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PARTISAN REVIEW
mind and energies, as James ages and time dwindles, are directed
elsewhere.
Yet the volume, coinciding as it does with the occurrence of his
greatest work, extends its rewards nonetheless to James's enlarging
phalanx of scholars and critics. And while Edel, on the whole, might
have clarified the relation of the Harvard series to the preceding
Percy Lubbock selection of 1920 - why were certain letters carried
over and others, often no less interesting, left behind? - its comple–
tion will settle the novelist's epistolary profile for at least the next
generation. James's is one of the most spacious of literary cor–
respondences; whereas the bulk of the earlier letters aroused perhaps
more curiosity than they satisfied, the contents of this volume are
surely more informative about James's unique artistic gifts and per–
sonality.
By 1898, still wounded and discouraged, James had purchased
Lamb House and retreated from London in search of tranquility and
a less distracting atmosphere. In the aftermath of his theatrical failure,
J ames put its lessons to good use; references occur throughout these
letters to the "scenic" and "dramatic" values familiar to James's readers,
representing the transfer to fiction of the principles he had absorbed
earlier in the decade. His experience in the theatre had taught him,
moreover, the perils of compromise, for a catastrophe that would
have silenced a less resilient artist elicited from James a new tenacity
apparent from many affirmations in these letters and from the in–
tractable difficulty of his later work. As he hibernated in Rye, adopt–
ing more reclusive and peculiar work habits, James complicated his
demands of himself and of his art and quietly changed the destiny of
the novel. Nor did James, from this later perspective, leave unin–
spected the work that had preceded his deepened purpose; among
other episodes, this volume covers the great project of the New York
Edition, the spring cleaning that James gave a certain number of his
works between the years 1907 and 1909, revising his earlier fiction in
the style of the major phase. An undertaking surely without prece–
dent in literary history, the New York Edition involves nothing less
than the desire to control, for posterity, the official shape and com–
plexion of one's own output. And if James, throughout his life, is
only occasionally explicit in letters about his aesthetic, it is because
he says all he could possibly say in the prefaces that accompany the
New York Edition and compose a personal manifesto, an eloquent
and searching vindication of the novelist's art. It is a defense that
J ames had occasion to repeat over the years; in many of these letters
(to Ward, to Wharton, to Shaw), and in the dignity of his response
