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February 23, 2005
OGIC: Mr. Plimpton and Mr. Deedy
When we last tuned in to the adventures or misadventures of the post-Plimpton Paris Review, the Board of Directors had announced that they would not renew the contract of editor Brigid Hughes. Hughes by all accounts had been trying to keep the prestigious but not popular journal steered as near as possible to the trail her mentor George Plimpton had blazed for it. On the news of her certain departure, observers speculated that the board had different ideas about little matters like circulation and profitability, and were taking delayed advantage of the power vacuum left by Plimpton's death to remake the Review as a more relevant and remunerative publication.At the time, all of this reminded me powerfully of something. But I didn't figure out what it was until this week: the opening scenes of an 1894 short story by Henry James, "The Death of the Lion." The story is freely available for downloading here. "The Death of the Lion" is narrated by the right-hand man of the recently deceased editor of a London weekly that has been taken over by a Mr. Pinhorn (is there anyone who is better at names than James at his best?). Mr. Pinhorn is all about the numbers.
Mr. Pinhorn was my "chief," as he was called in the office: he had accepted the high mission of bringing the paper up. This was a weekly periodical, and had been supposed to be almost past redemption when he took hold of it. It was Mr. Deedy who had let it down so dreadfully--he was never mentioned in the office now save in connection with that misdemeanour. Young as I was I had been in a manner taken over from Mr. Deedy, who had been owner as well as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and office-furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and depression, parted with at a rough valuation. I could account for my continuity only on the supposition that I had been cheap. I rather resented the practice of fathering all flatness on my late protector, who was in his unhonoured grave; but as I had my way to make I found matter enough for complacency in being on a "staff." At the same time I was aware that I was exposed to suspicion as a product of the old lowering system. This made me feel that I was doubly bound to have ideas, and had doubtless been at the bottom of my proposing to Mr. Pinhorn that I should lay my lean hands on Neil Paraday. I remember he looked at me as if he had never heard of this celebrity, who indeed at that moment was by no means in the middle of the heavens; and even when I had knowingly explained he expressed but little confidence in the demand for any such matter. When I had reminded him that the great principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the demand we required, he considered a moment and then rejoined: "I see; you want to write him up."
Pinhorn, we learn, has turned a genteel journal into a glorified gossip rag. Under Deedy the journal appears to have been mainly critical; Pinhorn has turned it into a fin-de-siècle People Magazine. In hatching his plan to write something about the literary light Neil Paraday, the narrator is trying to thread a a very small needle, maintaining a shred of the old high-mindedness of the journal under Deedy while satisfying Pinhorn's demand for newsworthiness. In the interest of giving his piece the appearance of being a scoop, he arranges to visit the reclusive author Paraday at home.
I was unregenerate, as I have hinted, and I was not concerned to straighten out the journalistic morals of my chief, feeling them indeed to be an abyss over the edge of which it was better not to peer. Really to be there this time moreover was a vision that made the idea of writing something subtle about Neil Paraday only the more inspiring. I would be as considerate as even Mr. Deedy could have wished, and yet I should be as present as only Mr. Pinhorn could conceive. My allusion to the sequestered manner in which Mr. Paraday lived (which had formed part of my explanation, though I knew of it only by hearsay) was, I could divine, very much what had made Mr. Pinhorn bite. It struck him as inconsistent with the success of his paper that anyone should be so sequestered as that. Moreover, was not an immediate exposure of everything just what the public wanted? Mr. Pinhorn effectually called me to order by reminding me of the promptness with which I had met Miss Braby at Liverpool, on her return from her fiasco in the States. Hadn't we published, while its freshness and flavour were unimpaired, Miss Braby's own version of that great international episode? I felt somewhat uneasy at this coupling of the actress and the author...
So the narrator gets "bundled off" to Paraday's, where he sits down and writes "merely a finicking, feverish study of my author's talent"--i.e., something purely critical, dirt not included. Pinhorn's response is rapid:
That night my manuscript came back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied with a letter, of which the gist was the desire to know what I meant by sending him such stuff....Mr. Pinhorn's note was not only a rebuke decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him (it was the case to say so) the genuine article, the revealing and reverberating sketch to the promise of which--and of which alone--I owed my squandered privilege.
This the narrator declines to do, marking the end of his tenure with the journal--his dismissal by the board, so to speak. The eventual fate of his critical piece goes to show whose side the reading public is on:
A week or two later I recast my peccant paper, and giving it a particular application to Mr. Paraday's new book, obtained for it the hospitality of another journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far justified that it attracted not the least attention.
This is grim, but not altogether easy to parse. Am I wrong to think that, despite the common pessimism of James's story (and for an even direr take on the 1890s literary scene, see George Gissing's 1891 novel New Grub Street) and today's Paris Review watchdogs, there's something slightly leavening in the realization that, 110 years on, it's essentially the same battle still being fought? This implies, at least, that it hasn't yet been lost. Besides which, we don't yet know what the new PR will look like, and under whose guidance it will be transformed--though there seems little doubt that transformed it will be. Finally, although the narrator of "Death of the Lion" seems decidedly on the side of the angels as far as the struggle for publishing's soul goes, that doesn't mean he's necessarily such an appealing figure himself. He has more than a little in common with the half-ridiculous, half-monstrous narrator of "The Aspern Papers," another Jamesian literary leech. Ambivalence, as usual in James and in life, carries the day.
I actually want to say more about "The Death of the Lion" and its portrait of a devolving literary sphere--there are some choice bits I've left out. Alas, it will have to wait until after I do a little (paid) finicking, feverish study of my own.
Posted February 23, 2005 3:46 AM
