Books
Wallace Stevens says that the happiness of life lies in participating and in being part, not in observing nor in thinking. Colm Toíbín has written a novel about the greatest of all American novelists, Henry James, a man who patently, and perhaps tragically, did not live by this wisdom.
Toíbín tells the story of James's life from January 1895, when the author was 51, to October 1899, a period that witnessed the failure of his play Guy Domville, the trial of Oscar Wilde, and a short, rather awkward visit to Dublin. It also saw the purchase of Lamb House in Sussex, where he was to live for the rest of his life, and the composition of some of the greatest prose fiction the world has ever known. The real story, however, like the story of all great novels, is internal: the consolatory pleasures of the imagination constitute the book's core.
In this period James wrote a number of what are ostensibly ghost stories. Critics have frequently expressed bafflement as to why an author who otherwise wrote almost genre-less novels should have chosen to confine himself to what is generally considered to be a rather trite and predictable set of conventions. Toíbín gives us something of an answer: James, his James at least, was a man haunted by the past. The Master shows us how, as we grow older, the dead come to play just as great a role in our lives as the living: the writer's vivacious cousin Minny Temple, the model for Isabel Archer and numerous other heroines; his maternal Aunt Kate; his brothers Wilky and Bob, who were killed in the American Civil War; his mother and father-all these ghostly figures haunt James's waking hours, as well as his dreams and the pages of his novels. Toíbín, it would appear, has written a ghost story of the Jamesean variety.
A question arises as we read The Master: how Jamesean a character is Toíbín's James? Well, he is preternaturally observant, certainly, and addicted to solitude.
He is in possession, like Isabel Archer, of an impatience to live, as well as, like Strether and those other endlessly pathetic protagonists of the late novels and novellas, a feeling that he has somehow not lived at all.
But Toíbín tells us things about his James that we would never learn from the author of The Ambassadors. A standard, and to some extent, legitimate criticism of James's characters is that they are disembodied intellects, free to observe and speculate and analyse, without the inconvenient distractions of the libido; Toíbín shows us a pure mind that finds a body remorselessly stuck to it.
The presentation of James's repressed homosexuality, for example, is marvellously subtle. The easy and reductive approach would have been to show The Master as the victim of Victorian prudery, one who learnt from the public humiliation of Oscar Wilde (which James follows closely in the novel) to keep his passions to himself.
Toíbín is far more acute. Unlike the impecunious Wilde, James could quite easily have moved to the continent where his friend, the writer John Addington Symonds, had discussed: "a problem in Greek ethics", with great candour.
Something about the dark, unacknowledged underbelly of England, Toíbín suggests, seems to have attracted James, to have helped fuel his imagination, however damaging it may have been to him personally.
This decision is typical of the James we are given throughout, one who seems to value the success of his art over the happiness of his life.
Yeats said that we must choose between perfection of the life and perfection of the work. To choose the latter is undoubtedly heroic but Toíbín questions it's wisdom with startling effect.
14th Oct 2004