730
PARTISAN REVIEW
letters disclosed by Lyall H. Powers makes clear James's enjoyment
(contrary to Wharton's recollections in
A Backward Glance)
of
The
Custom of the Country,
which he turns out to have admired no less
highly, it seems, than the novel usually considered her most "Jame–
sian,"
The Reef
His famous epistolary analysis of that novel - a
letter so often taken as indicating a capacity to appreciate, or even to
comprehend, fiction composed along the lines only ofJames's own–
appears in a fresh perspective when reread, as it now can be for the
first time, in the context of the entire sequence. Another hitherto
unpublished letter amplifies the praise that James expressed on other
occasions for
Ethan Frome,
"so beautifully done, so
sustenu,
such a feat
of artistic and imaginative projection." Already in 1904, before
The
House ofMirth,
James is following Wharton's development with great
interest; her third collection of stories"confirmed me so in my strong
sense of your wise and witty art
&
your real practice of the Mystery";
regarding a later collection, at a time when he is pleading to other
writers among his friends an inability to read any new fiction at all,
James writes, "Beseech you to kindly send me Tales of Men [and
Ghosts]. I want so awfully to see how you do it." Wharton may have
continued saluting him as "Cher Ma1tre," but James, after his early letters
of experienced advice and encouragement, quickly comes to address her
more as a full equal and colleague than as the imitative disciple so many
critics, at the time and later, complained of so often. Take, for example,
the remarkable letter ofJanuary 7, 1908, in which James readily turns
over to Wharton, as the
donnee
for a possible story, an anecdote shared
with her some time earlier, rehearsing at considerable length certain
technical possibilities and concluding, "Ah, how I
understand
the neces–
sity for you of a Fellow-critic!" If these letters are any indication, Whar–
ton's works consistently escape, for the most part, the constraining for–
mal expectations that James brought to bear on novels by some of his
other acquaintances at the time. Doctrinaire and unwavering as he could
appear on the subject of craft, James seems in fact to have enjoyed with
Wharton a rare sense of reciprocity and mutual comprehension. One of
the many disruptions in her private life leads him to declare, "For 'us,'
& for our genius the act of attestation of the life of the mind and the play
of that genius is by itself a sovereign help, a condition indispensable."
And one registers the gratefulness with which James predicts, as he
assesses yet another domestic complication, that "you will see and feel
what I mean - being about the only person who ever does, in general."
At some point", however, James's authority in matters of form, en–
abling as it must have been at first, obviously being to discomfort the
younger writer struggling to arrive at and explore her own voice. Her
own letters, preceding the establishment of their friendship, already illus-
