Reversal of Fortune

The republication of William Dean Howells’ 1890 novel “A Hazard of New Fortunes,” by Penguin Classics (as well as The Modern Library), brings back into focus a career in American Letters that has periodically, over the last 75 years, raised an issue that often presses on the national life; that is, the consequence of liberal devotions as contrasted with radical necessities. I myself have just reread the book for the first time since graduate school. I remember thinking then that Howells had intended to use New York in the same way that George Gissing was using London, and Emile Zola, Paris (as settings for large social novels in need of an urban landscape), and that a major difference among these writers, equally devoted to realism in the novel, was that the Europeans wrote out of a bitter socialist ardor, whereas Howells was writing as a middle-class liberal whose sentiments were strong, clear and tempered. The difference seemed crucial then and even today seems wonderfully telling.

Howells was born in 1837 in a small town in Ohio and educated to the age of 10. After that he worked for, and beside, his printer newspaperman father, becoming so good a journalist that at 23 he wrote a campaign biography for Lincoln that earned him a consulate post in Venice. The newsman from Ohio spent four years abroad, making himself into a literary man; upon his return to the United States in 1865, he headed for Boston, where he quickly found favor with men such as James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes and, under their sponsorship, went to work at the Atlantic Monthly.

In time, Howells was to become one of the greatest and most influential of American editors, “blessed,” as Phillip Lopate puts it in his richly useful introduction to the Penguin edition, “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.” Among his best friends were two men who had no use for each other: Mark Twain and Henry James.

Howells was himself a writing machine: novels, stories, essays, reviews poured from him for 50 years and more. From the beginning, he championed and practiced realism in the novel, urging American writers to concentrate on the commonplace and to describe it not through a glass darkly as the French or the Russians would, but in light of “the smiling aspects of life.” The phrase became infamous, causing the literati to scorn him as a quintessential middlebrow, and leading ultimately to Edmund Wilson’s dismissive phrase “the comfortable family men [in American literature] of whom Howells was chief.” Yet in the 1940s, Alfred Kazin wrote admiringly of him as the “first great domestic novelist of American life,” and in the 1950s, Lionel Trilling wrote an essay called “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste.”

Howells’ novels are divided between those set in family life--the greatest of which is “A Modern Instance,” a remarkably forthright account of a failing marriage that ends in divorce--and those in which Howells struggled to put on paper his own unhappiness with the injustices of American capitalism. In all cases, the work is shrewd, honest, vividly intelligent; and in all cases the prose, somehow, fails to deepen; the lively, interesting surface remains oddly unbroken.

Take “The Wedding Journey,” for example, the one everyone was reading in 1872. The setting of this novel is a honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls. The protagonist, Basil March, is enamored of his new wife, Isabel, but he thinks her ignorant, and he resents the sexual hold on him that makes him bow to what he sees as the natural pettiness of a woman’s character.

One day the couple walks out across a series of small bridges hanging over the falls and, suddenly, Isabel experiences a terror she cannot bring under control. Unnerved by the torrential floods of water, she sinks down, declaring that she cannot walk back. Howells writes that Basil “stared at her cowering form in blank amaze.” At last, she recovers and walks ashore, but thereafter Basil “treated Isabel ... with a superiority which he felt himself to be very odious, but which he could not disuse.”

The novel is open in its depiction of the power struggle beneath the calm, wedded surface; once married, one would be living intimately with judgment for years to come. This view of the “commonplace” was Howells at his best: knowing and grown-up. Yet the novel feels innocent; its touch is light, too light; it fails to achieve the power of its own insights.

“A Hazard of New Fortunes” takes up the Marches 20 years later when they move from Boston to New York so that Basil can leave his deadening job in insurance to fulfill an old literary ambition by becoming the editor of a magazine being started by a huckster named Fulkerson and bankrolled by an arriviste named Dryfoos.

Around these three, Howells gathers a large cast of socially prototypic characters--the immigrant socialist Lindau, the aloof artist Beaton, the do-gooder society girl Margaret Vance, the feminist Alma Leighton and the doomed man of conscience, Conrad Dryfoos (son of the magazine’s owner).

Stepping out of his Boston parlor into the streets of New York, Howells sets these people in motion against the alluring upstart city of the 1890s and has them encounter one another often enough that a moral crisis is provoked at the magazine, and a transportation strike brings the action to a melodramatic head.

In this novel the city is a great creation, a richness of description and response: the food, the immigrants, the neighborhoods; the elevated trains. Ah! the elevated trains. They say it all. “I don’t care if it is the ugliest place in the world,” declares Basil. “It shrieks and yells with ugliness here and there; but it never loses its spirits ... [It’s] as gay as an L road.... Those bends in the L that you get at Washington Square, and just below the Cooper Institute--they’re the gayest things in the world. Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque! And the whole city is so ... or else the L would never have got built here. New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay, but prince or pauper, it’s gay always.”

The Marches are an essence of middle-class liberalism--”there was no good cause that they did not wish well; they had a generous scorn of all kinds of narrow-heartedness; if it had ever come into their way to sacrifice themselves for others, they thought they would have done so, but they never asked why it had not come in their way”--and it is their needs and interests that are at the heart of “A Hazard of New Fortunes.” (The novel is justly famous for its six hilariously realistic chapters on apartment hunting: In 1890, the ads were as full of lies as they are today.) Together, Basil and Isabel see it all--the color, the motion, the brutishness; and on every side the wealth and the desperation. The inequities are appalling. In Boston they could insulate themselves against such knowledge, in New York they cannot. And they respond accordingly; that is, moderately. Like decent people everywhere, they are distressed at the sight of hunger, ignorance, discrimination. They feel their distress, indeed they do, and to some extent they respond. Then they go about their business. Emotions digress, anxieties cannot stay concentrated. Sympathies move them but do not overtake them. Neither do they overtake their creator.

“A Hazard of New Fortunes”--precisely because it is so worthy--presents the reader with a central dilemma in literature. The writing is a pleasure: expansive, intelligent, good-spirited. The opinions are wonderfully full, and the characters speak them beautifully. But these people remain unimagined; and, in an odd way, so does the prose. It is not that the characters are shallow, it is that the author of their being cannot inhabit their shallowness. The narration itself remains unimagined.

In his essay on Howells, Lionel Trilling observes that he “was a man of principle without being a man of heroic moral intensity.” Moral is Trilling’s buzz word for many things, including depth of engagement, that lack of which liberals are always being charged with. What it comes down to is: The liberal and the radical both perceive the pain of worldly circumstance, but the liberal can live with it, the radical cannot. It is the inability to live with it that drives the radical deeper into the heart of things.

I think in literature the writer must be a radical. The insight that guides the work must go the limit of felt thought, and then beyond. This, perhaps, is what Keats meant when he said, “Art takes its goodness from the ardor of the artist.” It’s that missing ardor that made Howells a great editor and a problematic novelist.

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Vivian Gornick is the author, most recently, of “The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.”