All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James
Edited by Susan M. Griffin
Johns Hopkins. 148 pages, $25.
The Empty Family
by Colm Tóibín
Simon & Schuster. 275 pages, $24.
A FEW YEARS AGO Henry James appeared in the novels of three contemporary gay writers. In the most tenuous of these connections, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, the protagonist is doing research for a doctoral thesis on James. In Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream, James is a prissy prude who intervenes in the career of Stephen Crane. In Colm Tóibín’s The Master, he is a lonely, closeted homosexual near the end of his life.
When I first heard that Tóibín had written a novel about Henry James, I wondered why. We already had five volumes of the Leon Edel biography. What could fiction add to fact? The answer was a portrait of loneliness. This was an audacious thing to do; there was a certain chutzpah about The Master. Now comes All a Novelist Needs, a collection of book reviews and essays by Tóibín that reflects his deep immersion in the considerable literature by and about James. Here we learn, for instance, that one reason Tóibín wrote his novel was to correct what he considered an unfair charge against James in Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life—along with Edel’s, the best book about James, in Tóibín’s opinion, but one that deals unfairly, he maintains, with James’ relationship with his cousin Minnie Templeton and friend Constance Fenimore Woolson. (Gordon thinks James exploited them; Tóibín does not.) Another inspiration for The Master, we discover, was more personal: the experience of losing the Man Booker Prize when his novel The Blackship Lighthouse was nominated made Tóibín think of James the night he was booed onstage at the premiere of his play Guy Domville.
All A Novelist Needs includes an appraisal of Sheldon Novick’s 2007 biography (in which Tóibín chides Novick for thinking that James was nicer than he really was); essays on the way in which James distanced himself from his Irish roots, his homosexuality, and his family; a study of James’ feelings about New York; and an essay on what happened, after James died, to the rest of the Jameses (a brood, Tóibín says, that Henry learned to keep at arm’s length in order to become what he wanted to be). There’s an account of how Tóibín came to write The Master (by reading Portrait of a Lady) and how James came to write The Portrait of a Lady (by reading Middlemarch), and, at the end, a short story by Tóibín about the way James got ideas for his novels (from anecdotes he heard in London dining rooms). This story, “Silence,” is told entirely from the viewpoint of a woman who ends up seated next to James at dinner, which illustrates what Tóibín says drew him to James in the first place: the fact that both he and James prefer to write from the viewpoint of a single consciousness. Susan Griffin, the editor of the collection, goes further: “If James was haunted by George Eliot,” she says in her introduction, “Colm Tóibín is haunted by Henry James.” James started his novels with what he called a donnée (a given)—usually a story that someone told James, which he stopped before he heard the ending because he wanted to create his own story based upon the situation. This, Tóibín affirms, is all a novelist needs: “nothing exact or precise, no character to be based on an actual person, but a configuration, something distant that can be mulled over, guessed at, dreamed about, imagined, a set of shadowy relations that the writer can begin to put substance on. Changing details, adding shape, but using always something, often from years back, that had captured the imagination, or mattered somehow in the hidden self, however fleetingly or mysteriously.” In other words, as Tóibín shows in his spellbinding essay about the way he wrote The Master (“A More Elaborate Web”), a writer makes things up—though James and Tóibín imagine the world very differently. James insisted on creating his own story because real life, he felt, was thin and incomplete; Tóibín, you could argue, uses fiction to show that life is thin and incomplete. “Silence,” the tale that closes All A Novelist Needs and begins his new collection of short stories, The Empty Family, is a perfect example. Its sense of quiet futility, its incompleteness, is, one finds reading this book, typical of these stories, which tend to be so understated, anti-climactic, and modest that they sometimes end with a line that seems to sabotage, if not disown, what has gone before. There is something perverse about Tóibín, as if he wants to contradict readers’ expectations. The Master, for example, scrupulously avoided the style of its hero, who, in The Golden Bowl, described a woman about “to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit with her pet gazelle.” Tóibín’s stories tend to open with sentences such as “Malik stood in the corner by the drawer where the cash was kept while Baldy counted the day’s takings.” The power of his writing depends on what’s not said, what’s offstage. If his writing is mannered, it is for its plainness, its studied refusal to go beyond a simple, almost eighth-grade vocabulary. (“The water was clear and blue and the sun was hot in the cloudless sky.”) Tóibín has talked in an interview about his desire to write against the stereotype of the lyrical Irishman—to remove the impediment of language that might come between the reader and the emotions being evoked on the page. But it’s not just his style. There is also his avoidance of epiphany, the way his plots fade or die off, that contrasts so starkly with James, who made the most of the moment of revelation and outlined the plots of his novels like a safecracker planning a heist. In James, the character’s consciousness evolves—that is the drama; in Tóibín, the onlookers remain locked inside themselves from start to finish. What people come to Tóibín for, one suspects, is a certain kind of sadness—“longing and loss,” as he called it in an interview—and they are not disappointed. In The Empty Family—whether the stories are about Barcelona or Dublin, women or gay men, this century or the l9th—there is a watchful loneliness at the center, a sort of void, an alienation (which was what The Master had going for it). Life is pinched and sad, a rootless alienation, a perpetual wandering. You cannot return to Ireland (though in three of these stories people do): Dublin is crummy, provincial, and irritating. In the land of the gift of gab, conversation serves only to avoid the analysis and refinement of meaning that James sometimes took to insane lengths. When this modesty of means and manner works (as in “The Colour of Shadows”), it’s affecting; when it doesn’t, one has the feeling one is reading nothing. Here, for instance, is how a man remembers his mother’s abandonment of him and his siblings when they were small: “We were emptied of everything, and in the vacuum came something like silence—almost no sound at all, just some sad echoes and dim feelings.” That, one is tempted to say, is Tóibín’s mood in a sentence. It’s a quality described in a blurb as “bittersweet,” but it seems more like numbness. Reading Tóibín, one thinks of a story by James Joyce called “Eveline,” in which a woman sits in a window in Dublin looking out onto the street when she’s supposed to be joining her fiancé at the dock to sail for Argentina. Tóibín wrote a very good novel about a gay man who lives in Buenos Aires (The Story of the Night), but it’s imbued with the same dejection one finds years later in The Empty Family—a quality one might call despair, except that that would be too grand. Still, it’s pretty bleak. In “Eveline,” the woman won’t go to Buenos Aires. In “The Story of the Night,” the gay man lives there—and what does he encounter? AIDS. In the Irish take on things, it makes no difference if you go or don’t go. Tóibín says that Henry James’ “most pressing themes” were “duplicity and greed, disappointment and renunciation.” One sees these things, certainly, in The Empty Family. Yet there is a vivacity in James that makes him, despite the closet, almost joyous in comparison, as if sexual liberation has only made us more morose. If Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (which won the Man Booker Prize the year The Master was nominated) echoes the social satire of James, Tóibín has taken up the interiority of James’ art: it’s as if the two men have divided up the corpse. In The Empty Family we are inside either a straight woman or a gay man’s head; the externals almost don’t matter. It may be an elderly woman returning to work on a film in Dublin, a Spanish Communist returning to her family after Franco’s death, an Irishman putting his aunt in a nursing home, another returning home for his mother’s death, or a writer in Dublin who has dinner with old friends. The creation of character does not seem the point—it’s their inability to connect. “The Street,” the last and longest story, which describes the adventures of two young men from Pakistan who fall in love with one another while working in Barcelona, is the exception. Reading it we finally feel a suspension of disbelief—even if its lovely ending smacks of Maurice. Tóibín gives to the two Pakistanis what he will not grant the Irish—love and happiness—in a story that combines homosexuality, Islam, and immigration. “The Street” is an example of something else in Tóibín’s book: the way it mixes gay and straight stories in almost equal parts. Take two other adjacent tales. In “Barcelona 1975,” a gay man remembers in detail the orgies he attended during his first year in that city. The next story, “The New Spain,” is about the Spanish woman who returns to Barcelona to collect an inheritance. Both stories are gloomy, off-kilter, anticlimactic; but the first is full of sodomy and depicts the way gay men lose one another simply because they will not commit. If Tóibín’s work focuses on the classic Irish themes—family, death, exile—it does so with an assumption that it doesn’t matter if the characters are straight or gay. In fact, as things have turned out, the two writers who have achieved mainstream recognition across the Atlantic without abandoning in the slightest their gay subject matter are Colm Tóibín and Alan Hollinghurst. This is admirable at a time when customer reviews of The Empty Family on amazon.co.uk still include readers who say they were offended by the gay material. It’s probably unfair to compare any living writer with James, but one thing can be said: James kept quiet about his Irish roots and his sexuality, while Tóibín has made them the basis of his career.
