Edel and Biography

31:4 Book Reviews ers may find, amid the densities and self-erasures of this book, some clear and memorable thinking on the relationship of biography to hagiography, the patronage system, the rise of industrial capitalism, the copyright laws, and the emergence of the "career" as a normative life pattern. Like most theoretical texts, this one resists a (brief) reviewer's attempts either to paraphrase the argument, dependent as it is on a thick local texture, or to suggest its qualities by any means other than direct quotation. Therefore, I will render summary judgment. Easily the most thoroughly theorized "poetics" of the genre to date, Recognizing Biography sets a high standard of sophistication for any subsequent approach along these lines. John W. Crowley ____________________________________Syracuse University EDEL AND BIOGRAPHY Gloria G. Fromm, ed. Essaying Biography, A Celebration for Leon Edel. Honolulu : Biographical Research Center, University of Hawaii Press, 1986. Paper $12.95 Lyall H. Powers, ed. Leon Edel and Literary Art. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988. $39.95 Biography might be analogous to William James's hypothetical white crow who secretly wondered what color he was in other people's eyes. In this generation of critics and theorists, biography has often, like the crow, been speculating on its colors. Biographers, however, have had less difficulty knowing their colors and the pre-eminent colorist is Leon Edel. In his masterful life of Henry James, and in his analysis of biographical writing, Literary Biography, revised in 1984 as Writing Lives, plus numerous essays, Edel has been the leading practioner/critic for nearly two generations of readers. Now, to celebrate his achievements, he is himself the cause celebre of two very different collections of essays in his honour: Essaying Biography, edited by Gloria G. Fromm, originally a Festschrift for Edel's 75th birthday, and Leon Edel and Literary Art, edited by Lyall H. Powers, a collection in honour of Edel's 80th birthday. Essaying Biography is the more eclectic of the two collections, divided into five sections including a useful bibliography of Edel's writings. The division , however, indicates the diversity and, finally, difficulty of unifying essays with subjects as disparate as dolphins, a twentieth-century American faith healer, the Beat poets, Bloomsbury and, of course, Henry James. Edel also has a piece in the collection, an unpublished introduction to Leonard Woolf's Wise Virgins which he wrote in 1978. However, among the contributors there are few who deal directly with the issues of biography that most fascinate critics today: its narrative possibilities, use of language and sources of textual and historical authority. Only Harvena Richter in her defense of Virginia Woolf's Roger Fry as a biography suggests some of the issues I've cited. Arguing that Woolf and Strachey "pioneered the 465 31:4 Book Reviews direction that biography is taking in the latter part of the twentieth century ," Richter goes on to support this inflated claim by arguing a line of descent from Woolf and Strachey to Edel and Michael Holroyd who ironically established his prominence in the Parthenon of biography via his life of Strachey . Amid the links of this somewhat narrow chain, Richter makes some suggestive remarks on the nature of biography as it employs psychological drama, concentrating on personal relationships and the use of "fiction-like . . . obstructions and resolutions." The majority of essays in Essaying Biography support Edel's assertion that biography should articulate the life-myth of the subject, often represented in the fiction or poetry of the subject. Adeline Tintner shows the usefulness of this approach for the literary scholar in her assessment of Edel's life of James, possibly the most useful essay in the collection for its ability to read Edel and evaluate his contribution. Prompted by an appreciation and affection for Edel—many in the collection were his former students—Essaying Biography nonetheless remains an unfocused collection shifting between the conventional "how I did it" account to a look at new material concerning unfamiliar lives and from an evaluation of the contribution of Edel's life of James to the study of James's fiction. Leon Edel and Literary Art is a livelier and more cogent festschrift, although equally diverse in...