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The Master. Colm Toibin. Picador. UK £15.99 HB.360 pp. Written over more than 20 years, the definitive biography of Henry James (by Leon Edel) runs to five volumes, the last of which, like the novel here under review, is called The Master. With one of the largest ever literary biographies already dedicated to a writer for whom thoughts and impressions far more than deeds or experiences characterised his life, a biographical novel (or novelised biography) might seem an extraordinary, even puzzling addition. And yet Colm Toibin’s moving and unsettling new book will almost certainly help to attract some of the wider audience James himself yearns for in the opening pages. The Master opens in 1895 with a portrait of a man drifting in an out of sleep, and memory, haunted by a vision of his dead mother and aunt which leaves him with “an overwhelming urge to start writing, anything to numb himself, distract himself.” For a novel which proves to have a great deal to say on the relationship between writing and feeling, this is a low-key but perfectly-judged point of departure. The scene also sets the tone and contains many of the ingredients for the rest of the book. Among other things, The Master is a study in loneliness in which the accidental second meaning of the word study has anything but accidental significance. For it is both Henry James’ physical retreat into his place of writing, as well as his emotional retreat into a way of thinking about the world as raw material, that makes him, even more than most other writers, a loner. Though his early home life was in almost constant motion and upheaval, and his biography might be summarised as a trajectory from the New England of his youth to the old England of the five or so years of his mid 50s covered here, the physical exile of an American in Europe was only one of the ways in which he became and remained an outsider. “No man should make a judgement who has recently published a book or put on a play.” The speaker is Henry’s friend Jonathan Sturges and the subject under discussion, though it might have been Henry’s recent failure on the London stage, is Oscar Wilde’s bravado in the face of impending public shame and legal censure. But if Henry sees the sense of his friend’s assertion, his enormous output of 20 completed novels plus almost as many collections of stories and critical works, suggest he decided not to act on it. One might even say that writing for him is a kind of springing into inaction. The son of one of the most influential, and eccentric, men in American letters, Henry James was the second of four sons and a youngest sister Alice (“an independent republic”) whose troubled life left him wracked by guilt that he had not done all he might have for her. The relationship seems to have provided a template for many of the relationships, both familial and platonic, recalled in this book: first closeness, then desertion, then regret. When his dear friend Minny Temple dies young, for example, all that is left to Henry is to try her out in a sequence of novels: “In Daisy Miller... she had died in Rome. In Travelling Companions, he had invented a marriage for her...” Toibin gets close to the place where writing is both omnipotence and terrible powerlessness all at once. Slighted by a dinner guest when staying in Florence with his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson (the remark suggested some intimacy between the two ex-pat Americans), James wishes "he were writing now, feeling that he would be able, in the privacy of his room, to come up with a reply". But if his social inadequacy provides an almost comical note here, one of the darkest moments of the book comes not long afterwards when, following his friend’s suicide, Henry returns to Florence and, in a subtle echo of the earlier scene, he ends up alone in her apartment sorting through her manuscripts as if, from her own privacy, there might now emerge some hitherto unpublished gem. Strictly speaking, of course, at least in his later years, James himself didn't leave manuscripts but typescripts. And no doubt a great deal of the flavour of his work came from his ability to compose in his head and speak the words aloud for his stenographer’s transcription. Fittingly, things spoken aloud, and the many more left unspoken, haunt this book. Names, for instance, have considerable power. First comes that opening in which Henry lies there for five pages before his name joins him. Then comes a terrific diptych of scenes a little later on. In the first there seems to be the possibility that Henry’s own name might appear on a list of well-known citizens said to have consorted with the boys involved in the Wilde case. But in Toibin’s light-handed telling, it’s entirely possible that Henry’s unease here is entirely something projected onto him by the other characters in the scene and, indeed, by the reader. That Wilde stands accused of "some dark, nameless crime" extends what might have been an interesting point into a line that runs through and unites this entire book. Was Henry James homosexual? Did he enjoy physical relations with, for instance, the army corporal who was his manservant when he escaped to Dublin after the failure of his play Guy Domville, or with his brother William’s friend Holmes, a veteran of the Civil War Henry himself had managed to dodge; or with Hendrik Andersen, the Norwegian sculptor he met in Paris and who turned out to have grown up in his native Newport? Refusing speculation or neat answers, Toibin instead uses external events and encounters to reflect and refract his real interest, Henry’s emotional existence. Famously described elsewhere as the writer who “chaws more than he bites off”, Henry James was, for H G Wells, “conscientiously fastidious and delicate...” if at the same time “like some victim of enchantment placed in the centre of an immense bladder.” For his brother William, he was simply “bloodless”. Acknowledging a debt to Henry’s suggestive, ruminative style, Toibin paints a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of an author who, some would say, virtual cult status has deprived of a large modern readership. The Master is a biographical fragment, bookended by thoughts of death, a novel in which unfulfilled desires are not used to explain a man but to display him, to reveal him in all his surprisingly vital inaction. And when it is not paying homage to the man through thoughtful attention, it manages to fascinate as, among other things, a map of the remarkable network of a few wealthy American families spread across Europe as the century of modern, global consciousness, and warfare, rolled into view.
© copyright Pat Boran
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