Weir Mitchell, who advocated rest cure and force-feedings, and she had died while under this treatment. The autopsy showed that she had been suffering, in fact, from some organic gastro-intestinal complaint. He wrote his friend Edward Everett Hale: “I come back sore from head to foot and grovel in the mere sense of loss. Never to hear, never to see, never to touch, till time shall be no more! How can I bear that?” Howells’ grief was so keen as to paralyze his capacity to work on the novel. He recalled later: “For weeks I made start after start, and tore up everything I wrote. I was in perfect despair about it.” Elinor Howells, who had long suffered from delicate health, became a permanent invalid after her daughter Winny’s death. Howells retreated to Belmont, Massachusetts, near his daughter’s grave, where he “experienced what anguish a man can live through.” Finally, the novel began to flow again, “as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think such things happen. ... It compelled into its course incidents, interests, individualities, which I had not known lay near.” This breakthrough of the emotional logjam produced a sudden fluency in Howells that allowed him to tie up all the loose ends, for better or worse.

 

Up to a point, A Hazard of New Fortunes keeps expanding with no end in sight, exhibiting an omnivorous appetite for everyday life, crises that turn into false alarms, flirtations which come to nothing, until finally it crashes against something immovable: the streetcar strike. This strike episode was a way for him to grasp at some larger social significance, to exorcise (and exercise) his continuing outrage at the Haymarket affair, and to bring out more sharply the Tolstoyan theme of man’s duty to man.

Given Howells’ sense of human character as a muddle of virtue and flaw, mistake and compromise, it must have been hard for him to arrive, in plot terms, at the irrevocable. Certainly the hanging of the Haymarket defendants had been something irrevocable, but it had horrified and disgusted him, not inspired him; as a writer, he was never able to tackle it head-on. Other realistic novelists, such as Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser, might orchestrate catastrophe with all the weight of evolutionary fate bearing down on their characters, but Howells’ old habits of optimism and comedy made him draw back from such grim certainties. He was happier showing simultaneous lives proliferating and streaming into the ocean of the quotidian. But he knew, perhaps regretfully, that he must make something happen. Hence the death of Conrad Dryfoos. Incidents of violence do pop up in Howells’ novels, but generally they happen “offstage” and are reticently described; here, as well. The problem with making the streetcar strike the novel’s defining climax is that it does not emanate from the plot preceding it; we have been hanging around a magazine and now are thrust into the strike like any urban nuisance (a blackout, say) to which the citydweller must suddenly adapt. It cannot bear the full weight of showing a character acting willfully, irrevocably, tragically. Indeed, Conrad’s death seems almost an accident.

The death of Conrad is effective melodrama, but it stops the novel cold. And that was, I believe, for personal reasons: Howells the novelist might have gone on, but Howells the father who had just lost his daughter could not. He could not imagine anything more powerful, more awful, than the death of one’s child. So even though Conrad is a minor character—the equivalent of the side-kick (in hundreds of movies since) whose death in the penultimate reel forces the lovers to reconcile their differences—the fact that he was the child of someone, old Dryfoos, meant that parental grief must dominate the final pages. Dryfoos’s grief is indeed moving and noble, but more problematic are the attempts of Howells, through his mouthpiece March, to wring some final meaning from the narrative. There is too much Sunday-sermon preaching at the end; the obvious Christ symbolism attached to Conrad gets a little sticky. March’s belated screeds against an economic system that leaves us “covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame” seem rhetorical, unearned; they would fit better in a Zola novel about miners than one which spends so much of its time in drawing rooms. Perhaps Howells had envisoned steering this large, capacious novel into one about labor struggles and class antagonisms; but the strike comes too late, the book already possesses its own bright, diverting identity: a middle-class city novel. This is A Hazard of New Fortunes’ only striking flaw: that it stops rather than satisfactorily concluding. But then, with all those subplots, with such an exploding universe dedicated to the everyday (Henry James had found it “simply prodigious”), how could it have been pulled together?

 

Howells would live another thirty years. He continued to write—Utopian novels, comic plays, memoirs, children’s tales, story collections—all intelligent, shrewd, and genial, none as vivid as A Hazard of New Fortunes. He continued speaking out for a just society; supported the NAACP, opposed America’s imperialist adventures in the Philippines, marched in a pro-women’s suffrage parade, defended labor’s causes. He was both honored and scorned: Asked to serve as the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, called “the Dean of American letters” (an irresistible pun on his middle name), he also became a juicy target for young Turks. Sinclair Lewis and H.