Portrait of a gentleman

The Master

By Colm Toibin

Scribner, 338 pp., $25

I confess that, like many writers, I've always been a little bit intimidated by Henry James.

For starters, there's his prodigious output: 20 novels, well over a hundred stories, a dozen plays, and countless critical writings. Then there are the novels themselves -- certainly among the most dense and challenging by any American author.

What intrigues me most about James, though, is his refusal to be anything in particular, except a writer. Though born to one of 19th-century America's most prominent families, he lived most of his life in Europe, eschewed lasting personal attachments of all kinds, and, with the exceptions of Dickens, Balzac, and his friend Edith Wharton, thought very little of other writers of his age. Nearly a century after his death, James's withering aesthetic snobbery still sets the bar.

The Henry James we meet in "The Master," veteran Irish novelist Colm Tibn's fictional treatise on James's life, does little to dispel this impression. Tibn's portrait affirms James's reputation as a totemic man of letters, purely engaged with the habit of art. It also reveals a man haunted by the past, whose affections were so deflected into the pages of his fiction that he was a kind of bystander to his own life.

Tibn's novel is sure to be compared with Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" (even the book's flap copy does this). Notwithstanding their shared appeal to the former English majors among us, the books are actually quite different. Whereas Cunningham approached Virginia Woolf obliquely, pinning his narrative less to Woolf herself than to her novel "Mrs. Dalloway," Tibn takes James head-on, putting us into the novelist's mind at a critical juncture of his life. Perhaps the book's greatest achievement -- one of many -- is the gentle understatement it employs to connect James's personal uncertainties at mid-career to a broader shift in the literary current at the turn of the century.

The book is anchored in a period of roughly five years, beginning in 1895, with James's public failure as a playwright and the catcalling reception of his play "Guy Domville." As anachronistic as the term may be, the James of the book's early pages is, at 52, in the throes of a bona fide midlife crisis: The anonymity of fiction has taken its toll, and he longs for a greater and more visible public acceptance. "He wondered if the theater could be not only a source of pleasure and amusement, but a lifeline, a way of beginning again now that the fruitful writing of fiction seemed to be fading."

James's touching desire to emerge from the shadowy realm of novel writing is quickly foiled. On opening night, James avoids the theater, instead attending the first act of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband," arriving at the performance of his own play just in time to receive the worst of the booing and hissing from the balcony. His feelings of exposure are painfully heightened by the cross-town triumph of Wilde's play, which the high-minded James finds "feeble and vulgar." "He had failed," Tibn writes, "to take the measure of the great flat foot of the public."

The novel then follows the defeated James on a series of wanderings: first to Ireland, then back to London, and finally to Rye, Sussex, where he purchases a country house that restores him to a feeling of comfort and belonging. Visitors come and go; invitations are accepted or refused; stories are conceived and written; flirtations (all with men) are entertained but never acted on. The surface of the novel is in this sense quite desultory; Tibn's portrait is less a novel in the proper (or Jamesian) sense than a series of episodes broadly conforming to the known patterns of movement of its subject.

The story's greater energy lies in the linkage that Tibn forges among James's emotional and physical exile, the subjects of his novels, and certain key episodes in his past. Here, Tibn may be accused of gerrymandering his portrait -- some of the correspondences he draws seem forced -- but James himself would be the first to concede that rigging the deck a little is well within a novelist's province.

Among the novel's most engaging creations are a trio of women: James's sister, Alice; his cousin Minnie Temple; and the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. All three haunt the text, as they haunt James himself, for the ways in which he failed each before her death. Each serves as the inspiration for one of several characters in his novels; in some cases, such as Isabel Archer from "The Portrait of a Lady," Tibn suggests that James appropriated qualities of each woman in fashioning his heroine. But the reader can't help but also feel the ways in which art fails as a stand-in for life itself. Woolson, whose suicidal jump from a Venice balcony may have been caused by an unrequited affection for James, pushes the writer into a genuinely heart-wrenching recognition of this fact: "Had he gone to Venice that winter, he knew, she would not have killed herself. . . . He was the person who could have rescued her."

A number of other important episodes underscore James's patterns of deflected affection, including a night of unconsummated love with his boyhood friend Oliver Wendell Holmes. And Tibn cannot resist positing a single, bedrock event in the formation of James's personality: the phony back ailment that kept him out of the Civil War, in which his brother Wilky died a hero's death.

Roughly summarized, this all could seem a bit programmatic. But in Tibn's skillful hands, what unfolds is a seamless and ultimately moving portrait of a fading era, and the way that life and art can mingle in the mind to create a kind of composite existence. "Each book he had written," Tibn writes, "each scene described or character created, had become an aspect of him, had entered into his driven spirit and lay there much as the years themselves had done." One has the feeling that, in these words, Tibn is not only talking about James himself.

Justin Cronin's novel "The Summer Guest" will appear later this month.