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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Fiction about actual historical persons, so intrinsically conflicted and impure, feels like part of postmodernism's rampant eclecticism. True, examples exist before the twentieth century, in, say, Tolstoy's depiction of Napoleon and the Russian general Kutuzov in "War and Peace," and in the portraits of the poet Petronius, the emperor Nero, and the saint Peter in Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis?" But until truth became thoroughly relative, and image seized priority over fact, and the historical past became an attic full of potentially entertaining trinkets, the famous dead were allowed to rest in the record they left in their documents and documented deeds, in their letters and the accounts of their contemporaries. What could not be known was left unsaid. Henry James was especially fierce in guarding the sacred domain of fiction against profanation by the ungainly chimeras of historical fiction, which he flatly labelled "humbug." It is ironical, then, that he has become himself the hero of a historical novel, called, rather inevitably, "The Master," by the greatly gifted Irish writer Colm Toibin (Scribners; $25).
The novel opens in January of 1895, in London, with the notorious failure of James's play "Guy Domville"; the premiere performance ended with the distinguished author being showered with jeers from the exasperated audience as he mistakenly ventured onstage for a curtain call. The novel closes in October of 1899 as James, now established in the cozy safety of his newly purchased house, Lamb House, in the East Sussex borough of Rye, says goodbye to his brother William, William's wife, Alice, and their daughter, Peggy, after a long visit, and returns with satisfaction to sole possession of his quiet rooms. The years 1895-1901 were titled, in the fourth volume of Leon Edel's five-volume biography of James, "The Treacherous Years," and as Toibin imagines them they are not free of incident, though the public humiliation of the "Guy Domville" debacle is the most dramatic event. James visits and is visited, he remembers and ruminates. He reflects back upon his rootless childhood in Europe, his dear but vague mother, his less vague Aunt Kate, his vigorous, idealistic, and somewhat demented father; scenes of his youth include discovering Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" and witnessing his younger brother Wilky's agony from the wounds of a civil war...
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