James vs. James

Last year saw many critics wondering, in understandable puzzlement, why there was a sudden glut of novels involving Henry James.  One doesn't have to share Dan Green's exasperation with literary biography to believe that historical fiction about a writer sounds like a surefire prescription for disaster--especially when the writer in question is James.   After all, the most important part of a writer's life--namely, the writing--tends not to be grist for any spine-tingling narrative's mill; to salvage the situation, the historical novelist must come up with something else to emphasize, as is the case with J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, Frederick Busch's The Mutual Friend, and Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun.*  In James' case, there isn't, at first glance, much "else" to write about.   

For critics who faced David Lodge's Author! Author! after an earlier bout with Colm Toibin's much slimmer The Master, there was one automatic response: compare the two novels.  But the aims of these two books are so dissimilar that simply comparing them won't really do.  Certainly, approaching Lodge after Toibin feels a bit like a slap in the face, style-wise.  Toibin's sentences are finely-turned and calculated; Lodge's are surprisingly breezy, even chatty.  (Luckily, neither novelist tries to "do" James' own style, although Lodge indulges in the occasional bit of labyrinthine dialogue.)  But the differences run much deeper than simply those of style.  Lodge gives us a traditional historical novel, complete with archival research and a lengthy bibliographical afterword.  Author! Author! groans under the weight of casually dropped Victorian names, not to mention the sometimes arcane details of theatrical staging, negotiations with publishers, and so forth.  Lodge does his best to evoke a sense of James as a participant in late-Victorian popular culture; the emphasis falls, that is, on what could be called the "visible" James, in his sometimes bristly and envy-ridden encounters with his contemporaries.  By contrast, The Master takes little interest in creating historical reality effects, let alone dwelling on major historical events (although the Civil War plays a key role).  Instead, the novel tries to imagine James in the act of perceiving and analyzing.  We are still dealing with James as he interacts with other people, but those interactions are less important than how James himself judges, stages, analyzes, and imagines them.  (The novel actually has remarkably little dialogue.)  In The Master, action takes second place to reflection.  It's no accident that most of the novel emphasizes James remembering, rather than doing something in the present. 

To see what I mean, let's take a look at two passages.  In the first, from Author! Author!, James reads an excerpt from Du Maurier's first novel, Peter Ibbetson:

...Henry did not as a rule approve of the pseudoautobiography as a fictional form.  An 'I' narrator might serve very well for a short story or tale, but in the long haul of the novel it was apt to encourage diffuseness and irrelevance.  For a beginner, however, it had its advantages as a narrative method, solving many potential problems by simple elimination, and it lent itself to Du Maurier's lyrical celebration of a child's loves, hopes and fears, the adult man's effort to recover a lost world of impressions.  A phrase occurred, 'to ache with the pangs of happy remembrance', which epitomised the mood of the whole thing.  It was done with considerable charm and delicacy, and no dissembling was required on Henry's part, when the reading was concluded, to congratulate the author and urge him to continue with the good work.  (105)

And here, in The Master, James watches someone else reading one of his own short stories:

...Now Henry watched Gray crossing the garden with a chair in one hand and the North American Review in the other to find a shady place in which he could sit and read the story.  Henry was nervous about Gray's response, but pleased also that the story could now be mentioned.  He imagined Gray reading it with the sharp eye of a war veteran, finding not enough about the action of the war and finding too much about women.  Watching him begin the story, and being able from the vantage point of another chair in the garden some distance away from him to see him proceed, was difficult, almost unnerving.  After a while he could manage it no more, he had had enough, and he took a long walk that afternoon and did not come back until suppertime.  (97-98)

In the excerpt from Lodge, we get a dab of James as practical critic, along with some relief that, after all, he can say something nice about his friend's first attempt at novel-writing.  The dip into theory turns this moment into a bit of narrative ventriloquism: Lodge takes this opportunity to educate the reader in James' own understanding of fictional practice.  At the same time, the adjectives "charm" and "delicacy" help us gauge James' estimate of his friend's work.  Peter Ibbetson might be a nice debut (at least, at this stage of its composition), but hardly serious competition for James' own ambitious prose.  By contrast, Toibin offers us James speculating on the subjective experience of his reader.  James moves from watching Gray reading to imagining how Gray would understand what he reads, given his status as a veteran; theory is much less important here than James' attempt to recreate the thought processes of another human being.  In a fine touch, James' imaginative skills give way to the reality of Gray's impenetrability, and the result turns out to be acutely discomforting.

One way of summing up the difference between the two novels' aims, then, would be to say that Lodge tries to recreate what James thought, while Toibin tries to recreate how he thought.  For that reason, Toibin downgrades straightforward plot in favor of identifying James' "typical" mode of regarding other human beings--almost clinically detached, yet aware of the possibilities inherent in silences, evasions, stutters.  The novel consistently links James' consciousness to rooms "from whose windows he had observed the world, so that they could be remembered and captured and held" (338); the imagery simultaneously conjures up protection, privilege, and imprisonment.  James tries to contain his emotional life so that he can truly see, a position that often entails great cruelty to others.  Lodge's James, by contrast, is far more "open" to the world, and easily tempted by the possibility of popular acclaim.  Author! Author! doesn't downgrade drama as an art form; in fact, as one minor character notes of James' attitude to the theatre, "[h]e was fascinated by it, but at the same time he despised it, and brought to it only his second-best ideas (often they were second-hand too)" (243).  James yearns to be applauded, but fails to recognize that drama, too, requires its own brand of artistic mastery.  Lodge makes it clear that James keeps trying to import his novelistic style into his dramas, with unfortunate results; no attempt here to rescue James' plays for the canon. 

Both novelists agree that James was an essentially unpleasant person, although Toibin's James is coldly unpleasant and Lodge's is prudishly unpleasant.  (Incidentally, both novelists also agree that James was probably gay, although Toibin is more emphatic about it.)  And yet both novels offer their own pleasures.  Toibin will frustrate anyone looking for something that resembles a plot, and at times his method feels a bit precious; nevertheless, the novel succeeds in evoking James' consciousness.  By contrast, Lodge will appeal more to those who enjoy historical fiction, although his 3x5 cards are often far too much in evidence.  Both are worthy contributions to the legend of "the Master."

*--Christopher Marlowe, the subject of George Garrett's Entered from the Sun and Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford, appears to have lived in very interesting times indeed--which is probably why neither novel ever manages to convey much sense of him as a poet and playwright. 

Comments

[iPhil]

I missed most of the Victorian stuff, but I like Lodge's The British Museum is falling Down.

iPhil

[sharon]

I don't really go in for this kind of biographical historical fiction that much (I haven't read either of the James novels), but on the subject of Marlowe I did thoroughly enjoy Tamburlaine Must Die last year.

[genevieve]

I enjoyed The Master, and would have hated to see it fail as I admire Toibin's work generally ( and I expected it to be something I might feel uncomfortable with as I'm not a faction fan). Thanks for the Marlowe tips, it is probably easier to read faction about him given that I've never given the original material a proper run and thought he was a fascinating figure.

[Ray Davis]

I thought published-as-fact-but-meticulously-speculative The Reckoning was more entertaining than the meticilously-researched-but-published-as-fiction novels. Your reckoning may differ, but you might as well give it a try if you can find it cheap or free.

[david crossen]

I must admit I didn't love The Master. I knew the facts, the consciousness can be extrapolated from the stories, and I didn't like the treatment of sexuality -- like his sleeping naked with Holmes. What happened? Incidentally, David Riggs wrote a magnificent life of Marlowe. It tells more about the educational experience than anything I've ever read about shakespeare except Baldwin's book. Wonderful