WILLIAM Dean Howells was pacing the rug in his library. He was worried that his Italian sketches were going to seem too parochial, that he ought to include more history, more erudition. But then he didn’t think he had the subtlety or depth of James; he could never retain a thousand impressions from standing in front of a painting. It really was presumptuous to write about Europe; he was always behind on English and French novels and had not yet read the new George Eliot novel that James said was so good. Howells came to a turn in the pattern of the rug. He remembered, as he sometimes did in moments of doubt, the praise James Russell Lowell had lavished on his writing about Venice. He thought that his Italian sketches would probably sell and that he and Elinor needed the money to pay for the bookshelves. He stopped to admire these briefly, reminded himself that James really knew nothing of the business of all this, no matter how clear he was on the principles, and, taking a deep breath, as if this resolved the question at least for the moment, began to run over the brilliant things James had said. Sometimes it took a full hour of pacing to finish in one’s head a conversation begun earlier in the evening with Henry James.
It was 1866; they might have talked about Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or Flaubert’s Salammbô, both of which James could have read in French in the last few years. More likely, they settled in to parsing Eliot’s latest, Felix Holt, just six months old, about which James had been writing a review for the Atlantic Monthly, of which Howells, now a mature twenty-nine, was the assistant editor. James could easily have spent the whole conversation on the merits and shortcomings of one of its central characters, Esther Lyon.
Though it was winter and they had meant just to take a turn through the Cambridge streets, they had found themselves walking, as they often did, out as far as Fresh Pond. They talked of the American novel, its limitations and possibilities. James was twenty-three and had written a few short stories—one, called “The Story of a Year,” had appeared in the Atlantic. James thought the material America offered its novelists was shallow. In his opinion, if you were writing of the American landscape the only solution was the one Nathaniel Hawthorne had found, to write what Hawthorne called romances—realism just flattened out without the depth of history. James would later write a biography of the creator of Hester Prynne, admiring the way that Hawthorne raised novels, like delicate flowers, out of the thin, unyielding American soil. Howells shared something of this feeling; he had been glad of his years in Venice, though he still felt himself to be an ignorant American. Henry James, who had a sense that he would love Italy, was jealous of Howells’s sojourn, while Howells, for his part, envied the ease of Henry James’s French and the seeming sophistication of his upbringing in New York and Geneva, London and Paris.
Of late, though, Howells had been getting more and more interested in what might be done with the stuff of an American life, a project in which he was helped by the vigorous conversation and discerning taste of his wife. He had met Elinor Mead, the daughter of a prominent Vermont family, when she was visiting her Ohio relatives and he had successfully courted her, largely at a distance. She, adventurously, agreed to his proposal that she come to Italy to marry him. Now they had returned to the States and were starting to build their household in Cambridge, and he was shortly to begin writing the novels that would chronicle their relationship: Their Wedding Journey, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and, in some sense, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Modern Instance, all very American novels of husbands and wives and families set almost entirely in Boston and New York.
Still, Howells shared with James a sense of the obstacles facing the realist project in America. The morning after this walk, Howells, with the sixth sense that always characterized his artistic judgment, wrote to a friend, “Talking of talks, young Henry James and I had a famous one last evening, two or three hours long, in which we settled the true principles of literary art. He is a very earnest fellow, and I think extremely gifted—gifted enough to do better than any one has yet done toward making us a real American novel.”
•
By 1866, Henry James and his parents were settled in Cambridge; William, who had returned from a biological specimen–gathering expedition to Brazil, did not remain long and was soon on his way to Europe to avoid having, or acknowledging having had, a nervous breakdown. All their adult lives, William and Henry James found themselves subject to the most disturbing backaches, headaches, stomach ailments, and exhaustion whenever they tried to live on the same side of the Atlantic. These maladies were at their worst if both men were resident in their parents’ house.
Henry James, Sr., had found Cambridge congenial and had become friendly with the Boston literary circle in part through Emerson, with whom he corresponded voluminously on matters of transcendence. Curtis and Wilkie James, both of whom had fought in the Civil War, were in Florida, damaged but alive and struggling to make a go of a cotton farm. Alice James, though she was often ill, and was back and forth to New York for the care of a specialist, was sometimes to be found at the center of a fierce debate in the Jameses’ parlor—Howells knew her as “a clear, strong intelligence, housed in pain.” Howells felt at home with the James family; his own father, like Henry James, Sr., was an abolitionist and a Swedenborgian. Writing later, Howells couldn’t remember whether it was at the Jameses’ house or somewhere else that he had first met young Henry James, whom his friends often called Harry to distinguish him from his father, but “we seemed presently to be always meeting, at his father’s house and at mine” or in “the kind Cambridge streets.” And when they met they talked not of Reconstruction or share-cropping or the futility of work in the face of destruction—they were “always together, and always talking of methods of fiction.”
Both Howells and James had many close male friends, but, particularly in this youthful moment, they did not like the subjects generally favored in conversation with men—politics and business. They preferred the company of women and what were often considered women’s subjects—art and writing and domesticity—and they knew they were writing for an audience made up mostly of women. “American literature,” Howells would write in the 1890s, “exists because American women appreciate it and love it.”
A mutual friend of theirs, Henry Adams, described something of their shared sense of American women in The Education of Henry Adams:
The American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth; none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever be nearly so familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much better company than the American man; she was probably much better company than her grandmothers.
Henry James and William Dean Howells and Henry Adams considered their sisters—Alice James, Victoria Howells, and Louisa Adams—among their closest and most important friends. James would not have left off this list his favorite young cousin, Minny Temple. These women were wonderful conversationalists, sometimes much more interested in politics than their brothers were. Perhaps, now and again, as William Dean Howells and Henry James ambled along together, they felt the presence of their sisters.
•
In 1869, Henry James left the hard newness of America for the soft crumbling buildings of England and Italy. Howells missed him very much. James wrote faithfully—their correspondence went on for forty-seven years—but, especially in the beginning, was so taken with his new surroundings, with the delightful freedom of being in Italy, the absorbing paintings in front of which he spent so many hours, the decadence of gondolas and of Americans with frescoed palazzi, that he was perhaps a little slighting in his attentions to Howells.
Still, in their letters, they often recurred to their walks together and to their shared project of making American novels. In recent years, Howells had convinced James Fields to publish further short stories by James, long after the elder editor had despaired of James’s lack of happy endings. “What we want,” Fields told James, “is short cheerful stories.” When Howells became editor himself he was one of James’s steadiest publishers, serializing, among others, Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, and The Portrait of a Lady in the Atlantic. James wrote to Howells decades later that Howells had been his first real supporter: “You showed me the way and opened me the door.”
For a little while, James continued to think that Howells was depriving himself of good material by staying too much in the United States. In 1871, James wrote to a friend that it was a shame Howells’s “charming style and refined intentions are so poorly and meagerly served by our American atmosphere.” But, two years later, James was delighted to receive the most recent installment of Howells’s A Chance Acquaintance, with its appealing heroine, Kitty Ellison, and began to feel that there was something more than he had suspected to Howells’s sense of American character:
Your work is a success and Kitty a creation. I have envied you greatly, as I read, the delight of feeling her grow so real and complete, so true and charming. I think, in bringing her through with such unerring felicity, your imagination has fait ses preuves. I wish I could talk over her successor with you, sitting on the pine-needles, by Fresh Pond.
A Chance Acquaintance was unusual in concerning itself entirely with a young, vigorous, and bookish American woman’s experience `of the world around her. Howells decided not to marry off his heroine, but to let the story of her trip to Quebec simply take up and leave off. Henry James was inspired by Kitty and the other women who turned up in Howells’s novels. Kitty’s “successor,” the one James wished they could talk over at Fresh Pond, was arguably Daisy Miller, whom James brought over to Switzerland five years later, in 1878.
By this time, James was in the thick of things in Europe—he was seeing a great deal of Turgenev, who had introduced him to Flaubert. Howells wanted to know all about his friend’s enviable proximity to these writers. In 1876, James wrote to Howells:
They are all charming talkers—though as editor of the austere Atlantic it would startle you to hear some of their projected subjects. The other day Edmond de Goncourt (the best of them) said he had been lately working very well—on his novel—he had got upon an episode that greatly interested him, and into which he was going very far. Flaubert: “What is it?” E. de G. “A whore-house de province.”
Howells wrote back to say he was glad he wasn’t French. But, though his tastes were occasionally curbed by a certain prudishness, Howells followed James’s discoveries closely and brought modern European work to the Atlantic and later, in his column “The Editor’s Study,” to Harper’s Monthly. He published reviews of works by Turgenev and by Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Maupassant, and, most especially, Tolstoy that helped to introduce these writers to American readers. Howells admired Turgenev’s work tremendously and was pleased to hear that Turgenev, too, had liked A Chance Acquaintance.
Under the influence of European realism and with the darkening of age, Howells and James watched their American woman grow, by 1880, more stoic and more tragic, into Catherine Sloper in Washington Square and then, in 1881, into the subtle Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. Howells added intensity and jealousy to her original innocence for Marcia Gaylord in A Modern Instance, published in 1882, and then took her up again as the droll Pen Lapham in The Rise of Silas Lapham, serialized in Century along with James’s The Bostonians, for which James created Verena Tarrant. Howells then gave her a luminous independence as Alma Leighton in A Hazard of New Fortunes in 1890. In 1897, James sent back across the Atlantic Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton and shortly after was ready to bring her forward as Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and, finally, as Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl.
The fates of these later American women could be attributed in part to what happened to the writers’ sisters and cousins, none of whom reached fifty. Alice James suffered a life of illness and died of breast cancer; Minny Temple was killed by consumption; Victoria Howells volunteered to care for Henry Israel Howells, their disabled brother, and was gradually immolated by his constant needs, dying of malaria; and Louisa Adams contracted tetanus after a cab accident. In their portraits of American women, William Dean Howells and Henry James paid homage to their sisters.
•
Howells and James were prodigiously productive. Howells wrote so much that sometimes his right thumb swelled up and his right wrist gave out altogether. Each wrote a book a year for almost forty years, and each read all the other’s work. They wrote as they talked, the way ordinary people walk: fluently, unerringly, reliably, with their own gaits, confidently, over their own terrain. And they wrote next to each other, into and out of each other’s lives, as if they still walked, every few weeks, out around the perimeter of Fresh Pond.
In 1904 and 1905, James came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-one years. Howells was then living in New York. The book James wrote about this journey, The American Scene, a travel narrative riddled with the late misgivings of age, included a short section about Cambridge. Though the convention was still that one did not mention the names of living friends in memoirs, James was, by that point, too appreciative of the good and decent Howells and too disappointed in now empty Cambridge to forbear writing of his friend: “I almost angrily missed, among the ruins, what I had mainly gone back to recover—some echo of the dreams of youth, the titles of tales, the communities of friendship, the sympathies and patiences, in fine, of dear W. D. H.”
William Dean Howells was by then nearing seventy and felt that he had outlasted his place—the next generation had made him the symbol of the establishment and had rebelled against him. He wrote to James, “I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in the pale moonlight.” He used to reassure himself that at least Henry James, six years his junior and for almost fifty years a steadying hand on the difficult path of writing novels, would always be there. When James died in 1916, Howells could barely stand the loss. The sense of those first discovering walks was very much on his mind when, a few years later, Howells undertook to write a memorial essay called “The American James.” He lay in bed, in his final illness, thinking of Maggie and Kitty and Vic and Alice and of a cold winter’s evening walk to Fresh Pond, and the very last words he wrote were: “We were always going to Fresh Pond, in those days a wandering space of woods and water where people skated in winter and boated in summer.”
•
That night in 1866, after their walk, they probably came back to Howells’s house, as they often did. Elinor Mead Howells would have had something ready for dinner, though James, suffering from indigestion, would never eat with them, and would instead crumble at bits of biscuits, which he always carried with him in his pockets. The conversation would have shifted, to the next issue of the Atlantic, or to houses, one of Elinor Mead Howells’s favorite subjects; they were all three interested in architecture and decoration. James was already developing his distinct conversational style, though now it had more suppleness and ambition and less of the convolutions and the tender authority it was to acquire with time. When James took his leave, perhaps Elinor Howells said to her husband that it was always pleasant to see young Harry, but she thought he should leave his parents’ house and go out into the world; he was clearly bursting to get away. Howells would have felt a little twinge, of envy for all James had the freedom to do and of sadness that he would be going. Perhaps there followed a sensation of warmth and relief that he himself was already settled and on his way. He went to the library, and he sat with a book for a few minutes, looking at the pages but thinking of Esther Lyon and of whether James was right that no such woman existed in America. The argument began again in his head, and he was still pacing when Elinor leaned in at the door an hour later to say good night.