by John Updike
But it is Bartley Hubbard, in A Modern Instance (1882), who lifts unlikability to something like the sublime—he is so bad, one might say, he is good. In a typically Howellsian daze of vanity and drifting good nature, he yields to the sexual aggression, in a small Maine town, of Marcia Gaylord, marries her when she chases him, and then acts out his wedded discontent in Boston. The novel, perhaps Howells’s strongest overall performance, made a sensation in its day with its depiction of a divorce; but its verity and power lie in its portrait of a marriage insecurely based upon unequal loves. Bartley’s beautifully slippery yet never downright ill-intentioned stream of self-advocacy, as it works within his unstable marriage and within his declining journalistic career, is of a psychological subtlety as humorous as it is accurate. For example, in the superb reconciliation scene the day after Bartley, in the wake of a bitter marital quarrel, was brought home dead drunk, many small motions of the husband’s mind, as it oscillates between apology and advantage-seeking, are registered. Albeit repentant, “he was not without a self-righteous sense of having given her a useful and necessary lesson.” She acts more repentant than he, and bursts into tears: “The sight unmanned Bartley; he hated to see any one cry, even his wife, to whose tears he was accustomed.” In promising it will never happen again, “he felt the glow of virtuous performance.” Her extreme innocence about alcohol and its effects gives him more leeway than he had expected; he explains to her that “If I’d had the habit of drinking, I shouldn’t have been affected by it.… I took what wouldn’t have touched a man that was in the habit of it.” Marcia eagerly pounces on this self-justification, and gazes upon him as the “one habitually sober man in a Boston full of inebriates.” She resumes her sewing “with shining eyes,” and “Bartley remained in his place on the sofa, feeling, and perhaps looking, rather sheepish. He had made a clean breast of it, and the confession had redounded only too much to his credit. To do him justice, he had not intended to bring the affair to quite such a triumphant conclusion; and perhaps something better than his sense of humor was also touched when he found himself not only exonerated but transformed into an exemplar of abstinence.”
Mark Twain, reading this novel as it was serialized, jubilantly wrote Howells, “You didn’t intend Bartley for me, but he is me, just the same.” Years later Howells told Brander Matthews that he had drawn Bartley, “the false scoundrel,” from himself. Certainly this flawed man and his flawed marriage are depicted with an unblinking scrutiny the opposite of sentimental. The scene summarized above is ironically refracted within the idealism of Ben Halleck, one of Howells’s hypermoralistic Bostonians, who finds the Hubbards’ reconciliation after “such beastliness” incredible, and has to be told of the married couple, “They can’t live together in enmity, and they must live together. I dare say the offense had merely worn itself out between them.”
When Bartley at last deserts Marcia, he becomes, by the light of her lonely vigil and proud agony, a villain; and the desperate trip to Indiana that Marcia and her father and child and Halleck and his sister undertake to forestall Bartley’s divorce proceedings is thrilling like little else in Howells. The reader’s pulse races as the party descends by train from the chill of Boston in early April into the softer, warmer Midwest from which Howells had sprung:
It is a beautiful land, and it had, even to their loath eyes, a charm that touched their hearts.… They had now left the river-hills and the rolling country beyond, and had entered the great plain which stretches from the Ohio to the Mississippi; and mile by mile, as they ran southward and westward, the spring unfolded in the mellow air under the dull, warm sun.
The novel, in this heartland, becomes an old-fashioned novel, melodramatic and sentimental; Marcia’s father, a Maine lawyer known as the Squire—as was Howells’s own father-in-law, in Brattleboro—arrives in the nick of time to deliver an old-fashioned peroration, much admired in the sleepy Indiana courtroom, in order to “bring yonder perjurer to justice.” But Marcia cries out that she means Bartley no harm; the Squire, thus arrested in his vengeance, collapses of a stroke; and the next day Bartley reveals himself to Halleck as much his old self—jocose, insouciant, not particularly repentant, with a self-justifying story to tell. He even has a happy ending to suggest: that Halleck, who loves Marcia, now marry her. But the Bostonian is too priggish, too tortured in his moralism, to accept, and by inaction condemns her to shrewish loneliness. Judged by standards derived not from novels but from American reality, the blithe deserter is not entirely unlikable, and the scrupulous man is far from admirable.
The muted, ambiguous ending of A Modern Instance brings us to the second peculiarity of Howells’s novels: their tendency to defuse themselves, to avert or mute their own crises. No book illustrates this tendency better than the one we are most likely to have read, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). The opening pages show Lapham, a blustering Vermonter who has made a fortune in the manufacture of paint, being interviewed by none other than Bartley Hubbard, in his better days. We prepare ourselves for a more or less painful tale of misdirected social aspiration—the loutish new capitalist thrusting himself and his modest wife, for the sake of their two marriageable daughters, upon the gentry of old Boston. From the start we are imbued with suggestions that Lapham, a coarse good fellow, is bound to overreach and arrive at ruin; an old financial sin—forcing out a partner at the point when his business began to prosper—is bound, by the logic of novels, to catch up with him. But, as the events unfurl, the representatives of Boston society, the Coreys, are too ironical and realistic to stage a confrontation or offer much resistance. When Mrs. Corey raises the dreadful possibility of their son’s marrying a “paint princess,” her husband, a dilettante painter (he works on a smaller scale than Lapham, who has surreally painted whole Vermont boulders in advertisement of his product), says breezily, “If money is fairly and honestly earned, why should we pretend to care what it comes out of, when we don’t really care? That superstition is exploded everywhere.” And the son, Tom Corey, actually wants to get into the paint business, and is level-headed enough to overlook Lapham’s bad points in behalf of the good ones and the opportunities for himself. There is an obligatory scene of social gaucherie, when new money mixes with old and the self-made Vermonter gets drunk on Beacon Hill spirits; but the scene is tenderly, lightly done, with something of nobility emerging from Lapham’s Civil War reminiscences and something of graciousness from the Coreys’ well-bred politeness.
Again, the wrong paint princess imagines that Tom is in love with her, but when this prolonged misunderstanding arrives at its denouement, the forsaken sister sensibly and stoically takes herself upcountry and doesn’t return to the novel until her wound is healed. In a piquing little subplot, a mysterious and ominously pretty girl working in Lapham’s Boston office appears to be under his special protection. An illegitimate daughter? God forbid, a mistress? The answer, when it comes, does Lapham nothing but credit and makes Mrs. Lapham ashamed of her wicked suspicions. Most benignly of all, the long-anticipated financial reverses turn out to be a blessing in disguise, involving Lapham’s moral regeneration and sending him back to Vermont, where he belongs. When the splendid house in Back Bay, whose construction has served as the very symbol of Lapham’s urban aspirations, burns to the ground uninsured, his wife exclaims, “Oh, thank the merciful Lord!” and Lapham coolly calculates that, “having resolved not to sell his house, he was no more crippled by its loss than he would have been by letting his money lie idle in it.” Indeed, Howells’s presiding comedic spirit contrives such a virtually irresistible opportunity for Lapham to recoup his fortunes that only a very elaborate exercise of fine scruple—as fantastically fine, to this reader, as Ben Halleck’s in A Modern Instance—enables him to escape renewed prosperity.
It is as if two men were busy in the composition of Silas Lapham—a plot deviser mapping out conflicts and points of explosion, and an agile underminer who knows that misunderstandings don’t last forever, that in this genial democracy social
differences get easily bridged, that people or at least Americans are basically reasonable and make the best of their disappointments, and that things generally work out if not for the best then for the second best. Howells says as much: “Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false.… Lapham’s adversity … was not always like the adversity we figure in allegory; it had its moments of being like prosperity.”
Realism for Zola and Frank Norris and Sinclair Lewis meant the exposure of something unpleasant; for Howells, it meant fidelity to the mild, middling truth of average American life. Chastised for tameness, he answered, “The manners of the novel have been improving with those of its readers; that is all. Gentlemen no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, or abduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely country-houses, or so habitually set about the ruin of their neighbors’ wives, as they once did.” In defending the American novel, compared with the French, for its lack of sexual frankness, he argued, “No one will pretend that there is not vicious love beneath the surface of our society; if he did, the fetid explosions of the divorce trials would refute him; but if he pretended that it was in any just sense characteristic of our society, he could be still more easily refuted.” Even Howells’s much-mocked phrase “the smiling aspects of American life” in its context argues from the perceived local reality: “Our novelists … concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American.… It is worth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to be softened and modified by conditions which formerly at least could not be said to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire.”
Men and circumstances are mightily mixed, and crises are generally averted or deflected, and life does not fall into plots: Howells’s novels press these truths upon us, in defiance of novelistic convention, which asked for heroes, crises, and elaborate plots. Like Kitty Ellison, he wanted “to take the slightest sort of plot, and lay the scene in the dullest kind of place, and then bring out all their possibilities.” In 1871, while working on his first novel, Howells wrote a friend, “There’s nothing like having railroads and steamboats transact your plot for you.” Decades later, in writing of Dickens, he stated, “The true plot comes out of the character.… Plot aforethought does not characterize. But Dickens believed it did, and all the romantic school of writers believed it did. Bulwer, Charles Reade, and even George Eliot, in some measure, thought so; but for all that—all that faking, that useless and false business of creating a plot and multiplying incidents—Dickens was the greater artist, because he could somehow make the thing transact itself.” All that faking, that useless and false business, Howells found a name for in an essay by a Spanish novelist, Armando Palacio Valdés, who assigned the term “effectism” to “the awaking at all cost in the reader vivid and violent emotions” with “a complicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses.” In opposition to “effectism” stood the simple, direct novels of Bjørnson, from which, according to Howells, we learn “that the lives of men and women, if they be honestly studied, can, without surprising incident or advantageous circumstance, be made as interesting in literature as are the smallest private affairs of the men and women in one’s own neighborhood.”
Howells’s books have plots, but the author—this is the third strange feature—does not seem to get whole-heartedly behind them, and leaves us with an impression of outlines not filled in, of developments not permitted. His characters strain against a leash that is not entirely in the hand of circumstance. Howells distrusted exaggeration and, insofar as exaggeration would seem to be intrinsic to fiction, he distrusted fiction. His long early training, remember, was in journalism, and his favorite novel, Don Quixote, warned of a man who had been deranged by reading the novels of his day, medieval romances. In My Literary Passions, Howells admits that he is not sure he doesn’t prefer history to fiction, and tells of a long sickness in his middle years when for seven or eight weeks “the mere sight of the printed page, broken up in dialogue, was anguish”: “it was the dramatic effect contrived by the playwright or novelist, and worked up to in the speech of his characters that I could not bear.” And it is a rare novel by Howells where the characters do not at some point sardonically contrast their behavior to that of people in novels.
The issue of plot goes deeper than melodrama or effectism; in subordinating action to character, Howells set himself against the greatest theoretician of narrative, Aristotle. In his 1899 lecture on the novel, Howells stated, “The old superstition of a dramatic situation as the supreme representation of life must be discarded, and the novelist must endeavor to give exactly the effect of life. I believe he will yet come to do this. I can never do it, for I was bred in a false school whose trammels I have never been quite able to burst; but the novelist who begins where I leave off, will yet write the novel which has been my idea.” Henry James, in one of his graceful yet guarded tributes, spoke of Howells as having transcended “the superstition of ‘form.’ ”
Why “superstition”? What does “form” mean, applied to narrative? For Aristotle—who was a physician’s son, and a keen student of physiology and zoology—the form of a play or narrative derives from its human use: the course of action in a tragedy “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” This is primary effectism: our hearts, entering into the complication and unravelling of the drama, achieve catharsis. A plot is a kind of machine that works upon us a beneficial, purgative effect, an effect of heightened tension which is then relieved; and so can most popular novels, movies, and television dramas be described: they are devices which more or less mechanically and cynically process our emotions and our capacity for caring about phantoms.
But what if a story is not a therapy—not an antidote to life but a clarification of it? What if you think that the narrative art derives its value and importance from its patient truthfulness to our mundane human condition? Then plot is justifiable only to the extent that reality itself can be said to have a plot, a design—plot becomes a philosophical and indeed a theological question. For the Greeks, plot traces the vengeance of the gods, often working their will through human passions. For Christians, plot bares divine Providence and its ultimate justice. In My Literary Passions, Howells recalled his youthful reading of Dickens:
While I read him, I was in a world where the right came out best … and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will yet attend it in our daily life.… In that world of his, in the ideal world, to which the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the shows of things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right.
Howells’s fiction, however, reveals little instinctive belief that merit will in fact be crowned with success and that the real world must conform itself to the ideal. Reared rather haphazardly as a Swedenborgian, in an Ohio saturated with Protestant piety, he slowly but thoroughly became an agnostic, and in his middle life turned to Tolstoy and Socialism in lieu of a supernatural faith. Purposefully, then, and not from any mere aesthetic disdain of flashy effectism, his fiction is formless, and was sensed as such by his contemporaries. A reviewer wrote that “Mr. Howells is more than democratic, he is anarchical.” Howells admired the aesthetic anarch in Mark Twain: “So far as I know Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before, or the thing that may be about to follow.… He saunters out into the trim world of letters, and lounges across its neatly kept paths, and walks about on the grass at will.” And Henry James, writing to his brother William concerning Howells’s novel of 1890, A Hazard of New Fortunes,
complained, “His abundance and facility are my constant wonder and envy—or rather not, perhaps, envy, inasmuch as he has purchased them by throwing the whole question of form, style and composition overboard into the deep sea—from which, on my side, I am perpetually trying to fish them up.”
When we look into ourselves on this question of form in fiction, we find an instinctive expectation that the events and characters presented to us will all prove part of a unified field, that a certain economy will limit their number and distribution, and that the story will end with everybody, in some sense, paid off—a villain like Iago brought to justice, a tormented soul like Othello laid to rest, and an innocent like Desdemona, if not rescued, at least vindicated. This sense of ultimately balanced accounts, still forceful in Dickens, rules the classic European novel, and oddly enough persists in Henry James, like Howells raised as a Swedenborgian and like Howells thoroughly lapsed. But, as no less an expert on matters of faith than Graham Greene has pointed out, James retained a religious sense; without any reference to God, it permeates his novels and gives their moral struggles an ominous grandeur, and their characters’ fates an air of just punishment.d Howells, though he sometimes tries to administer some heavenly justice—Bartley Hubbard, for instance, is perfunctorily shot and killed in Arizona, and Ben Halleck upbraids himself for having dared love Marcia while she was married to this cheerful rotter—really seems to have no heart for it; he was a moral anarch in his art, while observing all the proprieties as husband, concerned citizen, neo-Tolstoyan social moralist, and exemplary dean of the literary community. His dependence upon the received code of the proprieties helps account for his excessive prudery. His realism stopped sharply short of sexual realism,e and he condemned it in others, going back to Chaucer. Prudery may be to blame for his one outstanding critical failure, in a life so strikingly generous in its recognition of the various talents of others—his failure to appreciate Sister Carrie and to see that Dreiser, far more helplessly immersed than he in the new American reality of godless competition, had written, in this matter-of-fact account of a fallen woman’s rise, the untrammelled novel Howells wanted to write, a novel as realistic in its amorality as in its urban details.