Between the Storylines

Toibin’s book is as leisurely as any novel by the master, but like them it never flags. He begins at the low point of James’s life — being howled offstage by the audience at the end of the staging of his only play. He then goes back and forth in time and space, from the America of young Henry, to the European haunts of the older man. James escaped from a formidable family and its tragedies — father Henry’s suicide; brother William, the respected Harvard psychologist and philosopher; sister Alice, her scintillating intellect stifled by the mores of her time.

Toibin traces the gestation of the vast outpouring of essays, stories and novels. But more than that, he explores the inner James — the one who preferred life at his home at Rye in England. The James who thought of cousin Minny Templer after her death, that he “could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her experiences she would have wanted.”

If James’s outer life was placid and his inner life turmoil, Mansfield’s was entirely different. Unlike James, she was dead at 34 of tuberculosis, and had only three collections of stories to her credit. Yet, she was a star that blazed at the fringes of the Bloomsbury set, and was good enough as a writer to evoke the unusually bitchy comment from Virginia Woolf that “the more she is praised, the more I am convinced she is bad.” An emigre from sheepland, Mansfield wrote largely about New Zealand. A thoroughly English writer, she managed to make the prosaic Kiwi life interesting.

Mansfield was a rebel, with a characteristically blunt manner which made T.S. Eliot describe her as “a dangerous woman”. Mansfield fought hard against being squirreled away as a little woman. Stead explores her relationship in the first world war with J.M. Murry, her French lover Francis Corco, the devastating death of her younger brother and the onset of TB.

Toibin and Stead have brought their subjects out from the mist of myth that obscures them. Better than most biographies could, they show how James and Mansfield were, at one level, at war with their times, how they transcended them through the medium in which they sought their identity — writing. Next time, they will be read with a little more understanding — and empathy.