Essaying Biography a Celebration for Leon Edel
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ESSAYING BIOGRAPHY A CELEBRATION FOR LEON EDEL EDITED BY GLORIA G. FROMM ESSAYING BIOGRAPHY ESSAYING BIOGRAPHY A Celebration for Leon Edel EDITED BY Gloria G. Fromm A Biography Monograph Published for the Biographical Research Center by University of Hawaii Press General Editor: George Simson Copyright © 1986 by the Biographical Research Center ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Essaying biography. (A Biography monograph) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Biography (as a literary form) 2. Edel, Leon, 1907- I. Fromm, Gloria G., 1931 II. Edel, Leon, 1907- . III. Series. CT21.E79 1986 808'.06692 86-19280 ISBN 0-8248-1035-X (pbk.) CONTENTS I. PREFACES Editor’s Foreword 3 An Open Letter from an Old Admirer Sir Rupert Hart-Davis 5 Leonard Woolf and The Wise Virgins Leon Edel, introductionHoward Fertig 8 II. FORMULATIONS Biography and the Scholar: The Life of Henry fames Adeline R. Tintner 21 In Search of Henry James’s Educational Theory: The New Biography as Method Muriel G. Shine 36 The Biographer as Novelist Harvena Richter 59 III. AMERICANA On Writing Waldo Emerson Gay Wilson Allen 75 Style and Sincerity in the Letters of Henry Adams Viola Hopkins Winner 91 The Beat Brotherhood fohn Tytell 105 IV. EXEMPLA Katharine James Prince: A Partial Portrait Jean Strouse 127 William Macmillan: The Reluctant Healer Gloria G. Fromm 147 “I Reach Beyond the Laboratory Brain”: Men, Dolphins, and Biography Gavan Daws 167 V. OPERA VITAE The Writings of Leon Edel William Laskowski,Jr. (assisted by Vivian Cadbury) 195 Index 237 Notes on Contributors 247 I PREFACES EDITOR’S FOREWORD THIS book celebrates a major literary form and a master practi tioner. Reflecting Leon Edel’s achievement over more than half a century, it bears witness to the range of his biographical writ ings and to the span of his influence on contemporary letters. In deed, few modern biographers can match his versatility; none has worked so tirelessly to refine the image of twentieth—century liter ary biography, or argued so eloquently and humanely for the truth of art as well as of scholarship. Some years ago, in an essay-dialogue, “The Poetics of Biogra phy,” Leon Edel described “the recreation in words of a life [as] one of the most beautiful and most difficult tasks a literary artist can set himself.” He has taken on this challenge, time and again, with his own “new biography,” which “accepts the idea that there is a providence in every word a poet chooses, but also knows it cannot always discover that providence.” As paradigms he offers on the one hand the large—scale magisterial life ofHenryJames, on the other the canny essay-portrait of Thoreau, and as a model of the art of narrative synthesis the more recent group—portrait of Bloomsbury. Most recently, after bringing together his essays on literary psy chology in StuffofSleep and Dreams, he has set forth anew, in Writ ing Lives, the principles ofliterary biography that have governed all his work in the genre. And he has called once again for a criticism worthy of the biographer’s art, one that recoghizes the inseparabil ity of biography and criticism. Certain that a critic is not only in volved “in his own process . but in a biographical process as well,” conscious as biographers have rarely been of both ends and means, Leon Edel has already secured a place for himselfin literary 4 Prefaces history. This book, dedicated to him and providing a chronologi cal list of his published writings since 1929, seeks to demonstrate more than anything else the elasticity of the Edelian model of bi ography, one of whose chief requirements—the fitting of form to subject—has been met, it is hoped, by all the essays included here, from Sir Rupert Hart—Davis’s “open letter” to Gavan Daws’s excur sion “beyond the laboratory brain.” The prefaces, including one by Leon Edel himself, are followed by three essays which attempt formulations: Adeline Tintner’s study of the James biography both as text and as source material for the critic; Muriel Shine’s exploration ofJames’s own work for educational theory; and Harvena Richter’s investigation ofVirginia Woolf’s biographical premises and practices. The next group of es says illustrates certain aspects of American biography: Gay Wilson Allen sums up the issues involved in the writing of his life of Emerson and John Tytell provides the background for his bio graphical study of the Beat Generation, while Viola Hopkins Win ner examines the letters of Henry Adams as a special kind of bio graphical problem. In the final group are three examples of the biographical essay, one ofLeon Edel’s favorite modes:Jean Strouse’s “partial portrait” of a tantalizingly obscure member of the James family; and two reconstructions: my own of the extraordinary life of a healer and Gavan Daws’s of a remarkable episode in Hawaii. All the authors represented here (as well as two financial sup porters who wish to remain anonymous) are Leon Edel’s former students, colleagues, and fellow biographers—celebrants together of his ripe years and mindful, every one, of the Jarnesian epigraph he chose for The Master: “Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance. GLoRIA G. FROMM North Barrington, Illinois AN OPEN LETTER FROM AN OLD ADMIRER SIR RUPERT HART-DAVIS DEAREST LEON fearing that your festschrft might be overweighted by “the new biography,” I rashly volunteered to contribute an irreverent scrap of old biography, yours and mine. When I started my own publishing business in 1946, I wrote to Theodora Bosanquet, who had been Henry James’s secretary, to ask whether I might reprint (if possible in an expanded form) her excellent pamphlet HenryJames at Work, which had been published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1924. She pleaded her age, her busyness, her disinclination to tinker with something written so long ago, and advised me instead to get in touch with a brilliant young American who had published a thesis in French on Henry James’s “dramatic years.” Clutching at this straw I dispatched a letter to Lt. J. L. Edel 02026430, Information Control Div., H.Q. U.S.F.E.T., A.P.O 757, do U.S. Army, little guessing that this would lead to one of the most rewarding and delightful friendships of my life. Needless to say no immediate answer arrived, but in a couple of months I received a cordial letter from 58 West 83rd Street, New York, and thus began a correspondence that still flourishes after forty years. Its first fruits were my publication of The Other House, with your introduction, in 1948, your edition of The Complete Plays of Henry James in 1949, and a stream of similar volumes, culminating in the five volumes of your great biography of the Master. Do you remember the fun we had planning the twelve volumes of The Complete Tales? My schoolboy son Adam, who was good at maths, counted the words, which came to two million, and the tales 6 Prefaces had to be divided, chronologically, into twelve parts, each of roughly the same length. We tried two different ways of deciding what was a tale and what a novel: first a maximum length of, I think, 15 thousand words; secondly anything that had been originally published by itself in one volume (such as In the Cage) counted as a novel. To our delight both systems produced the same result. Meanwhile came our meeting, on my first postwar visit to New York in January 1950. You invited me to an excellent French restau rant, where we had a first-rate lunch, and delightedly discovered that we were almost exactly the same age (but never forget that I am twelve days your senior), and on the same wavelength concern ing Henry James and other literary matters. On another day you gave me lunch at your miniscule apartment at 309 East 23rd Street, within rifle-shot of the huge headquarters of the United Nations, whose endless discussions you were faith fully reporting in the ill-fated evening paper PM. Your apartment was indeed one of the smallest I have ever seen: the sort in which you can’t stand up in the bathroom without taking the key out of the door. Your friendship transformed my visit from a chore into a plea sure, and you repeated your benefactions on all my subsequent vis its, entertaining me first at 150—67 Village Road, Jamaica, then at your fine apartment at 336 Central Park West, and finally in the splendors of the Century Club, where you gave a men’s dinner party in my honour. When you began to come to London you sometimes stayed with me in the flat above my office in Soho Square, and we went out and about together. In particular I remember our running into Tommy Lascelles and Siegfried Sassoon watching a cricket match on the roof of the pavilion at Lord’s, and a party at Rosamond Lehmann’s in Eaton Square, where you scored a left and right with T. S. Eliot and the American Ambassador. Sometimes you spent a weekend with me and my family at Bromsden Farm, near Henley-on-Thames. At the end of one such visit we had our Most Terrible Day. Nowadays you are an intrepid air traveller, quick as the light from Pole to Pole, but in those days you were as terrified of flying as I still am. After breakfast I drove you to Heathrow to catch a plane to New York, only to learn that the flight was delayed for some five hours.