Simon Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master: Henry James as Others Saw Him. The subtitle says it, but conveys nothing of the elegance and resourcefulness with which Nowell-Smith put together this 1947 anthology of first-hand anecdotes and impressions–all of them carefully verified. To see James through the widely varied eyes of Arnold Bennett, E.F. Benson, G.K. Chesterton, Desmond MacCarthy, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and dozens of other contemporaries is to see him with the utmost immediacy, and the results are far more readable, even for pure pleasure, than any volume of this kind has any right to be (TT).
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
