Biofiction, Compulsory Sexuality, and Celibate Modernism in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author

Fagan, Paul

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_8

Paul Fagan⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

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Abstract

This chapter interrogates the representation of male celibacy in two biofictions about Henry James, Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004). It is argued that each novel neglects to historicise adequately the function of celibacy in the early modernist period, a time of radically shifting gender codes in which the modern meanings of male homosexuality were still being formed. Consequently, Tóibín’s and Lodge’s depictions of James’s life are determined by presentist constructions of masculinity and compulsory sexuality. An alternative theorisation of Jamesian celibacy is presented through Benjamin Kahan’s writing on celibate modernism, which historicises celibacy as a political tool for negotiating normative sexual codes while allowing for slippage between gender roles. Through comparative close readings of Tóibín’s and Lodge’s representations of the Guy Domville premiere and James’s relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, it is shown that they both read James’s celibacy symptomatically as always either a perversion of or a mask for other sexual identities, not as a sexual, artistic, and political identity in its own right. A historicised queering of Jamesian celibacy beyond sexual binaries (heterosexual or homosexual, latent or patent, consummated or renounced) is proposed to complicate the biofictional attempt to disclose secrets and reveal truths about lives lived on the borders of desire.

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Notes

1.
Lucy Biederman, “After the Year of Henry James: The Undermining of Authority in Short Fictions by Cynthia Ozick and Joyce Carol Oates,” The Henry James Review 38, no. 1 (2017): 88, https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2017.0009.
2.
Miranda Seymour, A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle, 1895–1915 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), 13.
3.
Michiel Heyns, “The Curse of Henry James,” Prospect, September 26, 2004, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/thecurseofhenryjames.
4.
Ibid.
5.
David Lodge, Author, Author (London: Penguin, 2005), 387.
6.
Colm Tóibín, The Master (London: Picador, 2005), 369.
7.
J. Russell Perkin, “Imagining Henry: Henry James as a Fictional Character in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author,” Journal of Modern Literature 33, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 118, https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2010.33.2.114.
8.
Lodge, Author, Author, n. pag.
9.
Robert Kusek, “The Many Lives of Henry James: Biographers, Critics and Novelists on the Master,” Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 6, no. 1 (2011): 78, https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.11.006.0304.
10.
Saul Rosenzweig, “The Ghost of Henry James,” Partisan Review 11 (Fall 1944): 454.
11.
Ross Posnock, “Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 224.
12.
Bethany Layne, Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 12.
13.
Sheila Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” in Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 64.
14.
Ibid.
15.
David McWhirter, “‘The Whole Chain of Relation and Responsibility’: Henry James and the New York Edition,” in Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. David McWhirter (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995), 3.
16.
Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (London: Collins, 1987), 15–16.
17.
Katherine V. Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel, 1850–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4.
18.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 171.
19.
Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 401–02.
20.
Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” 64.
21.
Sheldon M. Novick, “Introduction,” in Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R. Bradley (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 8.
22.
John R. Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 5.
23.
Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Young Master (New York: Random House, 1996), 324.
24.
Ibid., xii.
25.
Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 238.
26.
Philip Horne, “Henry James: The Master and the ‘Queer Affair’ of ‘The Pupil,’” Critical Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 80.
27.
Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 434.
28.
Ibid., 391.
29.
Bradley, Permanent Adolescence, 3.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Gordon, A Private Life, 5.
33.
Ibid., 370.
34.
Bradley, Permanent Adolescence, 4.
35.
Gordon, A Private Life, 391.
36.
Ibid.
37.
Kusek, “The Many Lives,” 80.
38.
Michael Lackey, “Introduction: The Rise of the American Biographical Novel,” in Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, ed. Michael Lackey (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 14.
39.
Millicent Bell, ‘The Divine, the Unique,’ Times Literary Supplement, 6 December 1996, 3–4; Sheldon M. Novick, ‘Henry James’s Life and Work,’ Times Literary Supplement, 27 December 1996, 17. See Bradley, Permanent Adolescence, 3.
40.
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 206.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading (New York: Routledge, 2005), 47.
43.
Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra, “Still the Silence: Feminist Reflections at the Edges of Sound,” in Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound, ed. Sheena Malhotra and Aimee Carrillo Rowe (London: Palgrave, 2013), 2.
44.
Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 2.
45.
Ibid., 2–3, quoting Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 52.
46.
Kahan, Celibacies, 3.
47.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 27.
48.
Kahan, Celibacies, 3, 2.
49.
Ibid., 5.
50.
Ibid., 3.
51.
Ibid., 1.
52.
In a partial list, Kahan identifies Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Baron Corvo, George Santayana, Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry, Rainer Maria Rilke, E. M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Edna Ferber, Edith Sitwell, T. E. Lawrence, Henry Darger, Josef Sudek, J. R. Ackerley, Jorge Luis Borges, Langston Hughes, Joseph Cornell, Eudora Welty, May Sarton, Comte de Lautréamont, George Moore, Pauline Hopkins, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Marcel Duchamp, Henry de Montherlant, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner. Ibid., 9.
53.
Ibid., 1.
54.
Paul Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 437–59, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2018.0035.
55.
Wai Chee Dimock, “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín and W. B. Yeats,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2013): 732–53, https://doi.org/10.1086/671354.
56.
Kahan, Celibacies, 41.
57.
Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97.
58.
Kahan, Celibacies, 41.
59.
Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. Pierre A. Walker (New York, Modern Library, 2003), 17.
60.
Kahan, Celibacies, 52.
61.
Ibid., 41.
62.
Ibid.
63.
Ibid.
64.
Henry James, Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 360 (emphasis in original).
65.
Eric Haralson, “Lambert Strether’s Excellent Adventure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 187.
66.
Ibid., 179.
67.
Michael O’Sullivan, “Singular Celibates: Narrative Seduction in Moore and Joyce,” in George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds, ed. Mary Pierse (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 209.
68.
Haralson, “Excellent Adventure,” 179.
69.
Ibid., 178.
70.
Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 392.
71.
Ibid., 179.
72.
Ibid.
73.
Ibid., 178.
74.
Kahan, Celibacies, 12.
75.
Henry James, Notes on Novelists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 231.
76.
Bradley, Permanent Adolescence, 1–2.
77.
Kahan, Celibacies, 30, quoting from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1.
78.
Perkin, “Imagining Henry,” 114.
79.
Lodge, Author, Author, 3.
80.
Layne, Real Thing, 40.
81.
David Lodge, The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel: With Other Essays on the Genesis, Composition, and Reception of Literary Fiction (London: Penguin, 2007), 38.
82.
John Harvey, “Lessons of the Master: The Henry James Novel,” The Yearbook of English Studies: From Decadent to Modernist: And Other Essays 37, no. 1 (2007): 78, https://doi.org/10.2307/20479279.
83.
Lodge, Author, Author, 171.
84.
Ibid., 172.
85.
Ibid.
86.
Layne, Real Thing, 13.
87.
Lodge, Author, Author, 375.
88.
Ibid., 385.
89.
Lodge, Year of Henry James, 6.
90.
Perkin, “Imagining Henry,” 115.
91.
Tóibín, The Master, 100.
92.
Perkin, “Imagining Henry,” 120.
93.
Ágnes Zsófia Kovács, “Recanonizing Henry James: Colm Tóibín’s The Master,” Americana 3, no. 1 (Spring 2007): http://americanaejournal.hu/vol3no1/kazs.
94.
Ibid.
95.
Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” 64.
96.
Laura E. Savu, Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 179.
97.
John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), xxiv.
98.
Tóibín, The Master, 5.
99.
Ibid., 2.
100.
Ibid., 3.
101.
Ibid., 2.
102.
Ibid., 10.
103.
Ibid., 5.
104.
Kovács, “Recanonizing Henry James,” n. pag.
105.
Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 41.
106.
Layne, Real Thing, 229.
107.
Renate Brosch, “The Figure of the Artist in David Lodge’s and Colm Tóibín’s Biofictions of Henry James,” in Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing in British, Irish and Canadian Fiction After 1945, ed. Annette Pankratz and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2012), 300.
108.
Lodge, Year of Henry James, 38.
109.
Colm Tóibín, “A More Elaborate Web: Becoming Henry James,” The Henry James Review 30, no. 3 (2009): 233, https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.0.0062.
110.
Lodge, Year of Henry James, 8.
111.
Layne, Real Thing, 36.
112.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 67.
113.
Tóibín, The Master, 3, 13, 11–12.
114.
Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” 64.
115.
Tóibín, The Master, 14, 19.
116.
Lodge, Author, Author, 231.
117.
Tóibín, The Master, 17.
118.
Ibid., 16. See also Dimock, “Weak Theory,” 743–44.
119.
Ellmann, Wilde, 170–71.
120.
Tóibín, The Master, 77.
121.
Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 363.
122.
Tóibín, The Master, 5.
123.
Heyns, “The Curse of Henry James,” n. pag.
124.
Ibid.
125.
Lodge, Author, Author, 208, 211.
126.
Ibid., 211.
127.
Tóibín, The Master, 237–38, 255.
128.
Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281.
129.
Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 128 (emphasis added).
130.
Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus’s Nightmare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 23.
131.
Christopher M. DeVault, “Love and Socialism in Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’: A Buberian Reading,” College Literature 37, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 79.
132.
Roberta Jackson, “The Open Closet in Dubliners: James Duffy’s Painful Case,” James Joyce Quarterly 50, no. 1/2 (Fall 2012–Winter 2013): 284, https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2012.0074.
133.
Lodge, Author, Author, 212.
134.
Colm Tóibín, “Single Minded,” The Guardian, April 28, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/28/fiction.colmtoibin.
135.
G. R. S. Taylor, “The Gospel According to Shaw,” The Freewoman 1, no. 2 (November 1911): 27–28.
136.
G. B. Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (London: Constable, 1932), 182.
137.
Erin Williams, “Female Celibacy in the Fiction of Gissing and Dixon: The Silent Strike of the Suburbanites,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 45, no. 3 (2002): 259–79.
138.
Perkin, “Imagining Henry,” 118.
139.
Ibid., 5, 42.
140.
Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–2.
141.
Ibid., 2.
142.
Ibid.
143.
Ibid.
144.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana, 65.
145.
Kahan, Celibacies, 145.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Brigitte Grahsl for her research assistance in the composition of the present chapter, as well as to the editors, external readers, and my colleagues David Conlon and Eugenie Theuer for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of the work.

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Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
Paul Fagan

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Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Julia Novak
Department of German, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Caitríona Ní Dhúill

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Fagan, P. (2022). Biofiction, Compulsory Sexuality, and Celibate Modernism in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author. In: Novak, J., Ní Dhúill, C. (eds) Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_8

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