalid diary-writing sister, their Swedenborgian father, Henry Sr., and die lesser known younger brothers, Wilkie and Bob. The story of the Jameses' reactions to Italy is a complex set of waverings and allegiances, where die senior Henry James's passion for a "sensuous education" for his chüdren, carried out in practice by taking them to Europe, is balanced by the sense of promise, the sense of future, that the New World has. William seems to react more hke his fatiier in his final preference for the land of the future; Henry, with his ultimate choice of Europe, seems to go back to the passion for a sensuous education; Alice gradually comes to see Italy from her personal viewpoint But of course things are not so clear and simple. The "tone" of the book is set by the opening essay by Leon Edel, "The Italian 220 The Henry James Review Journeys of Henry James." Edel works die miracle of "sketching in" in a mere fourteen pages what one wants to know, whether or not one has read his unsurpassable biography of the Master. Edel traces the gradual taking possession of Italy by James, the novelist's coming to terms with the literary forbears whom no literate nineteenth-century pilgrim could ignore, Stendhal, Goethe, die English Romantic poets, but also lesser known authors such as Jules Zeller (13), not to mention the authors of the Elizabethan tradition and the painters, in primis Claude Lorrain, beloved by Radcliffe and followers. By lighdy...