Word: edel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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HENRY JAMES: THE MASTER (1901-1916) by LEON EDEL 591 pages. Lippincott...
...almost 20 years Leon Edel's biography of Henry James has been rolling forth, majestic, involuted and nearly interminable, like one of the master's own sentences. Clear-eyed young students who began with Henry James: The Untried Years (1953) had turned middle-aged themselves by the time they popped on their bifocals to read Henry James: The Treacherous Years (1969). "How long, Leon, how long?" cried the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement when the fourth volume appeared. With this, the fifth and final volume, the question can be answered: 2,152 pages. Edel has also provided...
...first James still represents the official stereotype. Here is the high priest of art who refined himself right out of life, the superfastidious intellect whom Theodore Roosevelt called an "effete" and "miserable little snob," the too-exquisite stylist whom H.G. Wells described as a "leviathan retrieving pebbles." Edel's formidable accomplishment has been to unveil the second James in all his surprising robustness and to give this figure equal space on the wall...
...Edel finds this same sturdiness - this same toughness beneath urbanity - in James' later novels. Did James lack strong feelings? Listen, Edel says, to the words of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, sent abroad to rescue a young New Englander from un-Puritanical Paris and rather falling victim himself: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life...
...James belatedly coming to terms with possible sins of neglect in the 1894 suicide of the minor novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who had loved him? Edel leaves the question as just that. But it is a question that puts flesh upon a man too often misconstrued as disembodied intellect...