Quote of the Day (Alfred Kazin, on a ‘Gelatinous Muddy Mess’ of Deep Winter)

“Deep winter, yellow sky last night when I went to bed and yellow sky when I woke up. All the streets and skies and buses and people merge into a gelatinous muddy mess. I am depressed by the inability to walk freely—the sky comes down on me from morning on.” —American literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)

After this week’s blizzard, the roads and side streets are clear by now, but many street crossings are still a mess. You have to step gingerly lest you step into the squishy remnants of the storm. Don’t even think about walking out at night; you can’t discount the dangers of refreezing.

As they used to say on Hill Street Blues: let’s be careful out there.

This Day in Literary History (William Dean Howells, Near-Forgotten ‘Dean of American Letters,’ Dies)

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.

Quote of the Day (Alfred Kazin, on Writing)

"To write is in some way to cut the seemingly automatic pattern of violence, destructiveness and death wish. To write is to put the seeming insignificance of human existence into a different perspective. It is the need, the wish, and, please God, the ability, to reorder our physical faith."—Critic-memoirist Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), “The Self as History: Reflections on Autobiography,” in Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art (1979), edited by Marc Pachter

This Day in Literary History (Washington Irving Leaves for Life-Changing Trip to Europe)

May 19, 1804—Funded by his merchant brothers, who hoped a transatlantic voyage might clear up his lungs, 21-year-old Washington Irving sailed for Europe.

The trip ended up doing more than preserve his health, however: it also fired the burgeoning creativity and cosmopolitan spirit of America’s first professional writer—and confirmed his belief that the United States had no reason to feel inferior to those abroad who he felt were immoral, class-ridden, and, for all their pretensions, woefully ignorant of the New World.

William and Ebenezer Irving had other reasons for worrying about their beloved younger brother, the baby in the family of 11: he wasn’t showing much interest in commercial pursuits, such as the family’s then-thriving import business. Moreover, though he’d been clerking at a couple of law offices for a few years, he was showing little flair and even less interest in that profession. Though he’d eventually squeak by in his bar exam, he was showing no more than a desire to please his family by pursuing this.

What Washington (named, in a burst of parental patriotism, for the Father of His Country) did like was writing—an avocation to which he could give full vent to his charm and good humor.

Some letters he’d written for his brother Peter’s journal, The Morning Chronicle, under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle, had attracted much favorable attention, with many readers—including Aaron Burr—not only passing it along enthusiastically to friends and relatives but engaging in a guessing game as to the author’s true identity. (Just before the young man sailed for Europe, the Vice-President—increasingly a marginalized figure in national and state politics, but not yet the pariah he’d become after his duel with Alexander Hamilton—had sat down to dine with him.)

After more than two centuries of Americans living abroad—including such literary giants as Henry James, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—creative types have instinctively sensed the catalytic effects this can have on their work. More recently, as reported in the May 16, 2009 issue of The Economist, a psychological study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has proved that there is in fact a link between creativity and dwelling abroad.

All of this was not so well-established when Irving toured France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and England. His exposure to the lore of other lands would, years later, affect his work directly.

When he visited the small Italian town of Cogoletto, he soaked up impressions of the birthplace of Christopher Columbus that would come in handy when he wrote his biography of the explorer a quarter century later. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was influenced by German folktales, including the Brothers Grimm’s “Karl Katz.”

In certain ways, Irving’s exposure to foreign sources has probably hurt him in the eyes of critics who would like something more allegedly original and American. Nearly two decades ago, for instance, I attended a lecture by the critic Alfred Kazin at my local library in which he spoke about James Fenimore Cooper. I asked why Cooper tended to be taught more in colleges and universities than Irving. “When was the last time you read Irving?” he asked.

If I had not been so surprised by the question, I might have replied that it was right about the same time that I’d read Cooper. When Kazin actually got around to answering my inquiry, he continued that with the Leatherstocking Saga, Cooper had, in effect, created a whole new genre—the western—while Irving remained indebted in form to European sources.

I’m not sure that I buy this argument. After all, Cooper started out writing novels with a pale imitation of Jane Austen, The Precaution. Even when he moved on to a métier that was arguably more native to him—The Spy and The Leatherstocking Saga—he still remained influenced, to some extent, to the reigning master of historical fiction, Sir Walter Scott. And you simply cannot compare Cooper's clumsiness (expertly captured in Mark Twain's sendup, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses") with Irving's deft use of language.

The preference for Cooper over Irving in American English departments is a trifle bit perverse, if you ask me—sort of like English courses that include Samuel Richardson’s godawful Pamela and Clarissa simply because they began the novel in the British Isles. These courses should be encouraging people to enjoy reading, maybe even take English as a major—not sending them to the bar to drown their frustration in Jack Daniels.

Andrew Burstein’s biography The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving goes a long way toward reclaiming the writer’s reputation as an American original—someone whose 1809 burlesque, A History of New York, gave birth to the terms “Knickerbocker” (named after a character in that book) and “Gotham,” and who later wrote acclaimed biographies of Washington and Columbus that made use of original sources. (More recently, Elizabeth Bradley of the New York Public Library appeared on WNYC-FM's "Leonard Lopate Show" to discuss how Irving’s “Knickerbocker History” provided the template for Jon Stewart by combining real fact and fake news.)

In later years, like Benjamin Franklin, Irving’s celebrity would stand him in good stead in a diplomatic stint—in this case, as an ambassador to Spain—and he would live for 17 consecutive years without returning home. Much of his later success might have been due to his penchant for holding his tongue and maintaining an amiable surface even as foreigners excited his disgust.

The French brought out his critical side the most—something that would bring nods of agreement not only from Fox News but from President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher (who, in his memoir, Chances of a Lifetime, took an uncharacteristic shot at the French foreign minister for putting the “gall in Gallic” with a contemptuous parting birthday gift).

Irving was shocked at the French sexual openness—not only dancers’ “shameless exposure of their persons,” but also an older man’s urging that he take a mistress for himself. He was also annoyed that the nation—then coming, in earnest, under the thumb of Napoleon Bonaparte—acted so suspiciously toward anyone (Americans included) who might be British agents, and that at least one person he met wondered if America “was not in the neighborhood of Turkey or somewhere there about!”

One other matter that might interest in today’s Americans: Irving had a close encounter at sea, between Corsica and the Italian shoreline, with a pirate crew who boarded the American vessel, the Matilda. (The pirates were only able to secure wine and brandy from the ship.)

Irving stayed in Europe until early 1806. As he reflected on his encounters, he not only displayed, as Burstein observes, “an honest curiosity about people and places,” but also a greater attachment to his native country:

“I shall, I think, never complain against government when I return to America. My fellow countrymen do not know the blessings they enjoy; they are trifling with their felicity and are in fact themselves their own worst enemies.”