All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James (review)

It is interesting to consider how Colm Tóibín has influenced the reception of Henry James. His novel The Master has been read by many people who admire James, and it is one of the best ways to introduce a non-Jamesian to what James represents as a writer and a man. The novel captures many of the issues that concern a critic, and it presents what a teacher might want a student to begin to appreciate: the vision and complexity of the man we call “The Master.” This is no minor achievement. And the book is written in a prose that is precise, lucid, and often beautiful. The Master will be hard to duplicate or improve on as a work of fiction on James or as a nonacademic interpretation of him as a writer and a man.

The Master is just one side of Tóibín’s impact. Over the past several years, he has written on Henry James in journals, newspapers, and books. His criticism can be seen as an opportunity to think about James in some innovative and important ways. Now twelve of these essays have been collected by Susan M. Griffin in a volume called All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James. A solid introduction by Susan Griffin is usefully complemented by an index and a list of the original publications for these essays. A note states that the essays have been revised since their original publication.

The collection begins with a piece on a subject it would be fair to say most of us probably know little about: Henry James in Ireland. Although Tóibín calls it “A Footnote,” it is filled with interesting and amusing information brought together from various sources and first published in the Dublin Review in 2002. While illustrating James’s Irish background and his distinctly limited attitude toward this country, Tóibín suggests that James suppressed his solid Irish heritage—“He did not have a single drop of English blood” (4)—much as he suppressed his homosexuality. His sister Alice was ardently patriotic where Ireland was concerned and, it would appear, a woman who loved women. It was especially her commitment to the Irish cause in her published diary that troubled James. While James did not wish to know well—or have known—the actuality of his Irishness or his homosexuality, both were very much a part of his differentness. And it is Tóibín’s own Irishness, his difference, say, from an Englishman, his being a man like James, and his being a novelist that are a part of what brings many unexpected insights into his reading of James. For example, a brief piece from the Daily Telegraph (2004) on Lamb House suggests how James brought to his house in Rye his own family ghosts and how these ghosts entered his fiction. For him, the house was like a character that fed his writing. The next essay, which first appeared in the Henry James Review (2006), discusses how the instincts and uncertainties of a novelist reading and writing about James shaped The Master. The reader is made aware that the breadth of interpretations, once a novelist like Tóibín becomes a critic, has richer possibilities than we would likely imagine:

I am pointing this out—and much of it is obvious—merely to show that my own method of merging the deeply personal with the imagined, matters that come deliberately and also unwillingly and unconsciously, belongs to the main method by which novelists work and by which James himself, the supreme novelist, also worked. It allows for Freudian reading of novels and for novels to be read as a form of neurosis, but it is often much simpler: things that have mattered emotionally, often for the quality of their pattern, their beauty, their emotional shape, things that...