Odd Jobs (35 page)
Authors: John Updike
But what if a story is not a therapy—not an antidote to life but a clarification of it? What if you think that the narrative art derives its value and importance from its patient truthfulness to our mundane human condition? Then plot is justifiable only to the extent that reality itself can be said to have a plot, a design—plot becomes a philosophical and indeed a theological question. For the Greeks, plot traces the vengeance of the gods, often working their will through human passions. For Christians, plot bares divine Providence and its ultimate justice. In
My Literary Passions
, Howells recalled his youthful reading of Dickens:
While I read him, I was in a world where the right came out best … and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will yet attend it in our daily life.… In that world of his, in the ideal world, to which the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the shows of things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right.
Howells’s fiction, however, reveals little instinctive belief that merit will in fact be crowned with success and that the real world must conform itself to the ideal. Reared rather haphazardly as a Swedenborgian, in an Ohio saturated with Protestant piety, he slowly but thoroughly became an agnostic, and in his middle life turned to Tolstoy and Socialism in lieu of a supernatural faith. Purposefully, then, and not from any mere aesthetic disdain of flashy effectism, his fiction is formless, and was sensed as such by his contemporaries. A reviewer wrote that “Mr. Howells is more than democratic, he is anarchical.” Howells admired the aesthetic anarch in Mark Twain: “So far as I know Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before, or the thing that may be about to follow.… He saunters out into the trim world of letters, and lounges across its neatly kept paths, and walks about on the grass at will.” And Henry James, writing to his brother William concerning Howells’s novel of 1890,
A Hazard of New Fortunes
, complained, “His abundance and facility are my constant wonder and envy—or rather not, perhaps, envy, inasmuch as he has purchased them by throwing the whole question of form, style and
composition overboard into the deep sea—from which, on my side, I am perpetually trying to fish them up.”
When we look into ourselves on this question of form in fiction, we find an instinctive expectation that the events and characters presented to us will all prove part of a unified field, that a certain economy will limit their number and distribution, and that the story will end with everybody, in some sense, paid off—a villain like Iago brought to justice, a tormented soul like Othello laid to rest, and an innocent like Desdemona, if not rescued, at least vindicated. This sense of ultimately balanced accounts, still forceful in Dickens, rules the classic European novel, and oddly enough persists in Henry James, like Howells raised as a Swedenborgian and like Howells thoroughly lapsed. But, as no less an expert on matters of faith than Graham Greene has pointed out, James retained a religious sense; without any reference to God, it permeates his novels and gives their moral struggles an ominous grandeur, and their characters’ fates an air of just punishment.
d
Howells, though he sometimes tries to administer some heavenly justice—Bartley Hubbard, for instance, is perfunctorily shot and killed in Arizona, and Ben Halleck upbraids himself for having dared love Marcia while she was married to this cheerful rotter—really seems to have no heart for it; he was a moral anarch in his art, while observing all the proprieties as husband, concerned citizen, neo-Tolstoyan social moralist, and exemplary dean of the literary community. His dependence upon the received code of the proprieties helps account for his excessive prudery. His realism stopped sharply short of sexual realism,
e
and he condemned it in others, going back to Chaucer. Prudery may be to blame for his one outstanding critical failure, in a life so strikingly generous in its recognition of the various talents of others—his failure to appreciate
Sister Carrie
and to see that Dreiser, far more helplessly immersed than he in the new American reality of godless competition, had written, in this matter-of-fact account of a fallen woman’s rise, the untrammelled novel Howells wanted to write, a novel as realistic in its amorality as in its urban details.
A Hazard of New Fortunes
strives to be a novel of the modern city. One begins to read it exhilarated that Howells’s powers of observation have been released from the rather narrow, backward-looking world of Boston into the ethnic breadth and gritty energy of New York. Howells’s life-journey had taken him from Ohio to Italy, from Italy to New England, and in 1888, by gingerly half-steps, from Boston to New York. By moving, it has been said, he took the literary center of the United States with him, but the New England giants whom he had adored from afar and catered to in Cambridge were dead or senescent, and vitality had already passed from Boston, with its (as Howells put it) “idealizing tendency,” to New York, with its “realizing tendency.” His instincts for where his career should take him were ever sound.
In
A Hazard of New Fortunes
, a whole new world of novelistic possibilities opens up; but these possibilities are exploited piecemeal, in an attenuated chain. The early pages, following our old friends Basil and Isabel March in their search for an apartment, take us back to the light atmosphere of
Their Wedding Journey
—picaresque comedy and droll encounter on American soil. But as other characters are introduced, and various lines of tension and possibility established, we feel the lack of a unifying field, some equivalent of Napoleon’s invasion in
War and Peace
or the fog in
Bleak House
. There appear to be altogether too many of
Howells’s young ladies, with not near enough swains to carry them off, and the literary journal
Every Other Week
does not seem a massive enough central switchboard to connect the many human specimens, from raving Socialist to crusty millionaire, that the novel introduces. We are reminded of the author’s own warning that “the intrigue of close texture will never suit our conditions, which are so loose and open and variable.” We are conscious of the wide spaces, psychological and even geographical, between the characters—almost none of them native New Yorkers—that Howells has dotted about on Manhattan’s grid, and of the artificial coincidences whereby he brings them together to give off a few sparks. The Dryfooses, from the dark and fiery oil fields of northern Ohio, are vivid enough, but vivid in isolation, as are the charming Southerners the Woodwards, and the plucky protofeminist Alma Leighton, and the vacuous artist Beaton, an especially unlikable recruit in Howells’s long line of passive and foppish highbrow drifters. In short, where Howells needs a plot, to activate so large a field and give it overall momentum, he comes up instead with descriptions of New York, and honorably shrewd and concerned remarks about poverty and wealth, and isolated brilliant scenes, and characters too numerous and sharply distinct to disarm a feeling of caricature.
A better novel from the Nineties, in my view, is
The Landlord at Lion’s Head
(1897), which returns to New England and tries to face the ancient issue of why bad men succeed—though in truth Jeff Durgin strikes one as not only more likable but even more sensitive than his stern critic, the fastidious painter Westover. It turns out, quite charmingly, that underneath everything the two men have been competing for a girl, Cynthia, whom Westover first sees as a child, and whom Durgin bravely recognizes as too fine for him. The book has the ghostly flavor of a romance, with an alcoholic brother and a tubercular family out of Poe, and shows how little an author can will Tolstoyan solidity in a land where the monotonous civilization of a democracy imposes fine shades and pale colors.
The slim Ohio youth who in 1860 was recommended to Emerson by Hawthorne with the laconic note “I find this young man worthy” lived to see himself sneered at by Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken as the portly symbol of an outworn genteel tradition. Posterity tends to be hard upon those who have served their own times too well. If we imagine Howells and Henry James, as they paced the streets not far from here in Harvard Yard, to be competing in setting forth “the true principles
of literary art,” we must admit that James won the race. His titles thrive in paperback; in the divagational difficulty of his sentences and the proud passion of his increasingly abstract pattern-making he looms as the first great American modernist. Gertrude Stein, in her
Lectures in America
, differentiated him from his English contemporaries: “The others all stayed where they were, it was where they had come but Henry James knew he was on his way. That is because this did connect with the American way. And so although they did in a way the same thing, his had a future feeling and theirs an ending.” Yet, as we look about, could we not say that James has many academic idolaters but few imitators—Peter Taylor and Cynthia Ozick in their youths are the last I can think of—whereas the Howells faith in “poor Real Life” relayed with a “poetry … not ashamed of the plainest fact” is on all sides put to the test, and “effectism” banished to the drugstore racks and the best-seller lists? Howells’s heirs include not only Hamlin Garland and Booth Tarkington, who wrote and thanked him, but Sinclair Lewis, who devoted part of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to attacking him, and John O’Hara and Raymond Carver, who may not have read him. Today’s fiction, the vein of modernist formal experimentation exhausted, has turned, with an informal—a minimalist—bluntness of style, and with a concern for immediate detail that has given regionalism new life, to the areas of domestic morality and sexual politics that interested Howells. “Even if at the risk of some vagueness,” our “desultory, mutable, and unfixed” narratives of private conscience and crisis illumine the “vast, natural, unaffected dullness” of middling American life.
It is, after all, the triumph of American life that so much of it should be middling. Howells’s agenda remains our agenda—for the American writer to live in America and to mirror it in writing, with “everything brought out.” In 1903, I know not why, Charles Eliot Norton showed Howells some letters that Henry James had written him, likening Howells with his fine style to “a poor man holding a diamond and wondering how he can use it.” Howells’s response was equable and defiant: he wrote Norton, “I am not sorry for having wrought in common, crude material so much; that is the right American stuff.… I was always, as I still am, trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand.” It is hard to see, more than eight decades later, what else can be done.
1
My contribution to a panel, “How Does the State Imagine?,” conducted on January 13, 1986, as part of the 48th International PEN Congress, held in New York City with the overall theme of “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.”
2
The inaugural annual Herman Melville Lecture on the Creative Imagination, sponsored by The Writers’ Institute at Albany, New York, and given in that city on April 25, 1985.
3
Delivered at the Gothenburg Book Fair, in Gothenburg, Sweden, on August 20, 1987.
4
An address given at the Davis campus of the University of California on October 25, 1983, and then, somewhat revised, at the 1,644th stated meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 9, 1983.
5
Given on May 1, 1987, at Harvard University, in Emerson Hall, as part of a two-day birthday party for Howells.
*
To John Townsend Trowbridge, as reported in Trowbridge’s “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,”
The Atlantic Monthly
, LXXXIX (February 1902).
†
Moncure Conway, a young Virginian ordained as Methodist minister and subsequently liberalized by Emerson’s
Essays
. Emerson also told him that he kept a local pew for his wife and children and to that extent supported the minister because it was useful to have “a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at town meetings, to attend the sick and the dead.”
‡
Hawthorne, in “The Celestial Railroad” (1843), ridiculed the “innumerable lecturers, who diffuse such a various profundity, in all subjects of human or celestial science, that any man may acquire an omnigenous erudition, without the trouble of even learning to read.”
§
Edward and Charles both died before the age of thirty. William lived to be sixty-seven. The fifth brother who lived to adulthood, Robert Bulkeley, was mentally retarded and resided in institutions or foster homes until his death at the age of fifty-two.
‖
One hundred seventy-nine sermons by the young Emerson survive in Houghton Library at Harvard and are to be published eventually, in four volumes, by the University of Missouri Press. In 1938, twenty-five of them, selected by Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr., appeared under the ambiguous title
Young Emerson Speaks: Unpublished Discourses on Many Subjects
.
b
The two young Americans did not have many acknowledged American masters of prose fiction to serve as concrete exemplars. Melville’s achievements were quite unappreciated, and Poe, whom Emerson had called “the jingle man,” was lightly regarded in New England. There was Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and Hawthorne; and of those Hawthorne was the greatest—“he has the importance,” James was to write a decade later, in his small book on Hawthorne, “of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of American genius.” In this remarkable little volume’s most famous, and perhaps most heartfelt, passage, the now thoroughly expatriated James pities Hawthorne for “the coldness, the thinness, the blankness” of the American world he looked out upon, and asserts, “It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle—it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.… The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!”
This list of negatives has become, at least among American-lit majors, famous; less well known is Howells’s rejoinder, in a basically friendly review of the biography in
The Atlantic Monthly
in early 1880. He says of Hawthorne: “As a romancer, the twelve years of boyhood which he spent in the wild solitudes of Maine were probably of greater advantage to him than if they had been passed at Eton and Oxford. At least, until some other civilization has produced a romantic genius at all comparable to his, we must believe this. After leaving out all those novelistic ‘properties,’ as sovereigns, courts, aristocracy, gentry, castles, cottages, cathedrals, abbeys, universities, museums, political class, Epsoms, and Ascots, by the absence of which Mr. James suggests our poverty to the English conception, we have the whole of human life remaining, and a social structure presenting the only fresh and novel opportunities left to fiction, opportunities manifold and inexhaustible. No man would have known less what to do with that dreary and worn-out paraphernalia than Hawthorne.”
However, by insisting, as he often did, on Hawthorne as a “romancer” and his full-length fictions as “romances,” Howells rather concedes James’s point: America had yet to produce its true novelists. And James, it should be remembered, went on to say, his list completed: “The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say.” What remains, James pleasantly leaves it to us to conjecture, is the American’s freedom, his space, his gun, his home-grown food, and his right to look every other (male, white) citizen square in the eye—what de Tocqueville called “the general equality of condition among the people.”
c
He once described the novelist’s function as that of “dispersing the conventional acceptations by which men live on easy terms with themselves and obliging them to examine the grounds of their social and moral opinions.”
d
His characters suffer for their sins, however hedged and slight: in
The Wings of the Dove
, things will never be as they were for Kate Croy and Merton Densher as a result of their deception of Milly Theale, and in
The Golden Bowl
Charlotte Stant is not just punished but tortured for loving a man she does not have the money to buy. In even a relatively light-hearted short novel like
The Spoils of Poynton
, the calculated reticences and elaborate scruples ramify restrictingly. “You’ll be happy if you’re perfect!” Fleda Vetch tells Owen Gereth, who is doomed to be imperfect, an injunction oddly echoed at the end, when, in response to her incredulous query, “Poynton’s
gone?
,” the stationmaster tells her, “What can you call it, miss, if it ain’t really saved?” Such absolutism—such a sense of life as a set of irreparable moral crystals—is quite alien to Howells’s elastic world. It must be admitted that the rotation of these crystals generates a degree of heat, a heat of old hellfire that in Howells rather leaks away.
e
Not that there is no sex in Howells’s novels; but it surfaces in sudden small gestures or objects of a fetishistic intensity: in
Lapham
, Tom Corey presents Irene Lapham with a wood shaving she had playfully pierced with her parasol, and when she gives the souvenirs of her love over to Penelope, the pine-shaving, “fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon,” is among them; in
A Modern Instance
, Marcia Gaylord, after Bartley Hubbard goes out the door, stoops and kisses the doorknob “on which his hand had rested”; in
The Landlord at Lion’s Head
, Jeff Durgin, as he walks along with Bessie Lynde, whose mouth has been previously described as “beautiful and vividly red,” notices “the gray film of her veil pressed softly against her red mouth by her swift advance” and keeps “seeing the play of the veil’s edge against her lips as they talked.” These concentrated, veiled images stay impressed in the mind where a fuller and less inhibited treatment might fade.
