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HENRY JAMES: THE TREACHEROUS YEARS (1895-1901) by Leon Edel. 381 pages. Lippincott...
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...
...second-time winners: Composer Samuel Barber for Piano Concerto No. 1, and New York Timesman Anthony Lewis, winner of the $1,000 national reporting prize for his Supreme Court coverage. The rest of the winners: History: Constance McLaughlin Green's Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878; Biography: Leon Edel's two-volume continuation of his life of Henry James, The Conquest of London and The Middle Years; General nonfiction: Barbara W. Tuchman's The Guns of August; News photography: Hector Rondon of La Republica, Caracas; Cartoon: Frank Miller of the Des Moines Register; Editorial writing...
Letters: Fiction-William Faulkner The Reivers; non-Fiction-Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August; Poetry-William Carlos Williams, "Pictures from Brueghel"; Biography-Leon Edel, Henry James: Vol. II, The Conquest of London; Vol. III, The Middle Years...