Bookplanet: novels about novelist Henry James

The asperity papers
Why did two of today's top novelists tangle with Henry James in the same year? Terry Eagleton gets beyond the obvious
Terry Eagleton

2004 was the year in which it was hard to throw a stone without hitting a novel about Henry James. David Lodge's Author, Author was locked in ferocious combat with Colm Tóibín's The Master, while the maestro also cropped up in Alan Hollinghurst's Booker prize-winning The Line of Beauty. Emma Tennant's Felony, another narrative about the eminent American, was reissued that year in paperback, and a South African novel on him was doing the rounds of the publishers. Was it an astrological conjunction, or some spasm of the Zeitgeist, which lay behind this remarkable literary coincidence?

The true reasons may be more mundane. Lodge argues in The Year of Henry James, his record of the affair, that James has always been both a writer's writer and a critic's writer. Since Lodge himself is both together, the allure in his case proved doubly strong. But as he points out, James also created some of the most memorable women characters of the period, which makes him fit meat for the feminists; and queer theory gets a look in, too, as gay critics debate exactly how repressed his (probable) homosexuality was. In any case, novels about historical figures have become fashionable in the past decade or two, as Lodge reminds us, and a lot of these have been writers on writers. Literary types have never been notable for their lack of narcissism, and this book is no exception.

There's another reason, however, for this rash of Henriads, which one wouldn't really expect Lodge to note. In a post-political age, writers are more likely to be enthused by exquisite states of consciousness or the intricacies of personal relationships than by more workaday matters; and the aloof, fastidious James, a man famously described as chewing more than he could bite off, appears to fill this bill exactly.

The appearance, however, is mostly illusory. Few writers have been so haunted by the themes of power and possession. James's unfathomably subtle mind is materialist to its roots. Lodge admires him because he's all about "consciousness", but he is even more about ownership and exploitation. His fictions may be full of delectably cobwebby sentences, but they are also populated by bloodied victims and monstrous predators, and what drives them is a force as mysteriously elusive as art, known as money. It's this interaction between artistic (or moral) beauty and the brutal workings of power which make James so magnificent an artist. Lodge, Tóibín and Hollinghurst, one suspects, want the beauty without the brutality.

The Year of Henry James is full of fascinating stuff about how Lodge composed his novel. But just as Author, Author is loaded with irrelevant facts that don't earn their fictional keep (as Lodge's wife warned him when she first read the manuscript), so this commentary on the novel gives us a little more information than we need. For such a superbly imaginative writer, Lodge has a curiously prosaic streak to his mind. If writing fiction involves knowing what to leave out, this instinct seems momentarily to have failed him here. Instead, he tells us the name of the boat of his ex-agent, lets us know the size of his working notebook, describes the buildings in which he attends parties, and grows positively tedious about when best to publish. He even manages to include irrelevant details when writing to himself: "Last night in the bathroom, while getting ready to go to bed," he records in a note to himself, "I had an idea for a title ..."

A similar lack of perspective affects his treatment of the joust with Tóibín. Though he is impressively candid about his rancorous feelings about The Master, a book he still can't bring himself to read, the whole coincidence, minor enough in itself, begins to sound as momentous as Joyce and Lenin landing up in Zurich at the same time. He couldn't have been more agitated if he'd learnt that Tóibín had nicked his credit cards or was impersonating him every night in the Groucho Club. He recognises that the whole affair is a matter of life imitating art, since Author, Author is about James's own rivalry with George Du Maurier, whose novel Trilby was the bestseller of the 19th century. But he makes surprisingly little of this parallel. The book is all about ironies, but treats them unironically. As usual, its author maintains a strict division of labour between his hilarious novels and his buttoned-down, uninspired critical prose.

Chancing to see a stranded cargo ship on the coast near James's Rye, Lodge's only thought is about a literary rendezvous it might make him late for. The book never moves beyond an incestuous sphere of launches and reviews, agents and publishers, fellow novelists and arts festivals. Small world indeed. Lodge is honest enough to admit that he "lost" the battle with Tóibín, whatever that means, and that Author, Author hasn't sold as well as expected. I read his book before I read Tóibín's, and found that the splendid comedy of Author, Author showed up The Master as rather too unfunny and high-minded - not exactly precious, but a touch disembodied.

Even so, an undertone of quiet self-congratulation runs through this book, as we hear of the author's "substantial" advance for his work, of rave reviews and gushingly complimentary editors. It's a relief, then, to turn to the other essays in this volume, which include brief studies of Wells, Greene, Nabokov, Eco and Coetzee. Like all this author's criticism, these are thoughtful, lucid explorations, and Lodge on The Name of the Rose is particularly intriguing. He has the fineness of judgment that James himself thought indispensable for such work. It's just a pity that it falters somewhat when it comes nearer home.

(Terry Eagleton's The English Novel: An Introduction is published by Blackwell)