The Master

THE MASTER

‘A must read. Colm Tóibín has not only written a spectacular novel he has found a way to pay tribute to Henry
James. We should all be so gifted and so lucky’
Alice Sebold, author of
The Lovely Bones

‘Ultimately, it is the essence of Henry James … which Tóibín resurrects in this brilliant
novel’
The Times

‘It is hard to imagine an admirer of Henry James not being gripped by this novel – a work of literary devotion by a
writer who is himself a master of plush prose and psychological nuance’
Sunday Telegraph

‘One of the most remarkable novels of the year’
Sunday Herald

‘
The Master
gives us a genuine intimacy with one of the people who might have been Henry James’
London Review of Books

‘In
The Master
, [Tóibín] brings James to life in a way that no straight biography could’
Esquire

‘There can be few contemporary novelists capable of sustaining this sort of psychological probe over an entire novel, and
Tóibín does it with great artistry and conviction’
Spectator

‘Tóibín catches expertly the complexity of James’s fate, his reticence, his ambiguous longing for love and
his withdrawal from the prospect of it … A bold tribute to a writer whom serious artists still acknowledge as The Master’
Irish Times

‘A superlative book’
Scotsman

‘Full of insights, sharp cameos and tender perceptions of the anguished reticence of a man of feeling who did not dare to
commit himself to physical love’
New Statesman

‘In
The Master
, Colm Tóibín takes us almost shockingly close to the soul of Henry James and, by
extension, to the mystery of art itself. It is a remarkable, utterly original book’
Michael Cunningham, author of
The Hours

‘
The Master
is a terrific book’
Daily Telegraph

‘Enthralling … Tóibín displays – in a manner that is masterly – the wit and metaphorical
flair, psychological subtlety and phrases of pouncing incisiveness with which a great novelist captured the nuances of consciousness and the duplicities of society’
Sunday Times

C
OLM
T
ÓIBÍN
was born in Ireland in 1955 and lives in Dublin. He is the author of four novels,
The South
,
The Heather Blazing
,
The Story of the Night
and
The Blackwater Lightship
, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes
Bad Blood
,
Homage to Barcelona
,
The Sign of the Cross
and
Love in
a Dark Time
.

Also by Colm Tóibín

FICTION

The South

The Heather Blazing

The Story of the Night

The Blackwater Lightship

NON-FICTION

Bad Blood:
A Walk Along the Irish Border

Homage to Barcelona

The Sign of the Cross:
Travels in Catholic Europe

Love in a Dark Time:
Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar

Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush

PICADOR

F
OR
B
AIRBRE AND
M
ICHAEL
S
TACK

CHAPTER ONE

S
OMETIMES IN THE NIGHT
he dreamed about the dead – familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up. Now as he woke, it
was, he imagined, an hour or more before the dawn; there would be no sound or movement for several hours. He touched the muscles on his neck which had become stiff; to his fingers they seemed
unyielding and solid but not painful. As he moved his head, he could hear the muscles creaking. I am like an old door, he said to himself.

It was imperative, he knew, that he go back to sleep. He could not lie awake during these hours. He wanted to sleep, enter a lovely blackness, a dark, but not too dark, resting place, unhaunted,
unpeopled, with no flickering presences.

When he woke again, he was agitated and unsure where he was. He often woke like this, disturbed, only half remembering the dream and desperate for the day to begin. Sometimes when he dozed, he
would bask in the hazy, soft light of Bellosguardo in the early spring, the distances all misty, feeling the sheer pleasure of sunlight on his face, sitting in a chair, close to the wall of the old
house with the smell of wisteria and early roses and jasmine. He would hope when he woke that the day would be like the dream, that traces of the ease and the colour and the light would linger at
the edge of things until night fell again.

But this dream was different. It was dark or darkening somewhere, it was a city, an old place in Italy like Orvieto or Siena, but nowhere exact, a dream city with narrow streets, and he was
hurrying; he was uncertain now whether he was alone or with somebody, but he was hurrying and there were students walking slowly up the hill too, past lighted shops and cafes and restaurants, and
he was eager to get by them, finding ways to pass them. No matter how hard he tried to remember, he was still not sure if he had a companion; perhaps he did, or perhaps it was merely someone who
walked behind him. He could not recall much about this shadowy, intermittent presence, but for some of the time there seemed to be a person or a voice close to him who understood better than he did
the urgency, the need to hurry, and who insisted under his breath in mutterings and mumbles, cajoled him to walk faster, edge the students out of his path.

Why did he dream this? At each long and dimly lit entrance to a square, he recalled, he was tempted to leave the bustling street, but he was urged to carry on. Was his ghostly companion telling
him to carry on? Finally, he walked slowly into a vast Italian space, with towers and castellated roofs, and a sky the colour of dark blue ink, smooth and consistent. He stood there and watched as
though it were framed, taking in the symmetry and texture. This time – and he shivered when he recalled the scene – there were figures in the centre with their backs to him, figures
forming a circle, but he could see none of their faces. He was ready to walk towards them when the figures with their backs to him turned. One of them was his mother at the end of her life, his
mother when he had last seen her. Near her among the other women stood his Aunt Kate. Both of them had been dead for years; they were smiling at him and moving slowly towards him. Their faces were
lit like faces in a painting. The word that came to him, he was sure that he had dreamt the word as much as the scene, was the word ‘beseeching’. They were imploring him or somebody,
asking, yearning, and then putting their hands out in front of them in supplication, and as they moved towards him he woke in cold fright, and he wished that they could have spoken, or that he
could have offered the two people whom he had loved most in his life some consolation. What came over him in the aftertaste of the dream was a wearying, gnawing sadness and, since he knew that he
must not go back to sleep, an overwhelming urge to start writing, anything to numb himself, distract himself, from the vision of these two women who were lost to him.

He covered his face for a moment when he remembered one second in the dream which had caused him to wake abruptly. He would have given anything now to forget it, to prevent it from following him
into the day: in that square he had locked eyes with his mother, and her gaze was full of panic, her mouth ready to cry out. She fiercely wanted something beyond her reach, which she could not
obtain, and he could not help her.

I
N THE DAYS
coming up to the new year he had refused all invitations. He wrote to Lady Wolseley that he sat all day at rehearsals in the company of
several fat women who made the costumes. He was uneasy and anxious, often agitated, but sometimes, too, he was involved in the action on the stage as though it were all new to him, and he was moved
by it. He asked Lady Wolseley and her husband to unite in prayers for him on the opening night of his play, not far away now.

In the evening he could do nothing, and his sleep was fitful. He saw nobody except his servants, and they knew not to speak to him or trouble him beyond what was entirely necessary.

His play
Guy Domville
, the story of a rich Catholic heir who must choose whether to carry on the family line or join a monastery, would open on 5 January. All the invitations to the
opening night had gone out and he had already received many replies of acceptance and thanks. Alexander, the producer and lead actor, had a following among theatre-goers, and the costumes –
the play was set in the eighteenth century – were sumptuous. Yet, despite his new enjoyment of the society of actors and the glitter and the daily small changes and improvements in the
production, he was, he said, not made for the theatre. He sighed as he sat at his desk. He wished it were an ordinary day and he could read over yesterday’s sentences, spend a slow morning
making corrections, and then start out once more, filling the afternoon with ordinary work. And yet he knew that his mood could change as quickly as the light in the room could darken, and he
easily could feel only happiness at his life in the theatre and begin again to hate the company of his blank pages. Middle age, he thought, had made him fickle.

His visitor had arrived promptly at eleven o’clock. He could not have refused to see her; her letter had been carefully insistent. Soon she would be leaving Paris for good, she said, and
this would be her last visit to London. There was something oddly final and resigned in her tone, a tone so alien to her general spirit that he was quickly alerted to the seriousness of her
situation. He had not seen her for many years, but over these years he had received some letters from her and news from others about her. That morning, however, still haunted by his dream, and so
full of concern about his play, he saw her as merely a name in his diary, stirring an old memory sharp in its outlines and faded in its detail.

When she came into the room, her old face smiling warmly, her large-boned frame moving slowly and deliberately, her greeting so cheerful, open and affectionate, and her voice so beautiful and
soft, almost whispering, it was easy to put aside his worries about his play and the time he was wasting by not being in the theatre. He had forgotten how much he liked her and how easy it was to
be taken instantly back to those days when he was in his twenties and lingered as much as he could in the company of French and Russian writers in Paris.