Volume 31, Number 12 · July 19, 1984
Notes of a Friend and Brother
By Millicent Bell
Henry James Letters Volume 4: 1895–1916
edited by Leon Edel
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 835 pp., $30.00
The popular image of the aging Henry James was described by Hugh Walpole: 'a sort of stuffed waxwork from whose mouth a stream of coloured sentences, like winding rolls of green and pink paper, are forever issuing.' There is James asking a passer-by for road directions—in the style of The Golden Bowl. Or remarking after the departure of some female visitors, 'One of the wantons had a certain cadaverous grace.' Or even at the moment when he suffered a stroke, murmuring as he fell to the ground, 'So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing!' The caricature libels the complex person. But as he grew older, as more and more stories and novels issued from him, James did become his words, his writing. The waxwork figure who moved among the living, among tables and hairs and what's for dinner and who's for tennis or for sex, lived by perception and by language. 'I am,' he said to Henry Adams in 1914, 'that queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility.'
Review, 2747 words
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