by Gore Vidal
3
Civilization was very much on Howells’s mind when he came to write Indian Summer (1886). He deals, once more, with Americans in Italy. But this time there are no Don Ippolitos. The principals are all Americans in Florence. A middle-aged man, Theodore Colville, meets, again, Mrs. Bowen, a lady who once did not marry him when he wanted to marry her. She married a congressman. She has a young daughter, Effie. She is a widow.
Colville started life as an architect, a suitable occupation for a Howells character; then he shifted to newspaper publishing, an equally suitable profession. In Des Vaches, Indiana, he published, successfully, the Democrat-Republican newspaper. Although he lost a race for Congress, he has received from former political opponents “fulsome” praise. Like most American writers Howells never learned the meaning of the word fulsome. Colville then sold his newspaper and went to Europe because “he wanted to get away, to get far away, and with the abrupt and total change in his humor he reverted to a period in his life when journalism and politics and the ambition of Congress were things undreamed of.” He had been young in Italy, with a Ruskinian interest in architecture; he had loved and been rejected by Evelina—now the widow Bowen. He looks at Florence: “It is a city superficially so well known that it affects one somewhat like a collection of views of itself: they are from the most striking points, of course, but one has examined them before, and is disposed to be critical of them.” The same goes for people one has known when young.
Mrs. Bowen has a beautiful young friend named Imogene. Colville decides that he is in love with Imogene, and they drift toward marriage. There are numerous misunderstandings. Finally, it is Mrs. Bowen not Imogene who is in love with Colville. The drama of the three of them (a shadowy young clergyman named Morton is an undelineated fourth) is rendered beautifully. There are many unanticipated turns to what could easily have been a simpleminded romantic novella.
When Colville is confronted with the thought of his own great age (forty-one), he is told by a very old American expatriate:
At forty, one has still a great part of youth before him—perhaps the richest and sweetest part. By that time the turmoil of ideas and sensations is over; we see clearly and feel consciously. We are in a sort of quiet in which we peacefully enjoy. We have enlarged our perspective sufficiently to perceive things in their true proportion and relation; we are no longer tormented with the lurking fear of death, which darkens and imbitters our earlier years; we have got into the habit of life; we have often been ailing and we have not died…
Finally, “we are put into the world to be of it.” Thus, Howells strikes the Tolstoyan note. Yes, he is also smiling. But even as Indian Summer was being published, its author was attacking the state of Illinois for the murder of four workmen. He also sends himself up in the pages of his own novel. A Mrs. Amsden finds Colville and Imogene and Effie together after an emotional storm. Mrs. Amsden remarks that they form an interesting, even dramatic group:
“Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel,” suggested Colville, “if you’re in a romantic mood. One of Mr. James’s.”
“Don’t you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case.”
For this beguiling modesty Howells no doubt dug even deeper the grave for his reputation. How can an American novelist who is ironic about himself ever be great? In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling. Actually, Howells is fascinated with the interior drama of his characters, and quite a lot happens—to the reader as well as to the characters who are, finally, suitably paired: Imogene and Mr. Morton, Colville and Mrs. Bowen.
The Library of America has served William Dean Howells well. Although the spiritual father of the library, Edmund Wilson, did not want this project ever to fall into the hands of the Modern Language Association, all four of the novels in the present volume bear the proud emblem of that association. One can only assume that there are now fewer scholars outside academe’s groves than within. I found no misprints; but there are eccentricities.
In A Modern Instance (p. 474) we read of “the presidential canvas of the summer”; then (p. 485) we read “But the political canvass…” Now a tent is made of canvas and an election is a canvass of votes. It is true that the secondary spelling of “canvass” is “canvas” and so allowable; nevertheless, it is disturbing to find the same word spelled two ways within eleven pages. On page 3 the variant spelling “ancles” is used for “ankles.” On page 747 Howells writes “party-colored statues” when, surely, “particolored” was nineteenth-century common usage as opposed to the Chaucerian English “party.” Of course, as the editors tell us, “In nineteenth-century writings, for example, a word might be spelled in more than one way, even in the same work, and such variations might be carried into print.”
Anyway, none of this is serious. There are no disfiguring footnotes. The notes at the back are for the most part helpful translations of foreign phrases in the text. The chronology of Howells’s life is faultless but, perhaps, skimpy. For those who are obliged for career reasons to read Howells, this is a useful book. For those who are still able to read novels for pleasure, this is a marvelous book.
* * *
For some years I have been haunted by a story of Howells and that most civilized of all our presidents, James A. Garfield. In the early 1870s Howells and his father paid a call on Garfield. As they sat on Garfield’s veranda, young Howells began to talk about poetry and about the poets that he had met in Boston and New York. Suddenly, Garfield told him to stop. Then Garfield went to the edge of the veranda and shouted to his Ohio neighbors. “Come over here! He’s telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!” So the neighbors gathered around in the dusk; then Garfield said to Howells, “Now go on.”
Today we take it for granted that no living president will ever have heard the name of any living poet. This is not, necessarily, an unbearable loss. But it is unbearable to have lost those Ohio neighbors who actually read books of poetry and wanted to know about the poets.
For thirty years bookchat writers have accused me of having written that the novel is dead. I wrote no such thing but bookchat writers have the same difficulty extracting meaning from writing as presidents do. What I wrote was, “After some three hundred years the novel in English has lost the general reader (or rather the general reader has lost the novel), and I propose that he will not again recover his old enthusiasm.” Since 1956, the audience for the serious (or whatever this year’s adjective is) novel has continued to shrink. Arguably, the readers that are left are for the most part involuntary ones, obliged by the schools to read novels that they often have little taste for. The fact that a novelist like Howells—or even Bellow—is probably no longer accessible to much of anyone would be bearable if one felt that the sense of alternative worlds or visions or—all right, Leslie —nightmares, fantasies, fears could be obtained in some other way. But movies are no substitute while television is, literally, narcotizing: The human eye was not designed to stare at a light for any length of time. Popular prose fictions are still marketed with TV and movie tie-ins, but even the writers or word processors of these books find it harder and harder to write simply enough for people who don’t really know how to read.
Obviously, there is a great deal wrong with our educational system, as President Reagan recently, and rather gratuitously, noted. After all, an educated electorate would not have elected him president. It is generally agreed that things started to go wrong with the schools after the First World War. The past was taught less and less, and Latin and Greek ceased to be compulsory. Languages were either not taught or taught so badly that they might just as well not have been taught at all while American history books grew more and more mendacious, as Frances Fitzgerald so nicely described,*4 and even basic geog
raphy is now a nonsubject. Yet the average “educated” American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable.
* * *
Edmund Wilson’s practical response was to come up with the idea of making readily available the better part of American literature; hence, the Library of America. It is a step in the right direction. But will this library attract voluntary readers? Ultimately—and paradoxically—that will depend on the schools.
Since no one quite knows what a university ought to do, perhaps that should be the subject of our educational system. What variety of things should all educated people know? What is it that we don’t know that we need to know? Naturally, there is a certain risk in holding up a mirror to the system itself (something the realistic novelist always used to do) because one is apt to see, glaring back, the face of Caliban or, worse, plain glass reflecting glass. But something must now be done because Herzen’s terrible truth is absolutely true: “The end of each generation is itself.”
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
October 27, 1983
*1 The two principal biographies of Howells are Edwin H. Cady’s magisterial two-volume study (The Road to Realism and The Realist at War) and Kenneth S. Lynn’s shrewd William Dean Howells. Needless to say, they are out of print. Or were. I am told that this review helped get Cady back in print. Lynn is still out.
*2 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960; Stein and Day, 1975).
*3 I know that this passage will be said to have said that no one who teaches school has ever written a good novel. Read it again.
*4 America Revised (New York: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979).
CHAPTER 17
THE GOLDEN BOWL OF HENRY JAMES
1
A century ago, Mrs. Henry Adams confided to her diary: “It is high time Harry James was ordered home by his family. He is too good a fellow to be spoiled by injudicious old ladies in London—and in the long run they would like him all the better for knowing and living in his own country. He had better go to Cheyenne and run a hog ranch. The savage notices of his Hawthorne in American papers, all of which he brings me to read, are silly and overshoot the mark in their bitterness, but for all that he had better not hang around Europe much longer if he wants to make a lasting literary reputation.” That same year the egregious Bret Harte observed, sadly, that Henry James “looks, acts, thinks like an Englishman and writes like an Englishman.”
But the thirty-seven-year-old James was undeterred by public or private charges of un-Americanism; he had every intention of living the rest of a long and productive life in England. Since he was, in the phrase of his older brother William, like all the Jameses a native only of the James family, the Wyoming pig farmer that might have been preferred rooting, as it were (Oh, as it were!—one of his favorite phrases: a challenge to the reader to say, As it were not?), for those truffles that are to be found not beneath ancient oak trees in an old country but in his own marvelous and original consciousness. James did nothing like an Englishman—or an American. He was a great fact in himself, a new world, a terra incognita that he would devote all his days to mapping for the rest of us. In 1880 James’s American critics saw only the fussy bachelor expatriate, growing fat from too much dining out; none detected the sea change that was being undergone by what had been, until then, an essentially realistic American novelist whose subject had been Americans in Europe, of whom the most notorious was one Daisy Miller, eponymous heroine of his first celebrated novel (1878).
But by 1880, James was no longer able—or willing?—to render American characters with the same sureness of touch. For him, the novel must now be something other than the faithful detailing of familiar types engaged in mating rituals against carefully noted backgrounds. Let the Goncourts and the Zolas do that sort of thing. James would go further, much as Flaubert had tried to do; he would take the usual matter of realism and heighten it; and he would try to create something that no writer in English had ever thought it possible to do with a form as inherently loose and malleable as the novel: He would aim at perfection. While James’s critics were complaining that he was no longer American and could never be English, James was writing The Portrait of a Lady, as nearly perfect a work as a novel can be. From 1881, James was the master of the novel in English in a way that no one had ever been before; or has ever been since. Even that Puritan divine, F. R. Leavis, thought The Portrait “one of the great novels of the English language.”
* * *
Over the next twenty years, as James’s novels got longer and longer, they became, simultaneously and oddly, more concentrated. There are fewer and fewer characters (usually Americans in a European setting but Americans at some psychic distance from the great republic) while the backgrounds are barely sketched in. What indeed are the spoils of the house Poynton? James never tells us what the “old things” are that mother and son fight for to the death. Balzac would have given us a catalogue, and most novelists would have indicated something other than an impression of a vague interior perfection. As James more and more mastered his curious art, he relied more and more on the thing not said for his essential dramas; in the process, the books become somewhat closer to theater than to the novel-tradition that had gone before him. Famously, James made a law of the single viewpoint; and then constantly broke it. In theory, the auctorial “I” of the traditional novel was to be banished so that the story might unfold much like a play except that the interpretation of scenes (in other words, who is thinking what) would be confined to a single observer if not for an entire book, at least for the scene at hand. Although James had sworn to uphold forever his own Draconian law, on the first page of The Ambassadors, where we meet Strether, the principal consciousness of the story and the point of view from which events are to be seen and judged, there is a startling interference by the author, Mr. James himself, who states, firmly: “The principle I have just mentioned…” Fortunately, no more principles are mentioned by the atavistic “I.”
There is the familiar joke about the three styles of Henry James: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender. Yet there are indeed three reigns in the master’s imagined kingdom. James I is the traditional nineteenth-century novelist, busy with the usual comings and goings of the ordinary fiction writer; James II is the disciplined precise realist whose apotheosis is The Portrait of a Lady. From 1890 to 1895 there is a break in the royal line: James turns to the theater; and most beautifully fails. Next comes the restoration. James returns in triumph to the novel—still James II (for purposes of simile, Charles II as well); and then, at the end, the third James, the Old Pretender, the magician who, unlike Prospero, breaks not his staff but a golden bowl.
* * *
After 1895, there is a new heightening of effect in James’s narratives; he has learned from the theater to eliminate the nonessential but, paradoxically, the style becomes more complex. The Old Pretender’s elaborateness is due, I should think, to the fact that he had now taken to dictating his novels to a series of typewriter operators. Since James’s conversational style was endlessly complex, humorous, unexpected—euphemistic where most people are direct and suddenly precise where avoidance or ellipsis is usual—the last three novels that he produced (The Ambassadors, 1903; The Wings of the Dove, 1902; and The Golden Bowl, 1904) can be said to belong as much to the oral tradition of narrative as to the written.
James was fift
y-seven when he started The Ambassadors and sixty-one when he completed The Golden Bowl. In those five years he experienced a late flowering without precedent among novelists. But then he was more than usually content in his private life. He had moved out of London; and he had established himself at the mayoral Lamb House in Rye. If there is an eternal law of literature, a pleasant change of house for a writer will produce an efflorescence. Also, at sixty, James fell in love with a young man named Jocelyn Persse. A charming Anglo-Irish man-about-town, Persse was not at all literary; and somewhat bewildered that James should be in his thrall. But, for James, this attractive young extrovert must have been a great improvement over his predecessor in James’s affection, Hendrik Andersen, the handsome sculptor of megalomaniac forms. Andersen had been trouble. Persse was good company: “I rejoice greatly in your breezy, heathery, grousy—and housey, I suppose—adventures and envy you, as always, your exquisite possession of the Art of Life which beats any Art of mine hollow.” This “love affair” (with the Master, quotes are always necessary because we lack what Edith Wharton would call the significant data) had a most rejuvenating effect on James, and the first rapturous days with Persse coincided with the period in which he was writing The Golden Bowl.
* * *