There was absolutely no evidence linking the arrested leaders to the bomb—in fact, many were not even present when it happened—but the prosecutors argued that they had incited the crime by their revolutionary rhetoric. To Howells, they were being punished simply “for their opinions,” and he spoke out on behalf of the condemned men—virtually the sole member of the literary establishment to do so. It brought down censure on his head by a bloodthirsty press (“Mr. Howells Is Distressed,” mocked the Chicago Tribune headline) and considerable annoyance from his conservative publisher, Harper’s, but Howells did not back down. The intensity of his feelings may be gleaned from a letter to a friend: “For many weeks, for months, it has not been out of my waking thoughts; it is the last thing when I lie down, and the first thing when I rise up. It blackens my life. I feel the horror and the shame of the crime which the law is about to commit against justice.” On November 11, 1887, four of the men were hanged.

In a bibliographical note Howells later added to A Hazard of New Fortunes, he explained the connection between the Haymarket Affair and the genesis of the novel: “The shedding of blood, which is for remission of sins, had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago.... Opportunely for me, there was a great streetcar strike in New York, and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the love affairs common to fiction.” The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells’ previous success, had been a Boston novel, a romantic comedy of manners about what happens when a small-town millionaire tries to introduce his family into that city’s society, with its rule-bound formalities and snobbisms. A Hazard of New Fortunes was to be a New York novel, and so it dealt with immigrants, bohemians, strangers, labor unrest, love affairs—and a start-up magazine.

 

To grasp Howells’ mental state during the period he was beginning to think through this novel, we might start by consulting a candid, free-ranging letter he wrote to Henry James on October 10, 1888, in which he says:

 

I’m not in a very good humor with “America” myself. It seems to me the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun; and I suppose I love it less because it won’t let me love it more. I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social ideas; but after fifty years of optimistic content with “civilization” and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality. Meanwhile, I wear a fur-lined overcoat, and live in all the luxury my money can buy. This now-ended summer it brought us the use of a wide-verandahed villa in forty acres of seclusion where poor Winny [his oldest daughter] might get a little better possibly. The experiment isn’t wholly a failure; but helplessness and anguish still remain for her; and this winter she will go to New York with us, for such doctoring as we can get there.... Pilla [his youngest daughter, Mildred] draws in a life class in New York, and that is one of the larger reasons why we go there. But at the bottom of our wicked hearts we all like New York, and I hope to use some of its vast, gay, shapeless life in my fiction.

 

Here Howells seems to be setting out, almost obligingly for our uses, his main preoccupations: the shift from optimism about American life to a more disillusioned political stance, based on his growing awareness of its undemocratic inequities; the ironic self-awareness that he himself is seduced by luxury, a willing participant in the burgeoning middle-class consumer culture; the unending worry about his child Winifred’s ill health; and the somewhat guilty admission that he was falling in love with New York and wanted to find a way to turn its “vast, gay, shapeless life” into fiction. Howells may have been tweaking his friend with that last adjective: Shapelessness was the cardinal sin to James, whose rigorous standards of the art of fiction made him dismiss even Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s books as shapeless puddings. Howells’ shaggier sense of realism drew him increasingly toward a more improvisatory, informal, absorbent terrain, where all sorts of characters and materials might wander in and rub against each other, causing intriguing tensions.

Still it was not so easy for a realistic novelist to know what to put in the place of fictional contrivance—for instance, the useful supports of coincidence or melodrama. As critic Everett Carter has amusingly pointed out, in A Hazard of New Fortunes Howells availed himself of

 

an almost stage-like dramatic economy, introducing [the characters] to each other and to the audience by a series of coincidences which stretch belief to the breaking point. While the Marches hunted for their apartment, they happened to look at rooms kept by Mrs. Leighton, who happened to have been hostess at a similar establishment in the country, where her daughter Alma happened to be temporarily infatuated with the bright but unscrupulous young artist, Angus Beaton. Alma happened to be an artist as well, and her sketch for the cover of the new magazine happened to be the one which Fulkerson accepted. Another of Mrs. Leighton’s country guests had happened to be Mrs. Horn, whose niece, Margaret Vance, happened to meet Conrad Dryfoos on their charitable excursions to the poor of New York’s East Side. The restaurant Fulkerson happened to frequent, happened also to be the one favored by Lindau, and therefore the place where the fateful meeting between March and his old German tutor could take place.

 

To be generous, one could also argue that Howells was looking for some principles of social organization behind the surface chaos of the big city and that in the absence of a smaller, stratified society with clear rules, such as Boston, whatever encounters arose had to come from happenstance—that same ideal of Chance the Surrealists would later enshrine for the benefit of Paris.

But New York also gave Howells the materials—the license— to meander into backgrounds much more than he would have otherwise. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of A Hazard of New Fortunes is its freedom of digression, its side-excursions to street life. An urban walk provides simultaneous, serendipitous pulls of the attention between passersby, store-window displays, sky-scraper crowns gleaming in the distance, the aroma of food venders’ wares, a beggar’s insistent appeals for spare change. New York taught Howells how to shift his focus in planar fashion and to derive a charged pleasure from the very asymmetry between planes.

His realist credo had led him to rebel against “the moving accident” and “to avoid all manner of dire catastrophe.” But in his “Editor’s Study,” a column he wrote for Harper’s Monthly, he confessed the difficulties he was having in exploring the “too transitory, too intangible” life of the American city in the absence of a literary model. It comes down to this: Howells had to solve the problems of holding together a realistic novel woven out of “commonplaces” and of inventing the American city novel at the same time and with the same strategies.