The End of an Epic

By Melvin Maddocks

HENRY JAMES: THE MASTER (1901-1916) by LEON EDEL 591 pages. Lippincott. $12.95.

For 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 an answer to a much more difficult question: Exactly who and what was Henry James.

In 1899, when he was 56, James sat for a portrait by his young cousin Ellen Emmet. The painting, which James varnished himself and hung in his dining room, showed an Old Master, solemn if not portentous, massively trussed in a beige waistcoat and dark suit with a heavy-knotted, speckled cravat. A "smooth and anxious clerical gentleman" was the way James summed up his own likeness. But hidden underneath, on a separate canvas, was an unfinished portrait of quite a different man: Henry James as a country squire out of Fielding--ruddy face, eyes full of animal energy.

The first James still represents the official stereotype. Here is the high priest of art who refined himself right out of life, the superfastidious intellect whom Theodore Roosevelt called an "effete" and "miserable little snob," the too-exquisite stylist whom H.G. Wells described as a "leviathan retrieving pebbles." Edel's formidable accomplishment has been to unveil the second James in all his surprising robustness and to give this figure equal space on the wall.

The expatriate James of these later years was in fact a figure of immense vitality as well as subtlety, working at a pace that might have killed a young Hemingway. He wrote The Ambassadors in eight months, and his other two masterpieces, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, at the rate of one a year. His longish (and perhaps best) short story, The Beast in the Jungle, seems to have been composed in three days.

James was up at 8, bathed, shaved and meticulously dressed for breakfast by 9. After porridge and cream and three shirred eggs, he settled down to dictation, pacing and pausing to his own elegant prose rhythms until 1:45. In the afternoons and evenings he revised his typescripts, corrected his proofs, filled his fabled notebooks, and read voluminously. In addition, he maintained an elaborate correspondence with an awesome number of friends and relatives.

Nor did the master neglect his corporeal self. Wearing a peaked hat on his head and carrying a walking stick, he took his daily constitutional along the roadways of Sussex, often shadowed like a caricature by his dachshund Maximilian. Or else he donned his knickerbockers and a striped jacket and, with Jamesian dignity, hopped onto his bicycle to go for a spin.

"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.

sb Melvin Maddocks

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