by David Lodge
Why the biographical novel should have recently attracted so many writers as a literary form is an interesting question, to which there are several possible answers. It could be taken as a symptom of a declining faith or loss of confidence in the power of purely fictional narrative, in a culture where we are bombarded from every direction with factual narrative in the form of ‘news’. It could be regarded as a characteristic move of postmodernism – incorporating the art of the past in its own processes through reinterpretation and stylistic pastiche. It could be seen as a sign of decadence and exhaustion in contemporary writing, or as a positive and ingenious way of coping with the ‘anxiety of influence’. The same trend is observable in contemporary drama – for example: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1975), about James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara, and The Invention of Love (1997), about A. E. Housman and contemporaries; Michael Hastings’s Tom and Viv (1985), about T. S. Eliot and his first wife, Vivien, and Calico (2004), about James and Nora Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Joyce’s daughter, Lucia; Alan Bennett’s Kafka’s Dick (1987), and April de Angelis’s A Laughing Matter (2002), about David Garrick, Dr Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith.
In short, the biographical-novel-about-a-writer has recently acquired a new status and prominence as a subgenre of literary fiction, and it was only a matter of time before this kind of attention was turned on Henry James. That is what I meant by saying that the decision of several novelists, independently but at approximately the same time, to write novels about James was a coincidence waiting to happen.fn2 Speaking for myself, I would certainly not have thought of writing a book like Author, Author twenty years ago; not because I was uninterested in James – I have been reading, teaching and writing criticism about him since I was an undergraduate – but simply because my concept of what constituted a novel, especially my own kind of novel, did not then include the possibility of writing one about a real historical person. The fact that for much of my life I pursued a dual career, split between writing fiction and literary scholarship, publishing books of each kind in alternation, may have delayed my perception of the possibility of combining both kinds of interest and expertise in a biographical novel. For the same reason I perhaps overlooked the professional pitfalls of such a project.
There is a sense in which all literary novels published in the same year or season compete with each other – for readers, for sales (not quite the same thing, though the two are of course connected), for critical approval, and (a fairly new phenomenon, this) for prizes. The proliferation in the last few decades of literary prizes like the Booker, with their published shortlists and (more recently) longlists, has intensified and institutionalised the element of competition in the writing and publishing of fiction – a development which may have been good for the Novel, inasmuch as it has increased public interest in literary fiction, but not for the equanimity of novelists, publishers and agents. Normally, however, novels compete in all these ways as independent works of art, not as different treatments of the same subject matter. If it happens that two new novels have a theme in common, or the same historical background, they are likely to be compared and contrasted more directly. Writers are always uncomfortable when they find themselves in this situation, because it threatens to detract from the originality of their work – originality being a highly valued quality in modern literary culture.fn3 But in such cases there is bound to be a significant difference between the two narratives. It is impossible to imagine (outside the pages of Jorge Luis Borges) two novelists independently inventing the same fictional story enacted by identical characters, except at the very deep structural level where narratologists work, reducing all possible plots to a few basic archetypes. When two novelists take the life of the same historical person or persons as their subject, however, the possibility of duplication is much more real, the element of competition between the two novels becomes more specific and overt, and the stakes are higher. Biographers are familiar with this danger, and live in dread of finding that someone else is working on the same subject as themselves. Such a coincidence is invariably bad news for one, if not both, of the writers involved. There have been men and women whose lives were so interesting and important that there is always a receptive readership for a new biography of them – but seldom for two or more in the same year. If they are published simultaneously, the potential audience is split; if separated by an interval, the earlier book is likely to arouse more interest than the later. The same conditions apply to the biographical novel.
Of the recent spate of novels about Henry James, the two that were most directly in competition with each other in 2004 were The Master and Author, Author. The Line of Beauty merely alluded, occasionally and glancingly, to the life and character of Henry James. Heyns’s novel was unpublished. Felony had been first published over a year before; only about half of its brisk 190 pages were about James, and that part was narrowly focused on his relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, treated in a manner highly prejudicial to James. Colm Tóibín’s novel and mine had much more in common than either had with any of the others. (For reasons to be explained, I have not read The Master, but I have assimilated some information about it indirectly, and have had the facts checked by others.) Both are long, extensively researched books, sympathetic to James, which attempt to represent known facts of his life from inside his consciousness, using a novelist’s licence to imagine thoughts, feelings and spoken words which can never be reliably documented by a biographer. It is true that the structure of each book is different, and that they deal in part with different aspects and episodes of James’s life. The backbone of my novel is Henry James’s friendship with George Du Maurier, who does not figure in Tóibín’s book at all; he deals extensively with James’s relationship with Lady Louisa Wolsey, who is not mentioned in mine. Both of us have invented some incidents – Tóibín perhaps more boldly than I (at least, I have received that impression) and I feel safe in assuming that these additions to the record are quite different in each book. The main story of my novel is framed by an account of Henry James’s last illness and death, which is not covered by Tóibín. But there is nevertheless a significant amount of overlap between the narrative content of the two novels. The calamitous first night of James’s play Guy Domville in January 1895 is central to both. Tóibín begins with this traumatic experience, and traces James’s gradual recovery from it and rededication to the art of prose fiction, following his life, with occasional retrospective digressions, up until and just beyond his acquisition of Lamb House in Rye in 1897. The first half of my main story leads up to the first night of Guy Domville, and the second half corresponds almost exactly to the chronological span of The Master.
It never occurred to me when I was researching my novel that another writer might have had a very similar idea. Much later, when I was already well into the composition of the book, I experienced a qualm of uneasiness on reading a piece by Colm Tóibín in the London Review of Books which showed a remarkable familiarity with some fairly obscure details of the life and work of James, who was not the ostensible subject of the book under review. But there were many possible reasons for this interest – a work of non-fiction in progress, for instance. Tóibín’s most recent book at the time was a biographical study of Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (2002). If any fears that he might be engaged on a novel about James flitted through my mind, I quickly suppressed them, and forgot all about the review until later events reminded me of it.
I first learned about the existence of The Master at the end of September 2003, a few weeks after delivering the typescript of Author, Author to my publishers, as I recorded in the last paragraph of the ‘Acknowledgements, etc.’, appended to the novel. At a literary party some six months later, the writer and television presenter Joan Bakewell told me she was much moved by this note, and asked me if I burst into tears on hearing the news. I did not, but I appreciated her understanding of the emotional impact of such a discovery on a writer who had just brought three years’ work to a satis
factory completion. I was at first incredulous, then divided between dismay (that a novel by a highly respected writer on much the same subject was due to be published before mine) and relief (that I had not known about it sooner). It would have been deeply disturbing if I had made this discovery while I was actually writing my book, and had I made it very much earlier I might have abandoned or never started what turned out to be one of the most satisfying creative projects I have ever undertaken. But I immediately recognised the damaging effects that the prior appearance of The Master was likely to have on the way my novel would be read and received, and in due course all my fears were realised. I can truthfully say of Author, Author that I have never enjoyed writing a book more, and publishing one less.
I am usually secretive about my work-in-progress. I am afraid of being excessively influenced, and perhaps discouraged, by the reactions of others to what would be, if I were more open, an account of something in a fluid and incomplete state. I want to know what effect the novel will have on readers in its fully finished form, and that depends to some extent on their not knowing in advance what to expect, so I keep the subject to myself, even though it is in a way what I would most like to talk about, since it is what I am thinking about most of the time, whether or not I am at my desk. Perhaps I am afraid that some other writer might ‘steal my idea’ if I were to broadcast it widely; or perhaps there is a more devious and largely unconscious motivation at work: a denial of the possibility that anyone else might have had the same idea, illogically combined with a wish not to know about it if they have, because that might entail giving up the cherished project. However, there are inevitably a few people – family, friends, agent, publishers – in whom I confide sooner or later, and as the book approaches completion, and its form and content are pretty well established, I become more relaxed about mentioning it in casual conversation. There are writers – my friend Malcolm Bradbury was one – who take the opposite route: they announce the subject of their next novel in advance and read at public events from the work-in-progress. This may be a way of warning other writers off the subject, or a way of making themselves finish the promised novel. In Malcolm’s case I think he genuinely wanted to try out his ideas and his texts on others, and found the feedback of audiences useful.
I do not know in which category of writers Colm Tóibín would place himself, but I suspect it is the same secretive clan to which I belong. Even so, it was surprising that I had no inkling (a word which has a punning appositeness in this context) of the existence of The Master until several months after he delivered it to his publishers and a few weeks after I delivered mine. Once his novel was received by his publishers, in the spring of 2003, I might have picked up news of it on the literary grapevine. But, long before that, our common involvement in researching the same subject, consulting some of the same sources and visiting some of the same places, might well have alerted either of us to the other’s project. Michiel Heyns tells the story of an encounter with Colm Tóibín at Lamb House in Rye (Henry James’s principal residence from 1898 until his death in 1916) which might as easily have happened to me as to himself:
On a summer afternoon, shortly before the completion of my novel, my agent and I made a pilgrimage to Lamb House, now a National Trust property. There we met Colm Tóibín, whose presence was the first ominous inkling either of us had of his intentions. The custodian of the house kindly allowed us upstairs, normally closed to the public. Both of us made surreptitious notes, Tóibín’s, it seems, enabling him to write the passage in his book in which Henry James, in his bedroom, can hear his young guest and the object of his adulation, Hendrick Andersen, undress in the adjoining guest room.4
Colm Toíbín told the same story, with more amusing details, in an article in the Daily Telegraph in March 2004, when The Master was published. He described going to visit Lamb House, ‘on a bright Saturday afternoon two years ago, when I was close to completing a draft of my novel about Henry James’, and being moved on discovering a piece of needlework by Constance Fenimore Woolson over the mantelpiece of the front parlour. Then:
Suddenly, that day, as I stood staring at this object, a voice called my name. It was a London literary agent whom I knew. She was with one of her clients. She asked me what I was doing in Lamb House. I said that I was writing a book about Henry James.
‘So is my client,’ she said. She introduced me to her client, who was standing beside her.
‘Are you writing about this house?’ the agent asked.
I told her I was. As I spoke, I noticed a neatly dressed man whom I presumed was American listening to us carefully, moving closer.
‘Did you both say you are writing books on James?’ he asked. ‘Because so am I.’ He shook our hands cheerfully.
By this time a small crowd had gathered, marvelling at three writers pursuing the same goal. We were very careful with each other, no one wishing to say exactly how close to finishing we were. We were also very polite to each other. Then the man who rents the house from the National Trust and has the upstairs rooms as his private quarters, having heard all this, invited us to view James’ old drawing room on the first floor, as a special privilege.5
Tóibín does not identify the American writer, but one may safely assume from his cheerful demeanour that he was a scholar rather than a rival novelist. For me there are other intriguing features of the episode, and the two reports of it. If we put Tóibín’s ‘two years ago’ and Heyns’s ‘a summer afternoon’ together, it took place in the summer of 2002. I also visited Lamb House with my notebook and pencil that summer – on 1 August, to be precise – privately, by appointment. Tony Davis, the tenant/curator of Lamb House mentioned by Tóibín, is sure that my visit preceded that of the other writers, which he thinks took place in October, or September at the earliest. This sequence of events put him in a unique and sensitive position: he was the only person in the world who knew that both Colm Tóibín and I were working on novels about Henry James, because I had told him and his partner Sue confidentially of the reason for my interest in Lamb House when I arranged my visit. He was subsequently very helpful to me in supplying information and documents relating to Henry James’s servants, but he did not tell me about Colm Tóibín’s interest in James, nor Tóibín about mine, which was entirely the right and proper thing to do, and for which I am grateful, since the information would only have disturbed me. There was never any chance of my overtaking Colm Tóibín in the Henry James stakes even had I known there was the possibility of a race, since he was near to completing a draft of The Master when he went to Lamb House, whereas my visit was the last piece of research I did before actually starting to write Author, Author. But I had been in Lamb House – and indeed slept in Henry James’s bedroom – three years earlier, when Author, Author was just a gleam in my eye, so to speak. I first made a note about the relationship between Henry James and George Du Maurier as a subject for imaginative treatment in November 1995. I had just finished reading Du Maurier’s novel Trilby for the first time. An independent television company had approached me about adapting this work as a drama serial, so I obtained the Penguin Classics edition, edited by Daniel Pick, and read it. I thought the early chapters had a certain period charm, but as a narrative it was poorly constructed, melodramatic and sentimental. Pick records that Sir Frank Kermode told him it was the worst novel he had ever read. This seemed to me a rather harsh judgement, but I told the company, via my agent, that I could see no way of making the story credible or interesting to a modern television audience, and as far as I know the project was never realised.6 But two facts in Daniel Pick’s introduction made a strong impression on me. The first was that Henry James had been closely involved in the genesis of Trilby. The two men were good friends and often took walks together, on Hampstead Heath and in London. On one of these walks, in March 1889, Du Maurier summarised the story of Trilby and Svengali (both as yet nameless), which he had dreamed up as a young man, when he was toying with the idea of trying his hand at fiction, but never
completed, and offered it to James, who had been complaining of a dearth of ideas for plots. According to Du Maurier’s later account of this episode, James said that he lacked the requisite musical knowledge to write the story, and suggested that his friend should write it himself. Du Maurier, whose sight was failing and threatening to curtail his career as an artist and illustrator, was prompted by this conversation to start writing a novel – but on another subject. This was Peter Ibbetson, published in 1891. Its modest success encouraged him to try again, this time with Trilby, which appeared in 1894. The second fact in Pick’s introduction that struck me – indeed, astounded me – was that Trilby is thought to have been the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century. I had known it was popular, but not that popular.
