It was a good sign, though, that when the man from the exclusive Elite Directory turned up to gather the names of the Chelsea’s more distinguished occupants for its listings, he was given a single response: “Refused.”
2
The Coast of Bohemia
“I’m going to show you
where I live, where I dream.”
—WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS,
The Coast of Bohemia
IN ALL HIS VISITS to New York, William Dean Howells had never encountered a residence like the Chelsea Association Building, and in his search for a permanent home in the city, he thought he had seen everything. For months, the stout novelist from Boston and his tiny wife, Elinor, had scoured the unfamiliar city streets inspecting every kind of dwelling, from fourth-floor walkups to lavish apartment buildings overlooking Central Park. By the spring of 1888, they understood that there were a great variety of ways to live in New York—all of them expensive, naturally—but they had still found nothing to suit their needs. When their Greenwich Village sublet expired in April, they took an acquaintance up on the suggestion to try life at the Chelsea for a month or so and continue their quest from there.
At “ten stories high, and housing six hundred people,” Howells wrote to his father in Ohio, this enormous edifice exceeded in size even the pretentious limestone piles uptown—though at least its décor proved more pleasing, leaning more toward William Morris than the exotic aesthetic of Oscar Wilde. The numerous public rooms gave the Chelsea the convivial feel of a resort hotel, and it had a similarly diverse population. But there was an intriguing “workshop” atmosphere in the building as well, thanks to its location in what passed for this city’s arts district. Walking through the lobby, the Howellses were likely to spot the journalist-turned-playwright Bronson Howard deep in conversation with the actress Annie Russell; or Gustave Frohman and his brothers Charles and Daniel, who were making quite a name for themselves at the Lyceum theater, waiting to be joined by Gustave’s wife, Marie. Frequently, the sounds of sopranos and pianos drifted down the stairs. Even the soundproof study in the Howellses’ four-room suite seemed specially designed for a writer like himself.
Nowhere else in New York did one encounter this mix of domestic and artistic life, with meals in particular less like the solemn ceremonies in the city’s better hotels and more like the lively repasts at the Lotos Club. An imported French chef provided excellent cuisine, a musical trio serenaded the diners, and plenty of gossip about the residents was passed from one table to the next. One soon learned that Mrs. Blake, the comely young stockbroker’s wife, had been a comic-opera singer before her marriage; that William Damon, head of Tiffany and Company’s credit department, maintained several enormous saltwater aquaria in his rooms; that the elderly John Ellis, an obsessive promoter of the benefits of homeopathy, had made his fortune by inventing the machine lubricant Valvoline ; and that William Tilden, dissolute heir to a millionaire varnish manufacturer, had been sued for embezzling his brother’s share of their father’s estate.
It was, in short, the kind of brash, modern assemblage that Howells’s close friend Samuel Clemens most enjoyed—and the type of crowd that most appreciated Clemens in his public persona as Mark Twain. All spring, Clemens had been ducking in and out of New York, tending to an ever-proliferating assortment of failing businesses and reckless investments. The Howellses looked forward to his presence here beneath the laughing gargoyles of the Chelsea’s dining rooms, where he could be counted on to entertain them with his war stories about the New York theater—his works having inspired a rather startling series of flops—and to tantalize them with tidbits from his novel in progress A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Fascinated as he was by the workings of all types of systems, Clemens would enjoy pumping the august members of the Chelsea’s board for an accounting of the cooperative’s savings in shared expenses and rumored overruns in construction costs. He would be curious to know their opinion of city leaders’ decision, the year following the Chelsea’s completion, to outlaw such mammoth residential buildings in the future—reportedly due to fire and health concerns, though one might speculate that fear of socialist incursion also played a role.
This last topic was off-limits for Howells, who, in truth, could never feel fully at ease in any residence that used the term association, no matter how charming and comfortable the environment was. Unlike Clemens, he and his wife had been scarred by the previous generation’s radical experiments: Howells’s father, a Swedenborgian, had attempted in vain to create a utopian community in Ohio, and Elinor’s mother had been implicated in a free-love scandal at the infamous Oneida colony, which was led by Elinor’s uncle John Noyes. As a result, the couple shared a mild but chronic anxiety about keeping up appearances, despite their loyalty to their parents’ ideals.
Somehow, the city of New York had always managed to heighten this tension for Howells, beginning with his first visit as a young Ohio journalist nearly three decades before. That train trip east had been Howells’s reward to himself for the sale of several poems to the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, and during a stop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he had had the extraordinary good fortune to meet and even impress that magazine’s editor, James T. Fields, as well as Fields’s august associates James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Moving on to New York, the neophyte writer had discovered quite a different society at the offices of the New York Press, where a morning meeting with the publisher Henry Clapp had led to an impromptu field trip to Pfaff’s Beer Cellar on lower Broadway.
Howells didn’t need to be told of Pfaff’s status as headquarters for New York’s tiny but resolute bohemian population. The cellar’s reputation as a gathering place for “unwed mothers and unaccomplished poets” had already traveled as far as Ohio. It was no surprise, then, that the bookish Midwesterner was able to tolerate the vulgar atmosphere for only a few minutes—long enough to endure the howls of derision when he announced that he’d just been to Cambridge—before heading for the door. But further discomfort awaited him, as, on the way out, Howells encountered a roughly dressed, bearded man sitting alone at a corner table, instantly recognizable as the poet Walt Whitman, whose celebration of the body electric, Leaves of Grass, Howells had self-righteously rejected in a recent review.
It was one thing for a provincial twenty-three-year-old to parrot in his hometown newspaper the opinions of James Lowell, who had famously dismissed Whitman as a “friend of cab drivers.” It was another for him to have to accept the mature poet’s warm, gentle handshake and suffer the agony of his forgiving gaze. Ever since, a vestige of that uncomfortable moment had subtly colored all of Howells’s relations with New York. Through the decades that followed, as he met and married Elinor, joined the Atlantic Monthly as Fields’s assistant, and worked his way up to the position of editor of that most influential magazine, the struggle had continued between Howells’s desire to meet his employers’ lofty literary expectations and his own growing urge to represent, as writer and editor, the “real” America beyond Boston’s borders.
That urge was irresistible. Along with his two closest friends, the meticulous young Henry James and the hell-raising Twain, Howells had created an arsenal of realist fiction that aimed to stop Americans from looking at themselves through the wrong end of Europe’s “confounded literary telescope” and make them appreciate themselves for what they actually were. With each passing year, Howells’s genial small-town novels grew in popularity, and his New England mentors’ disapproval deepened over the sentimental attitudes, ungrammatical language, and other vulgarities he introduced in his fiction and in their magazine. Lowell, appalled by Howells’s mass appeal as well as his fattening bank account, took to caricaturing him privately to colleagues as a self-satisfied mediocrity, “plump and with ease shining out of his eyes.” Howells’s struggle to satisfy his Cambridge employers’ “mysterious prejudices and lofty reservations” created such tension that in 1881, the writer succumbed to a nervous breakdown, and a
s a birthday present to himself, he resigned from the Atlantic. He then went on to produce The Rise of Silas Lapham, the quintessentially American story of an ordinary businessman forced to choose between his wealth and his moral integrity, which became Howells’s most affecting and best-selling novel thus far.
J. W. Harper, publisher of Harper’s Monthly in New York, took note of how honestly Howells spoke to the conflicts and emotions experienced by ordinary Americans. Convinced that such an immensely popular author was far better suited to his widely read publication than to the small and elite Atlantic, Harper offered Howells a column in his magazine, along with the promise that he would serialize and publish one novel of his per year.
Howells’s acceptance of the offer was trumpeted in New York as a cultural coup—a passing of the baton from the old America to the new—and the size of his compensation was celebrated in the city’s newspapers to an unseemly degree. The old uneasiness resurfaced as Howells saw the literary profession treated not as a calling, as it was in Boston, but as a business on par with haberdasheries and shoe stores. But New York City now boasted half the nation’s major publishing houses and had more theaters per citizen than any other American city, so the transfer of power from Boston to New York was inevitable. New York’s commercial values were spreading throughout the nation, and, in fact, this city’s focus on profits at the expense of the general population’s well-being and the barrier that created between rich and poor was the theme he most wanted to explore.
There was rich material for such fiction in mid-1880s New York, with Jay Gould boasting that, if necessary, he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”; the anarchist Johann Most distributing bomb-making instruction booklets to the unruly residents of the Lower East Side; and a streetcar workers’ strike erupting in violence between laborers and police. In the spring of 1886, as Howells, still in Boston, initiated his column for Harper’s, New York’s streets filled with marching workers shouting, “Hi! Ho! The leeches must go!” in support of the United Labor Party’s mayoral candidate, Henry George—whose largest backer, Philip Hubert, put the profits from his New York cooperatives at the disposal of the campaign.
Inspired by these events to focus on the plight of American factory workers in his next novel, Howells took a research trip with Elinor to the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, and was shocked by the sight of so many undernourished young girls laboring amid clouds of cotton fiber and risking mangling by the machines. Even as he reflected on the unfairness of a society in which his own two daughters published poems and anticipated their debuts while other girls were robbed of their health and education, news came of related trouble in Chicago. According to reports, a May Day strike for an eight-hour workday had taken a tragic turn when someone threw a bomb into a crowd at Haymarket Square, causing police to open fire and ending in the deaths of nearly a dozen people. No one could identify the bomb thrower, but Chicago’s industrialists, eager to punish the strikers, demanded retribution. Within days, police rounded up and jailed eight suspected anarchists, despite the lack of any evidence linking them to the crime.
Back in Boston, Howells followed the trial’s progress with increasing outrage as the judge instructed the jury to find the defendants guilty if they had even condoned violence for any reason and regardless of whether they had committed it. The trial ended with convictions for all eight men and with death sentences for seven—solely for their political opinions. Howells pointed out that on these grounds, every one of his abolitionist friends would have been sent to the gallows. Yet when he asked these same friends to sign a petition on the convicted men’s behalf, none would—not James Lowell, not the Brook Farm alumnus George Curtis, not even Mark Twain. Instead, Howells was served with a curt reminder from his Harper’s Monthly editor that any public statement about the trial would put his job at risk.
Badly shaken by these events, the Howellses pondered what, in light of recent circumstances, they should do. One thing was certain: Boston lay behind them. Both felt compelled by their encounter with the millworkers—and by their recent reading of Tolstoy—toward a life of social activism. But much as Howells admired the Russian novelist’s advice to give up the life of selfish exploitation and “share the labor of the peasants,” he admitted to a friend that he couldn’t bring himself to go that far, “seeing that I’m now fifty, awkward, and fat.” What he and Elinor would like to do, Howells wrote to his sister, was settle somewhere “very humbly and simply, where we could be socially identified with the principles of progress and sympathy for the struggling mass.” Howells increasingly suspected, like Philip Hubert and numerous Fourierists had before him, that the cities provided not only the greatest need for social change but the greatest opportunity for realizing it in some way. It was time not just to draw a paycheck from the New York magazines, the Howellses decided, but to go to New York and mingle with the masses themselves.
Now, of course, after so many months of house-hunting, the couple understood how difficult it was to establish a humble and simple life in this city while maintaining the veneer of propriety they craved. As they were looking, though, they had found it liberating to immerse themselves in New York’s milling crowds, tour the enormous department stores, and marvel at the new elevated railway. The last was an abomination, as the clattering, sparking, steam-spewing trains roared scant feet past the windows of private homes and apartments, yet it was undeniably the “most beautiful thing in New York,” Howells admitted, “the one and always and certainly beautiful thing here.” He particularly loved the way the rail lines connected neighborhoods that had existed in virtual isolation for decades due to chronically clogged traffic and long travel times between districts. Riding the trains at night, speeding past blocks of working-class apartments, the novelist feasted on the moments of fleeting intimacy with their occupants. “It was better than the theater . . . to see those people through their windows,” he wrote, “a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a table.” Surely, in this new proximity, in this continuous performance, lay the potential for a new kind of human connection between classes that had been divided through no fault of their own.
To some degree, the Chelsea, this vast caravansary into which they had stumbled, seemed to hold out the promise of social proximity of a similar kind. Twenty years ago, for example, who could have imagined seeing Reverend George Hepworth of the shattering anti-Tweed “God and Mammon” sermons of the 1870s exchanging neighborly nods with the nephew of the recently deceased thief James Ingersoll? Who would have believed that the sculptor and philanthropist J. Sanford Saltus, heir to a steel-company fortune, would share a New York address with the Dunlap Hat Company’s head hatter? And where else in New York could Laura Sedgwick Collins, one of the Lyceum School’s prized pupils, have the opportunity to recite poetry to theater professionals in a rooftop garden, perhaps furthering her career?
Through his friendship with Elinor’s brother, the sculptor Larkin Mead, Howells had developed a special fondness for visual artists and enjoyed spending time in their studios. At the Chelsea, he encountered Charles Melville Dewey, a gregarious landscape painter well known in Boston who rented a top-floor apartment-studio with his young bride, fellow artist Julia Henshaw, for forty-two dollars a month. A farmer’s son from Lowville, New York, Dewey had paid for his New York art education by doing janitorial work, eventually saving enough money to travel to Paris to study academic portraiture alongside a future master of the genre, John Singer Sargent. But his imagination was captured by the luminous rural landscapes of Corot and others of the Barbizon school, whose misty images of peasants tending their fields cut to the essence of his own feelings about the integrating effect of nature on the human spirit—an effect he wanted to reproduce in America.
Returning to New York, Dewey had opened his own studio to experiment with these borrowed methods, producing such evocative American landscapes as A Pool in the Meadows and
Evening Glow. By the early 1880s, thanks largely to his efforts, he and other like-minded members of the Society of American Artists had begun to make inroads with a few collectors. Now, at the weekly dinner parties held in the Deweys’ art-filled Chelsea suite, Howells got to know several of the practitioners of what came to be called American tonalism, including the big, good-looking Irish-American John Francis Murphy, another impoverished farmer’s son inspired by youthful readings of Emerson and Thoreau, and Frank Knox Morton Rehn, the wealthy son of a prominent Philadelphia Quaker family, who specialized in moody seascapes in a defiantly “pure American” style. All three of these men were dedicated proselytizers, whipping up enthusiasm for American art not only at Dewey’s dinners but through exhibitions at the Lotos Club, where they hung their works alongside similar European paintings to convince viewers of their legitimacy.
It was encouraging, too, to witness the camaraderie developing among the drama, art, and music students who gathered for Sunday tea in the richly adorned parlors of their parents’ Chelsea suites. Chatting enthusiastically about pictures, books, and plays, these young people from small towns across America were drawn together like planets responding to a gravitational force. It amused Howells to listen to their grand schemes for improving the lives of the poor by frescoing their tenement walls and commissioning wagons to transport poor children to Central Park, but he wished they would turn more of their attention as artists toward recording the fascinating particulars of city life. Some young writers did. In his role as presiding, if presently embattled, dean of American letters, Howells occasionally came across one or another of the city’s penniless novelists holed up in a boarding house surrounded by “small dressmakers and the stuffers of birds,” as the novelist Edith Wharton would later describe them. Dining with these young men in the cheap Italian restaurants they frequented downtown, Howells found them an odd assortment—admirably cognizant of the literary value of the Lower East Side pushcart peddler and the old Irish sheet-music seller occupying a corner in Washington Square but too preoccupied in their isolation with their own narrow interests and lacking any larger ideals or literary aims. If the idealists and the realists could be brought together, the friction created might produce real literary heat.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 6