Customer Reviews

Henry James: The Young Master

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This biography addresses, for the first time, what has been obvious to readers of James and biographies of James who have not been afflicted with homophobia. Because he was not flamboyant as, say, Oscar Wilde, and because he never received what homophobics see as his "condign" punishment, scholars, I think, were reluctant to have a key element of the "canon," certainly not The Master, stigmatized with this accusation. Instead, it was acceptable to allow the stigma of repressed feelings and keep James properly closeted. Lest one think that this makes Novick's book bawdy and lurid, one should know that it merely restores to James his likely, vibrant and active life. In addition, one should know that this volume, of the two, is probably the more helpful for those who need or want foundational information about not just James' upbringing but also on the sources of much that occurs in his works including thematic tendencies. I found the book most enjoyable. It is thoroughly documented with only the periodic typographical anomalies (for example Zora Thurston). Having graded "The Pupil" at a recent AP reading, I was quite interested in Novick's comments on James' very strange educational history and its influence on that particular story.

This first volume on James's life in relation to the writings brings us up to 1881 and The Portrait of a Lady. Novick can be more daring than Leon Edel was, especially about James's love life, as there are now more letters available. It's also nice not to have Edel's over-the-top psychological readings of the works and his Literary-Guild style of narration. Readers may well have overlooked this important book, as it got little press when it came out--the NY Times Book Review gave it two paragraphs in their "Books in Brief" department! But when vol. ii comes out, we will have the most balanced and readable biography of James to date.

I read this bio of my favorite author, Henry James, with much interest, but I have to admit that it just doesn't grab me. I think the problem is that Novick, who wanted to separate himself from Edel, spent too much time on tiny details of Henry's life, taken from letters and other documents that Edel did not know. Because of this, the book reads like a list of details and minor events, rather giving the reader any feel of what Henry's inner life was like. He doesn't give much coverage to the actual writings, but rather what Henry did, when he did it, where he did it, and who he did it with. Since this first volume was published, Fred Kaplan's bio of James was released, which, I feel, was much more balanced and less pointillist. Edel's is still the more interesting - while the writing style takes getting used to, if you're an assiduous reader of Henry James it won't be any problem. But if you're a real fan of Henry James, and if you're interested in his life, you'll probably want to read all three of them. Just don't choose this one first.

I must confess straight away that I have never held Henry James in much esteem since I was forced to study his works by a Leavisite professor of English literature at university in Scotland almost 40 years ago. Unfortunately, at that time Professor Leavis, with his take-it-or-leave-it list of great writers (the later Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, Conrad, George Eliot, Jane Austen etc.)had a band of followers who spread his mechanical approach to literary criticism among a certain generation. Thankfully Leavis was dumped a long time ago and students of literature can go back to enjoying as well as studying writers.

Now I've got that off my chest, let's go back to this biography which is only the first a two-volume opus and takes up over 500 pages. Readers of my age will recall that an American worshipper of James called Leon Edel wrote a five-volume biography (yes, five volumes)along with collections of his letters and edited his novels and short stories.

So, why do we need another doorstopper and is there anything new in it? Well, according to the author - who has the kind of name Vladimir Nabokov could have invented for an American academic, Sheldon M. Novick -James was a homosexual! Even if this was important (and surely it should be for those Americans who regard James as their own Jane Austen), Novick does not get much mileage out of it. He claims that James had two homosexual affairs, one in the US and the other in Paris, but provides little proof and makes little of it. None other than Edel himself reviewed this book in 1996 and convincingly ridiculed Novick's claims.

The book itself is an (over)long, (over) leisurely (over) indulgent account of James's first 35 years which consists mainly of itineraries of the same routes - New England, Old England, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany - and meetings with dinner parties with expatriate Americans. In fact, James comes over as a rather dull person, content to sponge off his father's diminishing wealth as he treads and retreads the same old paths, sometimes in pursuit of medical treatment (back bad) or sometimes meet up with friends. The reader gets no sense of James's personality (if he had any) and reading this book is like watching a dull film in a darkened cinema where you can doze off for a few minutes or hours, wake up and find that nothing has happened.

By the end of the first volume James has become a literary success story and has completed what is regarded as his masterpiece "Portrait of a Lady" but we have no idea how this has happened. The author does nothing to convey James's personality, nor his greatness as a writer. I wonder what American readers thought of it. I won't be reading the second volume.