A Hazard of New Fortunes Read online

  All through the eighties, the supposedly well-adjusted Howells had been undergoing a political and emotional estrangement from the American status quo. Always fairly progressive, he had opened the pages of the Atlantic to muckraking exposes of Standard Oil Company, but he was moved to a more militant disenchantment by the Haymarket Affair. Seven anarchist labor organizers in Chicago, fighting for an eight-hour work day, were arrested for murder after someone had set off a bomb during a demonstration to protest the police shootings of protesters, killing several policemen and bystanders. There was absolutely no evidence linking the arrested leaders to the bomb—in fact, many were not even present when it happened—but the prosecutors argued that they had incited the crime by their revolutionary rhetoric. To Howells, they were being punished simply “for their opinions,” and he spoke out on behalf of the condemned men—virtually the sole member of the literary establishment to do so. It brought down censure on his head by a bloodthirsty press (“Mr. Howells Is Distressed,” mocked the Chicago Tribune headline) and considerable annoyance from his conservative publisher, Harper’s, but Howells did not back down. The intensity of his feelings may be gleaned from a letter to a friend: “For many weeks, for months, it has not been out of my waking thoughts; it is the last thing when I lie down, and the first thing when I rise up. It blackens my life. I feel the horror and the shame of the crime which the law is about to commit against justice.” On November 11, 1887, four of the men were hanged.

  In a bibliographical note Howells later added to A Hazard of New Fortunes, he explained the connection between the Haymarket Affair and the genesis of the novel: “The shedding of blood, which is for remission of sins, had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago.... Opportunely for me, there was a great streetcar strike in New York, and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the love affairs common to fiction.” The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells’ previous success, had been a Boston novel, a romantic comedy of manners about what happens when a small-town millionaire tries to introduce his family into that city’s society, with its rule-bound formalities and snobbisms. A Hazard of New Fortunes was to be a New York novel, and so it dealt with immigrants, bohemians, strangers, labor unrest, love affairs—and a start-up magazine.

  To grasp Howells’ mental state during the period he was beginning to think through this novel, we might start by consulting a candid, free-ranging letter he wrote to Henry James on October 10, 1888, in which he says:

  I’m not in a very good humor with “America” myself. It seems to me the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun; and I suppose I love it less because it won’t let me love it more. I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social ideas; but after fifty years of optimistic content with “civilization” and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality. Meanwhile, I wear a fur-lined overcoat, and live in all the luxury my money can buy. This now-ended summer it brought us the use of a wide-verandahed villa in forty acres of seclusion where poor Winny [his oldest daughter] might get a little better possibly. The experiment isn’t wholly a failure; but helplessness and anguish still remain for her; and this winter she will go to New York with us, for such doctoring as we can get there.... Pilla [his youngest daughter, Mildred] draws in a life class in New York, and that is one of the larger reasons why we go there. But at the bottom of our wicked hearts we all like New York, and I hope to use some of its vast, gay, shapeless life in my fiction.

  Here Howells seems to be setting out, almost obligingly for our uses, his main preoccupations: the shift from optimism about American life to a more disillusioned political stance, based on his growing awareness of its undemocratic inequities; the ironic self-awareness that he himself is seduced by luxury, a willing participant in the burgeoning middle-class consumer culture; the unending worry about his child Winifred’s ill health; and the somewhat guilty admission that he was falling in love with New York and wanted to find a way to turn its “vast, gay, shapeless life” into fiction. Howells may have been tweaking his friend with that last adjective: Shapelessness was the cardinal sin to James, whose rigorous standards of the art of fiction made him dismiss even Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s books as shapeless puddings. Howells’ shaggier sense of realism drew him increasingly toward a more improvisatory, informal, absorbent terrain, where all sorts of characters and materials might wander in and rub against each other, causing intriguing tensions.

  Still it was not so easy for a realistic novelist to know what to put in the place of fictional contrivance—for instance, the useful supports of coincidence or melodrama. As critic Everett Carter has amusingly pointed out, in A Hazard of New Fortunes Howells availed himself of

  an almost stage-like dramatic economy, introducing [the characters] to each other and to the audience by a series of coincidences which stretch belief to the breaking point. While the Marches hunted for their apartment, they happened to look at rooms kept by Mrs. Leighton, who happened to have been hostess at a similar establishment in the country, where her daughter Alma happened to be temporarily infatuated with the bright but unscrupulous young artist, Angus Beaton. Alma happened to be an artist as well, and her sketch for the cover of the new magazine happened to be the one which Fulkerson accepted. Another of Mrs. Leighton’s country guests had happened to be Mrs. Horn, whose niece, Margaret Vance, happened to meet Conrad Dryfoos on their charitable excursions to the poor of New York’s East Side. The restaurant Fulkerson happened to frequent, happened also to be the one favored by Lindau, and therefore the place where the fateful meeting between March and his old German tutor could take place.

  To be generous, one could also argue that Howells was looking for some principles of social organization behind the surface chaos of the big city and that in the absence of a smaller, stratified society with clear rules, such as Boston, whatever encounters arose had to come from happenstance—that same ideal of Chance the Surrealists would later enshrine for the benefit of Paris.

  But New York also gave Howells the materials—the license— to meander into backgrounds much more than he would have otherwise. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of A Hazard of New Fortunes is its freedom of digression, its side-excursions to street life. An urban walk provides simultaneous, serendipitous pulls of the attention between passersby, store-window displays, sky-scraper crowns gleaming in the distance, the aroma of food venders’ wares, a beggar’s insistent appeals for spare change. New York taught Howells how to shift his focus in planar fashion and to derive a charged pleasure from the very asymmetry between planes.

  His realist credo had led him to rebel against “the moving accident” and “to avoid all manner of dire catastrophe.” But in his “Editor’s Study,” a column he wrote for Harper’s Monthly, he confessed the difficulties he was having in exploring the “too transitory, too intangible” life of the American city in the absence of a literary model. It comes down to this: Howells had to solve the problems of holding together a realistic novel woven out of “commonplaces” and of inventing the American city novel at the same time and with the same strategies. Never that strong on literary form, letting his talents for physical detail, characterization, and good talk carry him through, Howells turned this weakness into a virtue: This time he seemed willing to trust his stubborn resistance to the conventions of romantic fiction, as an experiment. While he had no shortage of European models for city novels (Balzac, Dickens, Perez Galdos, Dostoevsky), he had virtually no American precedents from which to draw. Besides, New York was a new kind of city, one without the history and social stratifications of a European metropolis.

  Part one, the first six chapters, is the justly celebrated section on the Marches’ house hunting. Anyone who has ever searched for an apartment in New York cannot help smiling at how unchanged the dynamic is, how brilliantly Howells caught the status strivings and indignities and end
less scaling downward of expectations to fit the market realities. It is a delicious tour de force, a novella of sorts embedded inside the larger novel, allowing the reader to make initial forays into the confusing city in protective company. The fact that the Marches were already known to many readers through Howells’ earlier novel Their Wedding Journey shows the author’s own need to rely on a familiar element when exploring material of such larger sweep and inclusiveness. Then, too, there would be striking opportunities for comparison: Recall how smugly the Marches had reacted to New York in the earlier book. Now, not only had New York changed—coming into its own by the 1880s to become the city we now know, with its population of millions, shopping emporia, traffic problems, nervous pulse, and the Brooklyn Bridge knitting it together—but the couple had changed too. The intensely sympathetic Basil is no longer the promising young poet who had gone into insurance almost as a lark, but the beaten-down paterfamilias who had squandered his talents in the wrong profession and now has one more chance to salvage his life. “He was not master of himself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those he loved”—could a better definition be made of the family man? Isabel March was still charming in her ability to commandeer the moral high ground, though, to her husband, she had begun “hardening into traits of middle age, which were very like those of less interesting elder women.”

  As much as this first section is about house hunting, then, it is also a study of aging within a marriage, the old till-death-do-you-part kind of marriage, whose dynamic Howells saw as founded no longer on passion but on “forbearance.” Here are analyzed to perfection the tics of irritation and blame, the consignment of mutually dependent roles, the seesaw of moods (“his spirits began to rise and hers to sink”), and the function of forgiveness in any long-enduring union:

  She expected him in this event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in holding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did, he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable.... There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some tragedy.

  Alfred Kazin declared that “Howells was the first great domestic novelist of American life.” We have come a long way from the male isolates of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville; in the chatter or the silences between Isabel and Basil, we hear early rumblings of John Cheever’s and John Updike’s tragicomic, fretting couples.

  Having given us our fill of this dyadic bond, Howells is ready to hurl us into other, competing centers of interest: subplots that involve the artists Alma Leighton and Angus Beaton; the millionaire Dryfoos and his transplanted provincial family adrift in New York; the “do-gooder” society girl, Margaret Vance; the old German radical, Lindau; Colonel Woodburn, a Southerner still defending slavery, and his more practical daughter, who falls in love with the publisher, Fulkerson; and of course, the thing that ties them all together, the new magazine, Every Other Week.

  By 1890 the age of publicity had arrived, and New York was already established as the nation’s media capital. The enterprising, slippery Fulkerson embodies this religion of publicity, speaking a huckster’s lingo that might be early Madison Avenue (“the Won’t-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every enlightened man, woman, and child in this vast city”). It is Fulkerson who asserts that Americans find “no subject so fascinating... as life in New York City.” As if bearing this out, the novel itself sold twice as well as any of Howells’ others. When an interviewer asked him to what he attributed this, he replied: “Possibly to the fact that the scene is laid in New York: The public throughout the country is far more interested in New York than in Boston.”

  Like a precursor of The New Yorker, Every Other Week seeks to be light and informative, and to catch the Gotham spirit, mainly for readers outside the city limits. Howells, who knew plenty about getting out a magazine, shrewdly draws on insider detail about cover designs meant to “ensnare the heedless and captivate the fastidious,” or why first issues are always so tentative and unrepresentative. The snappy, sometimes cynical give-and-take of the magazine staff may be the first fictional representation of that epigrammatic tartness which would become the staple of New York wit.

  The magazine provides us with a milieu, a workplace. But always, before long, the reader is back on the streets with March, walking about opportunistically, seeking materials for a series of urban sketches the publisher wants him to write. The vogue for the urban sketch was then at its height: Newspapers routinely featured them; they were the glue of the “Sun and Shadow”—type New York guidebooks that promised to expose the secrets of the city; and aspiring writers often earned their first paychecks doing them. The irony is that March, entranced and appalled everywhere he looks, keeps putting off writing the series because he can’t seem to find the right distance or perspective, wanting first to “philosophize” the material—that is, figure out what to make of all this mass of detail—and finally gives up, whereas Howells pulled it off twice: first, in the walking-around sections of the novel, and second, in a group of pieces later reprinted in his 1896 essay collection, Impressions and Experiences. Howells was working out in essay form some of the same motifs that he would explore fictively in A Hazard: There are, for instance, essays on “New York Streets” and “Glimpses of Central Park,” and “An East-Side Ramble,” which takes him into the slums.

  People-watching had become the preferred sport of New York. Part of the interest came from eyeing the immigrant masses whose colorful clothing and exotic physical gestures were a growing part of the street scene. While many nativist, English-descended New York families expressed alarm at these foreigners gabbling away in strange tongues and felt their city being taken away from them, Howells, who had traveled on the Continent, seemed energized by the Italians and Spaniards and Portuguese and Germans and Russian Jews. (This was the same Howells, remember, who had welcomed the literary contributions of the Yiddish writer Abraham Cahan, the black poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the Spanish novelist A. Palacio Valdes).

  “March liked the swarthy, strange visages; he found nothing menacing for the future in them.” For the Marches, “the chief pleasure of their life in New York was from its quality of foreignness: the flavor of olives, which, once tasted, can never be forgotten.” They visit Castle Garden in the Battery, where “the emigrants first set foot on our continent. It warmed their hearts, so easily moved to any cheap sympathy, to see the friendly care the nation took of these humble guests.” Compare this benevolent attitude to Henry James’s dismay, in The American Scene (1910), at the “ingurgitation” of “the inconceivable alien” hordes streaming into Ellis Island.

  In the decades from 1880 to 1920, New York had become a huge magnet both to foreigners and to Americans from other parts, creating a new kind of urban experiment. For the moment, it was a city of strangers looking for a leg up. “He came to New York because he couldn’t help it—like the rest of us. I never know whether that’s a compliment to New York or not,” one character in the novel says. Mrs. March asks, “I wonder how long one could be a stranger here.” “Oh, indefinitely,” replies March. At its worst, this city of strangers turns its back on newcomers like the Dryfooses—the neighbors don’t help you mourn your dead—or robs and mugs them. At its best, the sea of strangers coalesces into a Whitmanesque paradigm of democracy, Humanity itself. Howells speaks of “some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level, that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface the deeply underlying nobody.” His spokesman, March, observes himself undergoing in New York “almost [a] loss of individuality at times,” but this dissolution of the ego is felt as a potential relief. In any case, there is no going back to the peaceful life of Boston: “He owned it was very pretty, but he said it was not life—it was death in life.” New York might not have “inner quiet,” to use Mrs. March’s phrase, but it was the real thing, modern life.

&nb
sp; Some of the most lyrical passages in the book are given over to the Marches’ enthusiastic trips on the elevated train, at the time still a novelty. The elevated (the El or L train, for short) offered the perfect voyeuristic medium: to peer in on the decor, habits, physiognomies, and physiques of one’s fellow citizens at a protected distance, sweeping by them in transit, without fear of incurring any human obligation—all in the form of a panorama, that quintessential nineteenth-century visual spectacle—what could be better?

  Walter Benjamin had some pointed things to say about how the nineteenth-century feuilletonist (newspaper essayist), adapting “the gaze of the flâneur” or sidewalk connoisseur, “still bestowed a conciliatory gleam over the growing destitution of men in the great city.” In this novel, Howells shows he is well aware of the dangers of having a purely aesthetic response to human suffering. He gives us March’s hesitations on that score and also throws in the foolish minor character, Kendricks, who is all too apt to construe people’s hurt as raw material for a future novel. While Howells was loath to aestheticize suffering, the literary artist in him was also averse to muckraking propaganda. March tells his wife: “I confess I was a little ashamed... for having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic point of view. But of course, you know, if I went to work at those things with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil them.” Howells’ extreme fair-mindedness and reluctance to let his big novel degenerate into radical agitprop may be witnessed by the pains he took in drawing the millionaire Dryfoos, not as some capitalist villain, but as a basically decent man who has mislaid a piece of his soul in the money-speculating game.