John Delavoy

John Delavoy is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Cosmopolis magazine in 1898 and collected in The Soft Side the same year. It belongs to the run of stories from the 1890s where James was thinking about the figure of the serious writer and the public that does not quite know what to do with such a writer.

The story is told by a young critic who has long admired the novelist John Delavoy, a difficult and uncompromising writer who has died without becoming famous. The narrator visits Delavoy’s sister and is shown a portrait of her brother, which he asks permission to publish in a magazine along with a serious critical essay. The magazine editor, however, only wants the picture and a chatty personal sketch. The story turns on the negotiation between the narrator who wants to do justice to Delavoy as an artist and the editor who knows what sells.

It is one of James’s running arguments about the place of serious literature in a commercial press, and the comedy is grim. The editor is not a villain, just a man doing his job. The narrator is not a hero, just a critic with limited power. The sister is the most quietly interesting character, a woman who has lived with the work and the failure and who understands more than anyone realises about what is being offered.

The story sits next to The Death of the Lion, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Next Time as part of James’s group of fables about literary life. It is shorter than those and probably less famous, but it has the same dry humor about magazine economics and the same affection for the kind of writer who never sells. For James readers who liked the longer stories about novelists, this is a natural follow on.