The Master

After Guy Domville

Henry James had always wanted to write for the theatre. His play Guy Domville opened at St James’s Theatre in London on 5 January 1895. The audience booed. James, brought onto the stage at the end, was met with jeers. He was fifty-one years old and one of the most celebrated novelists in the English-speaking world, and he had just been publicly humiliated.

The Master opens in the months after this failure and follows James through five years: his settlement into Lamb House in Rye, his friendships with Constance Fenimore Woolson (who may have been in love with him, and whose death in Venice preceded the play by a year), his complicated relationships with his brother William and his sister Alice, and his gradual composition of the three great late novels — The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl.

The Inner Life

What Tóibín does that makes the novel remarkable is render James’s suppressed homosexuality not as a biographical fact but as a lived condition. James feels desire for certain men — for the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, for his secretary William MacAlpine — and he does not act on it, not because he does not recognise it but because he has built a life organised around not acting on it. The art is partly what he makes with what he cannot have.

The style is Tóibín at his most Jamesian: the long sentence, the careful qualification, the approach to the unsaid by the route of the circumlocution. It is not pastiche but homage.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — One of the finest novels about the artistic life in recent fiction: a Henry James who is both recognisably historical and entirely Tóibín’s.

A Life Caught at Its Hinge

The Master (2004) does not attempt to narrate Henry James’s whole life. It chooses instead the five years from 1895 to 1900 — a deliberately bounded span that opens with catastrophe and proceeds through quiet reconstruction. The catastrophe is the opening-night failure of James’s play Guy Domville at the St James’s Theatre in London on 5 January 1895, when the audience booed and James, brought onto the stage, was met with jeers. Fifty-one years old and among the most celebrated novelists in the English-speaking world, he had just been publicly humiliated in the one arena he had most wanted to conquer. Tóibín begins at this wound and follows James as he retreats to Lamb House in Rye and slowly composes the three great late novels — The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl — out of the failure. The novel’s quiet argument is that James’s greatest work grew directly from his withdrawal from the world of public action into the world of art.

Desire Lived as Condition

The most remarkable thing Tóibín does is to render James’s suppressed homosexuality not as a biographical fact to be disclosed but as a lived, pervasive condition. James feels desire — for the young sculptor Hendrik Andersen, for his Scottish secretary William MacAlpine — and does not act on it, not because he fails to recognise it but because he has built an entire life organised around not acting on it. Tóibín is careful and unsensational here: the renunciation is not presented as simple repression but as a specific social and psychological formation, a way of being that shaped James’s personality and, crucially, his art. The novel suggests that the late style itself — its indirection, its endless qualification, its approach to everything important by way of circumlocution — is a formal encoding of a man who could not be direct about what mattered most to him. What James could not have, he made into form.

The Surrounding Lives

Around this central isolation Tóibín arranges the people who pressed on James’s solitude. Constance Fenimore Woolson, the American writer who may have loved him and whose death in Venice shadows the book, embodies the human cost of his withdrawal. His brilliant brother William and his invalid sister Alice supply the family pressures and rivalries that James both depended on and fled. The historical world is rendered with meticulous research — the fin-de-siècle social scene, the distant rumble of the Dreyfus affair — but always at the angle of James’s own oblique attention, filtered through a consciousness that registers everything and commits to almost nothing.

Ventriloquism Without Parody

The prose is Tóibín at his most Jamesian: the long, suspended sentence, the careful qualification, the patient approach to the unsaid. The achievement is that it never tips into pastiche. Tóibín writes about James somewhat as James might have written about another person — with sympathy, restraint, and an unwillingness to violate the privacy of the inner life by stating it too plainly. The deliberate pace mirrors James’s own and will not suit readers who want narrative drive, and those unfamiliar with James’s life and work will inevitably miss some resonances. But for the reader who brings even modest knowledge of its subject, The Master is among the finest novels ever written about the artistic life — a study of what it costs to make art the primary relationship of one’s existence, told by a writer who understood that the price is often not visible until it has already been paid.

Reading Guides

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