GEORGE C. CARRINGTON, JR. STAe <ffnwnetibe The World and Art of the Howells Novel Ohio State University Press $6.25 THE IMMENSE COMPLEX DRAMA The World and Art of the Howells Novel GEORGE C. CARRINGTON, JR. One of the most productive and complex of the major American writers, William Dean Howells presents many aspects to his biogra­ phers and critics — novelist, playwright, liter­ ary critic, editor, literary businessman, and Christian Socialist. Mr. Carrington chooses Howells the novelist as the subject of this penetrating examination of the complex relationships of theme, subject, technique, and form in the world of Howells fiction. He attempts to answer such questions as, What happens if we look at the novels of Howells with the irreducible minimum of exter­ nal reference and examine them for meaning? What do their structures tell us? What are their characteristic elements? Is there significance in the use of these elements? In the frequency of their use? In the patterns of their use? Avoiding the scholar-critic's preoccupation with programmatic realism, cultural concerns, historical phenomena, and parallels and influ­ ences, Mr. Carrington moves from the world of technical criticism into Howells' fiction and beyond, into the modern world of anxious, struggling, middle-class man. As a result, a new Howells emerges — a Howells who interests us not just because he was a novelist, but because of the novels he wrote: a Howells who lives as an artist or not at all. George C. Carrington, Jr., is assistant pro­ fessor of English at the Case Institute of Tech­ nology in Cleveland, Ohio. During 1966-67, he will be Fulbright Professor of American Studies in Iran. THE IMMENSE COMPLEX DRAMA No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real face or the will behind it. William Dean How ells THE IMMENSE COMPLEX DRAMA The World and Art of the Howells Novel George C. Carrington, Jr. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS, OHIO Copyright © 1966 by the Ohio State University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 66-16764 All quotations from Howells and the Age of Realism, by Everett Carter. Copyright 1954 by Everett Carter. Published by J. B. Lippincott Company. Used by permission of the publisher. All quotations from The Poetry of Experience, by Robert Langbaum, are Copyright 1957 by Random House, Inc., and are used by permission of Random House, Inc., New York City, and Chatto and Windus, Ltd., London. All quotations from William Dean Howells: Representative Selections, edited by Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolph Kirk. Copyright 1950 by the American Book Company. Published by the American Book Company. Used by permission of the editors. All quotations from The Road to Realism and The Realist at War, by Edwin H. Cady are Copyright 1956 and 1958 by the Syracuse University Press. Published by the Syracuse University Press. To Ildikd Preface THIS BOOK originated in a search for meaningful patterns of form and informing concepts in that sprawling body of fiction known as "American realism." Soon realizing the bulk of the material, I confined myself to the novels of Howells, the leading realist. Not being a Howells scholar or having an emotional investment in Howells, I approached the material with no special preconceptions and no need to make Howells look good. I did have an interest in fiction and some broad critical conceptions that are roughly those of the so-called New Critics; that is, that the important actions of an artist are not in his life but in his work; that the meaning of a work of art resides in the work of art, not in what anyone (including the author) says about it; that the work is ready to tell us its secrets if we observe attentively; that a work of fiction is an elaborate structured gesture, the dynamic resultant of many vectors, each one in turn the product of innumerable words and combinations of words, choices of stress and pace, actions, speeches, figures of speech, points of view, and so on; that this gesture communicates willy-nilly the author's psychic set, existential outlook, Weltanschauung, or whatever fashionable label one wishes to apply to the apprehension of the universe. At the beginning of my research, I had no idea what the structure and meaning of Howells' novels were; in fact, I rather shared the common view that they had little meaning and no structure. My conclusions forced themselves upon me; (vii) PREFACE I resisted a number of them because I felt that there could not possibly be that much in Howells. The study is, therefore, inductive, except for the theoretical background mentioned above; the conclusions emerge from the material (though that is, of course, no guarantee that they are adequate or correct). My attitudes and approaches have made this book different in some basic ways from most previous work on Howells; for a discussion of these differences, see the Introduction below. I do use some ideas from Howells' critical pronouncements and from scholarly analyses, but only for side illumination and for convenience in labeling. The archetypal Howells image and action, for example, I describe in terms of some of Professor Cady's insights; but I worked from the material to these convenient labels, not the other way around. The main body of my text consists of (i ) analysis of Howells' Weltanschauung, as it appears in the novels only; (2) presentation of his underlying formal principles, which arise from his need to objectify his world view in fiction, and of the major literary methods and devices that help him to realize his world view in words; and (3) discussion of his unending concern with perception and with ways of stimulat­ ing and examining it. I conclude with a judgment of Howells' flaws and achievements in the light of his novels. Each topic in the text unfolds from the previous one. Within the topics, I often follow a temporal scheme; for even if one avoids a flatly autobiographical approach to Howells, there is no gainsaying the truth that in his artistic life he went through successive periods of experiment, growth, maturity, and decline. The narrowness of my approach should also be clear. One of the most complex, productive, and evasive of the major American writers, Howells can only be discussed satisfactorily by taking him one side at a time—here, the side of the novelist—and ignoring the many other sides (the playwright, the critic, the editor, the man of letters, the literary businessman, the friend of writers, the Christian Socialist, the family man). Readers (viii) PREFACE are warned in advance not to look for things that are not here and are well treated elsewhere in the Howells literature. My intended reader is not the Howells expert, who needn't be sold on Howells, and who, in my experience, already has decided ideas about him; nor is he the man who knows nothing about Howells and needs first to absorb the Cady biography and the various scholarly studies. This reader has a slight knowledge of Howells, a desire to know what is important in American literature, and, at present, no feeling that it is necessary to expand the former in order to satisfy the latter. This study therefore lacks such elemental props as plot summaries, but is deliberately lengthy in certain places (Chapters III and IV) in which I belabor with examples and discussion those readers who have never felt that the Howells novel has any point (except autobiography or flat recording), or that Howells uses the techniques of language and art like a serious artist. For the same reasons, I have limited my choice of novels to the major ones, which any critic of Howells must deal with if he really takes Howells seriously, to some typical ones, and to a few isolated works crucial to Howells' develop^ ment. Any knowledgeable Howellsian can at once think of such omissions as Mrs. Farrell (or Private Theatricals*), The Quality of Mercy, and An Imperative Duty. In defense I can only say that I have read all of Howells' fiction; that choice is necessary if one is to avoid unwieldiness or a series of tiny inconsequential analyses; that I discuss sixteen Howells nov­ els, some at great length, and refer to many others; and that the choice of novels has been made, not to fit a predetermined scheme, but to reveal the pattern found among the novels themselves when they are taken as a whole. The documentation of the study has been kept as simple as possible. Most references are blended into the text. When a reference can be to only one book, only a page number is given; when there is more than one consecutive reference to a given page, the page number is given for the last reference (ix) PREFACE only. I use abbreviations to refer to the two volumes of Professor Cady's biography, and to the works of Howells that I most frequently quote. These abbreviations are as follows: Cady, I—The Road to Realism Cady, II—The Realist at War AK—Annie Kilhurn AC A—A Chance Acquaintance AFC—A Foregone Conclusion HNF—A Hazard of New Fortunes IS—Indian Summer K—The Kentons LA—The Lady of the Aroostook LLH—The Landlord at Lion's Head LG—The Leatherwood God AMI—A Modern Instance RSL—The Rise of Silas Lafham SD—The Shadow of a Dream SRL—The Son of Royal Langbrith SVQ—Sto-ps of Various Quills SS—Suburban Sketches TWJ—Their Wedding Journey TA—A Traveler from Altruria GEORGE C. CARRINGTON, JR. (x) Acknowledgments I OWE A GREAT DEBT to Professor William Charvat of the Ohio State University, who shepherded me patiently through the doctoral dissertation that forms the basis of this study, and whose suggestions helped make the study meaningful to a larger audience than myself.