618
PARTISAN REVIEW
Clairmont, Byron's mistress, and who was offered them, after Miss
Clairmont died, by her niece, on the condition that he would marry
her. James jotted down the
donnee
for his new tale even before he
joined Miss Woolson in Florence. And the interaction of egotism
and love had always been a theme in his fiction, from the early
Daisy
Miller
and
Washington Square
on, in any case. But Edel's interpreta–
tion attaches all instances of it after the Woolson relationship to the
effect of one experience. Thus when J ames, at forty-nine, wrote a
story about a man of forty-nine who realizes he has been a woman's
whole life, he deduces a "crisis" in the relationship of the writer and
this friend. After her death, he is certain, James's stories such as
"The Altar of the Dead" and "The Beast in the Jungle" exhibit his
haunting sense of responsibility.
The trouble is, however, that none of this is evident in the let–
ters. None of James's to Miss Woolson has survived, and his men–
tion of her to others is appreciative without a touch of larger emotion
until her death, which he attributed to her temperamental melan–
choly, verging at times on morbidity. Of her own letters only four
exist, written in 1882 and 1883, when she had not seen him for sev–
eral years. These show her professional and personal regard for
J ames; they are the letters of an admiring friend devoted to his
genius. But to have reprinted them in an appendix to this current
volume seems special pleading and editorial presumption in an edi–
tion that has so far included the reciprocal letters of no other corre–
spondent-not Stevenson nor Howells nor William James. The new
Pleiade edition of Flaubert's letters rightly includes those from his
mistress Louise Colet, but Louise's important relation to the French
writer is obvious in his own numerous letters to her, and editor Jean
Bruneau has included letters from Flaubert's other friends as well.
As they stand, James's letters are fascinating even without such
imposed design, as I have said . The story of the fiction writer's
attempt to become a popular dramatist has both pathos and comedy
in it. How curious it is that such a mature and self-critical artist
imagined that he could deliberately create (for money, as he
declared) a kind of production he despised, and then, when it failed
to please, convince himself of the virtues of his failed play, saying,
"You can't make a sow's ear out of a silk purse." He had deliber–
ately muffled hi s own genius, coldly worked for cheap effects of
melodrama, and yet could not understand why at that very moment
