How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (26 page)

The “fatal cheapness” of many historical novels lies in the way they show off their own hard-won verisimilitude, as overrich detail congests the narrative. Of meticulous detail
The Master
lacks none: nearly every page bears witness to a prodigious amount of research, from passing references to the appearances of James's room in Mrs. Curtis's palazzo, with its “pompous painted ceiling and walls of ancient pale green damask slightly shredded and patched”—almost a verbatim quotation of James, as it happens—to the way Henry complains to himself, after the failure of
Guy Domville
, that he'd failed to “take the measure of the great flat foot of the public”—another verbatim quotation. And yet while this dazzling embedding of bona fide Jamesian nuggets throughout his narrative will delight James scholars, they never obtrude into the smooth and elegant flow of the novel's movement. (Tóibín's major departure from the known facts is temporal: a number of events that occurred after 1900 are shepherded into the preceding decade.)

The deft wielding of the facts by (as it were) Tóibín the journalist and critic would be mere window dressing without the acute psychological perceptiveness that informs the author's portrait of his subject. This intelligent sense of the bigger picture enables Tóibín to come up with sensible solutions to some famous conundrums in James scholarship. I am not as persuaded as Tóibín was by the assertion, in Sheldon M. Novick's 1996 biography,
Henry James: The Young Master
, that the young James had a homosexual affair with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. when Holmes returned from the Civil War—a scenario supported in Novick's book by a reading of the existing documentary evidence that has the same relationship to rigorous scholarship that Monet's
water lilies do to high-resolution digital photographs. (Much hangs on a Freudian reading of an allusion by James to an “obelisk” that occurs in proximity to a description of the Holmes residence.)

Tóibín, however, finds the story “oddly convincing”—and indeed makes it much more convincing in his novel, where it provides a scene of almost unbearable tension between the two young men, the one blandly curious, the other immobile with a desire he is too terrified to act on. (Or perhaps not: it seems appropriately Jamesian to be confronted by a scene that you can read again and again without being able to determine just what, if anything, has happened.) What's important is the way Tóibín the novelist uses such scenes to suggest the sources of James's distinctive creative vision—to show why he is the father of the psychological novel: “He wondered at how, every day, as they moved around each other, each of them had stored away an entirely private world to which they could return at the sound of a name, or for no reason at all.”

 

The Master
will inevitably be compared to another recent novel about a great writer:
The Hours
, by Michael Cunningham, which was, at least in part, about Virginia Woolf as she set out to write
Mrs. Dalloway
. But Tóibín's book is concerned less with the creation of a single work than with something at once much bigger and much more elusive: the nature of an entire artistic consciousness (and a very great consciousness at that). Here is where
The Master
is both most suggestive and most problematic.

For as you make your way through
The Master
, with its impressionistic ambling between past and present, a distinctive and perhaps too repetitive pattern begins to emerge. Each memory that is triggered or captured may lead to the creation of a work of literature by Henry the artist, but each memory tends also to lead you by the hand to a scene of moral failure on the part of Henry the man. There's a passage early on in which the young Henry, working up one of his first short stories, uses an incident from his home life and finds himself enthralled by the “feeling of power” that a “raid on his own memories” can produce when they are transformed into art; what we are clearly intended to understand as a kind of artistic parasitism (and a corresponding aversion to “real” living) is increasingly held up to ruthless scrutiny—and judgment—by both the author of
The Master
and its characters. One friend
suggests quite blatantly that Henry's shrinking from Constance Woolson's needy affection drove her to self-destruction; Henry's use of the Symondses' marriage as fodder for “The Author of ‘Beltraffio'” shocks another friend, the writer Edmund Gosse. (“He insisted that writing a story using factual material and real people was dishonest and strange and somehow underhand.”) And Holmes flatly accuses Henry of responsibility for the death of Minny Temple, who'd hinted to James that she'd have loved to join him for a healthful vacation abroad; he didn't respond. By the end, remembering Minny, Tóibín's Henry shocks even himself. “He felt a sharp and unbearable idea staring at him, like something alive and fierce and predatory in the air, whispering to him that he had preferred her dead rather than alive, that he had known what to do with her once life was taken from her, but he had denied her when she asked him gently for help.”

This emphasis on James's alleged responsibility for Minny's death is, as it happens, one of Tóibín's rare departures from the documentary record about James's life: although he cites part of a letter that the real-life Minny wrote to James (“Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome”), he doesn't cite the postscript she added, in which it's clear she knows her fantasy of traveling with him in Europe was just that: “I am really not strong enough to go abroad with even the kindest of friends.” Tóibín can't acknowledge that James may have been “the kindest of friends,” because it interferes with his larger vision of James the cold fish, the artistic vampire living off the lifeblood of his innocent and truly suffering victims.
The Master
is, of course, a novel, and Tóibín isn't bound by the facts; but the way that he's loaded the dice against James here suggests what is, to my mind, a larger failure of sympathy.

This is strange, because sympathy is something Tóibín the critic, the chronicler of gay lives, has thought a great deal about. “The gay past is not pure,” he writes in
Love in a Dark Time
, referring to the way in which the homosexuals of an earlier generation were forced to lead double, lying lives. “It is duplicitous and slippery, and it requires a great deal of sympathy and understanding.” But
The Master
, Tóibín's fifth novel, made me wonder whether he fully understands only a certain kind of suffering, and has only a certain kind of sympathy. For Oscar Wilde, with his extravagant public sufferings and real physical abasement, for the scholar F. O. Matthiessen, with his tortured closetedness
and eventual suicide, Tóibín—who has acknowledged what he feels is the “abiding fascination of sadness…and, indeed, tragedy”—clearly has great sympathy in his essays. And it is for this nineteenth-century, operatic suffering that he has sympathy in the new novel, too: Minny and Constance and Alice James, with their Pucciniesque anguishes, their illnesses, premature death and suicide.

But it may be that Tóibín's very nature, his own fascination with high tragedy and his admirably fierce moral objection to the kind of secretiveness and closetedness that once ravaged him, as it did so many of us, makes him unable to get to the deep opaque heart of Henry James—the elusive and frustrating thing that got him going about James in the first place. For it's possible that James just didn't suffer in the way Tóibín understands suffering. From everything we know, he was indeed quite a happy person (by his own standards, rather than ours) for most of his life—productive, sociable, well loved, and remarkably kind. And, of course, a very great artist for whom art was the highest satisfaction. Yet Tóibín never explores what it might feel like to be satisfied by art alone (in the way that most of us want to be satisfied by love and sex); he just keeps showing you the damage that art causes without really suggesting what its compensatory value might be—for James or, indeed, for us. There is an early story of James's in which a young American asks himself whether “it is better to cultivate an art than to cultivate a passion”; for James in real life, at least, it seems clear what the answer was—just as it seems clear what Tóibín thinks, too. The last page of
The Master
provides one final memory, one final illumination of why James was “cold,” why for him there was a kind of emotion in art that nothing in “life” could match. A closing image of the lone artist, anxiously culling moments from life to be preserved in art, is meant, I suspect, to come off as melancholy, if not tragic.

But what if James wasn't tragic? That a life without passion as most of us understand it could still be a fulfilled life is one paradox that Tóibín's artful, moving, and very beautiful novel doesn't seem to have considered; and so he doesn't dramatize it because it isn't clear to him. What we get in
The Master
is, instead, the intricate and wrenching drama of James's “victims.” In the end, the Master himself remains, ultimately, unknowable—a problem that perhaps no artist could ever solve.

—The New York Times Book Review
, June 20, 2004

A
t the climax of Oscar Wilde's comic masterpiece,
The Importance of Being Earnest
, we learn that a baby has been mistaken for a book. Until that improbable revelation, the play—Wilde's wicked exposé of the artificiality of conventional morality, and his one unequivocally great work—is concerned less with procreation than with recreation.
Earnest
follows two fashionable young heroes, Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, as each leads an elaborate double life, complete with false identities and imaginary friends, that allows him to seek unrespectable pleasures while presenting a respectable face to his local society at home: London for Algy, whose fictional invalid friend, Bunbury, provides frequent excuses to escape to the countryside; Hertfordshire for Jack, whose assumption of a false identity of his own (that of an invented ne'er-do-well brother named “Ernest”) allows him to misbehave in town.

Those artificial façades start crumbling when both men fall victim to natural impulses. Jack has fallen in love with Algy's cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax, and Algy becomes besotted with Jack's young ward, Cecily Cardew, during a mischief-making visit to Jack's house in the country. (He arrives pretending to be the made-up black-sheep brother, Ernest—
which is just as well, since Cecily, like Gwendolen, has always yearned to marry a man named Ernest—and Jack, although irritated, can't expose Algy without exposing himself.) Jack's matrimonial aims, however, are seriously impaired by the fact that he has no pedigree. As he sheepishly reveals during an interview with Gwendolen's mother and Algy's aunt, the formidable Lady Bracknell, he was discovered, as an infant, in a large handbag in the cloakroom in Victoria Station, and subsequently adopted by the kindly gentleman who found him, Mr. Worthing.

Just how the baby got into the handbag is revealed in the play's final moments, when it evolves that Miss Prism, the tutor currently employed by Jack to educate Cecily, was once a nursemaid in the employ of Lady Bracknell's sister (Algy's mother)—the same nursemaid who'd gone for a promenade with Algy's elder brother twenty-eight years ago and subsequently disappeared, along with her charge. As the shocked company looks on, Prism describes how, “in a moment of mental abstraction,” she had switched the baby she was taking care of and the manuscript of the novel she was writing, placing the former in her handbag, which she deposited in the railway station cloakroom, and the latter in the pram, which she took for a stroll. On realizing that she'd lost the baby, Miss Prism fled London and never returned.

 

Miss Prism's inability to distinguish between a human being and a work of fiction may have been the result of mental abstraction, but for Oscar Wilde, the conflation of life and art was always deliberate. The result, for us, is that it has never been easy to separate how Wilde led his life—particularly his personal craving for notoriety—from his aesthetic and creative impulse to subvert. As early as the 1870s, before he'd left Oxford for London, the Dublin-born student of both Pater and Ruskin was playing the young
artiste
with a flair for self-promotion that caught the attention of the wide world. The character of Bunthorne in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta
Patience
was based on him; his postcollegiate debut as a public figure was at the splashy opening of the new Grosvenor Gallery, which the twenty-two-year-old Wilde attended in a coat cut to look like a cello.

Not everyone was seduced by the precocious youth and his attention-getting shenanigans. “What has he done,” the actress Helen Modjeska
complained, “this young man, that one meets him everywhere?…He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act—he does nothing but talk.” Nonetheless, Wilde had become sufficiently famous as a proponent of Aestheticism by his mid-twenties that he went on a two-year lecture tour of the United States, during which he gave tips to the colonials on how to make life more aesthetic. “The supreme object of life is to live,” went Wilde's refrain. “Few people live.”

By “living,” Wilde in his Aesthete mode meant living beautifully, down to the last detail. Despite its apparent superficiality—or indeed, because of its apparent superficiality—the insistence that every aspect of lived life be exquisite and unconventional was part of a philosophical and artistic project of subversion; the emphases on surfaces, appearances, and style flew in the face of conventional middle-class Victorian sensibility, with its leaden earnestness and saccharine sentimentality. This creed was intended to be a red flag waved in the face of bourgeois society, and was understood as such by those sophisticated enough to see what he was up to. “So much taste will lead to prison,” Degas murmured while Wilde visited Paris just before
Earnest
opened early in 1895.

Wilde's life was intended to be a demonstration of his artistic philosophy—was intended, that is to say, to seem like a work of art. The self-consciously dandyish clothes, the flowing locks that he wore provocatively long, the promenades down Piccadilly holding a lily, the unconventional all-white décor in the house at 16 Tite Street, where he eventually lived with his wife, Constance, and their two children, and which, like the famous blue china that adorned his Oxford rooms, was the subject of much comment; the polished epigrams he kept in a notebook at the ready (“you have a phrase for everything,” a disapproving Walter Pater scolded him): all these suggested that there was not a little truth in that famous remark to Gide, one that—typically of Wilde, for whom “a truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true”—assumed a distinction between art and life even as it sought to blur that distinction. “I have put my genius into my life,” he declared. “I have only put my talent into my works.”

The statement was probably true of everything except
Earnest
. Even at Oxford, where he showed extraordinary promise as a Classics student, it was clear that Wilde saw his intellectual gifts as a passport to
celebrity; that he happened to be brilliant enough to earn fame in any number of honorable ways was merely a means to an end. “God knows,” the young Magdalen graduate replied, when asked what he wanted to do after university. “I won't be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, notorious.”

He got everything he hoped for. Like many Victorian youths who had a literary bent and a restless nature, Wilde set out to be a poet. His early efforts were not without some success: he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize at Oxford with a poem called “Ravenna.” Yet for all their surface dazzle and facility, and despite a patent eagerness to shock with “decadent” material—in “Charmides,” a youth makes love to a statue of Athena, who takes predictably humorless revenge—Wilde's verse was always studied, and now seems dated, lacking the epigrammatic crispness and fluency of his prose, which by contrast seems surprisingly modern. (
Punch
dismissed his first volume of poems as “Swinburne and water.”) Pater had sensed early on that Wilde's real voice was the sound of speech, not song: “Why do you always write poetry?” he chided Wilde. “Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.” One reason was that it was as a poet that the young Wilde thought he could garner the most attention; his early career strongly suggests that he loved posing as a littérateur as much as he loved writing itself. “
Pour écrire il me faut du satin jaune
,” he announced. He insisted on writing the draft of his early play
The Duchess of Padua
on fabulously expensive stationery.

It was in prose that Wilde found his real voice, which was clearly that of a critic. The provocative titles of some of the essays—“The Truth of Masks,” “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist”—suggest,
in ovo
, the scope and character of his future artistic and philosophical project, which Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann succinctly characterized as “conducting, in the most civilized way, an anatomy of his society, and a radical reconsideration of its ethics.” The most ambitious prose vehicle for that project was
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, which, for all its haphazard construction, still suggests—with its almost prurient and (whatever his post facto demurs) never quite unadmiring portrait of beauty wholly divorced from morals—why Gide could have thought of Wilde as “the most dangerous product of modern civilization.” That
judgment may seem excessive to our modern ears, but in the wake of Dorian—and of Wilde's French-language drama
Salomé
, written at the same time and characterized by the same self-conscious desire to shock by means of decadent sexuality—it would have seemed quite justifiable. “Since Oscar wrote Dorian Gray,” Constance Wilde sighed in 1890, when her husband's novel was being denounced as decadent and immoral, “no one will speak to us.”

Five years later, people weren't only speaking to Wilde, they were begging for him. By then, it was evident that even
Dorian Gray
, with its famous inversions of substance and reflection, of life and art, hadn't been the ideal vehicle for his gifts; Wilde himself knew perfectly well he wasn't really a novelist. “I am afraid it is rather like my own life—all conversation and no action,” he said of
Dorian Gray
. But what is a weakness in a novel can be a strength in a play. Helen Modjeska had been prescient: Wilde was, at bottom, a great Irish talker, and his true métier, as the course of his career would soon demonstrate, was dialogue—real dialogue, rather than the rococo verses he'd put in the mouths of his early characters. It's the voice of Wilde the brilliant talker—amusing, incisive, economical, wicked, feeling, fresh, contemporary, right—that you hear in the plays. (And in the letters, too, which have the same quality of intellectual vivaciousness and delightfulness of expression that his best dialogue has.) It wasn't until he allowed that real-life voice to be heard in his work that Wilde achieved true distinction in art as well as life, however briefly. “Talk itself is a sort of spiritualised action,” he declared in May 1887, at a time when he'd begun writing down narratives and dialogues as a kind of training for his mature dramatic work, of which
Earnest
—with its razor-like epigrams and perfect inversions of the natural and the artificial, of life and art, of babies and books—was the most exquisite, and devastating, expression.

 

Typically, the creative breakthrough marked by Wilde's great comedy was deeply entwined with another, personal watershed: his authentic artistic self emerged into view at the same time that his authentic emo
tional self was being revealed. After being initiated into homosexual sex by the precocious Robbie Ross in 1886—Ross was seventeen, Wilde thirty-one—Wilde became increasingly involved in enacting the Greek love to which he'd always enjoyed alluding, even when he didn't actually practice it. (He'd scandalized his fellow Oxford undergraduates by observing, of a school athlete, that “his left leg is a Greek poem”; but back then he really was all talk.) Wilde's marriage had begun to unravel after his wife's second pregnancy, which left him physically repelled: “I…forced myself to touch and kiss her…I used to wash my mouth and open the window to cleanse my lips in the open air.” By the late Eighties and early Nineties, he was spending his free time first with Ross, and then, after their fateful 1891 meeting, with the pale-skinned, fair-haired Lord Alfred Douglas—“Bosie.” And, soon after, with the telegraph boys and rent boys and other lower-class youths of the homosexual demimonde, whose company gave Wilde—the gay among straights, the Irishman among Englishmen—the delicious, gratifying thrill of danger: “like feasting with panthers.”

Wilde's consummation of his Hellenic urges, after such a long courtship, put an end to all kinds of unresolved tensions. The art/life dialectic that Wilde made the basis of so many of his on-and offstage pronouncements was just one of many that structured his life and work; temperamentally, he preferred to hesitate between such poles rather than commit to either one. Just as he had hovered endlessly on the verge of conversion to Catholicism as an undergraduate, just as he could never quite choose between Ruskin's moralistic aesthetics and Pater's pagan “gem-like flame,” he had vacillated, from his earliest youth, between the classical and the medieval, the Greek and the Gothic. Between, that is to say, the form, the style, the profane “sanity” of his beloved Greeks, on the one hand, and religious feeling combined with Romantic exaltation, on the other. One of the things that “Ravenna” is about, indeed, is the keenly felt tension between the Hellenic and the Gothic. Its narrator wobbles between ecstatic apostrophes of Greece (“O Salamis! O lone Plataean plain!”) and invocations of Gaston de Foix and “hugelimbed Theodoric, the Gothic king.” “To be Greek one should have no clothes: to be mediaeval one should have no body: to be modern one should have no soul,” he wrote. But it was to the Greeks that he eventually returned.

It is tempting to read Wilde's “anatomy of his society”—his “radical reconsideration of its ethics” by means of a playful reordering, even deconstruction, of key terms—as the product of his Greek rather than his Gothic side: Hellenism was the rubric under which his intellectual and emotional passions could, for once, coexist in peace. In an essay he wrote at twenty-five for the Oxford Chancellor's Prize, he entwines style, illicit sexuality, and the classical exaltation of form above all things: