A few summer’s ago I was visting my brother in the States and was the only member of the family still sat out in the blistering heat of North Carolina. I had packed Colm Toibin’s The Master as it had nearly won the Booker Prize( Hollinghurst had for Line of Beauty which had not thrilled aside from teenage tendency to just pick out the sexy bits and then dump the rest..the allotment scene comes to mind!)
Toibin’s The Master was superb and though I am not a Henry James fan..( I tend to lose hope of life before he makes it out of a sub-clause in his later works.) .I found myself crying at the remarkable evocation of James’s doomed cousin Minny Temple who died of TB at 24. James found her company fascinating and she probably made him responsive in a way that few people ever did.
Toibin evokes the painful acknowledgement of James, who reading a letter she sent to a friend, realises that he may have lacked the integrity to meet her tragically whimsical request below:
…Henry thought now maybe meant more to him than any others, including all the words he had written himself, or anyone else had written. Her words haunted him so that saying them now, whispering them in the silence of the night, brought her exacting presence close to him. These words constituted one sentence. Minny had written: ‘You must tell me something that you are sure is true.‘ That, he thought, was what she wanted when she was alive and happy, as much as when she was dying, but it was her illness, her knowledge that time was short, that made her desperate to formulate her great and generous request.’You must tell me something that you are sure is true.‘ The words came to him in her sweet voice, and as he sat on his terrace in the darkness he wondered how he would have answered her if she had written the sentence to him. ( The Master, ColmToibin, p.110)
Minny Temple’s request for transparency reveals her understandable awareness of the ‘muddle’ of so much communication. And ironically if ever there was a writer who evades direct communictaion then surely it must be Henry James? I love this moment in the novel as it renders James profoundly human, self-doubting and honest…( My sense of utter frustration with James’s evasiveness in all things has never gone away…especially in Wings of a Dove which should have been his masterpiece but sold out to syntactical frigidity and emotional aridity)
It also invites the reader’s response too and so it involves us in James’s own ruminations and consciousness. The sense of solitude is palpable. Who would want to be on that terrace? A very old friend has just emailed me about his mum: she used to say that the two saddest words in the dictionary were ‘too late’ ..how right she was…
James never ceased to think about Minny Temple and she is of course Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. She would not go away. And neither would her question.
