Even though others had been breaking ground, I had a longer backward reach. After all, I had had a quarter of a century novitiate.

EDEL: I believe the secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip. The difference between one kind of biographer and another may be measured by the quantity of poetry infused into the narrative of life and doing—the poetry of existence, of trial and error, initiation and discovery, rites of passage and development, the inevitabilities of aging, or the truncatedlives, Keats, Byron and others, who died young and yet somehow burned like bright flames. This kind of writing requires patience, assiduity, also enthusiasm, feeling, and certainly a sense of the biographer’s participation. The biographer is a presence in life-writing, in charge of handling the material, establishing order, explaining and analyzing the ambiguities and anomalies. Biography is dull if it’s just dates and facts: it has for too long ignored the entire province of psychology and the emotions. Ultimately, there must be a sense of the inwardness of human beings as well as outwardness: the ways in which we make dreams into realities,the way fantasies become plays and novels and poems—or the general who fights a great battle, Nelson and Trafalgar, Wellington and Waterloo, Washington and Valley Forge, the defeated Napoleon and his Waterloo—the strivings and the failings. It involves finding the links between the body and the spirit or soul in which human beings seem to rise above weakness and struggle.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever feel like arguing with James?

EDEL: Not often. I did like his balanced view of life, his calm, his general “cool” compared to my own impulsive way of approaching life. But I think I can best answer your question by telling you the one dream I had about him.I never dreamed about him when I was working on the biography. But when I had finished, I one day dreamed I was a journalist again and with a group of journalists at Lamb House, his country house in Sussex. | remember that in the dream I was worried what he might think about all I had written about him. I hung back, and when the rest of the press went away I walked into his study. He was sitting behind his desk. I sat down and said,“Mr. James, I must tell you, I’ve had great difficulties establishing the hierarchies of your friendships.” He looked sadly at me and replied, “You know, I never got them sorted out myself.’ ]think what I did in that dream was to give myself James’s blessing. The dream also enunciated a biographical truth. The subject of a biography has never had a chance to bring order to a life so constantly lived and involved in action. It is the biographer who finds the frame,sorts things out, and for better or worse tries to bring order into life story—create a sense of sequence and coherence.