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A novelist is more than his novels, and I would like to end this book by giving you a glimpse of the man himself. This is not altogether easy to do – the well-known collection of not quite affectionate little anecdotes which pretend to tell us what he was like were all produced by wicked verbal cartoonists – Max Beerbohm, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf – who shared a talent for making a good story better. Leon Edel, James's biographer, suggests that in old age James came to resemble Dr Johnson in manner and bearing, and this analogy can be taken further. As with Johnson, it is impossible to read a great deal about James without feeling an enormous affection for him. Like Johnson's, his personality is unmistakable yet hard to sum up except in paradoxes – he was sociable but intensely solitary, reserved yet effusively affectionate, neurotic but enormously sane. Like Johnson, our sense of him is made up of the stories about him, and yet a thousand stories would not suffice to contain him.
I wish I could include all the thousand stories here, but there is space only for one. Virginia Woolf, in her biography of Roger Fry, describes how James several times visited the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912 and, as an old friend of the organizer, would be taken by Fry
down to the basement where, among the packing cases and the brown paper, tea would be provided. […]
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