Mr. Edel's biography of the young Henry James ["Henry James: The Untried Years"] is imposing…. The very notion of devoting so many pages to a period before James had produced a single important work is itself a measure of Mr. Edel's aspiration…. Zealously, but with intelligence and grace, he sets the record straight: he picks up all the "stitches" which James in his memoirs "dropped for worry-saving"—disposes of rash speculation as to the nature of the injury which James suffered at the age of eighteen—marshals the evidence bearing on James's affection for his cousin Minny Temple—unearths James's first short story. The only major fault in this phase of the book, though a strange one in a work that rightfully assumes so authoritative an air, has to do with the annotation: the notes are so sketchy and so badly presented as to make it almost impossible to discover the basis for many particular statements in the text.

The theme of "Henry James: The Untried Years" is plainly stated and elaborately developed. "Above all," says Mr. Edel, "it is … necessary to dispel the belief that there was, so to speak, no 'life' behind the Art of Henry James, that his was a purely cerebrating genius." Mr. Edel sets out to make the "life" as lively as he can. Not that he strains the evidence unduly: in the important cruxes he shows a fine impartiality…. Perhaps taking his cue from the undoubted fact that the very young James was often a romantic writer, Mr. Edel adopts what can only be called a romantic—if not, indeed, a melodramatic—view of him, filtered through the lenses of a modern psychology. The argument runs something like this: Beneath the traditionally accepted "wholesomeness" of the James family lay "a parental tug-and-pull upon the emotions of their offspring that was alike irrational and anxiety-provoking." Here Henry first conceived the "perversely ambiguous world" which was to preoccupy him. Here also, influenced chiefly by the relation between his mother and father, he came to think of love as deadly, as a commitment in which one participant (usually the woman) battened upon the other. Here, finally, he was forced into competition with his overwhelmingly ingenious brother William. And this was the source of his art: unable to meet this and other challenges on the plane of overt action, he cultivated an apparent passivity that masked an imaginative activity. The art of Henry James, though not simply "compensatory" in the sense of being escapist, was fundamentally therapeutic in origin.

This view is romantic in the sense that it emphasizes an emotional drama at the expense of intellectual biography. That the drama is presented in a rather highly colored version is not of great moment. One must allow for the devices of strategic emphasis. Moreover, in this connection Mr. Edel is frankly speculative, drawing heavily upon the stories and novels, reading between the lines of the memoirs, adducing a number of very interesting examples of unconscious wordplay…. It is worth remarking, however, that Mr. Edel's vivid picture has the defects of its qualities. The permanent significance of James—and surely the aspect of James with which the later volumes of this biography will increasingly be forced to deal—does lie in his "cerebrating genius." Of that genius—its nature, its affinities, its results—this book has relatively little to say, and nothing that is very searching or new. (pp. 128-30)