Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Writing at the master’s knee
Colm Tóibín’s imagined life of Henry James
BY JOHN FREEMAN

Between 1902 and 1905, Henry James published three of the 20th century’s finest novels: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. Ten years prior, however, James was in a rut, writing mostly shorter pieces and attempting to get a stalled playwrighting career off the ground. In his luminous fifth novel, The Master, Colm Tóibín imagines the life of this intensely private American novelist during his darkest hour. Not only does Tóibín explore the labyrinthine inner workings of this mysterious man, he gives readers a hushed and intimate portrait of how James might have worked.

The story opens in 1895, when James’s final attempt at playwrighting was booed out of the theater. In a style reminiscent of James’s own work, Toíbín depicts his humiliated hero retreating from the public eye and vowing to create his art anew. As Tóibín sees it, James’s central difficulty during this period was not what to write but how to regain the equilibrium he needed in order to work. The aging novelist travels to Rome and Florence, reduces contact with family and friends, and buys a home where he plans to live out the rest of his days quietly.

Readers familiar with Leon Edel’s magisterial five-volume biography will recognize the structural scaffolding Tóibín uses here — and they will also appreciate what a miraculous building he has constructed within it. Toíbín recognizes that the most difficult part of making history come alive is not in getting the details right but in conveying the texture and flavor of consciousness in an era not our own. The Master accomplishes this with two interlocking narratives. There is James’s practical, professional concerns and how he deals with them; more interesting, however, is how his journey forward turns inward. He flashes back to his childhood and growing up in the shadow of an older, more athletic brother — the daunting philosopher and Harvard professor of psychology William James — and a domineering father, Henry James Sr., a man who studied the world with a voracious if reductive desire to uncover evidence of humankind’s ability to better itself.

Some of the book’s best passages speculate as to how James might have used the sting of a cousin’s untimely death to create the heroines of Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Wings of the Dove. Tóibín does such a superb job of making James come alive that one needn’t have read these books to appreciate the tenderness of this resurrection. "He loved describing her white umbrella with a violet lining," Tóibín writes, "and the sense of intelligent pleasure in her movements, her glance and her voice."

Dozens of novels have conjured literary figures in recent years, but only Michael Cunningham in The Hours has shown a comparable understanding of the way mechanics and metaphysics mesh in the act of writing. When Tóibín describes James turning to dictation, he both depicts the act and embodies it:

He loved walking up and down the room, beginning a new sentence, letting it snake ahead, stopping it for a moment, adding a phrase, a brief pause, and then allowing the sentence to gallop to an elegant and fitting conclusion. He looked forward to starting in the morning, his typist punctual, uncomplaining, seemingly indifferent as though the words uttered by the novelist equaled in interest and importance his previous work in the commercial sector.

Having previously written in short, staccato sentences, Tóibín has reinvented his prose style to mimic James’s rich weave. He has also paid homage to James’s storytelling. Like James’s novels, The Master is a tale in which precious little actually happens. James, a lifelong bachelor, almost acts on his homosexual impulses but always refrains; he almost falls out with his family but makes amends in the end. The truly important action takes place in his head as he tames and sublimates his appetites into fiction. It’s a delicate process, this act of creation, fraught with psychological tension, and Tóibín captures it beautifully, making it seem miraculous that anyone writes fiction at all.

Colm Tóibín reads next Thursday, June 3, at 7:30 p.m. at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street in Newton; call (617) 244-6619.


Issue Date: May 28 - June 3, 2004
Back to the Books table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group