The Reticent Realist

HOWELLS: A CENTURY OF CRITICISM (247 pp.)--Edited by Kenneth E. Eble--Southern Methodist University Press ($4.50).

Not long after the Civil War, two intolerable improprieties came to the notice of U.S. Victorians. One was a minor mountain in north-central Vermont, which a less delicate age had named Camel's Rump. The other was a literary movement, which called itself realism, whose adherents proclaimed their intent to describe the world as it really was. The prudes dealt easily enough with the mountain; it became, and still remains. Camel's Hump. They had more trouble with the literary movement. For decades it was a standoff; realism did not disappear, but neither were the early realists (themselves nearly as prudish as their critics) able to keep their promise and describe the world as it was.

Of the three literary giants in America in the 19th century's last decades, one, Mark Twain, evaded the strictures of prudery because he was a humorist and because he was Mark Twain. The second, Henry James, very nearly succeeded in turning the strictures into virtues. The third, and least, in some ways makes the most interesting case study. It was William Dean Howells. not Twain or James, who presided over American literature for 50 years, who fought the critical battles for realism, and who, as the country's first avowed realist, was righteously damned as a vulgarian and a sensationalist.

Howells was both a prolific novelist and the nation's most influential critic, and eventually he forced the acceptance of his ideas: the duty of the modern novelist was to be "true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women"; such romanticists as Scott and Dickens were "dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to air." Second Deadly Silas. Howells' novels were written in a prose that both friends such as Twain and detractors such as H. L. Mencken admitted to be superb; and they were written about subjects that mattered--the hardening caste strata in U.S. society, the pain of divorce, the wrongs of a laissez-faire economy. Yet before his death in 1920, with the realism he had preached unshakably in vogue, he wrote to his friend Henry James, "I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight." Dead he was, and despite a recent and wholly campus-bound revival, he is likely to remain so: his best-known novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, will no doubt remain merely the second deadly Silas (after George Eliot's Silas Marner) of required student reading.

Tracing his decline makes a fascinating paper chase, which is the substance of this collection of essays, reviews and memoirs.

Howells argued eloquently and wisely that novelists must abandon fairy-tale heroics and write of the commonplace. But he could not see what James knew instinctively--that there was another side to reality, that life "often risks combinations and effects that make one rub one's eyes." Life as portrayed by Howells risked no such effects, and his novels unrolled with a tameness that even admiring contemporaries could not explain away. Henry Adams, writing a delicately equivocal notice of an early Howells novel (one of the pleasures of a collection of criticism is seeing eminent men of the past weasel out of tight places as shamelessly as critics of today), hints at torpor by remarking that the author must certainly have had feminine help in constructing so dainty a work. An anonymous English critic finds "a gentle current of interest" running through Howells' work, although he admits to an uncontrollable urge to kick the author's virtuous heroes. An American lady paragrapher writes with malice that she is always able to go to sleep at her customary hour when reading Howells.

Weedy Neurosis. The source of Howells' crippling tameness is more complex than his frequently cited refusal to write about sex (no American could write about sex in those days of rump-hump squeam-ishness). Howells simply could not write, and preferred not to think, about the darker sides of human nature. Much as he admired Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the realities they wrote of were to him merely Russian realities; it would be impossible to write a Russian novel in the U.S., he wrote, because here life took on a more "smiling aspect." Biographer Edwin H. Cady presents evidence that the peculiar blindness of this reticent realist may have had a base in neurosis. The son of an Ohio printer, Howells was a weedy adolescent plagued by acute vertigo, hypochondria and a tendency to uncontrollable homesickness. His literary ability won him a job as city editor of a Cincinnati newspaper, but his first view of police court sent him home with the shudders. His neuroticism, although he learned to control it. left him with a lifelong terror of going beyond the "cleanly respectabilities." Eventually the young man collected himself, wrote a campaign biography of Lincoln, and was given the consulship at Venice as a reward. When he returned, he became editor of the Atlantic and settled in Boston, where no one forced him to observe police-court reality and the most severe shock to his sensibilities was Mark Twain's swearing.

Ho wells went on writing his pale, successful novels and his unsuccessful plays (although George Bernard Shaw saw promise in them), urged people to read Zola and Tolstoy, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, and wrote an appreciation of Mark Twain that is a good deal better than the piece Twain wrote about him. At the end, when the bright young men he had encouraged had gone far beyond him. he endured patiently the cutting down of his statues. But his eclipse was only temporary. Eventually he came to be acknowledged a great man of letters, if not a great author. The battle with the prudes and sentimentalists had been won, and it had been won under banners first raised by the proper, gentle Dean.

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