Author, Author (Hardcover)

by David Lodge (Author) "LONDON, December 1915..." (more)
Key Phrases: Henry James, Lamb House, Guy Domville (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Lodge's (Thinks) meticulously researched but disappointingly tepid "docu-novel" opens in 1915, with Henry James on his death bed, and quickly establishes the context of this take on the great Anglo-American writer's life: James's conflicted jealousy about his friend George Du Maurier's success with the now virtually forgotten novel Trilby, his chaste relationship with the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolsey, and the fateful evening of January 5, 1895, when his play Guy Domville premiered in London and James was humiliated by the booing from the cheap seats. Why does a man who believes that the theater was noteworthy for "its vulgarity and aesthetic crudity" aspire to be a playwright? For the banal reason that "it was for an author the shortest road to fame and fortune." It may be Lodge's point that James sublimated his desires for love or sex into a longing for acclaim and wealth, but the James of this novel—the second this year to deal with his theatrical career, after Colm Tóibín's The Master—is petty, priggish and egocentric in the extreme (his reaction to the apparent suicide of Woolsey: "what he really dreaded was finding some evidence that she had done it on account of him"). Even if this portrayal is accurate—and given the author's scholarly credentials, there's no reason to doubt it—it makes for a singularly undramatic story.
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From The Washington Post
At the close of a sterile negotiation with Sam Goldwyn over a possible screenplay, George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have told the movie mogul that he finally understood their aesthetic differences: "You, sir, are interested principally in art. I am interested only in money."

Many literary authors have tried to make this Faustian bargain with the Mammon faction, imagining that one good killing at the Hollywood or Broadway box office will free them to produce their principled, deathless, elevated prose. Faulkner, Greene, Waugh . . . the only one who seems to have got away with it -- or should I say had it both ways? -- is Gore Vidal. Still, it is something of a struggle to imagine Henry James himself descending into this vulgar arena, and the chief virtue of David Lodge's latest novel is that he convincingly shows us "The Master" as he begins to make his sordid, pecuniary calculations. The action is set in England (and, part of the time, in Italy) on the cusp of the 1880s and early '90s. Mr. James has become distinctly stout and more than a little pompous, and the success of Portrait of a Lady (his only actual thriller, in my opinion) is receding behind him. Used to his comforts, he is uneasily aware of declining sales and a possible shortage of ready money. Meanwhile, as is always the case from the standpoint of those wedded to art, the cheap and the meretricious continue to flourish. James's friend, the popular illustrator George Du Maurier, writes a popular and sentimental novel called Trilby, which becomes the runaway seller of the age. An amoral showoff named Oscar Wilde seems unstoppable with his crowd-pleasing efforts. Most disconcerting of all, perhaps, Constance Fenimore Woolson, a tough-minded American authoress, continues to produce fiction that is both worthy and "accessible." James cannot shake the feeling that this woman also has a design to lay siege to his long-guarded bachelorhood.

Lodge is very deft in two aspects of his reconstruction: the sexual and the contextual. He makes it seem quite plausible that James thought about sex a good deal ("It was . . . necessary to this project that the novelist should know exactly what it was he was leaving out") and, eschewing any undue nudging, he also rightly infers that the bed into which James never got would have contained a lissome male. There is a scene in a London restaurant, in the course of which the visiting Guy de Maupassant tries to talk about women with his host, which made me laugh aloud. As for the historical, Lodge recreates the little world of London's West End stage with great charm and care. I say "little world," even though its dramas and defeats were enacted before a wide and growing public. James slaved on a plot that he hoped would bring him riches and fame as well as praise from the cognoscenti, and the result was the play "Guy Domville." On opening night, the theater critics of the London press included George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, and this on an evening when Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" was having its premiere only a few hundred yards away. (James chose to attend this first night, rather than his own, because of an excess of nerves.) I knew what had later happened to James on that night of nights, and could feel it coming on again as I turned the pages. It says a great deal for Lodge that he kept me in suspense for a considerable time about a denouement that I understood in advance, and then made that climax into something more shattering than I had anticipated. I shall give away nothing to the uninitiated, except to say that the pain we share with James is much diminished when we appreciate that this saved him for the writing of later novels such as The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.

Obviously Lodge would have to write at supra-Jamesian length if he put in everything about those late-Victorian, Edwardian and Great War decades in England. He resolves the problem by risking anachronism and by starting and finishing in the year of James's death. I wish he had included that other low moment in the great man's career: the awful snub administered to the aspirant Anglophile and potential Englishman by the brash young half-American Winston Churchill. But one cannot, as James himself ruefully conceded, hope to have everything. The novelist Peter De Vries once said that he wanted a mass audience large enough for his elite audience to despise: This is the third novel this year (anticipated by both Colm Toibin's The Master and Emma Tennant's Felony) to have James as its virtual sex object, so it would appear that the "wrong" sort of fame and immortality lies still within his posthumous grasp.

Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (October 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670033499
• ISBN-13: 978-0670033492
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #706,299 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "It was a dream but the dream is past.", December 19, 2004

By	M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The writer's life, the artistic temperament, and the world of the English stage are bought to life in this beautifully written, complex novel of history and ideas from author David Lodge. Author Author, while totally succeeding as an intricate recounting of Henry James's halcyon days as one of England's most famous men of letters, is also a vividly creative tale of penmanship, literary irony, the collision of values, and the transformation and courage it takes to reinvent oneself artistically.

The novel also works as a sprawling account of Edwardian England, from the pastoral countryside, to the quaint seaside towns, to the gas lit and foggy London suburbs, to the stuffiness and sense of moralistic propriety of the upper-class drawing rooms. Lodge paints a portrait of a society and a culture that is undergoing profound social and artistic changes. It is amidst these changes, that author Henry James is radically trying to reinvent himself as a playwright.

Framed by two deathbed scenes, the bulk of the story involves James's life-long friendship with George du Maurier, and his cautious relationship with the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson the one most influential woman in his life, who later commits suicide in Venice. James was frustrated and vexed by his dwindling book sales, and rather jealous of du Maurier who had recently achieved fame with the runaway success of his novel, Trilby. Seeking to redefine his work, James stakes his professional reputation and five years of work on a series of plays, the crowning achievement of which was to be Guy Domville. The centerpiece of the story recounts his humiliation and mortification at being savagely booed at the London premier when the lower classes nastily laugh and jeer at the silliness of the leading lady's plumed hat.

From his years dining with the literary and artistic society in London to his self imposed sequester at Lamb House, Rye where he enacted his instinct for bachelorly self-preservation, Lodge paints a picture of a man who was totally devoted to a philosophical and literary life. James, through his work, wanted to refine, intensify and preserve human consciousness believing that consciousness was a type of religion. He understood that the author of fictional narratives should represent life as it is experienced in reality, by an individual consciousness, and he developed a firm faith in the superior expressiveness and verisimilitude of the limited point of view.

James with his "his bushy beard, balding pate and incipient paunch," comes across as sexuality ambiguous, and his attitudes to sex "and the spilling of one's seed" were to him extremely distasteful. His views on sexuality were formed in childhood when he saw a male nude posing for a portrait and the image haunted him for days afterwards "with disturbing effects that were physical as well as mental." James also actively distances himself from Oscar Wilde and his aura of sexual scandal. And it is almost a relief when he reaches the calm waters of middle age having survived all the perils and problems, the vague longings and physical disturbances, associated with sex in early manhood.

Lodge has fun with introducing us to such famous figures as Compton Mackenzie, the son of the actor- manager Edward Compton, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Agatha Christie, who James bumps into on a cycle-ride from Torquay. Author Author is a sprawling, ambitious, and hugely entertaining novel. And Lodge, with a keen biographer's eye, doesn't hesitate to expose the complexities of James's life, involving his friendships, sexuality, and the ever changing demands of his art. Mike Leonard December 04.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars intriguing project, scintillating execution, July 21, 2005

By	Heather "graduate student of British literature" (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This novel takes the life of Henry James as its subject and interpolates fact with fiction without losing its energy. Lodge does a wonderful job of lighting up the things that we do know about James and adding some conjecture. His rendering of the opening night of "Guy Domville"--James's flop of a play--is both comic and tragic, and would itself be worth the price of the book. Unlike Colm Toibin's "The Master" (another fictionalized biography of James), Lodge doesn't succumb to saccharine or sentimental devices to close the book, but remains sharp from beginning to end.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Novel about An Interesting Novelist, March 20, 2005

By	Jane Austin "Jane" (Ma, USA) - See all my reviews

"Author, Author" is a well researched and entertaining novel about the novelist, Henry James. Its a must read for James'fans. Interestingly, his writings are remembered, studied and reprinted while more popular novels of his time ('best sellers') have been forgotten.( There is a lesson in that fact somewhere!) Beginning and ending with the deathbed scene of James the novel focuses on his later years and his time in England, and especially with his relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson and George DuMaurier. At the book's end, author Lodge, specifies what details he has made up. I found this book to be a page turner.