In Memoriam: Adeline R. Tintner (1912-2003)

Any graduate student poring over Henry James in the MLA International Bibliography in the summer of 1975 would have had to be awed, as I was, by the number of articles by Adeline R. Tintner. The titles of the pieces were intriguing and arcane. They suggested imperial erudition, relentless energy: "Sargent in the Fiction of Henry James"; "Iconic Analogy in 'The Lesson of the Master': Henry James's Legend of Saint George and the Dragon"; "Henry James's Salome and the Arts of the Fin de Siecle"; "Sir Sidney Colvin in The Golden Bowl: Mr. Crichton Identified"; "Henry James and a Watteau Fan"; "Keats and James and The Princess Casamassima"—to give just a sample of the twenty-seven items Tintner published between 1971 and 1975. The pace picked up: between 1976 and 1981, the bibliography lists fifty-five Tintner publications; and in the twenty years between 1981 and 2000, one hundred and twenty. In one representative year, 1983, there were fourteen Tintner items in the MLA Bibliography, more than there were for any other author.

Working on a dissertation that dealt with James's relation to English Romanticism, I moved in the depths of the prodigious shadow cast by Ms. Tintner. I remember wondering who she was, how old she was, and how she managed, presumably, to teach and yet to write so much.

Then, in the summer of 1977, when I was embarking on the discussions that would lead to the founding of the Henry James Review, my wife's Aunt Hannah told me she was old friends with a prolific James scholar, Adeline Tintner. They had been college classmates, Barnard 1932. Aunt Hannah also volunteered that she herself knew Leon Edel, and that the Edel-Tintner friendship went back to the 1930s. Aha!

As a student of English Romantic poetry, I very much admired The Wordsworth Circle—and was convinced there should be a comparable forum for the community of James scholars. I had been counseled, however, that a number of individuals had tried to start Henry James journals—among others, Robert Gale, William Stafford (then editor of Modern Fiction Studies), and Maurice Beebe (then editor of The Journal of Modern Literature)—but that each of them had abandoned the effort after failing to win the favor of Leon Edel, the "chairman of the board" of James studies. I wanted advice on the best diplomatic approach to Edel from those who knew him well, and so, with the cue given me by Aunt Hannah, I wrote to Adeline Tintner asking if I could meet with her. Her encouraging response brought me, later that summer of 1977, to the remarkable apartment she shared with her beloved husband, the distinguished gastroenterologist Henry Janowitz (the other HJ, as she called him).

When I met Adeline Tintner, she was sixty-five years old. When she died earlier this year, on January 20, she was less than a month short of her ninety-first birthday, which would have been on February 2. In the natural course of things, there is nothing astonishing about the death of a nonagenarian, and yet it is hard to compass that the unceasing delight Addy took in literature, art, and material culture, her zest for detection, and her energetic joy in discovery no longer have their formidable embodiment in that always elegant, taut, and sharply honed presence. The apartment on East End Avenue, across the road from Gracie Mansion, somehow belied its fashionable address, only because it was so abundantly the workshop of a ferocious independent scholar—no, she didn't teach, which only went a small way, after all, to explain her amazing productivity—and it was also, amidst its impressive and irregular clutter, the hoard of a legendary collector. Bookshelves lined the walls and stood out from them at perpendiculars, full of multiple editions of scores of major and minor figures of English, American, and continental literature. Manuscripts and boxes of densely annotated index cards covered...