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31:3 Book Reviews HENRY JAMES Adeline R. Tintner. The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics. With a Foreword by Leon Edel. $49.95 The Library of Henry James. Compiled and Edited with Essays by Leon Edel and Adeline R. Tintner. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987. $49.95 and $29.95 In 1986 Tintner's valuable The Museum World of Henry James presented a kaleidoscopic view of the seemingly infinite references to the visual arts in the novels, and now her companion volume, The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics, develops James's use of other writers, and, in the words of Edel's foreword, demonstrates "the way a close and observant reader penetrates the very mind and imagination of the past." Tintner's thesis is a little stronger than what Edel suggests, for she states at the outset, and restates throughout, that her effort is to demonstrate an "analogic method" whereby the Master bonowed or actually "stole" from earlier masters and rewrote the appropriated works in an effort to transmute and often improve upon what came before. Many readers may stumble over the vigor of Tintner's claim—the argument that the James of "Master Eustace" was rewriting Hamlet, or that when James wrote The Outcry "he chose Lear and not The Tempest to rewrite" does not surely convince after all the accumulated evidence is in. Certainly, as Tintner shows with astonishing perceptibility and an encyclopedic grasp of the bits of James's reading, Shakespeare, Milton, Novalis, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Ariosto , Leopardi, Bryon, Arnold, Balzac, Voltaire, Cervantes, Meredith, and perhaps scores of others had been read and digested and forgotten and remembered and alluded to by the novelist. Tintner's feat is exciting, often startling, always informative—she has the kind of background in European fiction and poetry that few other modem James scholars might begin to hope for. The reader of The Book World of Henry James will walk with Tintner down paths, streets, avenues, and tree-lined boulevards, and even if he or she does not accept the thesis of the masterful rewriting, the world of Henry James will never again quite read the same. There are many trees in Tintner's study, but perhaps it is a little skimpy on forest. When, for example, she claims that the "Guest's Confession" derives from The Merchant of Venice, Tintner notes several striking allusions to Shakespeare in the James tale. There is the pound of flesh; there is the daughter and the ducats; there is the shriek that one of the characters is a veritable Shylock. And yet James in relation to the spirit of Shakespeare's play is never discussed by Tintner. Why, we ask, was James so struck with this play where a melancholy man gives all for a shallow friend, where a furious outsider learns to rage, and where a somewhat facile love affair ends the piece? We get chapter and verse, and yet Tintner leaves it to us to determine—here and in most places—the subtle significance of allusion, of influence, and of haunting recollection. 349 31:3 Book Reviews I do not want this criticism to seem harsh, for I appreciate Tintner's book the way it is. She convinces us that in many many cases Henry James had a particular and perhaps a single source in mind when he conceived a tale. If she had attempted to develop fully the significance of each allusion, we would have an impossible 1000 page book on our hands—or a manageable book which noted and then fully explored a handful of allusions. She chooses to provide a developed work which is part source book and part revelation. It is in some ways left to each reader to determine the richer significance of the enormous network of allusion; and it provides something of a revelation in offering a specific sense of just what was the furniture of James's literary imagination and, perhaps just as significantly, of the mind of his audience. We marvel at James's sense of audience when we learn that a reference in "Glasses" describes Geoffrey Dawling following "as the phrase in the first volume of...

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