Review of The Complete Letters of Henry James 1872-1876

The Nebraska edition of James's letters began to appear six years ago, and its five volumes to date have now wholly supplanted the first volume of Leon Edel's Henry James Letters and made inroads on the second. It has established itself so confidently that one now takes perhaps too easily for granted the new reality it inaugurates in James studies: we shall, in time, get to read all James's surviving letters in the sequence of their composition, and the contrast that makes with all preceding stages in the publication of this astonishing correspondence is first and last a matter for rejoicing. Sheer excitement at the wealth of new material already made available to readers (to say nothing of the promise of the more to come) and awe at the scale and minuteness of the ongoing enterprise are matched by gratitude to Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias and their editorial team. The three volumes covering 1872 to 1876 contain 232 letters and two letter-fragments, and 105 of those items are appearing in print for the first time. Many of their most compelling moments involve revisitings of one sort or another. After the European initiations of the first installment of correspondence (1855-1872), we see James here beginning to do things for the second and third times: re-experiencing the touristic destinations of his earlier travels as places to live and work, discarding or confirming old habits and acquiring new ones, converting appreciation into production. At the minutest textual level, his second thoughts are shown up with admirable clarity by the plain-text editing of these volumes, which "reveal[s] James's mind in action" (CL2 1: 368) as well as the editors could desire. It is a gathering delight as well to find the sources of loosely attributed quotations one has always had to take on trust from Edel's biographical volumes. For instance, a pleasantly punning reference to Frank and Lizzie Boott, whom the traveling James keeps running into in the usual European places: "'The easy-fitting Bootts,' Henry James once described them in a letter home" (Edel 259). That letter now takes its place in the sequence of surviving correspondence, with Edel's relaxed, anecdotal "once" reduced to a proper historical specificity. James writes to his parents on 21 July 1872 from Grindelwald in Switzerland: "You will know, by this time, all about the Bootts having joined us & at the Byron + being very much the same easy=fitting Bootts as before" (CL2 1: 50). Moments like this come back to the reader of The Complete Letters at once very much the same as before and thrillingly not the same at all, more sharply defined and active within a larger, richer contextual field.

Now that scholars and critics have had the opportunity to get used to working with the Nebraska Edition, it may be timely to make some observations on its principles of textual presentation and annotation and to offer some practical reflections on what it is like for an academic reader to use. The editors sensibly anticipate "tension" between the virtues of "reliability" (faithful representation of "the meaningful details of the historical document") and "readability," and they are surely justified in favoring the former (CL2 1: 367). But those qualities in a scholarly edition may be complementary at least as often as they are at odds, and there is room to ask whether a slightly greater degree of editorial intervention might be achieved without compromise to the edition's principles. The basis of the edition is unshakeably sound, but a critical reader does encounter a very few areas where more help would be welcome.

The plain-text format adopted by Walker and Zacharias deploys a limited array of editorial symbols in the transcribed letter-text to represent cancellations, insertions, and emphases in the manuscript. Reviewing the first two volumes of the Nebraska Edition...