Word: edel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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James wanted to be a successful playwright as passionately as some men long to climb Everest. Guy Domville's failure caused him very nearly to break down as a man, but it left him functioning as a writer. Or so Leon Edel asserts in this, the fourth volume of his projected five-book biography. James spent the next years writing himself out of shock-applying what Edel calls "imaginative self-therapy." Recounting a transitional period in James' creative life, Professor Edel has more recourse than necessary to Freud, but his book is otherwise as graceful and precise...
Under the lash of critical rejection, Edel suggests, James' "feelings returned to childhood hurts." He harked back to earlier stories like The Pupil, whose moral Edel reads as: "Little boys die because they assert their claim to live." James not only returned to the terrible world "of blighted childhoods," Edel observes, he frequently practiced a sort of "spiritual transvestitism" and returned in the form of a little girl. In James' creative world, "little boys died. It was safer to be a little girl. They usually endured"-as in The Turn of the Screw (1898), possibly the best short...
James' emotional crisis resulted in new techniques as well as new themes. He had always thought of storytelling as painting, Edel argues; now he sharpened it toward drama. He unfolded his stories more and more through dialogue. Most important of all, the shock of the Guy Domville fiasco brought to life emotions James had half suppressed until then, including perverse love. The author discreetly suggests, with supporting letters, that late in life James became infatuated with a young, rather obtuse Norwegian-American sculptor named Hendrik Anderson...
Thereafter, as Edel sees it, in all ways, James revived. He moved from London to Sussex with his "faithful fat dog" Tosca, a canary and a bicycle. He had dinner at 8 on his terrace, as if his English cottage were a Florentine villa. Finally he bought Lamb House in Rye, acquired an agent, and managed his business with unsuspected shrewdness. He priced his short stories (in good times, he wrote one a week) at $250, got as much as $375 for an article, and insisted on $3,000 from Harper's Weekly for serial rights to The Awkward...
...presence of this face, Edel's quasi-Freudian explanations seem a little glib, and perhaps a little irrelevant. The simpler, curiously old-fashioned dictum of Ezra Pound somehow fits better: more writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence...