As soon as you cease to have it before your eyes—even when you have it before your eyes,—you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many people deny it exists, or is much more than the superstition of the sentimentalist.” So Howells, in his “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver,” summarizes as truthfully as anyone ever has the enormous psychological resistance of the haves to the reality of the have-nots. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, he analyzes coolly the very mechanisms of denial and rationalization by which we soothe ourselves with fantasies about good intentions. The result is what Kenneth S. Lynn called “the most revealing study ever made of sentimental American liberalism,” while Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, wrote more identifyingly: “It’s still the best book about middle-class life—or is it upper-middle? anyway, the lives of salaried professionals—in New York, a great American novel.”

 

A Hazard of New Fortunes is an ensemble novel, without a central character—unless it would be the city itself. (For once that cliché, that the city is also a major character in the novel, is absolutely correct.) Basil March is not the central character; though he may register the consciousness of the book, his actions do not initiate or determine its key events. In addition, he drops out of the book for chapters at a time.

At the opposite end of the character spectrum from the conscientious family man, March, stands the blithely self-justifying artist and bachelor, Angus Beaton, an intriguing creation of Howells’. Beaton is a male flirt who can’t seem to keep himself from leading on various women, including the naive, gauche heiress Christine Dryfoos, the debutante “do-gooder” Margaret Vance, and the “new woman” painter Alma Leighton. He operates partly out of cynicism, partly out of improvisatory intuition. “He had no scruple about breaking an engagement or failing to keep an appointment; he made promises without thinking of their fulfillment, and not because he was a faithless person, but because he was imaginative, and expected at the time to do what he said, but was fickle, and so did not.” Though most critics have been hard on Beaton as symbolic of an amoral, egoistic current in mass society, and though March keeps threatening to throttle him, Howells himself evinces an underground sympathy for his character. Undoubtedly the middle-aged author still remembered enough of his vain, self-inventing youth to enjoy Beaton’s companionship. (This character is a first cousin to Bartley Hubbard, the glib, pleasure-seeking journalist in A Modern Instance, to whom Howells acknowledged a shadow kinship.) Here, he privileges Beaton by letting him be the only character besides March, a clearer author surrogate, on whose thoughts we are allowed to eavesdrop at length.

Howells makes a point of showing that this American version of a Baudelairian dandy arose from the laboring classes, as a tombstone cutter’s son. His sardonic self-fluidity proves an effective counter-anchor to the overly bourgeois, decent March. Beaton is not a phony, he has talent to burn—certainly enough to give the magazine the visual panache it requires—and is a hard worker, in his idler’s way. Using the artist’s déclassé posture to gain admittance to society salons, he yet feels closer to the unpolished arriviste Christine than the sophisticated Margaret Vance. Too close to his working-class roots to have much liberal sympathy for the poor, his politics are appalling, as when he says the streetcar strikers should be shot, simply because they have inconvenienced him. He is not without a conscience, as evidenced by his worries about his father. But then, he immediately rationalizes his guilt: Instead of sending his father the money he fantasizes, he goes out and spends it on a fur-lined coat (the very luxury item, you might say, that Howells guiltily referred to in his letter to James). Just as Beaton imagines himself married to the primitive Christine Dryfoos “in a kind of admiring self-pity,” so March fantasizes doing more and more for the worthy Lindau, even leaving him money in his will—then promptly forgets about him. For all their seeming oppositions, March and Beaton are brothers in their comic propensity to rationalize.

Beaton is also representative of New York’s bachelor population. The city, by the very anonymity it offered, was a mecca for single people, just as it acted to undermine family life by its distractions and incentives to workaholism. (Even architecturally, Isabel March complains, the New York flat is “made for social show, not for family life at all,”) Beaton is the sort of bachelor who will try to wriggle out of any romantic corner, and so ends up with no one, while Alma Leighton, his female counterpart, seeks to maintain her freedom at all costs, though perhaps for different reasons. It is tempting to see her as an early feminist, presciently aware of the oppressions that might meet any woman who submits to an unequal marriage.

And indeed, by the end of the book, even the uxurious March is proclaiming, in the spirit of the fragmenting, disentangling city:

“Why shouldn’t we rejoice as much at a nonmarriage as a marriage? When we consider the enormous risks people take in linking their lives together after not half so much thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad whenever they don’t do it. I believe that this popular demand for the matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading. We get to thinking that there is no other happiness or good fortune in life except marriage, and it’s offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage, beauty, learning, and saving human life. We all know it isn’t. We know that in reality, marriage is dog-cheap, and anybody can have it for the asking—if he keeps asking enough people. By and by some fellow will wake up and see that a first-class story can be written from the antimarriage point of view.”

 

A Hazard of New Fortunes is not, finally, a comedy—especially not the kind that will end in a nuptial scene, such as The Rise of Silas Lapham. Between the lines, we can hear the novelist defending himself against the reader’s claims for a happy ending, with wedding bells uniting all the singles. He had vowed to work the novel toward “issues nobler and larger than those of the love affairs common to fiction.” Might we also speculate that Howells was speaking in code about his own domestic situation, which had become increasingly cheerless?

When he was well into the writing of the novel, on March 3, 1889, Howells incurred the sudden death of his bright, beloved daughter Winifred. She had been sick for years with a mysterious, wasting-away ailment that was originally diagnosed as psychological, like anorexia, and Howells had decided, against his wife Elinor’s wishes, to put their daughter under the care of a leading physician, Dr. S.