Don’t write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn it off as if into my sympathetic ear. Don’t be afraid of rests or pieces of dead color. I fancied a sort of hurried and anxious air in the first.” For James, he wrote some of the most astute early appreciations of that singular writer. In return, James praised him extravagantly for this or that “enchanting” work, meanwhile wondering behind his back when Howells would put his tough theories of the realist novel into full-fledged practice.

Howells’ early works were indeed enchanting, unfailingly intelligent, and a mite too cozy: the arriviste from Ohio was avid to please. His first novel, Their Wedding Journey, which appeared in 1872, followed the honeymoon of a young couple, Basil and Isabel March, on their voyage through the northeastern United States. Part travel book (Howells had begun as a travel writer and never lost his eye for place detail), part memoir (the Marches were a thinly disguised version of the author and his wife), and part fiction, it became a popular item to give to newlyweds. From the start, Howells’ insightful fascination with the dynamics of marriage is noteworthy. What is also striking, for our purposes here, is the couple’s smugness in putting down New York “with an enjoyment that none but Bostonians can know. They particularly derided the notion of New York’s being loved by anyone ... it was too vast, too coarse, too restless.” The author did distance himself slightly from his characters’ opinions by adding: “And as they twittered their little dispraises, the giant Mother of Commerce was growing more and more conscious of herself.” But he shared, by and large, their disapproval of New York; it was at that moment the correct position for a cultured American, Bostonian or otherwise, to take. And Howells was well on his way to becoming more Bostonian than the Bostonians.

A regular writing machine, he produced novels, short story collections, essays, travel sketches, memoirs. He who had never gotten past grammar school was awarded honorary degrees and asked to teach at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. In an era that respected male plumpness, he grew more portly as he aged—with his girth and gray walrus mustache, he radiated to the world a sense of equilibrium, competence, and contentment. True, the psychic mechanism remained as delicate as it was resilient: Occasionally he would have mental breakdowns, black spells, but they were usually short-lived, and he would be back in the harness, driving himself. He drove a hard bargain, too, in contracts with magazines and book publishers. Determined to be unlike his dreamy, impractical father, Howells showed a shrewd understanding of the business side of culture. He needed all the money he could get to support his wife and three children in grander and grander houses. The Howells family’s passion for “domiciliation” had a restless component, which included regularly uprooting themselves and moving into new digs, embracing the adventure of redecoration.

Howells had thus become the representative spokesman for the middle-class American householder—to the extent that Edmund Wilson could later refer to “the comfortable family men of whom Howells was chief.” A self-made success, Howells tended to project, for the longest while, his own good fortune onto the national landscape, finding the United States a pretty good place to live. While praising Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, he called upon American writers to reflect “the more smiling aspects of life,” arguing that America, after all, was not so dark a place as Russia, shipping convicts off to Siberia. Understandably, this “smiling aspects” phrase would be used later to lambaste Howells for Pollyanna complacency. But there is another way of interpreting it: In the interests of truth and proportion, the realist novelist must be fair to the positive experiences in life as well as the negative.

Howells’ theory of the realistic novel had led him to reject sentimentality (and excessive gloom is certainly a variant of sentimentality), melodrama, plot contrivance, the romantic hero, and the whole falsifying strain of making characters nobler and larger than life. He became devoted to fiction that reflected truthfulness, the “commonplace,” the rhythms and concerns of ordinary daily life. “The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which they’ve never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to ‘the riddle of the painful earth’ on his tongue,” says one of his characters.

In the 1880s, Howells’ novels began to deepen psychologically and become more socially critical, though he still had a tendency toward timidity or ingratiating entertainment. A Modern Instance (1882), one of Howells’ most powerful and daring novels, probes a disintegrating marriage and takes us to the brink of the inconsolable before backing off gingerly. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) explores class tensions in many subtle ways before its plot devolves into a contrived comedy of misunderstanding. Indian Summer (1886) is an effervescent romantic tale of Americans abroad in Rome, Jamesian in theme if not profundity. These were followed by The Minister’s Charge (1887) and Annie Kilburn (1888), two novels that stretched Howells’ movement toward critical realism without yet breaking out of the miniaturist mode.

 

All through the eighties, the supposedly well-adjusted Howells had been undergoing a political and emotional estrangement from the American status quo. Always fairly progressive, he had opened the pages of the Atlantic to muckraking exposes of Standard Oil Company, but he was moved to a more militant disenchantment by the Haymarket Affair. Seven anarchist labor organizers in Chicago, fighting for an eight-hour work day, were arrested for murder after someone had set off a bomb during a demonstration to protest the police shootings of protesters, killing several policemen and bystanders.