362
PARTISAN REVIEW
the production of evidences about
his
life. Of both his work and his life
it is difficult, therefore, for the general reader to get an over-all view.
The materials are, in a sense, there. But Matthiessen's
James Family
runs to a discouraging seven hundred pages; and not every man can
afford the New York edition of James's works: even if he can he still
has by no means all of James or perhaps even all of the best; "Why," as
Mr. Dupee asks, "did [James] so underrate his earlier work as to omit
Washington Square
and
The Europeans,
while giving two fat volumes
to
The Tragic Muse .
..."
And whatever motives may control the re–
printing of the early unrevised texts of James's work, it is certainly not
a desire to help readers understand James's history as a writer.
Moreover, the evidences for both James's work and his life are,
almost uniquely, a mass of minute particulars; his famous "mastery
over, his baffling escape from, Ideas" makes
him
a writer extremely dif–
ficult for a reader to find his way about in at first. There are few gen–
eral propositions about his work to fix on, even in a preliminary way,
and most of what there are (The International Theme, etc.) do very
little to help a beginner. Much the same thing
is
true of his life. James's
was a life of sensibility, of what Mr. Dupee well calls "a feeling for the
limits of life"; in that kind, like his novels, it was full of tremendous
events. But he was, from early childhood, almost as masterful at escap–
ing events in the ordinary sense as at escaping Ideas. "Of hair-breadth
scapes i' the imminent deadly breach" there is a really remarkable de–
ficiency in
his
life. In desperation we clutch at that accident with the
rural, rusty and quasi-extemporized old fire engine and make more of
it, as both Matthiessen and Mr. Dupee have pointed out, than the facts
will justify. In short we have needed, even more in James's case than in
most, a succinct and reliable account of James's life and works, and this
Mr. Dupee has given us.
He knows, himself, all the minute particulars of James's work and
of his life, but he never loses either himself or us in them. What he
gives us is a summary of these things. That summary has the one neces–
sary virtue for this kind of book, a respect for the commonplace: Mr.
Dupee never imposes on us conclusions he has come to by assuming
some more or less arbitrary theory of society or psychology, never neg–
lects the immediate and sensible conclusion for the tricky and sensational
one, never wanders afield into the brilliant details of James's work
to
the neglect of the main lines of the book he is summarizing. This does
not mean he is obvious and dull; it takes skill to
be
as sensible and
inclusive as are, for example, the following observations on the vext
question of James's feelings about Minny Temple and his whole
attitude toward love and marriage:
