Henry James

October 2, 1996
Opening in self-consciously literary fashion, Novick's life of James takes him into 1881, when he is an expatriate of 38 and The Portrait of a Lady establishes the novelist's transatlantic reputation. Novick (Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes), a law professor, abjures the psychoanalytic approaches of Leon Edel and Fred Kaplan and is more explicit than his predecessors in seeing suggestions in James's fiction of an "audacious" eroticism. To Novick, it may not be merely authorial imagination that generates James's exploitation of the theme of "the moral correctness of a love that may be contrary to convention; and the... immorality of loves that are perfectly conventional." By the close of this first part of a two-volume life, James has focused in his fiction on a "spontaneous moral sense that would be the distinctive American trait in the stories and novels." To give it reality, he developed his formula of the encounter of America with Europe: "the testing of the new type against the older races." Concurrent with the international theme, James himself became a confessed "cosmopolite" comfortable in European capitals and a committed "amiable bachelor." Novick sees these convergences in James's professional and emotional life as leaving the writer confident rather than neurotic, settled rather than imperiled. Not nearly as contrary to Kaplan's 1992 one-volume Henry James as some pages imply, Novick's biography will nevertheless stir controversy about the relationship of James's personality to his creativity. Illustrations not seen by PW.