Irving Howe 1954
Source: Saturday Review, 23 October 1954. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
In 1906 the grand-niece of William Dean Howells complained that his writing lacked virility. Virile writing, she went on to explain, was ‘very strong, don’t you know; and masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you into the air and trample you underfoot’. The young woman’s critical vocabulary was somewhat melodramatic, and one would as soon not know which writers she felt might satisfy her vertiginous requirements; yet she had a point. Howells’s half-prissy, half-humorous reply that he hoped ‘I'm a gentleman even when writing a novel’ helps convince one she had a point.
Howells has largely been ignored in recent years. Several of his books still read very well; he is in many ways an admirable and even estimable figure; but he does not present a critical challenge, there is almost nothing in his work to discover or uncover, he is as transparent as a store window, and as public too.
Now there is nothing necessarily bad in this critical ‘neglect’. Nor is there any reason why all writers should be written or talked about with the same interest at any given time - so long, that is, as people remember that the critical attention given a Kafka doesn’t mean that Fielding or Turgenev or Howells aren’t worth reading. The study of Kafka presents acute and fascinating critical problems. The study of Howells does not.
Not even, one must regretfully say, in the conscientious book Everett Carter, who teaches English at the University of California, has now written. [1] One cannot always be sure whether Mr Carter writes from a genuine passion for his subject or from an academic concern to ‘cover’ a subject. For while his Howells and the Age of Realism has all the minor virtues, being sensible, careful and compact, it is so organised as to be hopelessly academic. Instead of focusing upon Howells’s performance as a novelist, Mr Carter has chosen to concentrate on such secondary matters as the genesis of his work and its influence on other writers. Elaborately, and somewhat tediously, tracing the development of Howells’s literary theories, he has used his often sensitive estimates as illustrations of the shifts in Howells’s thinking.
This is a risky procedure, since it can sustain interest only in the case of a writer who is also a first-rate literary theorist - which Howells was not. Of course, Mr Carter’s method may be defended on the grounds of scholarship, which is sometimes made to justify the idea that anything relating to the biography of a writer, whether personal or intellectual, is fair game; but the result of such a procedure, almost always, is both promiscuous and anaemic.
As it happens, Mr Carter seems aware of the weakness in his approach and consequently interweaves critical vignettes of other writers - Edward Eggleston, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry James - who were Howells’ contemporaries. These prove to be among the best and liveliest passages in the book, though at times they succumb to another academic failing, the temptation to aggrandise one’s subject by making it seem more ‘significant’ than it really is. Thus Mr Carter feels obliged to enrol Mark Twain in Howells’s school of realism (at least as a part-time student), which gives that school what it had not had before, a major writer; but which is also far-fetched as literary criticism, since in his best work Mark Twain, light-miles away from anything resembling Howells’ or any other sort of realism, is actually a fabulist.
I must raise some other objections to Mr Carter’s approach. To study a writer in terms of his developing literary theories is largely to confine oneself to the plane of surface intentions. The famous formulation of ‘critical realism’ with which Howells climaxed his literary thinking - a method of composition, he said, which ‘disperses the conventional acceptations by which men live on easy terms with themselves and obliges them to examine the grounds of their social and moral opinions’ - is fine; but it cannot possibly tell us very much about the actual quality of Howells’ writings during the time he worked up this definition. It does not tell us, for example, that he lacked one of the essential talents of the great writer, the talent for losing one’s balance. ‘I like a man who plunges’, said Melville about Hawthorne; and Howells, for all his courage in publicising Taine, in becoming a socialist, in defending the Haymarket anarchists, didn’t plunge very deeply when it came to writing novels. Uneasily on the defensive, Mr Carter remarks that Howells ‘was not by temperament a Faust’. True; but that isn’t what really matters.
Howells was trapped by his infatuation with normality, by his excessive concern, as Vernon L Parrington remarked, with ‘the usual’. He did not realise how normal abnormality is, he did not sufficiently grasp the fact that even the most naturalistic novels are full of fantasy, grotesquerie and symbolic distortions. I do not mean to complain that he wasn’t a Dostoyevsky or a Melville: he was under no obligation to pursue any vein but his own. I complain that he didn’t pursue his own vein to its depths. It is sometimes said in his defence that he is one of the few writers who treats domestic life with a certain affectionate balance, and this is both true and a genuine literary virtue; but to see how he falls short even in this area one need only compare his treatment of the family with that of Tolstoy at the end of War and Peace, where Tolstoy communicates not only the charm and felicity of domestic life but also its linked horror and boredom. Nor is my point that Howells wasn’t as great a writer as Tolstoy; it is rather, as Henry James put it, that he lacked ‘the really grasping vision’. He was too easily content.
Except, perhaps, towards the end of his career when he began to sense that somewhere his work was deficient and to react against criticism with an irritation that his gentle surface could not quite hide. ‘I could not have palpitating divans in my stories’, he once said, and the remark is terribly revealing, not because one cares particularly about the palpitating divans (though literature would be much the poorer without them), but because it hints at the unwholesome corners that are so frequently found in the minds of the ‘wholesome’ writers. We are here only two or three steps away from the hearty, beef-and-ale, middle-brow novel which is to corrupt twentieth-century literature - and if Mr Carter had traced Howells’ unacknowledged relationship to the rise of middle-brow culture in America, instead of pursuing him in the labyrinths of his literary theories, he would have written a far more consequential book.
Still, I don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t much to be learned from Mr Carter’s studious research. Perhaps the trouble is a larger one, not confined to him. Why, one wonders, do so many professors feel obliged to turn out full-scale books on subjects that merit little more than longish essays? Had Mr Carter boiled his material down to fifteen or twenty thousand words the product would very likely have been first-rate. But he would also have been unable to publish it. The unhappy result of this situation is that too many critics, finding it virtually impossible to print long essays or collections of shorter ones, pad their genuine insights with academic cotton in order to turn out dullish ‘full-scale’ literary studies.
1. Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism, J B Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1954.