The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  And yet in the poised, ambiguous final paragraphs of the novel, there is a hint that nothing at all has been learnt, that no such devouring has occurred. For Nick’s response to his eviction is entirely in keeping with the aesthete’s nostalgic reading of the world which has brought him to this point. As he walks slowly and stunnedly down the street, unable to contemplate the present, he imagines instead that he has contracted Aids, and that he will die of the disease, and he casts his mind forward to the point of his death, trying to imagine how he will be remembered by the friends who survive him: ‘The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy, and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional.’ Then, suddenly – this future nostalgia having been comfortingly wallowed in – Nick’s mind recurs to the exquisite irrefutability of the present. He gazes at the light falling on the stonework of a building ahead of him, and the novel ends with a word and a sentiment against which it has ostensibly been briefing throughout: ‘It wasn’t just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.’

  12 Colm Tóibín, The Master

  BENJAMIN MARKOVITS

  Henry James makes a brief appearance towards the end of Colm Tóibín’s first novel, The South. The book tells the story of Katherine Proctor, a Protestant Irish woman who has left her husband and young son and moved, with uncertain purpose, to Spain. She begins to paint again, falls in love, gives birth to a daughter, and loses both lover and child in a car accident. Revolutionary politics plays a role in the story, the struggles of the communists and the struggles of the unionists. What gives a shape to the novel is the slow emergence of Katherine’s career from the fragments of various halfwilled decisions and strokes of fortune. Her mother, an Englishwoman who also left her husband and child to live in London, takes her daughter on holiday to Portugal: she brings with her ‘a lot of Henry James’s novels’, including The Ambassadors. Katherine, in a letter to a friend, compares herself to its protagonist: ‘I am like Chad, still starry-eyed at the sight of the new. I am like Chad who wants the opportunity to see more, to do more. I do not want everything to be over with me. There is more. There is more.’

  The allusion stands out, in part because the novel itself seems so unJamesian. The comparison to Chad makes clear how unlike Chad she is: the unembarrassed repetitions, the straightforward sentence structure. Her letter shows a lack of embarrassment all round: about optimism, about the bluntness of her comparison, about the simplicity of her reading. James, in his late preface to The Ambassadors, remarked that he never felt so sure of his ground as he did composing it. I imagine that The South was a harder novel to put together. Sections are separated by date and place; the connections between them are often skipped. It is made up of fragments in part because it follows no narrative line. Katherine drifts from episode to episode, not quite thoughtlessly, but without much conscious effort. Things happen to her. Between the fragments, holding them together, we have a sense of the real world – the world that hasn’t been made up. James himself would never appeal to it, which makes it notable that Tóibín has appealed to James.

  His work seems to owe more to Raymond Carver. Short direct sentences. An emphasis on the plausible. A matt emotional finish. One of the odd side-effects of ‘modest realism’ is that it produces so much misery: that’s what tends to emerge when you strip a plot of its extraordinary, satirical, and suspenseful elements. It certainly emerges in Tóibín’s work. James, by contrast, has the light touch of artifice. Fiction plays games, and even at his tragic best, he manages to impart a consoling aesthetic delight. His heroines suffer beautifully. Not that Tóibín’s novels seem uncrafted. The South, The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship suggest the thankless effort required to get small details right. He has said that you shouldn’t read more than one or two of them: they’re too grim. What he does impart in each of these simple and difficult books is the sense of a long and serious argument being made. We have an impression of his control, of a large overarching intention – but little sense of the small particular intentions, passage by passage, line by line, that make it up.

  Simplicity is one of his tricks, though his prose is not as simple as it first appears. Or maybe it’s truer to say, that there’s more to it than simplicity. His sentences aren’t that short; he’s capable of sketching his ideas with a fine-tipped pen. In The Heather Blazing, a judge, an important man, has returned to the sea in which he swam as a child:

  Each time a wave rolled inwards it unsettled the small stones at the shoreline, forcing them to knock against each other. They made a clattering, gurgling sound as each wave hit them and then retreated. He listened for it as the waves came in, a sound unlike any other, definite and oddly comforting, like two hollow objects being banged against each other, except that this was more modest, intimate.

  What Tóibín avoids, for the most part, are metaphorical flights and grammatical complexities. Even here, the simile demands from us only a slight imaginative effort: the sound of wave on stone is like the sound of two hollow objects making contact. When he runs on, he runs on unashamedly, connecting the parts of his thought with nothing more elaborate than a few commas. He balks at elegant variations, and has never taken seriously Nabokov’s advice, to avoid starting successive paragraphs with the same word. Subject + verb suits him fine. Children tell stories by saying, this and then this and then this; his novels are enormously complicated versions of their technique. The effect can be relentless, but his relentlessness is also deeply persuasive. Modesty is the proof he gives us of his realism.

  James, famously, is a master of just those tricks that Tóibín forswears: metaphorical flights, grammatical complexities, elegant variations. Which makes that brief allusion in The South all the more suggestive. What is his debt to James? The Master, Tóibín’s fifth novel, doesn’t offer an easy answer to the question, though James is its hero, and his life is its subject. Like The South, it is separated into sections, which are introduced by a time and a place. Like The South, it is shaped by the vague irregular outline of someone’s life. James drifts from episode to episode, not thoughtlessly, of course, but without much conscious effort. Things happen to him. The novel opens with the opening of his play Guy Domville. Like Chad, he is starry-eyed at the sight of the new. He wants the opportunity to do more, to see more:

  He was ready now to change his life. He foresaw an end to long, solitary days; the grim satisfaction that fiction gave him would be replaced by a life in which he wrote for voices and movement and an immediacy that through all his life up to now he had believed he would never experience.

  The theatre offers him a chance to take his place on the public stage. The story that follows describes his failure to make good on that chance – because of bad luck, because of his hesitations, his cowardice, because of the unchangeable tendencies of his character. His sexuality, or rather its suppression, has something to do with it. Guy Domville is about a man, the last of his family line, forced to choose between marriage and a life of contemplation – he wishes to retire to a monastery. I have said that Tóibín is good at covering up the tracks of his intentions. It looks at first as if he has made them clear here. A series of conversations, between James and an old friend, whom he knew in Paris, between James and Edmund Gosse, suggest that his homosexuality has been acknowledged, as a fact, as a problem, within his circle of acquaintance. We see him standing in the rain outside the Paris flat of his friend Paul Joukowski, hesitating, wondering whether to go in; later, remembering his own hesitations, his turning away at last. Someone mentions having seen Joukowski, greatly changed, aged; James refuses to admit his interest in him. This is a novel, it seems, about a man who cannot come to terms with the fact that he is gay.

  The trouble with such a novel is that it makes us, as readers, much wiser than James: if only he could
accept what everyone knows, his life would have been happier and more complete. I say ‘trouble’ – it’s a line many writers would have taken. (I should say now that Tóibín hasn’t.) The fact that James, as a historical figure, was enormously self-aware, enormously sophisticated, should undermine, a little, our confidence that we can understand him. But the truth is that most people are very good at their lives. They understand them much better in some ways (the work they do, the habits that sustain them, the content of their memories, the nature of their relations with friends, parents, lovers) than any novelist can hope to. Which makes the novelist’s task almost impossible: to let us into the lives of others, without violating our sense of the fact that what interests us about them is their privacy, or, to put it another way, their own superior understanding of themselves.

  Tóibín’s James, in fact, spends much of his novel resisting the attempts of others to make sense of him. He rebuffs Gosse, when, after the trial of Oscar Wilde is over, Gosse dresses up a little of his curiosity as a piece of concern:

  ‘It is advised, I think, that anyone who has been, as it were, compromised should arrange to travel as soon as possible. London is a large city and much can go on here quietly and secretly, but now the secrecy has been shattered.’

  Henry stood up and went to the bookcase between the windows and studied the books. ‘I wondered if you, if perhaps …’ Gosse began.

  ‘No.’ Henry turned sharply. ‘You do not wonder. There is nothing to wonder about.’

  ‘Well, that is a relief, if I may say so,’ Gosse said quietly, standing up.

  ‘Is that what you came here to ask?’ Henry kept his eyes fixed on Gosse, his gaze direct and hostile enough to prevent any reply.

  It’s an important moment – no one in the book comes closer than Gosse to raising the question, openly, of James’s sexuality. Tóibín allows James to express his own resistance to this line of inquiry. He does not himself enter into his character’s thoughts, though he is willing enough, elsewhere, to make the attempt. Henry stands up and Henry stares – as much at us as at Gosse. We see what his friend sees. He seems to be staring at Tóibín, too.

  Other people in the book also resist James’s attempts to turn them into his own characters. Writing, its effects, on both the writer and the people he uses for his writing, is in some sense the subject of The Master. I have said that the novel borrows its structure from The South: a series of episodes defined by the time and the place in which they are set. James’s history, however, progresses very differently from Katherine Proctor’s. In her case, the structure of the novel reflects the fact that she feels imprisoned inside each stage of her life. In her marriage, from which she escapes to Barcelona; in the narrow round of expatriate life, from which she escapes, with her lover, to the Pyrenees; in the Pyrenees, from which she escapes, at last, after the death of her lover and child, etc. The narrow timeframes of each chapter serve as the walls that she can’t see over, which keep her from making out the shape of her life. James, by contrast, spends very little of each chapter in the moment in which they are set. Tóibín allows him to range freely, backwards, into his memories, and forwards, into the stories he hopes to build from the scant materials of his personal experience. The setting of each chapter is really only the pivot on which he turns, to look both ways at his life. What moves the story forward, page by page, is the evolution of his work.

  The failure of Guy Domville in January of 1895 – James is booed when he appears on stage after the first night – forces him to give up on his public ambitions. What follows is an account of the private revolutions that enable him, by October of 1899, to write the remarkable sequence of late novels that begins with The Wings of the Dove (first published in 1902) and ends with The Golden Bowl (1904).

  He took up his pen again – the pen of all his unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. It was now, he believed, that he would do the work of his life. He was ready to begin again, to return to the old high art of fiction with ambitions now too deep and pure for any utterance.

  His is an extraordinary ambition; I mean, Tóibín’s. Great men are hard to write. Most people are very good at being themselves; the great are great in part because they are uniquely good at it. Novelists can tackle the problem in different ways. The simplest is to build a frame around their protagonist – to present him only as he appears in the more writable perspective of other people. Tóibín does not shy from the defining feature of James’s greatness, his creative genius; in fact, he attempts to account for it, in each episode of The Master, and often with unembarrassed directness. In Ireland James observes a very pretty girl, the daughter of guests at the house in which he is staying, play up sweetly to the admiration generally felt for her. He wonders what will become of such precocious, such conscious innocence – he holds it up, as it were, in different lights, to see what he can make of it. Later, he recalls a story told him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, about two children left in the care of a governess. The house is large and the governess has been instructed not to contact their guardian ‘under any circumstances’. Gosse asks him for the details of a rumour once reported about his father, that he had a vision of a terrible black bird, which reduced him to inconsolable helplessness; he needed months to recover. Henry had been too small to remember the incident, but Gosse suggests to him, on the strength of recent theories, ‘that a child can take in everything, hold it but not absorb it in what they call the unconscious’. Various ideas dovetail, and he begins to form a plan for, among other tales, The Turn of the Screw.

  Gosse eventually becomes suspicious of the uses to which Henry puts his gossip. He believes that ‘writing a story using factual material and real people’ is ‘dishonest and strange and somehow underhand’. It reduces the art of fiction to ‘a cheap raid on the real’. Gosse’s objections apply as much to Tóibín’s manipulation of James’s biography as to anything James attempts himself. What drives the story along is the effect of such ‘dishonesty’ and ‘underhandedness’ on the author. How much has he sacrificed for his art? Whom has he sacrificed? The novel begins with an account of James’s dreams, in which the dead he has loved return to him with an air of ‘beseeching’. At various points, members of James’s circle reproach him for the way he has detached himself from those who needed him. From his cousin Minny Temple, who wanted him to accompany her to Rome when she was sick with tuberculosis. From his friend, the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who killed herself in Venice, after James had failed, as he once suggested he might, to pass the long Venetian winter with her.

  Their reproaches touch him in part because they force him to reflect on his own emotional defenses. Europe has taught him the power of privacy. ‘Everyone he knew carried with them the aura of another life which was half secret and half open, to be known about but not mentioned.’ Americans, by contrast, interest James for a different reason: ‘their yearning openness … their readiness for experience’. James himself wanders between the two worlds: he wishes to be neither open nor secretive. That is, he wishes to be both at the same time, which can only be achieved at the expense of a private sphere. ‘He himself learned never to disclose anything, and never even to acknowledge the moment when some new information was imparted, to act as though a mere pleasantry had been exchanged.’ The suppression of his sexuality and his ‘raid on the real’ are related: James resists entangling himself in any relation that might expose him to his own talent for curiosity. ‘There is nothing to wonder about,’ he tells Gosse; it might be the refrain of the novel. Again and again, he consoles himself with variations on it. ‘He worried about his privacy, but assured himself that there was nothing in his correspondence which was entirely private.’

  The effort is exhausting, and the second half of the novel is occupied by his search for some kind of place of retreat. For James, the discriminating middle-class materialist, it takes the form of a permanent address. ‘It was as though he lived a life which lacked a façade, a stretch of frontage to protect him from
the world. Lamb House would offer him beautiful old windows from which to view the outside; the outside, in turn, could peer in only at his invitation.’ Invitations duly follow. Guests visit him there, friends from Boston, Lily Norton, Oliver Wendell Holmes; Henrik Andersen, a young man he picked up in Rome, a sculptor, handsome, ambitious, awkward, slightly ridiculous; his brother William, William’s wife Alice, their daughter. But James always reserves the mornings for his writing. When his hand fails him, he hires an amanuensis, a dour Scot named MacAlpine, to take dictation from him, and discovers, to his surprise, the pleasure of composing on his feet. Even in the midst of his inspirations, he is not alone; he presents a kind of public face to the blank page.

  James, in Tóibín’s novel, suppresses his sexuality (in this context, it doesn’t matter so much whether he’s gay or straight), not out of any delusion or failure of courage, but because it might interfere with his work. That, at least, is the account of himself he wishes to make, and the progress of his work allows James to argue for the sort of life he has chosen. His self-defence depends in part on something his cousin Minny once said to him. She served their group as a touchstone of spontaneous wisdom, and was courted, one summer, by his friends John Gray and Oliver Wendell Holmes. On the way up to visit her, James spent an awkward and intense night with Holmes, sharing a bed at an inn. Unlike James, Holmes had fought in the war; he had taken their enforced intimacy very coolly. Henry, for whom the experience remained one of the most passionate of his life, was amazed at the way that Holmes’s fearlessness had entered ‘so completely into the private realm’. In any case, they never shared a bed again. Holmes subsequently fell in love with Minny, but it was to Gray that she said, in a letter, ‘you must tell me something that you are sure is true’. These words, Tóibín remarks, mean more to James than any other, including those he has written himself.