Henry James: A Life in Letters. Edited by Philip Horne. Penguin Press. 668pp. £25 in UK
Henry James was not only the greatest novelist in the English language, but also the greatest letter writer. Indeed, James's letters - Philip Horne estimates that he wrote some 40,000 in his lifetime - may be considered a part of his artistic oeuvre, along with the criticism and the great series of prefaces he composed late in life for the New York edition of his novels, which together form an intricate and profound statement of his aesthetic creed. Philip Horne puts it well and with characteristic elegance when he declares that he has compiled this volume "in the belief that James's letters are among his works; that many of them are in themselves major works or contain major writing; and that a thoughtfully presented selection can constitute an involving narrative - a narrative of passionate creation."
It is possible to conceive of James's entire life as just that - a narrative of passionate creation. If he lived in order to write, he also wrote in order to live, in the fullest sense. Critics and biographers have taken it that the impassioned speech delivered by Lambert Strether to Little Bilham in The Ambassadors - "Do what you like so long as you don't make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!" - is a cry direct from the heart of an author who in his late years had come to the terrible realisation that he had sacrificed too much of himself on the altar of art; that he had, as Flaubert's mother said of her logomaniacal son, "thrown away his life in a mania for sentences". Yet as these letters attest, Henry James did pay as best he could his debt to life, even if part of the payment was made by proxy - that is, through his art. In a letter written only months before his death to H.G. Wells, who had launched a wounding attack on James's approach to life and letters in his book, Boon, James wrote that "for myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that". Art, he declared in the same letter, "makes life", by which he may be taken to mean that art puts a shape on what might otherwise be the incoherence of mere existing, that state in which, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, we have the experience but miss the significance. James was a passionate observer of the passing scene, an immensely shrewd and subtle-minded reader of human behaviour. Yet to say that art makes life is not the same as saying that art is life. He was well aware of the separation that can exist between, again to quote Eliot, the person who suffers and the artist who creates. Philip Horne draws attention to a letter in 1877 in which for his sister Alice's amusement James gives an account of a dinner party he attended where he was able to observe Robert Browning, then at the height of his fame. The novelist was not impressed by the "chattering and self-complacent" poet, whose "shrill interruptingness" shocked the younger man with its vulgarity. "But evidently there are 2 Brownings," James wrote, " - an esoteric & an exoteric. The former never peeps out in society, & the latter hasn't a ray of suggestion of Men & Women."
There was only one Henry James; insofar as it is possible, the man and the artist were, pace Eliot, of a piece. There are those, usually not his readers, who think of James as a kind of literary great-aunt, impossibly prissy and altogether too exquisite to dabble in the mess and confusion of everyday life; what Wells had said of James's characters he would probably also have said of the author: "These people...never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never shout at an election or perspire at poker..." Evidently Wells had not read, or had not read closely enough, such passages as that in The Portrait of a Lady between Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond when with the silky finesse of a Renaissance villain Osmond warns his wife how he will destroy her life if she defies him by going to see her dying benefactor Ralph Touchett - there's war for you - or in the same novel the final encounter between Isabel and Casper Goodwood, in which lust and love and the impossibility of fulfilment of either mingle to electrifying effect. James knew what life is, and expressed that knowledge with infinitely more passion and insight than a second-rather such as Wells could ever have hoped to manage. These letters bulge with that passionate sense of life and life's possibilities. They are robust, funny, dignified, gossipy, informative, entertaining and, above all, beautifully written. His correspondents range from his widowed mother - "Dearest mammy" - his brother, the philosopher William James, with whom Henry maintained a prickly but genuinely loving relationship, through various fellow writers, including, perhaps surprisingly, Robert Louis Stevenson - James's first impression of him was that he was "a great deal (in an inoffensive way) of a poseur", while RLS considered James "no out-of-doors, stand-up man whatever", though in time they grew extremely fond of each other - and very many grandees, particularly society ladies d'un certain age. There is much self-mockery - Philip Horne rightly points to an extraordinary 1907 dialogue letter which brilliantly parodies the style of the great, "late" novels such as The Golden Bowl - a relentless defence of his aesthetic beliefs, and a scorching honesty in assessing the work of others, even when he is writing to the authors themselves.
But this is more than merely a collection of letters; it is what its title announces, a Life of the writer, and as such it rivals many of the straightforward biographies, even Edel's five-volume monument. Philip Horne's method is to preface each letter with an explanatory note, identifying the recipient and sketching the circumstances in which the letter was written. There are also copious footnotes - and they really are footnotes, printed at the bottom of the relevant page and not bundled away at the back of the book, as is the usual way these days; Penguin Press, not noted as a scholarly publisher, is to be congratulated on this reversion to an older and better system and, in general, on the meticulously accurate and handsome production of the book, in which it has done its author and editor proud. Half of the 296 letters here are published for the first time, which fact alone would make the book invaluable. What Horne says of the forthcoming 30-volume edition of the Complete Letters might be said equally of his own more modest yet formidable achievement:
Even those who will not leap to devour this massive edition should welcome it for the sake of the mass of fascinating material, and the quantity of good writing, it will make available, significantly changing our understanding of James, and his place in the . . . literary cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It is fitting to close with a testament from a James - not Henry, this time, but William. Late in life Henry was asked to select for an anthology a passage from his brother's work. He chose the essay "Is Life Worth Living?", which concludes with a declaration that perfectly expresses the novelist's own deepest convictions: "These then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
Henry James in 1913, from the portrait by John Singer Sargent, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London