Henry James: Letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner (review)

In the country of Henry James scholars, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi is a national treasure. With her essays, editions, translations, exhibitions, and collections, Mamoli Zorzi has elucidated subtleties of James’s world outside of England and America, in particular the meaning in his life and work of his beloved Italy. With the internationalization, nay globalization, of Henry James studies over the past two decades, Mamoli Zorzi has stood at the crossroads, mediating between languages, centuries, and cultures, assisting Jamesians in their attempts to do what James himself most wanted: to gain a sense of the past, of difference, of experience. Growing out of her expertise on Anglo-American expatriates in Italy, and Venice in particular, Mamoli Zorzi’s new Henry James: Letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner further contributes to that effort.

Henry James: Letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner is another in a series of recent single-correspondent editions of Henry James letters. In winnowing out strands from an immense corpus that approaches 10,500 extant letter manuscripts and typescripts, these discrete volumes enable scholars, students, and James devotees to see the multifarious personae of the Master, supporting Millicent Bell’s observation that “James was as many persons as he had correspondents” (ix). As they often show sudden clarity of vision, James’s letters to one or two recipients bolster Philip Horne’s conviction that, far from being ancillary, James’s letters constitute an important facet of his oeuvre (Life). Examples of these focused collections include George Monteiro’s Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, Michael Anesko’s Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells, Susan Gunter’s Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, Gunter and Steven Jobe’s Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, and Mamoli Zorzi’s own Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen.¹ While these partial publications differ in their scope from Percy Lubbock’s, Leon Edel’s, and Philip Horne’s more comprehensive editions, now augmented by the first four volumes of Peter Walker and Greg Zacharias’s projected 140 volumes of The Complete Letters of Henry James, they chart the evolution of particular friendships as they intensify and change over time, reflecting larger shifts in James’s career and life.

Mamoli Zorzi’s new volume of James’s letters to American art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner completes a triad with two of her earlier single or double-correspondent editions, Letters to Miss Allen and Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, closing the circle of James’s relationships with key individuals connected to Daniel and Ariana Curtis’s Palazzo Barbaro on Venice’s Grand Canal. This exquisite baroque palace, James’s favorite European sanctuary and his model for Milly Theale’s Palazzo Leporelli in The Wings of the Dove, served as an Anglo-American outpost in Europe, the gathering place under the Curtises’ aegis of not only James, Allen, and Gardner, but also artists Frank Duveneck, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeil Whistler and Anglophone expatriates Katherine de Kay and Edith Bronson, Robert and Pen Browning, and William Wetmore and Emelyn Story, among many others. James’s most devoted students will want to read these three volumes together, noting modulations in James’s protean personality. James’s letters to Englishwoman Miss Allen show him as the inveterate gossip, willing to confess not only his sense of America’s faults but also the Curtises’ eccentricities. With the Curtises and Gardner, James is more cautious and deferential, careful to curry favor with wealthy and influential Americans with whom he shared not only a love of Italy but also an overlapping social circle. The reader understands the motivation for H. L. Mencken’s cruel observation that “In London [James] was in exactly the same situation as a young Westerner in Boston—that is, he was confronted by a culture more solid and assured than his own. It kept him shaky all his life long; it also kept him fawning, as his letters inconveniently reveal” (140–41).

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