Colm Toibin, The Master.

Taylor, Andrew

Colm Toibin, The Master. London: Picador, 2004. 359 pages. GBP 15.99.

Ventriloquizing the past is not necessarily a profitable activity for a writer, as Henry James recognized. Tolstoy's War and Peace, with its mixture of historical figures and invented ones, its detailed recreation of military campaigns interspersed with fictionalized romance, famously earned him scorn for its artistic profligacy: 'what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artisticaly mean?' he asked. Colm Toibin's novel The Master, an account of James's successes and failures--personal and professional--in the final years of the nineteenth century, is alive to the potential pitfalls of historical fiction. Towards the end of the book, after earning a rebuke from his brother William (represented by Toibin, unfairly, as possessing an excessively provincial mind) for not writing 'a novel about the Puritan Fathers', Henry replies: 'I view the historical novel as tainted by a fatal cheapness' (p. 336). 'Fatal cheapness' is what Toibin's book needs to avoid if it is not to be censured by its own central character.

Wisely Toibin refrains from imitating James's style--so easy to pastiche, as Max Beerbohm and Gore Vidal have shown us, but impossible (and unnecessary) to reproduce sincerely. Instead of adopting James's (late) stylistic preference for elaborate clauses and extended metaphors, Toibin chooses to incorporate a narrative framework that served James well throughout his career. The Master is told through the perceptions and reflections of a single character--'Henry'--but this character is grammatically presented in the text as a third person. James was wary of the first-person form--employing it only once in a novel (The Sacred Fount) as a means of dramatizing its epistemological limitations. More conducive to the combination of control and flexibility he desired was the notion of a 'centre of consciousness' that Toibin borrows here. His Henry achieves a characteristically Jamesian solidity, 'connected, connected intimately, with the general human exposure, and thereby ... befooled and bewildered, anxious, restless, fallible' (James's words), while at the same time in possession of a critical intelligence that can reflect on this condition.

Reflection is the dominant action of this book. From the opening words with their Joycean cadence ('Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead'), Toibin presents us with a figure whose memories return to haunt him almost at will. The ostensible chronology of the novel (January 1895 to October 1899), beginning with James's disastrous attempt to forge a career as a playwright and ending with his lease of Lamb House in Rye and the start of work on The Ambassadors, is regularly interrupted with retrospective re-tellings of key moments from his earlier life. The Master seeks to build a portrait of the artist by shuttling back and forth between an episode in the narrative present to illuminate aspects of James's past. We are freed from the claustrophobic and paranoid world of the 1890s and its sexual politics into several earlier important moments from James's life. The 'obscure hurt' that kept him out of the Civil War--so long a subject of conjecture to James scholars--is here an imagined illness promoted by his mother as a means of avoiding enlistment; a post-Civil War pastoral idyll of a holiday with his cousin Minny Temple and Oliver Wendell Holmes becomes a wonderfully evocative episode of sexual anticipation and sensory acuteness. Toibin is doing more, of course, than just offering his readers a compendium of key James moments. At its best, The Master takes us in directions that even Leon Edel's magisterial five-volume biography (which Toibin obviously knows well) dared not venture; for Toibin, the empirical material of the life can be shaped to construct a reading of James that emphasizes denial and evasion--a turning away from passion and sympathy.

In an earlier collection of essays, Love ill a Dark Time (2001), Toibin had addressed the relationship between James and sexuality through a reading of his celebrated story of loss and inaction, 'The Beast in the Jungle', in which the central character, Marcher, waits for the revelation of a secret that will give meaning to his life. Taking issue with queer theory's appropriation of James's writing, Toibin countered that 'It is astonishing how James managed to withhold his homosexuality from his work' (p.29). Only with the knowledge of James's withheld sexual identity, Toibin argued, does the tale 'become much darker ... You realise that the catastrophe the story led you to expect was in fact the very life that James chose to live, or was forced to live' (p. 33). Despite his admonitions against queer readings of James's texts, Toibin cannot resist reading the life back into the work: the tale 'is, ostensibly, about a man who realises that his failure to love has been a disaster; but it is also ... about a gay man whose sexuality has left him frozen in the world' (p. 34). Despite itself, such a bleak view is not quite what Toibin presents us with in Tile Master. Instead James's withdrawal in this book from emotional ties--and especially sexual ones--suggests that he is less a man frozen in the world, impervious to the workings of the heart, than a figure all too aware of the risks and longings connected to his desire for men.

Toibin's preference in Love in a Dark Time is for the more emotionally honest homosexual writer--Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement both receive incisive, sympathetic accounts enhanced by their respective tragic fates. James, a contemporary of both men (and less than keen on Wilde's very public persona), chose another path. Whereas Marcher is unaware of his evasions until the end of 'The Beast in the Jungle', in The Master it is precisely his own evasions and silences that James uses as material for his writing. The recollections of a vibrant Minny Temple and, as Toibin has it, James's refusal to reciprocate her feelings of romantic attachment before her early death, had already become the germ for Isabel Archer in Tile Portrait of a Lady. In the present of Toibin's novel she is soon to be reincarnated even more powerfully as Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove. Memory of moral failure, as The Master wishes us to see it, is nevertheless transformed into art. And what kind of failure is it when the complexities of one's life are recognized, acknowledged, or even lamented for their absence? Toibin's sexual politics are more comfortable with a figure like Casement. 'I admire the quality of his desire, his passion, his erotic complexity, his openness, his doubleness, his sexual energy' (p.105), he has written. There is a curious combination in this sentence of the explicit and the opaque, the direct and the veiled, as if Casement's greatness lies in a sexual openness that nevertheless requires concealment. Toibin's James is careful to avoid an explicit sexual identity, even one privately taken. Two young men, an Irish manservant Tom Hammond and the Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Andersen, attract James's attention, but nothing overt takes place, beyond some oblique gazing and careful hugging. There is a beautifully understated episode in the novel where a young James shares a bed with his friend Wendell Holmes. Holmes 'turned and cupped him with his body and placed one hand against his back and the other on his shoulder'. James 'knew not to turn or move, but subtly ... eased himself more comfortably into the shape of Holmes, closing his eyes and allowing his breath to come as freely as it would' (p. 100). Toibin's source for this episode is Sheldon Novick's 1996 biography of James, which proposed a sexual relationship between James and Holmes (a claim based, dubiously, on a rather unimaginative reading of the word 'obelisk' in their correspondence). Where Novick asserted, Toibin gestures, and the result is very Jamesian indeed.

Despite these moments of delicate sensitivity, however, The Master builds a picture of an artist figure plagued by a resolute inability to commit to anything except his art, where what gets sacrificed in the process is the possibility of intimacy. This is a very modern criticism superimposed onto James's imagined sexual politics, one that does not take into full account the trauma of the Wilde trial on constructions of male homosociality or indeed the possibility of an entirely different James, one for whom fulfilment could be achieved without the requirements of passion. Toibin is sympathetic to James up to a point, but James's refusal to acknowledge his sexuality or to act upon it (Wilde is the obvious anti-type here) finally turns him into a melancholic figure. The closing paragraph of the novel has him walking alone through the rooms at Lamb House, so that its previous occupants and visitors 'could be remembered and captured and held' (p. 359). Edith Wharton called James an 'ever-bubbling fountain of fun' who was 'the delight of his intimates'. For Toibin's James, intimacy is necessarily dispersed but its traces are made available for conversion into art. Despite the rewards of this process, The Master finally finds such an exchange unfulfilling.

ANDREW TAYLOR