Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship (review)

The bare outline of this master narrative in James studies is not unfamiliar to those of us who ran up against Leon Edel in our various efforts to consult primary materials, usually letters, in our work on Henry James. But what makes this marvelous book a must-read for anyone interested in Henry James’ life and writings or the politics of literary and historical scholarship in the twentieth century are its delineation of dramatis personae and the trails they blazed (or, just as often, kept from being blazed), its accounts of shadowy, if often theatricalized events, its analysis of collusion, conflict, and scuffling (much of it conducted sub rosa, of course) among James family members, editors, publishers, and librarians, and the vagaries and manipulations of copyright law and practice—all of it dramatically woven into a single fascinating work of scholarship and professional gossip. In the sake of full disclosure, let me confess right off (as many others might, including Millicent Bell, whose dust-jacket squib does not claim it) that it is my opinion that my personal experiences with Professor Edel over the use of James letters in the 1950s and l960s give me special qualifications for appreciating and assessing Michael Anesko’s achievement in Monopolizing the Master. As earnest of my bona fides, permit me to enter as evidence a quotation of one of Anesko’s notes:

The worst offenders, in Edel’s view, had published James material in spite of his express veto. Among them were George Monteiro (“Letters of Henry James to John Hay,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 4 [1963]: 639–95); Robert F. Sayre (The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964]); and Millicent Bell (Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship [New York: Braziller, 1965]). When in 1963 he wrote to congratulate Edel for having been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the second and third volumes of his biography, Monteiro included, as a courtesy, a copy of his James-Hay piece. The angry response he received could hardly have been anticipated. “Your offprint came to me as a surprise,” Edel admonished. “I had assumed you had understood that when permission to publish is refused one respects such decision. I am making vigorous protests, some of which will doubtless reach you. . . . I regret very much that a young scholar, starting on a career in publication, should have made so serious an error—or been counseled so unwisely in the matter.”

Yes, Virginia, such things did happen. And there is more—though I have yet to put my side of the story in writing.

In a deeply meaningful sense, however, Anesko has told all of our stories, and in rich context that only the devoted searching into library archives and published materials of all sorts has enabled him to tell—from Scribner’s publishing records and correspondence to the now little-known novels of Percy Lubbock, whose “hand-picking” as editor of the novelist’s letters by the James family (i.e., Alice James, the novelist’s sister-in-law, and her lawyer-son Harry) was engineered surreptitiously from afar by the now suspect Edith Wharton and a handful of her gossipy, meddling, and—for once—secret-keeping conspirators.

It is interesting that Anesko effectively begins his narrative with an excursion into how—through revisions of his fiction for the so-called New York Edition published by Scribner’s in the first decade of the twentieth century, combined with the set of remarkable prefaces he wrote for the edition—the Master strove to direct and give shape to his literary reputation and legacy as—first, foremost, and very nearly exclusively—the conscious artist, the one, par excellence, on whom nothing was lost. Thus it was no great jump, when he agreed to memorialize his brother William, for this consummate (and imperialistic) artist novelist to rewrite family letters (bowdlerize...