The Master: A Novel (Paperback)

by Colm Toibin (Author) "Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead-familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up..." (more)
Key Phrases: Lady Wolseley, Lamb House, Burgess Noakes (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States-including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice-to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
Say, with due reverence, "the Master" and any serious novel-reader instantly knows you are referring to Henry James (1843-1916). No one else in American or English literature comes close to matching James in his austere dedication to the writer's life. From the time of his first story -- about adultery, published in 1865 -- he elected to follow a path of essential loneliness. James mingled with society, dined with the great and the good on two continents, and listened and observed with guarded intensity. He made himself into the most sensitive possible register of social nuance, unspoken yearnings, hidden liaisons. But he remained apart from the fray, looking on the tumultuous, sorrowful human comedy with a pity tempered by compassionate understanding for our failings, sins and wounding misjudgments. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner might almost be James's artistic motto. All his own joys were, to the eyes of the world, muted, perhaps nonexistent. In one of his novels a character proclaims: "Live life. Live all you can. It's a mistake not to," and yet the Master himself seems never to have heeded this liberating affirmation and instead funneled all his animal vitality into the making of such masterpieces as The Portrait of a Lady, "The Turn of the Screw," "The Aspern Papers," The Ambassadors, and that greatest of all accounts of a missed life, "The Beast in the Jungle."

Colm Toibin alludes to each of these novels, novellas and stories (and several others) in this moving portrait of the artist in late middle age. Here the Irish novelist -- hitherto best known for The Blackwater Lightship, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize -- builds on the research and speculations of numerous scholars to construct a novel about James's interior life. This requires the utmost delicacy. In one sense, The Master might almost be viewed as an extreme example of what the French call the vie romancée, a highly embellished form of biography that goes beyond austere scholarship to adopt the exuberance and methods of fiction. Henri Troyat's Tolstoy, for instance, was faulted for being too exciting, too artful, too much like a Tolstoy novel. Similar charges have been leveled at the work of Peter Ackroyd on Dickens and Edmund Morris on Ronald Reagan. Readers tend to grow uneasy when they start to wonder where the facts stop and the artistic license begins.

But Toibin's impersonation of James works beautifully. The prose is appropriately grave and wistful, the sentences stately without being ponderous, the descriptions at once precise and evocative. The action, such as it is, moves smoothly from a time of temporary desolation to memories of horrible physical and mental suffering to angst-filled comedy (James dithering about how to deal with two drunken servants, James uncertain about how to dispose of the dresses of a dead woman). Toibin focuses on his subject in the years between 1895, when James's play "Guy Domville" was hooted on its opening night, and 1899, when his elder brother William came to visit at Lamb House, his beloved residence in Rye. But in between Toibin recreates scenes from James's childhood, offers a subtle interpretation of the apparent back injury -- the so-called great "vastation" -- that kept him out of the Civil War and helped make him an artist, and systematically introduces many of the people important in the writer's life. Most of these are women: his protective mother; his bitterly witty invalid sister Alice; the life-enhancing Minny Temple, adored by all the young men at Harvard, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and -- most heartbreaking of all -- the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who quietly fell in love with James and then killed herself when it seemed he had abandoned her. All these figure as agents who help him determine his artistic destiny or as temptations to relinquish it for a more human existence. Toibin does suggest that James's fundamental nature was homosexual, if largely unexpressed: He is notably fine in evoking the erotic tension between the novelist and a servant named Hammond (presumably fictional) and the "bewitched confusion" James feels for the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, portrayed here as muscular, ambitious, rather stupid and blindly selfish. One never knows where love will strike.

Toibin's masterly prose excels particularly in an easy-going command of the style indirect libre, which conveys a character's mental processes in the third person: "He wished that he was halfway through a book, with no need to finish until the spring when serialization would begin. He wished he could work quietly in his study with the haunting gray morning light of the London winter filtered through the windows. He wished for solitude and for the comfort of knowing that his life depended not on the multitude but on remaining himself." James himself specialized in this technique -- he preferred to avoid dialogue as much as possible -- because it allowed for the gradual unspooling of a thought, the patient dissection of an emotion or a motive. In The Master, Toibin uses it not only to enter James's mind but also as a means of giving us his reflections on his vocation. Though a novel, The Master is almost a breviary of the religion of art. Consider these three different, but equally striking, passages:

"Once it became more solid, the emerging story and all its ramifications and possibilities lifted him out of the gloom of his failure. He grew determined that he would become more hardworking now. 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."

"And in one of those letters [to John Gray] she had written the words which . . . Henry thought now maybe meant more to him than any others, including all the words he had written himself, or anyone else had written. Her words haunted him so that saying them now, whispering them in the silence of the night brought her exacting presence close to him. The words constituted one sentence. Minny had written: 'You must tell me something that you are sure is true.' That, he thought, was what she wanted when she was alive and happy, as much as when she was dying. . . . The words came to him in her sweet voice, and as he sat on his terrace in the darkness he wondered how he would have answered her if she had written the sentence to him."

"As an artist, he recognized, Andersen might know, or at least fathom the possibility, that each book he had written, each scene described or character created, had become an aspect of him, had entered into his driven spirit and lay there much as the years themselves had done. His relationship with Constance would be hard to explain; Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain." There are many other wise, if often rather doleful, observations in The Master, for the book seeks, in part, to show how a novelist transmutes his own experiences into something rich and strange and true: So, Minny Temple and Alice James are reimagined, in part, as Isabel Archer or Daisy Miller. Sometimes one feels a little too strongly that Toibin is plumping down the "real" events and figures behind the better known fictive ones. Sometimes it seems that he veers close to the besetting fault of so much historical fiction, that of having the hero mention or meet virtually every famous figure of the time. For instance, in the final pages of the book, in a single conversation, he presents William James outlining the lectures that will become The Varieties of Religious Experience, Henry James describing his current projects -- clearly "The Beast in the Jungle" and The Ambassadors -- and their visitor Edmund Gosse announcing that he's been mulling over a book about his childhood, one that will obviously become the only thing people still read by him, the wonderful Father and Son. Excessive? Perhaps. But such great works are the final justification for lives spent thinking and writing about the nature of human experience.

The Master is hardly a typical summer book, but it is convincing and enthralling. Those of an investigative bent might read it with an occasional glance through some of the biographical scholarship that Toibin cites in his acknowledgments. Others, new to James, might go on to look at the Master's actual work, starting perhaps with John Auchard's recently revised Portable Henry James (Penguin), an exceptional work of selection and distillation. But you don't need to do either of these. Colm Toibin has written a superb novel about a great artist, and done it in just the right way. It is worth reading just for itself -- and for insights like this one: At Harvard, we are told, the young Henry James suddenly understood "the idea of style itself, of thinking as a kind of style, and the writing of essays not as a conclusive call to duty or an earnest effort at self-location, but as play, as the wielding of tone." That is something I am sure is true.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 338 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (April 19, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743250419
• ISBN-13: 978-0743250412
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #8,915 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

85 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Portrait Of A Gentleman, June 12, 2004

By	H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Master (Hardcover)

I bought and read this novel, not so much because it's about Henry James as that is is written by Colm Toibin, one of my favorite contemporary writers. I am certainly no authority on Mr. James, having read only two of his novels-- many years ago-- both required in an English course, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY and THE TURN OF THE SCREW. Having finished this fine novel, however, I'm encouraged to read more James, particularly his letters and maybe a biography about him. Mr. Toibin's novel has the flavor and nuances, as best I can recall, of a Henry James novel, no small accomplishment. Toibin's James, though a bit like Eliot's Prufrock, is nevertheless a likable person and not so different from a lot of people I know. His sexuality is repressed, he has friendships with women whom he doesn't want to get too close to, he is the second child in a family of brilliant people-- William James being his older brother-- his father drinks too much, his beloved sister Alice suffers from emotional problems, he is attracted to men but doesn't act on his feelings, he is cowed by alcoholic servants, and he has a pushy woman friend from whom he has to hid a tapestry he has bought for his home because she told him he shouldn't purchase it. On the other hand, Toibin's James takes comfort in writing, in decorating a new home in Rye-- and while he sometimes may be lonely-- often enjoys solitude, something altogether different. "He loved the glorious silence a morning brought, knowing that he had no appointments that afternoon and no engagements that evening. He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment."

James through Toibin has poignant observations about life and death. "He realized that he did not even want the past back, that he had learned not to ask for that. His dead would not return. Being freed of the fear of their going gave him this strange contentment, the feeling that he wanted nothing more now but for time to go slowly." About his cousin Minny Temple who dies at an early age, James says that he "could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened. He wondered if this had happened to other writers who came before him. . ." What a wonderful way to become immortal, to be fictionalized by a great writer. Near the end of this novel James tells Edmund Gosse that "'I am a poor storyteller. . .a romancer, interested in dramatic niceties. While mly brother [William] makes sense of the world, I can only briefly attempt to make it come alive, or become stranger.'" The same can be said of Toibin, himself. In this finely wrought novel, he has make Henry James, the master, come alive.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Genesis Seeds of Genius: Meditating on Henry James, September 13, 2004

By	Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Master (Hardcover)

Colm Toibin's fine novel THE MASTER is an act of art in and of itself. This is a well-researched biography of one of America's greatest novelists but it is also a novel, a great work of literature that sifts through all the extant data found in the copious letters between Henry James and his brother (the equally famous William James) and others of his family and acquaintances, other biographies, and the vast writings about this extraordinary family . But what Toibin has achieved is more a dissection of the mind of a man who produced so many great books, showing us the gradual development of influences that, once digested, became such great books as 'The Turn of the Screw', 'The Portrait of a Lady', 'Washington Square', etc. THE MASTER opens with the expatriate James' embarrassing failure as a playwright ('Guy Domville') while his compatriot Oscar Wilde is enjoying tremendous success in another nearby London theater. This parallel plays significantly throughout the novel as a point of reference for James' periods of self doubt, fear of his own like sexual longings that ended Wilde's career in a famous trial, his odd transplantation from America to the United Kingdom and Italy, etc. Toibin's novel (by inference of his chapter titles) takes place from 1895 to 1899, but using the flashback and flash forward technique we are privy to the whole history of the James family (the premiere intellectual family in the latter 19th century), Henry's childhood and avoidance of serving in the Civil War, and all of the famous people who surrounded him (and at times slept with him in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes). In a sensitive way, Toibin addresses the ambiguous sexuality of Henry, touching reverently and yet sensually on his platonic relationships with a manservant Hammond, his houseboy Burgess Noakes in Rye, England, and his magnetic attraction to the Norwegian sculptor Hendrik Andersen. Yet Toibin devotes equal energy to exploring Henry's long-term friendship with the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson who committed suicide in his beloved Venice, his sister Alice who dies young and has a suggested lesbian relationship, Lady Wolseley who decorates his home in Rye, and his own brother William. Along the way are hints and digressions about novels in gestation and in final form. And as if this tome of information weren't enough to satisfy the reader, Toibin writes with such magnificent prose that the book literally sings. "As an artist, he recognized, Andersen might know, or at least fathom the possibility, that each book he had written became an aspect of him, had entered into his driven spirit and lay there much as the years themselves had done. His relationship with Constance would be hard to explain; Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as a piercing pain." And in the final chapter: " 'The moral?' Henry thought for a moment. 'The moral is the most pragmatic we can imagine, that life is a mystery and that only sentences are beautiful, and that we must be ready for change, especially when we go to Paris, and that no one,' he said, raising his glass, 'who has known the sweetness of Paris can properly return to the sweetness of the United States.' "

Erudite, elegant, and sensual. Colm Toibin has mastered it all in this exceptional book. Read it slowly - to absorb over a hundred years of history and the development of the intellect, and to savour the seeds of genius in a great mind. Highly Recommended.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On Reading THE MASTER, March 6, 2005

By	Ardita Fitz-Peters (New Haven, CT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Master (Hardcover)

After giving this book to myself for Christmas, I finally finished it this afternoon, having read, as is usual, the last two hundred pages in two days. It took the three months to read the first hundred pages.

The book is a fictionalized biography--it describes itself as a novel but I think it's too close to the truth to be called that--of an aging Henry James living in London and then in Rye, England, and visited by his friends and family. The most wonderful part of the book is the narration of Henry's interior monologue--his acid descriptions of frivolous people at parties, his sensual gazes at young men, especially servants, and, most important, how he forms his characters, his plots, and the situtations and dramas that people his novels and short stories. This last description of the process of writing novels is wonderful, not only because it's very particular to Henry James, but because it's the most precise and feels the most accurate description of the process of writing fiction yet expressed.