Deconstructing Henry, once again

Author, Author
By David Lodge
Viking, 390 pp., $24.95

''Author, Author," by David Lodge, is the latest in a spate of recent novels about Henry James, following Emma Tennant's ''Felony" and Colm Tibn's ''The Master." It seems an odd match -- one of England's finest comic novelists writing about one of literature's most ponderous. But Lodge combines wit and erudition here to produce a cunning, audacious portrait.

Instead of chipping away at the Jamesian edifice to expose the expected homosexual core, Lodge keeps his distance, setting the writer in his historical and social landscape. Portrayed this way, at the mercy of time and of circumstance, the literary high priest of consciousness emerges as ultimately unknowing; in other words, as human.

''Author, Author" begins at the end in London, in December 1915. ''The author is dying propped up in bed among starched sheets and plump pillows . . . while the young men are dying in the mud of No Man's Land." This comparison is sustained as Lodge looks back from James's deathbed to the writer's comfortable -- if not entirely happy -- sojourn in a turbulent Europe.

As the success of ''The Portrait of a Lady" fades and his reputation atrophies, James suffers both personal and professional injuries. In 1895 in London, he is publicly jeered on the first night of his doomed play, ''Guy Domville," a humiliation sharpened by the fact that Oscar Wilde's ''An Ideal Husband" is rapturously received on the same evening and that ''Trilby," a romance novel by his friend George Du Maurier, has just become the bestseller of the century.

A year earlier, he travels to Venice, where his closest female friend has killed herself and where James tries to dispose of her dresses in a canal, imagining an aesthetically fitting tribute. ''Instead of which, buoyed up by the air . . . they floated on the surface, surrounding the gondola like swollen corpses." Life's unruly lumps regularly capsize James's ordered existence. His fragile sister, Alice, dies, and reading her adoring descriptions of him in her journal, James realizes that ''the reason he had been kind to her was because she gratified his egotism."

Imagined introspection is rare here, making James's private admissions all the more shocking. Contemplating an acolyte, James remarks that ''there was nothing quite so sweet to injured merit as the tribute of an intelligent and gifted young man, the deference of disciple to master."

Lodge himself is respectful rather than deferential, describing the artistic triumphs and disappointments, the daily writing habits, with dry authority and an occasional jab. When James is awarded the Order of Merit, for example, the writer's sister-in-law allows herself ''a smile of tribal satisfaction."

The James family history, the Civil War, the Newport era, are dutifully sketched, but the novel's fulcrum is James's friendship with Du Maurier, the buoyant Punch magazine artist. Best remembered perhaps as Daphne Du Maurier's grandfather, the illustrator is everything that James is not: a husband, father, talker, and joker who blithely writes novels that sell. Embraced by the loving Du Maurier family, James can admire but also patronize his adoring friend -- until that friend becomes a literary celebrity. ''I hear there is a Trilby sausage," James says of one of the many products named after Du Maurier's novel. ''I'm afraid it's a very American kind of vulgarity. . . . One of the less amiable consequences of our enthusiasm for democracy and capitalism." Exposing the writer's egotism and pomposity, Lodge wisely allows James to speak for himself.

Minor dramas in the James/Du Maurier friendship and larger ones throughout the novel are either muted or deflected; confrontations are avoided, resentments and longings nursed in secret. The famous and the infamous appear -- H. G. Wells, Wilde, even Agatha Christie as a child -- but from the outset Lodge signals his interest in the smaller characters and the lesser disruptions. James's secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, ''genteel but financially pinched," is the novel's most memorable female character, despite appearing only at the beginning and the end. Burgess Noakes, the manservant; Joan Anderson, the housekeeper; and Minnie Kidd, the parlormaid, are not merely colorful but vivid.

Indeed, the novel's longest monologue -- almost three pages long -- is delivered by Noakes. Sitting beside James's bed, the young soldier tells the dying man how death arrived at the battle of Aubers Ridge. ''There was only three hundred yards of No Man's Land. Three football pitches. That's what Captain Courthope said, to encourage us like. . . . And when . . . the men went over the top, with the officers waving their red marking flags like linesmen, you might have thought it was a game, and looked for the ball."

Lodge's greatest achievement, perhaps, is to present the master not only as mortal -- helpless and delusional toward the end, dictating letters in the voice of Napoleon -- but also as a failure. The morning after the ''Guy Domville" debacle, James wakes ''as if he were coming round from chloroform, numbed but aware that a horrible pain was lurking somewhere just beyond the threshold of consciousness." He will go on to write ''The Ambassadors," ''The Wings of the Dove," ''The Golden Bowl," which will be greeted, in Lodge's words, with ''respectful bafflement or blank indifference." This reverent portrait of literary genius and human frailty allows us an intimate, but never prurient, view of James's vanity and desolation.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times.