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ition of "the unconscious" (Ozick), this "castrating" (Forster), a deep
loneliness and "sacred terror" linked to the deaths of a series of females
James had always kept at a cruel distance: Constance Fenimore Wool–
son and Alice James mentioned in
Fame
&
Folly,
to whom
Quarrel
&
Quandary
adds James's cousin Minny Temple. That James's tubercular
cousin, spurned by the novelist, should have succumbed to still
"another winter in Pelham," a place name shared by the very New York
neighborhood where Cynthia Ozick, soon to see herself a victim of (the
cult of) Henry James, grew up, is a touch suggestive of just how
"through-composed" these essays, in their entirety, appear to be. But, of
course, this whole ambivalent reality of James's unwitting premonition
of the unconscious has been "repressed," rendered invisible, as it were,
to his readers by the "moral radiance" emanating from Leon Edel's
compelling biography of the author as exemplary "civilizer." Whereby
Edel the biographer joins the catalogue of those benign betrayers–
translators of Kafka, friends of Job, adapters of Anne Frank-of the all
but unspeakable truths we have already encountered.
One measure of the distance traveled since
Art
&
Ardor
is a finely
etched appreciation of Gertrude Stein, "copycat Cubist" and modernist
"icon." The language of icons is, of course, the idiom of idolatry, and
might, in the earlier volume, have been made to resonate with Moloch
and the "national-aesthetic" regimes of World War
II.
Not so in
Quar–
rel
&
Quandary.
The one reference to the genocide is a note of wonder
at how these "two Jewish women of Montparnasse [Stein and Alice B.
Toklas] were somehow left unmolested during the War."
The question, it turns out, has a remarkable answer, though it has not
been pursued in the present volume, where the matter of the engulfment
of the Jews seems a shade less pressing than that of the neutralization of
art itself. Gertrude Stein escaped persecution in part because she offered
her services as a mouthpiece for Petain's regime. Pound may have
thought Mussolini was Thomas Jefferson
redivivus,
but in
I942
Stein
was comparing Petain to another American hero.
In
her preface to a
proposed edition of Petain's wartime speeches, translated by Stein her–
self, she tells us that Petain "is very like George Washington because he
too is first in war first in peace and first in the hearts of his country–
men." Like Washington, he "has given them courage in their darkest
moment held them together through their times of desperation and has
always told them the truth and in telling them the truth has made them
realize that the truth would set them free." More surprisingly still, the
marechal
is said to have defended "his armistice as he had defended Ver–
dun." Stein's Petain translations were, for contingent reasons, never
