Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  A Hazard of New Fortunes strives to be a novel of the modern city. One begins to read it exhilarated that Howells’s powers of observation have been released from the rather narrow, backward-looking world of Boston into the ethnic breadth and gritty energy of New York. Howells’s life-journey had taken him from Ohio to Italy, from Italy to New England, and in 1888, by gingerly half-steps, from Boston to New York. By moving, it has been said, he took the literary center of the United States with him, but the New England giants whom he had adored from afar and catered to in Cambridge were dead or senescent, and vitality had already passed from Boston, with its (as Howells put it) “idealizing tendency,” to New York, with its “realizing tendency.” His instincts for where his career should take him were ever sound.

  In A Hazard of New Fortunes, a whole new world of novelistic possibilities opens up; but these possibilities are exploited piecemeal, in an attenuated chain. The early pages, following our old friends Basil and Isabel March in their search for an apartment, take us back to the light atmosphere of Their Wedding Journey—picaresque comedy and droll encounter on American soil. But as other characters are introduced, and various lines of tension and possibility established, we feel the lack of a unifying field, some equivalent of Napoleon’s invasion in War and Peace or the fog in Bleak House. There appear to be altogether too many of Howells’s young ladies, with not near enough swains to carry them off, and the literary journal Every Other Week does not seem a massive enough central switchboard to connect the many human specimens, from raving Socialist to crusty millionaire, that the novel introduces. We are reminded of the author’s own warning that “the intrigue of close texture will never suit our conditions, which are so loose and open and variable.” We are conscious of the wide spaces, psychological and even geographical, between the characters—almost none of them native New Yorkers—that Howells has dotted about on Manhattan’s grid, and of the artificial coincidences whereby he brings them together to give off a few sparks. The Dryfooses, from the dark and fiery oil fields of northern Ohio, are vivid enough, but vivid in isolation, as are the charming Southerners the Woodwards, and the plucky protofeminist Alma Leighton, and the vacuous artist Beaton, an especially unlikable recruit in Howells’s long line of passive and foppish highbrow drifters. In short, where Howells needs a plot, to activate so large a field and give it overall momentum, he comes up instead with descriptions of New York, and honorably shrewd and concerned remarks about poverty and wealth, and isolated brilliant scenes, and characters too numerous and sharply distinct to disarm a feeling of caricature.

  A better novel from the Nineties, in my view, is The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897), which returns to New England and tries to face the ancient issue of why bad men succeed—though in truth Jeff Durgin strikes one as not only more likable but even more sensitive than his stern critic, the fastidious painter Westover. It turns out, quite charmingly, that underneath everything the two men have been competing for a girl, Cynthia, whom Westover first sees as a child, and whom Durgin bravely recognizes as too fine for him. The book has the ghostly flavor of a romance, with an alcoholic brother and a tubercular family out of Poe, and shows how little an author can will Tolstoyan solidity in a land where the monotonous civilization of a democracy imposes fine shades and pale colors.

  The slim Ohio youth who in 1860 was recommended to Emerson by Hawthorne with the laconic note “I find this young man worthy” lived to see himself sneered at by Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken as the portly symbol of an outworn genteel tradition. Posterity tends to be hard upon those who have served their own times too well. If we imagine Howells and Henry James, as they paced the streets not far from here in Harvard Yard, to be competing in setting forth “the true principles of literary art,” we must admit that James won the race. His titles thrive in paperback; in the divagational difficulty of his sentences and the proud passion of his increasingly abstract pattern-making he looms as the first great American modernist. Gertrude Stein, in her Lectures in America, differentiated him from his English contemporaries: “The others all stayed where they were, it was where they had come but Henry James knew he was on his way. That is because this did connect with the American way. And so although they did in a way the same thing, his had a future feeling and theirs an ending.” Yet, as we look about, could we not say that James has many academic idolaters but few imitators—Peter Taylor and Cynthia Ozick in their youths are the last I can think of—whereas the Howells faith in “poor Real Life” relayed with a “poetry … not ashamed of the plainest fact” is on all sides put to the test, and “effectism” banished to the drugstore racks and the best-seller lists? Howells’s heirs include not only Hamlin Garland and Booth Tarkington, who wrote and thanked him, but Sinclair Lewis, who devoted part of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to attacking him, and John O’Hara and Raymond Carver, who may not have read him. Today’s fiction, the vein of modernist formal experimentation exhausted, has turned, with an informal—a minimalist—bluntness of style, and with a concern for immediate detail that has given regionalism new life, to the areas of domestic morality and sexual politics that interested Howells. “Even if at the risk of some vagueness,” our “desultory, mutable, and unfixed” narratives of private conscience and crisis illumine the “vast, natural, unaffected dullness” of middling American life.

  It is, after all, the triumph of American life that so much of it should be middling. Howells’s agenda remains our agenda—for the American writer to live in America and to mirror it in writing, with “everything brought out.” In 1903, I know not why, Charles Eliot Norton showed Howells some letters that Henry James had written him, likening Howells with his fine style to “a poor man holding a diamond and wondering how he can use it.” Howells’s response was equable and defiant: he wrote Norton, “I am not sorry for having wrought in common, crude material so much; that is the right American stuff.… I was always, as I still am, trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand.” It is hard to see, more than eight decades later, what else can be done.

  1 My contribution to a panel, “How Does the State Imagine?,” conducted on January 13, 1986, as part of the 48th International PEN Congress, held in New York City with the overall theme of “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.”

  2 The inaugural annual Herman Melville Lecture on the Creative Imagination, sponsored by The Writers’ Institute at Albany, New York, and given in that city on April 25, 1985.

  3 Delivered at the Gothenburg Book Fair, in Gothenburg, Sweden, on August 20, 1987.

  4 An address given at the Davis campus of the University of California on October 25, 1983, and then, somewhat revised, at the 1,644th stated meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 9, 1983.

  5 Given on May 1, 1987, at Harvard University, in Emerson Hall, as part of a two-day birthday party for Howells.

  * To John Townsend Trowbridge, as reported in Trowbridge’s “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” The Atlantic Monthly, LXXXIX (February 1902).

  † Moncure Conway, a young Virginian ordained as Methodist minister and subsequently liberalized by Emerson’s Essays. Emerson also told him that he kept a local pew for his wife and children and to that extent supported the minister because it was useful to have “a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at town meetings, to attend the sick and the dead.”

  ‡ Hawthorne, in “The Celestial Railroad” (1843), ridiculed the “innumerable lecturers, who diffuse such a various profundity, in all subjects of human or celestial science, that any man may acquire an omnigenous erudition, without the trouble of even learning to read.”

  § Edward and Charles both died before the age of thirty. William lived to be sixty-seven. The fifth brother who lived to adulthood, Robert Bulkeley, was mentally retarded and resided in institutions or foster homes until his death at the age of fifty-two.

  ‖ One hundred seventy-nine sermons by the young Emerson sur
vive in Houghton Library at Harvard and are to be published eventually, in four volumes, by the University of Missouri Press. In 1938, twenty-five of them, selected by Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr., appeared under the ambiguous title Young Emerson Speaks: Unpublished Discourses on Many Subjects.

  a See this page.

  b The two young Americans did not have many acknowledged American masters of prose fiction to serve as concrete exemplars. Melville’s achievements were quite unappreciated, and Poe, whom Emerson had called “the jingle man,” was lightly regarded in New England. There was Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hawthorne; and of those Hawthorne was the greatest—“he has the importance,” James was to write a decade later, in his small book on Hawthorne, “of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of American genius.” In this remarkable little volume’s most famous, and perhaps most heartfelt, passage, the now thoroughly expatriated James pities Hawthorne for “the coldness, the thinness, the blankness” of the American world he looked out upon, and asserts, “It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle—it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.… The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!”

  This list of negatives has become, at least among American-lit majors, famous; less well known is Howells’s rejoinder, in a basically friendly review of the biography in The Atlantic Monthly in early 1880. He says of Hawthorne: “As a romancer, the twelve years of boyhood which he spent in the wild solitudes of Maine were probably of greater advantage to him than if they had been passed at Eton and Oxford. At least, until some other civilization has produced a romantic genius at all comparable to his, we must believe this. After leaving out all those novelistic ‘properties,’ as sovereigns, courts, aristocracy, gentry, castles, cottages, cathedrals, abbeys, universities, museums, political class, Epsoms, and Ascots, by the absence of which Mr. James suggests our poverty to the English conception, we have the whole of human life remaining, and a social structure presenting the only fresh and novel opportunities left to fiction, opportunities manifold and inexhaustible. No man would have known less what to do with that dreary and worn-out paraphernalia than Hawthorne.”

  However, by insisting, as he often did, on Hawthorne as a “romancer” and his full-length fictions as “romances,” Howells rather concedes James’s point: America had yet to produce its true novelists. And James, it should be remembered, went on to say, his list completed: “The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say.” What remains, James pleasantly leaves it to us to conjecture, is the American’s freedom, his space, his gun, his home-grown food, and his right to look every other (male, white) citizen square in the eye—what de Tocqueville called “the general equality of condition among the people.”

  c He once described the novelist’s function as that of “dispersing the conventional acceptations by which men live on easy terms with themselves and obliging them to examine the grounds of their social and moral opinions.”

  d His characters suffer for their sins, however hedged and slight: in The Wings of the Dove, things will never be as they were for Kate Croy and Merton Densher as a result of their deception of Milly Theale, and in The Golden Bowl Charlotte Stant is not just punished but tortured for loving a man she does not have the money to buy. In even a relatively light-hearted short novel like The Spoils of Poynton, the calculated reticences and elaborate scruples ramify restrictingly. “You’ll be happy if you’re perfect!” Fleda Vetch tells Owen Gereth, who is doomed to be imperfect, an injunction oddly echoed at the end, when, in response to her incredulous query, “Poynton’s gone?,” the stationmaster tells her, “What can you call it, miss, if it ain’t really saved?” Such absolutism—such a sense of life as a set of irreparable moral crystals—is quite alien to Howells’s elastic world. It must be admitted that the rotation of these crystals generates a degree of heat, a heat of old hellfire that in Howells rather leaks away.

  e Not that there is no sex in Howells’s novels; but it surfaces in sudden small gestures or objects of a fetishistic intensity: in Lapham, Tom Corey presents Irene Lapham with a wood shaving she had playfully pierced with her parasol, and when she gives the souvenirs of her love over to Penelope, the pine-shaving, “fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon,” is among them; in A Modern Instance, Marcia Gaylord, after Bartley Hubbard goes out the door, stoops and kisses the doorknob “on which his hand had rested”; in The Landlord at Lion’s Head, Jeff Durgin, as he walks along with Bessie Lynde, whose mouth has been previously described as “beautiful and vividly red,” notices “the gray film of her veil pressed softly against her red mouth by her swift advance” and keeps “seeing the play of the veil’s edge against her lips as they talked.” These concentrated, veiled images stay impressed in the mind where a fuller and less inhibited treatment might fade.

  INTRODUCTIONS

  To Indian Summer, by William Dean Howells

  THOUGH IT PRESENTS not so broad and conscientiously loaded a canvas as such important Howells novels as A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes, Indian Summer has faded less than most of this author’s immense and once immensely admired oeuvre. It was completed by March of 1884, when the impressions of an extended European trip with his family were fresh in his mind, but was held for sixteen months while The Rise of Silas Lapham, composed after Indian Summer, ran as a serial in Century magazine; accordingly, Howells had more time to polish this novel than he usually allowed himself, and in its text as serialized in Harper’s Monthly from July 1885 through February 1886 he found little to improve for book publication. In one inscribed copy of the book, Howells called it “the one I like best.” As it happens, I have read Indian Summer twice in the last three years, and found it even better on the second reading than at the first. Knowledge of the denouement enhances one’s appreciation of Howells’s foreshadowings and fine shadings. His determined—nay, doctrinaire—fidelity to the inconclusive texture of quotidian life, which can leave his novels diffuse and tepid, here attaches to a colorful locale and a classic situation. The novel examines a sexual triangle, with variations on the Oedipal triangle. Its unity of place, its small cast of characters, its precise evocation of the sights and seasons of Florence, its exceptionally well-honed prose, and something heartfelt in its basic concern with aging combine to give it the formal concentration whose absence is usually cited as one of Howells’s chief faults.

  Indian Summer is the culmination of Howells’s transatlantic, Jamesian mode. It might be imagined to hold a touch of friendly challenge, of riposte to the narratives of Americans abroad that had brought Henry James his one strong dose of popular success. Daisy Miller, when it appeared in Cornhill Magazine
in 1878, made a considerable sensation, and Indian Summer’s young heroine, Imogene Graham, even without the teasing dialogue that openly names James and Howells toward the end of Chapter XIV, would have been recognized as one of Daisy’s sisters, another heartbreakingly uncautious cornfed beauty—an, in James’s phrase, “inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.” Though Howells was six years older than James and during his lifetime came to enjoy the securer hold on the American reading public, he was slower to make his start in fiction, staunchly loyal to James in his capacity of magazine editor, and never averse to learning from other writers. Not only Daisy Miller but The American (1877) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) may have been in his mind as he settled to the glamorous scenes of Indian Summer.

  Americans of apparently unlimited means established in foreign apartments; teas and balls in the expatriate community; the rustle of long dresses and insular gossip; exotic customs and colorful native populations gaily viewed from the height of a rattling carriage; meetings in museums; pagan and Catholic monuments somewhat sinisterly redolent in Puritan nostrils—such, since Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, composed a comfortable ground for a romantic novel. Howells was well qualified to write one: he had spent the years of the Civil War as the American Consul in Venice and was a natural cosmopolitan, a learner of languages and a reader of European literature even as a boy in Ohio. What strikes us, however, in Indian Summer are its un-Jamesian elements, beginning with the American colloquialism of the title. Though Florence and the Italian landscape are described with guidebook thoroughness, it is the fragmentary memories of America that are truly poetic—workaday Des Vaches, Indiana, and its Main Street bridge overlooking a “tawny sweep of the Wabash”; the “untrammelled girlhood” America offers its young females, with strolls and picnics “free and un-chaperoned as the casing air”; and the Spartan New England village of Haddam East Village, whose winter snows still visit the Reverend Mr. Waters in his dreams: “I can still see the black wavering lines of the walls in the fields sinking into the drifts! the snow billowed over the graves by the church where I preached! the banks of snow around the houses! the white desolation everywhere!” Even the old clergyman’s vanished faith—“pale Unitarianism thinning out into paler doubt”—has in the description an affectionate, nostalgic ring. James’s expatriates rarely strike this note of fond specificity in their memories of the mother country: Fanny Assingham, in The Golden Bowl, speaks shudderingly of return to “the dreadful great country, State after State.” Howells’s hero, the dilettante architect Theodore Colville, is credited with the author’s own passionately professional interest in the United States as a site of mental exploration: “It was the problem of the vast, tumultuous American life, which he had turned his back on, that really concerned him.” James’s expatriates are seeking and losing their souls abroad; Howells’s are on holiday.