DAVID LEAVITT WRITES ABUT HENRY JAMES & THE LATEST BIOGRAPHY

HENRY JAMES
The Mature Master.
By Sheldon M. Novick.
Illustrated. 616 pp. Random House. $35.

In the title essay of a collection published this year, the novelist and critic David Lodge declared 2004 to have been “The Year of Henry James.” This was because 2004 saw the publication of two major “biographical” novels about James — “The Master,” by Colm Toibin, and Lodge’s own “Author, Author” — as well as a novel by Alan Hollinghurst, “The Line of Beauty,” in which the hero is writing a thesis on James. Both Toibin’s and Lodge’s novels took as their starting points the facts of Henry James’s life, and while they shared certain material, each had a distinct focus: Lodge wrote primarily about James’s involvement in the theater and his friendship with the caricaturist and writer George du Maurier, whose novel “Trilby” was enjoying phenomenal success just as James’s own literary star was in eclipse, while Toibin focused on James’s close relationships with his cousin Minny Temple, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson and the sculptor Hendrik Andersen. Toibin also dramatized a scene in which the young James sleeps naked in the same bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes — a scene, Lodge points out in his essay, probably derived from Sheldon M. Novick’s 1996 revisionist biography, “Henry James: The Young Master,” in which Novick suggested that James experienced his “initiation” into sex in 1865 and that his partner was very likely Holmes.

Novick is a law professor, and he likes making a case. In the preface to “The Young Master,” he challenged the received image of James as an effete, fussy figure; homosexual, if at all, only in spirit, and most likely celibate. Novick also criticized Leon Edel, the author of a canonical five-volume biography of James, for hewing too closely to “what now seems a rather old-fashioned, Freudian view of ‘homosexuality’ as a kind of failure.” Novick, on the other hand, intended to write a biography in which it would be shown “that Henry James underwent the ordinary experiences of life: that he separated himself from his enveloping family, that he fell in love with the wrong people, that his first sexual encounters were intense but not entirely happy.” If such a biography had not yet been written, Novick argued, it could be “attributed partly to James’s having loved young men.”

At the time of its publication, “The Young Master” provoked something of an uproar in James circles. Responding to Novick’s book on Slate, Edel objected strenuously to Novick’s claim that James had sexual relationships, writing that Novick “attempts to turn certain of his fancies into fact — but his data is simply too vague for him to get away with it.” Novick responded by defending his own biography, denouncing Edel’s — “For a modern reader,” Novick wrote, Edel’s biography “badly distorts the record of the novelist’s life” — and chiding the 89-year-old author for refusing to accept “that James, although his principal affections were for men, ever had sexual contact with a man.” Novick’s letter — which concludes “Lighten up, professor” — initiated an eight-part, on-the-record donnybrook that grew increasingly surreal and took an explicit turn when another James biographer, Fred Kaplan, entered the fray. The discourse now devolved into what Novick rightly characterized as “dirty” talk, reaching its apex when he wrote: “Least important of all, I think (but can’t be sure) that one evening in the spring of 1865,” James masturbated Oliver Wendell Holmes.

This debate over James’s sex life had the unfortunate effect of distracting attention from the many other aspects of Novick’s biography, among them his powerful evocation of James’s childhood, his portrayal of Henry James Sr. and his persuasive rereading of a crucial episode in James’s youth involving Minny Temple and Oliver Wendell Holmes. If reviews gave a lopsided impression of Novick’s book as a study of James’s sexuality, however, it was at least in part because Novick fanned the flame of debate by making — and defending — his case with such lawyerly gusto.

Read the full review from The New York Times, from where photo of James also taken.