The Reverberator

PRAISE FOR HENRY JAMES
AND THE REVERBERATOR

“Nowhere has Mr. James been more successful … an exceedingly careful and artistic piece of work.”

—LITERARY WORLD

(BOSTON)

“Most admirable … Francie’s fortunes are narrated with … incomparable ease, grace, and brilliancy”

—THE NATION

“A delicious Parisian bonbon … simply delicious.”

—WILLIAM JAMES

“Marked throughout by real genius.”

—THE SPECTATOR

“Realism found its chief exemplar in Mr. James … A novelist he is not, after the old fashion, or after any fashion but his own.”

—WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

“The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry James’s work.… He has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places. There are no secrets left within his range. He has disclosed them as they should be disclosed—that is, beautifully.”

—JOSEPH CONRAD

THE REVERBERATOR

HENRY JAMES as born in New York City in 1843, the son of theologian Henry James, Sr., and brother of philosopher William James. He entered Harvard Law School at nineteen but soon quit to write and travel in Europe, spending considerable time in Paris, where he met Flaubert, Turgenev, George Eliot, and Zola. Settling in London in 1876, he gained international fame with Daisy Miller, which scandalized Victorian society—and sold thousand of copies. Never again would he equal its popularity, but his increasingly sophisticated and meticulously observed work, such as The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors, established him as the first master of psychological fiction and a peerless portrayer of Americans in Europe. He was also adept at the form of the novella, and such examples as The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers contributed to his critical acclaim. James also made an attempt at a theatrical career, but after the failure of his play, Guy Domville, he retreated to Rye, on the south coast of England. He died there in 1916, shortly after becoming a British citizen.

CHOIRE SICHA is the co-proprietor of The Awl. He is a columnist for Bookforum, a former editor of Gawker, and the author of Very Recent History (HarperCollins, 2013).

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

—HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

THE REVERBERATOR

First serialized in Britain in Macmillan’s Magazine, 1888, and published in volume form the same year by Macmillan and Co., London and New York

© 2013 Melville House Publishing

Introduction © 2013 Choire Sicha

Melville House Publishing

145 Plymouth Street

Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.mhpbooks.com

eISBN: 978-1-61219-157-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record is available from the Library of Congress

v3.1

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Epigraph

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Other Books in This Series

INTRODUCTION

BY CHOIRE SICHA

Pretty pre-socialite May Marcy McClellan’s father had run for president against Abraham Lincoln in 1864, and later became governor of New Jersey. Her brother would, in 1904, become the mayor of New York City, and beat William Randolph Hearst for his second term; he had “drifted” into politics, as his Times obituary hilariously put it, upon becoming close with Tammany Hall figures while a politics reporter. Which is to say, she was fancy.

On November 14, 1886—shortly after her father died and shortly before her mother settled on Fifth Avenue across the street from the Astors—McClellan published an account of her recent time in Italy in the New York World. She begins with some lush description, and immediately scores a wild gaffe at the end of the first paragraph: “The picturesque Hotel Excelsior, situated on a hill some little distance from the town, was formerly a villa belonging to the patrician family of Morosini, of Venice, but a few years ago they were obliged for pecuniary reason to sell it.”

She discusses the women in detail, particularly their pearls:

I have counted as many as seventeen strings of huge ones around one woman’s neck. What makes it so much more remarkable is that these jewels are not the exception but the rule … Among the most to be envied was Donna Beatrice Engelfred, daughter of Prince Pia di Lavvia, who varied her appearance daily by wearing first sapphires, literally as large as pigeons’ eggs, then diamond solitaires, which any New York millionairess might envy.

She relays the current “Anglomania”: “The Romans and Neapolitans have it badly; it made me feel quite at home to see the preternaturally grave expression, the lurching walk and excessively British garments of these Latin dudes.” She then goes on about a “Princess Zucchini”—it really is like a parody!—and how the beauty of these people is their simplicity: the olive eyes, the early marriages, the handsome men …

This hilarious, probably racist but also really quite charming column, running on page ten as it did, still resulted in much astonished clutching of those European pearls. Henry James saw McClellan in Florence just a few months later, and subsequently absolutely trashed her in private letters to friends.

The column and the outcry had such an impact that, one year and three days later, James laid out the tale for himself—in quite a dishy fashion, as was the custom for his notebooks—along with the ways in which he would disguise and alter it for a novel:

Last winter, in Florence, I was struck with the queer incident of Miss McC.’s writing to the New York World that inconceivable letter about the Venetian society whose hospitality she had just been enjoying—and the strange typicality of the whole thing. She acted in perfect good faith and was amazed, and felt injured and persecuted, when an outcry and an indignation were the result … I shouldn’t have thought of the incident if in its main outline it hadn’t occurred: one can’t say a pretty and “nice” American girl wouldn’t do such a thing, simply because there was a Miss McC. who did it …

Just two weeks from then James was pitching this story to an editor, and The Reverberator, the result of these notes, began serialization in Macmillan’s three months later, in February 1888. It overlapped with the serial publication of The Aspern Papers in The Atlantic. (This was when Henry James was working on a Woody Allen schedule; hilariously, he thought everything was moving quite slowly, but that was probably because he was then quite concerned about his finances.)

The story that sprang from the International McClellan Incident is of Francie Dosson, a pretty and rich 25-year-old American girl. She and her un-pretty, conniving sister and simple father come from Boston to Paris. They meet a reporter named George Flack at sea on the way, who then tours them through town. Flack falls for Francie, but has introduced her to a trendy painter, who is painting frightening “Impressionist” portraits. (Sidebar! 1888 was already sixteen official years into Impressionism; and that year Gauguin was painting alongside Van Gogh, and Monet began his endless haystacks.) This painter’s best friend, of an American family (from “Carolina”) that has married ridiculously well into France and become Frencher-than-thou, falls for Francie as well. In the face of rivalry Flack decides he wants more than just Francie: he’s also after some hot copy for his American paper, The Reverberator.

A third of the way through the book, Mr.