The Master Book

The Master is the story of the key life-shaping experiences of Henry James. While we learn a lot about James' life, the book is not at all structured as a traditional biography. It begins late in James' life when he was settled in England and it has him reflect back on these experiences. In particular, three women, very close to him -- an invalid sister, a brilliant favorite cousin, and an author friend died relatively young. Another life-forming event was a summer camp experience with a large group of young people - siblings, friends and cousins, so formative, that in a sense James learned everything he needed to know about people to write his novels from this one experience.

James had a lifelong love-hate relationship with his domineering older brother, the psychologists and scholar, William James. Growing up, James lived with his family in Cambridge in Boston and summered among the elite in Newport, Rhode Island. In this insular New England literary culture, James mentions one day he would like to meet Nathaniel Hawthorne. His father had talked with him last week; James, mother and aunt knew all the women in Hawthorne's family, and James' younger sibling went to school with Hawthorne's children. So, a small world in literary Boston.

The author, who has written other gay-themed works (Blackwater Lightship) assumes James was a closet gay who never consummated a relationship with man or woman. Thus Toibin focuses many of James' formative experiences along this theme - sharing a bed as a youth with Oliver Wendell Holms, or enduring the inquiries of a good friend who, when names of customers of Oscar Wilde's "rent boys" were going to be made public during that affair, pressed James in so many words: "Well, will you be leaving for France like the others?" And the criticism, including that by his brother, why a MAN would want to write stories about WOMEN.

James did have a love affair -- with a house -- now the Lamb House, open to the public in Rye on England's south coast. There is humor, such as James' drawn-out effort to fire an elderly husband and wife butler-cook team who had become alcoholics. It's a great book; like most of James' work, it is much more interesting than it sounds; indeed it's a fascinating read, and James comes off as aloof but likeable.