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INTRODUCTION

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND THE DISCOVERY OF NEW YORK

BY PHILLIP LOPATE

A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells’ best novel—his largest, deepest, most ambitious, and as he himself judged it, “most vital of my fictions”—is also, to put it conservatively, one of the fifty greatest American novels of all time. But its singular importance may be that it was the first novel to capture New York City, or for that matter, any major American city, paving the way, as critic Kermit Vanderbilt has noted, “for Maggie, Sister Carrie, Babbitt, Manhattan Transfer, Miss Lonely-hearts, Invisible Man, and other city novels of the next century.” This pioneering significance aside, it can be enjoyed today for its remarkable freshness, openness, sympathetic wisdom, skillful prose, and quicksilver observations on the contradictions of metropolitan life.

Its title, too musty perhaps for such a lively work, is taken from Shakespeare’s King John (Chatillon, the French diplomat, describes with alarm the English adventurers who have crossed the channel: “Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs, / To make a hazard of new fortunes here”) and announces the theme of outsiders taking chances. The book itself was a gamble for Howells, who had built his fiction reputation on charming, intimate novels that explored a few characters in a tight narrative setting, modeled on Jane Austen and Turgenev; suddenly he took up a large fictional canvas that would portray the darker problems of an industrialized, big-money America and the new dynamic of anonymous masses thrown together in an urban setting. His inspiration, you might say, had switched from Turgenev to Tolstoy; he had fallen under the panoramic sway of Anna Karenina and Tolstoyan socialism. Having given up his post as editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, he had moved his household in the late 1880s from Boston to New York to write a book a year for Harper & Brothers. Such was his influence at the time, that he was said to have shifted the cultural capital of the country by his own relocation.

The nineteenth-century American fin de siecle was often referred to as “the Age of Howells.” In Alfred Kazin’s memorable assessment,

He had stood at the Great Divide of American literature. He had in his own person—reluctantly, yet with deep and unconscious ardor—united the world of Emerson and the world of Zola; he had riveted his education into the language. Who, indeed, had done as much as he to unify the traditions of American literature? He was more than an Elder Statesman of letters; he had been the greatest single force in the literature of his epoch.

Let us back up a bit, and try to understand what sort of man this Howells—once a Titan—was; how he had attained such eminence; and what external and internal forces were at work, effecting the changes that resulted in his best book.

William Dean Howells was born in Martin Springs, Ohio, on March 1, 1837. In those days, the Ohio Valley was considered “the West,” and some of Howells’ energetic ambition, democratic responsiveness to colloquial American speech, fascination with self-made types, as well as his lingering insecurities and naiveties, might be attributed to the fact that he came from a part of the country that was considered rural and unpolished. He had the sort of untrammeled small-town boyhood that his friend Mark Twain would later immortalize in Tom Sawyer. However, at ten he was forced to drop out of grammar school to set type in the family shop, giving him an early taste of grinding labor. His printer newspaperman father, William Cooper Howells, was a tender-hearted, impractical entrepreneur, a follower of Swedenborgian mysticism who kept getting fired from one periodical after another for explicitly expressing anti-slavery views or otherwise antagonizing the community. His son the future author read in his father’s library after working hours, acquiring a passion for Cervantes, Irving, and Heine.

In his teens Howells wrote sensitive, Heine-influenced poetry while covering state politics as a reporter alongside his father. The young man acquired such journalistic fluency that he was asked to write a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln. The results were quite pleasing, even to the subject himself, and Howells was rewarded with a consulate post in Venice. This was his ticket out of small-town Ohio. In Italy he acquired social polish, learned foreign languages, and read voraciously, broadening his education with continental realistic fiction. The acquisition of worldliness was characteristically joined to the sinking of domestic roots; he also brought his young wife, Elinor Mead, the daughter of a Vermont patrician, with him to Europe. Family life would henceforth be the pivot and anchor for all his expansions.

Back in the United States, having missed the key experience of his generation, the Civil War, he went to work for a brief time in New York at The Nation. Howells later recalled in “My First Impressions of New York” sitting in Pfaff’s beer cellar, taking in the conversation of the Gotham bohemians, and except for the honor of shaking Walt Whitman’s paw, finding the literary exchange much less stimulating than what he would become used to in Boston. He had already been introduced to the chief deities of the Boston Brahmin literary set—James Russell Lowell, his initial, somewhat patronizing, patron; Oliver Wendell Holmes, who gave Howells his blessing, saying to Lowell, “Well, James, this is the apostolic succession, this is the laying on of hands”; the guarded Ralph Waldo Emerson; the more sympathetic Nathaniel Hawthorne; even the reclusive Henry David Thoreau. Soon enough, he was summoned to Boston as assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Howells was now “their boy,” and a few years after, in 1871, when he became the main editor of the Atlantic, he was expected to honor these patriarchs when they sent in their submissions. At the same time, he made it his mission to open the magazine to new voices, such as Bret Harte and Frank Norris, primarily from the West.

In his monthly book reviews for the Atlantic, and later, after he had moved his column to Harper’s Monthly, he became both ideologue and cheerleader for the realistic novel, championing Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Harold Frederic, as well as foreign writers such as Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Giovanni Verga, Perez Galdos, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He encouraged Abraham Cahan, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and praised the eccentricities of Emily Dickinson and Thorsten Veblen. Howells was a great editor, blessed with catholic tastes, generosity toward other writers, and not least, a gift for friendship. The term “the Age of Howells” had as much to do with his bridging function as it did with his clout. That two of his best friends could have been such temperamental opposites as Mark Twain and Henry James says much about Howells’ flexible capacity to appreciate different types of genius. To Twain, he gave superb editorial advice while serializing the first half of Life on the Mississippi: “If I might put in my jaw at this point, I should say, stick to actual fact and character in the thing, and give things in detail. All that belongs with old river life is novel and is now mostly historical.