Why Read The Master by Colm Tóibín?

July 1st… I’ve returned to my blog on literature. Today’s page is about an Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, who wrote a novel about Henry James.

Colm Tóibín

Henry James

Oh, no, you might think. That “old-school” writer, born in 1843 and dead by 1916, who largely spent his life in England?  Yes, and if you could see the folder I have of recent articles on Henry and his famous brother, the pragmatist-philosopher William, you would realize both men are relevant today.

In The Master, a reader enters a time frame of January 1895 to October 1899. You learn nothing about Henry’s last seventeen years but read a lot about his life before 1895. Yet the backstory is clearly and artfully woven in… because Tóibín is a master of fiction like Henry. (Colm’s latest novel is Long Island, a sequel to the earlier Brooklyn.)

If you enjoy travel, you get to visit many places in The Master: Newport, R.I., Boston, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Ireland, and Rye, England. That’s where Henry lived from 1887 until his death.  What was the love of Henry’s life?  Writing. And Tóibín’s rendering of those “closeted” times is artful about sexual longings for one’s own sex. The novel begins with Henry attending a performance of an Oscar Wilde play. What happened to Oscar? He went to prison for his flagrant love of another man. What Henry possessed instead of someone to love, other than family and friends, was a keen intelligence for understanding both men and women.

In The Master, a reader meets memorable females. Those in his family (mother, aunt, sister, cousin) and a famous woman & writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson. And his cousin Minny is the prototype for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. 

A literary confession! I’ve no words for how much I abhorred this novel in college. Why? I tried to read Portrait in a weekend and write a paper on it, due on Monday. And no exceptions with this professor for late papers. Yet after re-reading The Master, I am returning to Isabel for a patient and wiser read than in my 1960 “salad days, when I was green in judgment.”

Next week: John Banville’s 2017 novel, Mrs. Osmond, about Henry’s character Isabel Archer Osmond. The brilliant Banville takes off where Henry ended. I call this Irish chutzpah!  

What Would Wallace Stegner Say About Donald’s Felonies?

Today I take leave of a writer I love. I am on the porch of the cottage where I read, write, and study. Before me is a verdant garden, tall trees in every direction, and a riot of chattering birds. I sit here in a wood rocker from Poso Park, a century-old cabin on the boundary of Sequoia National Forest. Nearby is another rocker from Poso, both older than my 81 years. I mention this cabin in California because of Wallace Stegner’s last book, a non-fiction work from 1992, and one worth reading about living and writing in the West.

Stegner loved wilderness and national parks and fought the good fight on their behalf.  He died 23 years before Donald Trump’s first reign and his gutting of the EPA, as if the agency were a rotting fish. Given Wallace’s moral code, he would not have been able to stomach anything about the rich boy who inherited Big Rock Candy Mountain. This was the mythical place that Stegner’s father George sought throughout life. And the wreckage from his father’s false dream was strewn everywhere he went, while dragging a fine wife and two sons with him. Stegner describes his father as “a boomer from the age of fourteen…always on the lookout for the big chance, the ground floor, the inside track… And if you believe the world owes you a bonanza, then restrictions and laws are only an irritation and a challenge.” How familiar this sounds.

Wallace Stegner, the famous writer and environmental activist, never reconciled with his father in life or death. Which is to say the violent did not bear it away. His father shot his mistress and then himself on June 15, 1939. News of the murder-suicide “splashed across the front and inside pages of Salt Lake’s three daily newspapers for two days.” (Fradkin bio, p.94) Stegner wrote that his father “did more human and environmental damage than he could have repaired in a second lifetime.” George’s story is one for tawdry rag-sheets like The National Inquirer. But the past week did bring this welcome headline to newspapers throughout the world and in our country. 

Ironically, George Stegner did not die with a felony, since there could be no trial. But his grave in the Salt Lake City Cemetery alongside son Cecil and wife Hilda is unmarked.  In Recapitulation, a brilliant novel about memory and time, Ambassador Bruce Mason does order a gravestone for Bo Mason. Yet in real life, he never took this action, unable to forgive his father for what he had done to both family and to those whose lives he crossed in a relentless search for the ‘deal’ and the summit of Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In early July I return to Literature I Love with Colm Toibin (Column Toe Bean ) as the Irish say!  

A Letter to George Saunders from the Northern Neck of Virginia

To: George Saunders

From: Gail Wilson Kenna

A student, one of those who took my course on your book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (of Chekhov short stories) is taking my latest course on Wallace Stegner.

She was one of those who wrote you a note after the “Swim” class met in an extra session to discuss your novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. You read the notes that students wrote to you about the Chekhov book, and then gave us helpful advice for reading Lincoln in the Bardo. I know enough about Wallace Stegner to say that he, like you, made time for students and readers until his death at age 84 in 1993.

In my current class, we are reading three Stegner novels with aging narrators: Joe Allston in The Spectator Bird, Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose, and Bruce Mason in Recapitulation. In the first class I discussed how Stegner’s fictional realism can be traced to his life and his historical interests, and that he was often at odds in the 1960s with those who distained his realism. One student, during a break, asked if I thought Stegner would appreciate the wildly experimental Lincoln in the Bardo.

I believe this first novel of yours would have amazed Stegner, and that by book’s end, it would have deeply moved him, as it did me.  At some point in your years of teaching, you might have used the 1982 Stegner essay, “Fiction: A Lens on Life.” At the beginning he asserts, “It is fiction as truth that I am concerned with...fiction that reflects experience instead of escaping it, that stimulates instead of deadening.” He goes on to say the writer tries with every piece of fiction to “create a world.” Which is what you did in Lincoln in the Bardo.

The essay concludes with words that Stegner might have written to you, George.  “The work of art is not a gem… but truly a lens. We look through it for the purified and honestly offered spirit of the artist. The ghosts of meaning that flit past the windows of his fictional house wear his face. And the reward of a lifetime of reading is a rich acquaintance with those gentle or powerful or rebellious or acceptant, those greatly mixed and humanly various but always greatly human ghosts.” 

What Stegner accomplished between 70 (Joe Allston’s age) and 1993 when he died, included two brilliant novels, Recapitulation and Crossing to Safety, plus non-fiction. Lucky you (and us) that you are only 66, and keeping alive the genre of the short story, and inspiring so many of us to write.

 Next week I’ll have some thoughts on why Stegner deserved the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird.