The expensive vagueness of The Wings of the Dove - It almost destroyed me, thinking it all out

So it’s not just me.  I’m glad to know that.  Here is William James writing to his brother in 1902:

I have read The Wings of the Dove (for which all thanks!) but what shall I say of a book constructed on a method which so belies everything that I acknowledge as law?  You’ve reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid) and have created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages, and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean)…  At any rate it is your own…

My premise is that William James has first, the intelligence of William James, and second, at this point almost forty years of experience reading the complete works of Henry James, so if he had this kind of trouble, I should not be surprised at my own.

I have the advantage of having read a century’s worth of subsequent novels that avoid their stories even more ruthlessly than those of James – am I ever used to that – but the writers I think of as the most Jamesian don’t write sentences like those.  Saul Bellow or Alan Hollinghurst or Hotel du Lac, those are examples I have in mind.  The sentences do not make me swear on the name of Dickens.  Maybe you know some more cryptic examples.

This is William Dean Howells, also smart and used to James, in “Mr. James’s Later Work” (1903), which he partly writes as a dialogue with “a weary woman” – she is speaking:

“’There they are,’ as he keeps making his people say in all his late books, when they are not calling one another dear lady, and dear man, and prodigious and magnificent, and of a vagueness or a richness, or a sympathy, or an opacity.  No, he is of a tremendosity, but he worries me to death; he kills me; he really gives me a headache.  He fascinates me, but I have no patience with him.”

I took the liberty of adding italics to the words that are directly borrowed from James.  I think some of the others are jokes.  “Tremendosity” is definitely a joke; “opacity” is not in The Wings of the Dove, at least; as for “vagueness,” this is practically a description of the novel:

an impenetrable ring fence, within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements, all strained to breaking  (9.4)

I had wondered if some of the adjectives that James’s characters fling at each other – “wonderful” – were perhaps examples of current slang, something he heard at dinner parties, but I guess not, or at least they were not at the parties Howells attended.  They are mostly signals that I am in James-world, which is not exactly like this one ever was.  The weary woman again:

“We could not bear to lose a word; every word – and there were a good many! – seemed to tell.  If you took one away you seemed to miss something important.  It almost destroyed me, thinking it all out.  I went round days, with my hand to my forehead; and I don’t believe I understand it perfectly yet.  Do you?”

No.  I have two other differences from Howells’s magnificent invention.  First, when I left all the words in I still thought I was missing something important, and second, it turns out I have endless patience with James, so I will bang on about him until I run out of babble.  I didn’t take a fifth as many notes as I did with The Ambassadors, so I won’t go on as long as that.

There was talk some years ago about novels going out - the rigid artistry of Howells

“The test of the value of Mr. Howells’ work will come fifty years from now, when his sheaf of novels will form the most accurate, sympathetic and artistic study of American society yet made by an American.”

That is Hamlin Garland as quoted by cub reporter Stephen Crane as found in “Howell Discussed at Avon-by-the-Sea” (1891, Library of America, p. 457).  Garland calls A Modern Instance “the greatest, most rigidly artistic novel ever written by an American.” 

“Well,” submitted Irene.  (The Rise of Silas Lapham, last line of Ch. 17)

The characters in Silas Lapham, Bostonian and Vermontian alike, frequently begin sentences with “Well,” or use the word as a sentence.  Writers are told not to mess around with alternatives to “said,” but Howells is comically skilled in that department and I can see how he leads other writers astray.

The critic William Pritchard wrote a helpful appreciation in the Winter 2011 issue of The Hudson Review (“Howells and the Right American Stuff”) in which he traces the Rise of William Dean Howells, by which like Howells he also means the fall, the slow fade of the most powerful American Man of Letters (editor, critic, champion) of the late 19th century at the hands of H. L. Mencken (“uninspired and hollow…  elegant and shallow,” p. 560) and others.

Pritchard takes for granted that the core of Howells’s novels are the 1880s run – A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Indian Summer (1886), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) – are significant novels; he reads a couple of earlier novels and four later obscurities.  He is like a book blogger, pawing through this forgotten stuff.  He notes that because these novels are so unknown

my procedure will be more scattershot and partial in an attempt to bring out some of the pungent style of each novel [now we see why I like this essay so much].  This is done in hopes that putative readers may find a well-stocked library with these novels on their shelves, having been borrowed last in, say, 1905 or thereabouts.  (561)

The implicit question is “What have we lost?” by abandoning these books for others.  They’re all good books, obviously.  Pritchard picks out the tormented, even Dostoevskian embezzler of The Quality of Mercy (1892), and the amusing portrait of the publishing industry in The World of Chance (1893) among other passages and characters.  Sort of sad, all of this good writing and inventiveness now necessarily forgotten because the novels that contain it are not quite good enough.

It will happen to Silas Lapham, too.  The biggest loss will be Chapter 14, the long dinner party scene, the peak of the rise of Silas Lapham, where “the talk [runs] off upon a subject that Lapham had never heard talked of before,” meaning novels:

“There was talk some years ago,” said James Bellingham, “about novels going out.”

“They're just coming in!” cried Miss Kingsbury.

Yes, that’s the spirit!

“I see you’re reading ‘Middlemarch.’” - William Dean Howells divides people into groups

I am early in the marriage plot of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).  Corey, from Boston society and 18th century money, will perhaps marry Irene Lapham, daughter of the new-money Vermont paint baron.  Penelope is the other daughter:

But after Corey greeted Irene he glanced at the novel under his eye, and said, in the dearth that sometimes befalls people at such times: “I see you’re reading ‘Middlemarch.’  Do you like George Eliot?”

“Who?” asked the girl.

Penelope interposed.  “I don’t believe Irene’s read it yet.  I’ve just got it out of the library…  I wish she [Eliot] would let you find out a little about the people for yourself,” she added.  But here her father struck in:

“I can’t get the time for books.”  (Ch. 7)

Middlemarch (1871) is a recurring motif the Howells novel.  It is used as a stand-in for culture in general.  The nouveau entrepreneur has no time for culture, while everyone in Boston society reads Middlemarch as soon as it is published, and in between is Penelope, capable of matching the old money intellectually, but in the cultural rearguard, reading Middlemarch late, reading a library copy; then there’s poor Irene.

The events of Silas Lapham suggest that it is set sometime after 1873, when the Long Depression begins – rough times for a commercial paint manufacturer.  This idea that reading the library book, reading the novel a couple of years late (“’I didn’t know it was so old.  It’s just got into the Seaside Library,’” Ch. 9) is a genuine point of division between the social levels of the two families, and also between the two daughters, the one who reads and the one who does not.  Chapter 9, the source of the proceeding injured protest, includes an excruciating scene where Irene asks Corey for advice on stocking the library of their new million dollar (in 2016 $) mansion.  Poor Irene.

It is not at all clear that all of those cultured readers of Middlemarch, a book of great ethical depth and artistic complexity, have gotten much out of it.  As Corey’s mother, a Middlemarch reader, comments:

“I suppose it’s the plain sister who’s reading ‘Middlemarch.’”  (Ch. 8)

The major temperamental division turns out, though, to be different than who has  read what but rather who is an ironist and who is not, and to what degree.    The entrepreneur is the model of sincerity – he has faith in his paint – although one daughter, the reader, is an ironist, “satirical” as Corey calls her.  The old money characters have been corrupted by irony to the point of dysfunction.  The useless father of that family is even Wildean at times:

His father shook his head with an ironical sigh.  “Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth.  It strikes at the root of the whole feudal system.”  (Ch. 5)

That really should be read as if Mr. Corey is Aunt Augusta in Earnest.  On the other side is the strange, blunt episode in Chapter 17 where Reverend Howells – I mean Reverend Sewell – preaches the Gospel of Common Sense to the paint maker and his wife; the scene is either a flop or a brutal form of counterpoint.  After all, Howells is an ironist, too.  These hilarious lines – paragraphs – close a chapter:

“Well, we must stand it, anyway,” said Mrs. Lapham, with the grim antique Yankee submission.

“Oh yes, we’ve got to stand it,” said Penelope, with the quaint modern American fatalism.  (Ch. 9)

If only he’d let me find out a little about the people for myself.

The Rise of Silas Lapham - colors, pencils, and plots

When Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for…

Hey, Bartley Hubbard, I know that guy.  He’s the no-good journalist husband in A Modern Instance (1882), and here he is, the first thing I see in the first line of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).  Why waste time coming up with a second Boston journalist when you have spent so much energy on this one.  William Dean Howells had been reading Balzac and Zola.  He was a great champion of international fiction.

What else do I learn in this first chapter.  The journalist interviews the title character for a newspaper profile, a handy device for a novelist that would grow old fast.  Silas Lapham is a paint manufacturer.  He inherited a Vermont paint mine – who knew there were such things – and developed it into a successful company.  Whatever else Howells does, he creates a convincing entrepreneurial type, a rare feat.

Silas Lapham already seems to have risen quite a lot.  A few chapters later, he begins building a million dollar mansion, for example.  Maybe the title is ironic.  Maybe Howells will describe his fall.

Oh no, Lapham has two daughters of marriageable age!  Why, this novel isn’t going to be about paint manufacturing after all – it’s a dang marriage plot, isn’t it?    It is.  Can vulgar, energetic new money find love and happiness with Boston’s listless but sophisticated old money?

Anthony Trollope – the novel resembles Trollope far more than anything French I have ever read – would alternate and parallel the two strands, the business plot and the marriage plot.  Howells, strangely, works on the marriage story for a couple hundred pages, brings it to a crisis, and suspends it, then he launches the business plot.  I began to wonder if Howells had forgotten about the marriage plot.  He returns to it with 22 pages to go, which turned out to be sufficient, but still.  Kinda off-kilter.  But what’s so special about working up parallel plots that have little to do with each other, the A-plot / B-plot of the well-made sitcom?  Howells’s structure is fine, just unusual.

The business plot is a good portrait of the entrepreneurial character, or the interaction between ethics and risk.  The marriage plot is more deeply ironic.  I’ll save that for tomorrow.

The prose of Silas Lapham can be dully plain: “He took a note-book from his pocket, laid it on his knee, and began to sharpen a pencil” (first page).  Or alternatively:

… at the end of one [street] the spars of a vessel penciled themselves delicately against the cool blue of the afternoon sky.  The air was full of a smell pleasantly compounded of oakum, of leather, and of oil.  It was not the busy season, and they met only two or three trucks heavily straggling toward the wharf with their long string teams; but the cobble-stones of the pavement were worn with the dint of ponderous wheels, and discolored with iron-rust from them; here and there, in wandering streaks over its surface, was the gray stain of the salt water with which the street had been sprinkled.  (Ch. 1)

The smells remind me that the context is commercial paint, for buildings, ships and machinery.  That the ship’s masts are “penciled” or that the street’s colors are “iron-rust” and “gray” are the narrator’s subtle counterpoint to his hero Silas Lapham, who would like to paint that ship, that street, everything, in bolder, long-lasting colors.  Maybe a little jab at the corroded journalist, too, who uses his pencil for less elegant purposes.

Tomorrow, Middlemarch.

The old people thought it all beautiful - some William Dean Howells prose

My case against A Modern Instance has two main parts.  First:

They had got down to Charles street, and Halleck took out his watch at the corner lamp.

“It isn’t at all late yet; only half-past eight.  The days are getting shorter.”

“Well?”  (Ch. 20, 369-70)

And so on.  Too much of this dull artless flat stuff.  Compared to his contemporaries – James and Twain, obviously, but also Trollope, Crane, even Dreiser, Howells has a weak, undistinguished voice.

Second, the novel has an authorial stand-in character who is brought in to discuss the problems of the novel whenever Howells loses confidence in his dramatization of them.  For some reason this character is given a subplot, and a proposal scene, and the end of the novel, although no reader besides Howells himself has ever had the slightest interest in Atherton the ironic attorney.  Maybe he is actually a parody of an authorial mouthpiece.

The case for, aside from what I wrote yesterday, includes this description of a baby:

… she had passed out of slippery and evasive doughiness into a firm tangibility that made it a pleasure to hold her.  (28, 452)

This description of Indiana:

… the spring night, whose breath softly buffeted their cheeks through the open window, had gathered over those eternal corn-fields, where the long, crooked winrows, burning on either hand, seemed a trail of fiery serpents writhing away from the train as it roared and clamored over the track.  (39, 567)

This theater entrance:

They passed in through the long colonnaded vestibule, with its paintings and plaster casts and rows of birds and animals in glass cases on either side and she gave scarcely a glance at any of those objects endeared by association if not by intrinsic beauty to the Boston play-goer: Gulliver, with the Lilliputians swarming upon him; the painty-necked ostriches and pelicans; the mummied mermaid under a glass-bell; the governors’ portraits; the stuffed elephant; Washington crossing the Delaware; Cleopatra applying the Asp; Sir William Pepperell, at full length on canvas and the pagan months and seasons in plaster, – if all these are indeed the subjects – were dim phantasmagoria…  (13, 302-3)

Painty-necked!  And that crack at the end by Howells.  This bizarre place, where it seems that Howells has wandered into a Melville novel, is Moses Kimball’s Museum theater, recognizable to any Bostonian of the time.  I will bet that A Modern Instance is read more in Boston than anywhere else.  It has a lot of good Boston flavor.

A great many of the people seemed to be taking hulled-corn and milk; baked beans formed another favorite dish, and squash-pie was in large request.  Marcia was not critical; roast-turkey for Bartley and stewed chicken for herself with cranberry-pie for both seemed to her a very good and sufficient dinner…  (14, 312)

Very American, that passage.

Ordinary life with moments of melodrama and coincidence, as if Howells wants to assure me he is not above it; flat arguments mixed with fine descriptions; plain old things side by side with Boston’s best grotesquerie.  “The old people thought it all beautiful,” Howells writes at one point (19, 361).  I don’t think they’re completely wrong.

He felt like a good man - William Dean Howell's A Modern Instance

A Modern Instance (1882), William Dean Howells.  This is the first Howells novel I have read.  Once upon a time, it was a famous book, much read.  Even now, it is one of two Howells novel still in print from Penguin Classics, along with The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and it is also available in a Library of America collection (where I read it), which means two editions are currently available.  I’ve never come across a book blogger who has read it, but it ain’t dead yet.

The novel is about a young couple's bad marriage, one that turns sour because the husband turns out to be a much smaller man than he first appears and the wife has limited options.  I get into the 1880s and 1890s and suddenly I am reading a surprising amount of divorce fiction.

The way the husband embraces and settles into his limitations is psychologically acute, the wife’s self-delusions a bit less so, or a bit more familiar, although she becomes fairly complex, too.  A character, near the end, finds himself in “awe of her ignorance” (Ch. 39, 563); he stood in for me pretty well.

This is the husband, repairing some damage after a fight:

His heart was full; he was grateful for the mercy that had spared him; he was so strong in his silent repentance that he felt like a good man.  (Ch. 22, 386)

That last part should be read with as much irony as possible.  Similarly, this is the wife’s father, staying in Boston, missing his little town in Maine:

He suffered from the loss of identity which is a common affliction with country people coming to town.  The feeling that they are of no special interest to any of the thousands the meet bewilders and harasses them; after the searching neighborhood of village life, the fact that nobody would meddle in their most intimate affairs if they could, is a vague distress.  The Squire not only experienced this, but, after reigning so long as the censor of morals and religion in Equity[, Maine], it was a deprivation for him to pass a whole week without saying a bitter thing to any one.  (Ch. 22, 394)

Small insights about regular people, but it’s the small accumulation of petty grievances that wreck the marriage.  As the novel darkened, it began to remind me of Sister Carrie (1899), as in a scene where the husband begins to fantasize about the end of his marriage, about escaping it.  “His thoughts wandered to conditions, to contingencies of which a man does not permit himself even to think without a degree of moral disintegration” (Ch. 30, 478) – what if they had never married, or never met, or if he ran off.  Howells never gets as dark as, say Leo Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), where in the exact parallel scene the husband thinks mostly about death, his wife’s and his own.  American fiction could only go so far, perhaps.