A Hazard of New Fortunes
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
PART FIRST
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
PART SECOND
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
PART THIRD
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
PART FOURTH
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
PART FIFTH
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
Arguably the most influential man of letters in the turn of the century United States and a great promoter of literary realism, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) began his career as a journalist at the Ohio State Journal while still in his teens. The cleverness, wit, and explicit political engagement of his work quickly earned him professional success, and his poetry, stories, and reviews began appearing in a number of leading magazines in the country. His campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, compiled in 1860, coupled with his militant liberalism prompted the administration to offer him the consulship in Venice, a post he held from 1861 to 1865. Upon his return from Europe, Howells came onboard the Atlantic Monthly, eventually becoming editor-in-chief of the magazine. In this position he closely worked with many writers, among them Mark Twain and Henry James. Howells’ enormous literary output ranged from poetry and journalism to full-blown novels, and his position as an enthusiastic exponent of the new realism earned him the respected title of Dean of American letters. Among his many works are such classic novels as A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and Indian Summer (1886).
Phillip Lopate is an essayist, novelist, poet, and lifelong New Yorker. His essay collections include Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and A Portrait of My Body, and he also edited the anthologies Writing New York and The Art of the Personal Essay. His novels are The Rug Merchant and Confessions of Summer. He has published a collection of film criticism, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, where he is currently completing a study of the New York waterfront. He is Adams Professor of English at Hofstra University.
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First published in Scotland by D. Douglas 1889
First published in the United States of America by Harper & Bros. 1890
This edition with an introduction by Philip Lopate
published in Penguin Books 2001
Introduction copyright © Phillip Lopate, 2001
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920.
A hazard of new fortunes/William Dean Howells; edited and with and
introduction by Philip Lopate.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-440-67267-5
1. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. Middle aged persons—Fiction. 3. City and
town life—Fiction. 4. Moving, Houshotd—Fiction. 5. Married people—
Fiction. 6. Social Classes—Fiction. I. Lopate, Phillip. II. Title.
PS2025 .H3 2001
813’.5—dc21
2001031336
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INTRODUCTION
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND THE DISCOVERY OF NEW YORK
BY PHILLIP LOPATE
A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells’ best novel—his largest, deepest, most ambitious, and as he himself judged it, “most vital of my fictions”—is also, to put it conservatively, one of the fifty greatest American novels of all time. But its singular importance may be that it was the first novel to capture New York City, or for that matter, any major American city, paving the way, as critic Kermit Vanderbilt has noted, “for Maggie, Sister Carrie, Babbitt, Manhattan Transfer, Miss Lonely-hearts, Invisible Man, and other city novels of the next century.” This pioneering significance aside, it can be enjoyed today for its remarkable freshness, openness, sympathetic wisdom, skillful prose, and quicksilver observations on the contradictions of metropolitan life.
Its title, too musty perhaps for such a lively work, is taken from Shakespeare’s King John (Chatillon, the French diplomat, describes with alarm the English adventurers who have crossed the channel: “Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs, / To make a hazard of new fortunes here”) and announces the theme of outsiders taking chances. The book itself was a gamble for Howells, who had built his fiction reputation on charming, intimate novels that explored a few characters in a tight narrative setting, modeled on Jane Austen and Turgenev; suddenly he took up a large fictional canvas that would portray the darker problems of an industrialized, big-money America and the new dynamic of anonymous masses thrown together in an urban setting. His inspiration, you might say, had switched from Turgenev to Tolstoy; he had fallen under the panoramic sway of Anna Karenina and Tolstoyan socialism. Having given up his post as editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, he had moved his household in the late 1880s from Boston to New York to write a book a year for Harper & Brothers. Such was
his influence at the time, that he was said to have shifted the cultural capital of the country by his own relocation.
The nineteenth-century American fin de siecle was often referred to as “the Age of Howells.” In Alfred Kazin’s memorable assessment,
He had stood at the Great Divide of American literature. He had in his own person—reluctantly, yet with deep and unconscious ardor—united the world of Emerson and the world of Zola; he had riveted his education into the language. Who, indeed, had done as much as he to unify the traditions of American literature? He was more than an Elder Statesman of letters; he had been the greatest single force in the literature of his epoch.
Let us back up a bit, and try to understand what sort of man this Howells—once a Titan—was; how he had attained such eminence; and what external and internal forces were at work, effecting the changes that resulted in his best book.
William Dean Howells was born in Martin Springs, Ohio, on March 1, 1837. In those days, the Ohio Valley was considered “the West,” and some of Howells’ energetic ambition, democratic responsiveness to colloquial American speech, fascination with self-made types, as well as his lingering insecurities and naiveties, might be attributed to the fact that he came from a part of the country that was considered rural and unpolished. He had the sort of untrammeled small-town boyhood that his friend Mark Twain would later immortalize in Tom Sawyer. However, at ten he was forced to drop out of grammar school to set type in the family shop, giving him an early taste of grinding labor. His printer newspaperman father, William Cooper Howells, was a tender-hearted, impractical entrepreneur, a follower of Swedenborgian mysticism who kept getting fired from one periodical after another for explicitly expressing anti-slavery views or otherwise antagonizing the community. His son the future author read in his father’s library after working hours, acquiring a passion for Cervantes, Irving, and Heine.
In his teens Howells wrote sensitive, Heine-influenced poetry while covering state politics as a reporter alongside his father. The young man acquired such journalistic fluency that he was asked to write a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln. The results were quite pleasing, even to the subject himself, and Howells was rewarded with a consulate post in Venice. This was his ticket out of small-town Ohio. In Italy he acquired social polish, learned foreign languages, and read voraciously, broadening his education with continental realistic fiction. The acquisition of worldliness was characteristically joined to the sinking of domestic roots; he also brought his young wife, Elinor Mead, the daughter of a Vermont patrician, with him to Europe. Family life would henceforth be the pivot and anchor for all his expansions.
Back in the United States, having missed the key experience of his generation, the Civil War, he went to work for a brief time in New York at The Nation. Howells later recalled in “My First Impressions of New York” sitting in Pfaff’s beer cellar, taking in the conversation of the Gotham bohemians, and except for the honor of shaking Walt Whitman’s paw, finding the literary exchange much less stimulating than what he would become used to in Boston. He had already been introduced to the chief deities of the Boston Brahmin literary set—James Russell Lowell, his initial, somewhat patronizing, patron; Oliver Wendell Holmes, who gave Howells his blessing, saying to Lowell, “Well, James, this is the apostolic succession, this is the laying on of hands”; the guarded Ralph Waldo Emerson; the more sympathetic Nathaniel Hawthorne; even the reclusive Henry David Thoreau. Soon enough, he was summoned to Boston as assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Howells was now “their boy,” and a few years after, in 1871, when he became the main editor of the Atlantic, he was expected to honor these patriarchs when they sent in their submissions. At the same time, he made it his mission to open the magazine to new voices, such as Bret Harte and Frank Norris, primarily from the West.
In his monthly book reviews for the Atlantic, and later, after he had moved his column to Harper’s Monthly, he became both ideologue and cheerleader for the realistic novel, championing Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Harold Frederic, as well as foreign writers such as Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Giovanni Verga, Perez Galdos, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He encouraged Abraham Cahan, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and praised the eccentricities of Emily Dickinson and Thorsten Veblen. Howells was a great editor, blessed with catholic tastes, generosity toward other writers, and not least, a gift for friendship. The term “the Age of Howells” had as much to do with his bridging function as it did with his clout. That two of his best friends could have been such temperamental opposites as Mark Twain and Henry James says much about Howells’ flexible capacity to appreciate different types of genius. To Twain, he gave superb editorial advice while serializing the first half of Life on the Mississippi: “If I might put in my jaw at this point, I should say, stick to actual fact and character in the thing, and give things in detail. All that belongs with old river life is novel and is now mostly historical. Don’t write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn it off as if into my sympathetic ear. Don’t be afraid of rests or pieces of dead color. I fancied a sort of hurried and anxious air in the first.” For James, he wrote some of the most astute early appreciations of that singular writer. In return, James praised him extravagantly for this or that “enchanting” work, meanwhile wondering behind his back when Howells would put his tough theories of the realist novel into full-fledged practice.
Howells’ early works were indeed enchanting, unfailingly intelligent, and a mite too cozy: the arriviste from Ohio was avid to please. His first novel, Their Wedding Journey, which appeared in 1872, followed the honeymoon of a young couple, Basil and Isabel March, on their voyage through the northeastern United States. Part travel book (Howells had begun as a travel writer and never lost his eye for place detail), part memoir (the Marches were a thinly disguised version of the author and his wife), and part fiction, it became a popular item to give to newlyweds. From the start, Howells’ insightful fascination with the dynamics of marriage is noteworthy. What is also striking, for our purposes here, is the couple’s smugness in putting down New York “with an enjoyment that none but Bostonians can know. They particularly derided the notion of New York’s being loved by anyone ... it was too vast, too coarse, too restless.” The author did distance himself slightly from his characters’ opinions by adding: “And as they twittered their little dispraises, the giant Mother of Commerce was growing more and more conscious of herself.” But he shared, by and large, their disapproval of New York; it was at that moment the correct position for a cultured American, Bostonian or otherwise, to take. And Howells was well on his way to becoming more Bostonian than the Bostonians.
A regular writing machine, he produced novels, short story collections, essays, travel sketches, memoirs. He who had never gotten past grammar school was awarded honorary degrees and asked to teach at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. In an era that respected male plumpness, he grew more portly as he aged—with his girth and gray walrus mustache, he radiated to the world a sense of equilibrium, competence, and contentment. True, the psychic mechanism remained as delicate as it was resilient: Occasionally he would have mental breakdowns, black spells, but they were usually short-lived, and he would be back in the harness, driving himself. He drove a hard bargain, too, in contracts with magazines and book publishers. Determined to be unlike his dreamy, impractical father, Howells showed a shrewd understanding of the business side of culture. He needed all the money he could get to support his wife and three children in grander and grander houses. The Howells family’s passion for “domiciliation” had a restless component, which included regularly uprooting themselves and moving into new digs, embracing the adventure of redecoration.
Howells had thus become the representative spokesman for the middle-class American householder—to the extent that Edmund Wilson could later refer to “the comfortable family men of whom Howells was chief.” A self-made success, Howells tended to project, for the longest while, his own good fortune onto the national landscape, finding
the United States a pretty good place to live. While praising Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, he called upon American writers to reflect “the more smiling aspects of life,” arguing that America, after all, was not so dark a place as Russia, shipping convicts off to Siberia. Understandably, this “smiling aspects” phrase would be used later to lambaste Howells for Pollyanna complacency. But there is another way of interpreting it: In the interests of truth and proportion, the realist novelist must be fair to the positive experiences in life as well as the negative.
Howells’ theory of the realistic novel had led him to reject sentimentality (and excessive gloom is certainly a variant of sentimentality), melodrama, plot contrivance, the romantic hero, and the whole falsifying strain of making characters nobler and larger than life. He became devoted to fiction that reflected truthfulness, the “commonplace,” the rhythms and concerns of ordinary daily life. “The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which they’ve never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to ‘the riddle of the painful earth’ on his tongue,” says one of his characters.
In the 1880s, Howells’ novels began to deepen psychologically and become more socially critical, though he still had a tendency toward timidity or ingratiating entertainment. A Modern Instance (1882), one of Howells’ most powerful and daring novels, probes a disintegrating marriage and takes us to the brink of the inconsolable before backing off gingerly. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) explores class tensions in many subtle ways before its plot devolves into a contrived comedy of misunderstanding. Indian Summer (1886) is an effervescent romantic tale of Americans abroad in Rome, Jamesian in theme if not profundity. These were followed by The Minister’s Charge (1887) and Annie Kilburn (1888), two novels that stretched Howells’ movement toward critical realism without yet breaking out of the miniaturist mode.