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Scholarship > Singularly like a bad illustration
"Singularly like a bad illustration" :
The Appearance of Henry James's
"The Real Thing" in the Pot-Boiler Press
When Henry James has the narrator of the short story "The Real Thing" (1892) say he is the kind of artist "who worked in black and white, for magazines, and for storybooks," James is making an implicit joke that readers commonly miss (RT 309). "The Real Thing" first appeared for British audiences in a semi-monthly periodical entitled Black and White, and it appeared accompanied by simple, single-color illustrations, which were known as paintings in "black-and-white." The story's original readers heard someone say he "worked in black and white" while they read an illustrated magazine called Black and White. The narrator's casual remark that Mrs. Monarch looked "singularly like a bad illustration" appeared on the same pages that showed actual illustrations, and another comment from later in the story, that "in those days there were few serious workers in black-and-white," subtly make light of both the magazine's title and the artistic medium (RT 312, 338 - 339). "The Real Thing," as it has come down to modern readers a century after its composition, then, is only half of the story's original text. The first readers of James's tale found it to be a combination of the words of James's narrator, an artist in black-and-white, and the paintings of an actual artist, who was faced with the task of illustrating James's story in Black and White.
Indeed, more than this story's modern readers commonly realize, the written text of "The Real Thing" subtly critiques the visual art that the editors of Black and White originally supplied for the story. Robert Gale noted in 1963 that the story's use of the phrase "black and white" probably poked fun at the periodical's title and illustrations. Virtually alone in noting the phrase's significance, Gale determined that James was "surely criticizing the quality of black-and-white magazine illustrations," and concluded that James clearly "had more things in mind" than a periodical's paintings when he wrote the tale (65, 66). What James did have in mind, according to influential readers from Leon Edel and F.O. Matthiessen to Virginia Hopkins Winner, was a dramatization of his own anti-mimetic theories. Artists, according to this way of thinking, do not reproduce the world with so-called photographic realism, but refine it, and produce something that approaches transcendent "truth" as it subordinates quotidian or sordid details.1 As Winner phrases this interpretation, "the finished work . . . is different in kind from the real thing; art clarifies, transforms, stylizes life." "The real thing," as the narrator of the tale demonstrates, "is indeed lost, but what is gained is truer and everlasting" (Winner 110). A later generation of readers seeks to evaluate the suspicious aesthetics of the story's narrator. These readers do not trust the narrator to voice James's own inclinations, so much as see him trying to obscure the power arrangements that he enacts with and through his art.2 Seeking to integrate the histories of literature and photography, a third group, which often overlaps with the second, reads the narrator's theories and practices in light of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photographic frontispieces for James's New York Edition, or in light of the Merchant / Ivory adaptations of many of his novels.3 But "The Real Thing" had a more immediate encounter with visual technology than any of these prominent readings of the story recognize, in that black-and-white paintings supposedly aided its first readers when they interpreted the written text. As a verbal artist competing with visual artists for space and for readers' attention, James tries to control the appearance of "The Real Thing" in a popular periodical. While deftly satirizing periodicals and their illustrators, James tries to demonstrate what verbal artists can "do" on a magazine's pages, and in front of reading audiences, that visual artists cannot. James in fact subtly devises "The Real Thing" to foil an artist's attempts to do the tale justice in black-and-white.
Picture and Text
Michael Anesko has characterized James's stance as a popular or as a "high brow" writer by detailing "James's calculated attempts to avoid both the din of commercialism and the silence of oblivion" (11). That is, he wrote for popular magazines, but tried to maintain a somewhat elitist appeal. He did not wish to appear so popular that he seemed to be a sell-out or a hack writer, nor so esoteric or arcane that he lost his audience. "The Real Thing" clearly belongs near the noisier end of Anesko's continuum. His two lengthiest serialized novels, The Princess Casamassima (1886) and The Tragic Muse (1890), having recently run their course, James went to Paris in 1891 to work on an "organized pot-boiling basis," as he told Edmund Gosse (SL 74). The series of stories he referred to as "pot-boilers" included "The Real Thing." James's notebook entry on the story indicates that he wished to write a tale that he could easily "place" in a popular magazine. The semi-monthly magazine Black and White, where he had already published two tales in the year since the magazine's debut, seemed like a good place for "The Real Thing" (NB 102).4 James's notebooks also tell us that the idea for this story began when two Londoners, who were down on their luck, applied as models to George Du Maurier, a personal friend of James's who drew satirical society cartoons for the magazine Punch (NB 101 - 105). Du Maurier shared the anecdote with James, who developed the idea into the story readers now know as "The Real Thing." Originating behind the scenes of one London magazine, "The Real Thing" clearly shows James's intentions to match the expected format of another.
Publishing the story meant anticipating both popular and elite audiences, as well as meeting both British and American tastes. James had placed two short stories, "Georgina's Reasons" and "Pandora," in the New York Sun in 1884. Though Anesko points out that the Sun reached an impressive 150,000 readers (87), James clearly regarded it as the organ of an overly broad and undiscriminating audience. But as Marcia Jacobson comments, "James's embarrassment at publishing in the rather lowbrow Sun did not stop him from doing so" (16). He seems indeed to have overcome his embarrassment a second time. The syndicate of S. S. McClure sold "The Real Thing" to the same paper and to at least nine other American papers in early 1892, and "The Real Thing" joined "Georgina's Reasons" and "Pandora" as the only stories in James's canon to make their first appearances in newspapers.5 A tale that modern-day readers customarily discover in unillustrated anthologies found a much different set of venues, and a more visually oriented marketplace, when it made its original appearance. . . .
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