Issue 98, Winter 1985
About biography, Lytton Strachey once wrote, “We do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as it is to live one.” In our own time, Leon Edel—a literary biographer for over fifty years—is the most notable practitioner of his craft.
When the prospect of an interview on the art of biography first came up, so did the issue of geography. Quite simply, Edel was in Honolulu, the interviewer, New York. With characteristic generosity, Edel offered a solution. “Will you come to Honolulu?” he wrote, “an ocean and a continent away? You are welcome to conduct the sessions here in my study on a hilltop overlooking the city, a fine green place with an intrusive sleek cat, plumeria trees, cooing doves and general quiet.” Tempting as it was, the meeting in Hawaii was preempted by the Edels’ visit to New York in the spring of 1985. This interview was conducted in their room at the Westbury Hotel during two consecutive mornings in mid-May. Now in his seventies, Leon Edel is a small man with a soft voice and a ready smile. We sat in armchairs by the window of his hotel room, with a tape recorder on a glass tabletop between us. Often, to stress a point, Edel would lean in toward the machine and raise his voice slightly to be sure he was heard over the rumblings of traffic on Madison Avenue. At other times, Edel would quote long passages by memory, then double-check the quotation in one of the many books or notepads piled neatly beside him. A seasoned biographer, Edel is well aware of the importance of accuracy, yet his assiduous checking proved to be mere formality. He invariably got each quotation right, word for word, a feat he noted with a broad smile and a slight twinkle in his eyes. After our last session together, the Edels took me to a celebratory lunch, where we discussed everything from Marjorie’s work—she has recently written the biography of a Hawaiian princess—to Edmund Wilson’s sex life, and shared the first wild strawberries of the season.
INTERVIEWER
What moves one to write a biography, to spend that much time in somebody else’s life?
LEON EDEL
It’s a little like falling in love; at any rate that’s the way it usually begins. You never know how long the affair or the infatuation will last. Of course, it’s a one-sided love affair since the love object is dead or, if alive, relatively unwooable. Most biographies are begun out of enchantment or affection; you read a poem and want to find the poet, you hear a statesman and are filled with admiration, or you are stirred by the triumphs of a general or an admiral. In the writing of the life changes occur, discoveries are made. Realities emerge. The love affair, however exhilarating, has to be terminated if a useful biography is to emerge. Sometimes there is disenchantment and even hate; the biographer feels deceived. Isn’t that the way all love affairs run—from dream and cloud-journey to earth-firmness?
INTERVIEWER
Of course, we’re talking about one kind of biography here; there are other kinds.
EDEL
Yes, the kind written by journalists and hacks to cash in on a new reputation or a horrendous crime; the quest for the Boston stranglers and the off-beat kinkiness that leads to murder; the material of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song . . . though the latter are not the works of hack writers, but novelists trying to put reality into fiction. The great and important biographies, however, derive from feelings akin to love and are written because the biographer feels a need to explore the given life regardless of publisher interest and possible success. Since we are focusing on biography as an art, let me put it this way: biography for better or worse is an involvement with another person; if the biographer forms an attachment or is “hooked,” the affair can last for years. It acquires, at any rate, a history of its own, a very complex history.
INTERVIEWER
How did you originally become interested in Henry James?
EDEL
That’s indeed a complex history. It began when I was a student of eighteen. And it started with James Joyce, not Henry James. In 1926, I heard stories about Joyce’s banned book Ulysses and what an oppressed author he was; nobody wanted to publish him. I sympathized; I explored. I finally got a smuggled copy. For a youth of eighteen the prose was dazzling. I thought of Joyce as a kind of Paganini of prose: a trickster who carried all English literature in his head. I was fascinated by the way Joyce tried to put the reader into the minds of his characters—that long soliloquy of Molly Bloom’s, the way Joyce flitted from Bloom’s thoughts into street smells and street incidents and then back into the stream of consciousness. Great stuff! Did I fall in love with Joyce? No, he wasn’t lovable. But he was a great performer and youth likes performance. So I went to my favorite professor and announced I would write a dissertation on the “stream of consciousness” in Joyce. “Impossible,” said the professor. Joyce was forty. His book wasn’t available. There were only some poems, Dubliners, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And anyhow, he was alive; at that time you wrote dissertations only on the dead, whose work was complete and who could be fully appraised.
INTERVIEWER
How did Joyce lead you to Henry James?
EDEL
My professor said to me during our conversation that James seemed to him really the man who had anticipated all the new writers. “Henry James? Who’s he?” I asked. My professor told me he was an American writer, just ten years dead, and I would find all his works in the library. Off I went, and there he was: thirty-five volumes of novels and tales in the old Macmillan edition, blue and gold, very crisp and new. His titles were beautiful—The Wings of the Dove, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl. I carried home the two-volume Wings and started reading. Often I only half understood. It moved slowly and with difficulty, but it was startling and strange to someone like myself who had read Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper. I began to dip into the two volumes of his letters. They were grandiose. And then I read that he had tried to write plays for five years and been booed off the stage. Somehow that episode fascinated me; it shocked me that a man so delicate and refined could receive this kind of treatment. I went back to my professor and we ended up with a compromise: I could write on James as a psychological novelist and smuggle in a chapter on Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, whom I also was reading. That was how I came to the moderns, at that early time.
INTERVIEWER
Where did you go from there?
EDEL
I had put myself through college working on a local paper in Montreal. After graduation and a year’s work I found myself dissatisfied—the life of a reporter somehow wasn’t what I wanted. So I applied for a fellowship to go abroad. I thought only of Paris and the Joycean world. In Quebec at the time the government had sold a great deal of liquor in their liquor-control stores to thirsty prohibition-starved Americans who crossed the border weekends, creating a great tourist industry. The provincial government decided to make a gesture out of its opulence to humanism and the arts; the result, a dozen fellowships a year for European study. I was carried across the Atlantic on the alcoholic profits, ostensibly to study French journalism. In Paris, I hung around the writing crowd, admired Hemingway from a distance, watched Joyce at the opera applauding an Irish singer, frequented Sylvia Beach’s bookshop where I met the young Cyril Connolly; I went to Brittany for a holiday, to Concarneau, a port filled then with red and blue sails of the tuna fleet, ran into Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, and Léonie Adams, who were there, and they took me in Paris to meet Ford Madox Ford so he could talk to me about Henry James, which he did, leaning on a grand piano and wheezing like a walrus. I was a junior hanger-on of the expatriates in Montparnasse, hearing the far-off rumbles of panic and the Wall Street crash. Then I pulled myself together. It dawned on me that I would go back to a changed world and I had better find something to show for my stay abroad. Also, I had to have progress reports to get my fellowship renewed—it was good for three years if I showed myself serious and industrious. I made friends with a gifted young Canadian from Toronto named E. K. Brown, whose life of Willa Cather I would later complete when he died prematurely. It was he who took me to see the French professor of American Literature and Civilization, and this professor, Charles Cestre, urged me to go on with my Jamesian studies. I offered to do a dissertation on James’s five years of failed playwriting.
INTERVIEWER
So your study of James’s plays anticipated the biography?
EDEL
The idea of a biography never occurred to me at that time. I had to investigate those mysterious five years of drama-writing, which I began to call James’s “dramatic years.”
INTERVIEWER
How did you launch your investigation?
EDEL
First, I read all of James’s published novels—all thirty-five volumes—and magazine stuff still uncollected. Then I made inquiries and learned that James’s produced plays were in London, but I’d have to get permission from the James executor to get at them. The plays were in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office where copies had been placed at the time of production to fulfill British censorship requirements. Would you believe that this old custom was still observed until late in this century? James had four plays produced; and after getting permission from the family, I sat in a little office in St. James’s Palace—very appropriate!—where I was allowed to bring my typewriter. Of course, this was long before the age of Xerox. One thing led to another. I met James’s last secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, a remarkable woman, and she looked up her old diaries and told me James had corresponded with Bernard Shaw. So I wrote to Shaw who immediately received me and gave me a discourse on how good James’s plays would have been if he had written them like Shaw plays. He was marvelously articulate; he marched up and down his long study talking at me, but actually losing himself in his spoken prose. He talked in completely punctuated sentences. Anyway, the end result of my researches in London and Paris, during which I met various persons who had known James—including Edith Wharton’was that I wrote two dissertations for a Sorbonne doctorat d’Etat, appeared before a board of examiners, five solemn French professors who gave me a hard time—it’s a public event—and finally grudgingly declared me a doctor of letters. Then I went back to Canada, and to the Depression.