The Master, by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, dramatizes various events from the life of author Henry James (1843 – 1916). The first chapter is titled “January 1895” and the last is “October 1899,” so Tóibín mostly shows us James as a man in his 50s, though in many chapters we find James thinking back on episodes from earlier in his life. The chapters could as easily have been titled according to the persons they concerned themselves with, from the author’s parents, to his siblings, to friends and relatives who played important roles in his life. So the chapter titled “March 1899” could as easily have been titled “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” as it mostly concerns the woman novelist who played an important but enigmatic role in James’s life just before the period of time covered in The Master.
As I started reading The Master, I’d half forgotten that I already knew quite a bit about the life of Henry James. In my graduate school days I’d taken a course focusing on his work, and in the years following, I’d tackled many of his novels and stories. My momentum was arrested as I began to realize just how much James had written—22 novels and over 100 stories, along with plays, autobiographies, and travel writings. I was never going to be able to swallow James whole. I had also started on Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of James, and had gotten through the first three volumes when I had a conversation with a friend and fellow student and informed her of this undertaking. Just then another student walked up and my friend said something like “He’s reading the five-volume biography of Henry James!” This was no doubt meant at least somewhat admiringly, but to my ears at that moment it was as though she’d said “He’s counting all the squirrels in Central Park!” I still haven’t tackled volumes four and five.
You might think that the life of a sedentary author who never married would not make for a good story, and certainly many people would agree with that assumption. Many of the same people would find James’s novels similarly lacking in dramatic content. Cormac McCarthy (who I have previously cited as disparaging “magical realism” in my post about Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666) has no use for writers who don’t "deal with issues of life and death," among whom he specifically mentions James and Proust (see Cormac McCarthy's Venmous Fiction. (Cranky guy, that Cormac.) Conversely, someone who does find James’ novels interesting might also find his life to be so as well. It has its mysteries, triumphs, and tragedies, like most lives; indeed, the scale of his triumphs and tragedies is more in line with the experience of the average reader. I think we want to read about both exceptional lives and ordinary lives; I do, at least. Maybe the ultimate accomplishment is making an ordinary life seem exceptional. In any case, many of the episodes that Tóibín depicts were as familiar to me as events from the news of bygone years. Here was the peculiar spiritual crisis of James’s father, Henry James, Senior: his so-called “vastation.” And there the tragedy of his brilliant and fearless cousin Minny Temple who died of tuberculosis at 24. Minny inhabits many of James’ heroines, most prominently Milly Theale from Wings of the Dove, with whom she shares her initials and her tragic early death.
One of my favorite chapters from The Master is the last one, in which James copes with an extended visit from his brother William (who was the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience and quite famous in his own right) and his wife and daughter. The brothers have never gotten along quite so well: William, the older, is judgmental and high strung, while Henry avoids confrontation but smolders with resentment at the “advice” his older brother frequently offers. It’s a very believable dynamic and quite relatable to those of us who grew up with siblings. William’s wife Alice helps to soothe relations between the brothers, and William’s daughter Peggy, age perhaps 11 or 12 at this time, delights her uncle as she discovers—and devours—the novels of Dickens during her stay, as well as her uncle’s best known novel:
…his niece suddenly asked him if he intended to write a second volume, a sequel, to The Portrait of a Lady. She told him that she had, less than one hour before, finished the book. Henry told her that he had written the book twenty years earlier and had long forgotten it: he did not think he would write a sequel to it.
“Why did she go back?” Peggy asked [referring to the book’s heroine, Isabel Archer, and her decision, at the end of the book, to return to her duplicitous husband].
…
“It is very difficult for anyone in their lives,” Henry began, “to make leaps into the dark. Isabel’s going to Europe from Albany, leaving all her family behind, and then against everyone’s advice and her own better judgement marrying Osmond, were leaps into the dark. Making such leaps requires us to be brave and determined, but doing so may also freeze any other possibilities. It is easier to renounce bravery rather than to be brave over and over. It could not, in her case, be done again. The will and the nerve needed for such actions do not come to us often, any of us, least of all Isabel Archer from Albany.
Apparently he had not completely forgotten the book. I doubt if any such conversation ever actually happened, but I certainly wish it could have. The internet doesn’t have much to say about Margaret (Peggy) James, except that she was born in 1887 and died in 1950.
Tóibín also does an excellent job of suggesting how James’s experiences in the world might have gotten his imagination started on various writing projects. Thoughts and ideas contributing to the composition of The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story and one of James’s best known and most frequently anthologized tales, originate in “a story he had heard (from the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less) about young children, left to the care of servants in an old country house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children: the children are bad, full of evil to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions return to haunt the house and children.”
That’s actually a sketchy summary of the tale James eventually wrote. Crucially, it is missing the main character—the governess who is hired to take care of the children, and who can never quite be sure if the supernatural presences she witnesses are real or not. The reader shares the governess’s uncertainty and adds to it an additional uncertainty about the emotional and mental stability of the governess herself. She is a young woman all alone in a difficult and ominous situation. She is under strict orders never to contact the children’s father, under any circumstances. What a strange injunction—it’s like something you’d find in a Kafka novel. How could she not be under a tremendous strain?
The rest of the chapter where James hears the Archbishop’s story, titled “March 1895,” could have been titled “Alice James,” because it mostly has to do with Henry’s sister, who is also named Alice. The subject of much scholarly interest and of an acclaimed biography, Alice James was an invalid who died in her early 40s. Tóibín suggests that her malady was actually a kind of extended existential crisis, the result of being unable to engage her intelligence and force to the life choices available to a woman in the 1880s. It’s not that it couldn’t be done—witness George Eliot—it’s that it could only be done a very emotionally secure woman with the necessary support. Alice’s nervous susceptibility, her obligations to family, and other factors doomed her.
As James is developing his idea for a ghost story about orphan children, Alice has just died. Tóibín suggests that James has infused her spirit into the character of his governess, her sense of being alone against the world. The ghost story is a good one, but as originally conceived, the people in it are ciphers. Alice was a real person with a complex and tragic combination of traits. The skill of a novelist like James was to blend an interesting story with the essence of a real person.
Tóibín clearly admires James in many ways, but he sees one major flaw in his hero and illustrates it in multiple instances: it is James’ cowardice; specifically, his unwillingness or inability to come to the aid of people close to him in their hour of need. He does not answer the summons when his cousin Milly is ill with tuberculosis and expresses her wish that Henry could show her Rome. She had written him: “Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome. I am crazy at the mere thought. I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.” Henry chooses not to take the hint. Years later, he is visited by his old friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, who also knew Milly when they were young. Holmes probes James on the matter:
“Do you ever regret not taking her to Italy when she was ill? he asked. “Gray says she asked you several times.”
“I don’t think ask is the word,” Henry said. “She was very ill then. Gray is misinformed.”
“Gray says that she asked you and you did not offer to help her and that a winter in Rome might have saved her.”
“Nothing could have saved her,” Henry said.
Henry felt the sharp deliberation of Holmes’ tone, the slow cruelty of it; he was, he thought, being questioned and judged by his old friend without any sympathy or affection.
If only in his writing, James does take Isabel Archer, one of Milly’s avatars, to Rome, with dubious consequences. Whether that is by way of making amends there is no way of knowing.
He does not answer the summons on another occasion when his novelist friend Constance Fenimore Woolson is depending on him to visit her in Venice during the winter of 1894. Henry and Constance have shared a strange kind of intimacy, meeting in various countries and taking accommodations near each other from time to time. Their intimacy is characterized at least as much by what they don’t say as by what they do. They are both guarded to an extraordinary degree: she, Tóibín suggests, by an exquisite vulnerability, he by an almost instinctive shudder of horror at the notion of a romantic alliance, particularly with a woman. Henry agrees to meet her in Venice, but then is put off when letters from a mutual acquaintance in Venice suggest that Woolson has been alluding to some sort of alliance with James. He does not come, and Woolson, confronted by this desertion (among other factors) commits suicide by throwing herself from the balcony of her hotel. Henry receives word of her death in a telegram:One afternoon in January he was working quietly when Smith put a telegram on the mantelpiece. Henry must, he later thought, have left it there without looking at it for an hour or more, being engrossed in his writing. It was only when he broke for tea that he moved absent-mindedly to the fireplace and opened the envelope. The telegram informed him that Constance was dead. His first response was to go to Smith and ask him calmly for tea; he then returned to his study and, closing the door and sitting at his desk, he studied the telegram which had come from Constance’s sister, Clara Benedict, in the United States. He knew that he would have to go to Venice and wondered now from whom he should enquire about the details of her death. He drank the tea when it was brought, and then he went to the window and frantically studied the street outside as though some distant detail there, some movement, a sound even, might help him to a full realization of what had happened or might erase such a realization as it slowly dawned.
Henry is as composed as ever during this episode, except for that single word, frantically, that somehow forces its way into the paragraph and serves to indicate the emotion he is trying to master. He knows that his decision not to go to Venice was at least in part intended to punish her for suggesting that an alliance between them has existed; he also knows that she understood this intent, and that she has found a way to punish him in turn.
These are not the only episodes in which Tóibín shows James dealing with a difficult situation by just not showing up. But they are the most prominent such episodes, and they also serve to demonstrate James’s aversion to even the idea of a heterosexual relationship, or any open display of emotion. The difficulty is that he does love both Milly and Constance. He just cannot show his love. Nor can he explain himself. So he writes their lives into his books instead, summoning the passion that is not available to him in real life.
