Who was William Dean Howells?
05/09/2011 09:46:00
This month sees I.B. Tauris publish William Dean Howells' travel memoir, Tuscan Cities, following up on the publication of Howell's first travel memoir, Italian Jouneys, earlier this year in June. However, who was William Dean Howells (1837-1920) and why is he the right person to take you around Italy? Below, Matthew Stevenson, contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, to which William Dean Howells contributed 335 articles between 1886 and 1920, answers this question in his foreword to Italian Journeys.
To read an extract from Tuscan Cities online, click here.
In the last half century Howells has faded from literary awareness, remembered, if at all, for his novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and as a pioneer of realism in American fiction. English majors at American universities might recall his close friendship with Mark Twain. After that, for most, the Howells trail will grow cold. Who knows that someone so prominent in literary Boston, where Howells was editor of the Atlantic Monthly and wrote novels that explored domestic realities, had even visited Italy, let alone written books about its decadence and splendors?
Were I writing this preface a century earlier, Howells would need no introduction, either to American or British readers. In the late nineteenth century, he was the chairman of American letters, whose vast work as an editor, novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, critic, poet, and travel writer set the literary standards for the age. Such was his importance that when he denounced black walnut in one of his novels, it disappeared from fashionable American houses.
His literary cause was a form of democratic realism. In 1887, near the peak of his career, he said that fiction should “speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know—the language of unaffected people everywhere—and we believe that even its masterpieces will find a response in all readers.” Especially in English circles, he was quick to declare the independence of the American novel.
Judge a man by his friends, and look at those that liked and admired Howells. He and Mark Twain were best friends—Twain grew up in Missouri, Howells in Ohio, and, at least in after-dinner memories, they shared childhoods similar that of Huck Finn. Howells also had enduring friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson (the New England essayist), Richard Henry Dana (Two Years Before the Mast), Henry James (both father and son, of the same name), Bret Harte (short stories), the English critic Matthew Arnold, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (the poet), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin). He promoted Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Among the young writers that he later encouraged and supported were Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Vachel Lindsay, and Robert Frost. Willa Cather attended his seventy-fifth birthday. Were you to have asked most of them who they considered to be America’s greatest writer, they likely would have nominated Howells. Well into the twentieth century, writers like Dreiser, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were experimenting with the forms that Howells had coined.
From 1870 to 1910, Howells was the gold standard of American letters, and the book that gained him this currency was his first, Italian Journeys, published in 1867. It was a another long journey that took him from Martin’s Ferry, Ohio to the summit of American letters. Growing up in a bookish although itinerant family, he spent his school years as a typesetter on his father’s newspaper and later worked as a reporter in Columbus.
In 1860, with the good fortune that would follow his literary career, he wrote a campaign biography of a candidate given little chance for victory in the presidential election: Abraham Lincoln. He wrote the book in less than a month, and even passed on the chance to meet the candidate in person (books, for Howells, were all about business). The biography resonated with Lincoln, and he appointed Howells to serve as the American consul in Venice, Italy, a position he took up in 1861.
Sailing for Europe, Howells left behind a sweetheart from Brattleboro, Vermont, Elinor Mead, who, after some torrid letters, joined him in marriage and in Italy. The newlyweds loved Venice. They lived on the Grand Canal and entertained visiting Americans. The Venetian republic was then an Austrian possession, where it was said even the priests spied for Vienna. Howells’ professional obligations were to file an annual report on the traffic that passed through the port and to write occasionally to the ambassador and the State Department.
A born linguist—he spoke French, German, and Spanish—Howells learned Italian and explored the city, for what would turn out to be Venetian Life, a book that introduced American readers to the republic at sea. In a letter to his sister Annie, he wrote: “It is so quaint, so old, so beautiful, so sad...” Later he recalled: “The fact is, that in the course of time one becomes skeptical of one’s whole youth, and Venice had been a great part, a vital part of my youth.” Throughout his life, especially in the low moments, he would return to Italy and spoke the language of an expatriate, in being “torn between two homesicknesses: the longing for America, and the desire to stay in Italy...”
Tiring of the diplomatic life in 1864, Howells decided to return to the world of letters that he had discovered in Boston before sailing for Europe. (On a memorable trip there in 1860, at age 23, he met Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Longfellow.) First he and Elinor traveled the length of the Italian peninsula, so that Howells could collect material for Italian Journeys. They traveled west from Venice to Padua, crossed to Genoa through Ferrara and Bologna, and then took a boat, on rough seas, to Naples, Pompeii, Capri and Rome. It was an abbreviated version of the Grand Tour, not unlike the Italian travels of James Boswell, whose literary directness, everyday speech in his writing, and taste for travel would have appealed to Howells, the apostle of realism. Howells wrote: “I have never been able to see much difference between what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life.” I can imagine him warming to Dr. Johnson.
As he did often in a literary career that spanned almost sixty years, Howells broke new ground with his trip across Italy. The newly unified country was unknown to American readers, largely seen in the context of its political turmoil—much the way the former states of Yugoslavia are written about today. What made the book celebrated is that he wrote about sacred Europe with the direct sensibility of someone who came of age setting type on the midwestern plains. Here is his first description of the Eternal City:
Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least interesting town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly ugly—especially the architecture of the churches. The Papal city contrives at the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried.
The same style can be read today, in such irreverent writers as Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson, but Howells was among those who invented the form of travel narratives as personal confessions. In turn, it moved literature to something more impressionistic, as travel books were a rite of passage for emerging writers. Italian Journeys was Howells’ passport to literary fame. For the next fifty years he traveled the world’s literary salons, as if in a gondola.
To describe accurately Howells’ career after he comes home from his Italian travels would require a stage version of Ragtime, in which he plays the central role. He spent almost ten years as editor of the Atlantic, among the most influential magazines of the era. (During the Civil War Lincoln said that a favorable piece in the Atlantic was worth a dozen victories on the battlefield.) As its editor, Howells met everyone, nurtured their work, and left his mark on the literature of the age, in his ceaseless argument that writing should be without pretension. His editorial genius was his first-class temperament that warmed to other writers. As he was visiting England, a friend, Edmund Gosse, wrote: “W.D. Howells is over here, and we have seen a great deal of him. To know him is to love him: I think he is one of the most winning personalities I have ever met . . .with such a fund of genius and strength.”
No one admired Howells more than Twain. The two were almost brothers. Each shared an affection for the other’s travel writing. Howells loved Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, and Twain loved Italian Journeys. Late in his life, Twain wrote: “In forty years [Howells’] English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing—he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world.” Interestingly, Twain had little time for the novels of Henry James, of which he said to Howells: “I would rather be ‘damned to John Bunyan’s heaven’ than finish reading The Bostonians.” But Howells had the accommodating gift of friendship, and he and Henry James were lifelong confidants, and saw each other when they could. James once attended a lecture at Harvard that Howells gave about a trip to Italy. Later James said that during the talk, when he closed his eyes, it was as if a window was opening on to Florence. Those windows are open here. ■
Images courtesy of NYPG and Hugh Manatee.
To read an extract from Tuscan Cities online, click here.
Matthew Stevenson is an American writer who lives in Switzerland. His Letters of Transit: Adventures and Encounters from America to the Pacific Isles is published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. His most recent book is Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited. He is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, to which William Dean Howells contributed 335 articles between 1886 and 1920, notably for the lead column, known as the Editor’s Easy Chair.
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