Tales from a Master's Notebook Read online

  The train of thought which has led to this book is mysterious in origin: as James says about The Tragic Muse in its Preface, ‘I fail to recover my precious first moment of consciousness of the idea to which it was to give form’. I have no memory of where it came from – an idle thought while browsing in the notebooks, perhaps, or a conversation with someone. It’s possible that I heard of the never-translated 2009 Spanish volume After Henry James, edited by Javier Montes, for which various contributors, mostly Spanish but including Colm Tóibín, wrote stories based on unused ‘germs’. (The original English version of the story appeared in his collection The Empty Family (2010), and I am very grateful to him for permission to reprint it here.)

  Whatever the original stimulus, for me the central prompting – James in his notebooks (sketching the story that Joseph O’Neill has taken on) says that ‘I hate to touch things only to leave them’ – has been the thought that rather than going to waste, these seeds might grow into something, albeit through a kind of surrogacy, and in the soil of other imaginations than James’s own. In the process some serious writers could come together to demonstrate the continuing life of his idea of the liberty of the novel – and of the tale: his idea in ‘The Art of Fiction’ that ‘the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free’.

  These are not James stories, of course. They show, rather, the truth of James’s notion, in the 1908 Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, of the multiple aspects of the ‘house of fiction’: ‘The house of fiction has … not one window, but a million … every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will … At each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other.’ In other words, the authors in this book, as I hoped, have taken James’s hint and made it their own, have written stories which give their own ‘impression of life’ – not Jamesian pastiches.

  James has made a number of appearances in recent fiction, under various guises. As a subject of study in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004); as a detective, working alongside his brother William and sister Alice to track down Jack the Ripper in What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James & Jack the Ripper (2010) by Paula Marantz Cohen; as a melancholy, unfulfilled homosexual writer struggling towards supreme achievement in Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004); as a ruefully sensitive professional man of letters, and friend to George du Maurier, in David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004); or as the employer of a brilliant young woman (fictionalised as Frieda Wroth but close to the actual Theodora Bosanquet) in Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s Tale (2005). One should also mention Felony: The Private History of ‘The Aspern Papers’ (2002) by Emma Tennant, where James maltreats Constance Fenimore Woolson, who is in love with him; or Cynthia Ozick’s long short story Dictation (2008), where Theodora Bosanquet plots mischievously behind James’s back; or ‘The Master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 1914–1916’ (2008) by Joyce Carol Oates, where the elderly James becomes the prey of homoerotic fantasies as he visits wounded soldiers; or Joan Aiken’s The Haunting of Lamb House (1991), where James sees ghosts in his Sussex home. Nor is it a direct continuation of James’s own fiction, like John Banville’s daring Mrs Osmond (2017), a sequel to The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In its way, though, it more directly than any of these picks up the dropped baton of James’s own strivings in the field of fiction.

  The book obviously has a double aspect, but it is organised very simply. The stories are presented in sequence, with no apparatus, so that they can be read first, straightforwardly, as the work of their authors. For those who are interested, an Appendix presents the notebook passages that have been their inspiration, so that readers can compare starting points and finishing lines; then, if they like, going back to reread the stories and trace the continuities and deviations. The subjects, it will be apparent, are in very various states. Some are long and full – sometimes returned to repeatedly over a period of months or years. Others are short, either pithy or (occasionally) nebulous or gnomic – jotted down as an aide-mémoire that evidently meant more to James than it can to us. Sometimes, as with the subject from which Giles Foden has evolved ‘The Road to Gabon’, James just puts down a rough diamond with no attempt at analysing its facets or giving it a setting. (The manuscript notebook page on which it occurs is reproduced as the frontispiece.) In other cases, he pursues one or more apparently false scents, takes what seem to be wrong turns that overcomplicate or end in an impasse. (I haven’t always presented these at full length, wanting to show mainly where authors have picked up from James.) Some subjects seem recorded rather dutifully after someone has pressed an anecdote on the famous author at dinner. Others are inspired by James’s own half-alienated or ironic observation of how the world wags. Sometimes, one must say, of how it wagged – for the topics occasionally feel dated, and after more than a century things have moved on – but even then, contemporary equivalents can usually be found.

  I should briefly comment on the title. While these tales start ‘from’ entries in the notebooks, they mostly move a considerable distance from their points of origin. And anything but slavish, they are freely inventive. In the title, also, it is ‘a Master’ rather than ‘the Master’; partly because there are numerous ‘masters’ (male and female) besides James, and partly because James maintained a distinctly ironic attitude to the term. In his great novella ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1888), the ‘Master’ of the title is a famous writer, possibly an untrustworthy hypocrite, who has squandered his talent through commercial overproduction; in his tale ‘The Tree of Knowledge’ (1900) it’s the title claimed by a dreadful sculptor whose family have seen through him but have to indulge his pretensions. James can use it to praise writers he admires, as when he speaks (in his lecture ‘The Lesson of Balzac’) of ‘the great interesting art of which Balzac remains the greatest master’; but it’s always an unstable notion for him, because as an honorific title it implies a fixed hierarchy, and James knew mastery was always provisional – a writer being only as good as her or his last story, or indeed, next story.

  I urged myself on from the start with the thought of Takashi Shimura assembling the Seven Samurai for a noble, possibly quixotic enterprise in Kurosawa’s great film. Recruiting my crew of contributors – seeking fine writers with a real connection to the subject and an excitement about the idea – has indeed been an interesting process, thrilling, frustrating, educational, protracted, full of possibilities and impossibilities. It has also been a privilege. Many hundreds of emails later, there is a stirring variety of contributors here. Quite a few I knew already – but others I approached more indirectly. I am extremely grateful to all those who out of a shared love of good writing have pulled together to make this book happen, and want to thank too those who gave help and good wishes but for all sorts of reasons couldn’t contribute. It was a pleasure to approach some very distinguished writers, partly because some of them said yes, partly because even when they said no (as I knew many would) their replies were gracious and richly characteristic and suggestive.

  In some cases the timing was simply wrong: ‘I have just spent three years locked in a room in my house writing a long, long novel … I am so exhausted, the wires in my head are so frayed, the muscles throughout my body are so sore, that it would be physically and mentally impossible for me to write a single word of fiction just now and perhaps for the rest of time.’ For some the very thought of compromising with someone else’s imagination ruled out participation, in a way I had to respect. ‘I am engaged in a project of my own – fully engaged – and can’t afford to entertain a Jamesian takeover,’ one told me; another, that ‘this sort of thing isn’t for me – it just doesn’t go with the way I work’; another, that ‘I’m busy mining my own i
magination. I think Henry James would get in the way!’ For others, the ideas were too Jamesian, too stamped with his artistic personality: ‘They all seem such ideas for HJ, rather than for [me]’; ‘Some of the ideas are off-putting in their length, and my reaction is Jamesian – too much detail, don’t tell me so much, I need to invent!’ For others still the process of choosing a subject had a complexity, and unpredictability, approaching what we find in James’s own ‘long figuring out’ of subjects in what he calls ‘the patient, passionate little cahier [notebook]’: they had to attend to their own sometimes inscrutable inner workings through a not wholly voluntary or conscious programme of brooding. The role of instinct in finding and feeling out a subject made it agonising for some, sometimes with happy results, sometimes not: ‘I’ve gone back and forth, back and forth, hunting and sniffing,’ one told me; another finally didn’t feel the stir of life in the chosen subject: ‘I confess there are no wiggles’. I was anxious not to disturb this serious process; for as one said, bowing out, ‘Good writing should always feel necessary.’ The stories that have emerged from this hard process have, it seems to me, all taken on a life, a necessity, of their own.

  I gave the writers a free choice: drew up a document containing over sixty subjects and simply tried to make sure no two writers picked the same subject – unknowingly, anyway. In fact, there were no conflicts. I’m almost sorry, as the comparison of two divergent tales stemming from a common subject would have been fascinating. I explicitly told everyone not to feel bound to stick strictly to James’s plan – partly because James’s plan might not have worked anyway (why, after all, didn’t he write it?), partly because their value lies in their own unique perspective. There was carte blanche for invention. It was entirely up to the writers to choose the period and setting for their tales – James himself would freely transpose an anecdote from its original Italian setting to France (as for The Reverberator, 1888), or, crossing the border the other way, make an errant husband who was originally English, then French, into an Italian Prince (The Golden Bowl, 1904). He debated, and occasionally changed, the gender of characters (the protagonist of The Wings of the Dove ‘seems to me preferably a woman, but of this I’m not sure’). He was a highly international writer – one of his least-known novels, for instance, Confidence (1879), takes characters to Siena, London, Paris, Le Havre and Étretat (renamed ‘Blanquais-les-Galets’), California, Mexico, India, the Orient, Athens and New York. James was not just cosmopolitan, that is, he was global, engaged with an interconnected, permeable world that was just coming into being.

  Some of the writers here, intrepid travellers, have made that territory – the world, now so much more accessible – especially their own: Paul Theroux, Joseph O’Neill, Amit Chaudhuri, Giles Foden. Part of the variety of this collection, then, is the variety of settings. But equally on display is a great range of modes and styles, and kinds of experience. As in James’s own oeuvre, there are comic stories of great houses and their vicissitudes, as in Lynne Truss’s satirical ‘Testaments’; ghost stories about wasted lives and the traces they leave, as in Rose Tremain’s haunting ‘Is Anybody There?’; ironic stories of the literary life, as in Jonathan Coe’s wry fable ‘Canadians Can’t Flirt’. Susie Boyt’s ‘People Were So Funny’, a delicate account of a young life devoted to the cares of age, is in its own way as poised in its evocation of the plight of the carer as James’s ‘“Europe”’ or ‘The Aspern Papers’. Sex, which usually simmers just below the surface in James, because of the manners of his age, has in places surged into view. Only one story, Colm Tóibín’s, is set in James’s own era – and there the surging is at its most turbulent. The other stories take place at a time close to our present; and it’s observable that the finding of ‘equivalents’ to Victorian or Edwardian conditions in our own time nearly always brings stimulating differences. Paul Theroux’s surprising mystery ‘Father X’ is animated by a rousing, and quite Jamesian, moral passion in its treatment of the Catholic Church in modern Boston. In ‘The Poltroon Husband’, Joseph O’Neill gives us a highly contemporary version of an American life in the woods, in which a nocturnal incident seems to crystallise some creeping anxieties. Giles Foden’s African adventure, ‘The Road to Gabon’, carries his compromised hero dauntingly far from the teacups of the homeland to a far-flung proving-ground. And Amit Chaudhuri’s ‘Wensleydale’ takes an Anglo-American Jamesian subject and relocates it to a pungently evoked melancholic Calcuttan, or Kolkatan, milieu. Some germs seem conceived in such a way as to carry a certain set of values, and some authors have – with a thoroughly Jamesian freedom – chosen to unsettle or ironise those values, particularly where sex is involved, notably Tessa Hadley in her ‘Old Friends’, which approaches James’s scenario from an invigoratingly different point of view. The valencies, then, are never equal; each chemical combination tends to produce some intriguingly new compound.

  To read these stories as they came in has been a real honour: I’ve sensed in them both the unbroken currency of James’s creative imagination, and the brilliance and originality of these authors of our own times, creating stories that are wholly their own. It has above all been fun, a term James himself used.

  For one tale, when the deadline was looming, I approached myself – as an experiment, and with considerable reluctance. It had been fascinating, and inspiring, to watch so many fine writers tease out James’s suggestions. And I felt the pressure of the idea that it was wrong to ask others to do something I wouldn’t or couldn’t at least attempt myself. There was a subject in the notebooks I felt drawn to, one that otherwise nobody was going to take on. The resulting story, however, wouldn’t figure here at all if a few sympathetic readers whose judgement I respect had passed an adverse verdict. It is offered with modesty, not as an equal to the others, but as testimony to the fascination of the creative process in James’s notebooks, in which I hope this collection will stir fresh interest.

  Late in life James (for the money, but also it seems for the sociability of it) took part in a collaborative novel, called The Whole Family (1908), in which a succession of US writers, each contributing a chapter from the point of view of one family member, wrestled for control of plot and meaning. Fascinating as it is – and James’s contribution above all – that book is a multi-vehicle car crash; and the only collaboration I have asked of the writers in these pages is whatever loose arrangement they wished to make, quite privately, with the spirit of James.

  This book, then, is not a glorified party game like that: these are real stories in their own right. No doubt this book will be of interest to academics. But it is aimed at interested readers of all kinds. There is, I am delighted to say, plenty of playfulness here, and some allusiveness, but the origin of these stories in another writer’s imagination – or one should say, perhaps, the fact that they have passed through and been honed by another’s imagination, for who can say where they originated? – is, ultimately, only part of their appeal. This book constitutes a ‘case’, as James himself might have said – a demonstration of the continuing vitality of fiction as a form, and of continuities between the practitioners of our own time and the great writers of the past. But the test that matters most, as always, is the emotion, engagement, excitement and pleasure of readers.

  Philip Horne, 2018

  A page from James’s Notebooks, from 1899, showing two of James’s ideas, under the heading ‘Anecdotes’ (as if that might have been the title of a collection), for stories that he didn’t ever write. The first, ‘The Sketches’, no one has ever picked up; the second, ‘The coward’, is the basis of Giles Foden’s ‘The Road to Gabon’. A transcription of the second can be found in the Appendix (see here); the first reads thus: ‘1) “The Sketches” – some little drama, situation, complication, fantasy, to be worked into small Rye-figure of woman working away (on my doorstep & elsewhere.)’ (MS Am 1094 (2221a) vol. 6, Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  PAUL THEROUX

  FATHER X

  ON THE LAST of my mo
nthly visits to him, my widowed father made a casual remark about his poor hearing. ‘The worst of deafness is not silence,’ he said. ‘I could bear that. It’s that I can actually hear voices, noises that sound like words spoken in the next room. But I’ll be damned if I can understand them.’ And he stared helplessly at me in bewilderment. He was in his late sixties but had a cherubic face, pink cheeks, blue eyes and tousled hair, like an elderly child. ‘Indistinct voices.’ And he smiled. ‘What is being said to us?’

  I drove five hundred miles to where I was living with my fiancée and got the news the next day that my father had died soon after I left – without warning; he was not ill, and not very old, but his heart failed; and I was too far away to be of any use. I hated that he had died alone – he had buried my mother, to whom he was devoted, three years before – and in my grief I clung to that casual remark he’d once made to me about being deaf. Hearing words but not understanding them.

  The statement, characteristic of his honesty, helped me through the funeral arrangements, and I repeated the words to myself like a mantra. In the end it did not seem casual at all, but rather like an eternal truth, at least of my life, of being in the presence of a drama, aware of all its spoken details and taking it for meaningless mumbling, not realising that a revelation was being offered that might change my view of myself, my family, the world – everything, including what I am about to reveal about my father here.