476
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the death of his brother William, "my ideal Elder Brother," as he
wrote their boyhood friend T . S. Perry-"my protector, my backer,
my authority , and my pride." The fruition of James's relationship
with his brother, both competitive and complementary, is one of
the chief fascinations of this volume, for the novelist seems to have
felt closer in temperament to William as he developed , with the ma–
jor phase, a new confidence in his art. Despite William's famous im–
patience with the later style , James seems to have struck a truce with
the superiority he had always attributed to his sibling, and his letters
to William and his family, consistently the longest by far, reflect a
great partnership of spirit and respect. And it was the plan to
organize a commemorative volume that evolved into the last con–
siderable accomplishment of James's career, the remarkable autobi–
ography of which he published two books and left a third unfinished
at his death .
The completion of
The Golden Bowl
in 1904 ended the most
sedentary decade ofJames's career, a time of quiet labor and of rus–
tication in Sussex interrupted by winters in London. Yet the period
of this volume includes the great adventure ofJames's later years, his
return to America in 1904-05 after twenty years abroad.
It
had always
been one of James's great themes to reverse the direction of Ameri–
can exploration, at the moment his countrymen domesticated the
West, by sending his fictional Americans East, across the Atlantic,
to rediscover an Old World as new and unfamiliar as the New World
had been to their ancestors. Absence now turned James's imagina–
tion westward again, to satisfy an increasing desire to see the coun–
try that had enlarged unrecognizably since his parents' death and to
renew an uneasy romance with his native land. Two decades of resi–
dence in England had somehow made him a writer more profoundly
American than ever, and James in many letters before his visit seems
to reconsider his expatriation, imploring William in 1899 to let his
children "contract local saturations and attachments in respect to
their
own
great and glorious country" and writing Edith Wharton "in
favor of the American Subject . . . . Profit, be warned, by my awful
example of exile and ignorance ."
Yet America itself, as described in these letters, greeted James
as a place of shocks and unexpected ruptures . Aside from the beau–
ties of New England autumns and the renewal of old friendships ,
James seems to have been confronted by more than he had bargained
for, more than his
imaginati~e
faculties could usefully assimilate–
"the movement and obsession and complication," he wrote from
Chicago, "of all this overwhelming
Muchness
of space and distance
