Literary Criticism: A publishing misfortune provides the basis for a subtle meditation on literary fiction.
On a tape that he made of his poems not many years before he died, Philip Larkin introduced Aubade, the bleak ode to mortality that was his final masterpiece, by recounting how he had lain awake night after night worrying about death until one night he decided to get up and write about his fear. Whether this exercise helped him to cope with his lifelong and obsessive terror of dying is doubtful - as the poem has it, "This is a special way of being afraid/ No trick dispels" - but it did result in the production of a very great poem.
David Lodge must have had a similar experience in the throes of a dark night of the soul after the debacle of the publication of his novel, Author, Author, which in turn took its inspiration from the debacle of the first night of Henry James's play Guy Domville.
In 2004, while Lodge's book was with the printers, he discovered that another novel based on the life and work of Henry James, Colm Tóibín's The Master, was in the pipeline, and that it also gave a central place to the Guy Domville episode. Not only that, but yet another novel, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which would win the 2004 Man Booker Prize, narrowly pipping Tóibín's shortlisted The Master, carried a number of thematic and stylistic references to James. There had been, too, a novel by Emma Tennant, Felony, based on HJ's tragic relationship with Constance Fennimore, published a year before Author, Author, while still one more HJ novel, The Typewriter's Tale, by the South African writer Michiel Heyns, had failed to find a publisher because of the blizzard of HJ fiction blowing through the literary world at the time.
The Year of Henry James is in part Lodge's rueful account of the, for him, annus horribilis that was 2004 - and no doubt 2006 has not been such a hot year for him either, as The Master's triumphal progress reached the pinnacle of the Impac Prize - but it is also a shrewd salvaging of valuables from the wreckage. After the humiliating failure of Guy Domville HJ sought to cure his shame by writing a series of highly dramatised, dialogue-driven novels; Lodge is as much a critic and academic as he is a novelist, and his attempt at self-healing has been to fashion from his experience a subtle meditation on, as the subtitle has it, "the genesis, composition and reception of literary fiction".
Lodge is forthright about the pain and disappointment he suffered, and about the almost risible nature of the predicament in which he found himself, when the success of Tóibín's novel eclipsed his more modest showing. He had taken as one of the main themes of his novel the relationship between HJ and his friend George Du Maurier, whose potboiler Trilby, the plot of which he had offered to a disdainful HJ, had brought its author the kind of lavish popular success that HJ vainly hankered after all his life. Lodge writes:
I had been aware for some time . . . that I had not only strayed into a zone of Jamesian ironies as a result of writing Author, Author, but I was in some measure re-enacting the story of my own novel. That was indeed the supreme irony, for me, of the Year of Henry James. Colm Tóibín was my Du Maurier, The Master his Trilby, and Author, Author was my Guy Domville. Like James I must suffer the pangs of professional envy and jealousy while struggling to conceal them.
The Year of Henry James or, Timing is All: the Story of a Novel, tackles the problem of coping with "professional envy and jealousy" with touching candour and honesty - it hastens to emphasise, for instance, that Colm Tóibín is no Du Maurier, and The Master most likely is no Trilby. Lodge's equable, measured, slightly didactic tone, polished by long years in the lecture hall, is very effective at holding anger and chagrin in check. However, in certain passages, for instance when he comes to speak about his few encounters with Colm Tóibín in the flesh, the lingering ache of old wounds is palpable - he even confesses to an envy of Tóibín's ears, which must be handsome organs indeed, although Lodge is quietly glad of his own full head of hair and that unageing appearance on which, so he tells us, more than one of his friends has remarked. Reading these passages, one wonders if Lodge's disappointment at the relative failure of his novel might have left him slightly and temporarily unhinged.
The second half of his book consists of a series of essays, which form a galaxy clustering around the long title piece and which develop, in subtle and suggestive ways, the main themes that were set out there. The topics covered in the satellite essays include HJ's short and most commercially successful novel, Daisy Miller, George Eliot's first attempt at fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life - for the merits of which he makes a generous and convincing case - Vladimir Nabokov's campus novel Pnin, JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, and "Graham Greene and the Anxiety of Influence", in which he traces Greene's love-hate attitude to the work of Joseph Conrad and-yes, you guessed it - Henry James.
The Greene essay, as the title indicates, takes up the critic Harold Bloom's contention that writers - Bloom concentrates mainly on poets - advance their own work by setting themselves in creative opposition to this one or that of their mighty predecessors. He quotes a passage from Bloom's 1973 critical milestone, The Anxiety of Influence, which is worth re-quoting here. Bloom writes:
Poetic influence - when it involves two strong, authentic poets - always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism, without which modern poetry as such could not exist.
The irony in Lodge's case, which Lodge does not remark, is that his own attitude to HJ seems one of mild and even humble admiration rather than that rage to strike the father dead that Bloom suggests is the engine of all great, or even just good, art. Indeed, with the possible exception of Emma Tennant, in her portrayal of HJ's treatment of poor Constance Fennimore, who loved him fruitlessly and ended by taking her own life, all the writers who in the Year of Henry James took HJ's life and work as a theme treated their subject with sympathetic warmth, regarding him, it would seem, neither as overweening father-figure nor as a giant at their shoulders, but as merely a fellow toiler in the vineyard of fiction. Lodge at one point remarks, somewhat complacently, that in Author, Author "I aimed at a style which would be compatible with James's own without being an exact imitation of it . . .", which prompts one to wonder that he, and his fellow Jamesians of the class of 2004, should have been so daring, or so foolish, as even to attempt to match the Master's matchless prose, not to mention his psychological acuity and awesomely commodious artistic sensibility.
The Year of Henry James ends up being far more than the sum of its parts. By setting out, as it seems, to anneal his wounds, Lodge has fashioned a wise and provocative study of how themes and subjects make their tenacious way slowly and almost imperceptibly through the body of literature to appear in works that may seem similar but are entirely particular to their various authors. On the matter of his own case of disastrously bad timing, he is, in the end, sanguine:
Only time will tell whether The Master is a better book than Author, Author, or vice versa, or whether they are equally admirable in different ways, or equally negligible. Time will also tell when I have finally got over this episode in my professional life and feel ableto put it behind me. It will be the moment when I decide I would really like to read The Master. That will happen eventually - but not just yet.
John Banville's novel The Sea (Picador) won the Man Booker Prize in 2005
The Year of Henry James By David Lodge Harvill Secker, 332pp, £18.99