Quote of the Day (William Dean Howells, on November)

“How often, in how many a far November,
Of childhood and my children's childhood I was glad,
With the wild rapture of the Fall,
Of all the beauty, and of all
The ruin, now so intolerably sad.”—American man of letters William Dean Howells (1837-1920), “November,” originally printed in Stops of Various Quills (1895), republished in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2: Herman Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (1993)

I took the image accompanying this post, of the Smithsonian Butterfield Habitat Garden, outside the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, when I was on vacation in Washington, DC, nine years ago this month.

Quote of the Day (William Dean Howells, on the Uncertainty of Work)

“No one is sure of finding work; no one is sure of not losing it. I may have my work taken away from me at any moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestion of a man who has not the qualification for knowing whether I do it well, or ill. At my time of life—at every time of life—a man ought to feel that if he will keep on doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to him, except through natural causes. But no man can feel this as things are now; and so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and trampling underfoot; lying, cheating, stealing; and then we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame, and look back over the way we've come to a palace of our own, or the poor-house, which is about the only possession we can claim in common with our brother-men, I don't think the retrospect can be pleasing."—American novelist, critic, and editor William Dean Howells (1837-1920), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889)

It was true 135 years ago when Howells wrote these words, and maybe more so now, about how “caprice” can end employment, for either individuals or mass numbers of employees.

 Executives screaming for less regulation may well end up playing casino with their employees’ futures. A multinational conglomerate thousands of miles away may abruptly terminate workers who’ve given the best part of their careers to a company.

All of this feeds into worker anger. Many may well accept the nearest explanation at hand that they can understand, even if they involve the creation of scapegoats. 

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.