“Simultaneously Anticipatory and Retrospective”: (Re)reading Henry James through Colm Tóibín’s The Master

The publication of Colm Tóibín’s The Master marked the zenith of a recent interest in Henry James as an object of fictional scrutiny. In 2004, an annus mirabilis that David Lodge dubbed “The Year of Henry James,” The Master appeared in March, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty in April, and Lodge’s Author, Author in September (Lodge, Year). All three of these novels were inspired by James, and Tóibín’s and Lodge’s featured him as a character. Preceded, at intervals, by the publication of novels by Carol de Chellis Hill, Kathryn Kramer, and Emma Tennant and succeeded at further intervals by works by Michiel Heyns and Cynthia Ozick, “The Year of Henry James” signaled a discernible rise in James’s public appeal. Biofiction about James reflects both the recent increase in novels about the lives of writers (Lodge, Year 8) and the prevalence of Neo-Victorianism, a combination that goes some way toward accounting for his popularity as a subject. The Master is typical of this group of novels in its concern with establishing, indeed, recapturing, the origins of James’s prose. With a few notable exceptions, these biofictions focus almost exclusively on the author’s mid-period, giving us the James who failed so publicly with Guy Domville rather than the James who ultimately secured his place in the canon with The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. While for Lodge, the failure of Guy Domville was integral to James’s Major Phase, prompting him to abandon the theater and “apply to prose narrative the method he had used in developing his ideas for plays” (Lodge, Author 283), Tóibín downplays the importance of James’s theatrical venture, instead favoring his accretion, between the years 1895 and 1899, of “the images and figures that would constitute the three masterpieces he was gathering all his strength to write” (Tóibín, BHJ 236). The Master moves freely between the narrative present and James’s past in order to demonstrate that “personal experience for James, as for most novelists, was the bank from which some of his images were borrowed” (235). Critics including Eibhear Walshe (148), Ágnes Kovács, and Laura Savu (178) have interpreted this associative narrative as suggesting that James’s ultimate emergence as “The Master” was contingent on his self-mastery, the successful sublimation of his homosexuality into literary endeavor. These readings are informed by what Eric Savoy calls the “biographical imperative”: “the overarching project of establishing a coherent argument for . . . James’s ‘homosexual identity’” (109). While there are exceptions to this mode of reading, including notable work by Daniel Hannah (73) and Max Saunders (6), the prevalent critical interest in The Master’s—and the Master’s—queerness has meant that its intertextuality has largely been under-represented.

This article will ask whether critical discourse surrounding James’s prefaces to the New York Edition might provide an alternative framework for discussing Tóibín’s intertextual biofiction. I will argue that biofiction has the potential to offer a reading of James that is alternative, though in many ways analogous, to that provided by the prefaces. Like the prefaces, biofiction ostensibly offers an introduction to James’s prose, aspects of which are, paradoxically, interpretable only by those already familiar with that prose. It has a similar potential to affect, whether by enhancement or by diminution, subsequent readings of James’s texts. By providing the uninitiated with a point of entry into the House of Fiction, biofiction thus reprises the prefaces’ task of mediating between the Master and consumer culture (Attridge 41). In a worst-case scenario, the explication that biofiction offers might append to James’s texts a schematic, over-literalizing preface of the sort James himself took pains to avoid. He knew that too literal an illustration might perform “the worst of services,” might “relieve[] . . . responsible prose of the duty of being, while placed before us, good enough” ( FW 1326). Conversely, if sufficiently tentative and provisional when approaching the “sources” of James’s...