by Gore Vidal
Howells lived far too long. Shortly before his death at the age of eighty-four, he wrote his old friend Henry James: “I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in the pale moonlight.” By then he had been dismissed by the likes of Sinclair Lewis as a dully beaming happy writer. But then Lewis knew as little of the American literary near-past as today’s writers know, say, of Lewis. If Lewis had read Howells at all, he would have detected in the work of this American realist a darkness sufficiently sable for even the most lost-and-found of literary generations or, as Howells wrote James two years after the Haymarket Square riots: “After fifty years of optimistic content with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end unless it bases itself on a real equality.” What that last phrase means is anyone’s guess. He is a spiritual rather than a practical socialist. It is interesting that the letter was written in the same year that Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 was published. The ideas of Robert Owen that Howells had absorbed from his father (later a Swedenborgian like Henry James, Sr.) were now commingled with the theories of Henry George, the tracts of William Morris, and, always, Tolstoi. Howells thought that there must be a path through the political jungle of a republic that had just hanged four men for their opinions; he never found it. But as a novelist he was making a path for himself and for others, and he called it realism.
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On Thanksgiving Day 1858, the twenty-one-year-old Howells was received at the court of the nineteen-year-old first lady of Ohio, Kate Chase, a handsome ambitious motherless girl who acted as hostess to her father the governor, Salmon P. Chase, a handsome ambitious wifeless man who was, in Abraham Lincoln’s thoughtful phrase, “on the subject of the Presidency, a little insane.”
Howells had grown up in Ohio; his father was an itinerant newspaper editor and publisher. He himself was a trained printer as well as an ambitious but not insane poet. Under the influence of Heine, he wrote a number of poems; one was published in the Atlantic Monthly. He was big in Cleveland. Howells and Kate got on well; she teased him for his social awkwardness; he charmed her as he charmed almost everyone. Although he wrote about the doings of the Ohio legislature for the Cincinnati Gazette, he preferred the company of cultivated ladies to that of politicians. A passionate autodidact, he tended to prefer the company of books to people. But through Kate he met future presidents and was served at table by his first butler.
In a sense the Chase connection was the making of Howells. When Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, Howells was chosen, somewhat improbably, to write a campaign biography of the candidate. Characteristically, Howells sent a friend to Springfield to chat with the subject of his book; he himself never met Lincoln. He then cobbled together a book that Lincoln did not think too bad. One suspects that he did not think it too good, either. Shortly before the president was shot, he withdrew the book for the second time from the Library of Congress: nice that he did not have a copy of it on the coffee table in the Blue Room, but then Lincoln was so unlike, in so many ways, our own recent sovereigns.
Once Lincoln was president, Chase became secretary of the treasury. Chase proposed that the campaign biographer be rewarded with a consulate. But nothing happened until Howells himself went to Washington where he found an ally in Lincoln’s very young and highly literary second secretary, John Hay, who, with the first secretary, John Nicolay, finally got Howells the consulate at Venice.
It is odd to think that a writer as curiously American as Howells should have been shaped by the Most Serene Republic at a bad moment in that ancient polity’s history—the Austrian occupation—rather than by the United States at the most dramatic moment in that polity’s history: the Civil War. Odd, also, that Howells managed, like the other two major writers of his generation, to stay out of the war. Neither Mark Twain nor Henry James rushed to the colors.
Since Howells had practically no official work to do, he learned Italian and perfected his German and French. He turned out poems that did not get printed in the Atlantic. “Not one of the MSS you have sent us,” wrote the editor, “swims our seas.” So Howells went off the deep end, into prose. He wrote Venetian sketches of great charm; he was always to be a good—even original—travel writer. Where the previous generation of Irving and Hawthorne had tended to love far too dearly a ruined castle wall, Howells gave the reader not only the accustomed romantic wall but the laundry drying on it, too. The Boston Advertiser published him.
Then came the turning point, as Howells termed it, in his life. He had acquired a charming if garrulous wife, who talked even more than Mark Twain’s wife, or as Twain put it, when Elinor Howells entered a room “dialogue ceased and monologue inherited its assets and continued the business at the old stand.” Howells wrote a serious study of the Italian theater called “Recent Italian Comedy,” which he sent to the North American Review, the most prestigious of American papers, coedited by his friend James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. At the time, Boston and Cambridge were in the throes of advanced Italophilia. Longfellow was translating Dante; and all the ladies spoke of Michelangelo. Lowell accepted the essay. Howells was now on his way, as a serious writer.
After nearly four years in Venice, which he did not much care for, Howells returned to New York. With a book of sketches called Venetian Life at the printers, he went job hunting. He was promptly hired by E. L. Godkin to help edit The Nation. Not long after, he was hired by the Atlantic Monthly as assistant to the editor; then from 1871 to 1881 he was editor in chief. In Boston, Howells was now at the heart of an American literary establishment which had no way of knowing that what looked to be eternal noon was actually Indian summer—for New England.
Just before Howells had gone to Venice, he had made the rounds of New England’s literary personages. He had met Holmes and Hawthorne whom he had liked; and Emerson whom he had not. Now, at the Atlantic, every distinguished writer came his editorial way; and soon he himself would be one of them. But what sort of writer was he to be? Poetry was plainly not his métier. Journalism was always easy for him, but he was ambitious. That left the novel, an art form which was not yet entirely “right.” The American product of the 1860s was even less “aesthetic” than the English and neither was up to the French, who were, alas, sexually vicious, or to the Russians, who were still largely untranslated except for the Paris-based Turgenev. At this interesting moment, Howells had one advantage denied his contemporaries, always excepting Henry James. He could read—and he had read—the new Europeans in the original. He went to school to Zola and Flaubert. Realism was in the European air, but how much reality could Americans endure? Out of the tension between the adventurousness of Flaubert and the edgy reticence of Hawthorne came the novels of William Dean Howells.
From Heine, Howells had learned the power of the plain style. Mark Twain had also learned the same lesson—from life. Whereas the previous generation of Melville and Hawthorne had inclined to elevated, even “poetic” prose, Twain and Howells and James the First were relatively straightforward in their prose and quotidian in their effects—no fauns with pointed ears need apply. In fact, when Howells first met Hawthorne, he shyly pointed to a copy of The Blithedale Romance and told the great man that that was his own favorite of the master’s works. Hawthorne appeared pleased; and said, “The Germans like it, too.”
But realism, for Howells, had its limits. He had grown up in a happy if somewhat uncertain environment: His father was constantly changing jobs, houses, religions. For a writer, Howells himself was more than usually a dedicated hypochondriac whose adolescence was shadowed by the certainty that he had contracted rabies which would surface in time to kill him at sixteen. Like most serious hypochondriacs, he enjoyed full rude health until he was eighty. But there were nervous collapses. Also, early in life, Howells had developed a deep aversion to sexual irregularity, which meant any form of sexuality outside marriage. Wh
en his mother befriended a knocked-up seamstress, the twelve-year-old Howells refused to pass her so much as the salt at table.
In Venice he could not get over the fact that there could be no social intercourse of any kind with unmarried girls (unlike the fun to be had with The American Girl, soon to be celebrated not only by Henry James but by Howells himself), while every married woman seemed bent on flinging even the purest of young bachelors into the sack. Doubtless, he kept himself chaste until marriage. But he railed a good deal against European decadence, to the amusement of the instinctively more worldly, if perhaps less operative Henry (“Oh, my aching back!”) James, who used to tease him about the latest descriptions of whorehouses to be found in French fiction. Nevertheless, for a writer who was to remain an influence well into the twentieth century, an aversion to irregular sexuality was not apt to endear him to a later generation which, once it could put sex into the novel, proceeded to leave out almost everything else. Where the late-nineteenth-century realistic novel might be said to deal with social climbing, the twentieth-century novel has dealt with sexual climbing, an activity rather easier to do than to write about.
The Library of America now brings us four of Howells’s novels written between 1875 and 1886. Before the publications of these four novels, Howells had already published his first novel, Their Wedding Journey (1871); his second novel, A Chance Acquaintance (1873); as well as sketches of Italy, people, and yet another personage. Elinor Mead Howells was a cousin of President Rutherford (known to all good Democrats as Rather-fraud) B. Hayes. So the campaign biographer of Lincoln, duly and dutifully and dully, wrote a book called Sketch of the Life and Character of Rutherford B. Hayes (1876). Thanks to Cousin Hayes, Howells was now able to reward those who had helped him. James Russell Lowell was sent to London as American ambassador.
Of the books written before A Foregone Conclusion (the first of the four now reissued), the ever-polite but never fraudulent Turgenev wrote Howells in 1874:
Accept my best thanks for the gracious gift of your delightful book Their Wedding Journey, which I have read with the same pleasure experienced before in reading A Chance Acquaintance and Venetian Life. Your literary physiognomy is a most sympathetic one; it is natural, simple and clear—and in the same time—it is full of unobtrusive poetry and fine humor. Then—I feel the peculiar American stamp on it—and that is not one of the least causes of my relishing so much your works.
This was written in English. In a sense, Turgenev is responding to Howells’s championing of his own work (Howells had reviewed Lisa and Rudin) but he is also responding to a sympathetic confrere, a young writer whom he has influenced though not so much as has “the peculiar American stamp.” Unfortunately, Turgenev never lived to read the later books. It would be interesting to see what he might have made of A Modern Instance, a book as dark and, at times, as melodramatic as a novel by Zola whose L’Assommoir Turgenev disliked.
A Foregone Conclusion (1875) has, as protagonist, the—what else?—American consul at Venice. The consul is a painter (young writers almost always make their protagonists artists who practice the one art that they themselves know nothing about: It’s the light, you see, in Cimabue). The consul attracts a young priest, Don Ippolito, who wants to emigrate to America and become an inventor. It is no accident that practically the first building in Washington to be completed in imperial marble splendor was the Patent Office. Don Ippolito is a sort of Italian Major Hoople. The inventions don’t really work but he keeps on because “Heaven only knows what kind of inventor’s Utopia our poor, patent-ridden country appeared to him in those dreams of his, and I can but dimly figure it to myself.” Here the auctorial “I” masquerades as the “I” of the consul, Ferris, who is otherwise presented in the objective third person. Howells has not entirely learned Turgenev’s lesson: stay out of the narrative. Let the characters move the narration and the reader. Howells’s native American garrulousness—and tendentiousness—occasionally breaks in.
Enter, inexorably, middle-aged American lady and daughter—Mrs. Vervain and Florida. This was four years before Howells’s friend sicked Daisy Miller on to a ravished world. But then The American Girl was to be a Howells theme, just as it was to be James’s and, later, and in a much tougher way, Mrs. Wharton’s. As every writer then knew, the readers of novels were mostly women, and they liked to read about the vicissitudes of young women, preferably ladies. But while James would eventually transmute his American girls into something that Euripides himself might find homely (e.g., Maggie Verver), Howells tends, gently, to mock. Incidentally, I do not believe that it has ever before been noted that the portrait of Florida is uncannily like Kate Chase.
It is a foregone conclusion that American girl and American mother (“the most extraordinary combination of perfect fool and perfect lady I ever saw”) will miss the point to Don Ippolito and Venice and Europe, and that he will miss the point to them. Don Ippolito falls in love with Florida. The Americans are horrified. How can a priest sworn to celibacy…? Since they are Protestants, the enormity of his fall from Roman Catholic grace is all the greater. Although Don Ippolito is perfectly happy to give up the Church, they will not let him. Mother and daughter flee. As for Ferris, he has misunderstood not only Don Ippolito but Florida’s response to him. Don Ippolito dies—with the comment to Ferris, “You would never see me as I was.”
The consul goes home to the States and joins the army. Like so many other characters in the works of those writers who managed to stay out of the Civil War, Ferris has a splendid war: “Ferris’s regiment was sent to a part of the southwest where he saw a good deal of fighting and fever and ague” (probably a lot easier than trying to get a job at the Atlantic). “At the end of two years, spent alternately in the field and the hospital, he was riding out near the camp one morning in unusual spirits, when two men in butternut fired at him: one had the mortification to miss him; the bullet of the other struck him in the arm. There was talk of amputation at first…” Pre-dictaphone and word processor, it was every writer’s nightmare that he lose his writing arm. But, worse, Ferris is a painter: he can never crosshatch again. Broke, at a loose end, he shows an old picture at an exhibition. Florida sees the picture. They are reunited. Mrs. Vervain is dead. Florida is rich. Ferris is poor. What is to be done?
It is here that the avant-garde realism of Howells shoves forward the whole art of the popular American novel: “It was fortunate for Ferris, since he could not work, that she had money; in exalted moments he had thought this a barrier to their marriage; yet he could not recall anyone who had refused the hand of a beautiful girl because of the accident of her wealth, and in the end, he silenced his scruples.” This is highly satisfying.
Then Howells, perhaps a bit nervous at just how far he has gone in the direction of realism, tosses a bone of marzipan to the lady-reader: “It might be said that in many other ways he was not her equal; but one ought to reflect how very few men are worthy of their wives in any sense.” Sighs of relief from many a hammock and boudoir! How well he knows the human heart.
Howells smiles at the end; but the smile is aslant, while the point to the tragedy (not Ferris’s for he had none, but that of Don Ippolito) is that, during the subsequent years of Ferris’s marriage, Don Ippolito “has at last ceased to be even the memory of a man with a passionate love and a mortal sorrow. Perhaps this final effect in the mind of him who has realized the happiness of which the poor priest vainly dreamed is not the least tragic phase of the tragedy of Don Ippolito.”
This coda is unexpectedly harsh—and not at all smiling. A priest ought not to fall in love. It is a foregone conclusion that if you violate the rules governing sexuality, society will get you, as Mrs. Wharton would demonstrate so much more subtly in The Age of Innocence; and Henry James would subtly deny since he knew, in a way that Howells did not, that the forbidden cake could be both safely eaten and kept. It is an odd irony that the donnée on which James based The Ambassadors was a remark that the fifty-seven-year-old Howells made to
a friend in Paris: No matter what, one ought to have one’s life; that it was too late for him, personally, but for someone young…“Don’t, at any rate, make my mistake,” Howells said. “Live!”
Kenneth S. Lynn has put the case, persuasively to my mind, that the “happy endings” of so many of Howells’s novels are deliberately “hollow or ironic. After all, it was Howells who had fashioned the, to Edith Wharton, “lapidary phrase”: Americans want tragedies with happy endings. There are times when Howells’s conclusion—let’s end with a marriage and live happily ever after—carry more formidable weight than the sometimes too-lacquered tragic codas of James: “We shall never be again as we were.” The fact is that people are almost always exactly as they were and they will be so again and again, given half a chance.
At forty-four, the highly experienced man of letters began his most ambitious novel, A Modern Instance. Although the story starts in a New England village, the drama is acted out in the Boston of Howells’s professional life, and the very unusual protagonist is a newspaperman on the make who charms everyone and hoodwinks a few; he also puts on too much weight, steals another man’s story, and makes suffer the innocent young village heiress whom he marries. In a sense, Howells is sending himself up; or some dark side of himself. Although Bartley Hubbard is nowhere in Howells’s class as a writer, much less standard-bearer for Western civilization, he is a man who gets what he wants through personal charm, hard work, and the ability to write recklessly and scandalously for newspapers in a way that the young William Randolph Hearst would capitalize on at century’s end, thus making possible today’s antipodean “popular” press, currently best exemplified by London’s giggly newspapers.
