Review-Essay on The Complete Notebooks of Henry James

Review-Essay on The Complete Notebooks of Henry James by Donald Stanford, Louisiana State University "From his first maturity until his death—and even on his deathbed —note-taking was at the heart of James's creation."—Leon Edel Forty years ago F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock published with the Oxford University Press The Notebooks of Henry James—perhaps the most useful book for the understanding and teaching of James in the entire history of Jamesian scholarship. The Notebooks have now been re-edited, re-arranged, and expanded with 20,000 words of new material (some of it never before published), and with a mass of new factual annotation drawn from the last four decades of Jamesian scholarship (ed. and introd. Leon Edel and LyaU H. Powers; New York and Oxford: Oxford U P, 1987; xvii, 633 pp.; $30). Many persons indicated only by initials in the original edition have been identified. The new editors, Leon Edel and LyaU H. Powers, have supplied in one convenient volume a wealth of material; yet the original edition has by no means been superseded. Matthiessen and Murdock provided invaluable ongoing critical commentary (printed in italics ), commentary that demonstrated what James actuaUy did with his données so eloquently discussed in these private coUoquies with his "other self"—his "good angel" or Daimon or Mio Caro or "Muse"—that make up the bulk of the Houghton notebooks (1878-1911). That is, they compare the essential developments and differences between the notebook entries and the final published texts of the novels and tales and they bring in also other material such as James's letters and reported conversations to reinforce their analyses. EspeciaUy to be regretted is the loss of Matthiessen's and Murdock's cogent commentaries on the last chapter of The Portrait of a Lady, the short story "Impressions of a Cousin" that was developed from a complicated donnée given James by Thackeray's daughter, The Bostonians, "The Liar," The Princess Casamassima, and "Brooksmith," to mention a few. It is clear that shelf room should be made for both editions. The formidable contents of the new edition include the nine Houghton "scribble books," which are the major component of both editions but now confusingly re-arranged into three parts—"The Notebooks," "The American Journals" and "Notes for London Town"; "The Pocket Diaries," "Detached Notes," "Dictated Notes" including the important "Project for the Ambassadors" and the not so important delirious deatiibed dictation of December, 1915; and an unfinished 222 The Henry James Review story of considerable interest, "Hugh Merrow," in which the artist of that name is asked to paint the picture of an imagined son or daughter for a childless couple, and "Cash Accounts and Addresses." The previously unpublished "Pocket Diaries" (1909-1915) give us valuable insight into the personality of James, primarily as a social luminary; they record his day to day appointments and visits with a wide-ranging list of friends and acquaintances such as Rupert Brooke, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, and wounded soldiers of aU ranks. (Yet James frequently referred to himself as the loneliest of men!) Many of the entries are extremely laconic, but Edel and Powers have brought some of them to life in their carefuUy researched headnotes in which they make use of outside references. For example, the diary entry for May 31, 1909, reads "lunched with Miss de R." In the headnote is an account of the same luncheon by Lady Ottoline MorreU: "James's 'basilisk gaze' surveyed Alice de Rothschild's taU footmen, her hothouse flowers, and the heaped white strawberries," and she quotes him as murmuring "murder and rapine would be preferable to this." The June 4, 1909, entry reads merely "Dine with Morton FuUerton and E. W. Charing Cross Hotel." Readers of R. W. B. Lewis's biography of Edith Wharton wiU remember that this evening, after James's early departure, was the culmination of Wharton's passionate love affair with FuUerton, for which James played Pandarus, and later that same evening Wharton wrote her Whitmanesque poem of surrender "Terminus"—aU of which was unknown to scholarship until the 1960s, when Yale removed the...