Leon Edel, the Last of the Big-time Owners

The George Bernard Shaw scholar Dan Laurence once explained at a Bibliographical Society meeting in New York why he had abandoned the field of Henry James studies and turned to Shaw. Leon Edel, with whom Laurence had collaborated on the Bibliography of Henry James (1957), had prevented him from using unpublished James material in his research. No matter how relevant it might be to his independent discoveries, Laurence explained he was told by Edel in no uncertain terms that he could not use James manuscript materials or correspondence in his published research.

Laurence's tale had an all-too-familiar ring. It seems Laurence and I had similar experiences with Leon Edel. Both of us as young scholars had been prohibited by Edel from using James manuscript materials in our research, not only letters and documents at Harvard University but any such materials anywhere else. Nor was there any doubt in my mind that Laurence and I were only two of the many James scholars so affected.

It is not the collective story that I will tell here, but my side of the tale, one that involves my periodic interactions with Leon Edel over a period of thirty years, lasting until shortly before his death in 1990. It is a story of confidence, perfidy, threat, as well as a reconciliation or, more accurately, an uneasy accommodation.

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With the glittering eye of an academic ancient mariner, I've told and retold this story, not nearly in its entirely but only up to the 1959 proscription by Leon Edel against my publication of any unpublished Henry James letters. In 2016 I even told that part of my story in an essay on manuscripts and letters and their legal and at times capricious owners.¹ But those accounts—verbal and published—tell only a small part of the overall story, what happened in 1958–59. They do not tell the strange and convoluted story of my subsequent experiences with Edel over the next twenty-five years, encounters that lasted until the late 1980s. Thus it is that now I undertake to tell the full story of my bumpy, often disruptive and painful, experiences with Leon Edel.

First, however, it may be useful to recall who Edel was. At the height of his fame and power over several decades in the twentieth century, he was, without a doubt, the last dominant and domineering Henry James scholar. Such was his power that Time magazine, I believe, once called him the Last of the Big-time Owners. Although ambivalently honorific, the Time sobriquet, if somewhat late in the game, acknowledged his sovereignty over anything and everything having to do with original, unpublished materials regarding Henry James and his family. For those to whom the name Leon Edel is now at best an obscure one, suffice it to say that he is the author of many articles and books relating to James, most notably a five-volume biography of the Anglo-American writer as well as the editor of a four-volume set of his letters.

Where to begin my account? It's not so much that beginnings are shadowy (usually they are) but that any beginning has its antecedent, and that antecedent, in turn, has its own antecedent, and, of course, it does not end there. But if one is to tell one's story, one must start somewhere. The beginning I choose for my story starts with Norma Matarissi (later Kacen) at the moment she told me about her work with the John Hay Papers, newly donated to Brown University. Knowing about my keen interest in Henry Adams, she asked me if I wanted to read Adams' letters to Hay, of which there was a sizable group. I jumped at her offer and next thing I knew there they were: several folders of Adams letters set before me as I sat a table in the Special Collections reading room on the third floor of the John Hay Library. I read through them avidly and, realizing immediately that they were eminently publishable, I set about doing the homework necessary to annotate...