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Title: Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899-1915 by Henry James, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Millicent Bell, Elena di Majo ISBN: 0-8139-2270-4 Publisher: University Press of Virginia Pub. Date: 01 April, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Summary: More insight into the Epistolary Henry James
Comment: Excerpt: When, years ago, I was studying Henry James's letters to Edith Wharton in order to be able to narrate the story of their friendship, I discovered that the James who wrote to this friend was not exactly the James who wrote about her to others.' It wasn't merely that these others were offered a more critical view of his "dearest Edith." The letters to Wharton revealed a different James. I realized that even the most spontaneous of letters has no exclusive authenticity. James was as many persons as he had correspondents.
He was a prolific writer of letters. By the latest count, 10,424 are to be found in libraries and private collections despite many lost or destroyed.' One after the other he would turn them out after the day's work on his fiction was done-letters to close and distant acquaintances; obligatory letters of social courtesy and professional correspondence with publishers and his agent; long, thoughtful, or just gossipy letters to his family and to friends of various degrees of intimacy. His contact with so many when he was living quite reclusively as well as when he was sociable was remarkable. Letters maintained his connection with the America of his youth even after he had settled permanently in Europe. Letters sustained the relationships that wove his life into the foreign scene. But if one reads them in their calendar order in a comprehensive published gathering-even the lamentably incomplete selections of Percy Lubbock or Leon Edel soon to be superseded by a complete collection of James's letters-one can see the differences among letters written simultaneously.' Some of his letters to particular correspondents
that have been extracted from the mass and published separately in the last decade or so-particularly those to Wharton, William James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, Edmund Gosse, and Jessie Allen-exhibit the history of those partial Jamesian selves each relationship called into being.'
In the present volume, seventy-eight letters James wrote between 1899 and 191 5 to the Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Andersen have been transcribed from the original manuscripts and edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. When the Italian edition of this collection was published in 2000, fifty-eight of the seventy-seven letters presented there were still unpublished in English and Italian. Although that number has been reduced to twenty-two by publication else-where,' this gathering of seventy-eight letters comprises for the first time all that are known to exist, including one previously over-looked. It gives us more fully than before still another Jamesian self to distinguish among the rest. That self has been identified as the James who, when he was nearly sixty, found himself in love with a much younger man in a way that had, as far as we know, no precedent in his pasta Yet the subtleties of both sides of the relationship may need more scrutiny. What also has not been adequately seen is that, however unpredictably, this relationship gave occasion for James to express some of his most fundamental ideas about life and art. Andersen may have been an audience unlikely to appreciate this. But the character and career of the younger man of whom he had grown fond provoked him-sometimes exasperated him-to an expression hardly to be found elsewhere in his writings.