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

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:

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:

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. Flack delivers a chilling and visionary speech to Francie, which he expanded for the (wordier, less punchy) New York edition of 1908, to give this mildly terrifying manifesto: