Thursday, October 18, 2007
William Dean Howells was once our neighbor
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The mention of William Dean Howells today evokes mostly shrugs. Actually, the largely forgotten Howells (1837-1920) was a literary pacesetter, the dean of the Realists among American writers, and might be remembered for the “Coast of Bohemia,” a book title term subsequently borrowed by several authors.
The peripatetic writer’s first New York address, in 1888, was 330 East 17th Street, an old brownstone from which he had a view of the Stuyvesant Square Park. It is now a bay between the Silver and Dazian buildings of the Beth Israel Medical Center, the staging area for the hospital’s refuse disposal bins. A later 1891-92 address was 241 East 17th Street, still extant, and 115 East 16th Street, variously from 1896 through the 1900s. The author took the 3rd Avenue El daily to work, and enjoyed his walks in the Gramercy neighborhood, eventually moving further uptown.
Howells, a prolific reader, whose only real education was at typesetting for his father’s newspaper in Ohio, started producing news dispatches while in his teens, and in 1860, after writing a campaign biography of Abe Lincoln, earned an appointment for the consular office in Naples, a five year sojourn in Europe that expanded his horizons and turned him into a novelist as well as a travel writer. In his life he completed over 100 books, counting his early poetry and subsequent plays, and including travel books, essays and reviews.
After the Naples term, during which he married Eleanor Mead of Vermont in Paris, 1862, and a brief stay in New York, Howells came to Boston and settled down as an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, writing and selecting articles for the literary journal Appointed editor in 1871, he remained there until 1881, then took off to travel and write. By then he was a well-known author, friend of Henry James and Mark Twain and his major novel written during his travels, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) came to be widely hailed. Humble Silas was a poor boy who rose to own a huge paint business, and his daughter moved up socially, marrying a Boston aristocrat. Eventually Silas’s business fortunes dimmed, and, rather than unloading the factory to an unsuspecting British investor, he chose failure. Whether this was a wise decision, in today’s perspective, is debatable – Sinclair Lewis dubbed him an idealist, not a portrayer of the real business entrepreneur – but the author’s Ohio ethic prevailed . To illustrate, Howells the widely traveled journalist, critic and explainer of European literature , who introduced to America such authors as Zola, Ibsen, Turgenev and Tolstoy, considered the story of Anna Karenina unsuitable for these shores, since a father could not read the book to young daughter.
Howells’s New York sojourn started in 1888. There was a job as editor of Harpers Monthly, and continued articles for the New Atlantic Monthly and Century magazines and a multitude of social injustice issues to be taken up in his moderate style. Here the Tolstoian wide canvas prompted him into writing A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), a New York panorama of business life, art and social problems. The Coast of Bohemia (1893) had an Ohio girl studying art.
This particular term, the Seacoast of Bohemia, has been teasing me, over the years, and writing about Howells has finally brought in further details. It comes from Shakespeare, in A Winter’s Tale, and deals with a shipwreck, and poor Perdita, child of a Sicilian king (possibly an allegory of Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of beheaded Anne Boleyn?), left abandoned on the shore. Old Bill was first twitted about his sense of geography by Ben Jonson, his contemporary. Subsequent Shakespearean scholars have suggested that the source, Robert Greene’s 1588 romance Pandosto, dealt with a 13th century period when land-locked Bohemia actually reached down to the Adriatic coast line, and, alternatively, that the author meant to speak of Bathymia, a land in Asia Minor. Since then, a number of authors, some Czech, as well as the American Thomas Nelson Page (1905), Australian poet James Hobblethwaite (in a haunting poem of Perdita) and British mystery novelists Nicholas Freeling and Ellis Peters (under her real name, Edith Pargeter) have been charmed by the romance of the expression. The Coast of Bohemia is a mystique, an ideal, and a symbol of both carefree existence and its perils.
Looking at William Dean Howells from the perspective of what we know of the business environment, his heroes do not fit into the panoply of our perspective. Though realist in describing family situations and the social struggle, he applies a somewhat soft hand to the robber baron environment and the highly competitive New York scene. The writer represents America as we want it to be, even today, an unattainable ideal in this consumer credit driven, export deficit economy, where the foreign creditors will eventually own us. But that is not a reason not to honor Howells, who saw America as a dream.
For the interested, there is a William Dean Howell Society, organized by academics some 20 years ago, with a newsletter. The membership is accessible, and the group is always interested in publishable papers. The local addresses came from the association’s resources.
The mention of William Dean Howells today evokes mostly shrugs. Actually, the largely forgotten Howells (1837-1920) was a literary pacesetter, the dean of the Realists among American writers, and might be remembered for the “Coast of Bohemia,” a book title term subsequently borrowed by several authors.
The peripatetic writer’s first New York address, in 1888, was 330 East 17th Street, an old brownstone from which he had a view of the Stuyvesant Square Park. It is now a bay between the Silver and Dazian buildings of the Beth Israel Medical Center, the staging area for the hospital’s refuse disposal bins. A later 1891-92 address was 241 East 17th Street, still extant, and 115 East 16th Street, variously from 1896 through the 1900s. The author took the 3rd Avenue El daily to work, and enjoyed his walks in the Gramercy neighborhood, eventually moving further uptown.
Howells, a prolific reader, whose only real education was at typesetting for his father’s newspaper in Ohio, started producing news dispatches while in his teens, and in 1860, after writing a campaign biography of Abe Lincoln, earned an appointment for the consular office in Naples, a five year sojourn in Europe that expanded his horizons and turned him into a novelist as well as a travel writer. In his life he completed over 100 books, counting his early poetry and subsequent plays, and including travel books, essays and reviews.
After the Naples term, during which he married Eleanor Mead of Vermont in Paris, 1862, and a brief stay in New York, Howells came to Boston and settled down as an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, writing and selecting articles for the literary journal Appointed editor in 1871, he remained there until 1881, then took off to travel and write. By then he was a well-known author, friend of Henry James and Mark Twain and his major novel written during his travels, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) came to be widely hailed. Humble Silas was a poor boy who rose to own a huge paint business, and his daughter moved up socially, marrying a Boston aristocrat. Eventually Silas’s business fortunes dimmed, and, rather than unloading the factory to an unsuspecting British investor, he chose failure. Whether this was a wise decision, in today’s perspective, is debatable – Sinclair Lewis dubbed him an idealist, not a portrayer of the real business entrepreneur – but the author’s Ohio ethic prevailed . To illustrate, Howells the widely traveled journalist, critic and explainer of European literature , who introduced to America such authors as Zola, Ibsen, Turgenev and Tolstoy, considered the story of Anna Karenina unsuitable for these shores, since a father could not read the book to young daughter.
Howells’s New York sojourn started in 1888. There was a job as editor of Harpers Monthly, and continued articles for the New Atlantic Monthly and Century magazines and a multitude of social injustice issues to be taken up in his moderate style. Here the Tolstoian wide canvas prompted him into writing A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), a New York panorama of business life, art and social problems. The Coast of Bohemia (1893) had an Ohio girl studying art.
This particular term, the Seacoast of Bohemia, has been teasing me, over the years, and writing about Howells has finally brought in further details. It comes from Shakespeare, in A Winter’s Tale, and deals with a shipwreck, and poor Perdita, child of a Sicilian king (possibly an allegory of Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of beheaded Anne Boleyn?), left abandoned on the shore. Old Bill was first twitted about his sense of geography by Ben Jonson, his contemporary. Subsequent Shakespearean scholars have suggested that the source, Robert Greene’s 1588 romance Pandosto, dealt with a 13th century period when land-locked Bohemia actually reached down to the Adriatic coast line, and, alternatively, that the author meant to speak of Bathymia, a land in Asia Minor. Since then, a number of authors, some Czech, as well as the American Thomas Nelson Page (1905), Australian poet James Hobblethwaite (in a haunting poem of Perdita) and British mystery novelists Nicholas Freeling and Ellis Peters (under her real name, Edith Pargeter) have been charmed by the romance of the expression. The Coast of Bohemia is a mystique, an ideal, and a symbol of both carefree existence and its perils.
Looking at William Dean Howells from the perspective of what we know of the business environment, his heroes do not fit into the panoply of our perspective. Though realist in describing family situations and the social struggle, he applies a somewhat soft hand to the robber baron environment and the highly competitive New York scene. The writer represents America as we want it to be, even today, an unattainable ideal in this consumer credit driven, export deficit economy, where the foreign creditors will eventually own us. But that is not a reason not to honor Howells, who saw America as a dream.
For the interested, there is a William Dean Howell Society, organized by academics some 20 years ago, with a newsletter. The membership is accessible, and the group is always interested in publishable papers. The local addresses came from the association’s resources.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 2:18 AM 
