WILLIAM Dean Howells was up before seven. After what had happened, sitting still seemed impossible, and he had washed, and dressed, and was walking around the streets of Boston thinking of how he would tell his sister Vic at home in Ohio about dinner at the Parker House. It was hard to believe that he had sat there with James Russell Lowell, the poet and editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and James T. Fields, its publisher, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., currently famous as the author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, and listened to their brilliant, wide-ranging conversation—“such talk,” Howells later wrote, “as I had, of course, never heard before.”
Howells, twenty-three years old, a newspaperman who until that point had never been out of the Midwest, walked in the languid air of an early August morning, running over the details in his adulatory head. The older men had been surprised and pleased to meet this cultured and diffident and yet somehow forceful young man from the Midwest. Two poems of his had been published in the Atlantic— it was flattering to find out that Lowell had very nearly declined them, thinking that they were translations of little-known works by the German romantic poet Heinrich Heine, so close were they in spirit and style to the poems of Howells’s idol. “If,” as Howells later wrote, “there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to find him.”
William Dean Howells spent his evenings in Ohio reading everything published in Berlin and Boston; his visit to the east was in the nature of a pilgrimage. It was perhaps as much an indication of his ambition as it was of the small size of that literary world that, in the course of a few weeks, Howells was able to meet, with the notable exception of Herman Melville, nearly every important literary figure of that moment.
William Dean Howells, 1866.
When he arrived in Boston, Howells had boldly gone to introduce himself to James Russell Lowell, never expecting that some days later Lowell would invite him to a dinner that seemed to Howells full of implications for his future. As Howells remembered all his life, at the end of the meal, Holmes, with a touch of irony and an accuracy he couldn’t have imagined, leaned forward in his chair and said in his caressing voice to Lowell, “Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” And in this way the literary Boston circle—so diminished in later years and almost completely extinct thirty years after the Civil War—claimed Howells for its own.
Just at the end of dinner, James Fields invited Howells to breakfast at his home the next morning. At the appointed hour, William Dean Howells knocked at the door of 148 Charles Street and James Fields and his wife, Annie Adams Fields, one of the happiest couples in Boston, welcomed Howells into their home on the bank of the Charles River. He sat “in the pretty room whose windows look out through leaves and flowers upon the river’s coming and going tides,” and he ate, for the first time in his life, blueberry cake.
The young Annie Adams Fields was a poet and essayist and a dear friend of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier; she later wrote biographies of Stowe and of Whittier, and of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She and James Fields had been married five years, and in that time had hosted and visited Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, the Brownings, and many others. Annie Adams Fields kept a diary of these visits and conversations, consciously expecting that it would be of historical value; excerpts of it were published after her death under the title Memories of a Hostess. In the Fieldses’ home, it would not be an unusual week if they had dinner for twelve with a violin recital in the library to follow, a breakfast party, a little reception after a reading for forty, and someone staying in each of their two guest rooms. Guests agreed that the real attractions weren’t the house and all its treasures but the geniality of James Fields and the low voice and compassionate intelligence of Annie Adams Fields.
That morning, after breakfast, James Fields left to go to the office, and Annie Adams Fields asked William Dean Howells if he would like to see the library. He was very willing, and they went upstairs to the second floor, the great room that ran the length of the house, its windows, too, looking out over the river. Howells immediately felt that he had come to a sort of sanctuary, a place with “an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might belong to the great literary houses of London.” Annie Adams Fields showed him the first editions published by her husband’s firm, Ticknor & Fields. She liked him, this responsive young man, barely five foot four, who looked at their books with such admiration. She watched the passion and shyness moving over his face, and five years later, when her husband was editor of the Atlantic Monthly and one evening said that he needed an assistant, it seems to have been Annie Adams Fields who suggested that he ask William Dean Howells. Howells wrote to his daughter that Lowell had once told him, “It was to Mrs. Fields liking me . . . that I owed my place on the Atlantic.”
Annie Adams Fields by Southworth and Hawes, 1861.
On that day, standing in the library, she might have asked him about his plans. He might have told her a little more than he usually revealed of his painful ambition to be a writer; she could have described to him something of the people whom he was about to go to Concord to meet. Lowell had promised Howells a letter of introduction to Hawthorne, who would in turn send Howells to Emerson and Thoreau. In the event, Howells would find them all a little unapproachable—the Bostonians and their Concord cousins were proud and could be cold. Emerson disparaged the rhymes of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work Howells rather liked, by calling Poe “the jingle-man”; Thoreau—who Howells correctly predicted would receive the recognition due him in a later, more receptive age—sat across the room from Howells and said barely a word; only Hawthorne, in his pensive way, encouraged the young man. As Howells remembered it, Hawthorne said that he should like to go to Ohio, to some place “on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise the damned shadow) of Europe had not fallen.” When he returned to Boston, Howells was somewhat relieved to find that James Fields thought all these stories hilarious and nearly fell out of his chair at Howells’s droll description of Thoreau. In his account, Howells said little of the lasting disappointment he felt when he asked Fields for a job as an assistant editor and Fields answered that the position had been filled. Howells got on a boat for New York.
•
The day after his arrival, in his eagerness to present himself at the offices of the Saturday Press, Howells rose early, breakfasted, and arrived well before the editors and contributors—“whose gay theory of life obliged them to a good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up late in the day”—began to come in. He spent the day with them, somewhat uncomfortably, for, though they had published a few of his poems, they struck him as a little uncouth and made fun of the people he had so admired in Boston, which was painful, “as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second country.” New York seemed to him loud and unrefined. In 1860, the population of the city was 814,000—more than double what it had been two decades before. Mobs of people jostled Howells on the streets. He stayed near the journal offices, and that evening, though beer and cigars both made him slightly sick, he went with some of the writers to Pfaff’s, their regular haunt, on Broadway, near Bleecker Street. He sat at one of the wooden tables a long time, feeling out of place, and then, just as he was leaving, someone caught his arm and introduced him to another of the Saturday Press writers, Walt Whitman.
He was often at Pfaff’s with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief fact of my experience. . . . I remember how he leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand.
In August of 1860, Whitman was forty-one. Until twelve years before, he had been Mr. Walter Whitman, a well-dressed urban gentleman, an imitative novelist, and the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where he wrote on Goethe, Coleridge, and George Sand, among other subjects. All three of these writers influenced the poetry Whitman began to write after he was fired from the Eagle for being against the extension of slavery into the territories recently annexed from Mexico. In 1855, Whitman had published the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. Ralph Waldo Emerson, though he never especially delivered on his promise of help, had recognized some element of his own doctrine—“the infinitude of the private man”—and had written encouragingly to Whitman, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman thought of his poems as answering Emerson’s call for a new American poetry, and was heartened by Emerson’s salutation. Otherwise Whitman was not terribly well regarded except by the writers of the Saturday Press, who admired his outrageousness—what Howells thought was his “offensive” language—and who championed him nearly alone at that time.
Whitman used to come to Pfaff’s from Brooklyn; he would take the Fulton Ferry across the East River and then ride up Broadway in a stagecoach, seated on the box with the coachman. A Boston newspaperman, writing an account of a visit to New York, described Whitman as working for the Broadway line. This was a natural mistake, as passengers often approached Whitman with their complaints and their fares.
That summer, Whitman was following the election campaign attentively. The poet was enamored of Abraham Lincoln; he had begun calling for a “log hut” president in 1856 and supported Lincoln as soon as the campaign began. Then, at the end of 1859, John Brown had made his violent stand against slavery at Harper’s Ferry and been hanged in Virginia. There was labor unrest, too; a few months later the largest American strike yet took place in Massachusetts. To people who knew him at that time, Whitman seemed to be slightly crazed with pent-up energy. He had just finished a poem called “Year of Meteors (1859–1860).” It had been, he wrote, a “brooding year!” “Your chants,” Whitman sang, “O year all mottled with evil and good—year of forebodings!”
Whitman wanted to put “a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America) freely, fully and truly on record”; this didn’t sit right with young William Dean Howells. Howells had written a somewhat scandalized review only a few months before meeting Whitman, in which he had described the poetry as “metreless, rhymeless, shaggy, coarse, sublime, disgusting, beautiful, tender, harsh, vile, elevated, foolish, wise, pure, and nasty.” Though he intended a further comment as censure rather than as praise, Howells had his usual insightful accuracy when he wrote that the reader of Whitman’s poems “goes through his book, like one in an ill-conditioned dream, perfectly nude, with his clothes over his arm.” For his part, Whitman rather liked this effect, which he called “heroic nudity,” but it made Howells distinctly uncomfortable. Howells was easily, painfully embarrassed; he was revolted by blood and disease; he was anxious about bodies and sex; he could never speak in detail of his family or his childhood.
Whitman might have read the review, but it had been unsigned, as reviews then often were, and Howells doubted Whitman had any idea who he was: “He may possibly have remembered seeing my name printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press.” It was possible, but also unlikely, that Whitman would have known Howells as the author of a recent campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, which had been quite popular in the west and had sold steadily in the east and was contributing somewhat to the candidate’s progress, though it hadn’t had nearly as large an effect as the widely circulated photograph of Lincoln taken by Mathew Brady, which later Lincoln would occasionally credit with winning him the election. Howells wrote quite a decent biography; Lincoln, though he found in it thirteen minor factual errors, seems to have been pleased with it and checked it out twice from the Library of Congress while he was president. Howells was expected to interview the candidate for the biography, but he didn’t feel up to the task and instead asked a law student of his acquaintance to go. Howells wrote the biography from the notes, thus missing, as he was later to write, “the greatest chance of my life in its kind, though I am not sure I was wholly wrong, for I might not have been equal to that chance.”
When Howells met Whitman for the first time, John Brown was nine months dead, southern states were mustering soldiers, and the bombarding of Fort Sumter was only eight months away, but Howells distinctly remembered that no one, in his entire trip, mentioned politics. Lincoln’s campaign biographer himself was not much interested. He and his new acquaintances felt secure, he said, and thought war impossible, and, really, they cared much more for literature. It was the moment before the cataclysm that was to divide the time of Lowell and Holmes from that of Whitman. But for William Dean Howells, his encounter with Whitman was somewhat less thrilling than it had been to stand in the Fieldses’ library and talk of writers “whose names were dear to me from my love of their work.” And to Whitman it was likely another night at Pfaff’s.
•
The summer of 1860 settled a number of questions for William Dean Howells. In 1861, not wanting to go into battle, hoping to move farther away from his demanding Ohio family, and desirous of bearing out the Italophile Lowell’s confidence in him, Howells got himself appointed consul to Venice, for services rendered in the matter of the biography. He went to Washington to secure the appointment and saw Lincoln in a hallway of the White House but again did not go to him and shake his hand. Howells spent the Civil War in Venice, looking at architecture and writing essays on Italian plays to which Lowell gave his approbation. By the time Howells came home, Lincoln had been killed.
In 1866, Howells became the assistant editor at the Atlantic Monthly and, in 1871, its editor. In 1881, James Fields died; Annie Adams Fields mourned his loss for the rest of her life. After a while, though, she became the close companion of Sarah Orne Jewett, a writer whose short stories and sketches Howells printed in the Atlantic during the decade in which he supported and in some cases established the careers of a generation of American writers, among them Howells’s two great friends, Mark Twain and Henry James. These writers all understood that Howells’s startling perceptiveness as a critic and his unusual capacity to be influenced both came from his willingness to take each work he encountered on its own terms. Howells’s friends were grateful to be read and considered so deeply; they had confidence in those merits of their work that had been identified by William Dean Howells.
At the Atlantic Monthly, Howells did not publish a word of Whitman’s poetry, the single largest failure in an otherwise consistently broadminded career. Annie Adams Fields was very fond of William Dean Howells and, by and large, thought his taste excellent, but she read Whitman’s work with “a virile delight” and differed with Howells’s published opinion of “the preponderant beastliness” of Leaves of Grass. What Whitman was striving for—to break free of constraint, to live and write among workingmen and -women, and, as he wrote, “to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives”—was something Howells resisted, but to which he also aspired. He did not always feel safe in the modern world, but he tried, hard, to depict it. In The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Traveler from Altruria, and The Landlord at Lion’s Head, Howells gave a picture of the awkwardness, the good and failed intentions, of certain individual members of the American middle class that mattered deeply to another generation—to Stephen Crane, whom Howells encouraged, and to Theodore Dreiser, who wrote a letter of admiration to Howells thanking him for putting into his work the “most appealing flowering-out of sympathy, tenderness, uncertainty, that I have as yet encountered.”
Howells’s move toward his own idea of realism was in part a response to the events of 1877, when there were strikes all along the railroads. The accompanying violence of rioters and police was severe. People in every city shakenly recognized the possibility of profound changes in the relations between the classes. Howells’s response as an editor was to begin publishing work that paid more attention to social issues. He turned to a person on whom he had often relied as a moral compass: in 1878, he published Annie Adams Fields’s essay “Three Typical Workingmen.” Fields had helped to found the Associated Charities of Boston, one of the most progressive early organizations of social work in the country; its motto was “Not alms but a friend.” In steady communication with her friend Jane Addams who founded Hull House in Chicago, Fields started coffeehouses that became important gathering places for working people. Coffeehouses were part of her theory of social change, as expressed in her influential book, How to Help the Poor, which sold a gratifying twenty-two thousand copies. One of the innovations of Fields and the Associated Charities was an emphasis on having volunteer social workers visit people in their homes. At Fields’s suggestion, in the early 1880s, William Dean Howells became a visitor, too.
It was, in some ways, at this much later date that Howells finally experienced the bleak fatalism induced in many others by the Civil War. Howells was pained by the conditions of what he called “industrial slavery.” In the sway of Tolstoy, whom he had lately begun to read, and in hopes of change, Howells made his most visible public stand in the matter of the Haymarket affair. In 1886, after a rally in Chicago—held to protest the police shooting of several strikers the previous day—a bomb had killed a number of people. The Chicago police had, with virtually no evidence, rounded up eight anarchists, four of whom were sentenced to death and later executed; a fifth committed suicide. Howells was the only well-known literary figure in America to publicly protest their sentence; he persuaded an old friend, the editor of the widely read New York Tribune, to publish an open letter in which he asked that the sentence be commuted to life in prison. This was costly for Howells. The Haymarket affair brought a storm of criticism down upon him and was the beginning of a much darker period in the life of one of America’s most powerful and well-regarded men of letters.
When, in 1900, melancholy and a little rueful, William Dean Howells wrote his memoir, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, it was with the benefit of a great deal of experience that he reflected on his literary tour of New England and New York. Annie Adams Fields, recognizing in the account the pleasure she and Howells shared in collecting well one’s memories of people, loved the book. Perhaps her letter gave Howells some solace. She wrote to him that his memoir allowed her to “look back in a way I seldom dare to do for myself into a past full of inspirations,” a past she felt sure was “a tender confirmation of a future which we know by faith.”
•
It was in the early 1890s that William Dean Howells and Walt Whitman met again, after one of Whitman’s lectures on Lincoln—Whitman’s most publicly glorious hour. Whitman had suffered several strokes and walked with a cane. He lived in Camden, New Jersey, in circumstances that to the outside eye resembled squalor and chaos, and he lectured on Lincoln, whom he had never met, though the two men used to nod to each other on the streets of Washington when Lincoln rode by. Whitman concluded his lecture by reciting his poem “O Captain! My Captain!,” which had become the best known of his works. He would occasionally groan when asked to read it, “My Captain again; always My Captain.”
Howells, now, belatedly, declaring his allegiance, was perhaps moved to hear Whitman say,
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Sitting in the audience, Howells might have thought of a party he had been at with Edwin Booth, the actor and brother of John Wilkes Booth. Edwin Booth had picked up a huge plaster cast of a hand that was resting on the host’s mantelpiece and asked, repeatedly, whose hand it was. The owner had finally replied that it was Lincoln’s. Booth silently put the massive hand down. Perhaps Howells, discreetly, when Booth was in some other room, walked over and lifted it, felt its heft, studied the wide palm and protruding knuckles, and set it down with a last, careful caress.
After Whitman’s lecture, Howells went up to him, and they spoke briefly. Howells wrote, “Then and always he gave me the sense of a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity. . . . The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.” Then indeed Whitman would have known Howells and quite possibly disliked him. Whitman now detested that Boston literary circle of which Howells had become the proud representative; Boston’s harsh opinion of his work meant that Whitman would not live to see his reputation come into its own but would have to gamble, as he wrote, on the judgment of readers “a hundred years from now.” Still, the evening of the Lincoln lecture was a triumphant moment; if Whitman felt resentful, he let it pass.
In Howells’s account of this second meeting, the strain of apology runs deeper still. Whitman and Lincoln are now twined together, possibly the two greatest missed opportunities of Howells’s life, the two hands he should have taken hold of had he wished, as he later did, for a life more connected with the suffering of his own time. Yet there might have been something knowing in Howells’s early shyness. Had he stayed in America in 1861 and been caught up in the shaggy, sublime poetry and politics of Lincoln and Whitman, the war might have destroyed him, as it did so many others. It’s possible that Howells shied away from Whitman and Lincoln precisely because their influence would have been so profound as to be intolerable. Perhaps it was best to choose instead the quiet library of Annie Adams Fields. Maybe, on that night at Pfaff’s, it was best to simply shake hands, mutter something of little consequence, leave the smell of cigar smoke and beer, and walk out onto Broadway in the warm August night.
•
In the last years of Whitman’s life, as the poet wrote, he was “(each successive fortnight getting stiffer and stuck deeper) much like some hard-cased dilapidated grim ancient shell-fish or time-bang’d conch (no legs, utterly non-locomotive).” His friends worried that Whitman was dangerously housebound, and one of them wrote to prominent literary men and women and asked them to help fund a horse and buggy for Whitman. Boston sent money. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who had always thought Whitman “indecent,” wrote to Whittier that Whitman “had served well the cause of humanity, and I do not begrudge him a ten dollar bill.”
And Annie Adams Fields, sitting one evening, the oil lamps burning, attending to her correspondence at the large wooden desk in the long library, nodded to herself when she saw the letter, set it aside, and later, when she had finished everything else, took her pen, dipped it in the inkwell, and wrote a few words in appreciation of the poet’s noble spirit. She folded a bill into the letter and left the envelope to go out with the mail in the morning.
