A portrait of Henry James

By MARGIE THOMSON

It's a writer's trick to make us feel we know about something, or someone, when in fact all we know is what we've been shown.

To read Colm Toibin's The Master (Picador, $34.95), an extraordinarily beautiful novel that takes place almost entirely within the psychological landscape of 19th-century novelist Henry James, is to enjoy the perhaps illusory feeling one has been given a special insight into the man — even, what it was like to be this most intensely private person.

Toibin, himself described in the Guardian as "one of those Irish geniuses" who, at 49, has four novels, much journalism and many essays to his name, has loved James' writing since, at 18, he read The Portrait of A Lady, one of James' most enduring novels about the experience of Americans confronting European culture.

"It was completely opposite to the world I was living in," says Toibin, who grew up in "a very small world", the Irish town of Enniscorthy, and attended the local Christian Brothers school, where his father was a teacher.

He went on to read the entire body of James' novels, never suspecting what had gone in to making them. It

wasn't until he was in a writers' retreat many years later, finishing his novel The Blackwater Lightship and needing "something boring" to read, that he pulled Leon Edel's five-volume biography of James from the bookcase.

"Until then I hadn't known the connection between the life and the work. Because of the peculiar way James wrote, the levels of self-effacement and self-suppression were great and so you don't notice a personality that governs the books as you do with, say, the novels of Joyce or Conrad, where the personalities of the authors were written into the books' DNA."

In one sense, James' life is one of the most documented in literary history, preserved in letters and notebooks, and explored in several biographies.

Initially Toibin simply thought he'd do a book of linked essays about aspects of James' life so key to his work: his sexuality (like Toibin, James was homosexual— although secretly so, and he remained celibate); his relationship with America, where he was born, England where he made his most permanent home, and Ireland from where his impoverished forebears came.

"That idea faded very quickly," Toibin says, "and the idea then came that the character I had in my head was actually a character in a novel, rather than a character in a book of essays.

"There are a few writers like that who I've been interested in for a long time, but I don't want to write a novel about the others.

"James lent himself to it in a sense that there's such an interior life and there's so little exterior.

"For all the documentation, there's nothing settled about James. Everything about him remains ambig-uous, and that will always be the case. He loved his family, he loved to be away from them. He loved going out, yet he longed for solitude. He loved women and he longed for men, and it just goes on like that.

"So, to some extent I invented somebody for my own purposes. While I stuck very closely to the facts, nevertheless he is an invention by a novelist.

"Who's to say who's real, because even if he'd been alive there was an unknowability about him, an inscrutability. I was playing about with that in a way."

Toibin's James is, for all his sociability, an elusive loner, an emotional recluse, a man with many friends yet thoroughly adept at sudden, hurtful withdrawal, and who suffered greatly at the hands of his own nature.

At least one reviewer (writing in the New York Times) posits that James didn't suffer the way Tobin has him do — that, rather, for James, art was the highest satisfaction and he simply didn't need love and sex like the rest of us.

"I think he's wrong," Toibin says emphatically. "James began to have nervous breakdowns after the years of my book. A number of years were really black years for him. As he grew into his 50s and 60s he suffered from loneliness.

"While art has its consolations it isn't the same as love, and while he may have done very well without close

intimacy for a very long time, once it grew towards the end it wasn't like that."

The Master takes us on a five-year voyage, from 1895 to 1899, around what Toibin himself describes as a kind of "James' greatest hits", linking real-life episodes with characters and situations in his novels.

One can't help thinking that James would have hated it. Such exposure! And yet Toibin says he has never imagined James reading The Master.

He stakes out his position with great forthrightness when he says: "He really cared about his privacy — and he also used other people's lives in his books. typical novelist."

Colm Toibin: The Master

One of the most notable Irish writers of today, Colm Toibin is famously entertaining, occasionally abrasive, often gracefully warm. Hear him in Auckland at an event sponsored by the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival:
Monday August 30, 8pm-9.15pm, Dorothy Winstone Centre, Auckland Girls' Grammar, Tickets $20 / Students $10 from Ticketek.