(2 of 2)
"The days depart and pass, laden somehow like processional camels — across the desert of one's solitude," James complained. Yet he possessed the social energy of a professional din ner guest. A master observer of scenes, he sought his scenes out, commuting seasonally to London, and finally in 1904 returning to the United States he had last observed 21 years before. He traveled as far as California on a notably successful lecture tour, sharing with his audiences (at fees of up to $250) "The Lesson of Balzac."
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."
Was 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.
James, Edel concludes, was always on the side of civilization: the "illusions" of order. But not, he argues, out of moral fussiness, as anti-Jacobites imply. To James, looking for the "figure in the carpet," life was a terrifying un known in the end, redeemed only by man's two contradictory passions: to establish order, then to risk that order in acts of love.
With a patience and tact nearly equal to the patience and tact of his subject, Edel has applied, throughout these five volumes, the master's technique to the master. The critic has erected a mirrored structure to reflect the original. In this concluding volume Edel has achieved what Henry James himself achieved with the characters in his last novels. To famously rarefied and aristocratic sensibilities he has managed to add the supremely ordinary, the wonderfully vulgar gift of a heart.
∙ Melvin Maddocks