Colm Tóibín, 2004 (2015)
This is a masterful book about a masterful subject – Henry James and
his writing. The book opens with an
imagined nighttime awakening from which James thinks about his day and how it
might go. In a few paragraphs, he condenses the tone and content that he then
fills out and details in the rest of the book.
Though the book is
called The Master, the title could
almost be ironic. As portrayed by Tóibín, James is uncertain, often uncomprehending, self-doubting and
self-deceiving. He misreads his support in London after his first and only play
opens and fails on its first night, then flees to Ireland rather than face his
friends. He allows a domineering acquaintance to push him into furnishing his
home with items he doesn’t really want. He allows his servants to appear drunk
and slovenly in front of guests rather than confront them. Most disastrously,
he allows his closest friend, a woman, to fall in love with him, but rather
than talk about it, he avoids her, leading or contributing to her recent
suicide. (Following which, he manages to have himself appointed her literary
executor, and secretly burns any compromising correspondence with her.) He has
strong homoerotic feelings without even acknowledging them for what they are (understandable
in the context of the times, when Oscar Wilde, whom James thinks shallow and clumsy,
faces his own disgrace and imprisonment). Far from being a master, this view of
James has him as a diffident, ineffectual stumbler.
Yet he observes and
interprets what he sees around him as the basis for a lifetime of deeply
sensitive, insightful literature. In spite of the frequent misunderstanding of his
readers, his family and friends, he stays fixed to his conception of his
writing. He thinks about style, themes, content for a variety of stories in the
course of the novel (and it’s fascinating to see where well known stories like The Turn of the Screw come from –
curious also to find out how much ghosts, both spectral and metaphorical, fit
into his life and his writing). He pulls themes from his own complex relationships
with his family and friends, and from what he understands, or is willing to
admit, about them. Underlying much of the characterization of James is his
repression of his homosexuality, which leads to his need to control and hide so
much of his life from others and from himself. And yet, while struggling to repress,
or at least control, his life, he somehow has enough awareness to use his
observations as fodder for his stories. He is, in fact, a master in his
writing. It is fitting that the book ends with James explaining to a friend
that “the moral … is that life is a mystery and that only sentences are
beautiful.” After which, he sends his friends home and returns to his writing.
Tóibín himself writes
with a control and insight that seem equal to James’. As a skilled writer
himself, and author of a previous book on James, I can see his fascination with
the details of James’ life and writing process. He uses James’s own style, complex
and internal, on James himself, a kind of homage to a literary master. He
traces the development of James’ thinking, his development of story ideas, his
resentment of other people’s misinformed views of his writing and his
appreciation of the few who do understand him. In James’ interior monologues, Tóibín traces the shifting relationships and
sense of control, just as James would do in his own writing. I wonder how much
of this is Tóibín’s imagining
of the literary process taken from his own insight as a masterful writer, and
how much comes from his research into James’ thinking from James’ letters and
other personal writing. I think it must be at least as much the former as the
latter, for this is a work of imagination, not simply a knitting together of
various stories from James. And, as always in fictions about real people, the
stories are about the author’s characters, not the people they are modeled on.
In the end, the
book gives me an insight, not only into James’ life, but also into his stories.
It makes me want to read more James. But it also introduces me to Tóibín as a skilled novelist that I want to
read more.
