Henry James Letters ed. by Leon Edel (review)

Reviews Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press. Volume I: 1843-1875; 1974, 493 pp. Cloth: $15.00. Volume II: 1875-1883; 1975, 438 pp. Cloth: $15.00. Here are two substantial volumes of Henry James's letters, out of a projected four, beginning with the earliest extantand ending in 1883, when, immediately after the death of his father, James dropped the "Jr." from his name both in his letters and on his title pages. The Portrait of a Lady was in print, and he hadknown even beforehehad begun writingit that it would be a major work. He was preparing to return to London and take up the literary and social reputations he had made for himself, and had clearly decided that he was going to be Henry James and that his father would have to become, posthumously, Henry James Sr. The earliest letter, of two boyishly brief sentences, is from 1856, and there are only fourteen dated before 1864, so we do not learn much about the adolescent James except that he once truly was an adolescent. About the young man we learn a great deal. The informality of the letter as a form enables him to let that already awesome sensibility play freely over the objects of an already large experience: Italy, Paris, London and thenaccumulated treasures of painting, sculpture, and architecture; expatriate Americans; literary society in Paris and in London; the society of London and the English country houses. His manner, even as a young man, is often magisterial; he announces to his brother William that "if Shakespeare is the greatest of poets Tintoretto is assuredly the greatest of painters" (1, 138). But he is not always speaking ex cathedra; often, andmost interestingly, he is working his way toward that exalted position, trying to discover what he thinks and feels rather than issuing bulletins from an achieved position. Nowhere is this more clearly and more touchingly so than in his reflections on the death of Minny Temple, which make particularly instructive reading after all that the historians have recently had to say on the subject of death in nineteenth-century America. James had been genuinely moved and needed desperately to discoverhowhe truly felt about thematter, and as a consequence he simply could not let the subject drop. In page afterpagewefind him tryingon, discarding, and trying on once more all of the attitudes available to him. In sum, his attitudes toward death do not differ significantly from those of ordinary Americans ofthe time exceptin the all-important matter of refinement and in the need to find an attitude fully adequate to the occasion, a need which goes touchingly unsatisfied. In the end he simply and desolately stops. That is almost the only occasion on which words fail him. Usually he is very much in command, or working toward a command, both of his subject and his correspondent, and very generally he manages to temper this mastery with a genuine sweetness of character. The respect and affection which he felt for his parents are pellucidly present, and his geniality is everywhere apparent. One sees it especially in his always finding something pleasant to say to Howells about the latter's writings, although something of what the effort musthave costhim may also be seen in his ventinghis irritation at Howells' limitations to his other correspondents. 278Reviews Edel's arrangement of the letters complements in many ways his arrangement of the life in the biography. He once announced (in The Master) that his edition of the letters would provide the basic sources for the biography, but thataimhas clearly changed. Even if the third and fourth volumes are much more substantial than the present ones, four volumes are going to include closer to five than ten per cent of the extant corpus, and making the most generous allowances for the exclusion of letters which are trivial or redundant, that means that a huge amount has been left out. Edel argues "that in an age of photo-duplication [scholars] no longer need total publication" (I, xxxii) and thus seems to be aiming this edition at that increasingly uncommon phenomenon, the common reader. To this one can only...