BOOKS
613
A
HYPOTHETICAL LIFE
HENRY JAMES LETTERS. VOLUME III (1883-1895). Edited
by
Leon
Edel.
Harvard University Press. $20.00.
Collections of letters give queer shapes to the histories of
their writers . Early childhood does not exist, and meagerly repre–
sented are the years when the young unknown's letters were pre–
cious only to his family or lovers. Later, possession of his letters con–
fers distinction, and many are saved, but survive chancily. Some are
deliberately destroyed, particularly those that tell too much the
recipient or the sender himself considers embarrassing, while pre–
cisely the writer's later importance makes those who have held on to
earlier unbosomings consider their responsibility to protect him and
themselves from the looming biographer. There are letter savers and
letter losers, and even the treasured bundle of the former may fall
into negligent hands. And some letters are never written because the
correspondents were close enough for direct speech-the love affair
ceases to be a matter of letters when the lovers are united; marriage,
like childhood, often leaves no epistolary traces.
And yet, letters are the bedrock of biography, especially in the
case of people who lived before the telephone. The biographer seizes
eagerly upon these registers of the diurnal; even postmarks confi–
dently locate his subject upon a particular day. But more important,
letters, along with journals if they happen to exist, bring us into
earshot of the living voice prompted into utterance by the occasion
as it passed.
If
numerous, they speak a history as though one could
Scotch tape them end to end to make up one of those old-fashioned
"Lives and Letters" with a minimum of connecting matter. And
yet, how arbitrary and misleading the final pattern may be-how
coerced by the condition of the biographer's files-full here, empty
there!
So one reflects, reading the letters of Henry
J
ames edited by
biographer Leon Edel. They give great pleasure without regard to
story. They are witty and elegant commentaries on life and litera–
ture, self-presentations of the artist whose fictional "I" is a perform–
ance adjusted to each reader. Gaps in sequence are less noticeable,
too, because there are so many more letters than any ordinary per–
son can conceive of writing, though they run more often to ten pages
