Introduction

This issue collects, for the first time, Colm Tóibín's critical essays on Henry James. Tóibín's best known engagement with James is probably his 2004 novel The Master, which grapples with the style and substance of Henry James's work and life. I mention Tóibín's novel at the start because the great strength of his criticism is that he reads and writes like a writer. In taking up James, Tóibín joins poet-critics including Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Richard Howard, and Cynthia Ozick. As this list alone illustrates, reading James as a writer is a various business. What's shared is that these are critics who write from the inside: as fellow artisans who understand the craft of writing and read to discover, precisely and fully, the workings of this particular novel or letter or essay. Such criticism is profoundly interested, and that interest makes for acuity. It is serious (Why else bother? Writers have their own books to write) but, at its best, never solemn, as these essays happily illustrate. "James, like most artists," Tóibín informs us, "knew what he was doing only some of the time" (BL).

The Master retells a period in Henry James's life. These essays follow suit insofar as, for Tóibín, understanding James's work demands attention to the scenes and situations of writing. This concern with biography is the very opposite of the literary criticism that James's stories so often warn against: reading past or through the artist's work to discover some hidden truth about his life. Favorably reviewing the second volume of Sheldon Novick's biography, Tóibín compares his own reading of a James passage with Novick's. It is, of course, the now infamous Notebook entry that begins "The point for me (for fatal, for impossible expansion) is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C[ambridge] . . . l'initiation premiere" (CN 319). Novick offers these words as proof that James had sex with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Tóibín mostly disagrees: "What could James be talking about? It seems to me that he is talking about writing, about discovering a style and its attendant pleasures and remembering this discovery more than forty years later as pure sensuality, in the same way as someone not a writer might remember first love, or sexual initiation. But I am not sure" (RB). Characteristic here is the recognition implicit in "someone not a writer"; for Tóibín, James's reflections comprise a narrative about the writing life.

Characteristic too is the admission—even enjoyment—of uncertainty, the celebration of James's "complexity and ambiguity and secrecy" (NY). Tóibín maintains that "We can trace James's sometimes unwitting, unconscious, and often quite deliberate efforts to mask and explore matters that concerned him deeply and uneasily" (NY). We glimpse, then, not Henry James as such but what mattered to Henry James. For both writers, "The imagination is a set of haunted, half-lit rooms" (HA). So Tóibín lays out a detailed map of James's New York, at the same time describing the city as a "realm whose contours remain shadowy and whose topography is unresolved" (NY). And, although Tóibín's essay takes us through to James's last New York story, he also uses James to warn that the critic's word is not conclusion: "Nothing is my last word about anything—I am interminably supersubtle and analytic" (NY).

Nor does this collection represent Tóibín's last word on James, either in the sense of a problem solved or, one hopes, the two writers' final critical encounter. These are occasional essays, written as introductions, reviews, and talks. Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading Tóibín on James comes from his ability to attend differently with each approach. Such various views are, of course, the matter of Henry James's inseparable style and subject. One thinks of the dances of discovery and concealment that are both matter and method in novels like The Wings of...