AUTHOR, AUTHOR
By David Lodge
Secker & Warburg, £16.99; 390pp
ISBN 0 436 20527 0
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At the opening of David Lodge’s new novel — the third novel published this year to address the work of Henry James — Minnie Kidd, the parlourmaid of the James household, decides to attempt the Master’s work. It is December, 1915; James lies dying while, as Lodge reminds us, much younger men are dying in Flanders fields. Delirious, the author has referred to the beast in the jungle — and Minnie discovers this is the title of a story he once wrote.
She begins reading, but can make neither head nor tail of it; for one thing it seems to start in the middle. “You said you had from your earliest time,” says May Bartram to John Marcher in this tale, “as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that perhaps would overwhelm you.”
That beast — the sense of something in the distance, awaiting us or awaited by us — stalks all of James’s work. It marks his sensibility as peculiarly modern. His novels consider what can be known, causing the reader to question his or her own perceptions of a situation and to wonder at the author’s motivation. The fictions of James are not so much stories as investigations into the nature of story itself. In his perceptive, posthumously-published study, American Memory in Henry James, William Righter remarks: “After all, what is the beginning of fiction if not in conflict, desire, disequilibrium, misapprehension, false expectations and other forms of difference? . . . The two worlds of one’s experience may touch, but the necessity of choice will ultimately require that the composite vision is not the basis of the eclectic and composite self.”
This disequilibrium exists, too, in the sense of James the man — which is surely what has drawn modern novelists to the author as character. James himself believed the essence of The Ambassadors was contained in Lambert Strether’s exhortation to “live all you can”; yet James hung back, or so it seems. In part the mystery, in this day and age, is a very particular one, and Lodge states it on the first page of his book: “If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice”. An understanding of life without experience of sex seems impossible now: but why should that be the case?
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Lodge’s novel is a strange and moving homage, if not a successful one. It is difficult not to make comparisons with Colm Tóibín’s resonant portrait of James, The Master, which begins after the catastrophic failure of James’s play, Guy Domville, in 1895; Lodge’s, for the most part, leads up to that failure. This seems clumsy, and almost cruel: it is well-known that James suffered the humiliation of being called on stage after the first performance and then booed. So there is little suspense, here; James’s eager preparations, we know, will end in disaster. And Lodge is too often victim of a desire to tip a wink from the future to the past, as when a young drama critic, Herbert Wells, falls in step beside another critic, G. B. Shaw; Wells tells Shaw he’s just sold a serial story to a magazine. “Now Shaw was impressed. ‘Congratulations! I’ll look out for it. What is it called?
’ “‘The Time Machine,’ said Wells.
“ ‘An intriguing title,’ said Shaw.”
What is the point of writing a novel about a novelist? It is a curious endeavour to undertake in the first place. Tóibín’s novel — its style restrained and almost mannered, although never a pastiche of James — works in the way that the best literary criticism should (but rarely does): it casts new light on the original. To read The Master is to consider James afresh, and that is no small achievement. It never intrudes upon James’s privacy and yet is revealing of his artistic self.
This can’t be said of Author, Author. Without a doubt, this is a book written out of a deep love for and knowledge of the work of Henry James; and it is not undiverting to read. But if you wished for insight into James, you could with more profit turn to his own work or, to consider his life, Leon Edel’s remarkable biography. Lodge’s portrait of James’s friendship with George du Maurier, whose novel Trilby was such a success in his day, is affecting; but this seems little to do with Henry James. Somehow the virtues of this book — virtues that derive from Lodge’s sensitivity, his humour, his ear for what is going on just outside the main action — are cloaked by the distracting presence of James-who-is-not-James.
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At the end of the book, Lodge reveals his hand. The novel has come full circle; it is now the end of February, 1916 and James is truly on the point of death. But suddenly, the author — Lodge — appears. He imagines that James — after the muted reception his late novels received and the failure of the revised New York Edition of his works, “must have felt that he had failed to impress his vision on the world’s collective consciousness as he had hoped to do at the outset of his literary career.”
So, he wishes to offer comfort to the dying James: “It’s tempting therefore to indulge in a fantasy of somehow time-travelling back to that afternoon . . .” Lodge would tell James of his success, of the theses, films, the TV tie-in editions — even, perhaps, of the novels such as the one he himself has just written.
There are many authors to whom one would wish to offer such comfort. William Blake, perhaps, or John Clare. Maybe even the Gawain poet; perhaps in the 14th century he felt success had eluded him too. But survival — worth — in literature doesn’t work that way, and Henry James, author of The Beast in the Jungle, The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet (to name but a few stories that addressed this topic) “must have felt” that better than most.
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