The Private Life, the Public Stage: Henry James in Recent Fiction

This essay links the recent wave of interest in Henry James's private life as material for fiction—specifically, in Colm Tóibín's The Master, David Lodge's Author, Author and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty—to James's conflicted, often queer responses to the private and the public. Tóibín and Lodge, in divergent ways, trace through James, the failed dramatist, their own ambivalences about biographical fiction's private-public play. For Tóibín, James's life and writing offer figures for the queer author's efforts to probe, complicate, and even conceal homoerotic desire. Lodge's novel remains haunted by a queer specter of James even as it places disembodied devotion at the centre of James's and the fictional biographer's art. While Hollinghurst's novel invokes James as a background presence, James's vexed attitudes toward publicity and privacy and his stylistic excess illuminate the novel's attention to the "guest" status of gay aesthetics in the heteronormative public sphere of Thatcherite Britain.