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ELT 36:2 1993 Although he effectively resituates James in a social and psychic context that opens new avenues for understanding the work (early and late), Posnock's own cultural politics, however appealing, claim more for James as an ideal exemplar than he should have to bear. Intent on making an airtight case for James's modernity, Posnock ignores or facilely dismisses elements in the works discussed that would qualify or delimit this commitment. Most egregiously, he is silent on the half of The American Scene that deals with the postbellum South. It is surely notable that James's capacity for empathie response fails before white America's oldest alien-immigrant—the African-American. At Richmond he evinces a Faulknerian sense of the South's humiliation and moral bankruptcy, "its obscure miseries and tragedies," but this sense is only for the white South through whose eyes he sees the "African type" as "some beast that had sprung from the jungle." The feelings of the African himself, however, are beyond James's ken. In Charleston he is exasperated at a porter who puts his dressing-bag down in the mud. With a willful blindness to the hostility embedded in such class relations, he wonders at the "apparently deep-seated inaptitude of the negro race at large for any alertness of personal service." Since Posnock consistently argues for James's sense of social embeddedness, one wishes that more attention had been given to these limitations, for in their way they too are exemplary. Despite its philosophic appeal, the open, permeable self that Posnock celebrates is also an historically limited concept. The James of The American Scene is a character who bemoans the "complete proscription of privacy in modern American life" and with it the loss of a sense of intimacy, of tradition, taste and historical memory. Posnock sees these individualistic values not as signifying regret at modernity but as an acceptance of modernity's dialectic with "subjectivity"; dialectic itself is now the totalizing concept. Anything may be possible in the seductive world of theory, but the reader of James must trust her own empirical response. James's permeable boundaries are finally imaginative ones. In life, he, like Whitman, remained solitary. Joyce Rowe Fordham University Biography of the Age William Gerhardie. God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age, 18901940 . Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky, eds. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1991. 360 pp. $22.95 228 BOOK REVIEWS WILLIAM GERHARDIE is an eccentric figure in the literature of the twentieth century. He was born in St. Petersburg of English parents and spent much of his life abroad. Although a graduate of Worcester College, Oxford, Gerhardie remained an outsider in Britain's class society. He was an egocentric social climber whose caustic views on politics and literature are reflected in his novels and well-regarded autobiography, Memoirs of a Polyglot (1931). Brilliant and superficial at the same time, Gerhardie's writings (and fragmented life) reflect much of the turmoil of the century. Gerhardie, who died in 1977, published no books after 1939. However, in 1981 God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age, 1890-1940, originally slated for publication by Methuen in 1942, was published posthumously . Its editors, Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky, pruned about 25 percent of text from the original manuscript. An identical version is reprinted now by Overlook Press. It makes available once more a book that, while possessed of many of Gerhardie's typical weaknesses, is of uncommon interest. God's Fifth Column consists of 96 brief essays, many of them biographical . These comprise an interpretive history of the five decades extending from 1890 to 1940. Gerhardie's theme is history as irony, played out in an era fraught with danger. The benign figure of Tolstoy provides a soft background for some of the events of these years; the malign personality of Hitler offers a menacing counterpoint. In between are scores of unforgettable characters who play cameo roles in a deft piece of historical writing: Asquith, Proust, Oscar Wilde, Curzon, Lenin, Shaw, Kaiser Wilhelm, Neville Chamberlain, William Jennings Bryan. Some are admirable like Walt Whitman, "the bard of American democracy ." Others are crazy thugs (the Marquess of Queensberry...

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