The Master - Reviews
Scotsman
6 March 2004
Portrait of a young Master
DAVID ROBINSON
Recently, says Colm Toibin, a friend who had been devastated by a failed relationship,
told him that he'd had enough of love. From now on, he said, he was going to
model himself on Henry James: live in the country, get on with his work, and
wipe out all thought of further attachments.
It's an easy mistake to make, this casual assumption that James's resolute avoidance
of commitment and his remorseless dedication to writing mirrored a calm inner
life. But as Toibin reminds us in his new novel The Master, which takes us inside
James's mind for five years of his life in the 1890s, just because the surface
might seem untroubled doesn't mean that there aren't powerful currents deeper
down.
There were times in Toibin's life when he might have made that mistake too. In
another career, half a lifetime away, when instead of being one of Ireland's
finest writers, he was one of its best journalists, James's egotistical dithering,
hypochondria, self-absorbtion - above all, his fastidious avoidance of emotional
involvement - must have seemed an impossibly dull subject.
Back then, as the young editor of the radical Irish news magazine Magill, there
were more important battles to fight. Twenty years ago, Ireland was a complacent,
repressed country completely lacking any tradition of investigative journalism
to shake things up. (I know: I lived there.) It needed people like Toibin - politically
involved, gay, unafraid of the old shibboleths - if it was ever to transform
itself from brackish backwater to the fearfully modern symmetry of the Celtic
tiger. With multiple campaigns against police brutality, polluting factories,
and for such apparently lost causes as loosening up the ban on abortion and divorce,
he did his bit.
He'd read Portrait of a Lady when he was 18, in the summer evenings when he
was working in a council office job in his native Wexford before going up to
UCD to read English. It left its mark on him even if James himself - with his
asceticism in the cause of art, his concentration on form rather than passion,
writing rather than life itself - still didn't. But all the journalism, all
the activist years, served a purpose. They helped, he has said "to get the
poison out of me, over the issues that bothered me - the IRA, intellectual
nationalism, the Church, conservative, soft-spoken government. I didn't need
to put the anger into the novels."
Instead, in his debut novel South, he drew on the three liberating years he spent
in Barcelona to provide a portrait of a (female) artist's search for love and
freedom that impressed even such stern critics as Don DeLillo and John Banville.
The Heather Blazing confirmed that promise, that here was a writer
who didn't need to shout, but whose quiet, unshowy sentences still exuded
control. The Story of the Night and the Booker-shortlisted The Blackwater
Lightship were stories of gay love and tragedy that similarly gained from
their subtlety and restraint.
Perhaps, in some sense, he had become a Jamesean already.
We meet in a cafe in the grounds of Dublin Castle. In the gallery on the floor
above is an engrossing exhibition Toibin has assembled from the treasures of
one of Europe's finest private collections of illuminated manuscripts and oriental
art. Outside is the gaudily painted architectural toytown that once used to be
the seat of British power in Ireland. Visiting it in 1895 as the Lord Lieutenant's
guest, Henry James would probably have been just as blind to the poverty he could
have seen from Dublin Castle's Georgian sash windows as Queen Victoria four years
later, when a wall was built just so she wouldn't catch a glimpse of her sullen
Irish subjects.
Behind James's Olympian aloofness, however, Toibin fleshes out a string of unfulfilled
longings and scarring regrets. Instead of the usual portrait of the artist as
a being in love with life, he conjures up a no less credible antithesis: the
artist defined by the thoughts he hasn't acted on, the impulses he has checked,
the love he never reached out and touched.
So Toibin's James sleeps naked, reluctantly chaste, next to Oliver Wendell Holmes,
a family friend and future chief justice of the United States, while the love
that dares not speak its name turns into a silent scream. In Paris, he stifles
an infatuation for a young man yet can still recall looking up at his lighted
window decades later. In Venice, he is overwhelmed by guilt for only realising
a woman loved him after she has committed suicide. Everywhere, he remembers how
his own selfishness cast a shadow on his dead sister's life. All the time, the
work progresses, for this is Fate's cruellest joke of all: that for all the imperfections
of his life, all most people will remember him for is his perfection of tone
and his mastery of form.
The Wilde case made the same points about the societal constraints on gay love
- and indeed James's friends do suggest to him that it might perhaps be wise
if he considered fleeing the country - but this nuanced portrait of what it cost
those who acceded to them is somehow far more effective. And because Toibin is
at the controls, there's a lot more to it than the relative unfamiliarity of
James's life story.
All the same, those secrets James would have presumably wanted to die with him
... where did Toibin find them? How much research did he have to do?
He throws back his head and laughs, then spends a full minute racing through
just some of the titles he had to read. The book started when he was finishing
The Blackwater Lightship, and he was "searching for something to read that wouldn't
be too interesting". The five-volume biography of James by Leon Edell sounded
suitably boring - until he started to read it.
At first this just provided the raw material for an essay in the London Review
of Books about how James's fiction actually masked, rather than revealed, his
sexuality. But as he started thinking his way into the Master's mind, a novel
started to take shape in his. It would start with the disastrous first night
of James's play Guy Domville; at its heart would be a scene the James Letters
had allowed him to imagine: where the middle-aged author shows the young, good-looking,
ambitious American sculptor Hendrik Andersen around his house at Rye. The young
man had asked him if he'd ever planned to write all those novels he's never read,
and, for the only time in the book, James's eyes fill with tears.
That scene, he admits, was one he had made up, but it went straight to the heart
of the reason he felt drawn to James. "He's beginning to write The Ambassadors,
in which an older man comes to Europe and realises that he's missed everything,
and here he is with Andersen, realising that he too hasn't anyone of his own
and that he has worked so hard ..."
Toibin is guarded about drawing wider parallels between the novel and his own
life. There's an obvious one between the social constraints against homosexuality
in the 19th century and those experienced by anyone growing up in rural Ireland
in the late 20th century, but he's having none of it. "People have an intense
curiosity to find out if what happened in the book happened to you, and as a
writer your job is not to answer."
Although one of the themes of the book is the extent to which James's experience
transmutes into his novels ("That's a subtle business, and it's not true in every
writer's life") he deflects any questions that even remotely suggests anything
similar in his own writing. "If anyone tried to do that to me, I'd try to stop
them. Because it would make things too obvious, drawing those terrible clunky
connections." He points both hands at the desk between us and moves them both
in parallel sideways, screwing up his face with disgust.
So no, there is no other personal theme either. The Master isn't a novel about
writing, about living vicariously through others, about recoiling from love and
the necessary selfishness of the writer. Only in one regard is there a parallel
he is prepared to accept: age. "I suppose what made me understand James was realising
that my own middle age had commenced. I wanted to start with the melancholy of
that - you know, that flowers bloom again, we don't - and realising that a lot
of chances have not been grasped. James is an objective correlative, a way into
it."
Later, he relents. Yes, he admits, there are parallels between growing up gay
in 1960s Ireland and the homophobic society that limited James's own life. "It
leaves a mark, of course it does. If you go to the Pod on a Friday night (which
I don't: I don't disco dance) there's an enormous freedom that makes its way
into the private realm.
"But bits of you solidify in time. What happened to me in my twenties entered
my spirit. Recently someone said to me - someone who's gay and having a great
time - ‘Your generation really got f***ed up, didn't it? Because you were brought
up with all this repression, then it suddenly changed, and now there's all this
freedom and bits of you are still repressed.'"
We talk further, about his admiration for contemporary Scottish fiction; about
his new play at the Abbey, which he wrote only after he'd finished writing about
James's crushing disappointment with Guy Domville; about how, like James, he
is planning to leave the city, in his case to quit Dublin and live in a house
he is having built on the one part of Ireland that is the most precious to him.
It's a place that haunts much of his fiction - a quiet stretch of the Wexford
coast where he used to go on holidays before his father died when Toibin was
just 12.
So there are parallels between life and work, even though he's right to keep
the deeper ones to himself. The Master is a superlative book, and there's no
need to know the precise details of Toibin's life that enabled him to make it
so.
In the preface to The Turn of the Screw, Henry James wrote: "Make him (the reader)
think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak
specifications."
For evil, read regrets and longings. And for both of them, read this compelling,
restrained book by (whatever he says) a still young master.
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