Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology (review)

The Henry James Review Spring, 1985 Leon Edel. Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. 352 pp. $20.00. According to Leon Edel, Sfuff of Sleep and Dreams "can be said to comprise my collected papers in literary psychology , or all tiiat I wish to preserve out of my numerous writings in the field" (xi). Indeed the volume largely consists of revised versions of published essays. Similarly, the subjects of these "experiments in literary psychology" are mainly the writers to whom Edel has devoted book-length works or editions : WuIa Catiier, Edmund Wilson, Virginia Woolf, Henry Thoreau, James Joyce, Alice James, and, of course, Henry James. The James essays serve as admirable examples of Edel's genre but do not provide new information or approaches for those who are familiar with his earlier works on the James family. For Henry James's relations with his father and brother, the reader should see die more detailed version in the biography. The essay on the novelist Hugh Walpole largely concerns WaIpole 's ambivalence toward James, so the James devotee would still tum to The Master for a tiiorough account of James's attitude toward Walpole. The essay on Alice James is a fine sketch of that troubled figure; the James scholar, however, would already be acquainted with Jean Strouse's excellent biography . The value of die present volume to the James expert lies not in its information about Henry James, but in the insights it offers about James's principal expositor, Leon Edel. In his definition of literary psychology, Edel stresses that it is "in essence a study ... of what literature expresses of the human being who creates it" (xiii), an expression that takes the form of a personal myth. "In my theorizing about biography, I have always argued that if a biographer can tap the unconscious myth of a subject, die battle is more than half won; we have a key to the material that is Ulustrative and relevant and can tiien know what is routine and irrelevant. The self myth is the truest part of an individual: by that myth we always seek to Uve; it is what gives us force, direction, and sustenance" (27). In the autobiographical portions of the book, Edel provides us with some clues to his own self myth. He characterizes his younger self as "a rather aesthetic young man" (3) whose "personal culture hero" (66) was James Joyce. In "A Journey to Vienna," he describes this young man as confronting "the big embracing world" (3) but feeling diminutive before it; he brings only a "small bundle of clothes" and a "little bundle of culture" (3). He says that "of the instinctual things, of more ultimate relations with men and women, particularly women, die deeper soundings of passion with either sex, I couldn't have known less" (3). In "A Journey to Vienna," women are repeatedly portrayed as enormous: "a stout matron" (5), "massive mounds of flesh" (4), "angular, big-boned landlady" (5), and "like Valkyries in their well-proportioned massiveness and elegance" (7). Of die room he rented from one such lady, furnished witii huge pieces, he notes that he "felt very small in it" (5). He calls himself a "hterary Huck Finn" (4), and, as we all know, small Huck Ut out for tiie territories to escape Aunt Sally. In "A Journey to Vienna," then, women are associated witii life, "the big embracing world," and life was what Edel's younger self wanted to evade through his aesthetic interests. Edel's "prime initiation" (7) was the result of meeting Dr. Alfred Adler, the founder of "individual psychology." Since die young Edel felt so small before Ufe, he was intrigued by Adler's "significant speculations on how human beings use power" (9). Adler suggested to Edel a mediod of achieving his own power, in the sense of meaningful accomplishment. "He proceeded to explain 'applied psychoanalysis' to me; if I wanted to be a biographer or critic I had to look at some of die material clinicians examined. What were a writer's personal relations, his family relations? How did he set about his career ?" (9). Adler had shown the...