The Master - Reviews

The Sunday Business Post

21 March 2004

Regarding Henry, his life and work

Colm Toibin's fifth novel is an intense , thoughtful and often moving exploration of the interior life of the novelist Henry James.

Toibin structures the novel around eleven glimpses of James during the period 1895-1900, when James was writing his "middle period" fiction, works such as The Spoils of Poynton; The Turn of the Screw; What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age.

Through a series of carefully-crafted scenes that develop from these moments, Toibin focuses on key incidents of James's earlier life and work (there are many references to Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady) and anticipates the major novels that would become some of the greatest in the English language: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl.

The Master is especially intriguing when Toibin identifies particular moments or incidents in James's emotional life and provides a sense of how the writer transformed these in his fiction. He shows the other side of James's renowned detachment by acknowledging the immense depth of personal feeling that lies b eh ind h is fiction.

Instead of endorsing the standard view of James as the aloof and often ironic observer,Toibin explores how he struggled to achieve this stance, and how much he sacrificed in order to sustain it. He portrays James as intensely self-conscious about what his detachment meant for himself and, crucially, for others.

His emotional disengagement required great self-sacrifice, as James turned away from love and from the demands that it might make upon him. As he was painfully aware, this disengagement would inevitably confuse, hurt and damage others.

Toibin suggests that James was periodically haunted by guilt and anxiety over the emotional damage he caused others. These feelings surfaced in his many ghost stories, and his recurrent exploration of characters with emotionally repressed, frustrated or restricted lives.

The theme of The Master is, therefore, one that is familiar from James's own fiction. James emphasised that emotional detachment was essential for the dedicated artist. This is exactly the idea behind his story The Lesson of the Master and in making his own title allude to that story, Toibin points us to the major theme of his novel.

But contrary to a widelyheld view,Toibin does not see James as emotionally repressed. Rather, he emerges in these pages as someone engaged in a constant struggle, who repeatedly refused opportunities to reciprocate the passion he generated in others. He was courageous enough to confront the consequences of these refusals on others - most especially his sister Alice; his cousin Minny Temple; the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and the sculptor Hendrick Andersen.

Toibin explores James's relations with each of these characters, and his complex feelings for his younger brother Wilky, who died of wounds suffered in the Civil War. James had not served in the war - his autobiography tells how an "obscure hurt" sustained after a fire rendered him unfit.

Toibin writes with acute insight about James's relations with Alice and with Minny Temple, who was a model for several of his most important women characters. He suggests that James felt responsible for the deaths of both because of his emotional reticence. In the case of Alice, who died of breast cancer after a long period as an invalid, he felt he had effectively colluded in her withdrawal from life, retreating to what Toibín des cr ib es as h is "hard-won solitude" rather than assisting her.

James perhaps came close to marrying Minny Temple but again made a withdrawal that he feared had resulted in her death. She died of tuberculosis after James had sidestepped her suggestion that she accompany him to Rome, where she might have recovered.

Toibn writes most powerfully on James's fourteenyear friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson. She committed suicide in Venice after James withdrew, in spite of apparently promising to take a house near her there. The representation of Constance and the effects of her death on James are brilliantly managed.

Toibin presents James as attracted to some men but refusing to act on this. Early in the novel there is a reference to James deciding not to visit Paul Joukowsky in his rooms in Paris in 1875 - an incident repeated in his relations with a servant called Hammond, and with Hendrick Andersen.

Toibin uses the trial of Oscar Wilde both to show James's friends trying to ascertain his sexual orientation, and to remind us of the then legal and public conditions of homosexuality.

This is an absorbing and often intense novel, which can be appreciated both by those with little knowledge of James, and by James experts who should relish the allusions to his fiction. Toibin's prose style is unfussy but with an understated elegance that is here perfectly suited to the exploration of James's interior life.

Stephen Matterson lectures and researches in American Literature at Trinity College