James's Letters to Younger Men

ELT 46 : 2 2003 entrepreneurs." Ruth Jhabvala, the scriptwriter, is quoted as believing the Ververs to be "all goodness" and consequently she presents them as "innocents preyed upon by the greedy and unscrupulous lovers." Nick Nolte's fine old gentleman is at variance with James's unprepossessing 47 year-old, and, as Lee Mitchell observes, in another good essay on the film, Jeremy Northam's Amerigo is "pumped up" to appeal to modern ideas of the erotic. Mitchell damningly compares this version to James Cellan Jones's 1973 B.B.C. adaptation, which captured the novel's "indirect and oblique view." Graham concludes—equally devastatingly— that Merchant-Ivory's Golden Bowl is a fantasy, myth-making that (quoting Barthes) "abolishes the complexity of human acts"—a complexity that is surely the essence of everything James ever wrote. This is, of course, a book every library should have, but it is good to note that much in it will also recommend the volume to the general reader. It is reasonably priced, and the essays enrich a new field of James studies, as well as providing a fascinating account of more than fifty years of film history. Clair Hughes ______________ Tokyo, Japan 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 + 249 pp. $29.95 DEARLY BELOVED FRIENDS: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men relies on the prolific interchange between queer theorists and Jamesians in recent years to justify its existence. There are no startling revelations in store for the readers of this volume, only the familiar pleasure of reading James's flirtatious correspondence with younger men in an unfamiliar format; letters of this nature and to these particular persons (the Danish-American sculptor, Andersen; the Anglo-Irish society figure, Jocelyn Persse; the American expatriate novelist, Howard Sturgis; the English man of letters, Walpole) have never been grouped together in just this way. The editors, Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe, are to be commended for their efforts at locating, transcribing , and publishing for the first time, with explanatory notes, 95 of the 166 letters in this volume. This is far from light work, and the editors are practiced and expert hands at this sort ofthing. Gunter is the author of a related book, Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James's Letters to Four 210 BOOK REVIEWS Women (1999), and Jobe has published a Calendar of the Letters of Henry James (2000). I wish the editors had given equal time and consideration to the raison d'être of their project. In their introduction, what passes for a serious attempt to situate Henry James within the context of nineteenthcentury knowledge and experience of homosexuality ("Homosexuality and heterosexuality, as we currently understand them, are modern, Western, bourgeois productions" [Halperin quoted in Dearly Beloved Friends 9]) actually serves to mask the more pertinent questions, for the purposes of this book, of "When, how, and with whom James reached the conclusion that he himself was sexually anomalous or even queer?" Citing Thomas Laqueur, Jeffrey Weeks, and David Halperin in defense of the view that homosexuality was not an identity category before 1895 or, perhaps, 1885 when the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed (criminalizing solicitation, pandering, fellatio , and sodomy between men), Gunter and Jobe gloss over the possibility that James was uniquely positioned to discern same-sex attraction. Admittedly, James's sexual orientation can never be categorized or known conclusively. Nor, however, can it be treated as a matter of indifference by present-day scholars, because James's evolving sexual persona and representations of sexuality coincide with the defining moment in the cultural construction of the homosexual subject. In the nineteenth century, sexual and gender indeterminacy signified a range of aberrant behaviors and identities, which were on a continuum with the emerging taxonomy and even popular understandings of homosexuality . Transgender theory, as deployed by the editors, is a postmodern conceptual apparatus as remote from James's understanding and experience of conventional sex and gender roles as those of antiquity. Drawing on recent trends in queer theory, which treat...