Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008
Passion and Henry James
By Alan Hollinghurst
Henry James: The Mature Master
by Sheldon M. Novick
Random House, 616 pp., $35.00
The writer of a two-part life who calls his first volume Young So-and-So faces a problem of tact and aptness when it comes to the second. Sometimes the life itself provides an elegant answer: Young Melbourne grew into Lord M., Young Thomas Hardy was followed by Thomas Hardy's Later Years, quietly eloquent of a career that flourished into his ninth decade. Sheldon M. Novick called the first half of his biography of Henry James, going up to 1881 and the publication of The Portrait of a Lady, The Young Master, a term whose resonances he seemed not quite to hear: Did James not struggle for mastery, by a prolonged, unresting process of discovery, or was Master, like Melbourne, a sort of feudal title? Since then, for eleven years, The Old Master has loomed; but in the event we have The Mature Master, not exactly an idiomatic expression, except perhaps in the world of S&M—a suggestion which even Novick, the advocate of a new, sexier James, might shrink from.
Review, 4145 words
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