Guest post by John Pym: Henry James’s ‘The Death of the Lion’

The title page of Terminations with a portrait of Henry James (1906) by the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photograph of James courtesy of the Literary Canon (S 2464).

An unnamed young Englishman, a lowly journalist with literary ambition, begins to tell a story (cast in the form of ‘meagre’ private notes): the author Neil Paraday is recuperating at home in the country from a grave illness; he’s published four books and his latest work, in two volumes, is about to appear. Signs suggest it will finally make his name. But will he live long enough, the reader wonders, to enjoy his good fortune? So begins Henry James’s tale ‘The Death of the Lion’, divided into ten fast-paced chapters, which appeared in April 1894 in Volume I of The Yellow Book, the Bodley Head’s strikingly illustrated new periodical.

A year later, James gathered together three of his published tales (including ‘The Death of the Lion’), two from The Yellow Book and one from Scribner’s Magazine, each touching on the intermingled themes of the business of literature and the price of reputation. These were to form the basis of a new collection which would conclude with a brand new work, a mystical, slightly suffocating story titled ‘The Altar of the Dead’, a two-hander, one of whose characters is a woman who earns her living by writing for magazines – though magazines, one infers, less generous or cutting-edge than The Yellow Book.

The four tales appeared between hard covers under the title Terminations. Opposite the title page of the English edition the London publisher William Heinemann drew attention to five other six-shilling ‘short stories in one volume’, including Frank Harris’s Elder Conklin and I. Zangwill’s The King of Schnorrers (‘With over Ninety Illustrations by Phil May and Others’, Heinemann added in a second notice at the back of the book).

In 1895 short stories sold well. They were admired and enjoyed, and could, as Terminations demonstrates, be attractively recycled. One reason James favoured The Yellow Book, his biographer Leon Edel notes, was that its publisher offered the inducement of no limit on an author’s word count. ‘The Death of the Lion’ runs to nearly fifteen thousand words, a figure that few if any commissioning editors of print journals would countenance today.

On reading Terminations a few months ago, I was struck first, however, not by the modern anomaly of three short stories reprinted between handsome blue boards, the page signatures of which had to be cut with a paperknife by the book’s first eager reader, but by how little the literary world sardonically (yet often merrily) satirised by Henry James in the closing years of the reign of Queen Victoria, had changed nearly a hundred and thirty years later at the start of the reign of King Charles III.

There were, perhaps, no Hay-on-Wye literary festivals or heaving Frankfurt book fairs in the mid-1890s, or indeed wearisome month-long author tours, but as James’s narrator recounts, looking at the scene from the outside, many of the modern absurdities of the Literary Life – in London, Venice or New York – were then abundantly present and oppressively to the fore.

The story opens, for instance, with a markedly unvarnished scene between our narrator and his ‘chief’, Mr Pinhorn, the sharp new editor of a weekly magazine recently saved from extinction by a fire-sale buy-up. The former pitches the idea of an interview with Mr Paraday: a man who hasn’t as yet, in that cold phrase, ‘been touched’ by anyone else. ‘When I had reminded him [Mr Pinhorn] 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”’ (my italics).

Neil Paraday – his creator’s alter ego? well, maybe – was a timid, somewhat anti-social man anxious mainly to be left in peace to complete his work. He had a rented base in Sloane Street, Chelsea, and a wife from whom he was separated but whose upkeep he paid. He was, at this point, it seems, simply getting by. But fame was about to crash on him like a wave, and the narrator perceives, in a characteristic burst of Jamesian empathy, his author’s acute vulnerability, and without ado (or even permission) appoints himself to the role of amanuensis and gatekeeper.

Enter the vainglorious Mr Morrow, with his walking stick and ‘violently new gloves’, a celebrity gossip columnist, who appears at Paraday’s country retreat, looking for a scoop and boasting of his syndicated effusions in thirty-seven influential journals – including The Tatler’s ‘Smatter and Chatter’ column. He’s a hack crashingly determined to create the required demand. Mr Morrow, the coming man, would not, one feels, have hesitated a second to burglarise a film star’s phone – had there been film stars or mobile phones in 1894.

James warms to his task as the tale unfolds. Next up is the salon hostess Mrs Weeks Wimbush, chatelaine of a grand mansion called Prestidge (pay close attention to these names), to which she invites her grand friends, Lady Augusta Minch and Lord Dorimont, plus a bulky, privileged and perfectly delineated European Princess, to be entertained by her latest literary lion, who, this July, is the luckless and not-at-all-well Neil Paraday.

James has his narrator elegantly embroider the tapestry of his ‘meagre notes’ by beginning to relate the climactic events of this catastrophic house party by means of a letter, a love letter of sorts, to the American heroine of the tale, Miss Fanny Hurter, a would-be autograph hunter first introduced bearing a huge volume containing signatures of the great and the good, living and dead.

I will not spoil the wrap-up – ‘The Death of the Lion’ is available at no cost to read online – except to say that Miss Hurter does not disappoint and that Henry James proves himself a quite exceptional farceur as Mrs Wimbush’s guests first casually disrespect the two volumes of Paraday’s new book, which have been reverentially displayed for them to leaf through and appreciate, and then succeed in losing the manuscript ‘scheme’ of the author’s next and very possibly greatest work.

It should be noted, however, that the tale’s final episode features two other authors wholly unlike Neil Paraday. They’re literary shooting stars possessed of a miraculous insight into ‘the larger latitude’ (whatever that may be) who play key roles in the denouement: Guy Walsingham author of Obsessions, and Dora Forbes author of The Other Way Round. But, heaven’s above! ‘Guy’ is really Miss Collop, ‘a pretty little girl who wore her hair in what used to be called a crop’, while ‘Dora’ is ‘florid and bald; [his face adorned with] a big red moustache’.

‘You bewilder me a little,’ the narrator says to Lady Augusta, chief culprit in the loss of Paraday’s priceless manuscript, when all this is being explained to him, ‘in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders and pronouns.’ Henry James – dated and unreadable..?

* * *

Kittie’s copy of Terminations and George’s inscription.

I’m grateful to Patrick Miles ­– whose Diary post of 6 February 2023, on the subject of short stories, prompted me to write the above – for the kind gift of a copy of the second edition of Terminations. The book came from the Library of George and Kittie Calderon and proved surplus to requirement when the collection was archived. The inscription on the flyleaf reveals that it was a Christmas present to Kittie from George (‘Peety’) in 1905.

© John Pym, 2023

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.