Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  The issue of whether or not this continent could nurture and sustain a serious literary artist was much discussed in the post-bellum United States. Howells and Henry James discussed it, on long walks in Cambridge in the late 1860s, when both young men had their careers before them,b and before James had voted, as it were, with his feet, and taken up permanent European residence. Howells in 1866 wrote to Edmund Clarence Stedman, “Talking of talks: young Henry James and I had a famous one last evening, two or three hours long, in which we settled the true principles of literary art.” In the last year of his life, 1920, Howells recalled in an unfinished memoir, “We seem to have been presently always together, and always talking of methods of fiction, whether we walked the streets by day or night, or we sat together reading our stuff to each other. I was seven years older than James, but I was much his junior in the art we both adored. Perhaps I did not yet feel my fiction definitely in me.” James’s tribute to Howells on his seventy-fifth birthday remembered this time “when we knew together what American life was—or thought we did.… You knew and felt these things better than I; you had learned them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, I think, to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the general truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. The real affair of the American case and character, as it met your view and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and … you gave yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare lucidity: you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the interest and the thrill and the charm of the common.…” In his letters to others, however, James spoke in less courtly fashion of Howells’s commitment to the American substance: as Their Wedding Journey was being serially published, he wrote to Grace Norton, “Poor Howells is certainly difficult to defend, if one takes a stand-point the least bit exalted; make any serious demand, and it’s all up with him. He presents, I confess, to my mind, a somewhat melancholy spectacle—in that his charming style and refined intentions are so poorly and meagerly served by our American atmosphere. There is no more inspiration in an American journey than that!” In reviewing Howells’s novel A Foregone Conclusion (1874) for The Nation, James nicely described the cultural situation as he saw it: “[Howells] reminds us of how much our native-grown imaginative effort is a matter of details, of fine shades, of pale colors, a making of small things do great service. Civilization with us is monotonous, and in the way of contrasts, of salient points, of chiaroscuro, we have to take what we can get. We have to look for these things in fields where a less devoted glance would see little more than an arid blank, and, at the last, we manage to find them. All this refines and sharpens our perceptions, makes us in a literary way, on our own scale, very delicate.”

  By the time of their Cambridge walks James had already formed that exalted conception of the novel which was to carry him through his life of triumphant single-mindedness; Howells had come more gingerly to the temple of prose fiction, by way of journalism and travel sketches. His first book with an American setting, Suburban Sketches (1870), attempts to treat the neighborhoods and incidents of Cambridge in terms of local color, much as he had treated those of Venice in his first book, Venetian Life (1866). Howells’s first two novels were elaborated books of travel; and he himself had travelled a long way to reach the threshold of what was to become an impressively productive career not only as a novelist but as a propagandist for the novel—the novel as a means of seizing reality, monotonous and delicate though it be.

  He was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in 1837, the son of a country-newspaper editor; the political and financial hazards of his father’s profession took Howells’s family to many Ohio towns, of which he lived longest in Hamilton, where he passed the eight years of childhood recalled in his memoir A Boy’s Town (1890), and Jefferson, where the now adolescent boy undertook a program—rigorous to the point of inducing nervous breakdown—of self-education, teaching himself Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, and German, in addition to reading voluminously in English. He had been setting type at age nine and delivering papers earlier still, and his actual formal schooling amounted at most to two years. In Jefferson, he set type from seven to lunch hour, read proof and distributed his case after lunch, and came home at about two or three to devote himself to reading or writing, in his little study beneath the stairs, until the rest of his family were in bed. He had conceived a fierce literary ambition, in an era when, as he wrote forty years later, “almost all the literary men in the country had other professions … or they were men of wealth; there was then not one who earned his bread solely by his pen in fiction, or drama, or history, or poetry, or criticism, in a day when people wanted very much less butter on their bread than they do now.”

  Howells often wrote reminiscently of his Ohio years, with the feeling and liveliness that attaches to formative experience. Among his memoiristic works is My Literary Passions (1895), which has the multiple value of being a sketchy autobiography, a record of his reading, and evidence of what books offered themselves to a Midwestern autodidact in the decades before the Civil War. His first passion, he tells us, was Goldsmith, and in the long backward glance Howells commends his kindly style: “The style is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that we shall not know somehow what manner of man he is within it; [Goldsmith’s] spiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself in the literary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the fancy in his work.” The supreme reading experience of Howells’s childhood was Don Quixote, translated by him into hundreds of Spanish daydreams and boyish games; from Cervantes and the other authors to whom his Spanish passion led, Howells drew this lesson: “I am sure that the intending author of American fiction would do well to study the Spanish picaresque novels; for in their simplicity of design he will find one of the best forms for an American story. The intrigue of close texture will never suit our conditions, which are so loose and open and variable; each man’s life among us is a romance of the Spanish model.” Shakespeare and Dickens and Thackeray and Macaulay and Chaucer and Tennyson took their turns in his affections and his attempts at mimicry; for a time, he indentured himself to the tight heroic couplets of Pope: “What I liked then was regularity, uniformity, exactness,” he says, going on to tell us in the tones of the mature aesthetic radical, “I did not conceive of literature as the expression of life, and I could not imagine that it ought to be desultory, mutable and unfixed, even if at the risk of some vagueness.”

  It was the poet Heine, for whose sake he submitted to the rigors of German grammar, who showed him that “the life of literature was from the springs of the best common speech, and that the nearer it could be made to conform, in voice, look, and gait, to graceful, easy, picturesque and humorous or impassioned talk, the better it was.” Howells says, “He undid my hands, which I had taken so much pains to tie behind my back.” Howells’s first acceptance from The Atlantic Monthly, in 1858, was a poem so much in his idol’s manner that it was held from publication for a year, until the editors had satisfied themselves it was not a translation; the magazine’s editor, James Russell Lowell, advised him years later, “You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as men do mercury.” In his life after leaving Ohio, Howells received especially strong impressions from such varied authors as the Italian playwright Goldoni, the Russian writer Turgenev, and the Norwegian novelist Bjørnson, from whom he learned that “the finest poetry is not ashamed of the plainest fact [and] that telling a thing is enough, and explaining it too much.” All three writers impressed him with what were, broadly speaking, the same virtues: naturalness of manner, a tact of presentation that allows the story to seem to tell itself, and a willingness to deal with common material and to suppress the author’s personality, which yet makes itself felt in the “essential friendliness” of style—the virtues, in short, that Howells was himself to manifest.

  When Howells was twenty-one, he tells us, “the whole world opened to me
through what had seemed an impenetrable wall.” He was offered a job as editor and reporter with a Republican newspaper, the Ohio State Journal, in Columbus; he was a success at it and in this state capital’s active society. In 1860 he was invited to write a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, and with the proceeds travelled east, where, at the age of twenty-three, he was received by the major intellectual figures of New England, even the reclusive Hawthorne and Thoreau, at a time when American literature was almost solely in Yankee hands. On this same excursion he went north to Brattleboro, to meet the family of Elinor Mead, the artistic and spirited young woman he was to marry. Lincoln won the election, and his administration awarded Howells, after some haggling, the U.S. consulship in Venice, where he was to remain for the four years of the Civil War. His first letters home overflow with a heightened sense of what a blessing it is to be an American: “Ah! come abroad, anybody that wants to know what a dear country Americans have!” and “There is no life in the world so cheerful, so social, so beautiful as the American” and “No one knows how much better than the whole world America is until he tries some other part of the world. Our people are manlier and purer than any in Europe; and though I hope to stay here my full four years, and know I shall profit by my experience and enjoy it, I still hope to go back and engage in the strife and combat, which make America so glorious a land for individuals.”

  In 1865 he returned to the strife and combat with his armor of culture considerably thickened and polished; if Ohio printshops had formed his secondary education, Venice was his college. A sojourn abroad not only enhances the home country; it reduces it and places it in a context. Howells’s sense of American life as a literary subject would not have been so vivid had he stayed in the Midwest, where he was immersed in this reality without boundary. He returned to the United States but did not wish to return home. A certain gloom, in fact, attached to his youth in Ohio, where he had been, he once wrote, “proud, vain, and poor.” He had suffered phobias and depression there, as well as overwork, and in 1864 he wrote his father, “I do not conceal from you that I have not yet in three years shaken off my old morbid horror of going back to live in a place where I have been so wretched.” “Morbid” is the striking term. His boyhood was characterized, he wrote in A Boy’s Town, by “more fears than hopes.” The central figure of his last novel, The Leatherwood God (1916), is said to be “so miser’ble, all the time, and so—well—scared.” The stanza of a poem from 1860 runs,

  Once on my mother’s breast, a child, I crept,

  Holding my breath;

  There, safe and sad, lay shuddering, and wept

  At the dark mystery of Death.

  According to Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, Howells once confided to Grace Norton his feeling “that he had lived his life under the dominion of fear.” Edel continues:

  James, commenting on this, said he had always felt the depression in Howells, but believed he was able to disconnect it from his “operative self.” It had never been, said James, “the least paralysing, or interfering, or practically depressing.” On the contrary, Howells had arrived at compensations “very stimulating to endeavor.”

  One wonders if Howells’s tenacious artistic clinging to the surface of things doesn’t show a fear of falling back into an abyss. Ohio had depths he did not wish to re-explore. He was no less than Henry James an expatriate, refusing to return to Jefferson, where his Swedenborgian father lived, much as James spurned Cambridge, where his Swedenborgian father lived.

  The East became Howells’s place of happy exile. He worked for four months in New York, as a columnist with The Nation, and then was asked by James T. Fields, who had succeeded Lowell as editor of The Atlantic, to come to Boston as his assistant. He accepted, and he and his wife soon moved to Cambridge, then considered a suburb, where his friendship with Lowell led to others with such literary Brahmins as Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Eliot Norton. His social and family life were active, his editorial duties many; yet he was no stranger to work, and had energy enough to continue worrying the curious problem of how to write fiction worthy of America, how to render his mystical sense of “poor Real Life” and of the something glorious in the average American’s “vast, natural, unaffected dullness.” He stated in retrospect, “Early in the practice of my art I perceived that what I must do in fiction, if I were to do anything worth while, was to get into it from life the things that had not been got into fiction before.”

  Over the years to come, Howells wrote a great deal of criticism, stating in sometimes pugnacious and controversial terms his increasingly firm views on the novel and on “realism”—a word he did much to promote. But we would seek, in the time remaining this afternoon, to focus more on the practice than on the preachments, and to touch on three of the features that distinguish his fiction and make it, even now, unsettling to our readerly expectations and irreducibly, as it were, avant-garde.

  The first of these truth-seeking, realistic features we might call the Not Quite Likable Hero. In his very first review of a novel for The Atlantic, Howells in 1866 complained of Bayard Taylor’s The Story of Kennett: “The hero of the book, we find a good deal like other heroes,—a little more natural than most, perhaps, but still portentously noble and perfect. He does not interest us much.” And seven years later, reviewing Ivan Turgenev’s Dimitri Roudine positively, he stated, “We are not quite sure whether we like or dislike the carefulness with which Roudine’s whole character is kept from us, so that we pass from admiration to despite before we come finally to half-respectful compassion; and yet is this not the way it would be in life?” This effect, of a hero whose moral aspect alters as we read about him, thus stirring up and challenging our preconceptions,c was always striven after by Howells, and helps produce our sensation, in his mature fiction, of not quite knowing which side we are on.

  There is no question, in Their Wedding Journey, of our not liking Basil March; he is so close to the author in temperament and intelligence that if we disliked him we would be obliged to close the book. But in A Chance Acquaintance, Arbuton, the very type of upper-class Boston rectitude—a “simulacrum,” Howells wrote to James, and a “stick”—is clearly not meant to be entirely likable; his faults of stiffness and snobbery are spelled out by the author and perceived by the sensitive heroine. For all of that, he has admirable traits, and is to be pitied in his final defeat, and in the ghastly comic scene where two proper Boston acquaintances surprise him into snubbing his own fiancée. In short, Arbuton is a created character; we can walk clear around him and see his several sides without confusion. A Chance Acquaintance, indeed, slight little vehicle as it is, seems to me to hold the Howells essence pure; there is nothing spun-out in it, nothing limp; Howells’s strong suit, his insight into the intricacy of male-female relations, is played with a crispness that amuses and affects us; the whole thing is as tonic and lucid as a dipperful of country spring water. Howells’s idol Turgenev, in Paris, read this little novel, and said, “Now I should like to visit a country where there are girls like the heroine.”

  But what are we to think of the hero of the next novel, A Foregone Conclusion? Henry Ferris, a rather dabbling painter who occupies the post Howells did, of American consul in Venice, seems an unmarried Basil March, yet with a passive and churlish streak that makes him appear inadequate in dealing with the spirited American girl Florida Vervain, and distinctly ungracious in responding to his unfortunate rival, the priest Don Ippolito, who on his deathbed vainly reaches out to the cold-hearted American. Ferris’s eventual triumph, in marrying the rich and beautiful Florida, is celebrated with sour notes:

  People are never equal to the romance of their youth in after life, except by fits, and Ferris especially could not keep himself at what he called the operatic pitch of their brief betrothal and the early days of their marriage.… 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 any one
who had refused the hand of a beautiful girl because of the accident of her wealth, and in the end, he silenced his scruples.

  In this novel the heroine, too, with her erratic and imperious temper, is not entirely likable; Howells’s dampening psychological reductions, on behalf of realism, were not confined to the male sex. But his females tend at least to be dynamic; their sins are ones of commission rather than omission, and the author asks the reader to excuse much that happens within, as he puts it here, “the whole mystery of a woman’s nerves.”

  Indian Summer (1886) also takes place in Italy, and its hero, Theodore Colville, like an older and plumper but not much wiser Ferris, also finds himself at the mercy of uncomprehended sexual maneuvers by the fair sex. Seventeen years ago, in Florence, he had vainly wooed an American girl; returning to this city as a tourist, he fails to realize that he is in love with her companion of old, now a handsome widow, and permits a girl of very tender years and slight experience to attach herself to him romantically. He goes about “feeling like some strange, newly invented kind of scoundrel—a rascal of such recent origin and introduction that he had not yet had time to classify himself and ascertain the exact degree of his turpitude.… He was the betrothed lover of this poor child, whose affection he could not check without a degree of brutality for which only a better man would have the courage.” Though the women of the novel, including the girl’s mother and the widow’s small daughter, eventually straighten things out for him, we remain somewhat resentful of his muddled behavior, of his idle-rich complacency, and of his relentless facetiousness and bemused detachment. Basil March, the charming travel companion and enraptured witness to human dullness, cuts an equivocal figure when cast as a romantic protagonist.