BOOKS
The Master and Mrs. Wharton
THE LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON. Edited by R. W. B. Lewis and
Nancy
Lewis. Charles
Scribner's Sons.
$29.95.
HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON: LETTERS, 1900-1915.
Edited
by
Lyall
H. Powen. Charles
Scribner's Sons.
$29.95.
More than once, during the twelve or so years of their famous
friendship, Edith Wharton and Henry James seem to have initially
considered, only to end up backing away from, the possibility of writing
about each other's work. In April 1910, W. Morton Herton learns
from a letter included in the admirable selection by R.W.B. Lewis and
Nancy Lewis that Wharton is weighing an invitation to "write an article
on him for the Figaro. Don't you think I shld be mad to attempt it?"
Whether or not Herton agreed, she apparently thought so, for we
hear nothing further on this score until Wharton announces, over
a year later, "I have begun my article on Henry" - denoting, it
appears, an entirely different assignment, identified by the editors as a
piece, never completed and now lost, on the New York Edition.
As
it
turned out, of course, Wharton would publish her principal statements
on James only after his death. James, for his part, finds himself "conscious
of a lively
&
spontaneous disposition to really dedicate a few lucid
remarks to the mystery of your genius" when he is approached in 1907,
for a few words about her latest novel, by an unscrupulous editor
claiming to act on Wharton's own initiative. Even after the fraud is
exposed, James maintains, "I
want
to enthuse over you, I yearn to, quite
- but I must wait for the right and bright and honorable occasion for so
doing." Such an occasion wouldn't arise for another several years, his
enthusiasm by then largely occluding itself in the tangled phrasing of a
single meandering, characteristically tortuous paragraph (on
The Custom
oj the Country)
halfway through James's important late essay, "The
Younger Generation." In such mutual ambivalences and equivocations
lies one key, perhaps, to the complexity of a literary relationship much
discussed but still, over thirty-five years after Millicent Bell's pio–
neering study, often simplistically misunderstood.
The convolutions of James's later prose, to be sure, are easily
misconstrued, and one may excuse Wharton's sardonic response, in a
letter reproduced here - "After being bracketed in Henry's article with
Galsworthy and Hitchens ... I feel that my niche in the Hall of Fame is
in the most fashionable of its many mansions" - to an essay that in fact
sets her apart favorably from her younger contemporaries. A series of
