William Dean Howells (1837–1920) – writer, critic and pioneer of the American realist school – was one of the most influential writers of American fiction during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A lifelong friend of Mark Twain and a contemporary of Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson, Howells’s own literary career took off with his novel, A Modern Instance but The Rise of Silas Lapham is his best-known. Widely acknowledged as the ‘American Dean of Letters', Howells was one of the first seven chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he later became president, and which instituted its Howells Medal for Fiction in 1915.
Matthew Stevenson is an American writer who lives in Switzerland. His Letters of Transit: Adventures and Encounters from America to the Pacific Isles is published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. His most recent book is Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited. He is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, to which William Dean Howells contributed 335 articles between 1886 and 1920, notably for the lead column, known as the Editor’s Easy Chair.
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Italian Journeys
From Venice to Naples
and Beyond
William Dean Howells
Foreword by Matthew Stevenson
New paperback edition published in 2011 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
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Foreword Copyright © Matthew Stevenson, 2011
Cover image: Gondolas in Venice, 1908 (oil on canvas), Monet, Claude (1840–1926) / Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
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ISBN: 978 1 84885 549 6
eISBN: 978 0 85773 153 1
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Contents
Foreword by Matthew Stevenson
The Road to Rome from Venice
Leaving Venice
From Padua to Ferrara
The Picturesque, the Improbable, and the Pathetic in Ferrara
Through Bologna to Genoa
Up and Down Genoa
By Sea from Genoa to Naples
Certain Things in Naples
A Day in Pompeii
A Half-hour at Herculaneum
Capri and Capriotes
The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naples
Between Rome and Naples
Roman Pearls
Forza Maggiore
At Padua
A Pilgrimage to Petrarch’s House at Arquà
A Visit to the Cimbri
Minor Travels
Pisa
The Ferrara Road
Trieste
Bassano
Possagno, Canova’s Birthplace
Como
Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma
Ducal Mantua
Foreword
by Matthew Stevenson
Who was William Dean Howells (1837–1920) and why is he the right person to take you around Italy?
In the last half century Howells has faded from literary awareness, remembered, if at all, for his novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and as a pioneer of realism in American fiction. English majors at American universities might recall his close friendship with Mark Twain. After that, for most, the Howells trail will grow cold. Who knows that someone so prominent in literary Boston, where Howells was editor of the Atlantic Monthly and wrote novels that explored domestic realities, had even visited Italy, let alone written books about its decadence and splendors?
Were I writing this preface a century earlier, Howells would need no introduction, either to American or British readers. In the late nineteenth century, he was the chairman of American letters, whose vast work as an editor, novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, critic, poet, and travel writer set the literary standards for the age. Such was his importance that when he denounced black walnut in one of his novels, it disappeared from fashionable American houses.
His literary cause was a form of democratic realism. In 1887, near the peak of his career, he said that fiction should “speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know – the language of unaffected people everywhere – and we believe that even its masterpieces will find a response in all readers.” Especially in English circles, he was quick to declare the independence of the American novel.
Judge a man by his friends, and look at those that liked and admired Howells. He and Mark Twain were best friends – Twain grew up in Missouri, Howells in Ohio, and, at least in after-dinner memories, they shared childhoods similar to that of Huck Finn. Howells also had enduring friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson (the New England essayist), Richard Henry Dana (Two Years Before the Mast), Henry James (both father and son, of the same name), Bret Harte (short stories), Matthew Arnold (the English critic), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (the poet), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin). He promoted Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Among the young writers that he later encouraged and supported were Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Vachel Lindsay, and Robert Frost. Willa Cather attended his seventy-fifth birthday. Were you to have asked most of them who they considered to be America’s greatest writer, they likely would have nominated Howells. Well into the twentieth century, writers like Dreiser, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were experimenting with the forms that Howells had coined.
From 1870 to 1910, Howells was the gold standard of American letters, and the book that gained him this currency was his first, Italian Journeys, published in 1867. It was another long journey that took him from Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, to the summit of American letters. Growing up in a bookish although itinerant family, he spent his school years as a typesetter on his father’s newspaper and later worked as a reporter in Columbus.
In 1860, with the good fortune that would follow his literary career, he wrote a campaign biography of a candidate given little chance for victory in the presidential election: Abraham Lincoln. He wrote the book in less than a month, and even passed on the chance to meet the candidate in person (books, for Howells, were all about business). The biography resonated with Lincoln, and he appointed Howells to serve as the American consul in Venice, Italy, a position he took up in 1861.
Sailing for Europe, Howells left behind a sweetheart from Brattleboro, Vermont, Elinor Mead, who, after some torrid letters, joined him in marriage
and in Italy. The newlyweds loved Venice. They lived on the Grand Canal and entertained visiting Americans. The Venetian republic was then an Austrian possession, where it was said even the priests spied for Vienna. Howells’s professional obligations were to file an annual report on the traffic that passed through the port and to write occasionally to the ambassador and the State Department.
A born linguist – he spoke French, German, and Spanish – Howells learned Italian and explored the city, for what would turn out to be Venetian Life, a book that introduced American readers to the republic at sea. In a letter to his sister Annie, he wrote: “It is so quaint, so old, so beautiful, so sad…” Later he recalled: “The fact is, that in the course of time one becomes skeptical of one’s whole youth, and Venice had been a great part, a vital part of my youth.” Throughout his life, especially in the low moments, he would return to Italy and spoke the language of an expatriate, in being “torn between two homesicknesses: the longing for America, and the desire to stay in Italy…”
Tiring of the diplomatic life in 1864, Howells decided to return to the world of letters that he had discovered in Boston before sailing for Europe. (On a memorable trip there in 1860, at the age of 23, he met Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Longfellow.) First he and Elinor traveled the length of the Italian peninsula, so that Howells could collect material for Italian Journeys. They traveled west from Venice to Padua, crossed to Genoa through Ferrara and Bologna, and then took a boat, on rough seas, to Naples, Pompeii, Capri and Rome. It was an abbreviated version of the Grand Tour, not unlike the Italian travels of James Boswell, whose literary directness, everyday speech in his writing, and taste for travel would have appealed to Howells, the apostle of realism. Howells wrote: “I have never been able to see much difference between what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life.” I can imagine him warming to Dr. Johnson.
As he did often in a literary career that spanned almost sixty years, Howells broke new ground with his trip across Italy. The newly unified country was unknown to American readers, largely seen in the context of its political turmoil – much the way the former states of Yugoslavia are written about today. What made the book celebrated is that he wrote about sacred Europe with the direct sensibility of someone who came of age setting type on the midwestern plains. Here is his first description of the Eternal City:
Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least interesting town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly ugly – especially the architecture of the churches. The Papal city contrives at the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried.
The same style can be read today, in such irreverent writers as Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson, but Howells was among those who invented the form of travel narratives as personal confessions. In turn, it moved literature to something more impressionistic, as travel books were a rite of passage for emerging writers. Italian Journeys was Howells’s passport to literary fame. For the next fifty years he traveled the world’s literary salons, as if in a gondola.
To describe accurately Howells’s career after he comes home from his Italian travels would require a stage version of Ragtime, in which he plays the central role. He spent almost ten years as editor of the Atlantic, among the most influential magazines of the era. (During the Civil War Lincoln said that a favorable piece in the Atlantic was worth a dozen victories on the battlefield.) As its editor, Howells met everyone, nurtured their work, and left his mark on the literature of the age, in his ceaseless argument that writing should be without pretension. His editorial genius was his first-class temperament that warmed to other writers. As he was visiting England, a friend, Edmund Gosse, wrote: “W.D. Howells is over here, and we have seen a great deal of him. To know him is to love him: I think he is one of the most winning personalities I have ever met…with such a fund of genius and strength.”
No one admired Howells more than Twain. The two were almost brothers. Each shared an affection for the other’s travel writing. Howells loved Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, and Twain loved Italian Journeys. Later in his life, Twain wrote: “In forty years [Howells’s] English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities – clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing – he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world.” Interestingly, Twain had little time for the novels of Henry James, of which he said to Howells: “I would rather be ‘damned to John Bunyan’s heaven' than finish reading The Bostonians.” But Howells had the accommodating gift of friendship, and he and Henry James were lifelong confidants, and saw each other when they could. James once attended a lecture at Harvard that Howells gave about a trip to Italy. Later James said that during the talk, when he closed his eyes, it was as if a window was opening on to Florence. Those windows are open here.
The Road to Rome from Venice
Leaving Venice
We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path, so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, battered, and bewildered, in Naples? Luckily,
“The moving accident is not my trade,” for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which, if I recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the reader from taking any road to Rome.
Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it?
From Padua to Ferrara
As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct line in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss family in the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent nineteen years of their lives. They were mother and father and only daughter and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country, was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning twilight with vague images of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet, and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew brighter these images melted away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane.
The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us every thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence had not robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were as near America as she was to Switzerland. “America!” she screamed; “you come from America! Dear God, the world is wide – the world is wide!” The thought was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail, and he hoped that the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear.
Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American unity (which is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the expensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with which we prosecuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the cultivation of cotton.
We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy. Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish that all English and America
n tourists, who think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in Italy, could have heard our honest man’s talk. The truth is, these ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that with which they devour strangers; and I am half-persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion, that you have been plundered much worse than they but the reverse often happens. They give little in fees; but their landlord, their porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate soup.
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