The last of Leon Edel's five volumes, "Henry James, The Master: 1901–1916," has appeared, and those who have, since the publication of the first volume in 1953, enjoyed his skilfully managed unfolding of the novelist's career may simply be assured that the climaxes of this period [are] … all properly scaled to give them their accustomed pleasures, in a prose tone which has a perceptibly, though not disproportionately, greater touch of magniloquence than that of earlier volumes. There is not much to startle anyone—Edel has fewer unexpected observations to offer than are to be found in the fourth volume…. The only element in the fifth volume which might provoke uneasiness is the use of passages from James's deathbed dictation which associate him with Napoleonic power, but I don't feel these are inappropriately handled; Edel had laid the ground for such fantasies in his first volume. (pp. 621-22)

The work as a whole may now be described as the most engrossing narrative about a writer's life in recent years. It is tempting to say, "about a writer's writings," for this is what most of all the book is about, but it is also suffused with the detail of a life. Edel's ease and grace in subduing his mountain of material to narrative use is remarkable, and consorts oddly with his incapacity to make convincing generalizations which relate his writer to other writers. The work is not one of intellectual distinction. It doesn't in this respect even approach Ellmann's "James Joyce"; it offers no sense of a mind dealing with a period or critical issues or a range of other writers—Edel's juxtapositions of James with Conrad or Shaw or Kipling or Proust are largely adjectival, and do not issue in judgment. Yet it makes an almost consistently interesting story, more so, I feel, in the first (1843–1870) and fourth (1895–1901) volumes than in the other three, for in these two Edel does his most imaginative reconstruction in relating the writings to each other and their producer…. (p. 622)

Edel's distinction lies in what he says constituted his reward, "the imagination of form and structure." I won't pretend to examine his technique fully, but some description of it is essential. He characterizes it as in part "retrospective," and in practice this means that it is boldly prospective as well; that in each of the 250 or so titled sections of his work he feels free to range forward and back in time to deal with the bearing or weight of the particular fact, person, set of relations, piece of fiction, journey, or whatever the focus may be, and that each of the sections aims at a miniature completeness of statement, a self-sufficient lucidity. As the matter of the particular section comes stage center it is addressed in the light of Edel's unmatched apprehension of its significance in the whole vast body of material. It may be preceded or followed by a section which includes, extends, or contracts its temporal span. For this use of transparent vignettes a price must be paid in leveled diction—since each section must be immediately comprehensible—and there is no place for detailed argument. Assertions are reinforced through repetition and the cumulation of bits of evidence, but their origin lies in the assumption of a total authority. Playing against the elastic range of the sections is the sharp chronological division of the thirty-three "books" into which the five volumes are divided. The titles given the sections and books are sometimes bare indicators, more frequently evocative chimes ringing through the stations of the life, James's titles, phrases from letters, and so on.

Edel's attempt to secure a sense of the passage of time is quite successful, although it depends rather more on our aroused expectation of the coming production of works we have prized and lived into than on the presentation of an historical epoch…. But this is consonant with the tone of the whole enterprise, the life is made to answer to what it led to; it is becoming a work of art which has beginnings which suggest its end, an end which suggests its beginnings…. Edel has it all in mind, and since he has he knows how to deploy the successive parts to recreate the whole. This may sound like the method of the phenomenological critic, who finds a master pattern in the presented surface, but there is in fact no resemblance, since Edel goes "behind" any such paradigm.

What lies behind is a story of which James is unconscious, Edel conscious. The term "family romance" is employed by Freud to designate the story we tell ourselves about mother and father. I will borrow it for a derived use: the story Edel tells himself and us about the cast of characters which James is unconsciously manipulating and rearranging in his fictions, his mother, his father, his brother William, himself, and such figures in his later life as he superimposes on members of the earlier cast, figures such as Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson. It must be noted that an actual psychoanalytic account would depend on what Edel can't supply and doesn't even seem to miss, those particular passages in infancy which, consolidated in adolescence, are thought to determine character…. In saying that Edel has deprived the psychic evidence he uses of its basis in a conception of character, I make a grave charge, which must be more fully explained. (pp. 623-25)

A quotation from the "Introduction" to the fourth volume of Edel's work, "The Treacherous Years: 1895–1901," illustrates a fundamental incapacity to apprehend the meaning of the unconscious on the part of a scholar who is clearly relying on a use of unconscious material. Speaking of an "inescapable use of the buried materials of life and experience to which the artist constantly returns," Edel says:

I refer to the ways in which an artist fashions the myth by which he lives. The physical habits of the creative personality, his "sex life" or his bowel movements, belong to the "functioning" being and do not reliably distinguish him from his fellow humans. What is characteristic is emotional life and the way in which the emotions dictate—other elements and mysterious forces aiding—the exercise of the demonstrative and symbol-making imagination.

It is staggering, intellectually scandalous, to find Edel undertaking such a dissociation. We must all go through what is at the time a taxing struggle to come to terms with our bowel movements, and most of us do so without marked scars, and we must all likewise encounter our own sexual impulses, though we hardly think of ourselves as choosing what to do with them. But to go on to say that these aspects of our development are disjoined from something called "emotional life" and are not of a piece with the rest of our emotional endowment is to make a two-story Henry James—to reveal a desire to cut off a discrete portion of the psyche for literary study, as if it could be dissevered without being mangled. If James is not at bottom a member of our genus he becomes simply that queer monster, the artist, the iconography of whose imagination becomes a self-sufficient account of him. Edel says that James himself deplored biography except as a "quest of imaginative experience" and describes James's own works at one point as "a kind of supreme biography." What this all comes to must be bluntly put: Edel is not to be trusted with evidence about the psyche.

The five volumes testify to this point in a pervasive way by their persistent avoidance of direct connections between James's formal achievement and his emotional disposition. The influence of Edel's family romance on James's choice of themes, subjects, characters, and events is endlessly documented, yet the influence of James's psyche on the immediate prose surface is barely touched upon…. (pp. 625-26)

This brings us to what Edel does attempt to supply as public or external context for his subject; even if we grant that he has cut James off from his own most intimate relation to his sentences, and cut him off from the culture which surrounded him, has he not effectually placed him in a literary tradition? Unfortunately, what Edel says on these matters doesn't provide any such assurance. (p. 627)

Edel's chief contentions about James's place in literary tradition are that he looks back to Balzac, whom James characterizes as "father of us all," and that he becomes an early modernist in "The Ambassadors." Edel affirms the first of these in the course of a discussion of James's turn to scenic and dramatic principles of construction in the period following the failure of "Guy Domville." "In his earlier novels," he writes, "James had emulated the richness of Balzac by creating a large background and describing an entire setting." This might conceivably apply to one novel, "The Bostonians," of which Edel has a sharply deprecatory view; in other cases James's works are so marginally and thinly social and political, whatever their other merits, that one cannot easily associate them with Balzac. But as usual the point is not argued within the Edel work. Nor is the second contention, which makes James an immediate predecessor of modernism. I have doubts about the second proposition as well, but the point I wish to make about both is that within the large framework of Edel's work they are both subordinate to his family romance, and do not open out to a discussion of Henry James's place in the literature of the periods involved.

We are driven back then to darkest James, the region which for Edel is most securely illumined. Edel's observations about the changes in the way in which James recorded "imaginative experience" are often, especially in the fourth volume, convincing, but they are assimilated to the struggle with the persons of the family romance as if the novelist were literally recreating himself as well as the character of his fiction. To sum it up, Edel's narrative becomes the analogue of a Jamesian fiction whose plot is the sequence of his contentions with the persons of the family romance, and in which James acts by producing his fictions—his responses to the inward demand for "self-analysis." In this narrative James loses that character which the psychoanalyst would assume that he had acquired in infancy, and consolidated in adolescence. This is the reason I have avoided the term "biography" in referring to Edel's work. The central figure has been spirited away, and the succession of his imaginative productions, letters and all, thrown up in a fountain of imaginative assertion, are standing in for that central figure. We may even say that since the psychic documentation is of an order which precludes comparison with other men, and hence with other writers, it is formally impossible, on the grounds Edel employs in this work, to give James a place in literary history. Edel's work of art has no essential ties to other possible patterns of human behavior or to the cultural scene of which James was a part. It appears that between the single shivering Pamela self of Edel's putative subject, the cowering or assertive ego, and the wide world in which marriages, ideas, politics, armchairs, and persons freely and messily mingle there need be no commerce which counts; art lies between and screens Edel and his subject from both the self and the world. Edel's sterilized Freudianism cannot relate James to any large social, cultural, or literary reality; all it can do is tie James's writings to each other. No standpoint from which Edel can make independent judgments remains; he is subdued to his subject's conception of his "imaginative experience" and becomes a commentator on that "supreme biography."

Why then are we an audience, and why is this narrative "engrossing"? It is assimilated to James's conscious romance with "mon bon," his inexhaustible sensibility, and, Edel's inexhaustible facticity notwithstanding, the career is subdued, the very family romance is subdued, to James's works. And that is what draws me, and has drawn so many. (pp. 628-29)