At Home

by Gore Vidal

  It is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoevsky’s book that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing….Whatever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally expelled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth….We invite our novelists, therefore, to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests. It is worth while even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities.

  This was meant to be a plea for realism. But it sounded like an invitation to ignore the sort of thing that was happening in Chicago. Ironists are often inadvertent victims of their own irony.

  * * *

  On November 2, 1887, the Supreme Court denied the anarchists’ appeal. On November 4, Howells canvased his literary peers. What to do? The dedicated abolitionist of thirty years earlier, George William Curtis, whose lecture Political Infidelity was a touchstone of political virtue, and the noble John Greenleaf Whittier agreed that something must be done; but they were damned if they were going to do it. So the belletrist who had just enjoined the nation’s scribblers to address themselves to the smiling aspects of a near-perfect land hurled his own grenade at the courts.

  In an open letter to the New York Tribune (published with deep reluctance by the ineffable Whitelaw Reid) Howells addressed all right-thinking persons to join with him in petitioning the governor of Illinois to commute the sentences. No respectable American man of letters had taken on the American system since Thomas Paine, who was neither American nor respectable. Of the Supreme Court, Howells wrote, it “simply affirmed the legality of the forms under which the Chicago court proceeded; it did not affirm the propriety of trying for murder men fairly indictable for conspiracy alone…” The men had been originally convicted of “constructive conspiracy to commit murder,” a star-chamberish offense, based on their fiery language, and never proved to be relevant to the actual events in Haymarket Square. In any case, he made the point that the Supreme Court

  by no means approved the principle of punishing them because of their frantic opinions, for a crime which they were not shown to have committed. The justice or injustice of their sentence was not before the highest tribunal of our law, and unhappily could not be got there. That question must remain for history, which judges the judgment of courts, to deal with; and I, for one, cannot doubt what the decision of history will be.

  Howells said that the remaining few days before the men were executed should be used to persuade the governor to show mercy. In the course of the next week the national press attacked Howells, which is what the American system has a national press for.

  On November 11, four of the men, wearing what look like surgical gowns, were hanged. Of the others, one had committed suicide and two had had their sentences commuted. On November 12, Howells, undaunted by the national hysteria now directed as much against him as against the enemies of property, wrote another public letter:

  It seems of course almost a pity to mix a note of regret with the hymn of thanksgiving for blood growing up from thousands of newspapers all over the land this morning; but I reflect that though I write amidst this joyful noise, my letter cannot reach the public before Monday at the earliest, and cannot therefore be regarded as an indecent interruption of the Te Deum.

  By that time journalism will not have ceased, but history will have at least begun. All over the world where civilized men can think and feel, they are even now asking themselves, For what, really, did those four men die so bravely? Why did one other die so miserably? Next week the journalistic theory that they died so because they were desperate murderers will have grown even more insufficient than it is now for the minds and hearts of dispassionate inquirers, and history will make the answer to which she must adhere for all time, They died in the prime of the first Republic the world has ever known, for their opinions’ sake [original emphasis].

  Howells then proceeds to make the case against the state’s attorney general and the judge and the shrieking press. It is a devastating attack: “I have wished to deal with facts. One of these is that we had a political execution in Chicago yesterday. The sooner we realize this, the better for us.” As polemic, Howells’s letter is more devastating and eloquent than Emile Zola’s J’accuse; as a defense of the right to express unpopular opinions, it is the equal of what we mistakenly take to be the thrust of Milton’s Areopagitica.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, the letter was not published in the year 1887. Eventually, the manuscript was found in an envelope addressed to Whitelaw Reid. The piece had been revised three times. It is possible that a copy had been sent to Reid who had not published it; it is possible that Howells had had second thoughts about the possibilities of libel actions from judge and state’s attorney general; it is possible that he was scared off by the general outcry against him. After all, he had not only a great career to worry about but an ill wife and a dying daughter. Whatever the reason, Howells let his great moment slip by. Even so, the letter-not-sent reveals a powerful mind affronted by “one of those spasms of paroxysmal righteousness to which our Anglo-Saxon race is peculiarly subject…” He also grimly notes that this “trial by passion, by terror, by prejudice, by hate, by newspaper” had ended with a result that has won “the approval of the entire nation.”

  I suspect that the cautious lifetime careerist advised the Tolstoyan socialist to cool it. Howells was in enough trouble already. After all, he was the most successful magazine editor in the country; he was a best-selling novelist. He could not afford to lose a public made up mostly of ladies. So he was heard no more on the subject. But at least he, alone of the country’s writers, had asked, publicly, on November 4, 1887, that justice be done.

  Howells, a master of irony, would no doubt have found ironic in the extreme his subsequent reputation as a synonym for middle-brow pusillanimity. After all, it was he who was the spiritual father of Dreiser (whom he did nothing for, curiously enough) and of Stephen Crane and Harold Frederic and Frank Norris, for whom he did a very great deal. He managed to be the friend and confidant of both Henry James and Mark Twain, quite a trick. He himself wrote a half-dozen of the Republic’s best novels. He was learned, witty, and generous.

  * * *

  Howells lived far too long. Shortly before his death at the age of eighty-four, he wrote his old friend Henry James: “I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in the pale moonlight.” By then he had been dismissed by the likes of Sinclair Lewis as a dully beaming happy writer. But then Lewis knew as little of the American literary near-past as today’s writers know, say, of Lewis. If Lewis had read Howells at all, he would have detected in the work of this American realist a darkness sufficiently sable for even the most lost-and-found of literary generations or, as Howells wrote James two years after the Haymarket Square riots: “After fifty years of optimistic content with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end unless it bases itself on a real equality.” What that last phrase means is anyone’s guess. He is a spiritual rather than a practical socialist. It is interesting that the letter was written in the same year that Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 was published. The ideas of Robert Owen that Howells had absorbed from his father (later a Swedenborgian like Henry James, Sr.) were now commingled with the theories of Henry George, the tracts of William Morris, and, always, Tolstoy. Howells thought that there must be a path through the political jungle of a republic that had just hanged four men for their opinions; he never found it. But as a novelist he was making a path for himself and for others, and he called it realism.

  2

  On Thanksgiving Day 1858, the twenty-one-year-old Howells was received at the court of the nineteen-year-old first lady of Ohio, Kate
Chase, a handsome ambitious motherless girl who acted as hostess to her father the governor, Salmon P. Chase, a handsome ambitious wifeless man who was, in Abraham Lincoln’s thoughtful phrase, “on the subject of the Presidency, a little insane.”

  Howells had grown up in Ohio;*1 his father was an itinerant newspaper editor and publisher. He himself was a trained printer as well as an ambitious but not insane poet. Under the influence of Heine, he wrote a number of poems; one was published in the Atlantic Monthly. He was big in Cleveland. Howells and Kate got on well; she teased him for his social awkwardness; he charmed her as he charmed almost everyone. Although he wrote about the doings of the Ohio legislature for the Cincinnati Gazette, he preferred the company of cultivated ladies to that of politicians. A passionate autodidact, he tended to prefer the company of books to people. But through Kate he met future presidents and was served at table by his first butler.

  In a sense the Chase connection was the making of Howells. When Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, Howells was chosen, somewhat improbably, to write a campaign biography of the candidate. Characteristically, Howells sent a friend to Springfield to chat with the subject of his book; he himself never met Lincoln. He then cobbled together a book that Lincoln did not think too bad. One suspects that he did not think it too good, either. Shortly before the president was shot, he withdrew the book for the second time from the Library of Congress: nice that he did not have a copy of it on the coffee table in the Blue Room, but then Lincoln was so unlike, in so many ways, our own recent sovereigns.

  Once Lincoln was president, Chase became secretary of the treasury. Chase proposed that the campaign biographer be rewarded with a consulate. But nothing happened until Howells himself went to Washington where he found an ally in Lincoln’s very young and highly literary second secretary, John Hay, who, with the first secretary, John Nicolay, finally got Howells the consulate at Venice.

  It is odd to think that a writer as curiously American as Howells should have been shaped by the Most Serene Republic at a bad moment in that ancient polity’s history—the Austrian occupation—rather than by the United States at the most dramatic moment in that polity’s history: the Civil War. Odd, also, that Howells managed, like the other two major writers of his generation, to stay out of the war. Neither Mark Twain nor Henry James rushed to the colors.

  * * *

  Since Howells had practically no official work to do, he learned Italian and perfected his German and French. He turned out poems that did not get printed in the Atlantic. “Not one of the MSS you have sent us,” wrote the editor, “swims our seas.” So Howells went off the deep end, into prose. He wrote Venetian sketches of great charm; he was always to be a good—even original—travel writer. Where the previous generation of Irving and Hawthorne had tended to love far too dearly a ruined castle wall, Howells gave the reader not only the accustomed romantic wall but the laundry drying on it, too. The Boston Advertiser published him.

  Then came the turning point, as Howells termed it, in his life. He had acquired a charming if garrulous wife, who talked even more than Mark Twain’s wife, or as Twain put it, when Elinor Howells entered a room “dialogue ceased and monologue inherited its assets and continued the business at the old stand.” Howells wrote a serious study of the Italian theater called “Recent Italian Comedy,” which he sent to the North American Review, the most prestigious of American papers, coedited by his friend James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. At the time, Boston and Cambridge were in the throes of advanced Italophilia. Longfellow was translating Dante; and all the ladies spoke of Michelangelo. Lowell accepted the essay. Howells was now on his way, as a serious writer.

  After nearly four years in Venice, which he did not much care for, Howells returned to New York. With a book of sketches called Venetian Life at the printers, he went job hunting. He was promptly hired by E. L. Godkin to help edit The Nation. Not long after, he was hired by the Atlantic Monthly as assistant to the editor; then from 1871 to 1881 he was editor in chief. In Boston, Howells was now at the heart of an American literary establishment which had no way of knowing that what looked to be eternal noon was actually Indian summer—for New England.

  Just before Howells had gone to Venice, he had made the rounds of New England’s literary personages. He had met Holmes and Hawthorne whom he had liked; and Emerson whom he had not. Now, at the Atlantic, every distinguished writer came his editorial way; and soon he himself would be one of them. But what sort of writer was he to be? Poetry was plainly not his métier. Journalism was always easy for him, but he was ambitious. That left the novel, an art form which was not yet entirely “right.” The American product of the 1860s was even less “aesthetic” than the English and neither was up to the French, who were, alas, sexually vicious, or to the Russians, who were still largely untranslated except for the Paris-based Turgenev. At this interesting moment, Howells had one advantage denied his contemporaries, always excepting Henry James. He could read—and he had read—the new Europeans in the original. He went to school to Zola and Flaubert. Realism was in the European air, but how much reality could Americans endure? Out of the tension between the adventurousness of Flaubert and the edgy reticence of Hawthorne came the novels of William Dean Howells.

  From Heine, Howells had learned the power of the plain style. Mark Twain had also learned the same lesson—from life. Whereas the previous generation of Melville and Hawthorne had inclined to elevated, even “poetic” prose, Twain and Howells and James the First were relatively straightforward in their prose and quotidian in their effects—no fauns with pointed ears need apply. In fact, when Howells first met Hawthorne, he shyly pointed to a copy of The Blithedale Romance and told the great man that that was his own favorite of the master’s works. Hawthorne appeared pleased; and said, “The Germans like it, too.”

  But realism, for Howells, had its limits. He had grown up in a happy if somewhat uncertain environment: His father was constantly changing jobs, houses, religions. For a writer, Howells himself was more than usually a dedicated hypochondriac whose adolescence was shadowed by the certainty that he had contracted rabies which would surface in time to kill him at sixteen. Like most serious hypochondriacs, he enjoyed full rude health until he was eighty. But there were nervous collapses. Also, early in life, Howells had developed a deep aversion to sexual irregularity, which meant any form of sexuality outside marriage. When his mother befriended a knocked-up seamstress, the twelve-year-old Howells refused to pass her so much as the salt at table.

  In Venice he could not get over the fact that there could be no social intercourse of any kind with unmarried girls (unlike the fun to be had with The American Girl, soon to be celebrated not only by Henry James but by Howells himself), while every married woman seemed bent on flinging even the purest of young bachelors into the sack. Doubtless, he kept himself chaste until marriage. But he railed a good deal against European decadence, to the amusement of the instinctively more worldly, if perhaps less operative Henry (“Oh, my aching back!”) James, who used to tease him about the latest descriptions of whorehouses to be found in French fiction. Nevertheless, for a writer who was to remain an influence well into the twentieth century, an aversion to irregular sexuality was not apt to endear him to a later generation which, once it could put sex into the novel, proceeded to leave out almost everything else. Where the late-nineteenth-century realistic novel might be said to deal with social climbing, the twentieth-century novel has dealt with sexual climbing, an activity rather easier to do than to write about.

  * * *

  The Library of America now brings us four of Howells’s novels written between 1875 and 1886. Before the publications of these four novels, Howells had already published his first novel Their Wedding Journey (1871); his second novel A Chance Acquaintance (1873); as well as sketches of Italy, people, and yet another personage. Elinor Mead Howells was a cousin of President Rutherford (known to all good Democrats
as Rather-fraud) B. Hayes. So the campaign biographer of Lincoln, duly and dutifully and dully, wrote a book called Sketch of the Life and Character of Rutherford B. Hayes (1876). Thanks to Cousin Hayes, Howells was now able to reward those who had helped him. James Russell Lowell was sent to London as American ambassador.

  Of the books written before A Foregone Conclusion (the first of the four now reissued), the ever-polite but never fraudulent Turgenev wrote Howells in 1874:

  Accept my best thanks for the gracious gift of your delightful book Their Wedding Journey, which I have read with the same pleasure experienced before in reading A Chance Acquaintance and Venetian Life. Your literary physiognomy is a most sympathetic one; it is natural, simple and clear—and in the same time—it is full of unobtrusive poetry and fine humor. Then—I feel the peculiar American stamp on it—and that is not one of the least causes of my relishing so much your works.

  This was written in English. In a sense, Turgenev is responding to Howells’s championing of his own work (Howells had reviewed Lisa and Rudin) but he is also responding to a sympathetic confrere, a young writer whom he has influenced though not so much as has “the peculiar American stamp.” Unfortunately, Turgenev never lived to read the later books. It would be interesting to see what he might have made of A Modern Instance, a book as dark and, at times, as melodramatic as a novel by Zola, whose L’Assommoir Turgenev disliked.

  * * *

  A Foregone Conclusion (1875) has, as protagonist, the—what else?—American consul at Venice. The consul is a painter (young writers almost always make their protagonists artists who practice the one art that they themselves know nothing about: It’s the light, you see, in Cimabue). The consul attracts a young priest, Don Ippolito, who wants to emigrate to America and become an inventor. It is no accident that practically the first building in Washington to be completed in imperial marble splendor was the Patent Office. Don Ippolito is a sort of Italian Major Hoople. The inventions don’t really work but he keeps on because “Heaven only knows what kind of inventor’s Utopia our poor, patent-ridden country appeared to him in those dreams of his, and I can but dimly figure it to myself.” Here the auctorial “I” masquerades as the “I” of the consul, Ferris, who is otherwise presented in the objective third person. Howells has not entirely learned Turgenev’s lesson: stay out of the narrative. Let the characters move the narration and the reader. Howells’s native American garrulousness—and tendentiousness—occasionally breaks in.