The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

by Gore Vidal

  Unlike Howells, or the Howells that we think we know, Bartley is sexually active; he is not about to make the Howells-Strether mistake. He lives until he is murdered by a man whom he may have libeled in a western newspaper. It would have been more convincing if an angry husband had been responsible for doing him in, but there were conventions that Howells felt obliged to observe, as his detractors, among them Leslie Fiedler, like to remind us. Mr. Fiedler writes in Love and Death in the American Novel (1975):

  Only in A Modern Instance, written in 1882 [sic: 1881], does Howells deal for once with a radically unhappy marriage; and here he adapts the genteel-sentimental pattern which had substituted the bad husband (his Bartley Hubbard has “no more moral nature than a baseball”) for the Seducer, the long-suffering wife for the Persecuted Maiden or fallen woman.

  Mr. Fiedler, of course, is—or was in 1960—deeply into “the reality of dream and nightmare, fantasy and fear,” and for him Howells is “the author of flawlessly polite, high-minded, well-written studies of untragic, essentially eventless life in New England—the antiseptic upper-middlebrow romance. Yet his forty books [sic: he means novels, of which Howells wrote thirty-five; there are close to one hundred books], in which there are no seductions and only rare moments of violence, are too restrictedly ‘realistic’, too…,” et cetera.

  Mr. Fiedler gets himself a bit off the hook by putting those quotes around the word realistic. After all, Howells had developed an aesthetic of the novel: and if he preferred to shoot Bartley offstage, why not? The classic tragedians did the same. He also inclined to Turgenev’s view that the real drama is in the usual. Obviously, this is not the way of the romantic writer but it is a no less valid way of apprehending reality than that of Melville or Faulkner, two writers Howells would have called “romancers,” about as much a term of compliment with him as “too unrestrictedly ‘realistic’” is to Mr. Fiedler. Without rehashing the tired Redskin versus Paleface debate of the 1940s, it should be noted that there is something wrong with a critical bias that insists upon, above all else, “dream and nightmare, fantasy and fear” but then when faced with the genuine article in, say, the books of William Burroughs or James Purdy or Paul Bowles starts to back off, nervously, lighting candles to The Family and all the other life-enhancing if unsmiling aspects of American life that do not cause AIDS or social unrest.

  Whatever our romantic critics may say, Bartley Hubbard is an archetypal American figure, caught for the first time by Howells: the amiable, easygoing bastard, who thinks nothing of taking what belongs to another. Certainly Mark Twain experienced the shock of recognition when he read the book: “You didn’t intend Bartley for me but he is me just the same…” James, more literary, thought the character derived from Tito, in the one (to me) close-to-bad novel of George Eliot, Romola. In later years Howells said that he himself was the model. Who was what makes no difference. There is only one Bartley Hubbard, and he appears for the first time in the pages of a remarkable novel that opened the way to Dreiser and to all those other realists who were to see the United States plain. The fact that there are no overt sexual scenes in Howells (“no palpitating divans,” as he put it) does not mean that sexual passion is not a powerful motor to many of the situations, as in life. On the other hand, the fact that there are other motors—ambition, greed, love of power—simply extends the author’s range and makes him more interesting to read than most writers.

  In this novel, Howells is interesting on the rise of journalism as a “serious” occupation. “There had not yet begun to be that talk of journalism as a profession which has since prevailed with our collegians…” There is also a crucial drunk scene in which Bartley blots his copybook with Boston; not to mention with his wife. It is curious how often Howells shows a protagonist who gets disastrously drunk and starts then to fall. Mark Twain had a dark suspicion that Howells always had him in mind when he wrote these scenes. But for Mr. Fiedler, “drunkenness is used as a chief symbol for the husband’s betrayal of the wife.” Arguably, it would have been better (and certainly more manly) if Bartley had corn-holed the Irish maid in full view of wife and child, but would a scene so powerful, even existential, add in any way to the delicate moral balances that Howells is trying to make?

  After all, Howells is illuminating a new character in American fiction, if not life, who, as “he wrote more than ever in the paper…discovered in himself that dual life, of which every one who sins or sorrows is sooner or later aware: that strange separation of the intellectual activity from the suffering of the soul, by which the mind toils on in a sort of ironical indifference to the pangs that wring the heart; the realization that in some ways his brain can get on perfectly well without his conscience.” This is worthy of the author of Sentimental Education; it is also the kind of insight about post-Christian man that Flaubert so often adverted to, indirectly, in his own novels and head-on in his letters.

  The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) begins with Bartley Hubbard brought back to life. It is, obviously, some years earlier than the end of A Modern Instance. Bartley is interviewing a self-made man called Silas Lapham who has made a fortune out of paint. Lapham is the familiar diamond in the rough, New England Jonathan style. He has two pretty daughters, a sensible wife, a comfortable house; and a growing fortune, faced with all the usual hazards. Howells makes the paint business quite as interesting as Balzac made paper making. This is not entirely a full-hearted compliment to either; nevertheless, each is a novelist fascinated by the way the real world works; and each makes it interesting to read about.

  In a sense, Silas Lapham’s rise is not unlike that of William Dean Howells: from a small town to Boston back street to Beacon Street on the Back Bay. But en route to the great address there are many lesser houses and Howells is at his best when he goes house hunting—and building. In fact, one suspects that, like Edith Wharton later, he would have made a splendid architect and interior decorator. In a fine comic scene, a tactful architect (plainly the author himself) guides Lapham to Good Taste. “‘Of course,’ resumed the architect, ‘I know there has been a great craze for black walnut. But it’s an ugly wood…’” All over the United States there must have been feminine gasps as stricken eyes were raised from the page to focus on the middle distance where quantities of once-beauteous black shone dully by gaslight; but worse was to come: “‘…and for a drawing room there is really nothing like white paint. We should want to introduce a little gold here and there. Perhaps we might run a painted frieze round under the cornice—garlands of roses on a gold ground; it would tell wonderfully in a white room.’” From that moment on, no more was black walnut seen again in the parlors of the Republic, while the sale of white paint soared; gold, too.

  The rise of Lapham’s house on Beacon Hill is, in a sense, the plot of the book, as well as the obvious symbol of worldly success. Howells makes us see and feel and smell the house as it slowly takes shape. Simultaneously, a young man called Tom Corey wants to work for Lapham. Since Corey belongs to the old patriciate, Lapham finds it hard to believe Corey is serious. But the young man is sincere; he really likes the old man. He must also work to live. There are romantic exchanges between him and the two daughters; there is an amiable mix-up. Finally, Tom says that it is Penelope not her sister whom he wants to marry. Mr. and Mrs. Lapham are bemused. In the world of the Coreys they are a proto–Maggie and Jiggs couple.

  Corey takes Lapham to a grand dinner party where the old man gets drunk and chats rather too much. It is the same scene, in a sense, as Bartley’s fall in the earlier novel, but where Bartley could not have minded less the impression he made, Lapham is deeply humiliated; and the fall begins. He loses his money; the new house burns down; by then, the house is an even more poignant character than Lapham, and the reader mourns the white-and-gold drawing room gone to ash. But there is a happy enough ending. Maggie and Jiggs return to the Vermont village of their origin (which they should never have left?) while Corey marries Penelope.

  It would be easy to point out tra
its in Penelope’s character which finally reconciled all her husband’s family and endeared her to them. These things continually happen in novels; and the Coreys, as they had always promised themselves to do, made the best, and not the worst, of Tom’s marriage…. But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between the Coreys and Tom Corey’s wife.

  The young couple move from Boston. Then Howells shifts from the specific to the general:

  It is certain that our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The price that we pay for civilization is the fine yet impassable differentiation of these. Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favor that this is so. They may be right; and at any rate the blank misgiving, the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young people’s departure left the Coreys is to be considered. That was the end of their son and brother for them; they felt that; and they were not mean or unamiable people.

  This strikes me as a subtle and wise reading of the world—no, not a world but the world; and quite the equal of James or Hardy.

  Whether or not this sort of careful social reading is still of interest to the few people who read novels voluntarily is not really relevant. But then today’s “serious” novel, when it is not reinventing itself as an artifact of words and signs, seldom deals with the world at all. One is no longer shown a businessman making money or his wife climbing up or down the social ladder. As most of our novelists now teach school, they tend to tell us what it is like to be a schoolteacher, and since schoolteachers have been taught to teach others to write only about what they know, they tell us what they know about, too, which is next to nothing about the way the rest of the population of the Republic lives.

  In a sense, if they are realists, they are acting in good faith. If you don’t know something about the paint business you had better not choose a protagonist who manufactures paint. Today, if the son of an Ohio newspaper editor would like to be a novelist, he would not quit school at fifteen to become a printer, and then learn six languages and do his best to read all the great literary figures of the present as well as of the past so that he could introduce, say, Barthes or Gadda to the American public while writing his own novels based on a close scrutiny of as many classes of society as he can get to know. Rather, he would graduate from high school; go on to a university and take a creative writing course; get an M.A. for having submitted a novel (about the son of an Ohio editor who grew up in a small town and found out about sex and wants to be a writer and so goes to a university where he submits, etc.).

  Then, if he is truly serious about a truly serious literary career, he will become a teacher. With luck, he will obtain tenure. In the summers and on sabbatical, he will write novels that others like himself will want to teach just as he, obligingly, teaches their novels. He will visit other campuses as a lecturer and he will talk about his books and about those books written by other teachers to an audience made up of ambitious young people who intend to write novels to be taught by one another to the rising generation and so on and on. What tends to be left out of these works is the world. World gone, no voluntary readers. No voluntary readers, no literature—only creative writing courses and English studies, activities marginal (to put it tactfully) to civilization.

  3

  Civilization was very much on Howells’s mind when he came to write Indian Summer (1886). He deals, once more, with Americans in Italy. But this time there are no Don Ippolitos. The principals are all Americans in Florence. A middle-aged man, Theodore Colville, meets, again, Mrs. Bowen, a lady who once did not marry him when he wanted to marry her. She married a congressman. She has a young daughter, Effie. She is a widow.

  Colville started life as an architect, a suitable occupation for a Howells character; then he shifted to newspaper publishing, an equally suitable profession. In Des Vaches, Indiana, he published, successfully, the Democrat-Republican newspaper. Although he lost a race for Congress, he has received from former political opponents “fulsome” praise. Like most American writers Howells never learned the meaning of the word fulsome. Colville then sold his newspaper and went to Europe because “he wanted to get away, to get far away, and with the abrupt and total change in his humor he reverted to a period in his life when journalism and politics and the ambition of Congress were things undreamed of.” He had been young in Italy, with a Ruskinian interest in architecture; he had loved and been rejected by Evelina—now the widow Bowen. He looks at Florence: “It is a city superficially so well known that it affects one somewhat like a collection of views of itself: they are from the most striking points, of course, but one has examined them before, and is disposed to be critical of them.” The same goes for people one has known when young.

  Mrs. Bowen has a beautiful young friend named Imogene. Colville decides that he is in love with Imogene, and they drift toward marriage. There are numerous misunderstandings. Finally, it is Mrs. Bowen not Imogene who is in love with Colville. The drama of the three of them (a shadowy young clergyman named Morton is an undelineated fourth) is rendered beautifully. There are many unanticipated turns to what could easily have been a simpleminded romantic novella.

  When Colville is confronted with the thought of his own great age (forty-one), he is told by a very old American expatriate:

  At forty, one has still a great part of youth before him—perhaps the richest and sweetest part. By that time the turmoil of ideas and sensations is over; we see clearly and feel consciously. We are in a sort of quiet in which we peacefully enjoy. We have enlarged our perspective sufficiently to perceive things in their true proportion and relation; we are no longer tormented with the lurking fear of death, which darkens and imbitters our earlier years; we have got into the habit of life; we have often been ailing and we have not died…

  Finally, “we are put into the world to be of it.” Thus, Howells strikes the Tolstoian note. Yes, he is also smiling. But even as Indian Summer was being published, its author was attacking the state of Illinois for the murder of four workmen. He also sends himself up in the pages of his own novel. A Mrs. Amsden finds Colville and Imogene and Effie together after an emotional storm. Mrs. Amsden remarks that they form an interesting, even dramatic group:

  “Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel,” suggested Colville, “if you’re in a romantic mood. One of Mr. James’s.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case.”

  For this beguiling modesty Howells no doubt dug even deeper the grave for his reputation. How can an American novelist who is ironic about himself ever be great? In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling. Actually, Howells is fascinated with the interior drama of his characters, and quite a lot happens—to the reader as well as to the characters who are, finally, suitably paired: Imogene and Mr. Morton, Colville and Mrs. Bowen.

  The Library of America has served William Dean Howells well. Although the spiritual father of the library, Edmund Wilson, did not want this project ever to fall into the hands of the Modern Language Association, all four of the novels in the present volume bear the proud emblem of that association. One can only assume that there are now fewer scholars outside Academe’s groves than within. I found no misprints; but there are eccentricities.

  In A Modern Instance (p. 474) we read of “the presidential canvas of the summer” then (p. 485) we read “But the political canvass…” Now a tent is made of canvas and an election is a canvass of votes. It is true that the secondary spelling of “canvass” is “canvas” and so allowable; nevertheless, it is disturbing to find the same word spelled two ways within eleven pages. On page 3 the variant spelling “ancles” is used for “ankles.” On page 747 Howells writes “party-colored statues” when, surely, “parti-colored” was nineteenth-centu
ry common usage as opposed to the Chaucerian English “party.” Of course, as the editors tell us, “In nineteenth-century writings, for example, a word might be spelled in more than one way, even in the same work, and such variations might be carried into print.”

  Anyway, none of this is serious. There are no disfiguring footnotes. The notes at the back are for the most part helpful translations of foreign phrases in the text. The chronology of Howells’s life is faultless but, perhaps, skimpy. For those who are obliged for career reasons to read Howells, this is a useful book. For those who are still able to read novels for pleasure, this is a marvelous book.

  For some years I have been haunted by a story of Howells and that most civilized of all our presidents, James A. Garfield. In the early 1870s Howells and his father paid a call on Garfield. As they sat on Garfield’s veranda, young Howells began to talk about poetry and about the poets that he had met in Boston and New York. Suddenly, Garfield told him to stop. Then Garfield went to the edge of the veranda and shouted to his Ohio neighbors. “Come over here! He’s telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!” So the neighbors gathered around in the dusk; then Garfield said to Howells, “Now go on.”

  Today we take it for granted that no living president will ever have heard the name of any living poet. This is not, necessarily, an unbearable loss. But it is unbearable to have lost those Ohio neighbors who actually read books of poetry and wanted to know about the poets.

  For thirty years book-chat writers have accused me of having written that the novel is dead. I wrote no such thing but book-chat writers have the same difficulty extracting meaning from writing as presidents do. What I wrote was, “After some three hundred years the novel in English has lost the general reader (or rather the general reader has lost the novel), and I propose that he will not again recover his old enthusiasm.” Since 1956, the audience for the serious (or whatever this year’s adjective is) novel has continued to shrink. Arguably, the readers that are left are for the most part involuntary ones, obliged by the schools to read novels that they often have little taste for. The fact that a novelist like Howells—or even Bellow—is probably no longer accessible to much of anyone would be bearable if one felt that the sense of alternative worlds or visions or—all right, Leslie—nightmares, fantasies, fears could be obtained in some other way. But movies are no substitute while television is, literally, narcotizing: The human eye was not designed to stare at a light for any length of time. Popular prose fictions are still marketed with TV and movie tie-ins, but even the writers or word-processors of these books find it harder and harder to write simply enough for people who don’t really know how to read.