The Master

by Colm Toibin

  Henry had seen him on return trips to America during his childhood at his grandmother’s house in Albany, where he had also met the Temples, and later at Newport. As the others started again to talk about him, Henry’s mind wandered back to five years earlier when the Civil War seemed an impossible nightmare and the James family had returned to Newport from Europe so that William could study art.

  One day in the fall of 1860 Henry had come into the studio to find his cousin Gus Barker standing naked on a pedestal while the advanced students sketched him. Gus was strong and wiry, red-haired and white-skinned. He stood immobile and unembarrassed as the five or six students, including William, worked on their drawings as though they did not know the model. Gus Barker, like the Temples, had lost his mother, and his orphanhood gave him the same mystery and independence. No mother could arrive to tell him to cease this display and put on his clothes forthwith. His form was beautiful and manly, and Henry was surprised by his own need to watch him, while pretending that his interest in Gus Barker, like that of the other students, was distant and academic. He studied William’s drawing closely so that he could then raise his eyes and study at some length his naked cousin’s perfect gymnastic figure, his strength, and his calm sensual aura.

  It struck him all these years later that he had been thinking something which he could not tell Gray or Holmes or even Minny, that his mind during these few minutes had wandered over a scene whose meaning would have to remain secret to him. He simply did not suppose that Gray’s mind worked like that, or the mind and imagination of Holmes, or the Temple sisters. He did not even know if his brother William’s mind moved into areas that would always have to remain obscure to those around him. He thought about the result if he spoke his mind, told his companions as truthfully as he could what the name Gus Barker had provoked in his memory. He wondered at how, every day, as they moved around each other, each of them had stored away an entirely private world to which they could return at the sound of a name, or for no reason at all. For a second as he thought about this, he caught Holmes’s eye, and he found that he had not been able to disguise himself fully, that Holmes had seen through his social mask to the mind which had strayed into realms which could not be shared. Both of them shared something now, tacitly, momentarily, which the others did not even notice.

  Gradually, then, over the days, Minny Temple made a choice. She chose subtly and carefully so that no one saw at first that she had done so, but what was not apparent to Gray or Holmes or her sisters became clear to Henry because she wished it to be clear to him. She chose Henry as her friend and confidant, the one she trusted most, could speak to most easily. And she may have chosen Holmes for something too because she never ignored him, or shone her light on the others more than on him. But she chose Gray as the one on whom she could have most effect, who most needed her. She paid no attention to his military talk and his gruff, practical comments and his clipped witticisms. She wished to change him, and Henry watched her gently cajoling him, without allowing herself to become offensive.

  One day when she handed Gray lines of Browning to read, he held back and asked her to read them aloud.

  ‘No, I want you to read them to yourself,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t read poetry,’ he said.

  Henry and Holmes and her two sisters did not speak; this, Henry knew, was a decisive moment in Minny’s fight to mould John Gray into a shape acceptable to her.

  ‘Of course you can read poetry,’ she said, ‘but you must first forget the “read” part and the “poetry” part and concentrate on the “I” part and find new credentials for it, and soon you will be a changed man and your youth will return. But if you really want me to, then I will read the verse aloud.’

  ‘Minny,’ her sister said, ‘you must not be abrupt to Mr Gray.’

  ‘Mr Gray is going to be a great lawyer,’ Holmes said. ‘He is learning to defend himself, I feel, so that he will in time learn to defend others more worthy of defence, perhaps.’

  ‘I long for you to read it aloud,’ Gray said.

  ‘And I long for the day when you will read it too, quietly and with emotion,’ Minny said taking the book.

  HENRY BEGAN to imagine an heiress, recently orphaned, who had three suitors, a young woman whose patient intelligence had never been fully appreciated by those around her. He did not want to make her as beautiful as Minny was that August; instead, he made his heroine positively plain but for the frequent recurrence of a magnificent smile. He made two of the suitors military men; the third, who gave his name to the story, Poor Richard, whose manner was that of a nervous headstrong man, brought close to desperation by unrequited love, was a civilian. Richard adored Gertrude Whittaker, but she did not take him as seriously as she took the two Civil War soldiers. One of them, Captain Severn, was himself a serious and conscientious man, who was discreet, deliberate and unused to acting without a definite purpose. And Major Lutrell, on the other hand, who could play the part of Gray, was both agreeable and insufferable. All three began a siege to win Miss Whittaker’s love and marry her. In the end, she accepted none of them.

  The story began for him in a small single moment in which Richard watches Captain Severn sinking into a silence very nearly as helpless as his own as they observe the progress of a lively dialogue between Miss Whittaker and Major Lutrell. So too at North Conway had this become for Henry and for Holmes a daily routine, as Minny continued her battle to soften Gray, to make him more conscious of his soul than his uniform, of his deepest fears and longings rather than of his self-protective army talk, suitably censored for ladies. Holmes began by believing that Minny did not like Gray, which pleased him, and then became aware with flashes of alarm that Gray was winning. Holmes’s alarm made a sound that Minny and her sisters and Gray were too distracted to hear, but which Henry picked up easily and stored and thought about when he was alone.

  He did not realize then and did not, in fact, grasp for many years how these few weeks in North Conway – the endlessly conversing group of them gathered under the rustling pines – would be enough for him, would be, in effect, all he needed to know in his life. In all his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed at that time: the two ambitious, patrician New Englanders, already alert to the eminence which awaited them, and the American girls, led by Minny, fresh and open to life, so inquisitive, so imbued with a boundless curiosity and charm and intelligence. And between them much that would have to be left unsaid and a great deal that would never be known. Already, on that lawn beside the house where the Temple sisters stayed that summer, there were secrets and unstated alliances, and already a sense that Minny Temple would escape them and soar above them, although none of them had an idea how soon this would happen and how sad it would be.

  He had no memory of when he first knew she was dying. Certainly, that summer there was no intimation of any illness.

  He remembered that some time later his mother had mentioned Minny’s being poorly, her tone disapproving, as though believing at first that Minny’s illness was a way of drawing attention to herself.

  Their group met once more in his parents’ parlour in Quincy Street near the end of the following year; he recalled how surprising it was to find that Minny had been corresponding with both Gray and Holmes. His mother, he remembered, liked Gray and thought he was as nice as ever, nicer than Holmes, and reported later that Minny had told her she was quite disenchanted with Holmes and had talked to her of Holmes’s egotism, but also his beautiful eyes. Henry was surprised that Minny now seemed to be confiding in his mother.

  He sat on his terrace now thousands of miles away and many years later. As the crescent moon appeared, he studied its strange, thin, implacable beauty, and sighed as he remembered William coming into his room with the news that Minny had a deposit on her lung. Henry was not sure that this was his first hearing of the news, but he was certain that it was the first time it was not whispered. Henry recalled his own depression in the months that followed, h
is own immobility, and he knew that he had not seen her, but was kept abreast of the news by his mother, who was keenly interested in the illness of everyone, but especially young women of marriageable age, and was now taking Minny’s illness seriously.

  He tried to think when John Gray had told him first of Minny’s long letters to him. Gray had found them difficult, somewhat embarrassing, he said, confidential and feverish, but he had replied, and so she wrote to Gray over and over in the last year of her life. And in one of those letters she had written the words which Gray had repeated to him and which Henry thought now maybe meant more to him than any others, including all the words he had written himself, or anyone else had written. Her words haunted him so that saying them now, whispering them in the silence of the night, brought her exacting presence close to him. The words constituted one sentence. Minny had written: ‘You must tell me something that you are sure is true.’ That, he thought, was what she wanted when she was alive and happy, as much as when she was dying, but it was her illness, her knowledge that time was short, that made her desperate to formulate the phrase that summed up her great and generous quest. ‘You must tell me something that you are sure is true.’ The words came to him in her sweet voice, and as he sat on his terrace in the darkness he wondered how he would have answered her if she had written the sentence to him.

  He asked himself if the intensity of her personality, and the sheer originality of her ambitions, placed against the dullness and banality and penury which surrounded her, might have unsettled her will to live. He felt this especially when her sisters married for security rather than love, and when Minny was forced to depend on their husbands for her upkeep as her lungs began to haemorrhage and her health began to fail. He remembered seeing her in New York for the last time two days before he sailed for Europe alone for the first time, and he made an effort then to disguise, as much as he could, his pure excitement, his boundless appetite for what was to come. They had agreed that the same journey would be the right thing for her and it was detestable that he was sailing off without her. Despite her illness and her envy, the hour they spent that day was bright, their talk all gaiety. They spoke of meeting in Rome the following winter, and of his plans in London, whom he would see, where he would visit. Her envy became extravagant only when he spoke of a possible visit to Mrs Lewes, her beloved George Eliot. She tossed her head and laughed at the enormity of her own jealousy.

  It was clear that she was ill, and so apparent to them both that she would not recover that they did not mention it. Nonetheless, as he was leaving her, he asked her how she was sleeping.

  ‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘Oh, I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up.’

  But then she laughed bravely and freely and her smile to him was carefully arranged so that there was nothing hollow or false about it. And then she left him.

  IN ENGLAND when he came to visit Mrs Lewes on a Sunday afternoon at North Bank, having secured admission through the intervention of a family friend, he imagined Minny with him, asking George Eliot the questions that no one in Minny’s own circle wished to ask, or wished indeed to answer. He imagined her voice, awed now but slowly building in richness in the room. At the moment of departure he pictured his cousin standing up and being noticed by the novelist, having made an impression, and reaching out warmly to shake her hand, and being invited to return. In a letter, he tried to describe Mrs Lewes to Minny, her accent, the calm severity of her gaze, her strange ugliness, her mingled sagacity and sweetness, her dignity and character, her graciousness and remote indifference. It was easier, however, to write to his father about her; writing to Minny had now become like writing to a ghost.

  MINNY DIED in March, a year after he had last seen her. He was still in England. He felt it as the end of his youth, knowing that death, at the last, was dreadful to her. She would have given anything to live. In the years that followed, he longed to know what she would have thought of his books and stories, and of the decisions he made about his life. This sense of missing her deep and demanding response made itself felt to Gray and Holmes as well, and also to William. All of them wondered in their nervous ambition and great, agitated egotism what Minny would have thought about them or said about them. Henry wondered too what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a world which would inevitably attempt to confine her. His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.

  It was not true to say that Minny Temple haunted him in the years that followed; rather, he haunted her. He conjured up her presence everywhere, when he returned to his parents’ house, and later when he travelled in France and Italy. In the shadows of the great cathedrals, he saw her emerge, delicate and elegant and richly curious, ready to be stunned into silence by each work of art that she saw, and then trying to find the words which might fit the moment, allow her new sensuous life to settle and deepen.

  Soon after she died he wrote a story, ‘Travelling Companions’, in which William, travelling in Italy from Germany, met her by chance in Milan Cathedral, having seen her first in front of Leonardo’s The Last Supper. He loved describing her white umbrella with a violet lining and the sense of intelligent pleasure in her movements, her glance and her voice. He could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened. He wondered if this had happened to other writers who came before him, if Hawthorne or George Eliot had written to make the dead come back to life, had worked all day and all night, like a magician or an alchemist, defying fate and time and all the implacable elements to re-create a sacred life.

  He could not stop wondering how she would have lived, what she would have done. With Alice, the question of Minny was not to be raised, as his sister envied everything that Minny had possessed: her strange beauty and allure, her confidence, her deep seriousness, her effect on men. And later, Alice envied Minny her being dead.

  Speculation about Minny did, however, interest William, and both he and Henry were certain in their discussion on the subject that she would not have known whom to marry, that her choice, had she lived, would have been too idealistic, or too impetuous, or too unnatural. Her marriage, both agreed, would have been mistaken, and this seemed to suggest that something in her complex organism had understood this, had known that her future as a penniless, clever woman was a sadly insoluble problem.

  Both brothers had felt that, at some level, at most levels, narrow life contained no place for her. All her conduct and character, Henry thought, seemed to have pointed to this conclusion – how profoundly inconsequential, in her history, continued life might have been.

  He often imagined her married to Gray or Holmes or William, how diminished she would seem, how marriage for her would be a battle that she would have to lose. In Poor Richard, he had sent her to Europe where she did not marry. In Daisy Miller, in which he had emphasized her brashness and bravery and careless attitude to conventions, she had died in Rome. In Travelling Companions, he had invented a marriage for her, dramatizing the Italian circumstances of her meeting with her consort. He did not follow her into the daily domestic routines managed in the shadow of a dull man.

  It was when he read Daniel Deronda that something came into his mind which had not occurred to him before – the dramatic possibilities of a spirited woman being destroyed by a stifling marriage. By coincidence, at this time he happened also to read Phineas Finn by Trollope, mainly as a way of getting to sleep, and was struck too by the marriage of Lady Laura Kennedy and the sheer interest such an alliance had for the reader whose sympathies had been drawn to the brave, bright heroine confronting her destiny with the illusion of freedom.

  He set to wor
k. By then he had lived some years in England, he felt that he could see America more clearly, and he wanted more than anything to bring to life an American spirit who was fresh and free, ready for life and certain only of her own great openness to others and to experience. It was not hard to place his young lady in his grandmother’s house in Albany, the strange, cramped, old-fashioned rooms from which Mrs Touchett, bossy and rich, could rescue Isabel Archer and take her to England where so many of his heroines had longed to go. In England, he could easily surround her with his old and carefully wrought trio of suitors, the straight-talking serious one; the gentler, patrician one; and the one who would be her friend and the fascinated student of her destiny, being too unfit or ill or steeped in irony to be her lover.

  He worked on the book in Florence and felt, as he woke each morning in his hotel on the river or later in rooms on Bellosguardo, that he had a great mission now to make Minny walk these streets, to allow the soft Tuscan sunlight to shine on her soft face. But more than that, he sought to re-create her moral presence more finely and more dramatically than he had ever done before. He wanted to take this penniless American girl and offer her a solid, old universe in which to breathe. He gave her money, suitors, villas and palaces, new friends and new sensations. He had never felt as powerful and as dutiful; he walked the streets of Florence and the quays and the steep, winding hill to Bellosguardo with a new lightness, and this lightness made its way into the book. It moved elegantly, easily and freely as though Minny herself were protecting him, presiding over him. There were scenes he wrote in which, having imagined everything and set it down, he was, at moments, unsure whether it had genuinely happened or whether his imagined world had finally come to replace the real.

  Yet Minny was real for him throughout the years, more real than any of the new people he met and associated with. She belonged to the part of him he guarded most fiercely, his hidden self, which no one in England knew about or understood. It was easier to preserve her under English skies, in a land where no one cared to remember the dead as he remembered his cousin, where the flat present with its attendant order ruled. It was here he let her walk with the power and haunting resonance of an old song echoing through the years, sounding its sad notes to him wherever he went.