Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870 by Leon Edel (review)

SHORTER NOTICES 441 ligion (Kierkegaard) through agnosticism (Heidegger) and atheism (Sartre) back to religion (Berdyaev, Marcel, Jaspers). Man, as a subject , can only be reconciled with himself if he is first reconciled with him whose name is I AM. The seven essays on individual philosophers, which fonn the bulk of this work, are unified by the continuity of an easy and graceful style and by introductory and concluding chapters which are full of original and stimulating comments. On the whole, this book appears to be a reliable guide to a complicated and difficult subject. D. R. G. OWEN Henry James: The Untried YearsJ 1843-1870. By LEON EDEL. Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott Company [Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co.]. 1953. Pp. 350. $6.00. Although the last fifteen years or so have seen a greatly heightened interest in the writings and personality of Henry James, no adequate, full-length biography has existed. Now Leon Edel has begun to fill that need with this biography of the first twenty-seven years of James's life; two more volumes, covering the forty-six mature years, are to follow. Readers of James have expected much from Mr. Edel's biography , for few, if any, have a more extensive knowledge of Henry James. They have not been disappointed. Earlier writers on James were ridden by the desire to demonstrate theses about American culture, about Puritanism, about James's personality , or about aesthetic form. Mr. Edel's end has been to discover James as he actually was, to speculate about why he was as he was, and to illuminate the life from the writing. His ruling ideas about James's personality seem to have been arrived at inductively and with discrimination. His major conclusion about the young James is that he was inhibited by a complex of family and social forces from direct expression of his strong individuality, and consequently realized his individuality in his "prodigiously creative art." Direct action for James was rendered impossible primarily by the nature of the tight but chaotic James family. The father seemed to the family a dear but ineffectual intellectual j the mother was paradoxically soft and strong. This ambiguous relation between male and female was intensified in its effects on James by the father's ever-shifting educational theories, from which the children profited and suffered. Moreover the family had an ever-shifting dwelling place-among others, Albany, New York, Geneva, London, Paris, Boulougne, Newport, and Cambridge. 442 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY eXloerlerlce was nr."'nl"T'lQ.'I'UP than 328. $4.25. more COffiis not to be Poetry. ii, ...