Word: edel
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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...
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...