Odd Jobs (32 page)

I noticed a man about my age with a bald head—not a healthy, luminous baldness but the unnatural, gauzy baldness that chemotherapy induces.
On Emerson’s advice, I checked the presumptuous motion of pity in my heart, my officious inner attempt to adopt and dispose of other people’s facts; for, sitting there in the waiting lounge somewhat like a sultan, the man was not asking for pity but instead was calmly wrapped in his own independent and perhaps triumphant thoughts. I sat down myself and read—who else?—Emerson. Emerson it was my own whim to peruse in the little old uniform edition of brown leather and marbled endpapers I had bought at a church fair for five dollars and most of whose pages had never been cut. To slit these pages I used my bookmark, the joker of an old deck of cards—another whim, and yet efficient. “The way of life is wonderful,” I read; “it is by abandonment.” Looking up, I noticed a man in a chair opposite me reading a book also. He was reading a novel called
The Coup
, which I had once written. He was a stout cigar-smoking man who slowly turned the pages with a terrible steady frown; he was not at all my image of the Ideal Reader. Yet there he was, in front of me; who was I to doubt now that, as Emerson promised, “Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages”? And that, as the same page of “The Over-Soul” states, “The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.” Was not this day of mine—October 4, 1983—demonstrating at every emblematic turn that “a thread runs through all things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that thread”?

A man within unavoidable earshot was making a call on a pay phone. His side of the conversation went: “Stella? Any news?” A pause, and then, “Isn’t that great? It so easily could have been different. I’m so happy for him.” How much, indeed, I could not help thinking, of the news we receive
is
good. “We are natural believers,” Emerson says in his essay on Montaigne. “Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.” It was Emerson’s revelation that God and the self are of the same substance. He may have been wrong, too blithe in Mankind’s behalf, to think that nature—which he called the “
other me
”—is possessed of optimism and always answers to our soul; but he was immensely right in suggesting that the prime
me
, the ego, is perforce optimistic.

T
HIS YEAR
is the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of William Dean Howells’s birth, and the fact has been celebrated but quietly. Few writers filled the American literary sky as amply as Howells in his prime; few have fallen so relatively far into disesteem. We remember Howells, if we do, as a genial broad valley between Mark Twain and Henry James—a cultivated and well-travelled Ohioan able to appreciate two great writers who could not at all appreciate each other. And then there was something about his calling himself a “realist,” and depicting “the American girl,” and turning toward socialism in middle age. As a poet, playwright, and short-story writer, he has left no impression, and as a novelist a diminished one; but as a critic and an editor he cannot be eradicated from the high annals of the literature of the long period between the end of the Civil War and America’s entry into World War I. Affectionate correspondent and zealous promoter of James and Twain, vivacious intimate of the New England worthies Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier, a tireless fosterer of younger realists such as Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Robert Herrick, he boldly pushed the young Stephen Crane’s
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
at a time when bookstores were too scandalized to carry it, urged Swedish and Spanish and Russian novelists upon American readers, and welcomed to native letters the first Jewish-American novelist, Abraham Cahan. Theodore Dreiser called Howells our “ ‘lookout on the watch-tower,’ straining for a first glimpse of approaching genius”; Edmund Wilson summed him up as “our always tactful toastmaster, our clearing-house, our universal solvent, our respecter of the distinguished veteran, our encourager of the promising young.” His wife, Elinor Mead Howells, was a cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes, and President William Howard Taft attended Howells’s seventy-fifth birthday party, in 1912, to which not only Henry James but H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy sent warm greetings; seventy-five years after that gala event, which four hundred guests thronged at Sherry’s Restaurant in Manhattan, we can still find traces of Howells’s tremendous charm and prestige fossilized at the head of lists: in Boston,
he was the first president of the Tavern Club, and in New York, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

As a novelist, he was, after Twain, the most financially successful American of his time. His novels, few of them short, were serialized in magazines and then purchased and admired again in book form. The critical terms of the admiration were, to an extent, ones he himself set in his own criticism—his book reviews and literary columns in
The Atlantic Monthly, The Century
, and
Harper’s Magazine
. Howells had what very few American novelists have had: a theory of the novel—how it should be written, and what it should be about. Its method should be realism, which he once defined as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material,” and its subject should be the common life of ordinary Americans. In 1899, at the peak of his prestige, he enunciated a radical aesthetic agenda for the audience of a lecture, “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading.” The ideal novelist of the future, he proposed,

This vision, of bringing dullness and mixedness out of the rain of actuality into the house of fiction, had been with Howells from the start. In the first book of his which might be called a novel,
Their Wedding Journey
(1871), the author, while describing conversations his honeymooners overhear on a night boat up the Hudson, suddenly exclaims, “Ah! poor Real Life, which I love, can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face?” A dozen pages farther on, his married couple, Isabel and Basil March—alter egos who are to reappear in
Howells’s novels in the decades ahead—sit alertly in a railway carriage and their loquacious companion the author confides to us:

Howells’s next book,
A Chance Acquaintance
(1873), may unambiguously be called a novel, though it also makes extensive use of travel impressions and takes up a character, Kitty Ellison of Eriecreek, New York, whom the Marches had encountered in their wedding journey; their paths diverged, and the reader of
A Chance Acquaintance
follows Kitty and her uncle and aunt into the province and city of Quebec, where she enjoys a romantic encounter with a young traveller from Boston, Mr. Arbuton. In the course of deepening their acquaintanceship they several times discuss the problem of making the American reality—North American, in this instance—accessible to the imagination. They take a boat cruise up and down the Saguenay River, amid scenery of grand emptiness:

Mr. Arbuton, who has travelled much in Europe and has the air of a Harvard man, observes, “The great drawback to this sort of thing in America is that there is no human interest about the scenery, fine as it is.”

Kitty loyally protests, “Why, I don’t know, there was that little settlement round the saw-mill. Can’t you imagine any human interest in the lives of the people there? It seems to me that one might make almost anything out of them. Suppose, for example, that the owner of that mill was a disappointed man who had come here to bury the wreck of his life in—sawdust?”

Our Boston swain answers politely, “O, yes! That sort of thing; certainly. But I didn’t mean that, I meant something historical. There is no past, no atmosphere, no traditions, you know.” And, later, continuing this flirtatious debate, Kitty says, “If I were to write a story, I should want to take the slightest sort of plot, and lay the scene in the dullest kind of place, and then bring out all their possibilities.” Indeed, she has read a book just like that, called
Details
, with the texture of Howells’s ideal fiction: “Nothing extraordinary, little, every-day things told so exquisitely, and all fading naturally away without any particular result, only the full meaning of everything brought out.” Mr. Arbuton’s rejoinder is weak but with something, surely, in it: “And don’t you think,” he asks, “it’s rather a sad ending for all to fade away without any particular result?”

The issue of whether or not this continent could nurture and sustain a serious literary artist was much discussed in the post-bellum United States. Howells and Henry James discussed it, on long walks in Cambridge in the late 1860s, when both young men had their careers before them,
^b
and before James had voted, as it were, with his feet, and taken
up permanent European residence. Howells in 1866 wrote to Edmund Clarence Stedman, “Talking of talks: young Henry James and I had a famous one last evening, two or three hours long, in which we settled the true principles of literary art.” In the last year of his life, 1920, Howells recalled in an unfinished memoir, “We seem to have been presently
always together, and always talking of methods of fiction, whether we walked the streets by day or night, or we sat together reading our stuff to each other. I was seven years older than James, but I was much his junior in the art we both adored. Perhaps I did not yet feel my fiction definitely in me.” James’s tribute to Howells on his seventy-fifth birthday remembered this time “when we knew together what American life
was
—or thought we did.… You knew and felt these things better than I; you had learned them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, I think, to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the general truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. The
real
affair of the American case and character, as it met your view and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and … you gave yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare lucidity: you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the interest and the thrill and the charm of the common.…” In his letters to others, however, James spoke in less courtly fashion of Howells’s commitment to the American substance: as
Their Wedding Journey
was being serially published, he wrote to Grace Norton, “Poor Howells is certainly difficult to defend, if one takes a stand-point the least bit exalted; make any serious demand, and it’s all up with him. He presents, I confess, to my mind, a somewhat melancholy spectacle—in that his charming style and refined intentions are so poorly and meagerly served by our American atmosphere. There is no more inspiration in an American journey than
that!
” In reviewing Howells’s novel
A Foregone Conclusion
(1874) for
The Nation
, James nicely described the cultural situation as he saw it: “[Howells] reminds us of how much our native-grown imaginative effort is a matter of details, of fine shades, of pale colors, a making of small things do great service. Civilization with us is monotonous, and in the way of contrasts, of salient points, of chiaroscuro, we have to take what we can get. We have to look for these things in fields where a less devoted glance would see little more than an arid blank, and, at the last, we manage to find them. All this refines and sharpens our perceptions, makes us in a literary way, on our own scale, very delicate.”

By the time of their Cambridge walks James had already formed that exalted conception of the novel which was to carry him through his life of triumphant single-mindedness; Howells had come more gingerly to the temple of prose fiction, by way of journalism and travel sketches. His
first book with an American setting,
Suburban Sketches
(1870), attempts to treat the neighborhoods and incidents of Cambridge in terms of local color, much as he had treated those of Venice in his first book,
Venetian Life
(1866). Howells’s first two novels were elaborated books of travel; and he himself had travelled a long way to reach the threshold of what was to become an impressively productive career not only as a novelist but as a propagandist for the novel—the novel as a means of seizing reality, monotonous and delicate though it be.