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PARTISAN REVIEW
familiar letter existed as a volatile discursive mode elaborating itself into
different forms . To writers like Richardson and Rousseau the letter was
suddenly a privileged way of speaking, a subversion of the generality of
classical language . Unlike the letter Cicero and St. Jerome wrote, and then
Abelard,
this
letter now had access to the full range of human discourse:
colloquial expression , formal rhetoric, any topic , any tone ; and it was
presumably closed in its circuit, it was heart to heart. In the intimate bosom of
its august confidence, one could tell the truth that could not be told in the
salon , one could express desire without the fear of an imminent embrace , one
could talk about the illicit with composure. Thus the letter overcame in a
single bound ofwords newly formed sets of social and moral barriers between
the classes , between the sexes . It spoke out of alienation, it made distance
presence , and at length , one suspects, the letter became so cozily aligned with
loneliness that separation itself became a value , the occasion and justification
for writing letters .
None of these assumptions occur inJames's correspondence . His letters
are not a refuge from the restrictions of the social world , but rather an
extension of that world , another of its functions . The language of even his
most spontaneous letters is never innocent. Victorian propriety governs the
play of his epistolary style and shields from us the sweating desperate soul
Rousseau would have bared . So it is that the large and dramatic decisions that
structureJames 's life in the period 1843-1883 are not openly
con~idered
in his
letters. For example , in Volume I, the whole flow of his life is toward a single
utterance in 1875 : " I take possession of the old world-I inhale it-I appro–
priate it! " But what did this choice signify and how did it articulate itself
throughJames 'smany-sided reflection? In his early letters home (particularly
in those to his parents) ,James is very careful not to impugn his nationality or
make invidious comparisons when describing the richness of his European
experience . At times, however, the sense of what he had left behind in
America, of what was America in him, poignantly emerges . In the Ducal
Palace he sits dreaming before Veronese and Tintoretto : .. But I feel as if I
might sit there forever (as I sat there a long time this morning) and only feel
more and more my inexorable Yankeehood ." In Volume I we see clearly
enough what attracted James in Europe-the brilliance of its surfaces, the
complication of its perspectives , but only rarely do we hear the murmur of
James's inexorable Yankeehood. He is guarded in these letters, often opaque,
and they are finallydisappointing in what the reveal of the young artist whose
cold Puritan bones were obviously cooking in warm Italy . The young James is
of course eager to demonstrate the good Europe is doing him. He was on a
prolonged Grand Tour, and his parents were somewhat reluctantly footing
the bill. Thus, Ruskin in hand , James appreciates his cultural heritage in
