BOOKS
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trate Wharton's determination to distance herself from his achievement.
The appearance of
The Sacred Fount
leads her to declare to Sara Norton,
"(I wish so fine a title had not been attached to so ignoble a book.) ...
1 could cry over the ruins of such a talent." To William C. Brownell,
her guide in the world of letters, Wharton repeatedly expresses her
disenchantment. She closes one letter with the postscript, "Don't ask me
what 1 think of the Wings of the Dove," notes irreverently in another,
soon after meeting him again, that "Mr. James ... talks, thank heaven,
more lucidly than he writes," and complains as early as 1904 that "the
continued cry that 1 am an echo of Mr. James (whose books of the last
ten years I can't read, much as 1 delight in the man) . .. makes me feel
rather hopeless." One of the many ironies of their relationship is the fact
that James befriended Wharton just as his works seemed no longer ap–
proachable to her, even as reviewers persisted in associating hers with his
influence. What the Scribner's selection amply demonstrates, among
other things, is in fact an almost immediate and increasing critical and
creative independence, on Wharton's part, from the Jamesian example.
By the same token, to continue speaking of her work specifically in
connection with James, even on its behalf, is thus to keep Wharton
within the shadow she sought so early on to evade, and helps perpetuate
a myth that Powers's volume, with its somewhat misleading title, inad–
vertently reinforces. While she saved nearly all of the letters she received
from James, only a few of Wharton's survived the bonfires at Lamb
House; of the one hundred eighty items appearing in
Henry James and
Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915,
fully one hundred sixty-seven are from
one of the correspondents, thereby leaving the reader to infer, as best one
can, the other side of a rich, ongoing dialogue. Given its lopsided
contents, in other words, Wharton's voice is unavoidably silenced in such
a volume, where she is forced to take once again the backseat to James,
as she has so often - at least until recently - in the prevailing critical
outlook on her work. Powers, to be sure, has been associated
throughout his career far more with James's work, and it is to James that
his accomplishment here performs an obvious service, not only presenting
around one hundred thirty letters never before in print but also retrieving
nearly a dozen hitherto accessible only in Percy Lubbock's selection of
1920. His volume, therefore, would have been important even if only for
helping to correct at least this part of the arbitrary disorder in which
James's correspondence has been left by Leon Edel- here the addressee,
ironically, of a rather eye-popping dedication. Unfortunately, Powers has
paid his Master the dubious additional tribute of emulating, to some
extent, the editorial peculiarities that played such havoc with the four–
volume selection ofJames's letters assembled some years ago by Edel. A
volume this significant surely could have been spared more than half a
