Review

Author, Author

By David Lodge

Published by Penguin

Perhaps it says something about our current age and its needs and values that two of our leading novelists, David Lodge and Colm Tóibín, should choose as their subject the life and work (but most conspicuously the life) of one of the early 20th-century’s finest practioners of the art.

James himself was so notoriously secret about his private life that he burned nearly all of his correspondence with fellow writers and other leading figures of the age. One exception was the correspondence with Punch cartoonist and bestselling author of Trilby, George du Maurier. This relationship is the inspiration for, and forms the heart of, Lodge’s novel.

Author, Author opens with James on his deathbed in 1916, and loops backwards and forwards in time, explaining much of the background and build-up to the Guy Domville episode and the resurgence of power which enabled him to write his last three great novels – The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904) – all studies in the contrasts of American/European character.

Lodge’s portrait is full of detail and finely drawn. The only jarring note is at the end where he intrudes on James's deathbed scene and then intersperses a lengthy passage of James’s thoughts on the afterlife. (This material is interesting but would have been better confined to a preface.) Nonetheless, this is a clever, well-crafted novel, which displays the man behind the artist in all his egotism, insecurity and human frailty.

The book's title, which refers to the customary curtain call for the author at first nights, is deeply ironic. Hopes of theatrical success haunted James’s middle years; then, in 1895 at the disastrous premiere of his play Guy Domville, the author suffered his most crushing public humiliation when he was booed onstage.

It is with this dramatic moment that Colm Tóibín chooses to open his novel, The Master, a convincing, authentic and beautifully-realised portrait of the expatriate, Anglophile artist during the years 1895-1900.

Equally well-constructed from a careful reading of James’s life and correspondence, Tóibín practises a peculiarly Jamesian tact and leaves much unsaid, but inferred. Germs of ideas for new works, such as The Turn of the Screw, are noted and alluded to, but left unrealised, so that we recognise, without sharing, their moment of conception. Subtle, nuanced and finely-balanced, Tóibín brings to his novelistic account of Henry James many of the master’s own finest qualities.

In the end, however, what is perhaps most remarkable is not how many of the same incidents are used by the two novelists, but how few. Both books achieve what all good explorations of a novelist’s life should do, and make the reader eager to go back to the source and the Master himself.

Reviewed by Sarah MacDougall

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