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The Life of Henry James #2
Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870-1881
Henry The Conquest of London, 1870-81
465 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
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About the author
Leon Edel
142 books7 followersJoseph Leon Edel was a American/Canadian literary critic and biographer. Edel taught English and American literature at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) from 1932 until 1934, New York University from 1953 until 1972, and at University of Hawaii at Manoa from 1972 until 1978. From 1944 to 1952, he worked as a reporter and feature writer for the left-wing New York newspapers PM and the Daily Compass.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 12, 2023
I read these five volumes in 1978 when they first came out in paperback. I am rereading them 45 years later.
When I first read them, I was trying to understand what the big deal was about Henry James. I had tried a few of novels. The style was ridiculously ornate, and the stories were about people I didn't care about doing things that I didn't care about.
The biography was a fascinating story of a very peculiar man who self-consciously built himself a world that let him do exactly what he liked doing. He enjoyed being an author. He enjoyed the sedate upper class. He enjoyed hearing all the gossip but not being the subject of it. Most importantly, he enjoyed observing and describing the complications of love and family, without being involved with them.
These many years later, I still am not capable of appreciating James the writer. As I get older, I have become less patient with writers who enjoy not getting to the point.
What I appreciate on the second reading of the biography is Edel's recreation of the wealthy ex-pat European life. James spends most of this period, 1870 to 1881, in Paris, Rome, Venice and London. He lives in a world largely separate from the common French, Italian or English people, except as butlers, cooks or cabmen. James lives in a world of wealthy Americans who are renting homes or apartments and are enjoying a life of foreign leisure.
Edel has a great chapter on the six woman who, at different times, went riding with James in the countryside outside Rome. They were all connected to various prominent Boston families. This was the world he moved in while living for over a year in Rome. He had no close Italian friends. He saw the same people when he moved to Paris or London.
When James settled in London, he did begin to become accepted in the English literary circles and started to be accepted as charming in high society. He still, however, spent much of his time with ex-pat Bostonians.
Edel argues, correctly I think, that James had a very particular idea of his role as a novelist. His job was to observe and report on what he saw. He did not interpret it through any particular theory, and he did not write with the goal of changing society. He simply tried to capture the fleeting moments exactly. He was not Dickens or Tolstoy with a cause to further. As Edel says, James had "a kind of Olympian acceptance of life as something not to be defied, or argued with, but to be coped with and mastered. Revolt, he implies, is futile."
This is the period when James becomes a success. He had some attention from his early novels, stories and journalism but his "Portrait of a Lady" made him an established writer. Edel captures James' ambition and discipline which he hid under his genteel man about town demeanor.
His complicated relationship with his successful older brother William James festers during this period. William is continually giving him advise about his writing. William told Henry that his style "ran a little more to curliness than suited the average mind.". (Good point, William.) When Wiliam visits him in Rome, he was glad to see him and glad to see him go.
Henry and his family wrote a huge number of letters, and it seems as if they were all preserved. Edel mines those letters to give a feeling of the life unfolding day to day. They also give him an invaluable insight into what they were thinking at the time.
At times, particularly once Henry settles in London, the book can feel like a list of dinners, country weekends and banquets but usually Edel keeps the story moving along.
This is a detailed and fascinating picture on a writer who created himself in a foreign land.
When I first read them, I was trying to understand what the big deal was about Henry James. I had tried a few of novels. The style was ridiculously ornate, and the stories were about people I didn't care about doing things that I didn't care about.
The biography was a fascinating story of a very peculiar man who self-consciously built himself a world that let him do exactly what he liked doing. He enjoyed being an author. He enjoyed the sedate upper class. He enjoyed hearing all the gossip but not being the subject of it. Most importantly, he enjoyed observing and describing the complications of love and family, without being involved with them.
These many years later, I still am not capable of appreciating James the writer. As I get older, I have become less patient with writers who enjoy not getting to the point.
What I appreciate on the second reading of the biography is Edel's recreation of the wealthy ex-pat European life. James spends most of this period, 1870 to 1881, in Paris, Rome, Venice and London. He lives in a world largely separate from the common French, Italian or English people, except as butlers, cooks or cabmen. James lives in a world of wealthy Americans who are renting homes or apartments and are enjoying a life of foreign leisure.
Edel has a great chapter on the six woman who, at different times, went riding with James in the countryside outside Rome. They were all connected to various prominent Boston families. This was the world he moved in while living for over a year in Rome. He had no close Italian friends. He saw the same people when he moved to Paris or London.
When James settled in London, he did begin to become accepted in the English literary circles and started to be accepted as charming in high society. He still, however, spent much of his time with ex-pat Bostonians.
Edel argues, correctly I think, that James had a very particular idea of his role as a novelist. His job was to observe and report on what he saw. He did not interpret it through any particular theory, and he did not write with the goal of changing society. He simply tried to capture the fleeting moments exactly. He was not Dickens or Tolstoy with a cause to further. As Edel says, James had "a kind of Olympian acceptance of life as something not to be defied, or argued with, but to be coped with and mastered. Revolt, he implies, is futile."
This is the period when James becomes a success. He had some attention from his early novels, stories and journalism but his "Portrait of a Lady" made him an established writer. Edel captures James' ambition and discipline which he hid under his genteel man about town demeanor.
His complicated relationship with his successful older brother William James festers during this period. William is continually giving him advise about his writing. William told Henry that his style "ran a little more to curliness than suited the average mind.". (Good point, William.) When Wiliam visits him in Rome, he was glad to see him and glad to see him go.
Henry and his family wrote a huge number of letters, and it seems as if they were all preserved. Edel mines those letters to give a feeling of the life unfolding day to day. They also give him an invaluable insight into what they were thinking at the time.
At times, particularly once Henry settles in London, the book can feel like a list of dinners, country weekends and banquets but usually Edel keeps the story moving along.
This is a detailed and fascinating picture on a writer who created himself in a foreign land.
January 6, 2009
Professional Writer
There is a certain exhilaration in seeing Henry James move, seemingly inexorably, to the success of Daisy Miller, and the even greater achievement of A Portrait of a Lady. James turned out to be a shrewd entrepreneur of his genius, earning a living on his literary labors, writing less journalism as his fiction commanded higher prices, and so becoming independent of his family at Quincy Street, Massachusetts, as he tried New York City, then Paris, and finally London.
In Paris, James did not think very much of the circle around Flaubert, which included writers like Maupaussant and Zola, and they did not embrace the American either. His deepest literary friendship was with another expatriate, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, whose realism James admired enormously. The Russian was about twenty years older than James, and so was a kind of brother-and-father substitute for the lonely bachelor living on his own.
James was a very professional writer. Mornings dedicated to writing, afternoons and evenings were invested in social visits, dinners and salons. He was not only making connections but was also gathering material for his novels. The great houses of England opened their doors to this handsome young American whose intelligent talk entertained and impressed. Edel's writing never flags in its liveliness, but yet another visit to another country house is only interesting to a certain extent, and even encounters with other literary lions, like George Eliot, give a flavor closer to gossip than epiphany.
It is the perennial problem of penning a life of a writer, particularly an author like James who, essentially, did nothing else. The life is in the writing, and what life there is outside the writing is not the most vital part of the man.
There is a certain exhilaration in seeing Henry James move, seemingly inexorably, to the success of Daisy Miller, and the even greater achievement of A Portrait of a Lady. James turned out to be a shrewd entrepreneur of his genius, earning a living on his literary labors, writing less journalism as his fiction commanded higher prices, and so becoming independent of his family at Quincy Street, Massachusetts, as he tried New York City, then Paris, and finally London.
In Paris, James did not think very much of the circle around Flaubert, which included writers like Maupaussant and Zola, and they did not embrace the American either. His deepest literary friendship was with another expatriate, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, whose realism James admired enormously. The Russian was about twenty years older than James, and so was a kind of brother-and-father substitute for the lonely bachelor living on his own.
James was a very professional writer. Mornings dedicated to writing, afternoons and evenings were invested in social visits, dinners and salons. He was not only making connections but was also gathering material for his novels. The great houses of England opened their doors to this handsome young American whose intelligent talk entertained and impressed. Edel's writing never flags in its liveliness, but yet another visit to another country house is only interesting to a certain extent, and even encounters with other literary lions, like George Eliot, give a flavor closer to gossip than epiphany.
It is the perennial problem of penning a life of a writer, particularly an author like James who, essentially, did nothing else. The life is in the writing, and what life there is outside the writing is not the most vital part of the man.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews