Most excitement here has been my reading the two books about Henry James, two novels, one by the Irishman, the other by the Englishman. I had no interest in James. I guess the langours of summer allowed me to be curious as to why two writers produced novels about him nearly at the same time–published last year about three weeks apart. The Irish guy’s is essentially a religious story, James the heroic saint for art, told in slightly hushed, reverential tones, in the mode of touring the beloved writer’s home in awe that there really is the desk, there the pen, there the shawl he wore by the fire. After a while all that hushed tone of the sacred became irritating.
The Brit’s version turned out to be more to my taste. David Lodge told good stories about James’s struggles with money, his books, his publishers, his declining sales, his failure in the theater. He also told of his long friendship with a cartoonist for the magazine Punch, Du Maurier, who almost by luck wrote a bad novel that caught the public’s taste and from which DM earned tons of money, while James watched silently, keeping the frienship by never voicing his true opinion about the quality of the book. DuMaurier even created a pop icon of the age—Svengali. [Amazingly Svengali got mentioned on the Daily Show last night, Christopher Hitchens and Jon Stewart.] James dedicates himself in Lodge’s book to his work, but without the faux organ music of saintliness in the background. [Just This Moment Henry James gets mentioned in a rerun episode of "CSI:Las Vegas" on Spike right now, 8:15 pm Friday evening].
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an earlier email on this topic–
In general Lodge the Brit is mostly concerned with James as a working writer, places him in a complex social fabric made up of friendships with other writers, both male and female, one possible romance with the American writer, Constance Fenimore Cooper, that never goes anywhere and mostly James’s quiet sense of jealousy and rivalry with other writers, especially the ungodly commerical success of his friend Du Maurier, who wrote a low-quality novel that made a ton of money. Also Lodge is concerned with the
skill and craft and techniques of James’s writing as he defines it against those of other writers. And of course the five year flirtation with writing for the theater which comes to a tremendous halt of failure.
The Irishman, Tóibín (I never knew Irish names could have accents, let
alone two in so short a word), opens his novel with that failure of the
career in theater and moves on into the later novels, with lots of
flashbacks to childhood to fill-out his sense of what James’s inner
life must have been like. He is way too concerned with showing how much
he sensitively resonates with James’s inner sensibility and solitude
and exquisite life of feeling. He overuses the word "solitude"
and allows himself too many lines like this last one of chapter Six—
"And there was silence now in Kensington, not a sound in the house,
[James has bought a house on the shore in Rye] 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." (144) Tóibín’s book has all sorts of glowing praise from the press on its cover because, I
think, it is basically in the style and mode of the dreadful Michael
Cunningham’s "The Hours". Which is what I tried to describe earlier—the writer as saint, our voices lowered and sensitized in sacred awe.
Lodge’s James comes much more to life, feels like a real person. Lodge started as a comic novelist and he manages to recreate James with a tone that has a touch of humor to it, a touch of wit and irony that James would have enjoyed. We see James in his version actually chuckling at times, enjoying jokes, being humorous. And his finale for the book is a delightful meditation on James’s death and his ideas on whether there is anything after death. And Lodge even manages to get a laugh into this death meditation. He address James directly in a flashforward to assure him that although he died thinking his work had garnered little recognition, this has steadily been reversed in the century after his death and James’s work is now in the Pantheon of Modern Literature. " . . . but it wouldn’t be tactful to mention [to James all the scholarship and biographies written about him] or the fact that he would be adopted by a branch of academic criticism known as Queer Theory, whose exponents claim, for instance, to find metaphors of anal fisting in the Prefaces to The New York Edition). (375)
Here is that other gridist whose name I couldn’t remember the other day. Stanley Whitney. 
