The Lesson of the Master

Henry James' biographer teaches the secrets of his craft

It is 10 o'clock of a sleepy August morning at Dartmouth. The central green, scene of continuous softball games throughout the day, is still quiet. But in 122 Silsby Hall, a short, wiry professor --with a dapper little mustache and the florid gestures of a born talker--is holding forth with enthusiasm. "I remember how frightened I was when I was first given access to Henry James' papers," he says. "They were in a basement room in Harvard's Widener Library--four tables piled high with boxes, each box containing 250 to 500 letters, plus trunks full of notebooks that had never been opened since James' death. I just stood there in a panic. Where should I start?"

The storyteller is Leon Edel, 69, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his monumental biography of Henry James (2,152 pages in five volumes). He has also edited two volumes in a series of James' letters as well as his collected plays. A longtime (1949-72) professor at New York University, where he held the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters, Edel is now teaching in a post-retirement position at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. But he journeyed to Dartmouth for the summer session, a regular academic term in the college's new full-year calendar, for a special purpose: to inaugurate the Vernon Visiting Professorship of Biography, the only chair in the country devoted exclusively to biography. TIME Education Editor Annalyn Swan attended the class and reported:

Edel's offering is called, broadly, "Understanding Biography." But the two-hour class each Tuesday and Thursday morning is really the occasion for an extemporaneous review of Edel's own discoveries. "Any academic can set up his shingle and be a literary critic," says Edel to his T-shirted students. "But biography is more difficult; it involves vast archives." On the other hand, he dismisses--with a downward sweep of his arms--documentary biographers who limit themselves to a recitation of facts. Says he: "The only imagination allowed is over form, not facts, but that imagination can be considerable." Edel's ideal, and a theme of the course, is that biography "can become a work of art and literature."

The students want practical advice. One of them, an intent note taker, asks how "geographical descriptions" should be fitted into a biographical narrative. "Wherever they fit naturally," Edel retorts.

An autocratic talker, Edel zigzags from topic to topic, trailing half-spoken sentences in his wake. He sugars his more serious discussion--on the role of psychology in biography, methods of research, and narrative forms--with anecdotes culled from his past. An interest in the psychological novel, and in James as its exponent, led Edel to Paris in the 1920s. There, while a doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne, he encountered James Joyce. "Joyce once sat beside me at a reading, but his impassive face put me off," recalls Edel. "What could I say anyway?" he shrugs. " 'Mr. Joyce, I really enjoyed Ulysses?"

In terms of technique, Edel's advice to his class would make Boswell blanch. Throw out great masses of detail, he advises, in favor of "essences and distillations." Let the biographer describe scenes in his own words, not those of the subject. Quote documents sparingly, for fear of blurring the story line. Most heretical of all, he advocates psychoanalyzing a subject--as when, in his Henry James, he constantly linked sibling rivalry between Henry and his brother William to plots and characters in James' work.

This psychological approach drew some critical fire as the five volumes on James appeared, but it fascinates his Dartmouth students. "I don't go overboard about biography, so to speak, but I think Edel's psychological method offers interesting insights," says Senior Peter Tagge. An ardent sailor, Tagge is writing for his course project a profile of round-the-world Sailor Robin Knox-Johnston. Diane Kilpatrick, a psychologist at Dartmouth's student health center, was also drawn by Edel's analytic method. When Edel proved at the first session to be "a fascinating storyteller," she juggled her schedule so that she could audit the course and has attended "religiously" ever since.

Despite his own colossal biography of James, Edel feels that the Master still has not been fully plumbed. "Even his acceptances or regrets to social events--and in later years, his telegrams--are written in the grand manner," Edel tells his class. He pauses, his hands momentarily stilled. "One could do 'The Collected Social Letters of Henry James,' " he muses. "Yes, or even The Collected Telegrams.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.