BOOKS
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Bismarck," gave the lie to her weakness. The diary represents on the
one hand her acceptance of female anonymity - it was a perfectly
private document - and on the other her defiance of it; for it showed
such power of style and thought as to constitute, as Henry wrote
when he saw it after her death, "a new claim for the family renown."
Her other act of life was her death. When she discovered she had
cancer, she went almost gladly to meet it, the long process of "killing
herself" now being taken over by murderous cells in her breast, and
she becoming herself a philosophic, almost dispassionate witness.
Alice James's story is told completely, with the superb literary
grace and intelligence worthy of its subject, by Jean Strouse. This
remarkable biography also places its central figure in a larger social
context with a vivid foreground of nearer figures, the other members
of the James family. She is perhaps too diffident in the realm of
psychological analysis - but one can be drawn into the speculative
spider-trap too readily when one studies the complex web of James
family relationships. In any case, she has discovered a new kind of
subject and a new form for biography. In dramatizing such a life as
Alice James's, she both validates its importance, showing the
achievement even in a life outwardly inactive, and demonstrates that
personal histories of supreme interest can be made out of the
chronicles of inner being .
MILLICENT BELL
THE VITAL CENTER
EDGES OF EXTREMITY: SOME PROBLEMS OF LITERARY MODERN·
ISM. By Kingsley Widmer.
The University of Tulsa Monograph Series
Number 17. $4.00.
While the volume of writing on the classic modernists
has, by now, reached overwhelming proportions, the body of
Criticism that addresses the whole of modernism is surprisingly
small, contentious, and inconclusive. Surprising but not surprising,
when one thinks about it. There is still a lively debate about the
nature of romanticism, about the imputed rationality of the
eighteenth century, and
E.
M . W. Tillyard once published a book
