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)
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