"Literary Prestige Is the Eminence of Nobodies": Henry James, Literary Work, and Celebrity in the Illustrated London News

Critics have long laid to rest the image of Henry James as the supremely detached artist-in-words, supported by family wealth, concerned alone with the stylistic and moral complexity of his fictions, resolutely disdainful of the marketplace. Rather, as Michael Anesko has convincingly demonstrated, James was a uniquely canny navigator of the rapidly transforming, late nineteenth-century Anglo-American publishing industry. James, Anesko argues, "showed from the first a deliberate awareness of the marketplace," and "earned his way by literary labor until he was past fifty." ¹ Indeed, the tension between James's devotion to his own brand of self-conscious artistry and his eager if conflicted accommodations to the imperatives of the literary marketplace animates and structures much of his fiction. ² It produces, among many other tropes, James's plethora of journalist characters, aggressively commercial modern men and women who typically embody the excesses of a print culture obsessed with sensation, celebrity, and speed at the expense of sobriety, privacy, and subtle, judicious criticism. As Daniel Borus has pointed out, characters such as Henrietta Stackpole in Portrait of a Lady, the ironically named George Flack of The Reverberator, and Matthias Pardon in The Bostonians "at nearly every step . . . frustrate the perceptions and ideals of the characters about whom James is most concerned." ³

But these characters are not merely straw men (and women) for James's defense of high art: they provide vehicles for James to dramatize the contemporary instabilities in the cultural meanings of authorship, literature, and literary work. James's journalist characters typically view themselves, or are viewed by others, as "literary" figures. The Boston socialites surrounding Matthias Pardon see him as having "an appearance perfectly reconcilable with a large degree of literary attainment," which they define as "a state of intimacy with the newspapers, the cultivation of the great arts of publicity." Flack, when his newspaper work is compared to another characters' reading of fiction, opines, "Well, it's all literature." ⁴ This linkage appears to readers of our era as a conflation of literature and journalism, an interpretation the stories support by devaluing the opinions of the journalist characters and thus implicitly asserting a clear distinction between the two spheres of activity. In historical context, however, the depiction of characters who view paragraph writing for the newspapers as "literary labor" is also a historically accurate, realistic (if simultaneously ironic) touch. The historical distinction between journalism and literature was emerging in these years as part of a wider contestation about authorship, literature, and the cultural meanings of writing and literary work. ⁵ In these stories James was, in other words, intervening to draw and underscore distinctions, to define the nature of literary work, to assert a model of authorship, and to satirize other, competing models.

"Greville Fane" (1892) is an interesting and relatively unnoticed working out of these issues, which we encounter through the lens of an unnamed narrator, a journalist and a fiction writer with pretensions to art and a disappointed skepticism toward the literary marketplace. ⁶ But this essay is not another explication of James's "take" on authorship and the literary marketplace. ⁷ Rather, this essay revisits the appearance of "Greville Fane" in the resolutely commercial space of the Illustrated London News (ILN) to demonstrate the degree to which James's satire of contemporary print culture gets complicated, contained, and undercut by its surroundings. "Greville Fane" seeks to satirize literary celebrity and the notion of fiction writing as "a job like any other," which can be mastered through training and experience. By placing this story in the Illustrated London News, which traded in literary celebrity and largely sanctioned a market understanding of literary production, James may have sought to carry his critique of these values into enemy territory; this essay is precisely an examination of how, in that setting, James's "take" will not take when it is literally framed and contained by the dominant values of the Illustrated London News, values that are visible both in the words of other writers and, more subtly but equally...