The Master

by Colm Toibin

  Alice was dead now, Aunt Kate was in her grave, the parents who noticed nothing also lay inert under the ground, and William was miles away in his own world, where he would stay. And there was silence now in Kensington, not a sound in the house, except the sound, like a vague cry in the distance, of his own great solitude, and his memory working like grief, the past coming to him with its arm outstretched looking for comfort.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  April 1898

  THE PHOTOGRAPHS CAME as he had asked for them; one was close-up and detailed, showing in relief the monument to the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment being led by Colonel Shaw, and the other taken from a distance, showing the Boston Common and Saint Gaudens’s monument in the corner. Henry carried the photographs to the window to study them in a better light and then went back to the table and found William’s letter calling the new monument a glorious work of art, simple and realistic. He could hear the certainty in William’s voice. William had given the official address on the unveiling of this memorial to the 54th Regiment, the first black regiment of the American army, in which their brother Wilky had served. He had spoken for three quarters of an hour, and then been, as he put it, toted around for two hours in a brake at the tail end of the procession. It was, he wrote to Henry, an extraordinary occasion for sentiment with everything softened and made poetic and unreal by the time which had passed.

  It was easy for Henry to reply to him, to say that he would have given anything to have been there and to add, choosing his words carefully, that the spirit of their poor dead brother Wilky would have been very much present on Boston Common during the unveiling of the monument, and that the event would have been a poetic justice to him. Henry noticed that William had not enclosed a copy of his speech either with his letter or with the photographs and was glad now that he did not have to comment on it. William had become a public figure, full of manly expression and fearless opinions. Thus he could speak for forty-five minutes to a crowded hall about the nobility of the Yankee cause and the legacy of the Union dead, especially the dead of the 54th and 55th Regiments in which both Wilky and Bob had served.

  Henry’s own sentences in his first story about the Civil War had remained in his mind through all the years: ‘The exploits of his campaign are recorded in the public journals of the day, where the curious may still pursue them. My own taste has always been for unwritten history and my present business is with the reverse of the picture.’ And he wondered, as he studied the photographs on and off throughout the day, what his own speech, his own reversed picture, might say about the 54th Regiment and the Civil War. He wondered also about the power of one unasked and tactless question which could have punctured the power of William’s speech at the unveiling. It concerned William personally and Henry too; and in soft whispers now it asked why neither of them had actually fought, along with their two brothers, for the cause of freedom.

  THE STORY OF his father’s wooden leg was one of the often-told delights of his childhood. If Henry showed signs of illness, or hurt himself in a fall, or if he agreed to complete an arduous task, then he would be promised the story by his mother, who told it as though she had witnessed it. His father was a boy who loved to play, she said, and was happiest away from his parents who were very strict with him. He was most content when playing with his friends. One of the games they played in the park was dangerous and involved hot-air balloons. They used spirit of turpentine to produce the flame to make the hot air rise. When the balloon caught fire you had to be careful because the burning balloon could land on you, land on your hair or on your clothes and you too could catch fire, his mother said, her face serious and her voice slow and grave, because the turpentine was highly combustible.

  He loved the word ‘combustible’ and made her repeat it. From an early age, he knew what it meant. But that day, she went on, his father had accidentally spilled the turpentine on his pantaloons, and, without understanding the danger he was in, he stood with all the other boys watching the balloons rise and then catch fire, one by one falling down, and all the boys standing out of the way, and warning each other to avoid them. But your father, she told him, saw one burning balloon floating towards the stables just beside the park, and he liked the horses there and the stable boys let him feed them sometimes, so when he noticed the balloon land in the hayloft above the stables he realized the danger and he ran towards the loft, climbing the ladder to stamp out the fire. But – and now his mother held Henry’s hand – as soon as he stood on the flame, and it wasn’t even a strong flame and the hay hadn’t even started to burn, as soon as the flame came in contact with the turpentine and his pantaloons, your father, just barely thirteen, went on fire and no one could help him. He ran from the hayloft screaming, but by the time they could put out the fire his two legs had been so badly burned that one of them had to be amputated.

  It was cut from above the knee, and at this point of the story his mother put her hand around his knee, but he did not flinch, and she too remained calm, as she explained how painful it had been and how brave he was and how hard he tried not to scream. But, in the end, she said, it was impossible and they always recounted that his screams could be heard for miles around. For two years afterwards your father had to stay in bed, she told him, and he had to contemplate a future in which he would not be able to run, or play games. He would have to have a wooden leg, and that was a bigger test of his fortitude than the pain of the amputation.

  What was strange – and here her voice grew tender as she spoke – was that only good came from this accident. Up to then, she said, your papa’s father was very strict with him, and was also much preoccupied with his myriad businesses – she watched him now as he nodded to signal that he understood the word ‘myriad’ from his Bible – and his mother had a large household and her other children. But now, after the accident, they came to their son’s aid, they showed him a new and deep tenderness and he felt enclosed and protected by their love. At the beginning, they never left his side and his father seemed to sense his pain and share his panic until many times his father had to be taken away in tears. Later, as he began to recover, they made sure he had everything he needed, and gradually then, your father replaced his dreams of races and games with the life of the mind, with books and speculation. He began, she said, to contemplate the fate of man in the world and the life of man in relation to God as no one else in America had ever done. He had all due grounding in the Bible and in youthful theology, but in his two years as an invalid he was allowed to read whatever he pleased and, of course, he had time to think. And thus commenced, his mother said, your father’s noble quest. Later, when he became friends with Emerson, Emerson always said that Henry James had an advantage over him: he knew about suffering first hand and he had learned to think and read away from school masters and fellow scholars. Emerson always said, his mother told him, that your father had a truly original mind.

  On Sundays and during their holidays, when they were travelling and on days when there was no school, Henry stayed close to his mother; as the others found fulfilment in playing or boyish escapades, he would wait until she was free, or he would join in the work, and then they would move silently towards some comfortable place, often leaving Aunt Kate to finish what his mother had been doing, and his mother would talk to him, or read to him, or they would go through some of her things, tidying and putting them all in order.

  THE FAMILY was divided into three parts – William and Henry, whose education was supervised in elaborate detail by their father; Wilky and Bob, whose noise-making skills and lack of scholarly initiative made their father unhappy, thus causing him to feel that sending Wilky and Bob to school together was not only convenient, since they were both so close in age, but that it might also be effective. Wilky might develop some of Bob’s caution; Bob might, under Wilky’s influence, learn to make himself agreeable to visitors and smile warmly at familiar faces. Alice was an independent republic.

  When people asked them, especially in N
ewport, 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. But none of this added up to a simple phrase, an easy answer. And when their father suggested they tell their enquirers that he was a seeker after the truth, the matter became more perplexing. As they grew older a second question, commonly asked, began to puzzle them further. What were they themselves going to become? William, at the beginning, was going to become a painter, and Bob, to the great hilarity of the others, wanted to open a dry goods store. Alice, clearly, was going to become a wife. But what were Henry and Wilky going to do? This question did not interest their father and could not be discussed easily with their mother and thus was left in abeyance, another example, if one were needed, of the strangeness of their family, which both they and the world of Newport had come to accept.

  Since he relished clashings and new beginnings, Henry senior was ready to discuss any matter with any man, and was even prepared to discuss politics should the need arise, although he viewed the political world as a great distraction from, and impediment to, the possibility of human progress under the great light which God had made for humankind. The Civil War, however, began to fascinate him, not only because he saw it, in its essence, as a war between progress and cruelty, but also because he saw the end of the war as a time when protean energies could come to the fore, when there would be neither victors nor vanquished, but a grand transition in his country from youth to manhood, from appearance to reality, from passing shadow to deathless substance.

  Nonetheless, in the early days of the Civil War Henry senior told anyone who came within his range that he was holding firmly to the coat-tails of his sons who were, he insisted, desperately trying to enlist. Henry senior did not believe that his own sons should join, he said, because he did not believe that any existing government, or any future government, was worth an honest human life or a clean one like theirs.

  As his father discovered the pleasure of mixing political transcendence and prudent care for his family, Henry discovered a large bundle under the stairs of the house in Newport which contained back numbers of the Revue des Deux Mondes, complete with its salmon-coloured wrapping, which sang to him in the privacy of his room like a choir of angels. Even the names opened for him a world of possibility beyond the surrounding dullness and domesticity and patriotism and religiosity: Sainte-Beuve, the Goncourts, Mérimée, Renan. Names which suggested not only the modern mind at its most enquiring but the idea of style itself, of thinking as a kind of style, and the writing of essays not as a conclusive call to duty or an earnest effort at self-location, but as play, as the wielding of tone.

  The shut door of his room, and his being left alone there, became the governing comforts of his life. He would appear at meals and accept the mockery of the others at his silences, his seriousness, his pale face and gaunt presence. Nothing mattered now except the spellbound time alone, not only with the Revue des Deux Mondes, but with Balzac, who wrote of a France that Henry had merely glimpsed, but enough to know that he himself would never possess a subject as richly layered and suggestive, as sharply focussed and centred, as the France of Balzac’s Human Comedy.

  As William went to Harvard and Wilky made efforts to leave Sanborn, a boarding school that was ‘an experiment in coeducation’ supported by Emerson and Hawthorne, and Bob, having already left Sanborn, sailed his boat and made a nuisance of himself, Henry’s mother began to watch her bookish second son as though he were a patient. His mother protected his privacy and made sure also that no criticism of him was uttered by anyone, especially not by his father. Since Henry senior tended to find out what he believed by listening to his own utterances, his non-criticism of Henry meant approval, since he felt only benevolence for that towards which he did not express anathema.

  His mother began to appear silently in Henry’s room two or three times a day with a mug of fresh milk, or a small jar of honey, or a jug of cool water. She entered the room without knocking, and usually did not speak, and suggested in her placid movements and her quietness an approval for the work being done. For the first time, Henry later thought, Mrs James was witnessing her husband’s theories about the need to discover and explore the secret pleasures of the self through reading and thinking put into practice without any accompanying fervid hint of the unreliable to unsettle her.

  On one of those calm summer evenings at Newport, his mother came into his room to find that he had fallen asleep in his chair, his book on his lap. He woke to discover her hand on his brow and a worried look on her face. She went downstairs immediately and returned briskly with the maid who prepared the bed for him, his mother brandishing a freshly wetted cloth to attempt, she said, to cool him down. If this did not work, his mother said, she would call the doctor forthwith, but now he must go to bed. He had been overtaxing himself and he must rest, she said. He knew that he had not been overtaxing himself, knew that he had merely fallen asleep on a hot summer’s day, but by this time Aunt Kate had appeared and he was a patient, getting all the close attention that illness received in the family.

  His mother began to carry his meals to his room and excuse him when company not to his taste was in the house, making sure also that he was not confined to bed during outings he would enjoy or when company that would interest him was present. She did not discuss his illness with him and when she asked him how he felt, it was to know if he were much the same or slightly better; she did not leave him free to reply that he was not ill at all.

  There began then a conspiracy between them, a drama in which each knew the roles and the lines and the movements. Henry learned to walk slowly, never to run, to smile but never to laugh, to stand up hesitantly and awkwardly and to sit down with relief. He learned not to eat heartily or drink his fill.

  Soon after this when gleeful and full-blooded talk of recruits and the need to serve his country filled the air, his mother watched over him daily with greater worry and indulgence. Often, when he woke in the morning he found her sitting by his bed, having stolen into his room, studying him gently and smiling soothingly when his eyes opened.

  There were a few times he could not disguise his strength, or hide his readiness to take part. That October a high wind from the sea blew through Newport and a small conflagration at a stable on the corner of Beach and State quickly became a raging fire. Two whole streets, including shops and bars and stables and private residences, were in danger, and soon, as one stable was gutted, horses and carriages and valuable belongings were removed to safety. Every able-bodied person was needed to pump water from wells or carry water from cisterns. That night, as frenzied activity and fierce urgent shouting went on all around him, Henry worked without thinking. It was only when the fire had been extinguished and his arms and back ached that he thought of the probable extent of his mother’s concern.

  She and his aunt, who had been alerted to his activity by Bob, were waiting for him when he came home.

  They made him retire to the sofa and then set about filling a hot bath for him. He closed his eyes and lay back as they bustled about him. His mother’s mouth was shut tight. Later, when he had emerged from his hot bath, scrubbed and tired and ready for bed, she expressed the fear that he had injured his back. They would know by the morning, she said, if the injury was bad. Now it was late and he should sleep for as long as he could.

  The next day, he did not rise until suppertime. His mother told him to move slowly. She helped him down the stairs. He entered the dining room leaning on her, as his father and his aunt moved the chairs out of the way so that he could pass easily. They helped him to sit down and watched him carefully, encouraging him to eat and drink to build up his strength. Later, his mother helped him back to bed and for a few days he took all his meals in his room and had the sympathy of the entire household.

  Slowly, in the months that followed, as Henry started t
o work on translations from the French, Henry senior gradually changed his mind about the war. He began to see it not just as a cause worth supporting in theory but as a cause worth volunteering for. And as he propounded his opinions at the family table, much to the delight of Bob, too young to join but old enough to be fired with enthusiasm, his wife became increasingly solicitous of Henry.

  Neither before the war broke out, nor during its early months, did Henry or his mother ever discuss his illness or its symptoms at any length, nor did Henry ever allow himself any clear reflection on whatever malady was affecting him. He began to live with it, managing his disability as neither a game nor an act but a strange, secret thing. By not insisting on its being defined, by allowing the conspiracy with his mother to run its guilty course, never having contemplated any other possibility, he lived his illness, even when he was alone, with sincerity.

  As news came in, however, in this first year of the war, of cousins who had joined up, including Gus Barker and William Temple, Minny’s brother, who had been, much to his pride, made a captain on his first day in honour of his dead father, the fact that the James boys were remaining civilians, and Henry in idleness, could not but be noted by all those who paid even scant attention to the matter.

  Henry’s mother understood that Henry’s nameless abstract ailment, his obscure hurt, could not continue indefinitely without a name, that a professional diagnosis would have to be arrived at. His father therefore accompanied him to Boston to see Dr Richardson, an eminent surgeon made even more eminent, in Aunt Kate’s opinion, by his dead wife’s large fortune. He was a known expert on injuries to the back.

  Much time had elapsed since Henry had been alone with his father. On the journey to Boston, Henry senior seemed deeply uneasy with him, unsure, it appeared, whether he could share with his second son his views on the change which would come to America as a result of the war, this currently being the only topic that interested him. He was mostly silent, but not withdrawn. He looked like someone whose mind was working, whose brain was on the point of reaching some grand conclusion. When they arrived, Henry senior seemed to have greater difficulty walking in Boston than he did in Newport, as though his confidence or the power of his wooden leg had diminished as they reached the metropolis.