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lsandersonA Beast in the Jungle
By DAVID LEAVITT
By DAVID LEAVITT
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. Too much about Henry James?
