Howells and the Canon

I once met a California miner, drawled Mark Twain, who'd been swindled by a trio of imposters. They called themselves Ralph Waldo Emerson (“A seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed”), Oliver Wendell Holmes (“as fat as a balloon . . . with double chins all the way down to his stomach”), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (with the build of a prize fighter and “cropped and bristly hair . . . as if he had a wig made of hairbrushes”). These supposedly “littery people” cheated at cards as they drank up the whiskey and misquoted their own poetry before they absconded with the miner's boots.1This was the gist of Samuel Clemens’ notorious speech at the 1877 birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier. According to the perpetrator many years later, the countenances of many in the audience had gradually “turned to a sort of black frost.”2 W. D. Howells, who as toastmaster was responsible for Mark Twain's appearance, found himself transmogrified into a ringmaster. Henry Nash Smith calls the burlesque “an act of aggression,” in which Howells was a secret sharer, against the “sacerdotal cult” of the New England literati.3To be sure, the eminences “were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them,” Howells wrote; “nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it myself.”4 Howells had persistent doubts about his acceptance by the sacerdotal cult, which had laid hands upon him after his arrival in Boston and, in effect, foreordained his Deanship.As Kenneth S. Lynn perceives, “No matter how often he ran Western stories in the Atlantic, or emphasized the fact that he himself was a Westerner, born and bred, the fact remained that he had become a man of letters in New England and the willing servant of its leading magazine.” When the befuddled miner in Clemens’ tale asks if he too is an impostor like the other “littery people,” the question applies to Howells as well.5On the first page of My Mark Twain (1910), Howells differentiates himself from the man with the flaming mustache and sealskin coat who had barged into his Atlantic Monthly office in 1869. Clemens’ first words were too “graphic” for Howells’ “fainter pencil to illustrate.” He adds that he often hid his friend's letters because of their “Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish” (LFA 256). That is, Howells was split between attraction to Clemens’ obstreperousness and repulsion from his crudity.6 What remains unresolved here is whether Howells himself is “prudish.”Such ambiguity saturates Howells’ recollections of Mark Twain. Take, for example, the evening when Clemens—after supposedly walking from Hartford to Boston!—crashed a sedate dinner party at Howells’ home in Cambridge. “I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure” (LFA 284).The oysters epitomize the refined taste of Cambridge society, of which the interloping braggart is oblivious as he gobbles more than his share.Howells does not say that Clemens mortified him exactly, but that is implicit as he recalls how Clemens’ incessant smoking forced him to air out the house after visits and sometimes to snatch a smoldering cigar from his fingers as he slept. The idea of Howells, “mindful of my fire insurance,” tiptoeing into his guest's bedroom is comical, but it nonetheless suggests his need to protect both Clemens and himself.“He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied,” Howells continues, “and we were greedy of him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value” (LFA 284). That is, Howells’ acquaintance was too provincial to recognize Mark Twain's significance beyond their narrow boundaries. This mattered because if the Cambridge elite was critical of Clemens in one sense, it was critical to Howells in another.The same uneasiness informs Howells’ account of the Battle of Concord centennial observance in 1875, two years before the Whittier Dinner. Howells and Clemens, who were traveling together, had received celebrity invitations that included railroad passage from Boston to Concord. “Why bother to go into Boston,” Howells inquired, “when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the Cambridge station?” (LFA 280). But when the train pulled in, it was so packed that the friends decided to walk instead.After it became too chilly to continue, Clemens proposed that they catch a ride in a passing coach. “He said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was, they would gladly, perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his far vaster renown he would approach them, our success would be assured” (LFA 281). It wasn't. Having missed the ceremony altogether, they wearily retreated to Cambridge.Howells says that he came to “think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been.” But it was far easier for Clemens than for Howells to make light of the matter because it was Howells’ attendance that was mandatory at an event—as the Whittier Dinner would be two years later—a celebration of New England's glory. And it was Howells who “felt keenly the shame of defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure” (LFA 281). Uncannily like the deadbeats at the mining camp, these “littery people” were exposed as frauds trading on their purported renown.The Whittier fiasco is contextualized by other gustatory occasions. There is the raucous gathering of Bret Harte's cronies during his triumphal Eastern tour in 1870. Present were Harte, Howells, Clemens, Ralph Keeler, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and the publisher James T. Fields. The men indulged in “idle and aimless and joyful talk-play,” which prefigured the Whittier Dinner in Harte's “fleering dramatization of Clemens's mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. ‘Why, fellows,’ he spluttered, ‘this is the dream of Mark's life,’ and I remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun” (LFA 258).Howells recalls a similar uproar at another such party, at which Mark Twain roasted all the guests, including the city planner George Edwin Waring: This beautiful and splendid trooper-like Waring was there, and I recall how in the long rambling speech in which Clemens went round the table hitting every head at it. . . . He congratulated Waring upon his engineering genius, and his hypnotic control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan of draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in the down-hill course of the sewers, Waring would come with a plan to drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common Council without opposition. (LFA 287)Clemens mirthfully accused Waring of fraud, the same allegation he thought would delight the guests at the Whittier Dinner. But among these reprobates, the result was not “silence, weighing many tons to the square inch” (LFA 295), but jollity all around.Writing to Clemens in 1901, Howells recalled with satisfaction their “joint success in keeping away from the Concord Centennial in 1875.” He wondered if they might do likewise about the Yale bicentennial, at which both of them were slated to receive honorary degrees. But the truants at Concord turned up in New Haven after all. At this stage in their acclaim, skipping so august an event was simply unimaginable.In sharp contrast to their exaltation, Howells depicts their visit to Ulysses S. Grant's cramped apartment in New York City. All three men were cut from the same cloth; they all came from the vast Mississippi valley. But Howells nevertheless felt like the odd man out.Howells was far more comfortable eating tasteless beans with Grant than he could ever have been at the Whittier feast. But if Howells had felt out of place there, he was no more at home with the Plutarchan captain. It was Mark Twain, not Howells, who was the literary man Grant “could make sure of.” It was also Mark Twain who came to Grant's rescue when he was broke and cancer-ridden by publishing his Memoirs, the large sales of which relieved his desperation.When Tolstoy's seventieth birthday was observed at a New York dinner in September 1898, the ailing E. C. Stedman could not attend. In his letter of regret, however, he seized the opportunity to praise Tolstoy's chief American advocate: In my own belief the most sincere, the most modest, the most distinguished of our living writers has never been so great as since he openly consecrated his humor, his imagination, his pathos to the service of humanity, though with compassionate tears that almost blinded his vision to the glimpses of dawn. If he is not yet fully comprehended, he is beloved—already on our hearts’ list for canonization. The rest will follow. If I were at your gathering, I would ask you to join me in a toast to Mr. Howells. (SL IV, 213–14n)7Stedman was not using “canonization” in its current academic sense. He was thinking of sainthood. But the slippage from sacred to secular meaning was implicit, as it was in Stedman's quasi-Biblical American Anthology 1787–1900. This massive book—three pounds and nearly nine hundred pages—was the most comprehensive collection of American poetry yet to be published. It was Stedman's effort at the turn of the new century to fix the poetic canon of the old one.8 Much the same purpose was served by the publication in that same pivotal year of Howells’ Literary Friends and Acquaintance, which along with My Literary Passions (1895) and My Mark Twain (1910), established the Dean's canon of American literature.“Criticism . . . I have not cared for, and often I have found it repulsive.” Howells expressed such sentiments repeatedly. But although he may have loathed writing criticism, his production of it was prolific, from his youthful book reviews in the Ohio State Journal to his innumerable columns for Harper's Monthly. During the last twenty years of his career, as he became more and more of a public presence, Howells published more than 150 pieces of criticism. He took his authority to include the reformation of American taste through his pronouncements about what was worth reading.By 1900, the elite Eastern journals were losing ground to a “new mode of literary production” that entailed “new literary institutions, a new function for literature, and new conditions of literary work.” These changes, as David R. Shumway remarks, “produced a crisis of succession in literary—and especially critical—authority.” Thus, although Howells was “the most influential person in American literary culture at the turn of the century” and though no one in academe challenged his hegemony, “it was ultimately the professors who superseded the Dean and universities that assumed responsibility for establishing and maintaining the American canon.”10The professionalization of literary studies coincided with the professionalization of law, medicine, engineering, and the social sciences. It was part and parcel of a wider transition into industrial with its control of the its toward and of and its on especially among the of through and universities into along with the they The up to be a and of the and by those and by the other that came into to and service the social of was never an to his but the new academic those with an academic a became a for academic of “the as a of the to be “the of and which should against to the of and and as against a of were by on as a in at during the along with what now would be called to service the academic by they into and sometimes American as though only at the of the Shumway no canon of American at the of its academic were these as the of in of “it is not that the American canon would at the of the during the and and that it would be during the before that was and the however, Howells to American literature, its and its as his for he the E. who had to our our our our our really Howells by the by “the in which our great of had with the of and there were John T. and Henry in their Howells Stedman and for the we only John R. W. James the C. it is because their come to as we that yet to Howells the of the John and Henry praise was the by the John and John included Thomas George W. John E. and George James and as our who were by and Thomas this Howells did not the American writers of he but his in the he Henry James and Mark Twain, along with such as George W. John W. and E. In his for the of Howells that this stage of the there is no such as in the literary but there is a a humanity, which is much He American writing with the of from and which he was for more than American of his for that the vast of that all the American not a but a Howells contended that literature, so far as they have is literature, just as the is He however, influential between and he the but of American a toward an refined and both in thought and almost to the other a to and to the of The poetry of Longfellow and could be said to these of both is a part of that American which also the of Mark Twain and of of and of of Bret and of of W. and of Henry of and of W. of and of T. his to the in Howells a to his his at the collection of . . . and when he to the little with the or the of after the Howells Harper's Monthly as a his to the took the of book reviews and on the and of American He a more in and of from his Dean's canon was by My Literary Passions in which he the writers who had him in his and the among them in an of in which My Literary Passions ran was for a of literary was and taste was than such at Howells took them into his such as his own and establishing a of of in which as to Howells’ He too what it is to be only to be by after of for had been a long from which the Howells that it should ever But once the had the literary to the of as fully as if his had never He he has to though the of the new could not and it the of other The of Howells’ literary is a in which the of to more but never in own the for literary literary with an air of not in The of when he the about the of a of course, and and he And an of the as well as the and And of course, and him up with and other literary of leading writers by and with those in the one of these a New England writers were a large part of the and of American These were and and sometimes as and were said to an on New York but the New were to the New and were in the because they the of American culture the of New That Howells for both of them their in the John that Howells the Dean of American and there was no one on the he made a about the it was never an academic after Howells’ arrival in he at and he the But for the of his he academic He at as well as the Smith at And although he took honorary from both and Yale to honorary from Yale Western and was never the not the at in which Howells would have and could have him the he as the Dean without academic of Howells’ is by his at a stage of of the had been in the the audience to the Dean for its among those in the the New York Dean Howells, toward many were from to when there was about of the for the and “the Dean of American was to be (SL Howells here not only as the of literary but also as the of literary a too Howells’ also had the leading and the Dean to in “I you would about who to from what I last of out by one with our Howells had in the of this He nonetheless on writing to the “I to tell you how great I thought your the other . . . I you for a (SL course, had no need of Howells’ in own But no than those in the of the to the Dean's Henry it on the of Howells’ seventieth birthday in “I to my that when the and of our come to be it will be that for one in American the has been for the The of and as a and in the (SL The of Howells, however, was passing in It came and went in little more than a from his tour in to his birthday celebration in was on by George of the Howells’ publisher and, in effect, his the evening of more than hundred guests at the in New and about a hundred on the the were and including but was expressed by of and all of them by from the American of Howells most the an who had The of for its and and such as and James of these had ever met were letters from Thomas James and from American including Henry who a long and but praise from The came by way of a letter from to Henry he to like on account of what he called his well as his of . . . There men in this that I should like to himself was one of another he had the other two were Henry George and Howells. of my to such praise as this from Howells to his for a little . . . from the that ever a of Howells never had a was seeking more . . . and often only a or two in New but During the they in New England and they in the from New The large on two of large a and a Howells had a down the from the to as a the it was for academic and other occasions. in a Howells’ Howells, would a of Howells to and the These were with and on the toward the The of the first such was a on Howells by a distinguished John were published in the New also a at Howells’ and he could not have been more as he among the years later, on the another distinguished for the New made a the such gathering, in the Howells a The a of the New York literary had been but to be on a the not to with the man with was as way to the and the than fact that both and Howells had up in and to their literary What were about Howells’ It became had not into his This was by about this and a to It was the Whittier Dinner as the audience sort of black about a The in American of yet in or that on the in which an for and of Dean Howells, for example, a for what became of Howells’ during the In a letter to Henry he himself as a with my down and the them in the (SL At it might be said that the has so that the have did not all at It was during the Howells into a and only did and among only a of so did the publication of was a of Howells’ and an of of which were through the of and you will not be a fully you have been a hundred Clemens to Howells in “it is the of the of all your will be as as I a but an you a but a before the of Howells’ in in to for the Anthology of American had the walking of in the of John the In to the in has a of in of American or three every with and a with Howells was in the same year as the The is a from which I The New York was established in The Dean of the a who in turn a of The from to was a who was also for his critical book on The ceremony on the of I was along with the Howells, the had the event from a one had thought to or from the Howells was especially since in on Howells was by a at who had in Howells about his for Howells was expressed by a and I the and found that Howells’ was than no one had to the we out the to and the They were and But than the an was decided to the by the one the The is but the has a to an because it the of the if it were Howells’