Lessons of the Master

Lessons of the Master Leon Edel. Henry James: The Master 1901-1916. J.B. Lippincott Company. 1972. $12.95. 591 pp. I The fifth and final volume of Leon Edel' s psychoanalytically informed reconstruction of the life and art of Henry James has appeared. It has taken more than twenty years to complete this ambitious and enormously difficult enterprise, but it has been well worth the waiting. The difficulty was all Leon Edel's; the informed reader can depend on experiencing nothing but the keen pleasure of intellectual and emotional satisfaction. It is gratifying to report that the exciting and portentous expectations aroused by the previous four volumes have been fulfilled; Leon Edel has demonstrated that authentic knowledge and genuine wisdom can be achieved about the meaning of imaginative literature. This is the finest biography of a writer that has been written, saturated with the author's humane yet honest sympathy for his subject, tempered into an organic unity by his balanced intelligence. Only one person has examined the experience of Henry James with greater personal immediacy and more ruthless precision, and that was Henry James himself. In the closing passage of his book, Mr. Edel attributes Henry James's "enduring fame" to the fact that "he had dealt exclusively with the myth of civilization." That is the only myth to which Mr. Edel refers. The high value of his own life of Henry James is primarily a result of the same cause: he too deals exclusively with realities. The long and bumpy road of the various academic disciplines which have been compelled to come to grips with the science of psychoanalysis is a familiar subject. The patterns of reaction and the deployment of the standard battery of defensive maneuvers within each of the disciplines have been the same. The prototype of this behavior is to be found in the characteristic phases through which the average patient passes as he stumbles through the therapeutic experience towards reality. In no sphere of formalized study has the confrontation been bumpier or more productive of convulsions, denials, and policies of withdrawal and isolation than among those scholars who try to reach life through literature; it has THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. III, NO. 1 1 SPRING 1.972 naturally been hardest on those whose primary object is to take the life out of literature. About twenty years ago, Lionel Trilling concluded (or conceded) that the discoveries of psychoanalysis had made it necessary to begin the "renovation of a culture.n Since psychoanalysis entails a wholesale redefinition of reality and of the nature of human experience, and since it virtually demolishes all prior theories of the mind - the very instrument which had formulated our earlier ideas about reality, experience , and the mind itself - it does seem that a renovation of the culture might be a logical expectation, or at least a reasonable hope. Over the years Mr. Trilling has submitted to the logic of his accumulated concessions and exchanged them for the luxury of total capitulation . But he is an exception to the rule in his profession. For the most part, literary specialists have joined forces (and fantasies) to manufacture and disseminate idea-systems - intellectualized reaction-formations. The pathology content of these idea-systems varies. Some are merely confused and contradictory; others are fullblown delusional extravaganzas. The common symptom of these idea-systems is always embedded in their slogans, and the common feature of their slogans is an insistence on the mystical autonomy of literature. Under the spell of this battle cry, the study of literature has moved perilously far into pure obscurantism. It is now often indistinguishable from the practice and the purpose of unadulterated voodoo. Witchdoctors and medicine men prescribe the formulas, organize the obsessional rituals, and establish the systems of taboos. All the disciples have to do is beat the tom-toms and chant the incantations. Particular poets - those most adaptable to the purpose - are plucked from history, sucked dry of their experience, exempted from the laws of nature, projected out of reality, and deified. Their poems are fondled like fetishes in a stone-age ceremoniat and literature is thus transformed from a legitimate and necessary mode of civilized...