Henry James: A Life

One of the best literary biographies that I know of in existence, period. James was nothing if not a highly sensitive observer and experiencer of old Europe, and Edel understands and shares this aspect of the expatriate's rapture. I also enjoyed reading James' short story The Passionate Pilgrim this year about a young man who goes to England from America and falls in love with the aged patina of English architecture, old taverns, country houses, and Oxford quads and lawns:

" It's well there should be such places, shaped in the interest of factitious needs, invented to minister to the book-begotten longing for a medium in which one may dream unwaked and believe unconfuted; to foster the sweet illusion that all's well in a world where so show more much is so damnable, all right and rounded, smooth and fair, in this sphere of the rough and ragged, the pitiful unachieved especially, and the dreadful uncommenced. The world's made--work's over. Now for leisure! England's safe--now for Theocritus and Horace, for lawn and sky! "

These days very few university campuses seem to be full of scholars lounging on the lawn chatting about poetry, but rather are places of grimly aspiring meritocrats with their eyes on the dollar.

Oxford again: "The plain perpendicular of the so mildly conventual fronts, masking blest seraglios of culture and leisure, irritates the imagination scarce less than the harem-walls of Eastern towns. Within their arching portals, however, you discover more sacred and sunless courts, and the dark verdure soothing and cooling to bookish eyes. The grey-green quadrangles stand for ever open with a trustful hospitality. The seat of the humanities is stronger in her own good manners than in a marshalled host of wardens and beadles. "

When James wrote this short story, as Leon Edel tells us in his biography, he was back in the US after some time in England and Italy and felt like he was disinherited of the great European treasure house of culture and history. Interesting to transpose Australians like Peter Porter and Clive James into the place of James and his characters. Australians have often been passionate pilgrims to European cathedrals and manor houses, museums and galleries, piazzas and ruins. Australians too have sometimes felt dispossessed of European culture and history on their southern continent.

Interestingly James wrote the Passionate Pilgrim just 8 years after Thoreau had died just around the corner from where James was living. Henry James literary and cultural sensibility was superb, but he remained unresponsive to the inspiring ecology of New England. Thankfully this world is big enough for both a Henry James and a Henry Thoreau, and readers are richer for having both.

The biography I read in its two volume guise (both together make 1800 pages!). I often felt I empathised with James as he cared for his parents, and then experienced their passing away, and later his wanting to find an anchorage point in the world, and moving into a house in the country in Rhye. James missed his physically contiguity with the flux of urban life and drama as he departed London - and again I empathise with this having felt the thrill of arriving in an apartment in Paris years ago and feeling suddenly part of the world in a way that was thrilling. show less

A somewhat dated new critic style of biography (condensed); very American 60s and 70s with much new material discovered and out since that time. A good start to learn about James, though, and considered a touchstone of literary biography.