Abstract

The Secret Drawer

In the midst of his labors on his many-volumed biography of Henry James, Leon Edel paused to give a series of lectures in which, meditating on the tension between biographer and subject, he revealed that not only had James deliberately set out to thwart his future biographer by burning his papers, he had also played the Jamesian trick of equipping his desk with a secret drawer that, when opened after his death, turned out to contain only a gout remedy and a prescription for glasses. On the scholarly level, as his readers now know, Edel was more than holding his own. A biographical feat with which he was particularly pleased had to do with his discovery that in 1909, at age 66, James had consulted a London, England doctor about his heart.