At Home

by Gore Vidal

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  One is constantly surprised by the spaciousness of James’s sympathies as he got older. In time, the vulgarity of Whitman was seen for what it is, the nation itself made flesh. Edith Wharton in A Backward Glance writes,

  It was a joy to me to discover that James thought [Whitman] the greatest of American poets. Leaves of Grass was put into his hands, and all that evening we sat rapt while he wandered from “The Song of Myself” to “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

  On the other hand, no sentiment was ever exempt from his critical irony, and James could not resist exclaiming, at the reading’s end, “Oh, yes, a great genius; undoubtedly a very great genius! Only one cannot help deploring his too-extensive acquaintance with foreign languages.” Like the late Tennessee Williams, Whitman loved foreign phrases and usually got them wrong.

  The fact that one is never told just how James’s heroes make their money was neither coyness nor disdain: It was simply a blank, as he confessed in 1898: “Those who know [business] are not the men to paint it; those who might attempt it are not the men who know it.” One wonders what his friend the author of The Rise of Silas Lapham thought of the alleged absence in our literature of the businessman—of “the magnificent theme en disponibilité.”

  James was very much interested in “the real world”; and not without a certain shrewdness in political matters. Surprisingly, he reviews in The Nation (1875) Charles Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the United States, from Personal Visit and Observation, Etc., a book once again in print. Nordhoff was a Prussian-born American journalist who covered the Civil War for the New York Herald. In the 1870s, he decided to investigate applied communism in the United States, as demonstrated by the Oneida, Amana, Mount Lebanon, and Shaker groups. “Hitherto,” Nordhoff writes, “very little, indeed almost nothing definite and precise, has been made known concerning these societies; and Communism remains loudly but very vaguely spoken of, by friends as well as enemies, and is commonly either a word of terror or contempt in the public prints.” Tout ça change, as the good Walt might have said.

  For over a century, communism has been the necessary enemy of our republic’s ruling oligarchy. Yet before 1917, communism was not associated with totalitarianism or Russian imperialism or the iron rule of a nomenklatura. Communism was simply an economic theory, having to do with greater efficiency in production as a result of making those who did the work the owners. James grasps this principle rather better than most of his contemporaries, and he commends Nordhoff for his ability to show us

  communistic life from the point of view of an adversary to trades-unions, and to see whether in the United States, with their vast area for free experiments in this line, it might not offer a better promise to workingmen than mere coalitions to increase wages and shorten the hours of labor.

  Although he thinks Nordhoff (probably a closet German socialist) tends to “dip his pen into rose-color,” James is intrigued by the material efficiency of the societies. He is also appalled by their social customs: Some are celibate, some swap mates. “One is struck, throughout Mr. Nordhoff’s book, with the existence in human nature of lurking and unsuspected strata, as it were, of asceticism, of the capacity for taking a grim satisfaction in dreariness.” Then James adds with characteristic sly irony: “Remember that there are in America many domestic circles in which, as compared with the dreariness of private life, the dreariness of Shakerism seems like boisterous gaiety.”

  Predictably, James deplores the “attempt to organize and glorify the detestable tendency toward the complete effacement of privacy in life and thought everywhere so rampant with us nowadays.” Would that he could move among us today and revel in our government’s call for obligatory blood and urine tests. “But [lack of privacy] is the worst fact chronicled in Mr. Nordhoff’s volume, which, for the rest, seems to establish fairly that, under certain conditions and with strictly rational hopes, communism in America may be a paying experiment.” Now that I have revived these lines, James, already banned in certain public libraries for pornography (The Turn of the Screw, what else?), can now be banned as a communist. A small price, all in all, to pay for freedom.

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  As the complete Henry James is to be republished in the Library of America, it is amusing to read what he has to say of the other novelists in the series, also, more to the point, what he does not have to say. For instance, there is no mention of Jack London, whose best work was done before James died in 1916. Although the inner life of a dog in the Arctic circle might not have appealed to the Master, James might have found a good deal to ponder in The Sea Wolf and The Iron Heel. Stephen Crane appears in his letters (and his life; he liked him, not her) but there is no reference to Crane anywhere in the flow, the torrent, of names like Alger, Bazley, Channing, Fletcher, Gannett, Sedley, Spofford, Whitney…

  James’s study of Hawthorne is famous; it is also full of evasive high praise: James did not care for romance; yet Hawthorne’s one “real” novel, The Blithedale Romance, which is not, to me, a romance at all, is to James notable for its “absence of satire…of its not aiming in the least at satire.” I thought the whole thing a splendid send-up of Brook Farm, and Zenobia a truly comic character. In any case, Hawthorne is the only American novelist to whom James pays full homage.

  He does do justice to his friend Howells. He certainly applauds Howells’s ability for “definite notation”; yet he doesn’t much care for Howells’s ladies. But Howells is not writing about the drawing room; he writes about men, work, business. Bartley Hubbard is a splendid invention—the newspaperman as inventor—while the story of Silas Lapham does for the paint business what Balzac so magically did for paper. James (writing for lady readers?) looks elsewhere.

  Fenimore Cooper is mentioned, blandly, twice, while Melville is dismissed in the following line: “the charming Putnam [magazine] of faraway years—the early fifties…the prose, as mild and easy as an Indian summer in the woods, of Herman Melville, of George William Curtis and ‘Ik Marvel.’ ”

  Mark Twain, with whom Henry James was forced so titanically to contest in the pages of Van Wyck Brooks (James lost), is mentioned only once: “In the day of Mark Twain there is no harm in being reminded that the absence of drollery may, at a stretch, be compensated by the presence of sublimity.” So much for the Redskin Chief from the Paleface Prince. Finally, James praises his friend Mrs. Wharton, with the no longer acceptable but perfectly apt characterization: “of the masculine conclusion tending to crown the feminine observation.”

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  James is on happier ground when dealing with English and French writers. As for the Russians, except for Turgenev, whom he knew, they seem to have made no impression. There is a perfunctory nod to Tolstoy (1914) in a survey of the new novel. Tolstoy is “the great Russian” whose influence can be detected in the world of Wells and Bennett. The name Dostoevsky is added to a list of deliberately disparate writers. Admittedly, by then (1897) James had ceased to be a working reviewer as opposed to being an occasional writer of “London Notes” for Harper’s, with a tendency “to pass judgment in parenthesis,” something he maintained that the critic by him admired, Matthew Arnold, never did.

  Henry James’s admiration of the never entirely fashionable and often despised Balzac is to his eternal credit as a critic. On the other hand, his attitude to Flaubert, whom he knew, is very odd indeed. He thought that Flaubert (whom he could see all ’round, he once declared) had produced a single masterpiece; and that that was that. He seems not to have got the point to Sentimental Education, the first truly “modern novel,” which demonstrated for the first time in literature the fact that life is simply drift; and though Bouvard and Pécuchet is unfinished, the notion is still splendid if droll (James, who was, in life, the essence of drollery, did not much care for levity in the novel, tant pis).

  It is always easy to make fun of book reviewers, and what we take now to be, in
our superior future time, their mistakes. But he is wrongheaded when he writes (1876): “Putting aside Mme. Sand, it is hard to see who, among the French purveyors of more or less ingenious fiction, is more accomplished than [M. Octave Feuillet]. There are writers who began with better things—Flaubert, Gustave Droz, and Victor Cherbuliez—but they have lately done worse, whereas M. Feuillet never falls below himself.” Flaubert had been lately doing such “worse” things as publishing Sentimental Education (1869) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), while Three Tales would be published the next year. James had read one of them:

  Gustave Flaubert has written a story about the devotion of a servant-girl to a parrot, and the production, highly finished as it is, cannot, on the whole, be called a success. We are perfectly free to call it flat, but I think it might have been interesting; and I, for my part, am extremely glad he should have written it; it is a contribution to our knowledge of what can be done—or what cannot. Ivan Turgenev has written a tale about a deaf and dumb serf and a lap-dog, and the thing is touching, loving, a little masterpiece. He struck the note of life where Flaubert missed it—he flew in the face of a presumption and achieved a victory.

  James is never on thinner ice than when he goes on about “presumptions,” as if the lovely art was nothing but constant presuming. In The Art of Fiction (1884), he is more open: “There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novel may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert have worked in this field with equal glory.” Equal is not the right word; but glory is.

  The usually generous James cannot entirely accept Flaubert, the one contemporary writer whose dedication to his art was comparable to his own. Although James goes on and on about the greatness of Madame Bovary, he cannot, simultaneously, resist undermining it:

  Nothing will ever prevent Flaubert’s heroine from having been an extremely minor specimen, even of the possibilities of her own type, a twopenny lady, in truth, of an experience so limited that some of her chords, it is clear, can never be sounded at all. It is a mistake, in other words, to speak of any feminine nature as consummately exhibited, that is exhibited in so small a number of its possible relations. Give it three or four others, we feel moved to say—“then we can talk.”

  Plainly, Flaubert’s version of a “twopenny lady” is not the portrait of a lady of the sort that James could happily “talk” about. I suspect, finally, that James not only did not like Flaubert’s writing but that he had serious moral reservations about French literature in general: “There are other subjects,” he wrote plaintively, “than those of the eternal triangle of the husband, the wife and the lover.” Among critics, James is hardly a master; rather, he is a master of the novel who makes asides that are, often, luminous; as often, not.

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  In the spring of 1948, I was received in Paris by André Gide at 1 bis Rue Vaneau. I spent a pleasant hour with the Master and John Lehmann, my English publisher. We talked of literature, of national differences, of changing fashions, of James. Then Gide (the proud translator of Conrad) asked, “What is it that you Americans—and English—see in Henry James?” I could only stammer idiocies in my schoolboy French. Ironically, now, nearly forty years later, I find myself explaining to the young that there was once a famous French writer named André Gide. Fashions change but, as George Santayana remarked, “it would be insufferable if they did not.” Each generation has its own likes and dislikes and ignorances.

  In our postliterary time, it is hard to believe that once upon a time a life could be devoted to the perfecting of an art form, and that of all the art forms the novel was the most—exigent, to use a modest word. Today the novel is either a commodity that anyone can put together, or it is an artifact, which means nothing or anything or everything, depending on one’s literary theory. No longer can it be said of a writer, as James said of Hawthorne in 1905: “The grand sign of being a classic is that when you have ‘passed,’ as they say at examinations, you have passed; you have become one once for all; you have taken your degree and may be left to the light and the ages.” In our exciting world the only light cast is cast by the cathode-ray tube; and the idea of “the ages” is, at best, moot—mute?

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  November 6, 1986

  CHAPTER 16

  WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

  1

  On May 1, 1886, American workers in general and Chicago’s workers in particular decided that the eight-hour workday was an idea whose time had come. Workers demonstrated, and a number of factories were struck. Management responded in kind. At McCormick Reaper strikers were replaced by “scabs.” On May 3, when the scabs left the factory at the end of a long traditional workday, they were mobbed by the strikers. Chicago’s police promptly opened fire and America’s gilded age looked to be cracking open.

  The next night, in Haymarket Square, the anarchists held a meeting presided over by the mayor of Chicago. A thousand workers listened to many thousands of highly incendiary words. But all was orderly until His Honor went home; then the police “dispersed” the meeting with that tact which has ever marked Hog City’s law-enforcement officers. At one point, someone (never identified) threw a bomb; a number of policemen and workers were killed or wounded. Subsequently, there were numerous arrests and in-depth grillings.

  Finally, more or less at random, eight men were indicted for “conspiracy to murder.” There was no hard evidence of any kind. One man was not even in town that day while another was home playing cards. By and large, the great conservative Republic felt no compassion for anarchists, even the ones who had taken up the revolutionary game of bridge; worse, an eight-hour workday would drive a stake through the economy’s heart.

  On August 20, a prejudiced judge and jury found seven of the eight men guilty of murder in the first degree; the eighth man (who had not been in town that night) got fifteen years in the slammer because he had a big mouth. The anarchists’ counsel, Judge Roger A. Pryor, then appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court.

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  During the short hot summer of 1886, the case was much discussed. The peculiar arbitrariness of condemning to death men whom no one had seen commit a crime but who had been heard, at one time or another, to use “incendiary and seditious language” was duly noted in bookish circles. Yet no intellectual of the slightest national importance spoke up. Of America’s famous men of letters, Mark Twain maintained his habitual silence on any issue where he might, even for an instant, lose the love of the folks. Henry James was in London, somewhat shaken by the recent failure of not only The Bostonians but The Princess Casamassima. The sad young man of The Princess Casamassima is an anarchist, who has had, like James himself that year, “more news of life than he knew what to do with.” Although Henry Adams’s education was being conducted that summer in Japan, he had made, the previous year, an interesting comment on the American political system—or lack of one:

  Where no real principle divides us…some queer mechanical balance holds the two parties even, so that changes of great numbers of voters leave no trace in the sum total. I suspect the law will someday be formulated that in democratic societies, parties tend to an equilibrium.

  As the original entropy man, Adams had to explain, somehow, the election of the Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884, after a quarter-century of Republican abolitionist virtue and exuberant greed.

  Of the Republic’s major literary and intellectual figures (the division was not so clearly drawn then between town, as it were, and gown), only one took a public stand. At forty-nine, William Dean Howells was the author of that year’s charming “realistic” novel, Indian Summer; he was also easily the busiest and smoothest of America’s men of letters. Years before, he had come out of Ohio to conquer the world of literature; and had succeeded. He had been the first outlander to
be editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In the year of the Haymarket Square riot, he had shifted the literary capital of the country from Boston to New York when he took over Harper’s Monthly, for which he wrote a column called “The Editor’s Study”; and a thousand other things as well. That summer Howells had been reading Tolstoy. In fact, Tolstoy was making a socialist out of him; and Howells was appalled by Chicago’s judge, jury, and press. He was also turning out his column, a hasty affair by his own best standards but positively lapidary by ours.

  * * *

  In the September 1886 issue of Harper’s, Howells, who had done so much to bring Turgenev and Tolstoy to the attention of American readers, decided to do the same for Dostoevsky, whose Crime and Punishment was then available only in a French translation. Since Howells had left school at fifteen, he had been able to become very learned indeed. He had taught himself Latin and Greek; learned Spanish, German, Italian, and French. He read many books in many languages, and he knew many things. He also wrote many books; and many of those books are of the first rank. He was different from us. Look at Dean run! Look at Dean read! Look-say what Dean writes!

  While the Haymarket Square riots were causing Howells to question the basis of the American “democracy,” he was describing a Russian writer who had been arrested for what he had written and sent off to Siberia where he was taken out to be shot but not shot—the kind of fun still to be found to this very day south of our borders where the dominoes roam. As Howells proceeded most shrewdly to explain Dostoevsky to American readers, he rather absently dynamited his own reputation for the next century. Although he admired Dostoevsky’s art, he could find little similarity between the officially happy, shadowless United States and the dark Byzantine cruelties of czarist Russia: