630
PARTISAN REVIEW
Stout choose to name his detective Nero Wolfe? What is the signi–
ficance of
The Professor's House
to Willa Cather, since that curi–
ous novel is informed by a deep depression not entirely accounted
for in the fiction itself? Edel is at his best when on the trail to an
answer. One senses the enormously thorough though lightly
worn scholarship, the bold marshaling of factual detaiL Above
all, one teels his pleasure in the chase after psychological truth.
The hunt ends when the literary text is stripped away to re–
veal "what literature expresses of the human being who creates
it." That is, Edel's procedure involves the concept of the text hid–
ing psychic reality like a mask. Moreover, the unmasking of the
work in order to arrive at the personal reality of the author is not
entirely without conflict. When Edel defends "literary psychol–
ogy," his prose assumes a tone either self-justificatory or, occa–
sionally, messianic. Certainly, there is a substantial body of crit–
ical opinion opposed to exposing the clay feet of any artist, and
much of this opposition is directed toward any scrutiny of liter–
ature informed by psychoanalytic insight. Yet why, one wonders,
is Edel trying to convince the unconvinceable? While his essays
themselves, sound in scholarship and commonsensical in psy–
chology, are his best argument against narrow-mindedness, his
description of what he is doing is questionable.
Were he to wonder what is the unconscious meaning of this
act of unmasking that it requires such defensive justification and
inaccurate description, Edel would turn to biographical evidence,
memoirs, letters, and the entire canon of a subject's work for evi–
dence of his subject's "unconscious myth." Along the way, he
would pose other questions about the choice of various authors
for study, the meaning of the long immersion in James out of
which the admirable biography emerged, and the meaning of
this sort of inquiry itself.
Such questions lead us away from a discussion of literary
psychology to its seductively gratifying practice where we, too,
become detectives. Edel surely avoids theoretical explanations be–
cause he knows how pleasurably involved his audience becomes
in the detective's pursuit of mystery. Indeed, readable, lucid,
with his knack of asking the intriguing question, Edel appeals to
the whodunit reader in each of us.
Nevertheless, Edel makes some claims for his literary psy–
chology that ought to be examined. He distinguishes, rather un-
