The Master - Reviews

The Guardian

20 March 2004

The great pretender

Hermione Lee acclaims Colm Tóibín The Master, a bold attempt at being Henry James

This is an audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book. I started it in a state of distrust, and ended it absorbed and moved. How dare Colm Tóibín, for all his great gifts as a novelist (I began by thinking) have the chutzpah to pretend to be Henry James, to know what he thought, to make up his life? My biographical scruples were doing battle with fictional licence. Biographers don't, on the whole (unless they're Peter Ackroyd) invent their subject's conversations, or take their clothes off and put them into bed, or fantasise their secret memories and unacted desires. Biographers (if they have any decency) don't freely paraphrase their subject's writings, or quote from their letters without footnotes. But novelists are allowed to make free. Tóibín has created his own invention, with remarkable boldness and subtlety, out of the life of "The Master", as Henry James was often called: a title which nicely combines James's achievement and reputation, his control over his own life, and Tóibín's veneration for him.

The Master is ruthlessly selective; it recreates only four years of James's life and only a few of his relationships, beginning with the humiliating failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895, and ending with his brother's stay, with his wife and daughter, in Rye, in 1899. In these four years, James visits Ireland (an excuse for a lightning sketch of late 19th-century British colonialism, a subject closer to Tóibín's heart than James's), reacts with horror to the trial of Oscar Wilde (its scandal carefully set against his own intense discretion), acquires Lamb House in Rye and has reluctantly to sack a pair of grotesquely incompetent servants (the novel's best-sustained comic episode). He returns to Italy after a five-year absence, falls in love with the handsome and egotistical young sculptor Hendrik Andersen, and makes his peace with his brother. He writes, among other things, The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, "The Figure in the Carpet" and The Turn of the Screw, and starts planning The Ambassadors.

But because this is very much a novel about memory and return, the narrative keeps sliding back, as if following James's thought processes, into the crucial events of his past life. In this cunning way we enter into James's extraordinary family life - his father's alarming search for spiritual perfection, his mother's protective care of her writer son, the illness and death of his caustic, brilliant, neurotic invalid sister Alice, his conflict with his overbearing older brother William. Henry's evasion of the American Civil War, dramatically contrasted with his brother Wilkie's injuries; his love for his dazzling and doomed young cousin Minnie Temple; his close, edgy friendship with the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, her suicide in Venice and James's clearing-out of her possessions.

But they are mixed with scenes which Tóibín has invented or extrapolated from the fact. There is a suggestive argument with Edmund Gosse, soon to write Father and Son, over whether there can be repressed memories, locked in the unconscious. ("No", Henry said sternly, "nothing is locked within") There is an unspoken attraction to a manservant in Ireland. There is a sexy (but not sexual) night in bed, at Minnie Temple's house, with Oliver Wendell Holmes. There is the amazing scene (based on fact) of James disposing of Constance Fenimore Woolson's dresses, after her death, by going out on the Venetian lagoon with her faithful gondolier and dropping them into the water, where they balloon back like dark, giant, mushrooming ghosts.

At first I thought that the main point of the novel would be to expose the secrets of James's repressed homosexuality; and certainly Tóibín makes the most of James's long-ago feelings for the homosexual Paul Joukowsky and his mixed attraction and repulsion for Andersen. But the plot that emerges from The Master's crafty structure is more interesting, and less obvious, than the outing of Henry James. It becomes apparent that James, at least in this version, has repeatedly resisted demands, controlled intimacy and avoided commitment in order to do his writing. Tóibín's James is haunted by self-reproaches: did he abandon Minnie and prefer her "dead rather than alive", so that he could turn her into art? Did he fake his "wound" at the time of the war? Every human contact he makes must be measured against the imperative of "this quiet and strange treachery" towards the world, so that he can be "not available": "alone in his room with the night coming down... and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would not be disturbed".

How the books grow out of the life is the novel's deepest story. The phrase "I can imagine" crops up several times in the imaginary conversations. It irritated me, as it seemed so anomalous - but it's a clue to what Tóibín is doing. He shows us James's capacity for imagining his way in minute detail into, say, the state of mind of an abandoned child, his superhuman attention to "figures seen from a window or a doorway, a small gesture standing for a much larger relationship, something hidden suddenly revealed". Tóibín too "can imagine" his way into Henry James with exceptional attention - and, particularly, into the process of turning his own "personal store" of memories and relationships into fiction. Sometimes he allows himself simplistic biographical links, but at its best, the novel deals carefully and subtly with the complicated, mysterious process of how a novelist - above all, this master-novelist - goes about "masking and unmasking himself".

What James mostly makes his books out of, Tóibín thinks, are his ghosts: the lost, the past, the dead. The book is suffused with longing and bereavement and the power of writing to cure and console. This emphasis means that we miss out, to a great extent, on the funny, worldly, satirical Henry James, whose novels can be read as comedies. But what we are left with is a powerful note of sadness, as the great novelist, working alone in Lamb House, hears the sound "like a vague cry in the distance, of his own great solitude, and his memory working like grief, the past coming to him with its arm outstretched looking for comfort".