A Life of James

ELT 44 : 1 2001 In the end, Envisioning Africa is only mildly ground-breaking: a large portion of the material that Firchow presents has been anticipated, articulated, and elaborated by scholars who have preceded him. Nevertheless , Firchow adds some new wrinkles to our understanding of Heart of Darkness and he successfully calls into question what many interpretations of Conrad's attitudes toward racism and imperialism distort, misconstrue, or fail to take into account. Christine Roth ______________ University of Florida A Life of James Lyndall Gordon. A Private Life of Henry James. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. xii + 500 pp. $32.50 LYNDALL GORDON has written deservedly acclaimed lives of T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, but her latest book is an experiment in biography rather than merely another life of James. Subtitled "Two Women and His Art," its concern—and what could be more appropriate to this particular novelist?—is less with the monolithic author than with relationships, with personal intimacies and creative influences. It seeks to penetrate secrets and mysteries, and the Primary Sources section of the Select Bibliography begins with a paradoxical listing that is strikingly but fittingly titled "Missing Papers." For these are secrets and mysteries that James himself sought zealously to preserve —for Gordon, he is "a man of secrets, sunk from sight a hundred years ago"—and the destruction of documentary evidence was purposeful and systematic. This is of course by no means an unusual phenomenon ; among others, Thomas Hardy, James's contemporary and fellowclubman ("friend" seems scarcely le mot juste), adopted over many years a very similar strategy. But it enormously complicates the work of the biographer while at the same time offering the reader something of the fascination of a detective story. The "two women" are Mary (Minny) Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Both have received attention from previous Jamesian biographers , but Gordon accords them a much more central place in his life, claiming that "Alone, it seems ..., [they] were bold enough to cross the uncrossable boundary ofthat private life." Both died prematurely. Both prompted James to acts of concealment: he locked Minny's photograph away, and made "a pact with Fenimore to destroy their correspondence." Both, in Gordon's judgment, "return obsessively" in James's work. Both 104 BOOK REVIEWS were involved in what Gordon calls "collaboration," as "female partners, posthumous partners ... in that unseen space in which life is transformed into art." James's cousin Minny Temple died in 1870 at the age of 24, and therefore belongs to the period of James's youth at Newport, Rhode Island. She was, in Jamesian phrase, "a plant of pure American growth" who rendered the air of sedate Newport "vocal with her accents, alive with her movements"—a free spirit whose unfulfilled promise may have helped to shape the characters of Isabel Archer and Milly Theale. As Gordon sets out to show, James's rise to international fame was achieved in the decade after Minny's death, and was not unconnected with that tragic event: this is the period during which he moves from the minor art of the earliest novels to "the first great wave of genius, taking its rise from Mary Temple: the high destinies of Bessie Alden and Isabel Archer, American girls who go abroad." The account in this book of Minny's life and death have a remarkable intimacy, and the reader is given a sense of closeness to the living original that is a rare experience in relation to the lesser figures in a biography . But then one of the striking features of this book is the rejection of the traditional biographical hierarchy: the two relatively obscure women with whom it is concerned stand, at least temporarily, on an equal footing with the great artist they knew and, arguably, inspired. After Minny's death, Fenimore, a descendant of James Fenimore Cooper, furnished James with "a second model of independence." She was herself a published author, specializing in stories of the "localcolour " school—a genre characterized by Gordon as offering "the first real picturings of the South to the North after the Civil War"—though her true subject was "the self-reliant woman." In later years...