614
PARTISAN REVIEW
than to one ("This is the eleventh letter I have written this morn–
ing," he remarks once to his brother). For the period of the latest
volume there are five times as many as were published for the same
span in the 1920 collection of Percy Lubbock, and yet Edel's is only
a selection from a much larger mass . But the shape of the
Letters
is a
shape of absence as well as presence, as we can see by looking back
at the biography based chiefly on this material, which Edel comple–
ted in 1972.
Volume I (1974) oftheJames
Letters
showed that for James's life
up to the age of thirty-two Edel had had to rely chiefly on those writ–
ten to his immediate family when he was distant from it and to a
small number of American friends such as the Cambridge Norton
family and a boyhood chum, Thomas Sargent Perry. Were there no
other close relationships? Surely by thirty-two one has had occasion
for those discoveries of otherness, those collisions and incorporations
that make for the crystalli zation of personality, define sexual self–
hood among other things. Despite what Freud said , it is not all set–
tl ed in the family drama. But the record of the letters is bare of such
evidence, and Edel was clearly forced by his material to stress the
localized influences ofJames 's early home life, perhaps to overstress
the idea that James's history and character would have its origin in
oedipal and sibling tensions .
No evidence of any emotional experiences outside the family
exists, however, except, perhaps, for his declared feeling for his
cousin Minny Temple, whose death when he was twenty-seven and
she was twenty-four he call ed the end of his youth. Some of her gay,
brave , affectionate but not in the least sentimental letters to him sur–
vive, but none of his to her, and in the letters written
about
her after
her death and in his autobiographic
Notes oj a Son and Brother
years
later she is already turned into the pearl and coral of myth that
would emerge as Milly Theale, heroine of
The Wings oj the Dove.
The
reality
of his feelings eludes us. The epistolary record is evasive, too,
concerning another experience mythicized long afterwards in
James's memoirs, his response to the major public experience of his
generation, the Civil War. No letters refer to the "obscure hurt " he
claimed, in that later time, to have suffered shortly after the guns
went off at Fort Sumter. Was it on ly a justification for nonparticipa–
tion thought up afterwards, as Edel suggests? Did he feel guilt for
not sharing the disastrous battle experiences of his two younger
brothers? The letters do not enlighten.
