REVIEW OF BOOKS

J. I. M. Stewart on the last years of the Master

Among Professor Edel's skills is that of playing, in a controlled way, the artless rambling chronicler, and it is in evidence in this the fifth and final volume of his biography.* Consider Elizabeth Jessie Jane Allen. Her great-grandfather had been the Earl of Jersey; she met James "under the noble and hospitable roof of the Curtises in the Palazzo Barbaro (renamed Palazzo Leporelli in The Wings of the Dove) "; she lived in Eaton Square with two loyal maids and a cat. Moreover: Miss Allen used to write her letters in a low chair with a small table at her side. Her penmanship was beautiful and as each letter was ready for the post she dropped it on the floor to be mailed by one of her maids. She affected a cape and bonnet when she went to the theatre with Henry. She attached great importance to her little glass of port at lunch. Her voice was deep and low. She was above all an old-fashioned Lady Bountiful.

Need we ourselves "'attach great importance" to Miss Allen? Well, her letters to James were thirty-page affairs, devoted (if John Singer Sargent is to be believed) to " mischievous tattle about James's friends, whom she always tried to alienate from him," and that they were appreciated is evidenced by the fact that in the Houghton collection there are more than 200 letters in reply. One dimension of the Master's life is thus suggested to us.

The Lady Bountiful theme, too, has interest. Early in their friendship Miss Allen sent James successively a cinquecento taper, two brass Venetian candlesticks (these James greeted with an ominous reference to "the positive frenzy of your altruism "), a fine casket, and finally two large bear-skin rugs. James could not quite swallow the rugs, or not without much heavily humorous fuss about an "impossible, unspeakable, unforgiveable " act. He had recurrent trouble of this sort With his affluent friends. Walter Berry (who came of an old New York family and should have known better) presented him with "a beautifully fitted leather suitcase lined with morocco leather." James's rebuke took the form of a 2,000-word letter elaborating on the theme that the sumptuous object showed up everything else in Lamb House as beggarly. Neither

Berry nor his close friend Edith Wharton appears to have seen the point. The wealthy and talented lady was confirmed in the view that the Master lived in painfully dissimulated penury, and took secret means to make him the object of a charitable subscription. Foiled in this (for James, on getting wind of it, exploded into telegrams and anger), she, persuaded his American publisher to offer him a wholly unrealistic advance on a projected novel — the $8,000 involved actually coming out of her own royalties due from the firm. James was tricked and, it seems, heartened; the result was his unfinished The Ivory Tower, which was to be an anatomy of the corrupting power of great wealth in American

society. A crowning irony, Mr Edel does not fail to remark.

A detailed account of James in his multitudinous social relations during the last fifteen years of his life inevitably requires much space, but the method is largely justified because the Master so seldom lets his assiduous biographer down. Small events, minor contacts, produce responses

which carry us deep into the character of the man. On October 31, 1909 James wrote to Violet Hunt, inviting her to spend a weekend at Rye and "have a long jaw." Two days later, he discovered that she was about to be involved in public marital scandal. He at once cancelled the "long jaw" thus:

I deeply regret and deplore the lamentable position in which I gather you have placed yourself in respect to divorce proceedings about to be taken by Mrs Hueffer: it affects me as painfully unedifying, and that compels me to regard all agreeable and unembarrassed communication between us as impossible. I can neither suffer you to come down to hear me utter those homely truths, nor pretend, at such a time, to free and natural discourse of other things, on a basis of avoidance of what must now be to the front in your own consciousness and what in a very unwelcome fashion disconcerts mine.

We may be shocked by this, but we must reflect on the predicament of one who, subject to affections which, if divulged, would themselves have been judged "painfully unedifying ". by many, was yet so timidly conventional as to withdraw an offer of hospitality in this way.

Over against the letter to Violet Hunt may be set one to Antonio de Navarro, the idle heir to an American steamship line, who was in the habit of sending James accounts of his nervous distresses, James wrote:

I am very sorry to hear of your depressions and lassitudes, I scarcely know what to say about them. The want of a commanding, that is of an imperative occupation is a fertile source of woe — to an dme bien nee — and you are in some degree paying the penalty of your ' material ' advantages themselves. . . • My own conditions resemble yours . . . but I am luckily possessed of a certain amount of corrective to our unnatural state, a certain amount of remedy, refuge, retreat, and anodyne! From the bottom of my heart I pity you for being without some practicable door for getting out of yourself. We all need orle, and if I didn't have mine I shouldn't — well, I shouldn't be writing you this now. It takes at the best, I think, a great deal of courage and patience to live — but one must do everything to invent, to force open, that door of exit from mere immersion in one's own states. You are young and gallant and intelligent — so, a/ions done, there are still horizons.

It must be worth turning over many letters, wading through much "twaddle of graciousness," to find such matter as this.

Perhaps one learns more of James from watching the open traffic of his social life than from pondering the nature and weight and significance of such intimate relationships as have left any evidence of themselves. But of these, enigmatical as they may be, three are prominent in this volume. Hendrik Andersen, whose body had been as splendid as his marble nudes were null, is still a power — and one fructifying, in Mr Edel's view, The Wings of the Dove, a novel in which love is at the very heart of the action. "In allowing himself to experience the touch, the presence, the embrace, of the young sculptor, James had learned the meaning of physical love." We may certainly agree that here, while it lasted, had been the involvement most likely to carry James out of his depth; the letters to Andersen reveal, at least intermittently, "the desperation, or anguish, or ache of passion." But the two men seldom met, and passion cooled to warmth and tenderness. In 1903 James, at sixty, encountered the thirty-year-old Jocelyn Persse, a nephew of Lady Gregory, but one quite without literary interests or intellectual pretension. Within nine days of their meeting the young man had become " my dear, dear Jocelyn." It was love at first sight, Mr Edel says. "In his relation with Persse, James finally freed himself from the prolonged innocence of his earlier years. Persse helped complete the process begun four years earlier when James had met Andersen in Rome."

I find it difficult to decide just what Mr Edel means here, and could wish for fuller documentation. What seems to come through the narrative is that James had had the very great luck to find a young man who took to him at once, didn't greatly bother about his genius, was willing to spend quite a lot of time with him, and had the wisdom or sophistication required to cope with such intimations of James's emotional need as bobbed up. The result was the most stable, tranquil, undemanding, and therefore delightful of what we may call the Master's love affairs if we please.

The last of them was with Hugh Walpole. Not for him, as for Persse, the distinction of having contributed hints for Prince Amerigo, or anything of the sort. For one thing, he arrived too late on the scene. He was mediocre, he was ambitious, and he needed to be admired. But he needed, too, to love and to be loved, and this must have been the essential reason why James — as James told A. C. Benson — felt for him "the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection." He became, in the Master's correspondence, "darling darling little Hugh" and the like. One may suspect that he was slightly bewildered by the whole affair, and not clear where it was designed to lead. Mr Edel prints part of a letter from James which seems to be a reply to the young man's recording certain "high jinks " in London: presumably adventures reflecting Walpole's own sexual inversion. James writes:

It's good healthy exercise, when it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of thing that it's good, and considerably final to have done. We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.

Mr Edel's excerpt ends here. But in Sir Rupert Hart-Davis's biography of Walpole the letter continues:

I think I don't regret a single ' excess ' of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and pessibilities I didn't embrace.

Did this letter or something like it (Mr Edel asks no such question) put ideas — or even possible duties — in Walpole's head? Mr Edel does tell us of something communicated to him by Mr Stephen Spender. Spender as a young man was told by Walpole that he had offered himself to James and that James had said "I can't, I can't." With this absurd ambiguity (for was James's response received and transmitted as of moral or of physiological reference?) we reach the end of this particular road in the Master's biography. Or not quite:

The Swedish authoress, Mia Leche Lofgren, recorded a conversation with a 'medical gymnast' who said he had worked for Henry James and 'didn't like him.' Wasn't he friendly? the authoress asked, and the answer was, 'Yes, he was too friendly.'

Ever since his celebrated discovery in James's notebook of the • name-sequence Ledward-Bedward-Deadward Mr Edel has acknowledged the fascination of Freudian inquiry into the mind of the Master, and his particular interest in names continues. Milly Theale is not only a dove; she is clearly intended to come to us as a little duck as well. Kate Croy is virtually Kate Crow, and a crow is a black bird, and merle is French for blackbird, and so here is a thread leading to Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady. Again, why did James seek to insist that the New York edition should be in 23 volumes? Mr Edel explains that Balzac's collected works had

been thus issued, but not before he has speculated " about the significance of the combination of 2 and 3 . . . James had always been the 'third person ' in his relations with his mother and his brother; and then his Aunt Kate was the third person in a combination with his parents."

Such speculations are small pointers to a large concern. Mr Edel believes, I think, that we shed, or try to shed, our sicknesses in books; and he interprets James's major works as gigantic efforts of this kind. Thus the characters in The Wings of the Dove "were an outgrowth in the novelist's mind of elements in his buried life" and through them "James was making a supreme attempt to understand and resolve a life-dilemma." But it was in The Golden Bow/ that he succeeded: " Everything in this novel is at last — and for the only time in Henry James — resolved." The result was four years of sustained good health during which he laboured at the New York edition. It was only when the reception of that edition staggeringly disappointed his hopes that he suffered, apparently for a full year, severe nervous illness.

James's death-bed — it is perhaps another irony — was substantially chronicled in waiting notebooks. To his secretary, Miss Bosanquet, he dictated ruminations from which Mr Edel's best efforts fail to extract much even arcane meaning, and also two entirely coherent letters purporting to be from the Emperor Napoleon to one of his married sisters. This last bizarre achievement would have interested the Master whom Leon Edel, in his noble biography and elsewhere, has so faithfully served.