W. D. Howells in the News
Sunday, June 05, 2005
The W. D. Howells in the News Site has moved to http://howellsinthenews.blogspot.com, although the archives of posts prior to May 2005 will remain here. To see newer posts, please click on the above address.
From Randy Cohen, "We Mapped Manhattan," in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/books/review/05RAND01.html? (free registration required):
Some mysteries remain -- the apartment of J. D. Salinger's nomadic Glass family, who seem to move from East to West Side; the address of the Xenophon, where William Dean Howells's March family found a sublet in ''A Hazard of New Fortunes.'' Nor could we confidently pin down the office of Bartleby the Scrivener, despite many good suggestions from readers, including Ann Sullivan-Cross's. Having had a job at 14 Wall Street -- ''like working in a dead letter office, at the depths of a dark world governed by dark laws'' -- she felt sure she recognized the spot; she pointed out, moreover, that Melville's brother Allan had a law office at that address.
Monday, May 30, 2005
from the Los Angeles Times
[ . . . ] Postmodern theorists, promoting a fluid sense of identity, were only the latest step in unhinging art and discourse from any stable sense of the real world. Just as political upheaval left people physically insecure and globalization left them economically insecure, postmodernism was part of a complex of changes that left them feeling morally insecure, uncertain about who they were or what they really knew.
For some, there was a newfound freedom in all this. But many Americans today, sensing that the foundations of their world have crumbled, feel a deep nostalgia for something solid and real. Surrounded by a media culture, adrift in virtual reality, they seek assurance from their own senses. They turn to what John Dewey called "the quest for certainty."
I see evidence of this in my own field of literary studies, which has long been in the vanguard of postmodernism. In his book "After Theory," a widely discussed obituary for decades of obfuscation that he himself had helped to promote, Terry Eagleton mocks "a certain postmodern fondness for not knowing what you think about anything."
To understand the changes that shook the modern world, my students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. For readers like me who grew up in the second half of the 20th century on the unsettling innovations of modernism, and who were attuned to its atmosphere of crisis and disillusionment, the firm social compass of these earlier writers has come as a surprise. [. . . ]
From Newsday.com: Recommended reading
A lesser-known entry in the Americans-in-Europe genre, the school of novels ruled by Edith Wharton and Henry James, William Dean Howells' comedy of manners, "Indian Summer," (New York Review Books, $14) is as sublime as they come. As the title implies, this is a book about a season on the cusp, specifically the season of middle-age in the life of Howells' hero, Theodore Colville. A 40-year-old Midwestern newspaper publisher who finds himself in Florence after selling his business, Colville runs into another American, Lina Bowen, whom he knew years before as the intimate of a woman he loved who jilted him. Mrs. Bowen, now widowed, is spending the season in Florence with her young daughter, Effie, and a friend's 20-year-old daughter, Imogene.
It should be plain from that setup that Colville and Imogene fall for each other. Howells' description of this mutual infatuation is like listening to a melody that's a few beats off the rhythm. No one can quite surrender to the sweetness because no one really believes in it. From the moment Colville and Imogene 'fess up their feelings, they realize they're trapped.
In the finest line of her ace introduction, Wendy Lesser says, "Middle age ... is the period of life at which one first senses what it means to become a part of the past."
"Indian Summer" is not, however, a tragic novel. Ultimately, it's one of those rare works (like Ron Shelton's film "Bull Durham") about the deep, unexpected satisfactions to be found in compromise. [. . . ]
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
From the New York Sun (unfortunately, only paid subscribers can access much more than this):
Other than English majors and literary scholars, who reads William Dean Howells? If your project is 19th-century American fiction, then Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Crane, and the early Wharton and Dreiser head the list. Yet Howells wrote magnificent travel books (he was U. S. consul in Venice), and at least three novels that deserve their place in the canon. "A Modern Instance" (1882) is a shrewd and diverting study of a corrupt and womanizing Boston journalist, Bartley Hubbard; "The Rise of Silas Lapham" (1885) dramatizes the fate of a self-made Vermont businessman; "A Hazard of New Fortunes" (1890), set in New York City, reflects profound misgivings about rampant capitalism.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
From "Vaudeville's brief, shining moment" at City-Journal.org
In the new century, these performances that cost so little—rarely more than $1— and gave so much, beguiled not just the common folk but intellectuals, too. As novelist William Dean Howells wrote in Harper’s, “I am an inveterate vaudeville-goer, for the simple reason that I find better acting, and better drama, than you get on your legitimate stage.”
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
From W. Ninth St. turns 180: Highlights from a history of socialites ... (NY Times; free registration required)
Other wordsmiths arrived, shuffling up and down W. Ninth like a pack of cards in pursuit of Lady Luck. In 1870, author Bret Harte got comfy at 16 W. Ninth on his sister’s sofa. In 1888, William Dean Howells breezed through 46 W. Ninth St. for three months. For a few months in 1918, Edna St. Vincent Millay and her sister Norma sniffled in unheated lodgings on W. Ninth when her first book, “Renascence,” was published
Saturday, March 12, 2005
From the St. Augustine Sun Sentinel:
The Spanish, she says, weren't the only ones to leave something behind in St. Augustine. Prince Achille Murat, the short, portly nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who married George Washington's grandniece, boarded at a coquina dwelling here in 1824 (The Murat House has been preserved.); William Dean Howells, the American writer, wintered here at a Colonial Revival home in 1916. (It, too, has been restored.)
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Howells as authority for Deadwood language
From "The Misfit," Mark Singer's profile of David Milch of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, in The New Yorker (Feb. 14 & 21, 2005), p. 203:
Carolyn Strauss, of HBO, told me, "Early on, the issue of language came up a lot. We asked David, 'Are you obscuring your message or the over-all acceptability of the piece in a way that may not be necessary?' He felt strongly that it was necessary. He'd done a lot of research." At Strauss's urging, Milch wrote an essay on the subject--five single-spaced pages, followed by four pages of bibliography--defending realism and freedom of expression as indispensable correctives to the varnished mythologies of the West perpetrated by Hollywood. After quoting from oral histories as well as authorities like H. L. Mencken, Daniel Boorstin, and William Dean Howells, he concluded . . . " If [these words] would have been in common usage in the time and place in which 'Deadwood' is set, then, like any words, in form and frequency their expression will be governed by the personality of a given character, imagined by the author with whatever imperfection, as the character is shaped and tested in the crucible of experience. The goal is not to offend but to realize the character's full humanness."
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
This article appears courtesy of its author, Rosslyn Elliott, who has given permission for this to be reprinted on W. D. Howells in the News. It was first published in the Hamilton Journal News on July 11, 2004. The William Dean Howells Society thanks Rosslyn Elliott for making it available.
Rosslyn Elliott
A Pilgrimage to Hamilton
Literary tourism is an interesting concept. What exactly are we searching for when we go to a specific geographical location associated with the life of a writer? Perhaps it is the insubstantial nature of the printed word, which is simultaneously completely intimate and completely abstract, that prompts us to search for some physical evidence that this writer who has spoken to us out of the mists of time was once as solid as we are. Perhaps it is the same instinct that led Christian pilgrims to seek Jerusalem. If I told my peers in academia that I was going on a pilgrimage for William Dean Howells, they might laugh knowingly. Many academics, entranced by flashier or more sinister figures, think that Howells was not the type of writer to inspire such devotion.
The fact of the matter is that William Dean Howells was such a writer, and it was sheerly in search of Howells that I visited Hamilton not so long ago. I discovered a town that to unfamiliar eyes lies like a sleeping beauty on the
bank of the river, waiting only for the kiss that will unveil its charms. A walk through the historic district is as atmospheric as a tour of New Orleans - the air of Hamilton's oldest area is charged with the presence of the past.
Surrounded by nineteenth-century homes, I could easily imagine myself back to a time when I would hear not the subliminal hum of distant traffic but the clip-clopping of hooves, creaking of carriages, and the shouts and laughter of neighbors and merchants going about their everyday business.
I don't romanticize the nineteenth-century; I know the Hamilton of that era would have been very dusty, and, without the convenience of modern climatecontrol, too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. I also appreciate the medical advances that mean my children are much more likely to grow to adulthood than those children born in 1850. Nonetheless, I am struck by the beauty of Hamilton's living history, through which we see a past in which the harshness of life sometimes helped us to understand what we had in common with our neighbors.
William Dean Howells was very interested in what we had in common with our neighbors. He had a deep faith that Americans of different backgrounds, races, and beliefs could learn to live together by remembering what we have in common rather than what divides us. He wrote about the social injustices of his time with wit and pathos, gently exposing hypocrisy and sticking up for the underdog. Yet, unlike many of today's social crusaders, he was temperate and a peace-maker. He was also a very talented novelist who depicted his society with compassion and complexity, with an objective touch rarely found in novels revolving around social issues. His brilliance lay in depicting character with such accuracy, poignance, and wit that we always see the human being first and the issue second. In short, William Dean Howells was not only a terrific writer and editor, but also a wise man and a good one. Wisdom and goodness have often been in short supply in literary circles - when we read literary biographies we are more likely to see drunks, addicts, suicides, and the mentally-ill. Perhaps that is why I find Howells so compelling as an author. If I want to look at human life through another set of eyes, I want those eyes to be not drunk,depressed, or malignant, but instead clear, generous, and compassionate towards others.
Hamilton is so satisfying for the Howells-lover not because relics of Howells himself remain (though his uncle's 1837 home still stands at 304 Riverfront) but because there are such clear and beautiful reminders of the town and the America that he loved. The old homes, businesses, and public buildings in which Americans lived their lives over a century ago now witness the triumphs and tragedies of a different generation. I believe that all the people who come and go through those buildings still are, as Howells would say "more alike than unlike one another." I like to think that that some smiling ghost of Howells still remains in the timber and stone of those historic buildings, and that perhaps it whispers encouragement to those who are seeking to do good in Hamilton today.
