David Lodge Author, Author.
Viking, 389 pages, $24.95
Colm Tóibín The Master
Scribner, 352 pages, $25
In the acknowledgments to his nicely nuanced novel, David Lodge writes: “A few weeks after I delivered the completed Author, Author to my publishers in September 2003, I learned that Colm Tóibín had also written a novel about Henry James which would be published in the spring of 2004.” The “also” refers to Emma Tennant’s novel, Felony, subtitled The Private History of The Aspern Papers, which Lodge first became aware of in November 2002. So as not to be distracted or influenced by a work he gathered centered on James’s relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, Lodge decided not to read Felony or reviews about it while working on his own novel. He concludes his acknowledgments with the tantalizing line, “I leave it to students of the Zeitgeist to ponder the significance of these coincidences.”
I am no expert on the Zeitgeist. As a biographer, though, I look for sources. Although Lodge provides a bibliography and claims that his “biggest single debt is to Leon Edel,” he also mentions, among a listing of other sources, that he “profited particularly” from Lyndall Gordon’s Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (1998). A private life of Henry James? What could that mean? Surely that is a title more suited to a novel. Emma Tennant’s subtitle is clearly meant to echo Gordon’s, and Tennant forthrightly identifies Gordon’s primacy in the acknowledgments to Felony.
Gordon, I believe, has a particular appeal for novelists because she writes about evidence that has disappeared. Her mission is to reveal what Henry James wanted buried: the precise meaning of his relationships with Minnie Temple, the inspiration for many of his finest fictional characters, and with Constance Fenimore Woolson, the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, an author herself. Woolson would later commit suicide—perhaps because James was not willing to share more of his life with her. Gordon follows Leon Edel’s line that James felt he was to blame for Woolson’s death: “The very urgency of his repeated denials of responsibility calls attention to their tie,” Gordon concludes.
More importantly, however, Gordon writes like a novelist. Here is the first paragraph of her book, which introduces “A Biographic Mystery”:
In April 1894, a middle-aged gentleman [Henry James], bearing a load of dresses, was rowed to the deepest part of the Venetian lagoon. A strange scene followed: he began to drown the dresses, one by one. There were a good many, well-made, tasteful, and all dark, suggesting a lady of quiet habits and some reserve. The gondolier’s pole would have been useful for pushing them under the still water. But the dresses refused to drown. One by one they rose to the surface, their busts and sleeves swelling like black balloons. Purposefully, the gentleman pushed them under, but silent, reproachful, they rose before his eyes.
I can imagine Emma Tennant reading this passage and finding it irresistible. I then see her checking the biographer’s substantial source notes and discovering that Henry James himself described this episode to Mercede Huntington of the Villa Mercede, once known as the Villa Castellani, Bellosguardo, Florence, where James and Woolson spent a happy period together (in separate accommodations), meeting (Edel and other biographers infer) for daily conversation.
Like a novelist, Gordon shows rather than tells. She comments very little on the drama of her opening scene, except to say that the drowning of the dresses suggests James’s sense of culpability in Woolson’s death. Even Gordon’s source note for the episode is novel-like in that she makes no interpretative comment on James’s need to tell what Mercede Huntington called his “strange tale.”
The BBC first broadcast Huntington’s account on June 4, 1956. A transcript was not published until 1987, and I do not know if Leon Edel was aware of this story. It is difficult to believe he could have ignored it, given his quasi-Freudian treatment of James’s biography. Fred Kaplan retold the story in Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (1992), but he ruined its impact with the typical kind of interpolations that drive readers away from biographies and back to novels: “For some bizarre reason, he [James] thought that he could best get rid of them [the dresses] by drowning them.” Not letting the story speak for itself, Kaplan adds: “He seemed engulfed by these dark simulacra, by the nightmarish representations of Fenimore [this is what James liked to call Woolson] that rose one after another, irrepressibly, making their claim of attachment, as if they belonged to him forever.” I can see Gordon reading Kaplan, and remarking: “I can do more by saying less.”
I wish to fasten on Gordon’s treatment of Woolson and James because it so clearly helps to connect the constellation of recent novels that have centered on James. Like James, Woolson had the highest literary aspirations. She sought him out as “The Master,” but she also tried to rival his work and even based several of her characters on him. Gordon’s book came at a time when Woolson’s work was earning greater respect from critics and biographers. Woolson is treated with great sensitivity in Kaplan’s biography, where she appears as a much more formidable figure than the “old maid” Edel patronizes. Gordon advances beyond Kaplan by pointing out that Woolson’s “innovative fables of artists precede those of Henry James.” James also used her as a character in his fiction, but certain ideas for his stories seem to have originated with her—a possibility Edel considered but did not develop.
James and Woolson made a pact to destroy their correspondence, a fact that prompts Gordon to quote the James scholar Alfred Habegger: “Researchers are increasingly aware ‘that interpretation has already been built into the documents allowed to survive.’” A biographer himself, James tried to control his biography through the selective destruction of evidence. Yet, as Gordon insists, some residue of an alternative story does remain. Certain letters eluded James’s destruction, for example, and Woolson left a memorial to herself in letters discovered in the papers of her friends and associates.
But Gordon’s interest in James is not one-dimensional:
[H]e understood … that what is distinctive in women’s lives is precisely what is hidden, not only from the glare of publicity, but from the daylight aspect which women present for their protection—or, it may be, for the protection of those who can’t face what they are. James was irresistible to women because he met authenticity without fear, possessed himself of it, and put it out to play on the stage of his imagination. His knowing, supremely intelligent, ageless, and—yes—irresistible, is what makes James increasingly pertinent.
To revisit James suddenly becomes—near the end of Gordon’s first chapter—an exploration of the Zeitgeist. “The real James remained an American,” Gordon affirms:
A visionary moralist, he did not indulge in the European vogue for decadence. He was not a cynic. With him, virtue is seen to hold in a period when art-for-art’s-sake debunks Victorian morality, and Modernism with its array of ineffectual men—Prufrock, Petroushka, Chaplin’s little tramp—takes the stage. The vision of James has outlived the disillusion of the twentieth century; as the Moderns move farther into the past, he is with us, more than ever our contemporary. Only now do we approach the kinds of manhood and womanhood he proposed, not viable in his own age, but possible—essential—in ours.
James’s women, Gordon insists, “were not submissive, not the helpless muse.” With these women James formed bonds few men at the time could imagine. “We approach, here, ties more intimate than sex, closer than those of family and friends,” a fusing of male and female that leads Gordon to her first chapter’s provocative conclusion:
Here is a starting point: to challenge the myth of the artist with the truer story of what we might call, for want of a better word, collaboration. To some extent, of course, James invented himself, but he could not have written as he did without partners—female partners, posthumous partners—on that unseen space in which life is transformed into art.
We turn to James, in other words, not to see where we have been, but where we are going.
Yet James himself did not wish to acknowledge the very “collaboration” Gordon seeks to reveal, which makes him the flawed and fascinating hero of the biographer’s tale. It is this James who appears in Tennant’s Felony, a thief who purloins the lives of others even as he writes his tale of The Aspern Papers, featuring a biographer who will stoop to stealing or do nearly anything, except (he belatedly realizes) marry Miss Tina, in order to secure the archive of his esteemed subject.
Leon Edel surmised that James had Woolson in mind while creating Tina. Tina, like Woolson, is related to an important literary figure. And Woolson’s few extant letters to James suggest that he had inspired an intimacy between them that had perhaps encouraged her to think of them marrying. In Edel’s biography and in Tennant’s novel, James also has in mind the story of the bumptious Captain Silsbee, who attempted to seduce Claire Clairmont, Byron’s lover and possessor of his and Shelley’s letters. In Felony, The Aspern Papers’s “herbaceous prose” is a sham, one of James’s disguises: “His tale rears up and lies flat again, a fold of paper masquerading as the real thing.”
Something curious happens in these novels about James. His fiction becomes a kind of fraud, a failure to deal with the reality that Gordon seeks to expose. These nov-els—especially Tennant’s—expose James’s duplicity:
Did he, even, do this purposely, at the time of presenting Miss Tina, the “young” Miss Bordereau (as Constance knows herself to be, and described as of ‘minor antiquity’ besides) with the infinitely cruel description of herself contained in The Aspern Papers? Is the man truly a publishing scoundrel, exposed by his own novella on the subject of greed for a poet’s papers?
Like biographers, these novelists are reading James’s novels back into his life, even as they read the novels in terms of the life that Gordon and other biographers have supplied. These novels seem to challenge the Modernist tenet that biography does not matter, that the work of art stands by itself. Gordon’s reference to the Moderns and to art for art’s sake in her first chapter resonates strongly in my biographer’s mind as I read novels that imply art does appear differently—and James appears different-ly—when the biographical context is allowed to emerge.
This newfound respect for biography seems apparent in the remarkable crop of biographical novels that have appeared recently. In works as various as I, Fatty, The Divine Sarah, and The Perfect American, the lives of Fatty (Roscoe) Arbuckle, Sarah Bernhardt, and Walt Disney arise out of strenuous efforts by novelists to behave like biographers. These novels represent a break with Modernism—or so it seems to me—in their willingness to reveal their research. I was struck by this point while reading Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Blonde about Marilyn Monroe, which seems, especially in its opening pages, to draw on my biography of the film star, and I was gratified to see Oates single out my work in her acknowledgments. This is a far cry from the truly old-fashioned Modernist work, for example, of Susan Sontag, a writer who did not deign to acknowledge her sources in In America, arguing that biography was merely fodder for the novel. I feel bound to say, though, that Sontag had reason to disparage biographies since she was accused of plagiarism.
In Colm Tóibín’s novel, The Master, Edmund Gosse is offended when James steals a story of his for a tale published in the English Illustrated Magazine. Gosse objects to the “art of fiction as a cheap raid on the real and the true,” and for a while refuses to provide the novelist with his “usual store of gossip.” And here I thought biography was a “cheap raid on the real.” The biographer, the butt of so many Modernist diatribes, has been replaced—at least in these novels about James—by the novelist.
Tóibín’s novel seems like a distillation of the James biographies. No important incident in James’s life seems absent, as Tóibín takes up James’s ambiguous sexuality, the mysterious back injury that exempted him from fighting in the Civil War, and his failure in the theater. This is a masterly feat of compression less than half the size of the noteworthy biographies. But then fiction only demands from fact those details or incidents which contribute to the novelist’s vision. Tóibín only has to be true to his Henry James, whereas the biographer not only has to compete with rival interpretations but also to reckon with recalcitrant history, which is richly informative in certain respects but rarely as revelatory as novels.
And yet, for all the novel’s supremacy in certain respects over biography, I cannot see how Tóibín could have created this exquisite scene without Gordon’s book at his side:
One morning in Florence, when the maid had come, and he [James] had opened a letter from Katherine Loring about the health and welfare of his sister Alice, he began to discuss Alice with Constance.
“Life has been difficult for her,” he said. “Life itself seems to be the root of her malady.”
“I think it’s difficult for all of us. The gap is so wide,” Constance said.
“You mean between her imagination and her confines?” Henry asked.
“I mean between using our intelligence as women to the full and the social consequences of that,” Constance said. “Alice has done what she had to do, and I admire her.”
“She really has done nothing except to stay in bed,” Henry said.
“That’s precisely what I mean,” Constance replied.
“I do not understand,” he said.
“I mean that the consequences get into the marrow of your soul.”
She smiled at him softly as though she had uttered a pleasantry.
“I’m sure she would agree with you,” he said. “She is blessed in having Miss Loring.”
“She seems a ministering angel,” Constance said.
“Yes, we all need a Miss Loring,” Henry said. As soon as he made the last remark, he regretted it. The very sound of the name Miss Loring suggested a spinster skilled only in the art of caring for others. He had meant it as a joke, or a sign of gratitude, or a way of reducing the intensity of their exchange, but he knew, as it hung in the air, that it had come out as a flippant expression of his own need, as though that was what he required from Constance. He turned to her now, preparing a statement which would take the harm out of what he had just said, but he observed that she did not seem to have noticed it, or take it on board. He was sure, nonetheless, that she had heard him. She remained placid as she resumed the conversation.
Can it be any clearer what Gordon means by collaboration, or how necessary Constance Fenimore Woolson was to Henry James? In the years after her suicide, he visited her grave several times, and memories of her invaded his fiction. She pushed him to new insights, but the very act of challenging James’s understanding had to be unnerving for both of them. And Woolson knew as much, carefully retreating behind a pleasant and placid façade, hiding herself as women, in Gordon’s view, are wont to do.
What James could not bear was the exposure of his own need; what he could not countenance was anything that destroyed what Gordon calls “the romantic myth, perpetuated by James himself in the rarefied solitude of a writer in ‘The Private Life.’” Genius cannot “emerge in a void,” Gordon argues, although that is what James tried to create by drowning Woolson’s clothes and destroying anything in her papers relating to him. As perhaps only a novelist can fully do, Tóibín has brought Woolson back from the void, although without Gordon’s biography could he have done so?
Tóibín, Tennant, and Lodge all depict a James who hid from himself in his fiction. If biography offers only limited access to the inner life, these novelists seem to suggest that fiction has its own lacuna. A novel may seem complete in itself, yet biography demonstrates that novelists withhold as much as they vouchsafe. James focused on ideas for stories rather than on his life. In Tóibín’s novel, he is the master of evasion, always finding the right word to end a conversation or simply taking refuge in silence.
In a curious way, Tóibín’s novel is a vindication of biography, for even in The Master James is remote. In his most private hours—as portrayed in The Master at any rate—James is no more forthcoming with himself than he is with others. That we cannot know James any better in fiction establishes a kind of equilibrium between biographer and novelist. Tóibín’s work suggests that James knew his characters better than he wished to know himself, just as a biographer, in certain respects, can know his subject better than the subject can know himself.
Carl Rollyson writes a column on biography every Wednesday for the New York Sun.
