The portrait of a gentleman
Sebastian Smee
THE MASTER by Colm TóibIn Picador, £16, pp. 470. ISBN 0330485652 Colm Toibin's fifth novel opens with a tremendously assured description of an already famous Henry James awaiting the opening night of his first play in London. He does so with lurching sensations of dread and anticipation. The venture, if successful, will launch him on a new and profitable course: 'He foresaw an end to long, solitary days: this new world was now within his grasp.'
The premiere, however, turns into a public humiliation. And so James, like a prodded mollusc retreating into its convoluted carapace, resumes his old life of solitude with chastened resolve. The rest of the novel, which traces the aging novelist through four years of his life, using present events to frame a restless probing of the past, is equally assured. But something in
its very conception — the inherent presumption and redundancy, perhaps, of devoting a 470-page novel to the interior life of another novelist — left me dissatisfied, even after what felt like a feast of subtle pleasures. In the wake of his disastrous foray into the theatre, Henry wishes 'for solitude and for the comfort of knowing that his life depended not on the multitude but on remaining himself', His fate is set in contrast to Oscar Wilde's. Just as Henry's first play falls on its face, Wilde — 'loud and large and Irish as he was' — is enjoying yet another popular success with An Ideal Husband.
It isn't long, however, before Wilde's sexual indiscretions turn his adoring public — and the law — against him. Henry watches on, appalled. Any possibility, we are made to feel, that he might one day succumb to what Katherine Mansfield called our 'profound and terrible need to make contact' and act on his own homosexual inclinations is snuffed out by the spectacle.
Thus, a pattern emerges: our hero is, on the one hand, tremblingly sensitive, socially fluent and sympathetic, and on the other weak and wary and defensive, to the point of outright selfishness. Thibin conveys with considerable tact the ways in which these apparent contradictions create the conditions for James's finespun art.
But he is more interested in the personal fall-out, and so it is that Henry's relationships with his sister and two dear female friends form the dramatic backbone of the book. All three women die in circumstances that reflect badly on him — or, at least, on his willingness to act sympathetically at a moment when such actions might count. 'He had his reasons for choosing to remain alone,' we are told in one key passage; 'his imagination, however, had stretched merely as'far as his fears and not beyond.'
Toibin sympathetically conveys Henry's sense of the bliss of solitude; the feeling, when one sinks into such periods, that they might just prove indefinite, that one might never be bothered by vulgarity or falseness or the demands of others again. Even as events rage outside, he finds himself wanting to 'savour, as deeply as he could, this quiet and strange treachery, his own surreptitious withdrawal from the world'.
If there is a problem with all this it is that TOibin's theme becomes like a rather indiscreet watermark on almost every page. One feels towards the end that, though he may have found a good subject, he has found perhaps one too many ways of extending it. Having said that, there can be few contemporary novelists capable of sustaining this sort of psychological probe over an entire novel, and Toibin does it with great artistry and conviction. His clear, looping prose is supple and involving, and the last 10 or 20 pages, which are suffused with a spirit of reconciliation, are particularly fine.
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