by John Updike
Emerson was always such, of course; as Oliver Wendell Holmes said of him, “He never let go the string of his balloon.” The founder of Emersonianism was not its ideal practitioner; his extraordinary loyalty to the exasperating Bronson Alcott must have resided, it seems to me, in his awe of Alcott’s greatly superior impracticality. Thoreau, too, appeared to Emerson a kind of saint, who, he said in the beautiful eulogy delivered at Thoreau’s funeral in 1862, “lived extempore from hour to hour, like the birds and the angels.” Thoreau even worked miracles: “One day walking with a stranger who inquired, where Indian arrowheads could be found, he replied, ‘Every where,’ and stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground.” More amazing still, “From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.”a No such magical sureness, his self-doubting journals reveal, had been granted Emerson; he felt skeptical about his own enthusiasms, mocking himself, in the essay “Illusions,” as susceptible to any new style or mythology. “I fancy,” he wrote, “that the world will be all brave and right, if dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will daub with this new paint; but it will not stick. ’Tis like the cement which the peddler sells at the door; he makes broken crockery hold with it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the cement which will make it hold when he is gone.”
I found the preparation of this lecture a somewhat recalcitrant process, especially since Emerson himself, as I read him, seemed to be advising against it. Such a performance by a would-be creative writer goes against my own instincts; it is something done to please society, that society which, we have just learned, is a “conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” And I did not even have the excuse, which Emerson had, of making a living by lectures. Further, the subject himself proved elusive and problematical, in the manner I have tried to describe; as I read, a hundred stimulated thoughts would besiege me, but all in the nature of paint that would not stick. What notes I took became scrambled; seeking to refer back to a key passage, I would find the words had quite vanished from Emerson’s pages. So, one morning, I decided to take leave of my bookish responsibilities and work in my cellar upon some modest carpentry project that had been long left hanging. While happily, brainlessly planing away, I turned on the radio—an “educational” station, to be sure—and was treated to a lengthy “Earth Mass” employing not only human voices and conventional musical instruments but tapes of howling wolves, whales conversing in their mysterious booms and groans, and the rushing sound of the Colorado River. How very Emersonian, I thought: and felt his ghost smile within me. For have we not late in this century come to see how it is that “the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative”? Amid all our materialism, have not sheer crowding and shared peril merged nature with our souls?
Then I had to make haste, for I was to take a train from my suburban town into Boston; I was to have a painless session at Massachusetts General Hospital, where anesthesia was first demonstrated in this country and where my dermatologist stood ready to tell me that nature was utterly stupid. I walked down to the tracks through my own woods and in my transcendental humor perceived the oddity of owning woods at all, of legally claiming a few acres of forest that so plainly belong to the trees themselves, and to the invisible creatures that burrow and forage among the trees and will not mark with even a minute’s respectful pause their ostensible owner’s passing from this earth. Emerson, expanding his holdings in Concord, in 1844 bought fourteen wooded acres by Walden Pond; but it was Thoreau who built a cabin and lived there, and Thoreau who wrote the masterpiece called Walden. We possess, that is, by apprehension and not by legal fiat; the spirit does create matter, along its circumference of awareness.
Emerging from my own neglected woods, I crossed the railroad tracks and bought at a so-called Convenient Food Mart a can of ginger ale and, after much hesitation, a bag of peanuts in the shell. Most of my life has been lived with women who find peanut shells a trial, especially those papery inner husks that elude every broom; I have associated shelling peanuts with the exercise of personal freedom ever since, as a boy, left alone to wander for an hour in the Pennsylvania city three miles from my home, I would buy a half-pound bag and eat the peanuts as I wandered, dropping the shells into what trash cans and gutters and hedges and sewer grates presented themselves during my carefree stroll. Buying and eating so whimsical a lunch as peanuts and ginger ale appeared to me, obsessed with preparations for this address, as a peculiarly national opportunity and an appropriate celebration of the American insouciance that Emerson had labored to provide with a philosophical frame.
The train, I should say, was equipped with plastic windows, since younger Americans than I had been long celebrating their own insouciance and yielding to their own inspirations by tossing rocks at the windows as they flew past and shattering them if they were glass. Substituted plastic solved that problem, but in time the plastic has clouded to near-perfect opacity, so that as I hurtled to Boston the trees and houses and vistas on the way were vaguer and less to be guessed at than the shadows flickering in Plato’s famous cave, the womb out of which both Emersonianism and the Gospel of St. John were born.
I arrived, still cracking peanuts, at the hospital. What better exemplifies modern-day America than a hospital! Here a true cross-section of colors and creeds, ages and classes mingles, united by our physical fallibility and our hope that science will save us. Though it was autumn, the weather in New England was lingeringly warm, so the crowd summoned to the hospital was lightly dressed, in bright colors, in sandals and jogging shorts. Nubile, merciful nurses and brisk, sage physicians moved in angelic white through the throng of the infirm and their visitors. There were limping young athletes called in from their game by some injury they would forget in a week, young women pushing delicate bug-eyed babies in strollers or lugging them on their hips, elderly couples with an air of having long harbored a single complaint between them. “Life is an ecstasy,” Emerson tells us in “Illusions.” “Life is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it.” Now a multitude of such as these had been fetched here, smelling of nitrous oxide, bearing the rainbow auras of their lives and their employments; to be among them was happiness.
I noticed a man about my age with a bald head—not a healthy, luminous baldness but the unnatural, gauzy baldness that chemotherapy induces. On Emerson’s advice, I checked the presumptuous motion of pity in my heart, my officious inner attempt to adopt and dispose of other people’s facts; for, sitting there in the waiting lounge somewhat like a sultan, the man was not asking for pity but instead was calmly wrapped in his own independent and perhaps triumphant thoughts. I sat down myself and read—who else?—Emerson. Emerson it was my own whim to peruse in the little old uniform edition of brown leather and marbled endpapers I had bought at a church fair for five dollars and most of whose pages had never been cut. To slit these pages I used my bookmark, the joker of an old deck of cards—another whim, and yet efficient. “The way of life is wonderful,” I read; “it is by abandonment.” Looking up, I noticed a man in a chair opposite me reading a book also. He was reading a novel called The Coup, which I had once written. He was a stout cigar-smoking man who slowly turned the pages with a terrible steady frown; he was not at all my image of the Ideal Reader. Yet there he was, in front of me; who was I to doubt now that, as Emerson promised, “Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages”? And that, as the same page of “The Over-Soul” states, “The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uni
nterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.” Was not this day of mine—October 4, 1983—demonstrating at every emblematic turn that “a thread runs through all things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that thread”?
A man within unavoidable earshot was making a call on a pay phone. His side of the conversation went: “Stella? Any news?” A pause, and then, “Isn’t that great? It so easily could have been different. I’m so happy for him.” How much, indeed, I could not help thinking, of the news we receive is good. “We are natural believers,” Emerson says in his essay on Montaigne. “Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.” It was Emerson’s revelation that God and the self are of the same substance. He may have been wrong, too blithe in Mankind’s behalf, to think that nature—which he called the “other me”—is possessed of optimism and always answers to our soul; but he was immensely right in suggesting that the prime me, the ego, is perforce optimistic.
Howells as Anti-Novelist5
THIS YEAR is the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of William Dean Howells’s birth, and the fact has been celebrated but quietly. Few writers filled the American literary sky as amply as Howells in his prime; few have fallen so relatively far into disesteem. We remember Howells, if we do, as a genial broad valley between Mark Twain and Henry James—a cultivated and well-travelled Ohioan able to appreciate two great writers who could not at all appreciate each other. And then there was something about his calling himself a “realist,” and depicting “the American girl,” and turning toward socialism in middle age. As a poet, playwright, and short-story writer, he has left no impression, and as a novelist a diminished one; but as a critic and an editor he cannot be eradicated from the high annals of the literature of the long period between the end of the Civil War and America’s entry into World War I. Affectionate correspondent and zealous promoter of James and Twain, vivacious intimate of the New England worthies Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier, a tireless fosterer of younger realists such as Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Robert Herrick, he boldly pushed the young Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets at a time when bookstores were too scandalized to carry it, urged Swedish and Spanish and Russian novelists upon American readers, and welcomed to native letters the first Jewish-American novelist, Abraham Cahan. Theodore Dreiser called Howells our “ ‘lookout on the watch-tower,’ straining for a first glimpse of approaching genius”; Edmund Wilson summed him up as “our always tactful toastmaster, our clearing-house, our universal solvent, our respecter of the distinguished veteran, our encourager of the promising young.” His wife, Elinor Mead Howells, was a cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes, and President William Howard Taft attended Howells’s seventy-fifth birthday party, in 1912, to which not only Henry James but H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy sent warm greetings; seventy-five years after that gala event, which four hundred guests thronged at Sherry’s Restaurant in Manhattan, we can still find traces of Howells’s tremendous charm and prestige fossilized at the head of lists: in Boston, he was the first president of the Tavern Club, and in New York, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As a novelist, he was, after Twain, the most financially successful American of his time. His novels, few of them short, were serialized in magazines and then purchased and admired again in book form. The critical terms of the admiration were, to an extent, ones he himself set in his own criticism—his book reviews and literary columns in The Atlantic Monthly, The Century, and Harper’s Magazine. Howells had what very few American novelists have had: a theory of the novel—how it should be written, and what it should be about. Its method should be realism, which he once defined as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material,” and its subject should be the common life of ordinary Americans. In 1899, at the peak of his prestige, he enunciated a radical aesthetic agenda for the audience of a lecture, “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading.” The ideal novelist of the future, he proposed,
will not rest till he has made his story as like life as he can, with the same mixed motives, the same voluntary and involuntary actions, the same unaccountable advances and perplexing pauses, the same moments of rapture, the same days and weeks of horrible dullness, the same conflict of the higher and lower purposes, the same vices and virtues, inspirations and propensities.… As it is now the representation of life in novels, even the most conscientious in its details, is warped and distorted by the novelist’s anxiety to produce an image that is startling and impressive, as well as true. But if he can once conceive the notion of letting the reader’s imagination care for these things; if he can convince himself that his own affair is to arrange a correct perspective, in which all things shall appear in their very proportion and relation, he will have mastered the secret of repose, which is the soul of beauty in all its forms.
This vision, of bringing dullness and mixedness out of the rain of actuality into the house of fiction, had been with Howells from the start. In the first book of his which might be called a novel, Their Wedding Journey (1871), the author, while describing conversations his honeymooners overhear on a night boat up the Hudson, suddenly exclaims, “Ah! poor Real Life, which I love, can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face?” A dozen pages farther on, his married couple, Isabel and Basil March—alter egos who are to reappear in Howells’s novels in the decades ahead—sit alertly in a railway carriage and their loquacious companion the author confides to us:
It was in all respects an ordinary carful of human beings, and it was perhaps the more worthy to be studied on that account. As in literature the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an improbable character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very precious; and I never perceive him to be so much a man and a brother as when I feel of the pressure of his vast, natural, unaffected dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently into his life and inhabit there, to think his shallow and feeble thoughts, to be moved by his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumined by his stinted inspirations, to share his foolish prejudices, to practice his obtuse selfishness.
Howells’s next book, A Chance Acquaintance (1873), may unambiguously be called a novel, though it also makes extensive use of travel impressions and takes up a character, Kitty Ellison of Eriecreek, New York, whom the Marches had encountered in their wedding journey; their paths diverged, and the reader of A Chance Acquaintance follows Kitty and her uncle and aunt into the province and city of Quebec, where she enjoys a romantic encounter with a young traveller from Boston, Mr. Arbuton. In the course of deepening their acquaintanceship they several times discuss the problem of making the American reality—North American, in this instance—accessible to the imagination. They take a boat cruise up and down the Saguenay River, amid scenery of grand emptiness:
On either hand the uninhabitable shore rose in desolate grandeur, friendless heights of rock with a thin covering of pines seen in dim outline along their tops and deepening into the solid dark of hollows and ravines upon their sides. The cry of some wild bird struck through the silence of which the noise of the steamer had grown to be a part, and echoed away to nothing.
Mr. Arbuton, who has travelled much in Europe and has the air of a Harvard man, observes, “The great drawback to this sort of thing in America is that there is no human interest about the scenery, fine as it is.”
Kitty loyally protests, “Why, I don’t know, there was that little settlement round the saw-mill. Can’t you imagine any human interest in the lives of the people there? It seems to me that one might make almost anything out of them. Suppose, for example, that the owner of that mill was a disappointed man who had come here to bury the wreck of his life in—sawdust?”
