Reviewed by: All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James Michèle Mendelssohn All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James. Colm Tóibín. Ed. and Intro. Susan M. Griffin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 148. $55.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Colm Tóibín goes where literary scholars generally don’t. While they may be cowed by intentional fallacy, that Cerberus of scholarship, Tóibín flashes his novelist credentials and is granted [End Page 651] safe passage to the realm of the creative essay. The result is All a Novelist Needs, a collection introduced by Susan M. Griffin, who publishes the Henry James Review, where many of these pieces appeared in 2009. That journal issue was already a sort of afterlife, since many of these essays had been published elsewhere, some as early as 2002. Whether they deserve triplicate publication is a matter for debate, but what their repeated presentation certainly confirms is that Tóibín has secured his place among Jamesians. The organizing principle of this book is the idea that all a novelist needs is the literary equivalent of an “access all areas” pass. Tóibín brandishes his here, to interesting effect. He comes and goes as he pleases, easily moving between literary criticism, reviewery and biography-fiction (in “Silence,” on which more later). “Henry James’s New York” paints a nuanced portrait of a strange, angry, neurotic man profoundly disturbed by “what has been lost to him, what has been done, in the name of commerce and material progress, to a place he once knew. . . . A new world was being built on the site of his dreams” (53–4). This vividly elucidates The American Scene’s psychological hinterland. Along with a delightful essay on George Eliot, these are the best essays in the collection. A review of the first volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James reveals a young James far different from the industrious man of later years, one inclined to the dolce far niente (much like the hero of Daisy Miller, Winterbourne, who is “studying”—the scare quotes are James’s—for an advanced degree in idleness and flirtation). The young James is eager to leave the stifling family nest but homesick when he finally does, and already inclined to purple prose. Tóibín is best at his most irreverent, as when he suggests, of a particularly turgid letter, “it is hard at this point not to wish that someone . . . had arrived . . . to distract James as he wrote, or that someone at the Houghton Library had further damaged the manuscript of this letter . . . because it gets worse” (105). Tóibín’s lucid, unadorned style is refreshing, as is his infusion of the analytical with the personal. “Over the mantle piece in the front reception room [of Lamb House in Rye, where James lived],” he writes, “I found an object that took my breath away” (19). This moment of rapture at the discovery of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s needlework is interrupted by another breath-taking discovery: two other novelists, both in the house with him, are also writing books on James. “We were very careful with each other . . . we were also very polite to each other,” he explains diplomatically in “The Haunting of Lamb House.” Tóibín writes especially well about James’s self-effacement, and his willingness to politely “disappear for the sake of his art” (21). Tóibín’s adoption of a similar strategy has, in turn, enabled him to become more James-like. In a piece subtitled “Becoming Henry James”, he tells of a job he once held—“dusty work, drudgery really, but I liked my coworkers and did not kill myself” (24)—and the evenings during which he read The Portrait of a Lady, his first encounter with James. “I never once thought about Henry James himself. He seemed beautifully absent from his own novel, which was another aspect of his power” (25). The same absent presence serves Tóibín equally well. As a critic, he subtly directs his reader, urging us to see and look anew, as in “Henry James...