Is there some magic about Irish writers? Or am I nationalistic in a way I hadn’t realized? Think of John LeCarré, Colum McCann, Anne Enright, Frank McCourt, Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Naill Williams, Tana French and so many more—none have ever disappointed me, and all seem to know how to transport a reader to wherever their fertile minds decide to take us. Not only do they take us there, but they take us in style. Not only do they take us in style, but they make us part of their story.
I recently reread Colm Toíbín’s “The Master,” a 2004 historical novel based on the life of Henry James. I was swept away again. Reading this book is like becoming a secondary character at Downton Abby. For example, at a days-long party in which privileged guests each have their own accommodations:
“The gas lamps were lit in his apartment and the fire was blazing. It was as though Hammond had known he would be returning early. The sitting room was beautiful like this, old wood and flickering shadows and long dark velvet curtains. It was strange, he thought, how familiar these rooms had become to him, and how much he needed the peace they provided.”
The description is so simple, and yet how easy for us to fill in the chairs and a sofa, the small tables, a desk, the deep color of the curtains, and the ornate Persian rugs. Before he is even described, we can visualize Hammond, the valet de chambre in his black and white uniform, preternaturally anticipating James’s needs and desires.
Though biographical, “The Master” concentrates on four years in particular, from 1895 to 1899, when James was in his 50s and at the height of his fame. We learn how he got there in subtle flashbacks, and we learn about his status in the family as a quiet, bookish boy compared to his siblings: his brother William, a year older, sure of himself and his talents as a writer and philosopher, and a hard act for Henry to follow; his two younger brothers, Wilky, a passionate idealist, and Bob, who “sailed his boat and made a nuisance of himself”; and his sister, Alice, “an independent republic” who became a “strange and witty invalid” in her later life.
This is very much the life of a writer, his powers of observation, his discipline; but it is also a book about writing in the 19th century, when writers wrote by hand. James’s writing hand bore the brunt of his devotion to his work:
“He held it now as though it were a foreign object placed in his care, unpleasant and unwelcome and at times, venomous. He could write in the mornings, but by noon the pain was too intense along the bone running from the wrist to his little finger and the muscles and nerves and tendons around it.”
It was his brother William who suggested Henry avail himself of a modern invention, the stenograph, and find someone who could type up his chapters after a day’s dictation. James was not convinced at first but soon became a convert.
“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.”
Soon, though, he regretted letting anyone know, “as those who learned that he was now talking his words into a machine, that the art of fiction had become industrialized, took a dim view of his decision and, indeed, of his future.”
James was a “bachelor,” his sexuality broadly hinted at in “The Master.” And he was an American, though he spent most of his life in London. But he was enchanted by what he saw as “the yearning openness of Americans, their readiness for experience, their eyes bright with expectation and promise.” So unlike the company he kept.
“As he worked on his novels of English morals and manners, he felt the dry nature of the English experience, sure of its own place and unready for change, steeped in the solid and the social, a system of manners developed without much interruption for a thousand years.”
Though James cherished his privacy, there was plenty of society, he had many friends, and he was especially close to several women, though he couldn’t give them the intimacy they so wanted from him. It is clear that he broke hearts, and clear that his own heart was devoted to his writing above all else.
This biography does not analyze James’s work, as many do, but Toíbín shows us how James worked and how attentive, how devoted he was to his craft. Enough is said about what went into James’s stories and novels that readers may want to read everything he ever wrote. But one can’t help wonder what is real here, and what is Toíbín’s invention. Of course, the dialogue must be Toíbín’s own, but James is made so real, and the times so true, one has to wonder, who exactly is the master of this extraordinary book?
Doris Ober is the former managing editor of the “West Marin Review,” author of “The Dogtown Chronicles” and “The Alzheimer Years,” and an avid reader. She lives in Point Reyes Station.