James's Letters to Younger Men

ELT 48 : 1 2005 Perhaps, although neither James nor Righter identify it as such, the golden bowl of the novel—a wedding gift which Amerigo realizes is only a crystal bowl with gilding concealing a crack—may represent both old world and new among its burdens of symbolism. Each is flawed, their deficiencies masked on the one hand by manners and the other by money. Although in both novels the parting for America is effectively the ultimate breaking of an apparently golden bowl, the object itself, its perfection only illusory, will also be physically broken in the second novel, as is the amoral equilibrium—"the Edenic vision of the four." By no authorial accident Verver's name is Adam, and he is expelled from the Jamesian paradise. Yet it would have never lasted, and he will have the wherewithal to reconstruct what aspects of it money can manage in the imperfect world that is early twentieth-century America. Rosemary Righter's editorial achievement in weaving posthumous manuscript pages into a seamless whole is evident from the narrative and its thematic continuity. We know from her brief preface that she reordered some of the pages, all written by "thick-nibbed fountain pen," into typescript. In a revealing endnote she identifies some intrusion, including a quotation that is her own translation from a 1998 French study by Mona Ozouf, La muse démocratique, writing that the book has "affinities" with her late husband's "own interest in James that seemed to justify the inclusion of a comment that he would have enjoyed." An associate editor οι The Times, she has furnished a keen professional hand to what William Righter has described as a window into "an allegorical structure in which the problem of American identity is resituated." On 28 July 1915, a year into the Great War, the artillery echoes of which could be heard on occasion across the Channel at Lamb House in Rye, Henry James, now failing in health, threw off his American citizenship at long last, taking the oath of allegiance to King George V and becoming a British subject. Righter's American Memory in Henry James explains why. STANLEY WEINTRAUB University of Delaware James's Letters to Younger Men Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. xxiii + 249pp. Cloth $29.95 Paper $19.95 108 BOOK REVIEWS IN HIS WILL, the celebrated author Henry James left 100 pounds to three close friends. Two of those were men, one was a woman. The editors Jobe and Gunter have printed a selection of the letters James wrote to the two male legatees, Jocelyn Persse (described as "a gallant man-about-town" by Leon Edel and Lyall Powers in their edition of James's notebooks) and the writer Hugh Walpole. They have added a selection of the correspondences with the young "Norwegian-born but Newport-raised" sculptor Hendrik Andersen and the writer Howard Sturgis. It is, at first sight, not entirely clear why the editors have opted for these four younger men. James had a special relationship with several "younger men" towards the end of his life. And as to the chosen four, they are indeed "younger" but three of them are significantly younger than James, allowing him also to develop paternal feelings for them, whereas James was only twelve years older than Howard Sturgis. Perhaps therefore one has to accept the editors' reason for grouping together these letters: "What groups [them] together... are those budgets of letters from relationships that either began or flourished after 1897; that display James's epistolary style as it rises from the affectionate to the markedly intimate, physical, and even erotic; and that, excepting the Andersen letters, have been least 'ventilated,' to use James's word, by previous editors." The complexities of James's relationships with his male and female acquaintances are well-known to James scholars and the editors here are very much aware of them. These relationships, they argue, can hardly be squeezed into the narrow compartments produced in the modern , Western analyses of human attachments. Furthermore, they remind the reader that an earlier construction of...