W. D. Howells and the Perplexity of Henry James

The letter Henry James wrote to Howells, after reading A Hazard of New Fortunes in 1890, was filled mostly with praise but also struck a note of ambivalence:

I note certain things which make me wonder at your form & your fortune (e.g.—as I have told you before—the fatal colours in which they let you, because you live at home—is it?—paint American life; & the fact that there’s a whole quarter of the heaven upon which, in the matter of composition, you seem to be consciously—is it consciously?—to have turned your back)¹

James was perplexed. His own The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima were critical failures, and he had begun to see the depiction of history in the novel as an unsolvable problem of form. For now he had abandoned the novel. But in America Howells enjoyed commercial success as well as a steady and prodigious output. “Your reservoir deluges me altogether,” James admitted, but he wondered if Howells was himself careless of drowning. Hazard had captured a truth about American life in all its complexity and interest, but it had done so at the expense of form. It was careless and inartistic, even incoherent.

Yet James sensed that pressing the issue of composition was not quite right. Was there a conscious plan? Perhaps the novel’s incoherence was the point? He was reconsidering his basic assumptions about form. Howells seemed to have designed his novel according to the vagaries, incoherencies, and multiplications of ordinary reality. He captured in the apparently insignificant details of middle-class life the flux of experience in America, where history was still in the making. “You set a measure & example of the prehensile perception,” James writes later in the letter, “& the whole thing, in short, [is] so observed, so caught, so felt, so conceived & created—so damningly and inexplicably American.”²

This was a significant change in James’ understanding of Howells. James had always thought Howells’ preoccupation with the American middle class was an impediment to high art. He mistook Howells’ preference for limited characters as a limited capacity for historical understanding. Neither Howells’ material nor his aesthetic intellect seemed quite adequate to developing a novel.

Still, James sensed that in Hazard the material and the expression were aligned in some interesting ways, the results more important than the lapses in composition.

This article is an attempt to make evident and describe the working of Howells’ unapparent form. What Howells knew, and what James came to realize by reading Howells, was that novel-writing was a mode of historical thinking: not thinking about history or the mere representation of ideas, but in fact a process more radically empirical for its independence on mere ideas. James called it “prehensile perception”: Howells’ writing apprehended its historical material, not giving that material the shape of art but keeping pace with the unfolding of ordinary experience, the events that preceded the coherence of stories and constituted their own truth. The novelist, through the design of character and plot, indeed in the development of sentences, pursued the historical evidence and discovered the real everyday life. Down the critical years, Howells’ trust in the novel form to do its own work has been difficult to see because his way of demonstrating it was so unusual. It was not theoretical truth he sought, or the transcendent morality of the conventional novel. Literature, he thought, could come to know history more precisely and politics more realistically than any theory, so long as it remained true to its evidence, including or especially to the evidence’s inconsistencies and even its inscrutability. Howells wrote in order to find out the truth about ordinary life, and the more he discovered the more his novels tended toward disjunction.

The everyday in a middle-class culture, Howells’ perennial subject, is peculiarly interesting, because where transcendental aspirations are the norm the everyday appears elusive, hardly real, even seems not to exist at all. Of course in political terms, a middle-class culture considers everyone ordinary. It is assumed that everyone shares the same economic goals and the...