Saturday in Byblos:
Henry James’s ‘Special Type’ and the Ethics of Exploitation

The New York Times never could compete with Dear Abby in the New York Post (“Dear Abby: My married mistress abandoned me for spending too much time on Wordle”). So when it redesigned its magazine in 1999 it plagiarized Abby and called the column “The Ethicist.” 

It’s just as irresistible if more white- than blue-collared, like the inaugural question by a reader who in those quaint days of computer screens the size of F-150s glimpsed a colleague’s email to her boss that trashed her, or more recent queries that, like giant flashing billboards in Times Square, blare the tone-deaf elitism of the paper: “Should I feel bad about joining a concierge medical practice?” Or: “Is it bad to buy into a gentrified neighborhood?” Or, more endurably, “My father had an affair while my mother was dying. Should I tell my siblings?” 

Here’s one that appeared in slightly different form in a precursor to Dear Abby and The Ethicist, this one in the June 16, 1900 issue of Collier’s Weekly.

“My name is Mr. Brivet.” (You can tell he’s a prick immediately; only an unspecial type hoists an honorific over a first name.) “I’m married to Mrs. Brivet. I don’t love her anymore. The feeling is mutual. I’m in love with Mrs. Cavenham, and we want to marry. The odious Mrs. Brivet won’t grant me a divorce, at least not without cause: she would like to blame me, and she wants the blame well publicized in our social circle. I don’t mind the blame. As you can imagine, I’m disgustingly rich and not everyone’s affinity. But do I do it without unnecessarily slandering Mrs. Cavenham? She doesn’t want to look like a homewrecker.

“I hung fire until I got a terrific idea while visiting a painter who likes to think he’s a friend of mine. He was sketching someone or other who frequently sits for him, Alice Dundene. She’s one of the most beautiful and good-natured of women, but she’s no lady. I decided to stage an affair with her and publicize it. No one knows her in our circles, no one would care. I certainly wouldn’t. Besides, Alice would be handsomely remunerated. Money always simplifies. I let her in on the trick to keep her strings off my pegs. 

“It did the trick. Mrs. Brivet filed, and I was free. Problem is, Alice fell in love with me. I can’t blame her. But it’s not changing our deal. She so loves me that she wants the best for me. She wants what I want. If I want Mrs. Cavenham, then so be it. That she hates Mrs. Cavenham, whom she finds awfully pretty–though she said she’d hate her even if she found her ugly–makes Alice even more of a special type. In the way of service and sacrifice for love I’ve really known nothing go beyond it. My question is: how is any of this not a win-win for all concerned?”

As suggested by clues borrowed copiously from the original, Brivet’s question is a summary of a Henry James story, “The Special Type,” that first appeared in that 1900 issue of Collier’s (you can read it in full here.) The plot, the names, the syntax and some of the lines–down to “disgustingly rich”–are lifted word for word out of the story, which may as well have been a letter to an ethicist: the unnamed painter and narrator of the story plays that role. He finds Alice “too good for [Brivet’s] fell purpose,” and tells him so, only for Brivet to protest that “my purpose is a sacred one.” It isn’t just in James’s time that the honorific-minded sanctify class-rancid exploitation. 

This isn’t a horror story in the “Turn of the Screw” sense of Henry James. But the claustrophobic demands of social standing create halls of horror familiar to us even in the most modern relationships. The horror in “The Special Type,” besides a title that commodifies the only lady and real human in the story, is Alice’s sacrificial complicity on one hand and Mrs. Cavenham’s indifferent one on the other. Cavenham thinks so little of Alice that she doesn’t even see her as a commodity, as her future husband does, but as them. Brivet could have had any quantity of them, but Mrs. Cavenham offers him “quality.” So she refuses to refer to Alice by name, using instead “the collective and promiscuous plural pronoun” she had no reason to imagine would one day be minted in non-binary power. Henry James is a golden bowl of irony, especially when he doesn’t intend it.

You get the sense that James harbors a flickering of admiration for Brivet’s transactional success (just as he harbored at least some jealousy for the “disgustingly rich” American) even as he patronizes Alice by putting her on a pedestal–a literal pedestal in the story as she sits for paintings, a metaphorical one in James’s vast universe of oblivious sexism. He visited a similar theme in Portrait of a Lady, shoving Isabel Archer back into her miserable marriage in sacrifice to social expectations. It never bothered James much that highbrow marriage depended on the condemnation of women to second-class status. They had a role to fulfill, not a life to live, and sometimes they required the lubricant of “special types.”  

The ever-twisty James gives us an ending where sexual–if onanistic–possession triumphs over social hierarchies. The newly bejeweled Mrs. Cavenham commissioned the painter for a portrait of her beloved. The result is the painter’s masterpiece, “the very view of him she had desired to possess; it was the dear man in his intimate essence for those who knew him; and for anyone who should be deprived of him it would be the next best thing to the sound of his voice.” 

As a parting gift Brivet had offered to Alice “whatever in the world I most desire.” She asked the painter for a portrait of her unrequited. The painter, turning the tables on everyone, lies to her and says Brivet sat for him for just that reason. He gives her the painting. “It will be him for me,” Alice says. “I shall live with it, keep it all to myself, and–do you know what it will do?–it will seem to make up.” For what? We learn that Alice and Brivet had never been alone. No nudge-nudge-wink-wink between them. But now they can be. She can finally “live” with him. 

“Believing that one possesses something is as sweet as actually possessing it,” André Gide had written in his first novel nine years before James’s “Special Type” appeared, “and aren’t all possessions ultimately illusory?” Now who’s commodifying whom? It isn’t exactly “Lars and the Real Girl,” but close, and with a little more fluidity around the pronouns.