The Master

“Now he would walk home and keep his head down like a man who has committed a crime and is in imminent danger of apprehension.”

The inherent shame in this quotation can be seen in the visceral description of Henry’s slinking body language after the public’s rejection of his play. In many ways, the failure of the play serves as this novel’s inciting incident. Although Henry is an accomplished writer, he is not a very popular figure. His books are dense and character-driven, and they appeal to readers who are interested in high art, while the dramas designed for the stage—like those of Oscar Wilde—have a more widespread appeal. While Wilde’s works were immensely popular in their day, Henry’s play was not. Recovering from this intense professional failure proves to be a long, arduous road for Henry, but he ultimately feels better about himself when he writes a new novel.

“Money was a kind of grace. Everywhere he had been, the having of it and the holding of it set men apart. It gave men a beautiful, distant control over the world, and it gave women a poised sense of themselves, an inner light which even old age could not obliterate.”

Class is an important backdrop to this novel. Henry is affluent, and although he worries that his father’s inheritance may run out, he is nonetheless accustomed to a high standard of living and wants to maintain it. He moves in wealthy social circles, and that atmosphere suffuses his novels, most of which depict life for wealthy Europeans and Americans during the last several decades of the 19th century and the first several decades of the 20th century.

“He did not ever in his life actively seek the hard gloom of popularity, and yet he wanted his books to sell.”

As this frank passage indicates, Henry values quality and is content to be a novelist whose works are well regarded, even if they are not widely read. He views writing as an art form and devotes as much time as possible to honing his craft. He creates works that are emotionally rich, detail-oriented, and character-driven. Still, he knows that in order to garner the public’s esteem and respect, his books must be read often enough to remain in print and become at least marginally profitable. Understanding the complex interplay between art and profit is another key facet of Henry’s personality, although he still places more importance on quality than sales.

“When he turned to watch them, he noticed the nurse speaking gently to the child, and Mona smiling up at her, contented and not in need of anything.”

Henry is a quiet, observant man who proves to be particularly attuned to the people around him. As this passage indicates, his observations focus on the most minute details of people’s interactions, and he often takes note of their words, actions, and emotions, mentally filing this data away for later use in his writing. In this scene, he observes the daughter of one of the Wolseley’s party guests as she interacts with her nurse. One of James’s most famous novellas, The Turn of the Screw, features a complex relationship between a governess and her two charges, and the suggestion in this scene is that Henry is gathering material that he will later use to describe the characters that will appear in this particular novel of his.

“He loved the glorious silence a morning brought, when he knew he had no appointments that afternoon and no engagements that evening.”

As a profoundly solitary individual, Henry always feels a measure of tension between the way he would prefer to spend his time and the energy that society demands of him. However, Henry still devotes many hours each day to thinking and writing in solitude. He is much more comfortable in his own company than he is in social situations, and for that reason, he often feels even more out of place in society. Other people need human contact much more than he does, and he feels a rift between himself and his peers.

“He wrote two novels during Alice’s stay in England that were saturated with the peculiar atmosphere of his sister’s world.”

Henry James is best known for his mastery of psychological fiction. His characters are multi-faceted, complex, and well-developed. He drew inspiration from everyone he knew, both family and friends, and his novels are suffused with a deep understanding of the human psyche. Here, the fictionalized version of James notes that many of his sister’s more difficult experiences ended up in his writing, as did many elements of her personality. Although his characters are not precise facsimiles of Alice, they nonetheless display many of her traits and motivations.

“With his parents dead and Alice gone, he believed that nothing could touch him, thus his failure in the theatre came as a great shock.”

After the shock of his play’s failure, Henry must work hard to recover his personal and professional equilibrium. He feels humiliated by his play’s poor reception because he believes himself to be a talented writer, and only when he gives up his ambitions to be a playwright and returns to writing novels does he finally overcome this momentary setback. When he throws himself completely into the writing process, he finds that the more time he devotes to his book, the less time he has to ruminate on his failed theatrical venture. This process demonstrates Henry’s resilience and shows how important writing is to his identity.

“Even before he went to Ireland, Henry had heard that Wilde had abandoned all due discretion.”

As this quote suggests, Henry and Oscar Wilde serve as foils to one another. Wilde is a successful playwright, while Henry’s one play is a failure, and Wilde is ostentatious while Henry is reserved. There is even more contrast in the way they approach sexuality. Wilde is open about his sexuality, and this fact shocks the staid and retiring Henry, who actively represses his own sexual desires for other men in order to maintain his good standing in society. As a result, he escapes the notoriety and legal entanglements that Wilde experiences, but he must also live with a lifetime of regret and an unslaked longing for a deeper connection.

“When he first encountered Minny Temple, aged seventeen, not having seen her for some years, the sentiment was very much one of appreciation, even awe.”

Henry James found inspiration for many of his characters in the real-life quirks of people he knew, most notably his friends and family. As the narrative suggests, Minny Temple resembles Isabel Archer, James’s famous heroine from Portrait of a Lady. During this scene, Minny converses with Henry, his father, and his brother on the lawn, and Portrait of a Lady begins with a similar conversation between Isabel Archer, her cousin, his brother, and their father.

“In all of his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed.”

Henry is a solitary individual who often feels more comfortable observing than he does interacting. He often handles the challenge of social situations by carefully watching the people around him. He develops in-depth, complex understandings of who they are as people, and he identifies their motivations and their particular ways of interacting with their own friends and family members. These detailed character studies then find their way into his work.

“Henry did not know how soon he could take his leave without being rude.”

Henry expresses this sentiment repeatedly during the novel, and it is clear that he must take an arduously cognitive approach to social situations that come naturally to most people. In this scene, he carefully analyzes his situation for avenues of escape but fears the consequences of following The Lure of Solitude too early. Despite his attempts to abide by the rules of social conventions, he only attends such events for the minimum amount of time that civility dictates. His extreme introversion is one of his most prominent character traits.

“Each time he came to describe the ghost, or the ethereal and menacing presence of Peter Quint, none of this mattered. The scene itself, the emptiness of the house, its newness for the governess, and then the invasive figures, utterly real to her, and seemingly real also to the children and the housekeeper.”

Literature is Henry’s greatest interest and chief devotion. Here, he becomes entirely engrossed by the process of writing a story that, although not named in the novel, is suggested to be his famous novella The Turn of the Screw. Henry loses himself in the world of his novels, and his keen intellect and intelligence are central to his own development as a person.

“[W]hen people asked them, especially in Newport, what their father did, all five James children had difficulty replying. Their father lived on his inheritance, the revenue from rent and dividends, but this was hardly what he did. He was also a sort of philosopher and sometimes he gave lectures and wrote articles.”

Henry James comes from a family that is both affluent and intellectual, and like his father before him, he enjoys the benefit of inherited wealth, which allows him to let his appreciation for learning shape the course of his entire life. Many of Henry’s novels explore life in the upper classes and reflect his keen understanding of psychology, philosophy, and other subjects that were of interest to his family.

“The sick soldiers lay inert, half-dead, watching the two young men from Newport from the sides of their eyes. What struck Henry first was how young most of them seemed, how soft and raw.”

The Civil War is one of the most important events to take place during Henry’s lifetime. It has a profound impact on Henry, his family, and the country. Henry’s brother Wilky is severely wounded during the war and survives only because he happens to run into a family friend while languishing in a makeshift battlefield hospital. Wilky’s injuries and long convalescence reshape the family, and it is during this period that Henry begins to turn his attention more seriously toward the art of writing.

“The idea of residing in a small English community belonged in his dreams, and he found himself, especially in the presence of American guests, deeply proud of his acceptance in Rye and his knowledge of its denizens, its topography, and its history.”

Henry is a cosmopolitan figure who has spent time in Italy, France, and other parts of Europe. His identity is complex, and because of his extensive travels, he does not consider himself to be fully American. However, he is also not quite European. He identifies more as a man of the world and rejects the widespread sense of nationalistic pride that many Americans exude. Henry’s broad mindset was common during the years in which he lived and worked, although the two world wars would make it much more difficult for people to live as Henry James and his compatriots did.

“Later, as he took his stroll in the garden, he would enjoy being protected from the world by the high garden walls of Lamb House.”

Henry is a quiet, reclusive man. He has enjoyed the opportunity to live abroad and travel, but as he ages, he finds himself in need of a real home. Lamb House represents an archetypically English identity in his eyes and confers upon him a sense of affluence, but it also serves as his sanctuary. As such, it provides the atmosphere he needs in order to write more effectively.

“He realized as he traveled further south and left the girls to their European tour that he could live easily without many of his friends.”

Henry constantly vacillates between his love of solitude and the more conventional pleasures of society. At this point in his life, he is settled at Lamb House and sometimes enjoys entertaining, but when he visits Paris with his nieces, he realizes that he is still a solitary creature at heart. He is moved more by writing about human relationships than having them, and he understands that he would rather observe the social behaviors of others than take part in society himself.

“The winters were not kind to Constance. Dark days and low temperatures made her feel depressed so that there were times when she could not get out of bed, could not see him or anyone else, could not work.”

Constance is one of Henry’s closest friends, and this passage illustrates the extremes to which her mood sometimes falls when she is in the throes of deep depression. Although she is creative and solitary like Henry, her struggles with severe depression make it clear that her social anxiety has different origins than Henry’s. Constance ultimately loses the battle against her mental illness and dies by suicide, and her death becomes one of the defining moments of Henry’s life. In the wake of her loss, he is filled with both grief and guilt, and he wonders if he could have done more to possibly prevent her death.

“They were both Americans who’d been away from America for many years.”

By emphasizing Henry’s philosophical and physical distance from his country of origin, Tóibín once again highlights the writer’s cosmopolitan worldview. Henry is not quite European, but he grows to identify more with expats than with provincial Americans. His closest friends also share his travel-based lifestyle, appreciating the values he develops as a result of years of immersion in multiple cultures.

“They were neither Romans nor Americans but their manners were perfect and their habits well formed.”

When Henry returns to Rome as a middle-aged man, he finds both himself and the city to be drastically changed, and his resulting melancholy destabilizes him emotionally. However, his sense of equilibrium is restored when he finds like-minded individuals who share his nostalgia for an earlier era. In this passage, the people that he meets mirror his own taste for blending the habits and characteristics of more than a single culture.

“Henry felt acutely the sculptor’s presence. He liked being beside him.”

Andersen is another man for whom Henry has unrequited romantic feelings. Because Henry refuses to allow himself to fully express his own sexuality, his life is peppered with these brief quasi-relationships, and his ongoing struggle in this area highlights The Pain of Repression and Self-Denial. He first came of age during an era in which it was not socially acceptable to be gay, and he remains unable to act on any of his romantic impulses.

“Lady Wolseley was wearing scarlet silk which appeared immensely dramatic when her long black cloak was removed.”

Lady Wolseley is one of Henry’s best friends. Here, she is depicted in a flamboyant outfit that is typical of her bold sense of style and reflects her broader character: She has a larger-than-life personality, enjoys attention, and is most at home among friends or at large-scale social events.

“I think America still waits the novelist with eyes as sharp as yours and sympathies as wide-ranging.”

Here, William’s wife Alice speaks with Henry about his career. His work as a novelist is a key facet of his identity, and Henry spends much of the novel reflecting on art and his own creative process. He does not consider himself a fully American novelist because he has spent so much of his life abroad, and Alice acknowledges this reality while also validating Henry’s talent and keen powers of observation.