Volume 44, Number 1 · January 9, 1997
The Real Thing
By Janet Malcolm
Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans
reproduced from prints made by Lee Friedlander, Introduction by Susan Sontag, interviews edited by John Szarkowski
Random House, 83 pp., $60.00
'The Real Thing,' one of Henry James's most delicate exercises in irony, is the story of a young artist's encounter with an odd couple—a well-dressed, middle-aged, rather vacuous pair named the Monarchs, who come to his studio one day and offer themselves as professional models. He is taken aback—he had thought they were society people who had come to have their portraits painted. Well, they are society people, as he is, but society people who have lost their money and desperately need work. They have learned that the artist does illustrations for book and magazine fiction and propose themselves as models for the high-born characters. As the husband puts it, ''Wouldn't it be rather a pull sometimes to have—a—to have—?' He hung fire; he wanted me to help him by phrasing what he meant. But I couldn't—I didn't know. So he brought it out, awkwardly: 'The real thing; a gentleman, you know, or a lady.''
Review, 4626 words
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