Author, Author

Rating:
Summary: dog on hind legs again
Review: The best thing about this book is Max Beerbohm's jacket caricature. Downhill after that.

Novels about writers are really only possible when dealing with frauds like Hemingway or Fitzgerald whose non-cerebral off-hour roisterings provide the raw material of fiction. Mr. Lodge serves up, in a somewhat different sauce, much the same gray fleshed entrée earlier sauteed by Coim Toibin in "The Master". (The main difference seems to be Lodge's ambivalence as to HJ's sexuality vs. Toibin's certainties.) James was reportedly a charming fellow, a great get for fashionable hostesses, witty, urbane,--none of which travels well in these works.Unlike his contemporary Oscar Wilde, he was neither given to quotable epigram nor offered up to popular tragedy. And it really doesn't matter whether Lodge's handling is masterful or several pitches too journalese, or whatever. HJ is the Edsel of fictive persons. "Caviar to the general" may be a lugubrious summing up of a writer's life, but it is hardly the makings of anyone else's care.

Reading this book is like watching the Congressional Testimony of Alan Greenspan dry on the hearing room carpet.

Rating:
Summary: "It was a dream but the dream is past."
Review: The writer's life, the artistic temperament, and the world of the English stage are bought to life in this beautifully written, complex novel of history and ideas from author David Lodge. Author Author, while totally succeeding as an intricate recounting of Henry James's halcyon days as one of England's most famous men of letters, is also a vividly creative tale of penmanship, literary irony, the collision of values, and the transformation and courage it takes to reinvent oneself artistically.

The novel also works as a sprawling account of Edwardian England, from the pastoral countryside, to the quaint seaside towns, to the gas lit and foggy London suburbs, to the stuffiness and sense of moralistic propriety of the upper-class drawing rooms. Lodge paints a portrait of a society and a culture that is undergoing profound social and artistic changes. It is amidst these changes, that author Henry James is radically trying to reinvent himself as a playwright.

Framed by two deathbed scenes, the bulk of the story involves James's life-long friendship with George du Maurier, and his cautious relationship with the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson the one most influential woman in his life, who later commits suicide in Venice. James was frustrated and vexed by his dwindling book sales, and rather jealous of du Maurier who had recently achieved fame with the runaway success of his novel, Trilby. Seeking to redefine his work, James stakes his professional reputation and five years of work on a series of plays, the crowning achievement of which was to be Guy Domville. The centerpiece of the story recounts his humiliation and mortification at being savagely booed at the London premier when the lower classes nastily laugh and jeer at the silliness of the leading lady's plumed hat.

From his years dining with the literary and artistic society in London to his self imposed sequester at Lamb House, Rye where he enacted his instinct for bachelorly self-preservation, Lodge paints a picture of a man who was totally devoted to a philosophical and literary life. James, through his work, wanted to refine, intensify and preserve human consciousness believing that consciousness was a type of religion. He understood that the author of fictional narratives should represent life as it is experienced in reality, by an individual consciousness, and he developed a firm faith in the superior expressiveness and verisimilitude of the limited point of view.

James with his "his bushy beard, balding pate and incipient paunch," comes across as sexuality ambiguous, and his attitudes to sex "and the spilling of one's seed" were to him extremely distasteful. His views on sexuality were formed in childhood when he saw a male nude posing for a portrait and the image haunted him for days afterwards "with disturbing effects that were physical as well as mental." James also actively distances himself from Oscar Wilde and his aura of sexual scandal. And it is almost a relief when he reaches the calm waters of middle age having survived all the perils and problems, the vague longings and physical disturbances, associated with sex in early manhood.

Lodge has fun with introducing us to such famous figures as Compton Mackenzie, the son of the actor- manager Edward Compton, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Agatha Christie, who James bumps into on a cycle-ride from Torquay. Author Author is a sprawling, ambitious, and hugely entertaining novel. And Lodge, with a keen biographer's eye, doesn't hesitate to expose the complexities of James's life, involving his friendships, sexuality, and the ever changing demands of his art. Mike Leonard December 04.