Two Visions of Henry James

...James' sexual inclinations are, of course, among the great untidy mysteries of his life...

...Some of the dresses had floated to the surface again like black balloons, evidence of the strange sea burial they had just enacted, their arms and bellies bloated with water___Henry watched as he worked at it with the pole, pushing the ballooning dress under the surface and holding it there and then moving his attention to another dress which had partially resurfaced, pushing that under again, working with ferocious strength and determination...

...Although the contemporary forces that would propel several writers at once to focus on James' life in Europe at the end of the 19th century are difficult to trace, it is interesting to consider the merits of the biographical novel as a genre...

...And a few years ago the American novelist David Leavitt was named in a lawsuit for finding a different solution to the same problem, allegedly plundering (without acknowledgment) Sir Stephen Spender's real life story for use in a novel, While England Sleeps (1993)—as if biography could be transformed into fiction by merely claiming it was made up...

...Henry James is not around to sue the novelists who have used the details of his life, recorded so meticulously by his biographer Leon Edel, to suit their own purposes...

...Tóibin does not knit his thematic strands too tightly, leaving room for some perplexities in his portrayal of James' inner being...

...In attemptingto integrate an enormous amount of biographical material, he left himself scant room to practice the novelistic arts in which he is so accomplished...

...This beautiful and frightening scene both confirms an inner truth and perplexes us, in the manner of a dream...

...But that does not seem a credible imagining of his thoughts...

...Both writers had agreed to burn each other's letters, but four of Woolson's to James survive...

...What, then, is the point of a novelization...

...But between the two James novels that appeared this year, it is clear which author James would have sued if he could...

...Lodge is not much concerned with James' feelings about Woolson, beyond a sense of guilt that she might have killed herself because he did not return her love...

...It was a spectacle at once macabre and farcical, and he felt acutely the humiliation and folly of his own part in it...

...Of his friendships during the 1880s, his relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, a hard-working spinster novelist three years his senior, is probably the most intriguing...

...The biographer seemed to support the notion that James was a celibate with homosexual yearnings who recoiled from physical intimacy...

...Then he raised them from the depths of death into a new fictional existence...

...Curiously, Tóibin avoids quoting James' letters to Andersen...

...The Irishman's suggestions about James' thoughts and desires would have sickened the master, who loathed any intrusion on his privacy...

...Lodge's account may be more comprehensive, and represent James' voice more fully—unlike Tóibin, Lodge quotes frequently from James' writing—but it fails to impose sufficient thematic order or to develop character, emotion and dialogue compellingly...

...Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Author, "The Fact Checker's Bible" In the Acknowledgments at the back of Author, Author, David Lodge notes that he is not the only writer to have recently engaged in a fictional recreation of Henry James' later years...

...They total 15,000 words and suggest that she was quite enamored of him...

...It is also clear that James' authorial eye would judge Tóibin's novel a more successful venture than Lodge's regardless of, and because of, Tóibin's nearly complete transformation of fact into fiction...

...Lodge, by contrast, concentrates more on James'exterior than interior life...

...In Author, Author the story of James disposing of Woolson's clothes reads like a paraphrased memory, rather than a description of an emotional event: "Buoyed up by the air trapped inside their voluminous folds, they floated on the surface, surrounding the gondola like swollencorpses, like so many drowned Fenimores...

...His legal troubles arose because of the real facts interspersed in his fiction, not because of the fiction in his facts...

...Edel's portrait is necessarily limited by the absence of existing communication between the two friends...

...His celibacy seems the product of an asexual temperament, rather than ambivalence or repression (Andersen does not appear in Author, Author...

...Lodge's James is not burdened, either, by recollections of his mother, thoughts of the past, or frustrated sexuality...

...Tito took the pole in both hands as if to defend himself...

...The breadth of Author, Author's coverage of James' activities, friendships and literary work, though, is admirable...

...They met in Italy in 1880 and maintained an on-again, offagain companionship that included, at one point, sharing a house, and ended when Woolson flung herself off abalcony in Venice in 1894...

...A Norwegian sculptor, Hendrik Andersen, also moves him, but his habit of observing rather than acting prevents him from initiating physical contact...

...Writers have always been evasive about the distinction between biography and fiction...

...And when Lodge unshackles his imagination—as in the purely fictional scenes between James' maid and his manservant, Burgess Noakes—the book comes alive...

...Tóibin's The Master appeared on both sides of the Atlantic this spring...

...Wouldn't a man who wrote a long novel on the subject of a manipulative relationship between two women have more to say, if only to himself, about his sister's domestic arrangements...

...The stuff of many literary biographies is to chart the correspondences between the author's real life and the events that appear in his supposed fictions—as if fiction was simply biography dressed in different clothes...

...And then Henry saw what it was...

...Perhaps he felt their overt and passionate language—James mentions embraces and exhorts Andersen to lean on him "like a brother and a lover"—would undermine his depiction of an inactive, introverted man...

...Tóibin shows him to be flummoxed over what to do with them—at once attracted to their scent and shy about the intimacy of handling the articles— especially her undergarments...

...But for the most part it reads like a serious yet misbegotten effort...

...He emphasizes his subject's literary ambitions and friendships, particularly with George Du Maurier, an illustrator-turned-second-rate novelist whose sales skyrocketed while James'declined...

...The absence of such interior conversation makes Lodge's James little different from the one in the biographies...

...Where this left an insurmountable gap for even a biographer as prepared to speculate as Edel, for Colm Tóibin it yields a rich opportunity for imaginative re-creation...

...What Tóibin saw as an extraordinary opportunity for insight became for Lodge an airless trap...

...The very first books in English to be called novels, by Daniel Defoe, were disguised as autobiographies—as if an entirely invented story would not merit the public's attention...

...I leave it to students of the Zeitgeist to ponder the significance of these coincidences," says Lodge...

...Tennant's Felony was published in the UK in 2003...

...Deaths and professional failures—notably the foundering of James' play Guy Domville in 1894—were sweetened by new friendships, increased literary stature (ironically accompanied by declining sales) and James' acquisition of the elegant Lamb House in Rye, on the English coast...

...In Author, Author, Lodge behaves too conscientiously as a biographer to succeed in his role as novelist...

...He found them less threatening and more useful to his imaginative work after they had died...

...Once again, Tóibin opted for artistic integrity over biographical authenticity...

...James indeed recoiled from intimate relationships with women...

...He elects, following an impulse rife with symbolism, to drown the clothes in a deep lagoon with the help of a gondolier, but the clothes refuse to be laid to rest without force: "In the gathering dusk it appeared as though some seal or some dark rounded object from the deep had appeared on the surface of the water...

...When James went to Venice after Woolson's suicide, he found himself in the odd position of having to dispose of her clothes...

...At the start of the 21 st century, both the English writer Emma Tennant and Colm Tóibin, an Irishman, were working on novels that overlap with Lodge's in subject matter...

...Presumably if Leavitt had waited until Spender died (in 1996), he could have written a novel based explicitly on Spender's life without consequences...

...Tóibin, less fettered by facts than Edel, explores James' sexuality in scenes no biographer could verify and suggests inclinations in line with Edel's supposition...

...About his sister's close friendship with Katherine Loring, James is as tight-lipped to Lodge's readers as he would have been to an inquiring journalist at the time: "If there was in Katherine's dedication something more than pure altruism and emotional investment of a kind he had written about in The Bostonians, Henry was not disposed to comment or criticize...

...The period of James' life covered by Lodge and Tóibin was one of tremendous change in his personal affairs and in his work...

...Leon Edel was careful not to assume too much about James' sexuality, quoting one friend's recollection that James called Oscar Wilde an "unclean beast" alongside another's opinion that James was "wildly in love" with his friend Jocelyn Persse...

...In The Master, Tóibin takes far more liberties and ranges more speculatively than David Lodge dares in Author, Author...

...Tóibin's James imagines a liaison with Paul Zhukovsky and is drawn to an Irish valet...