The Typewriter's Tale

November 21, 2016
Any Henry James aficionado should recognize the setting (Henry James’s Lamb House in Rye) and major players (including James himself and Edith Wharton) in this imagined story of James’s personal typist in 1907. Twenty-three-year-old Frieda Wroth (a fictional character) comes from modest means and has taken a job as a typewriter for the venerable author (partly to avoid the fate of a life with her respectable but boring suitor in London). Her new career mostly consists of sitting in front of the Remington and mindlessly transcribing James’s words—that is, until Morton Fullerton arrives to visit his friend and mentor. The young and dashingly handsome Fullerton seduces Frieda and asks her to find the packet of his letters to James, which must be hidden somewhere inside Lamb House. Frieda’s promise, combined with a visit from James’s niece Peggy, leads Frieda to experiment with telepathy and contacting those from the beyond. And so begin her communications with Fullerton, transcribed with the Remington in much the same way she takes dictation. There is nothing normal about the James household—from the comings and goings of visitors to the chewing exercises performed nightly by Henry James himself. And Frieda fits right in. Though she isn’t the strongest protagonist and the fiction and nonfiction elements don’t fully mesh, fans of James will find a compelling take on his private life.

December 15, 2016
A novel from the point of view of Henry James' fictional amanuensis. It's 1907, and Frieda Wroth, a young woman from a small English town, has recently completed a course in typewriting, a skill that promises to liberate women by preparing them for employment. Frieda's prospects seem even brighter when she's hired by the celebrated author Henry James to take dictation. But certain ironies soon become evident, the most vivid of which is that the role of the typist, despite those early hints at liberation, is an essentially passive one: as James dictates, Frieda types. During her free time, Frieda makes her own little forays into novel writing, forays that bear the unmistakable stamp of James' influence. But then a guest comes to visit her employer, and Frieda's world shifts its scope. Morton Fullerton is a charming, mysterious, and handsome American living in Paris. He catches Frieda's eye, or she catches his, or both; in any case, it isn't long before Fullerton has asked Frieda to retrieve for him certain compromising letters he's sent, over the years, to Henry James. In other words, he'd like her to steal. If Heyns, an accomplished South African scholar, translator, and writer, relies a bit too often on too-convenient coincidence, that's a forgivable sin. So, too, is the matter of his prose style, which, though elegant for the most part, occasionally, like Frieda's, collapses beneath the weight of James' influence. But his novel plays on a fascinating interchange among the idea of taking dictation, the role of a medium, the concepts of telepathy and thought transference (much in vogue at the time), and the role of the writer who, not unlike a medium, merely gives voice to those who speak through him. Then there are the cameos by real-life, but larger-than-life, personages like Edith Wharton, which are amusing but also convincing: Wharton, like James in this novel, comes to life as a full-fledged character. Literary history blends masterfully with a plot of intrigue in this slim and delightful novel.

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Starred review from December 15, 2016
The great American master storyteller Henry James (author of the classic novel Portrait of a Lady, among many others) intrigues today's novelists, including Colm Toibin (The Master, 2004), who are interested in discovering or at least imagining the nature of his life. Heyns' highly creative novel locates itself in James' final decade, when he was resident of the charming English coastal town of Rye. In Heyns' Author's Note, he explains, My young typewriter typist in modern language is based on Theodora Bosanquet, who was in James' employ from 1907 to his death. James does not write in longhand or type, but rather dictates to his typewriter, our heroine, Frieda Wroth, as he paces the room orally spinning his intricate plots. With threads of spiritualism, which was popular at the time, woven into the story, Heyns creates an engaging and highly suitable whodunit atmosphere to support her tale, which is centered on an American friend of James, Morton Fullerton, paying a visit to James in Rye, arranging a rendezvous with Frieda, and enlisting her aid in finding and securing a cache of letters in James' possession, letters that certain parties, including Fullerton's and James' good friend, novelist Edith Wharton, would not want exposed. Faithfully re-created real-life individuals mix well with authentically drawn fictitious ones.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)