Word: edel
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...students want practical advice. One of them, an intent note taker, asks how "geographical descriptions" should be fitted into a biographical narrative. "Wherever they fit naturally," Edel retorts...
...storyteller is Leon Edel, 69, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his monumental biography of Henry James (2,152 pages in five volumes). He has also edited two volumes in a series of James' letters as well as his collected plays. A longtime (1949-72) professor at New York University, where he held the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters, Edel is now teaching in a post-retirement position at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. But he journeyed to Dartmouth for the summer session, a regular academic term...
...Edel's offering is called, broadly, "Understanding Biography." But the two-hour class each Tuesday and Thursday morning is really the occasion for an extemporaneous review of Edel's own discoveries. "Any academic can set up his shingle and be a literary critic," says Edel to his T-shirted students. "But biography is more difficult; it involves vast archives." On the other hand, he dismisses-with a downward sweep of his arms-documentary biographers who limit themselves to a recitation of facts. Says he: "The only imagination allowed is over form, not facts, but that imagination...
...autocratic talker, Edel zigzags from topic to topic, trailing half-spoken sentences in his wake. He sugars his more serious discussion-on the role of psychology in biography, methods of research, and narrative forms-with anecdotes culled from his past. An interest in the psychological novel, and in James as its exponent, led Edel to Paris in the 1920s. There, while a doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne, he encountered James Joyce. "Joyce once sat beside me at a reading, but his impassive face put me off," recalls Edel. "What could I say anyway?" he shrugs. " 'Mr. Joyce, I really...
During the time chronicled in these notebooks (expertly edited by Leon Edel), Wilson was merely Bunny Wilson, a bright, pompous young writer among other writers in Greenwich Village. He supported himself with work at Vanity Fair, where the staff sometimes played a game with the secretaries called "The Rape of the Sabine Women," and later became an associate editor of the more staid New Republic. By day, he reviewed the best of his contemporaries. After hours, he saw them not quite at their best: E.E. Cummings lying in a bathtub maliciously imitating John Dos Passes' speech impediment; Dorothy Parker...