The Reverberator (2 page)

Well, yow. So Henry James Nostradamus’d
People
magazine and TMZ and actually much of the way we live now.

There were two other events that precipitated this funny novel. James’s notebooks suggest that Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, was a model for Mr. Flack, after he sold
out a family friend by means of a published conversation. James always claimed that he couldn’t abide interviews, but he did subject himself to at least four—including his last with Julian himself in Los Angeles, years later, when James was sixty-two. While James was cautious and perhaps even slick with him, he does give this memorable line about life in America: “These telephones—they pursue one everywhere. At the slightest pretext, one flies to the telephone, on no pretext—for the mere purpose of chatter!” (Whereas now we just text at the table.)

A third incident, according to Allan Burns, writing in the
Henry James Review
in 1995, was James being sold out himself: “He was invited to dine by ‘the terrible Mrs. Sherwood,’ who ‘then wrote a fearful letter about it (I having gone, all unconscious) to the American journals, which she afterwards sent me as if I should be delighted to see it.’ ” Catty!

James’s objection to all this
interviewing
was not some stodgy absurdity. At the time, “interviewing” was the hot new industry-disrupting business plan for the media: writing in the
Henry James Review
in 2007, Matthew Rubery tells us that it was “not practiced in America until the 1860s or in England until the 1880s.”

(Still, this newfangled scheme was slow to dominate. In 1888, the
New-York Daily Tribune
, like other city papers, was crammed with words and news—and, even then, long columns were spent in (so sorry) “aggregation.” On page 4, the “Talk of the Day” ran beneath the “Personal” column—deaths, retirements, etc. From May 5, 1888: “Freight cars from the North still come into Chicago covered in snow.” “Senator Ingalls climbed the Tall Sycamore of the Wabash yesterday,” attributed to the
Washington Critic
. Then, a joke about a hobo’s dog—it’s about the dog eating steak, and essentially reads like a joke about, it seems, “welfare queens”—but of course it’s so hard to tell from here.)

Newspapers were (and are?) a great business, but they were always desperate to get a leg up. When the
New York Times
began in 1851, already hundreds upon hundreds of New York newspapers had risen and died—and William Randolph Hearst only bought his first New York newspaper in 1895. In the battle to stay ahead, publications competed—for example, to see who could obtain the fastest boat, so as to get the news quickest from the ships arriving from Europe and scurry it back to the typesetter. In this competition, New York papers were engineering what was seen as a war on society.

“Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops,’ ” wrote Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in the
Harvard Law Review
in 1890, in a rather overwrought attack on the press in an age when “personal gossip attains the dignity of print.” This is what Henry James saw as the new “devouring
publicity
of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private.”

While America was beginning this slide into celebrity tabloidism, and the first
New York Social Register
—a European import done up in a truly American style—came into being in 1886, it was also the case that in both America and England compulsory education had begun to spread literacy further among the non-rich. So staunch
advocacy journalism about the “lower classes” was being put forward at the same time that these growing audiences of women and non-rich people were discovered to be opportunities for new journalism products.
Tit-Bits
, a silly blog of a thing, was founded in 1881; the idea for a publication filled with small news and notes and humor for ladies came about, recounts Margaret Beetham in
A Magazine of Her Own?
(1996), because a bigwig newspaper editor read items from the real, big-boy paper to his wife, and she just enjoyed it ever so much.

Magazines were introducing reporters’ bylines, to make stars of reporters; newspapers would follow. Oscar Wilde—Henry James’s theatrical competitor, in at least one sense of the phrase—had taken the editorship of
The Lady’s World
in 1887, changing the title to
The Woman’s World
, and was trying to give women the “inside view.” “The creation of stars … began more hesitantly in the press but celebrity interviews, portraits of writers and pictures of their ‘homes’ were soon a staple of the magazines,” writes Beetham.

It was certainly not all fluff and fur capes, although the original manner of “the interview” was what we would call exceedingly friendly. Following in a decent tradition of English muckraking, also in 1887 Nellie Bly published “Ten Days in a Mad-House”—originally in the
New York World
, no less. “[G]irl stunt reporting became a recognizable genre in the popular press of the late 1880s and early 1890s,” according to Jean Marie Lutes’ 2006 history
Front Page Girls
.

This all sounds like a great deal of amazing fun, but when Hearst burst onto the market in 1895 with his
New York Journal
, the papers promptly became louder, bolder,
more crime-obsessed, more graphic, and of course more tabloid—tabloid in a manner nearly identical to the one we know today. Unfortunately, at the same time, the papers also became far less true. What James and others feared certainly came to pass. For better—the media now, for instance, does not
necessarily
solely serve to protect the interests of the rich—and for worse, but mostly for capitalism, we absolutely discarded many of the old notions of privacy.

With all this in mind, you can see James playing little games about newspapers throughout
The Reverberator
. He introduces a ghostly observer-narrator, for seemingly no reason; he pairs off people who, essentially, interview each other; notions about consent and privacy and the presence of light—his sign for publicity—are everywhere.

When James reworked
The Reverberator
for the 1908 New York edition, he coarsened Flack, much as he revised the lady-interviewer character of Henrietta Stackpole in
The Portrait of a Lady
. “James remakes Henrietta as inhuman,” Lutes summarized; he took her from comic foil to evil symbol.

But by then, both the journalists quite probably deserved it.

“In the United States … the publication in the newspapers of the most intimate details of private life is taken as a matter of course,” wrote a reviewer of
The Reverberator
, from the foreign planet of England, in the
Westminster Review
. “In not a few instances the notice of the press is courted rather than resented.”

Reviews of
The Reverberator
were all over the map.
It would be fascinating to have read the book back then, when a newspaper’s ability to scandalize didn’t seem so far-off, and when all the book’s jokes were fresh—just a few have necessarily gone missing along the way, though much of the big hilarity remains. Even contemporaneously, a number of the original reviews were not amused—and a few seemed revealing of the reviewer.

The
New York Times
gave it a pretty solid and dismissive pan. Robert Bridges in
Time
came a bit later, noted these bad reviews, and suggested a reason: “Perhaps the severe criticisms of the press were not a little prompted by the prickings of the editorial conscience, which in its rare moments of introspection discovers how hard it is for the man of best intentions to publish a wide-awake newspaper and not violate some of the conventions by ‘invading the sanctities of the home.’”

Months later, in
The Nation
, one Annie M.R. Logan gave the book a rave, if a funny, ornery one.

She goes on to call it “exceptional.”

And by letter, James’s brother William was enthusiastic
as well—and he was not always the first with praise. “I quite squealed through it, and all the household has amazingly enjoyed it,” he wrote. “It shows the technical ease you have attained, that you can handle so delicate and difficult a fancy so lightly. It is simply delicious.”

As for the rest of us, the young girls in search of high society and the greedy journalists and the terrible rich people who own newspapers, not much has really changed. Certainly in New York City, it all seems to come around again and again. On the front page of the same
New York World
that contained poor May McClellan’s charming Italian diary, there ran a story with the hysterical headline “ARE THE RICH GROWING POORER?” “There is great poverty and much unseen suffering in New York, beyond doubt,” it noted. “But it is a city imperial in wealth and luxury.” The story went on, about the art, the jewels, the newly rich, the “waters studded with pleasure yachts, floating palaces.” In the end, the answer to the headline, as it is to almost every question in a headline, turned out to be “no.” But wouldn’t it fit just perfectly on the front of the
Times
’ “Style” section today?

“I GUESS MY DAUGHTER’S IN HERE,” THE OLD man said, leading the way into the little
salon de lecture
. He was not of the most advanced age, but that is the way George Flack considered him, and indeed he looked older than he was. George Flack had found him sitting in the court of the hotel (he sat a great deal in the court of the hotel), and had gone up to him with characteristic directness and asked him for Miss Francina. Poor Mr. Dosson had with the greatest docility disposed himself to wait upon the young man: he had as a matter of course got up and made his way across the court, to announce to the personage in question that she had a visitor. He looked submissive almost servile, as he preceded the visitor, thrusting his head forward in his quest; but it was not in Mr. Flack’s line to notice that sort of thing. He accepted the old gentleman’s good offices as he would have accepted those of a waiter, murmuring no protest for the sake of making it appear that he had come to see him as well. An observer of these two persons would have assured himself that the degree to which Mr. Dosson thought it natural that any one should want to see his daughter was only equalled by the degree to which the young man thought it natural her father should find her for him. There was a superfluous drapery in the doorway of the
salon de lecture
, which Mr.
Dosson pushed aside while George Flack stepped in after him.

The reading-room of the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham was not of great proportions, and had seemed to Mr. Dosson from the first to consist principally of a bare, highly-polished floor, on which it was easy for a relaxed elderly American to slip. It was composed further, to his perception, of a table with a green velvet cloth, of a fireplace with a great deal of fringe and no fire, of a window with a great deal of curtain and no light, and of the
Figaro
, which he couldn’t read, and the
New York Herald
, which he had already read. A single person was just now in possession of these conveniences—a young lady who sat with her back to the window, looking straight before her into the conventional room. She was dressed as for the street; her empty hands rested upon the arms of her chair (she had withdrawn her long gloves, which were lying in her lap), and she seemed to be doing nothing as hard as she could. Her face was so much in shadow as to be barely distinguishable; nevertheless as soon as he saw her the young man exclaimed—“Why, it ain’t Miss Francie—it’s Miss Delia!”