W. D. Howells in the News
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.
Monday, December 06, 2004
From "How stories shape U.S. politics: Presidential narratives often determine presidential success"
CARLIN ROMANO
Knight Ridder Newspapers
How delightful, then, to listen anew to Nathaniel Hawthorne on young Franklin Pierce: "a beautiful boy, with blue eyes, light, curling hair, and a sweet expression of face. The traits presented of him indicate moral symmetry, kindliness, and a delicate texture of sentiment..."
And to William Dean Howells, tugging at heartstrings as he mused on how Rutherford B. Hayes had been wounded four times in the Civil War.
One of Hayes' wounds, Howells intoned, made it hard for him to climb stairs, but that would "not prevent his ascent on the Capitol steps" come Inauguration Day.
