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| Terracotta bust of the twelve-year-old Count Alberto Bevilacqua by Hendrik Christian Andersen. Purchased by Henry James for Lamb House, Rye. |
[Image source: https://jasoncochran.com/2014/04/29/henry-james-muses-the-bust-in-his-dining-room-and-a-sort-of-secret-dynasty/ .]
... For his friends, this night would be entered into the annals of the unmentionable, pages in which he had so studiously avoided having his name appear. As time passed, however, he realized that he could not betray the performers now. He could not give into his own horrible urge to be alone in the darkness, to escape into the night and walk as though he had written nothing and was nobody. He would have to go to them and thank them; he would have to insist that the repast planned after the triumph of his play should go ahead. In the half light he stood preparing himself, steeling himself, ready to suppress whatever his own urges and needs might be. He made his hands into fists as he set out to smile and bow and imagine that the evening in all its glory had been due entirely to the talents of the actors in the great tradition of the London stage.
(From Colm Tóibín's The Master, end of Ch 1 (January 1895).)
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That final sentence is a little miracle; Tóibín showing us Henry's distressed thoughts preparing for verbiage; the nonsense he must say at the after-show party, so begins to imagine.
The Master is the wonderful portrait of an artistic freedom gone rogue. The more desperately Henry needs to preserve his freedom, the more he must confine his life and his thoughts. The more uncompromising he needs to be, the more he must compromise. It's a trade-off that's almost ruinous, to his life and to his art. Almost.
Like many of his stories, Guy Domville was helplessly personal in its accent on renunciation. Guy's willingness to marry is as lightly thrown off as it's assumed; it's evident that he adores Mrs Peverel as a mother-figure.
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GUY. What I must forget is that I've strayed! -- From the happiness that was near to the happiness that was far!
MRS. PEVEREL. But the happiness that was "near" was a life you had put away.
GUY. The happiness that was near was a treasure not mine to touch! I believed that treasure then to be another's.
MRS. PEVEREL. You had too great things to think of -- and now I see how they've changed you. You hold yourself in another way.
GUY. (Smiling.) I try to carry my "name"!
MRS. PEVEREL. (Triumphant, to prove how right she has been.) You carry it better than you did!
GUY. People have cried me up for it. But the better the name, the better the man should be.
MRS. PEVEREL. He can't be better than when his duty prevails.
GUY. Sometimes that duty is darkened, and then it shines again! It lighted my way as I came, and it's bright in my eyes at this hour. But the brightness, in truth, is yours -- it grows and grows in your presence. Better than anything I sought or found is that purer passion -- this calm retreat! (Then on an ironic movement of MRS. PEVEREL'S.) Aye, calm, Madam (struck with the sight of LORD DEVENISH'S white gloves), save for these! I've seen them before -- I've touched them. (Thinking, recalling; then with light breaking.) At Richmond!
MRS. PEVEREL. (Deeply discomposed, at a loss.) My Lord Devenish left them.
GUY. (Astounded.) Was he here?
(From Guy Domville, Act III.)
Complete English text of Guy Domville, alongside a 2012 Portuguese translation by Mônica Zardo (PDF):
https://lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/10183/66289/1/000870716.pdf
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Guy Domville is set in 1780. The sets and costumes were designed accordingly (with mixed success), but Henry James took no great interest in the date he had specified. The characters speak modern Jamesian. Guy does indeed arrive in a "shay", that is, a chaise, a vehicle going out of use by the mid 19th century. But "shay" is American slang, perhaps recalled from "The Deacon's Masterpiece", a popular poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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Henry was so agitated on the opening night at St James's Theatre (5 January 1895) that he knew he must keep away. He walked up the street to the Haymarket to see Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (which had opened two days before) returning to his own play only for its final lines and the catcalls. Seeing Wilde's play had made him feel worse; not only was it trash (Henry considered most plays to be trash), it had "smash hit" written all over it.
LORD GORING. Come in there, father. Your sneezes are quite heartrending.
LORD CAVERSHAM. Well, sir, I suppose I have a right to sneeze when I choose?
LORD GORING. [Apologetically.] Quite so, father. I was merely expressing sympathy.
LORD CAVERSHAM. Oh, damn sympathy. There is a great deal too much of that sort of thing going on nowadays.
LORD GORING. I quite agree with you, father. If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world.
LORD CAVERSHAM. [Going towards the smoking-room.] That is a paradox, sir. I hate paradoxes.
LORD GORING. So do I, father. Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious.
LORD CAVERSHAM. [Turning round, and looking at his son beneath his bushy eyebrows.] Do you always really understand what you say, sir?
LORD GORING. [After some hesitation.] Yes, father, if I listen attentively.
Complete text of An Ideal Husband:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/885/885-h/885-h.htm
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| Hendrik Christian Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence, 1894 painting by Andreas Martin Andersen. |
[Image source: Wikimedia Commons .]
The painting has been given various interpretations: the homoeroticism seems blatant and yet is conceivably a figment. The same might be said of the scene in The Master from Henry's youth, when he spends a night in a single bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, both of them naked. [This was the Holmes who was later a US Supreme Court justice and proponent of eugenics.]
In the novel that formative scene, young Henry being cupped by Holmes' body, is quietly recalled much later in Andersen's sympathetic embrace of the older Henry in the Protestant cemetery in Rome (a scene, by the way, that also contains a cat who wants to be stroked).
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Henry in the Protestant cemetery is overcome before the recent tomb of his friend, the author Constance Fenimore Woolson, who committed suicide in Venice in 1894. (Was she another, the novel asks, who made the fatal mistake of pinning her hopes on Henry?)
Anyway, she had her own comment on art without compromise, when the obscure heroine of "Miss Grief" asks a successful author to read her play.
I followed up my advantage, opened the little paper volume and began. I first took the drama line by line, and spoke of the faults of expression and structure; then I turned back and touched upon two or three glaring impossibilities in the plot. "Your absorbed interest in the motive of the whole no doubt made you forget these blemishes," I said apologetically.
But, to my surprise, I found that she did not see the blemishes—that she appreciated nothing I had said, comprehended nothing. Such unaccountable obtuseness puzzled me. I began again, going over the whole with even greater minuteness and care. I worked hard: the perspiration stood in beads upon my forehead as I struggled with her—what shall I call it—obstinacy? But it was not exactly obstinacy. She simply could not see the faults of her own work, any more than a blind man can see the smoke that dims a patch of blue sky. When I had finished my task the second time she still remained as gently impassive as before. I leaned back in my chair exhausted, and looked at her.
Even then she did not seem to comprehend (whether she agreed with it or not) what I must be thinking. "It is such a heaven to me that you like it!" she murmured dreamily, breaking the silence. Then, with more animation, "And now you will let me recite it?"
I was too weary to oppose her; she threw aside her shawl and bonnet, and, standing in the centre of the room, began.
And she carried me along with her: all the strong passages were doubly strong when spoken, and the faults, which seemed nothing to her, were made by her earnestness to seem nothing to me, at least for that moment. When it was ended she stood looking at me with a triumphant smile.
"Yes," I said, "I like it, and you see that I do. But I like it because my taste is peculiar. To me originality and force are everything—perhaps because I have them not to any marked degree myself—but the world at large will not overlook as I do your absolutely barbarous shortcomings on account of them. Will you trust me to go over the drama and correct it at my pleasure?" This was a vast deal for me to offer; I was surprised at myself.
"No," she answered softly, still smiling. "There shall not be so much as a comma altered." Then she sat down and fell into a reverie as though she were alone.
(From "Miss Grief".)
Woolson's writings are available on Project Gutenberg, so I've read a few of her stories. The most challenging was "King David", a brazenly racist assault on northern do-gooders (and their own inner racism), anticipating Stephen Crane. Her writing responded more warmly to the American South than anywhere else, I think.
As soon as they could speak, "Where are the two out in the sail-boat?" asked the Sister.
"God knows!" answered Melvyna. "The last time I noticed their sail they were about a mile outside of the reef."
"I will go and see."
"Go and see! Are you crazy? You can never get through that water."
"The saints would help me, I think," said the little Sister.
She had risen, and now stood regarding the watery waste with the usual timid look in her gentle eyes. Then she stepped forward with her uncertain tread, and before the woman by her side comprehended her purpose she was gone, ankle-deep in the tide, knee-deep, and finally wading across the sand up to her waist in water toward the lighthouse. The great wave was no deeper, however, even there. She waded to the door of the tower, opened it with difficulty, climbed the stairway, and gained the light-room, where the glass of the windows was all shattered, and the little chamber half full of the dead bodies of birds, swept along by the whirlwind and dashed against the tower, none of them falling to the ground or losing an inch of their level in the air as they sped onward, until they struck against some high object, which broke their mad and awful journey. Holding on by the shattered casement, Sister St. Luke gazed out to sea. The wind was blowing fiercely, and the waves were lashed to fury. The sky was inky black. The reef was under water, save one high knob of its backbone, and to that two dark objects were clinging. Farther down she saw the wreck of the boat driving before the gale. Pedro was over in the village; the tide was coming in over the high sea, and night was approaching. She walked quickly down the rough stone stairs, stepped into the water again, and waded across where the paroquet boat had been driven against the wall of the house, bailed it out with one of Melvyna's pans, and then, climbing in from the window of the sitting-room, she hoisted the sail, and in a moment was out on the dark sea.
(From "Sister St Luke". Like "King David" this story appears in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches.)
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The ‘historical novel’ is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labour as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness, for the simple reason that the difficulty of the job is inordinate and that a mere escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivety, becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that may be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as naught: I mean the invention, the representation of the old CONSCIOUSNESS, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose mind half the things that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent. You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman or rather fifty – whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force – and even then it’s all humbug.
That was Henry James writing to Sarah Orne Jewett about historical fiction. She had just published The Tory Lover (1901) -- her first historical fiction, and the last book before the carriage accident ended her career as an author.
But James' observation proves that all fiction, not just historical fiction, is "almost impossible". If a complete reconstruction of another's consciousness is truly necessary, then how can you put any other people into a novel than yourself? You immediately run up against the mystery of people who are older than yourself, and the still more intractable mystery of people who are younger. Different cultural background, different gender, different childhood, different social class, different health history, different talents.. and all the rest... You don't fully know anyone. To people your pages demands not universal knowledge but a sort of happy knack. Fiction is necessarily cheap. It must borrow, adapt, intrude, stage, creatively misremember and distort, reverse engineer, make adroit use of clichés, indulge in mystification, be flagrantly anachronistic, imagine such discourse as never existed, plunder from the intimacies of friends, cover its tracks, and exploit a hundred other tricks to spark the miracle of a story coming to life.
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"My dear," he said, speaking eagerly, so that she must listen and would not draw away, "my dear, you ask an almost impossible thing; you should see that a suspected man were better left ashore, on such a voyage as this. Do you not discern that he may even turn my crew against me? He has been the young squire and benefactor of a good third of my men, and can you not see that I must always be on my guard?"
"But we must not distrust his word," begged Mary again, a little shaken.
"I have followed the sea, boy and man, since I was twelve years old. I have been a seafarer all my days," said Paul Jones. "I know all the sad experiences of human nature that a man may learn. I trust no man in war and danger and these days of self-advancement, so far that I am not always on the alert against treachery. Too many have failed me whom I counted my sure friends. I am going out now, only half trusted here at home, to the coasts where treason can hurt me most. I myself am still a suspected and envied man by those beneath me. I am given only this poor ship, after many generous promises. I fear a curse goes with it."
"You shall have our hopes and prayers," faltered Mary, with a quivering lip. The bitterness of his speech moved her deepest feelings; she was overstrung, and she was but a girl, and they stood in the moonlight together.
"Do not ask me again what I must only deny you, even in this happy moment of nearness," he said sadly, and watched her face fall and all the light go out of it. He knew all that she knew, and even more, of Wallingford's dangerous position, and pitied her for a single moment with all the pity that belonged to his heart. A lonely man, solitary in his very nature, and always foreboding with a kind of hopelessness the sorrows that must fall to him by reason of an unkindness that his nature stirred in the hearts of his fellows, his very soul had lain bare to her trusting look.
He stood there for one moment self-arraigned before Mary Hamilton, and knowing that what he lacked was love. He was the captain of the Ranger; it was true that Glory was his mistress. In that moment the heavens had opened, and his own hand had shut the gates.
The smile came back to Mary's face, so strange a flash of tenderness had brightened his own. When that unforgettable light went out, she did not know that all the jealousy of a lonely heart began to burn within him.
(from The Tory Lover, Ch 6)
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Sarah Orne Jewett isn't in The Master -- more's the pity! -- but some of Henry's phrases are, for instance the "fatal cheapness" and the "humbug". In the novel he uses them while repelling his brother William, who thinks Henry should write a historical fiction about "the Puritan fathers".
As John Updike pointed out in his review, The Master is emphatically a historical fiction. But Tóibín, an intuitively un-Jamesian novelist in so many ways, is thinking about this matter of a vocation alongside his novelist-hero, thinking its personal costs and what must be compromised and how what we repeatedly experience and what we're always having to deny and even what we dread are somehow what we have chosen, and how easy it is to fossilize into a horrible parody of what we hoped to be, and also how it's no good overthinking it, and that these questions aren't restricted to writing novels or any other vocation but sit unacknowledged at the centre of everyone's life.
In its totally different way The Master is just as personal a novel as Nora Webster.
(It's a strange coincidence that one of the few unhistorical characters in The Master -- a young and arrogant English MP -- is surnamed Webster.)
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On Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing:
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/06/colm-toibin-heather-blazing-1992.html
Labels: Colm Tóibín, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Hendrik Christian Andersen, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Orne Jewett
