Henry James Letters, III, 1883-1895 (review)

Abstract

Henry James Letters, III, 1883-1895. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, Mass.: BeIknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1980. 579 pp. $20.00. With the publication of the third volume of Henry James's letters, we are in the midst of a temporary calm after the storm of scholarly controversy that accompanied the appearance of the first two volumes in the mid-seventies. For the general reader, there are fewer copy-editing errors and some improvement in the indexing; for the specialist, there is no further clarification forthcoming on the principles of selection and annotation. When the project is completed, the winds will rise; but at the moment we can count our blessings, for this is an interesting volume indeed. Part of the interest, of course, lies in the fact that this selection of letters and Mr. Edel's biography continue to serve as glosses upon each other. The dates and events, 1883 to 1895, are nearly identical to the third volume of the biography, The Middle Years: 1882-1895. This volume of letters is divided into four parts: "Search for an Anchorage (1883-1886)," "Italian Hours (18861887 )," "A London Life (1887-1890)," and "The Dramatic Years (1891-1895)," followed by four long previously unpublished letters from Constance Fenimore Woolson (written not long after she and James met) that Mr. Edel found catalogued among William James's correspondence. The largest number of letters in this volume are addressed to William and his wife (42), Grace Norton (22) and her brother Charles (5), Francis Boott (18) and his daughter, Elizabeth (6), Robert Louis Stevenson (20), and Edmund Gosse (18). There is a good selection of letters to William Dean Howells, Morton Fullerton, Theodore Child and seventy other separate recipients. During these dozen years there were a series of deaths and entrances. They begin as James is recovering from the deaths of his mother and his father and as he faces the departures of his brother WiIky and Turgenev. As time passes and he moves into the personal and professional crises that Edel calls James's "dramatic" years, there is the lingering illness and death of Alice James; the increasing distance from Robert Louis Stevenson, for whom he feels a special affection but who is self-exiled and dying in Samoa; the sudden, sharp grief over Lizzie Boott's unexpected death; the philosophic responses to the deaths of old friends like Mrs. Kemble and James Russell Lowell; the shock and ambivalence attendant on the gradually revealed news of Miss Woolson's presumed suicide in Florence. But, simultaneously, James was entering upon major phases of his life and art. This was the "new era" in his career (as he put it) when he produced The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, works that reflect his self-estimate during that decade as an incurable pessimist who had no comfort for any man: "I would no more generalize than I would slide down the stairs" (p. 259). He visited with Daudet, Zola, and Goncourt in the mid-eighties, when he believed that "naturalism" had taken possession of Paris like a contagion, but, as he told Howells, they were doing the only work he respected, despite their ferocious pessimism, because it was at least serious and honest. We see James reacting contemptuously to the "critical world's" reception of The Bostonians and defensively to the charge that he had ill-used Miss Elizabeth Peabody, but more interesting are his numerous and perceptive references to the political situation in England, his increasing irritation with the EngTHE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 200 SPRING, 1982 lish upper classes (which he believed doomed), and his dark predictions on the inevitable decline of the British Empire (thirty years before the butchery of World War I). "I can imagine no spectacle more touching, more thrilling and even dramatic," he wrote Grace Norton in 1885, "than to see this great precarious artificial empire . . . struggling with forces which, perhaps, in the long run will prove too many for it" (p. 67). As he gradually withdraws from the intense social activity that characterized his "conquest" of London, and as he writes other middle-period works such as The Tragic Muse, "The Aspern Papers," "Lady Barberina," and The Reverberator...