Regarding Henry

In a newspaper column some years ago, David Lodge made the best case he could for the “nonfiction novel,” a term coined by Truman Capote for a genre that dates back to Daniel Defoe and Thomas Carlyle. When novels take their inspiration from fact, based on real people and events, Lodge argued, they can achieve the best results of both fiction and nonfiction. They are gripping because they claim to be true, but they can be more intense and eloquent than ordinary journalistic accounts because they can be shaped according to the demands of drama. But there is a danger, unarticulated by Lodge: The historical record can easily become an inducement to authorial laziness. The contents of letters transform into not-quite-plausible dialogue; a biography’s index of names becomes an instant, unwieldy dramatis personae. Novels create their own reality. What was true in life may not always convince on the page.

Still, if anyone was ever prepared to straddle fact and fiction to write a novel about Henry James, it should have been David Lodge. A retired professor of English literature as well as a novelist, he has often written about James, and in his recent collection of essays and his last novel, “Thinks ... ,” he explicitly took on James’ project of distilling and dramatizing human consciousness. Lodge’s past work, particularly his campus novels “Changing Places” and “Small World,” show his remarkable ability to juggle large casts of characters without causing readerly confusion. He’s funny and smart. But despite his background, and though the acknowledgments section of “Author, Author” lists nearly 50 literary and historical studies of James and his world, one is never quite convinced that Lodge’s James is the same person who wrote “The Portrait of a Lady” and “The Wings of the Dove,” who gave us Daisy Miller and Lambert Strether, whose singular devotion to the depiction of human thought and behavior haunts the modern novel.

James’ novels (presumably what brought him to Lodge’s attention in the first place) make only occasional appearances in “Author, Author.” Although the book is framed by scenes of James on his deathbed, the master novelist at last, Lodge offers us little sense of how he got there, instead devoting himself to James’ middle age at the close of the 19th century, when he was still trying to achieve success as a playwright. Lodge is fascinated by the economics of producing James’ short-run plays, by James’ intrusions into casting and directorial decisions, the glamour of opening nights, the reviews -- all the accouterments of writing but none of what makes James special. The directors and actors swirling around James are no more to us than names vaguely recalled from various biographies; Lodge never furnishes them with the details needed to flesh them out. Most of the novel is caught up in seemingly endless descriptions of James waiting for plays to be performed, of their going poorly, of James refusing to give up on them even as the opening-night audience for “Guy Domville” boos him off the stage.

Alongside, Lodge offers passages about James’ friend George Du Maurier, an illustrator who wrote the sentimental novel “Trilby” as a lark and rose to stardom when it became an international bestseller. Du Maurier did not loom nearly so large in James’ life as Lodge suggests, but his usefulness as a foil -- the hack -- gives him pride of place. While James avoids romantic entanglements lest they distract him from his work, the uxorious Du Maurier has too many cherubic children for the reader to keep straight. Although nearly all contemporary biographers of James agree that he was homosexual, Lodge never diverges from the idea of James as a pillar of his art who refuses to marry only because his craft would thereby suffer: “He needed to be free, free to be selfish -- that is to say, selflessly committed to his art.” But this is no great struggle. To Lodge, James is all artist, all literary ambition, fortunately lacking sexual and romantic desires. But what can a writer do with such a person? You can write criticism of his works, poems in praise of him, but as the hero of a novel, a man without any human complications cannot fail to disappoint.

This is not to suggest that “Author, Author” would be a success if only it were more of a biography. As with all of us, there are gaps between James’ official and actual selves, so his biographers, notably Leon Edel, present speculations about his inner life, making clear where the facts end and their own suppositions begin. But what the historical record does not offer, Lodge is unwilling to supply. Instead he gluts his novel with details: the contents of telegrams and newspapers, dates, figures. When James goes to the theater, Lodge hunts down the play so that we can read what James must have heard. But such facts never quite create what James called the “solidity of specification.”

Instead, most of the novel’s sentences resemble lists, like this one, “Henry had arranged a supper party at De Vere Gardens for William, the Comptons, Miss Robins, their mutual friend Mrs. Hugh Bell and her husband, Balestier, and the Du Mauriers,” without telling us what De Vere Gardens looks like or how the guests behave -- and we’re on to the next scene, the next fact. A character cannot reach for a book without Lodge’s squeezing in an index card: “Theodora hesitates a moment between ‘The Better Sort,’ the collection of eleven stories in which ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ first appeared in 1903, and Volume XVII of the New York Edition in which it was reprinted in 1908.” More troubling than mere didacticism, though, is Lodge’s willingness to sacrifice plausibility for the sake of his facts. Characters either know too little -- must be told things they are surely already aware of (“ ‘I was in Italy at the time, you know,’ he said. ‘There was a lawsuit, wasn’t there?’ ”) -- or know too much. (James “silently recited the stage directions, which he knew by heart.... “) In crowding his novel with bric-a-brac, Lodge falls into the trap of the historical novel that James himself once warned a friend about: “You may multiply little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like -- the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its absence the whole effect is as nought; I mean ... the representation of the old consciousness.”

Nevertheless, a historical novel about Henry James is indeed possible. Perhaps unfairly, “Author, Author” suffers most of all from its proximity to Colm Toibin’s “The Master,” also a novel with Henry James as its main character, and which was published first, last spring. Toibin’s project, to imagine James’ consciousness, at first raised the hackles of Jamesians. But Toibin wore his research (no less prodigious than Lodge’s) so lightly, and created a narrative so subtle and thoughtful, that even those who found faults with elements of his portrait agreed that “The Master” was a work of art.

In interviews, Toibin has pointed out that James’ outward life is markedly duller than those of other major writers -- none of the eroticism of James Joyce, the exotic travels of Joseph Conrad, the dramatic depressions of Virginia Woolf. James filled his days with work, mostly reading whenever he wasn’t writing. Although there are volumes of James’ published letters, he was nevertheless an extremely private person, one who destroyed most of his papers in a bonfire so that biographers wouldn’t get their hands on them. In some ways, Lodge might have been better off if all of James’ letters had been destroyed, if there had been no historical record to study apart from James’ fiction and criticism. Perhaps then Lodge would have been forced to create a work of the imagination. *