The Master
Colm Toibín
(Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
2004 Scribner
ISBN: 0743250400

The story of five years in the life of celebrated writer Henry James.

Henry James was born two decades before the Civil War into one of America's first intellectual families. He left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, & London, among privileged artists & writers.

In this fictional recounting of those years in which Henry James wrote a sequence of major novels that came into being at a high personal cost, Colm Tóibín captures the loneliness & longing, the hope & despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, & whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him & those he tried to love. Henry James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proved blind to his own needs & incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own conscience. Perhaps this blind spot was the matrix of his gifts to the literary world.

Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma H. Bond writes:

The Master is a roman á clef, a fictionalized study grounded in historical fact greatly amplified by the author's imagination. The book seamlessly illuminates the life & work of the great writer & his distinguished family in a manner that often makes it difficult for the reader to know where Henry James ends & Colm Tóibín begins. It wasn't until I was well into the book that I realized it was a work of fiction. The book gives a historically accurate portrait of Europe at the turn of the century that illustrates why many artists & writers spent much of their lives there.

Tóibín paints a particularly vivid portrait of Henry's repressed homosexuality, & how as a man of the times he kept it a dark secret even from himself. Two brilliant scenes make clear his yearnings & temptations, even though they never are brought consciously to his mind. In one scene, circumstances forced him to sleep naked in a small bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes. The passion both men felt is made obvious, but it is never quite clear whether or not they acted on it. Neither man ever mentioned what had or had not happened between them that night.

Henry's brother, William James, was a world famous psychologist who is beautifully discussed by Rebecca Brown, our editor of RebeccasReads, in Sailing on Streams of Consciousness. Tóibín brings him to life as a human being rather than as a psychologist, & is particularly insightful in portraying the conflicted relationship between the brothers. William, the oldest of four, was the least vulnerable & most confident. Travel & disruption seemed not to affect him at all. He was strong & popular, &, unlike Henry, confident of his right to be chosen as part of the next game. In further contrast to the introverted, emotionally aloof Henry, William was a loud & boisterous boy who loved banging doors & rough sports. Although there was only two years difference between them, one gets the impression that Henry feared his older brother, & behaved more like his son than his sibling. While the emphasis in the book is on the relationship between William & Henry, the author allows himself to throw in a few of William's brilliant theories, such as, “I believe the mystical experience of the individual, in any of its manifestations, to be a possession of an extended subliminal self.” (p. 333)

The book also paints a realistic portrait of witty, intelligent Alice, the only sister in the family. Alice was a strange creature, unlike any other I have encountered in either literature or life. For example, when she was asked to pray to meet her dear departed ones in the next life, she answered, “One need pray for nothing. Reference to those whom we should meet again makes me shiver. It is an invasion of their sanctity. It is the sort of personal claim to which I am deeply opposed.” (p. 49) Henry & Alice shared many personality traits. Neither married nor had children; both rejected engagements, deep companionship, & the warmth of love. Henry felt that they had both been banished & abandoned when their siblings married & their parents followed each other into the grave. Alice committed suicide the year their father died & after her beloved brother William married a woman also called Alice (!). Although her death came as a shock to her family, it could have been anticipated by a remark she made to a friend: “I cannot bear to live another day,” she said. “I beg that it might not be asked of me.” (p. 61).

Tóibín also brings alive Henry James, Sr., the illustrious father. Tóibín writes, “Henry had never known a time when people did not argue with his father. As soon as he could listen, he had witnessed William and his father in deep discussion which involved raised voices and heated divergence of views. Most male visitors and some female ones, too, seemed to come to the house specifically to argue. Freedom of all sorts, and especially religious freedom, was his father's great subject; but he also had many others; he did not believe in confining himself, it was one of his principles ” (pp. 86-87). Mr. James, Sr., held views which would horrify today's feminists. “By nature,” he spoke blatantly & emphatically, “woman is inferior to man. She is man's inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect and his inferior in physical strength... It is a woman's job to be submissive.” (pp. 87-88) Nor were his views on femininity disputed by his sons. William felt “amiably” about them. “My father has many convictions,” he said. Only young, straightforward cousin Minny dared to contradict the old man. She said, “I do not know if being physically weaker than man means we understand less, or live less intelligently in the world.” When Henry senior was annoyed, his niece asked, “Is that in the Bible, sir, or is it one of the Commandments, or did you learn it in school?”

A touching description is given of the friendship & suicide of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a woman who loved & was loved in return by Henry. Although they lived in the same house for a while, they never had intimate relations. He believed that the happiness they felt together came from the perfect balance between the distance they kept from each other & their need for no other company. “I have come as close as I could, as near as I dared,” James said, on approaching the place of her death. A less inhibited man might have married Constance & lived happily with her for the rest of their lives. His rejection of her was at least one of the factors that led to the tragedy of her death. Instead, Henry James lived out his life as a lonely old man, with acquaintances & servants rather than intimates, & occasional visits of members of his brother William's family for company.

The book is wonderfully revealing of the technique of writing utilized by a genius, & demonstrates how a novelist transmutes his own experiences into something rich, unique, & truthful. i.e. in this description of a walk he took in Venice, “The story was now clear in his mind and he had soaked up enough of the faded palaces where his heroines would live and the sense of old secrets and heroic attachments in these shadowy, bejeweled inhospitable buildings, once full of sweet romance and high-toned gaiety, and now repositories of gloom and cobwebs, so many of them inhabited by the unsettle and the infirm.” (p. 226). Many of the author's phrases give a fresh twist to an old idea. For instance, in discussing James's need to allow his mind its freedoms, Tóibín writes, “He lived on the randomness of the minds's workings.” (p. 46). In describing the mind of Oliver Wendell Homes, the author writes, “He was formed like a planing machine to gorge a deep self-beneficial groove through life.” (p. 84).

The Master is a perceptive study of the life & working technique of a great writer, & a superb exploration of creativity. It is highly recommended for those who are interested in the illustrious James family, who want insight into the mind of a literary genius, who would like a vivid picture of the life of artists & writers in Europe early in the twentieth century, & for those who simply like a good read.

It is a fine book, a scholarly & interesting book. Why then do I feel that something is missing in it? Perhaps it is because the author's involvement with the detached James was an intellectual one built on the research of numerous scholars, as Tóibín constructed a novel which patiently dissects James's emotions & motives. In the opinion of this reviewer, if Tóibín had written more passionately about James, The Master would have been a great novel rather than an excellent one.

More from Colm Tóibín:
Fiction
The South
The Heather Blazing
The Story of the Night
The Blackwater Lightship (shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize)

Nonfiction
Ireland: On the Edge of Europe
Homage to Barcelona
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature.
(04/10/05)

Dr. Alma Bond
2005©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2005);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.