May 11, 1920-- William Dean Howells, dubbed “Dean of American Letters” for his exploration of
multiple genres and his influence as a critic and editor on the nation’s literature, died
in his sleep in New York City at age 83.
The prior decade had seen the passing of Howells’
two great but very dissimilar friends, Henry James and Mark Twain. At the peak
of his influence and popularity, Howells’ fiction had been ranked alongside theirs
as exemplars of a realistic school decidedly at odds with the romantic
novels more favored by American publishers in the early post-Civil War period.
But the century since his death has been kinder to
the two writers that Howells championed than to the editor-novelist himself.
While Twain continues to be studied for introducing native vernacular to
American literature and James is celebrated for his pioneering psychological
insights into characters’ motivations, Howells is seen as conventional, even
something of an old fogy.
Four writers—a novelist and three critics— might be
said to have interred Howells’ reputation. The first, biographer Van Wyck
Brooks, did not wait even a year before his death before criticizing him (and
Twain’s wife Libby) in The Ordeal of Mark Twain for reining in his rude, ribald genius with their own puritanism and prudery.
H.L. Mencken picked up on this theme, inveighing
against Howells, with characteristic invective, for churning out "a long
row of uninspired and hollow books" and acting like a “somewhat kittenish
old maid."
Many listeners in 1930 might have been mistakenly heard the voice of Mencken in that of the Nobel Literature laureate that
year, Sinclair Lewis, who picked up Mencken’s rhetorical tropes and fairly ran
with them. The rise of Howells, Lewis charged in his lecture, had represented for American literature “something like a
standard, and a very bad standard it was”:
“Mr. Howells was one of the gentlest, sweetest, and
most honest of men, but he had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest
delight was to have tea at the vicarage. He abhorred not only profanity and
obscenity but all of what H. G. Wells has called ‘the jolly coarsenesses of
life.’ In his fantastic vision of life, which he innocently conceived to be
realistic, farmers, and seamen and factory hands might exist, but the farmer
must never be covered with muck, the seaman must never roll out bawdy chanteys,
the factory hand must be thankful to his good kind employer, and all of them
must long for the opportunity to visit Florence and smile gently at the
quaintness of the beggars.”
The evisceration of Howells was effectively
completed a generation later in 27-year-old Alfred Kazin’s sweeping study of
American prose from the 1890s through 1940, On Native Grounds. The opening chapter uses Howell as the central figure
against which virtually an entire new genre, the naturalists and their
successors: “he was a monumental example of the antiquated nineteenth-century
conscience upon which a new order of society had placed an intolerable burden.”
Literary reputation is a fleeting thing—and ironically,
even the four men who did so much to take down Howells do not stand up so well
as they once did. At the same time, if Howells has not reacquired his once-exalted
status, a more respectful tone has crept into evaluations of his work.
Historian Richard White, for instance, used Howells
as a voice to try to make sense of the squalling Industrial Age in his book, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865‒1896. His Howells is
less prudish than ambivalent, an observer too thoughtful to miss in his novels
and magazine columns the injustices of his time but too perplexed by them all
to offer a corrective to them.
The best way to ensure a writer is read is to make
sure he is assigned to students. Though Howells’ most influential novels (from
1875 through 1888) can be found in a two-volume Library of America series, I doubt
if more than a few students have gone beyond even one: The Rise of Silas Lapham. But if you have to start somewhere with
him, it might as well be here.
Less buffoonish than Lewis’ George Babbitt, less
brutal than Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood, Lapham is also more thoroughly
recognizable and human. Proud, boastful, eager to maintain his place in
society, this businessman lets his greed get the better of him. The “rise” in
the title is actually ironic: His realization of his folly and determination to
live for others following the collapse of his fortunes produces a moral, rather
than financial, elevation.
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