Leon Edel: In Memoriam

Abstract

Leon Edel: In Memoriam Daniel Mark Fogel On September 5, 1997, four days short of his ninetieth birthday, Leon Edel died at his home in Honolulu, Hawaii. His Life of Henry James is not only by far the greatest work of scholarship and criticism on Henry James but also one of the finest biographies ever written, and even, as John Aldridge put the case a quarter of a century ago, “one of the truly distinguished works of scholarship . . . of all time.” The New York Times obituary of Edel (Monday, September 8) quotes more recent opinion to much the same effect: the novelist Louis Auchincloss calling the Life “the great American literary biography,” and the poet Richard Howard hailing it as one of the “grand English-language biographies of our time,” providing “the replete characterization of a fully creative human existence.” No student of Henry James will agree with Leon Edel on every point. Some of us differ with him very sharply on fundamental issues in interpretation of James’s life and work. Yet all of us are so deeply in his debt that we are barely conscious most of the time of how much our fundamental knowledge of our subject, as pervasive for the student of James as the air we breathe, has been derived from Leon Edel’s lifelong labors—from the Life of Henry James, of course, but also from Edel’s discovery and preservation of basic materials (for instance, Henry James’s letters to Morton Fullerton and to Alphonse Daudet that Edel discovered in Paris soon after entering the city on the heels of General de Gaulle in 1944) and from his James editions and scholarly resources, among others The Complete Plays of Henry James, The Complete Tales of Henry James, the four volumes of Henry James Letters, the Bibliography of Henry James (with Dan H. Laurence), The Complete Notebooks (with Lyall H. Powers), and The Library of Henry James (with Adeline R. Tintner). Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the first son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Simon and Fannie Malamud Edel, Joseph Leon Edel was raised in the Canadian Midwest. After earning his bachelor’s degree at the age of nineteen at McGill, Edel proposed to write a master’s thesis on James Joyce. He was rebuffed by his professor, George Latham, because “A writer has to die before we write dissertations about him.” Latham suggested to Edel, however, that Joyce and other modernist experimenters “all go back to Henry James.” “Henry James!” Leon Edel exclaimed. “Who’s he?” [End Page 207] By 1928 he had produced a master’s thesis on James and had developed his first major Jamesian theory. Discerning, in Percy Lubbock’s edition of James’s letters, the rough contours of the Guy Domville debacle, Edel hypothesized that James derived from his theatrical experience, albeit an episode of public failure and humiliation, lessons that proved invaluable for the novels and tales of his last two decades. Ten years later, as the first person to examine the contents of a sea chest of James’s literary remains packed by the novelist’s amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, Edel found his theory confirmed in a famous passage in the writer’s notebooks, James’s affirmation to himself that out “of all of this wasted passion and squandered time” he had learned a “precious lesson,” “the divine principle of the scenario.” Edel went to Europe in 1928 as the winner of a prestigious Province of Quebec Scholarship. The stock market crashed. He decided he should earn a higher degree, and he enrolled in doctoral study at the Sorbonne, where he wrote two James dissertations, one in English on the prefaces to the New York Edition, the other in French on James’s theatrical experiences (the basis for the monograph-length introduction to The Complete Plays of 1949). In 1929, Edel began a series of interviews with persons who had known Henry James. He interviewed G. Bernard Shaw, Theodora Bosanquet, Harley Granville-Barker, Allen Wade, and James’s valet, Burgess Noakes, among others. He met Morton Fullerton, who had been James’s friend since 1890 and who for a brief period was Edith Wharton’s lover. He befriended Wharton...