The portrait of a writer

The biographer is bound by fact, but the historical novelist need only be plausible. His characters may bear the names of those who once actually lived, but he enjoys a liberty that the biographer does not. Even the most amply documented of lives contained moments in which important words went unsaid, scenes determined by a level, all-knowing stare or the way one pair of eyes avoided another. That’s the kind of unspoken communication in which the fiction of Henry James delights, and no biographer can possibly treat James’ inner experience with the kind of freedom he brought to his characters. That is precisely what the Irish writer Colm Toibin has achieved in this deeply engrossing novel.

“The Master” follows James through what have been called the most treacherous years of his life. It begins in 1895, when his bid for popular success as a playwright had failed, and ends in 1899, with his purchase of a house in the English coastal town of Rye. They were the years in which he wrote “The Turn of the Screw” and in which the involutions of his late style took shape -- the years that made him into the figure of Toibin’s title. Much of the novel takes the form of reverie. Sometimes we watch as “Henry” crafts a new story, lingering “softly over the fresh fright he was causing to the governess.” More often, we catch him in the act of remembrance, recalling “the strange mixture of rot and human sweat” of which his brother Wilky’s army uniform had smelled, or his sense of his sister Alice suffering the dilemma of “a woman brought up in a free-thinking family which confined its free thought to conversation.”

In every case, those memories are keyed to events in the novel’s present. In 1896, for example, James had a brief visit from Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom he described in a letter as having a precious “faculty of uncritical enjoyment and seeing and imagining those he meets in no relation but their relation to himself.” Toibin uses that visit to send his hero back to the summer of 1865 and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. James’ first stories had just appeared, and Holmes had returned from the Civil War that the young writer himself had avoided. Both competed for the attention of James’ consumptive cousin Minny Temple, who after her death would achieve immortality as the “American girl” of her relative’s fiction. By summer’s end, she was in love with Holmes -- and so, perhaps, Toibin suggests, was Henry himself.

In a 1996 biography, Sheldon M. Novick claimed that James and the future Supreme Court justice had become lovers that spring. Nobody now doubts the direction of James’ sexual leanings. But nobody really knows whether he ever acted on a physical desire, and Novick’s own claim is at best speculative, based on a tendentious reading of a French phrase in a journal entry of 1905. Still, the idea is clearly on Toibin’s mind -- only he’s shrewd enough not to draw on it directly. Instead, he imagines a scene in New Hampshire where, as the letters of the period describe, the farmhouse lodging the young men shared could have provided them with but one bed. So, Toibin’s Henry remembers watching Holmes undress “in the quivering, shadowy light

I don’t for a moment believe that these historical figures had an affair. But Toibin’s characters are another matter, and it’s entirely plausible that the young Henry, so conscious of having gone untouched by his generation’s ordeal of fire, might have looked at Holmes in just this way; plausible too that Holmes’ 1896 visit might have brought back an unrecorded hour. That episode is typical of the way this novel works. Each chapter shows us a Henry who has been brushed by the wings of the past. He begins “The Turn of the Screw” and thinks of his sister Alice, for whom sickness was an art and whose masterpiece was her own slow death; he receives a visit from a New England spinster and remembers the suicide in Venice of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson. And though Toibin’s sense of the past offers fully dramatized scenes and dialogue that make it look as though the novel’s present has dropped away, his best pages nevertheless recall that famous chapter in “The Portrait of a Lady” in which Isabel Archer sits alone before a fire and thinks, does nothing, and learns everything.

As that comparison suggests, however, the more one already knows about James, the more rewarding this novel will seem. Toibin’s prose makes a lean straight line in comparison to James’ own; still, part of the fun comes in recognizing the way, as he notes on the acknowledgments page, he’s “peppered” the novel with excerpts “from the writings of Henry James and his family.” Such allusiveness ensures that “The Master” will be compared to Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours,” but the two books are in fact very different. Toibin eschews the formal dazzle of Cunningham’s multiple narratives, with their sense of a tightrope successfully walked, and doesn’t try to resolve James’ life into a single image in the way that Cunningham does with Virginia Woolf. Instead, he gives us an infinitely patient intelligence and an entirely convincing portrait of a writer at work: the glimmer of an idea with which a new story first comes, the way a tale is produced by the lamination of moments widely separated in time and space. He shows us that fiction never provides a transcript of experience but instead offers a variation upon it; a sense of how things might have gone if only they had been different.

Toibin’s Henry is not a picture of James in his entirety. There’s little here of the bounce and the brio of the young writer of “Daisy Miller”; the character seems rather to have always had the caution of age, his privacy guarded by a form of weighty modesty. In places, Toibin has shuffled the dates of a story or an incident for dramatic effect, and the book isn’t entirely seamless. A few sentences belong to the rhetorical register of biography: “After the failure of ‘Guy Domville,’ his determination to work did battle with the feeling that he had been defeated and exposed.” And while it ends appropriately, with a chapter devoted to Henry’s relations with his brother William, there’s little sense of necessity in that ending. James lived another 16 years. Perhaps it’s selfish, but I would love to read Toibin’s version of James’ motoring experiences with Edith Wharton.

Toibin’s most highly regarded earlier novel is the Booker short-listed “The Blackwater Lightship” (1999), but he is equally known for his essays, in particular for “Love in a Dark Time” (2001), a volume on the lives of gay artists. There, he argued that it seemed “astonishing” how fully James “managed to withhold his homosexuality from his work,” and the novelist did indeed become a specialist in not naming the things he described, in tracing the contours of an absence and depicting the refusal of knowledge. But Toibin himself seems to match his subject in his awareness of the uses and the costs of evasion. The old James became a great burner of letters and other documents, and he directed that no account of his life be written. That request was ignored, and “The Master” is of course indebted to the work of James’ several biographers. But none has given us a more nuanced version of this great man’s sense of all he dared not say. *