Dunbar: Howells has done me irrevocable harm

Paul Laurence Dunbar had reason both to be thankful to editor/critic William Dean Howells and to be upset with him. Howells had used his influence to launch Dunbar's national fame. In doing so, however, he also drew attention specifically to Dunbar's dialect poems and encouraged him to do more of them (and less of his more traditional works). In doing so, Howells limited the public's expectation of Dunbar's work as stereotypically black. Worse, the problem was compounded by other critics who followed the word of the "Dean of American Letters." The poet was acutely aware of the problem. As he wrote in a letter dated March 15, 1897:

One critic says a thing and the rest hasten to say the same thing, in many instances using the identical words. I see now very clearly that Mr. Howells has done me irrevocable harm in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse.

Similar sentiments were expressed overseas as well. Dunbar wanted to stay popular and successful. As such, he had to cater much of his work to the expectations Howells created for his potential readers. Further, critics implied he only deserved recognition because he was black; similar writings from a white person were less impressive. Dunbar, confined to this sphere, had difficulty fighting against it. Still, enough of his works challenge and complicate his contemporary reputation. Such tension is clear in one of his most powerful works "We Wear the Mask":

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
     It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
     We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile,
But let the world dream otherwise,
     We wear the mask!

Howells and Higginson: hitherto unbroken

William Dean Howells was just 30 years old when he became editor of The Atlantic Monthly and, immediately upon taking the role, found the pressures of the role at the distinguished magazine. For one, he often received contributions from friends and had the difficult task of deciding their merit as objectively as possible. Further, Howells was a westerner (from Ohio) who suddenly found himself among the New England literary elite. Five years into his editorship, he was still fighting for respect from some.

Such was the case with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had been a regular contributor for years. When Howells hesitated on accepting one of his submissions, Higginson fired back in an angry letter dated September 30, 1871:

I would not on any account have you print anything of mine which you thought "well enough," so I have arranged for it elsewhere — with a regret you can hardly understand, as you have not, like me, written for but one literary magazine for thirteen years & felt identified with it.

Higginson also noted he had already "foolishly" withdrawn his payment for the article before it was even accepted, "relying on an experience hitherto unbroken." He went on: "I shall not make such a mistake again, & shall in the future count on merely business relation with the Atlantic." Further, he threatened, he would happily offer his writings elsewhere.

*Information from this post comes from William Dean Howells: The Development of a Novelist (1959) by George N. Bennett.

James on Howells: admirably light

The Story of a Play by William Dean Howells received rave reviews from the author's friend Henry James, who called it "admirably light" and infused with "the writer's fundamental optimism." Indeed, James emphasized that optimism in his review of the book, published on July 9, 1898, and noted that Howells created "a world all lubricated with good nature and the tone of pleasantry" in the "short and charming novel."  He went on:

Life, in his pages, is never too hard, too ugly, passions and perversities never too sharp, not to allow, on the part of his people, of such an exercise of friendly wit about each other as may well, when one considers it, minimize shocks and strains. So it muffles and softens, all round, the edges of 'The Story of a Play.'

This was also somewhat of a criticism; James wondered if there was any tragedy in the comic world of theater which Howells presented. "You know," Howells wrote to James in response, "my experience of the theatre was comic, rather than tragical, and I treated of it lightly because it was light." With that said, however, he revealed a strange dramatic tragedy he had just experienced. An actor suggested that he turn his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham into a play, which he did. With the project finished, however, that actor changed his mind and told Howells he "does not want it. What a race!" Nevertheless, Howells told James: "My heart warmed itself over in the glow of your praise."

Howells and Webb: safe-harbored!

After the publication of Vagrom Verse by Charles Henry Webb, critics were quick to praise the well-established New York writer. The influential William Dean Howells wrote to Webb (who occasionally used the pen name "John Paul") just how much respect he earned by the book's publication. In a letter dated January 14, 1889, Howells wrote to Webb:

The low standard of literature in Boston may be guessed from the following paragraph out of the Transcript: —

"No book of poems has touched the people's heart for a long time like Charles Henry Webb's (John Paul) 'Vagrom Verse,' from which we copied 'Alec Dunham's Boat' the other day.

Webb already had a long career in the literary world, including serving as an editor in California for a time (his writers included Mark Twain and Bret Harte). Some of his work was humorous (including his dedication to Vagrom Verse, which included the lines, "I dedicate my verse to those / Who really do not like my prose"), though much was serious. The poem which Howells referenced, "Alec Dunham's Boat," got a fair amount of attention.

There she lies at her moorings,
    The little two-master,
Answering not now
    The call of disaster.
Loose swings the rudder,
    Unshipped the tiller;
Crossing the Bar so,
    One sea would fill her!

Foresail and mainsail
    In loose folds are lying:
Naked the mast-heads —
    No pennon flying;
Seaweed and wreck
    Alike may drift past her;
There lies the pilot-boat —
    Where is her master?

Lantern at Great Point,
    Brightly it burns;
Beacon on Brant Point
    The signal returns.
Far out to sea
    Sankoty flashes;
White on the shore
    The crested wave dashes.

Strident No'th-easter
    And smoky Sou'-wester
Call for the pilot-boat,
    Eager to test her.
And a ship on the Bar,
    Just where the waves cast her!
Moored lies the pilot-boat —
    Where is her master?

Oh, barque driving in,
    God send that you lee get,
Past Tuckernuck shoals,
    The reefs of Muskeget.
There go minute guns;
    Now faster and faster —
But no more to their aid
    Flies the little two-master.

For the pilot one night
    Left his boat as you see her —
Light moored, that at signal
    He ready might free her.
But not from her moorings
    Came the pilot to cast her,
Though a signal he answered —
    One set by the Master.

Gone, say you, and whither?
    Do you ask me which way
Went good pilot as ever
    Brought ship into bay?
Who shall say how he cast off,
    If to starboard or larboard?
But of one thing I'm sure —
    The pilot's safe-harbored!

Howells: very slowly and reluctantly

"I am working very hard at my story here, which takes shape very slowly and reluctantly," William Dean Howells wrote to Henry James on October 4, 1882 from France. "I shall never again, I hope, attempt to finish a thing so long thrown aside."

The story in question, A Woman's Reason, would be published the next year, though it was started four years before Howells wrote this note. In another letter around this period, he admitted, "I have had such a good time that I have been unable to do so much even as kill a consumptive girl, or make a lover homesick enough to start home from China and get wrecked on an atoll in the South Pacific." Dining out "four times a week" and traveling through Europe was making him too happy.

Howells, who was hailed then and now as a master of literary realism, took an odd turn in A Woman's Reason — one which critics noticed. In A Woman's Reason, a well-born woman named Helen Harkness loses access to an inheritance when her father dies bankrupt. Helen is saved when her fiancé, long thought dead, returns from a shipwreck. As he references in his letter to James, Howells kept the story at sea for too long. He spends 80 pages describing the character's shipwreck and the adventure which followed.

"After promising to give us sound realistic work," one critic complained, Howells "has descended to the function of producing lollipops." James warned his friend away from "factitious glosses." Howells, in turn, admitted to Mark Twain that A Woman's Reason bore "the fatal marks of haste and distraction." Modern scholar Elsa Nettels noted the shipwreck scene was "the most palpable example in Howells's work of the kind of contrivance he deplored in romantic novels."

*Much of the information from this post comes from Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (1997), edited by Michael Anesko. I also consulted Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America (1988) by Elsa Nettels.

The curtain was rung down

The issue of the Boston Evening Transcript for March 4, 1885, reported a "genuine surprise" for some of Boston's literary elite. The prior evening, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Dean Howells went to dine with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, to meet one of that magazine's newest sensations. Charles Egbert Craddock, whose writings included "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" and "In the Tennessee Mountains," was the special guest of the evening. Though they knew the name was a fake, they did not expect that the pseudonym hid that the talented writer was a woman.

For six years, it was not known that Craddock was really Mary N. Murfree, a young writer from St. Louis. As the Transcript reported, "Thus the curtain was rung down on one of the neatest comedies ever presented to the American reading public. And what a distinguished cast the comedy had!"

Aldrich (himself a poet and playwright) had met Murfree the night before and was quite shocked, expecting a strapping and broad-shoulder six-foot man from Tennessee. Knowing that the same reaction would come from Holmes and Howells, he orchestrated the dinner the next evening. The three men, it was reported, referred to Craddock/Murfree using the plural "they" for the evening. Upon seeing her, Holmes is said to have shouted, "He is a woman!" Irony must not have been lost on Howells; during his late tenure on the Atlantic before Aldrich took over, he had published some of the works of Craddock/Murfree. Later, in his Literature and Life: Studies, he praised Craddock/Murfree for the use of regional dialect and local color. But, somewhat passive-aggressively, he referred to her as "Miss Murfree, who so long masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock."

*At least one account mentions that Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett were also present. Their reaction is not recorded, so far as I have found.

A Foregone Conclusion: best of all your books

On December 7, 1874, Edmund Clarence Stedman (pictured left) wrote to William Dean Howells (below) that he had just read the latter's A Foregone Conclusion. Stedman, himself a poet and advocate for copyright law, admitted, "I... like it the best of all your books."

A Foregone Conclusion (the name borrows from a line in Othello) features a Catholic Priest, Don Ippolito, who admits his love for a woman named Florida. The story, told through the eyes of Mr. Ferris, drew some criticism from Catholics (including poet John Boyle O'Reilly) but scholar Susan M. Griffin suggests the story really undercuts the realism vs. idealism debate in literature.

In the eyes of Stedman, however, the story was flawless. Having read it in installments in The Atlantic Monthly (which Howells edited), he refers to the "gradual but steady progress in construction" of the story. He also praises Howells for his ability to manage several separate characters, noting: "This is a faculty which every schoolgirl seems to have, and which men of brains have to train themselves in by sheer force of intellect and practice."

In the same letter, Stedman also offered Howells a poem, "The Skull in the Gold Drift," for him to consider for publication. That, and his tendency for over-the-top praise of his friends (which was repaid in kind), can leave us skeptical of his assessment of A Foregone Conclusion.

Howells: Raining life-blood like water

Part of the grueling Chattanooga Campaign during the Civil War, the Battle of Lookout Mountain was fought on November 24, 1863. Following their defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga, the Union army hoped for a break; by defeating the Confederate army in Tennessee, they would have access to the deep South and, with it, an end to the war.

Recently-married and future editor of the Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells had nothing to do with the fighting that day. Even so, he memorialized the battle in his poem, "Battle of Lookout Mountain":

Where the dews and the rains of heaven have their fountain,
   Like its thunder and its lightning our brave burst on the foe.
Up above the clouds on Freedom's Lookout Mountain
   Raining life-blood like water on the valleys down below.
        Oh, green be the laurels that grow,
        Oh, sweet be the wild-buds that blow,
   In the dells of the mountain where the brave are lying low.

Light of our hope and crown of our story,
   Bright as sunlight, pure as starlight shall their deed of daring glow.
While the day and the night out of heaven shed their glory.
   On Freedom's Lookout Mountain whence they routed Freedom's foe.
        Oh, soft be the gales when they go
        Through the pines on the summit where they blow,
   Chanting solemn music for the souls that passed below.

Howells, Scudder, Gilman: Pretty blood curdling

"The author wished me to send you this," William Dean Howells wrote to Horace Scudder (pictured at left) on October 5, 1890. "It's pretty blood curdling, but strong, and is certainly worth reading." The story Howells sent along with his letter was "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Scudder, by then, had replaced Howells as editor of The Atlantic Monthly some nine years earlier. Gilman had herself referred to "The Yellow Wall-Paper" as "my awful story," and reported that her husband called it "a ghastly tale... [which] beats Poe and Doré!" She admitted it was "a simple tale, but highly unpleasant."

Scudder, a reverend, apparently agreed. In fact, he found it a bit too ghastly. To Gilman, he wrote a two-sentence letter:

Mr. Howells has handed me this story. I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!

This somewhat curt letter was Scudder's only notice to Gilman that he chose not to publish the story in The Atlantic Monthly. It did not see print until the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine. Howells disagreed with his friend's opinion. In 1920, he included "The Yellow Wall-Paper" in his collection of The Great Modern American Stories.

*For more information, see Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition, edited by Catherine J. Golden.

Thaxter: A Memorable Murder

Convicted murderer Louis Wagner was executed on June 25, 1875. In March of that year on the Isles of Shoals (Smuttynose, specifically), two young Norwegian women were bludgeoned to death. Wagner, a 28-year old Prussian immigrant, seemed to have no real motive for killing the two women.

Local resident Celia Thaxter, horrified by the ordeal in the relative quiet of the islands, tried to cope by writing about the incident. She spent hours reading newspaper accounts before writing "A Memorable Murder." She completed the manuscript shortly before Wagner's execution. As she waited for that day, she became concerned that an account of a true murder was in poor taste. She wrote to Annie Adams Fields:

I am only waiting for Wagner to be hung or not (next Friday is the day appointed for his execution) to rush to your threshold with my manuscript and read it to you and J. T. F. [James T. Fields] that you may tell me if I offend against good taste or the proprieties of existence. For it is a delicate subject to handle, so notorious, so ghastly and dreadful - and I would not dare to send it to [William Dean] Howells without asking Mr. Fields first.

Apparently both James and Annie Fields approved, as did William Dean Howells, who published it in The Atlantic Monthly. In the essay, Thaxter offered something the newspapers lacked. "The sickening details of the double murder are well known," she wrote, "...but the pathos of the story is not realized." Thaxter focused on the gentle, innocent lives of the two women, allowing them more than merely serving the role of victims.

So they abode in peace and quiet, with not an evil thought in their minds, kind and considerate toward each other... till out of the perfectly cloudless sky one day a bolt descended, without a whisper of warning, and brought ruin and desolation into that peaceful home.

Her description of the murderer Louis Wagner was quite different: "He was always lurking in corners, lingering, looking, listening, and he would look no man straight in the eyes."

*Much of the information in this post comes from Norma H. Mandel's The Garden Gate: The Life of Celia Laighton Thaxter.

Birth of William Dean Howells as editor

"Don't despise Boston!" publisher James T. Fields once said to William Dean Howells, a native of Ohio. The two were meeting at the home of poet Bayard Taylor. Three days later, Fields sent a letter inviting Howells to serve as assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He started working in that role on March 1, 1866 – the anniversary of his birth on March 1, 1837.

The details, as Howells noted, involved proof-reading, correspondence with contributors, gathering manuscripts, and writing a few reviews for each issue. He negotiated with Fields for a $50 a week salary. "Upon these terms we closed," Howells wrote, "and on the 1st of March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began my work."

Howells also met with James Russell Lowell, the monthly's founding editor, to get his blessing. Howells spent the next fifteen years with the magazine, the last ten as its head editor. He enjoyed it, noting he "found it by no means drudgery." Under his guidance, the Atlantic moved beyond its traditional New England roots and established itself as an important national periodical. Through his association with the magazine, he built friendships with Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Celia Thaxter.

Howells was a writer himself; by the end of his life, he published poetry, travel essays, novels, biographies, and everything else. Later in his life, he wrote about his experience as editor of the Atlantic Monthly in "Recollections of an Atlantic Editorship."