Correspondence

Correspondence To the Editor: I want to thank Leon Edel for kindly sharing the note that Gertrude Stein sent him after he had sent her, in 1932, his first two books on James, Henry James: Les Années dramatiques and The Prefaces of Henry James (HJR 9 [1988]: 224). Mr. Edel's timing was fortuitous, since Stein, in that period, was commenting a good deal on James—in The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokios, composed in autumn 1932; in the "Henry James" section of her Four in America, probably composed in winter 1933-spring 1934; and in her Lectures in America, composed in summer 1934. Though characteristically gnomic, Stein's note to Edel makes sense in the context of these writings. Its interest, as Mr. Edel notes, lies in the allusive wordplay of Stein's main point, that "it was one of my [Stein's] tragedies that the introductions were not continued a tragedy I felt for myself as well as for him [James] at that time although I never knew him." Though Stein often used the word "tragedy" for hyperbolic effect, she also used it here, I imagine, to play on die coincidence of Edel's two subjects. She picked up the second sense of Edel's French title— Edel himself had noted it on the first page of his préface (Années 11)—to convert James's "dramatic" years into his dramatically "tragic" years; and she then shifted tiiat characterization from the period of James's drama to tiiat of the New York Edition.1 Changing James's and Edel's word "prefaces" to her word "introductions ," she completed the wordplay tiiat generates the two distinct levels of meaning to which Mr. Edel alludes. The first, essentially public level concerns the failure of the New York Edition to gain a wide audience and therefore warrant more volumes with more prefaces, or introductions; the second, essentially private level concerns Stein's having solicited a personal introduction to James that failed to produce a meeting. Stein saw each failure as "tragic" for both James and herself. Stein, we know, avidly read documentary literature—biography, memoirs, letters (see ABT and EA passim; McAlmon 205). Given that taste and given her keen interest in James, we might presume that she read Lubbock's edition of James's letters, published in 1920 (and see Caramello 199n8). If so, she would have known two important letters concerning the New York Edition and its prefaces. In 1908, flushed witii hopes for the emerging Edition but exhausted from the labor of writing its prefaces, James wrote Howells that it would be long before he would want to collect these prefaces into a "comprehensive manual" and "furnish them with a final Preface"—that he was "done with prefaces for ever"; he added that the Edition would need supplementary volumes but, "I pray God, witiiout Prefaces"; and he concluded the passage with his "dim vague view Correspondence 215 of reintroducing" The Bostonians into the Edition (LHJ II, 98-104). In 1915, however, wracked witii what he twice called tiie "failure" of the Edition, James wrote Gosse that the Edition—and he mentioned the prefaces—"has never had the least intelligent critical justice done it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid it"; he added tiiat Scribner's had "deprecated" inclusion of The Bostonians and that, indeed, "nothing whatever has been added to the series—and there is little enough appearance now that there will ever"; and he concluded tiiat he would now lack occasion to revise and to preface The Bostonians—tiiat "I should have liked to write that Preface to the Bostonians—which will never be written now" (LHJ II, 496-99). If Stein had not read Lubbock's edition, she still would have known, presumably, the salient passage in the letter to Howells: Mr. Edel had cited it in the book he had sent her (Prefaces 29). Stein, we also know, owned a New York Edition. In a series of letters written in 1947, after Stein's death, Alice Toklas told Donald Sutherland this and other pertinent information. Toklas noted a connection between Kate Cray and Stein's Melanctha (from "Melanctha," in Three...