A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  Still, he could not indefinitely evade the dilemma that informs the central moral questions of the novel: What is our brotherly responsibility for our fellow man, especially the stranger who is suffering? How can we hope to alleviate all the misery we see by individual acts of charity? And yet, is this an excuse to do nothing? (In a fascinating essay he wrote at the same time, “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver,” Howells wryly analyzes the act of giving money to street beggars in New York. Torn between wanting to give and not wanting to “pauperize” the needy, he reflects: “I hate a bad conscience, and of the two bad consciences, I always choose the least,” namely, giving. But, intending to give the beggar a dime, he finds in his pocket only half a dollar, which seems too steep a contribution. He ponders: “Shall we always give to him that asketh? ... What is a deserving case of charity—or rather, what is not? Is a starving or freezing person to be denied because he or she is drunken or vicious? What is desert to the poor? What is desert to the rich, I suppose the reader would answer.” In the novel, March runs after a garbage-picker who looks like a gentleman and hands him some money, and is almost shamed by the profuse thanks this modest gesture evokes.)

  The Marches’ attitudes, particularly Basil’s, go through many subtle shifts. Shortly after their arrival in their new city, they debate: How much misery is there actually in New York? Then they try to reassure themselves that the poor don’t feel it as keenly as they might, being used to no other existence. Then they try to make it into a colorful spectacle, even envying the poor their dramatic flair. A century later, we cannot help wincing at Isabel March’s patronizing love for blacks, say. But remember, Howells is way ahead of them: showing step-by-step how this touristic response to the Other is an inevitable stage in the ongoing process of acquiring a deeper understanding.

  Their point of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressions of New York remained the same that they had been fifteen years before: huge, noisy, ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed then. The main difference was that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only regarded it a spectacle; and March could not release himself from a sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or critical, attitude he took. A sense of the striving and the suffering deeply possessed him, and this grew the more intense as he gained some knowledge of the forces at work—forces of pity, of destruction, of perdition, of salvation.

  So March achieves that ethical high ground, complicity, acknowledging an implication in the wrongs around him. He feels called upon to do something more than watch—but what? Conrad and Margaret Vance are actively working in the ghetto, part of a generation of society reformers or “do-gooders,” as they were then called. But they are not an entirely attractive exemplar, for activism may carry with it a certain humorless, fanatical narrowing (“The man of one idea is always a little ridiculous,” Beaton says disparagingly). March tries to be generally helpful, to take principled stands whenever possible, but they don’t finally matter a great deal. The point is that he now understands—is “complicit” with the mystery of suffering and knows how wrong poverty is. By the end of the novel he is railing against the fact that a workingman may slave all his life and still not be secure at the end from hunger and destitution. This may seem cold comfort to the destitute, but as Alfred Kazin put it: “What interested Howells at this point was the education of men of goodwill—the slow and painful growth of a few sensitive minds in the face of materialism and inequality.”

  Other critics have taken Howells to task for his inability to inhabit the lives of the poor; that is, for his cleaving to the perspective of the middle class looking at the poor (and for that matter, at the rich). But not every great novel can take in all of society convincingly: This one has the strength of its honesty in x-raying the limitations of a determinedly middle-class perspective, thereby “mirroring for Americans their own complacency and revealing the nature of the society for which they are ultimately responsible,” as William Alexander remarks. The Marches’ illusions about poverty, that “somehow it existed for their appreciation,” may undergo a shift, but it cannot undo a lifetime spent “self-enwrapt”—to use Howells’ nice term for middle-class narcissism.

  “The whole spectacle of poverty, indeed, is incredible. As soon as you cease to have it before your eyes—even when you have it before your eyes,—you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many people deny it exists, or is much more than the superstition of the sentimentalist.” So Howells, in his “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver,” summarizes as truthfully as anyone ever has the enormous psychological resistance of the haves to the reality of the have-nots. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, he analyzes coolly the very mechanisms of denial and rationalization by which we soothe ourselves with fantasies about good intentions. The result is what Kenneth S. Lynn called “the most revealing study ever made of sentimental American liberalism,” while Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, wrote more identifyingly: “It’s still the best book about middle-class life—or is it upper-middle? anyway, the lives of salaried professionals—in New York, a great American novel.”

  A Hazard of New Fortunes is an ensemble novel, without a central character—unless it would be the city itself. (For once that cliché, that the city is also a major character in the novel, is absolutely correct.) Basil March is not the central character; though he may register the consciousness of the book, his actions do not initiate or determine its key events. In addition, he drops out of the book for chapters at a time.

  At the opposite end of the character spectrum from the conscientious family man, March, stands the blithely self-justifying artist and bachelor, Angus Beaton, an intriguing creation of Howells’. Beaton is a male flirt who can’t seem to keep himself from leading on various women, including the naive, gauche heiress Christine Dryfoos, the debutante “do-gooder” Margaret Vance, and the “new woman” painter Alma Leighton. He operates partly out of cynicism, partly out of improvisatory intuition. “He had no scruple about breaking an engagement or failing to keep an appointment; he made promises without thinking of their fulfillment, and not because he was a faithless person, but because he was imaginative, and expected at the time to do what he said, but was fickle, and so did not.” Though most critics have been hard on Beaton as symbolic of an amoral, egoistic current in mass society, and though March keeps threatening to throttle him, Howells himself evinces an underground sympathy for his character. Undoubtedly the middle-aged author still remembered enough of his vain, self-inventing youth to enjoy Beaton’s companionship. (This character is a first cousin to Bartley Hubbard, the glib, pleasure-seeking journalist in A Modern Instance, to whom Howells acknowledged a shadow kinship.) Here, he privileges Beaton by letting him be the only character besides March, a clearer author surrogate, on whose thoughts we are allowed to eavesdrop at length.

  Howells makes a point of showing that this American version of a Baudelairian dandy arose from the laboring classes, as a tombstone cutter’s son. His sardonic self-fluidity proves an effective counter-anchor to the overly bourgeois, decent March. Beaton is not a phony, he has talent to burn—certainly enough to give the magazine the visual panache it requires—and is a hard worker, in his idler’s way. Using the artist’s déclassé posture to gain admittance to society salons, he yet feels closer to the unpolished arriviste Christine than the sophisticated Margaret Vance. Too close to his working-class roots to have much liberal sympathy for the poor, his politics are appalling, as when he says the streetcar strikers should be shot, simply because they have inconvenienced him. He is not without a conscience, as evidenced by his worries about his father. But then, he immediately rationalizes his guilt: Instead of sending his father the money he fantasizes, he goes out and spends it on a fur-lined coat (the very luxury item, you might say, that Howells guiltily referred to in his letter to James). Just as Beaton imagines himself married to the primitive Christine Dryfoos “in a kind of admiring self-pity,” so March fantasizes doing more and more for the worth
y Lindau, even leaving him money in his will—then promptly forgets about him. For all their seeming oppositions, March and Beaton are brothers in their comic propensity to rationalize.

  Beaton is also representative of New York’s bachelor population. The city, by the very anonymity it offered, was a mecca for single people, just as it acted to undermine family life by its distractions and incentives to workaholism. (Even architecturally, Isabel March complains, the New York flat is “made for social show, not for family life at all,”) Beaton is the sort of bachelor who will try to wriggle out of any romantic corner, and so ends up with no one, while Alma Leighton, his female counterpart, seeks to maintain her freedom at all costs, though perhaps for different reasons. It is tempting to see her as an early feminist, presciently aware of the oppressions that might meet any woman who submits to an unequal marriage.

  And indeed, by the end of the book, even the uxurious March is proclaiming, in the spirit of the fragmenting, disentangling city:

  “Why shouldn’t we rejoice as much at a nonmarriage as a marriage? When we consider the enormous risks people take in linking their lives together after not half so much thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad whenever they don’t do it. I believe that this popular demand for the matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading. We get to thinking that there is no other happiness or good fortune in life except marriage, and it’s offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage, beauty, learning, and saving human life. We all know it isn’t. We know that in reality, marriage is dog-cheap, and anybody can have it for the asking—if he keeps asking enough people. By and by some fellow will wake up and see that a first-class story can be written from the antimarriage point of view.”

  A Hazard of New Fortunes is not, finally, a comedy—especially not the kind that will end in a nuptial scene, such as The Rise of Silas Lapham. Between the lines, we can hear the novelist defending himself against the reader’s claims for a happy ending, with wedding bells uniting all the singles. He had vowed to work the novel toward “issues nobler and larger than those of the love affairs common to fiction.” Might we also speculate that Howells was speaking in code about his own domestic situation, which had become increasingly cheerless?

  When he was well into the writing of the novel, on March 3, 1889, Howells incurred the sudden death of his bright, beloved daughter Winifred. She had been sick for years with a mysterious, wasting-away ailment that was originally diagnosed as psychological, like anorexia, and Howells had decided, against his wife Elinor’s wishes, to put their daughter under the care of a leading physician, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who advocated rest cure and force-feedings, and she had died while under this treatment. The autopsy showed that she had been suffering, in fact, from some organic gastro-intestinal complaint. He wrote his friend Edward Everett Hale: “I come back sore from head to foot and grovel in the mere sense of loss. Never to hear, never to see, never to touch, till time shall be no more! How can I bear that?” Howells’ grief was so keen as to paralyze his capacity to work on the novel. He recalled later: “For weeks I made start after start, and tore up everything I wrote. I was in perfect despair about it.” Elinor Howells, who had long suffered from delicate health, became a permanent invalid after her daughter Winny’s death. Howells retreated to Belmont, Massachusetts, near his daughter’s grave, where he “experienced what anguish a man can live through.” Finally, the novel began to flow again, “as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think such things happen. ... It compelled into its course incidents, interests, individualities, which I had not known lay near.” This breakthrough of the emotional logjam produced a sudden fluency in Howells that allowed him to tie up all the loose ends, for better or worse.

  Up to a point, A Hazard of New Fortunes keeps expanding with no end in sight, exhibiting an omnivorous appetite for everyday life, crises that turn into false alarms, flirtations which come to nothing, until finally it crashes against something immovable: the streetcar strike. This strike episode was a way for him to grasp at some larger social significance, to exorcise (and exercise) his continuing outrage at the Haymarket affair, and to bring out more sharply the Tolstoyan theme of man’s duty to man.

  Given Howells’ sense of human character as a muddle of virtue and flaw, mistake and compromise, it must have been hard for him to arrive, in plot terms, at the irrevocable. Certainly the hanging of the Haymarket defendants had been something irrevocable, but it had horrified and disgusted him, not inspired him; as a writer, he was never able to tackle it head-on. Other realistic novelists, such as Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser, might orchestrate catastrophe with all the weight of evolutionary fate bearing down on their characters, but Howells’ old habits of optimism and comedy made him draw back from such grim certainties. He was happier showing simultaneous lives proliferating and streaming into the ocean of the quotidian. But he knew, perhaps regretfully, that he must make something happen. Hence the death of Conrad Dryfoos. Incidents of violence do pop up in Howells’ novels, but generally they happen “offstage” and are reticently described; here, as well. The problem with making the streetcar strike the novel’s defining climax is that it does not emanate from the plot preceding it; we have been hanging around a magazine and now are thrust into the strike like any urban nuisance (a blackout, say) to which the citydweller must suddenly adapt. It cannot bear the full weight of showing a character acting willfully, irrevocably, tragically. Indeed, Conrad’s death seems almost an accident.

  The death of Conrad is effective melodrama, but it stops the novel cold. And that was, I believe, for personal reasons: Howells the novelist might have gone on, but Howells the father who had just lost his daughter could not. He could not imagine anything more powerful, more awful, than the death of one’s child. So even though Conrad is a minor character—the equivalent of the side-kick (in hundreds of movies since) whose death in the penultimate reel forces the lovers to reconcile their differences—the fact that he was the child of someone, old Dryfoos, meant that parental grief must dominate the final pages. Dryfoos’s grief is indeed moving and noble, but more problematic are the attempts of Howells, through his mouthpiece March, to wring some final meaning from the narrative. There is too much Sunday-sermon preaching at the end; the obvious Christ symbolism attached to Conrad gets a little sticky. March’s belated screeds against an economic system that leaves us “covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame” seem rhetorical, unearned; they would fit better in a Zola novel about miners than one which spends so much of its time in drawing rooms. Perhaps Howells had envisoned steering this large, capacious novel into one about labor struggles and class antagonisms; but the strike comes too late, the book already possesses its own bright, diverting identity: a middle-class city novel. This is A Hazard of New Fortunes’ only striking flaw: that it stops rather than satisfactorily concluding. But then, with all those subplots, with such an exploding universe dedicated to the everyday (Henry James had found it “simply prodigious”), how could it have been pulled together?

  Howells would live another thirty years. He continued to write—Utopian novels, comic plays, memoirs, children’s tales, story collections—all intelligent, shrewd, and genial, none as vivid as A Hazard of New Fortunes. He continued speaking out for a just society; supported the NAACP, opposed America’s imperialist adventures in the Philippines, marched in a pro-women’s suffrage parade, defended labor’s causes. He was both honored and scorned: Asked to serve as the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, called “the Dean of American letters” (an irresistible pun on his middle name), he also became a juicy target for young Turks. Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken laced into him. Perhaps resenting his former gatekeeper status, they mocked his “smiling aspects of life” statement and portrayed him as an irrelevant ninny.

  Not so Dreiser, who wrote a moving tribute calling him “an influence for the good in American letters” and “a sweet and wholesome presence in the
world of art. By the side of the egotists in his field, the chaser after fame and the hagglers over money, this man is a towering figure. His greatness is his goodness, his charm his sincerity.” Yet even here, the stress on his sweetness showed he was about to be tossed aside as too sugary, too Victorian. Howells lived long enough to say, with characteristic self-mocking realism: “I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in the pale moonlight.”

  “The critical intelligence... has not at all begun to render you its tribute... your really beautiful time will come,” Henry James assured him. Clearly it hasn’t, yet. In a brilliant essay, “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste,” Lionel Trilling pondered why this “very engaging novelist” does not stand higher with the contemporary reading public. Trilling expanded on three points, derived from Henry James’s analysis of Howells’ characteristics: (1) that Howells preferred “the common, the immediate, the familiar” to “the rare and strange,” and that our modernist taste requires “the extreme”; (2) that Howells, in his zest to capture life on the fly, was less concerned with self-reflexive artifice and the perfections of form, qualities we now perhaps overvalue; and (3) most suggestively, that Howells had a deficient awareness of evil. Trilling speaks wryly of the “charisma” that evil has come to have for today’s readers, especially after the genocidal horrors of the twentieth century. He also speaks touchingly of Howells’ sweetness, his affection for people: “Again, when we have said all that there is to say about Howells’ theory of character, have taken full account of its intentional lack of glory, we must see that in its reasoned neutrality, in its insistence on the virtual equality in any person of the good and the bad, or of the interesting and the dull, there is a kind of love, perhaps not so much of persons as of persons in society, of the social idea.”