Colm Tóibín: The Master

Henry James carefully controlled the characters in his fiction, but sometimes they got away from him. The governess in his ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, worked on him so that he allowed her “a freedom which he had never intended for her … to wallow in the danger, to want it to come towards her, to motion it close, signal to it.”

He recognised this longing in himself. When the garden door creaked, “his first thought would be to welcome what was coming now to break the sad, helpless monotony of the self, to feel a moment of desperate hope that it was to come at last, whatever it was.”

This is the fictional Henry James in Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master, and I am grateful to have known him so intimately. Getting close to the real Henry was not so easy. As with his fiction, he carefully controlled his own life, holding people at a distance to allow him the space to write. Tóibín imagines the effects of this choice of art over intimacy: the sadness of what he has foregone, of what his “wall of books” has cost him; and the longing for something to smash his controlled, complacent life, the “beast in the jungle”, perhaps something analogous to the momentous spiritual crisis his father had experienced.

This is a book to savour – to read slowly, to stop and meditate on its insights and subtleties, and to reread. There is so much: Henry’s connivance with his mother in promoting his hypochondria so that he could begin writing rather than enlist to fight in the Civil War; the way he constructed his stories using his memories and friends; the effects on him of the sexual attraction he felt for other men and how he managed it; his use of close friends to satisfy his own needs while ignoring their need for him, and the shock of insight when he realised what he had done, as he did after the suicide of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

Henry James is not the only person to struggle between the desire for intimacy and the fear of it – it is a central life struggle for many of us. In his book Distraction, the philosopher Damon Young writes about “this subtle threat at the heart of our battles with distraction: that attention to ourselves, to our private pursuits, often involves sacrificing our intimate relationships.”

At the start of The Master, Henry’s need for privacy overrules his need for closeness, but during the period covered in the book there are hints of a changing balance between the two forces. Perhaps this is partly prompted by grief and regret – the loss of Constance and the realisation of his complicity in her death. The main sign of change is the closeness he allows with the young sculptor Hendrik Andersen. There is a sexual element (in feeling, not deed), but it is much more than that. He is more giving of himself, less protective of his privacy, less likely to resort to avoidance strategies. Even in Henry’s difficult relationship with his brother William, there are signs of a reduced need to hold him and his family at a distance. We get the sense of Henry feeling his way towards a more even balance between art and intimacy, towards embracing a fuller version of life.

The Master is the best novel I’ve read in years, and makes me uneasy about my praise of other novels in previous blog posts. It will continue to percolate through my mind, and further posts may trickle out. It was a wonderful conclusion to my 2010 reading year.