Elizabeth Robins's Hair

What would Jamesians actually say to Henry James, if such an angelic conversation—leaving aside Ouija boards and prosopopoeia—were possible? Toward the conclusion of Author, Author, David Lodge projects his readers back in time to February 1916, to James's final hours, to a scene in which somebody with the gift of prophecy might speak reassuringly of the canonization to come. If only James had died with some intimation that he would become an established classic, his works continually in print and assiduously pored over, and himself the indispensible figure in the theory and practice of the novel! However, given the sad narrative that Lodge has unfolded—of James's humiliation in the theater during the 1890s; of his dwindling readership; of his friendship with less-talented writers like George du Maurier, whose Trilby became a lucrative, popular sensation—we are left with the distinct impression that James's fading ear might well have been more responsive to prognostications of money and gloire, the two things that had eluded him. "What fun" it would be to tell him that he would find a vast audience in the cinema, that "the novels and stories would provide coveted roles for some of the greatest actors and actresses in the world; and that film and TV tie-in editions of these books would sell in large quantitites" (375). Now that would have made him really sit up!

In our own time, no period of James's long and rich life is more appealing, more narratable, than the 1890s—the period that Leon Edel subsumes under the title The Treacherous Years, the fourth volume of his biography. Both Colm Tóibín in The Master and David Lodge in Author, Author trace James's complicated responses to a series of traumatic events in this painful decade: the slow death of Alice James; the suicide of Constance Fenimore Woolson; and, in the spectacular downfall of Oscar Wilde, the emerging legibility of the fin-de-siècle homosexual as, according to Foucault, "a personage, a past, a case history . . . secret that always gave itself away" (43). What is most compelling about these narratives is neither the individual events nor the sum of their parts; it is, rather, the interface between whatever panic and guilt James must have felt in his private life and the very public embarrassment he experienced in the theater. Although James was a connoisseur of embarrassment (Embarrassments was the title of an 1896 volume of stories), nothing in his attenuated fictions could have prepared him for the literal affect he experienced in the actual theater. I refer of course to the boos and invective that greeted his curtain call on the opening night of Guy Domville, on 5 January 1895, which brought his protracted theatrical déboire to a close. Such a circumspect and guarded man as Henry James could not have failed, in the days and weeks that ensued, to grasp that he had had a sharp taste of public exposure. He came to be acquainted with abjection. If he believed that he had risked and possibly lost everything—his reputation, among the discerning, as the most gifted writer of his generation—then it also seems likely that, in withdrawing from London to Rye, he also resolved to live out his life as an intensely private and inviolable citizen. Awaiting him, of course, were the brilliant fictions of the major phase and the parameters of a closet that, despite his increasing involvement with attractive young men, remain inordinately difficult for us to trace.

The heightened sense of risk in the public domain explains why the years James spent in the theater remain crucial to the biography and to our sharpened sense of the strengths and limitations of his art. Lodge and Tóibín, in their narrative methods, apportion between them the principles of Jamesian composition: Tóibín, gravitating toward "picture," gives us plenty of introspection, while Lodge's novel depends almost entirely on "scene," on dialogue and interaction. Although The Master begins where Author, Author leaves off...