Henry James: The Mature Master - Hardcover

Reviewed by Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

The faintly redundant subtitle is easily explained: The fifth and last volume of Leon Edel's classic Henry James biography was called simply The Master, echoing the honorific conferred on the great storyteller by his friends. James has remained "The Master," and Edel's biography (1953-1972) is among the greatest in the language. Nonetheless, the short verdict on this concluding volume of Sheldon M. Novick's two-part biography (the first, The Young Master, appeared a decade ago) is that it weathers the Edel test. It is fluent, confident, informed (at times excessively so, since Novick burdens it with many relatively inconsequential James letters), and it is also perceptive and sensible.

Good sense is a quality that too much writing about James lacks. The fatuity of some recent portraiture may be seen in a tall tale of which Novick is properly skeptical. James was close friends with the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose 1894 death in Venice, perhaps by suicide, deeply disturbed him. Decades after her death, James's devoted attentions to her memory gave rise to the bizarre story that James had himself rowed out into the Venetian lagoon and there attempted to "sink" Miss Woolson's dresses, only to see them bob stubbornly to the surface. The tale rests on the recollection of an elderly Italian lady, 62 years later, who said (in a BBC broadcast) that she heard it from James. It has been catnip for credulous biographers, so that James, a man of sane and settled habits, emerges as the weirdest of eccentrics. Novick calls the tale "improbable," and he is right.

The story of the unsinkable dresses is, however, typical of Jamesian apocrypha on which barrels of ink are regularly squandered -- along with the propensity of some critics to lock him in an ivory tower that belies James's humanity. Given these hazards, any volume that treats the writer's middle to late years (roughly 1881 to his death of congestive heart failure in 1916) must confront certain well-worn issues, among which two are paramount: one personal, the other literary. On the personal side, what about his sexual life? And on the literary side, what about the alleged obscurity of his "late style," the experimental narrative manner he developed following his disappointed efforts as a playwright in the 1890s?

The issue of James's sexuality suggests why many great writers, including James, have taken a dim view of literary biography in which, so often, the body of work takes a back seat to prurient curiosity about the writer's private life. The preoccupation with James's sex life may be traced to the second thoughts Edel expressed in a 1985 abridged edition of his five-volume work. Edel observed that times and manners had changed, and he had "discard[ed] certain former reticences . . . . No biographer can tell 'everything,' [but] we are able to offer a more forthright record of personal relations, of deeper emotions and sexual fantasies."

What Edel cautiously intimated, bumptious successors have made into an obsessive focus. Novick, writing on the heels of attempts to join James to gay-lib ideology, deals with this delicate issue by implication. His treatment is muted and insinuating, since there are no certainties. For those persuaded, as Novick seems to be, that James led a secret homosexual life, such evidence as he presents lies in gushing letters to young male friends that speak of enfolding arms and other endearments. To our ears, such figures may hint at carnal passion, although the Victorian implications may well have been more conventional. But writers live mainly in their work, and in James's case the question of sexuality is neither more nor less relevant than it is in, say, Shakespeare's explicitly androgynous sonnets.

As for James's late style, of which Novick writes with sympathy and perception, it often provokes the charge of obscurity that has been leveled against many of the modern masters of prose fiction and prompts the question: Did such revolutionists as James, Proust, Joyce and Faulkner lose touch with their era? Or did the era, dulled by mass-media banality, lose touch with them? James's late style is thickly metaphorical and pictorial and, though intricate in syntax, far less so in the fiction than in the late autobiographical works.

As a critic, Novick turns in a hit-and-miss performance, uneven on the earlier works. (He is fond of the dubious notion that Jamesian characters are modeled on living persons.) On the later works he is better, writing with a delicate appreciation of James's mature style. As he shows, it exploited what James called "the divine scenic method," a new way of seeing that recalls Conrad's remark that the storyteller's task is "above all, to make you see." It was a byproduct of his playwriting experience and his determination to embody in his tales all the subtleties of human awareness. In the pursuit of those subtleties, James created privileged observers whom he came to call "reflectors," who see the action -- as E.M. Forster joked -- "through lenses procured from a rather too first-class oculist."

The issue has been much canvassed, but rarely as well as here in this very readable portrait. Novick has given us a Henry James who is not only artistically heroic but entirely admirable as colleague, friend, companion and brother -- as he was in life.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.