Letters: William & Henry James

ELT 41 : 4 1998 theater's being the fashion among a certain class, and the last luxury of a few, rather than taking its place in the common habits of the people, as it does in France." In stark juxtaposition to such verities of national character , these essays reveal James's own shifting allegiances to available identity constructs: American or English, provincial or cosmopolitan, democrat or elitist. Scholars engaged with James's discourses of sexuality will be drawn to James's evolving position statements on the aesthetic merits of Pre-Raphaelite art, Paterian criticism, and literary Decadence as signifiers of his homoerotism as well as sexual panic. In "The Picture Season in London" (1877), James starts off deploring some morbid tendencies of the artist Burne-Jones but praises his imaginative faculty and technique. Shortly thereafter a new perspective emerges, strongly reminiscent of Pater's The Renaissance (1874) and of the shared homocentric interests of Oxbridge and its cultural affiliates. For James, Burne-Jones's figures are deliriously androgynous: "Perhaps they are young men; they look indeed like beautiful, rather sickly boys. Or rather, they are sublimely sexless, and ready to assume whatever charm of manhood or maidenhood the imagination desires." This talk is the first flowering of James's decadent imagination, and it can be seen as more unabashedly homoerotic in the pictorial essays than in his fiction. Whatever the limitations of the edition, the appearance of this significant and extensive collection of James's essays on art and drama is a contribution to knowledge, one that will force scholars to reappraise James's aesthetic philosophy in light of contemporary debates. Wendy Graham _______________ Vassar College Letters: William & Henry James Selected Letters of William and Henry James. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds. Intro. John J. McDermott. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xxxii + 570 pp. $39.95 PERHAPS THE GREATEST recent contribution to Henry James studies took place from 1992 to 1994 when the University Press of Virginia published the first three volumes of The Correspondence of William James, which are devoted to the letters the brothers William and Henry wrote to each other. The editors are Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley. This year a one-volume edition of letters selected from those first three volumes has been published and edited by the 492 BOOK REVIEWS same editors to reach a wider audience than the presumably restricted scholarly readers of the three volumes. The 216 letters in this volume have been selected out of 740 letters and postcards, although even that number "probably makes up less than half of the original number." These letters were chosen because "they more than others illustrate the brothers' responses to each other—responses that spoke at times, as one might expect, of conflicts and rivalries and misunderstandings." The primary intent was "to produce enjoyable reading in a volume that the reader can pick up time and time again in moments of leisure." The volume under review occupies 570 pages taken from a total of 1509 pages. The three volumes are wonderful and the Selected Letters equally so. In the latter none of the important letters are missing. The general impression the reader has from this selection is the extraordinary intimacy and freedom with which the brothers express their innermost concerns about family life and about their own creative life. But the one feeling this reader did not get was that of sibling rivalry, a notion promulgated by Leon Edel. In the last edition of his life of Henry James, the volume called Henry James: A Life (1985), Edel repeats his version of WilUam James's reaction to The Golden Bowl. "He launched a measured critique" of the late novel which he, William, had not read earlier. Edel quotes from the letter : "[It] put me, as most of your recenter long stories have put me, in a very puzzled state of mind." The "method of elaboration" went "agin the grain" of all his own impulses in writing, adding, "But why won't you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing...