Volume 40, Number 3 · January 28, 1993
The Master at War
By John Bayley
Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography
by Fred Kaplan
Morrow, 620 pp., $25.00
Henry James's awareness of things had an unexpected military streak. No professional soldier can afford illusions about his life and its duties and James certainly had none; but he would have seen the point of Marshal Lyautey's claim that gaiety was needed to be a good officer. It is probably also needed to be a good biographer, certainly a good biographer of James; and Fred Kaplan is fortunate to possess in large measure the ebullience esteemed so highly by the French general. Edel's great biography was not lacking in it either; but Edel allowed himself a certain nonmilitary indulgence in prosy abstraction and psychological theorizing. Kaplan's gaiety takes him straight into battle, as it were, and riding his narration like a spirited horse.
Review, 3435 words
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