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  • The Difficult Art Of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market by Francesca Sawaya
  • Bell Julian Clement
THE DIFFICULT ART OF GIVING: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market. By Francesca Sawaya. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014.

This collection of five essays from literary historian Francesca Sawaya examines the evolving American practice of philanthropy from the Gilded Age into the first third of the twentieth century through the writings of Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens, Charles Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser. The essays trace the patterns of philanthropic giving depicted in their works and consider the role of philanthropy in the careers of each.

Sawaya calls on the writings of Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockefeller to observe that philanthropy plays an ambiguous role in a “free market” society. Philanthropic interventions are necessary to fill the gaps left by the market and allow the society to function, but these very interventions call into question the assumptions of market equity and efficiency on which the society is founded. The role of philanthropy in literary production is equally problematic: artists are hedged in, ideologically as well as practically, by the social constructs which produce the gifts that support their art.

The works of Sawaya’s five literary observers illustrate the uncertainty and circuity of philanthropy’s impacts. The patronage offered political radicals by James’s Princess Casamassima is queered by the bitterness that motivates her. Only when giving is institutionalized, [End Page 134] suggests James, as in the plan of The Golden Bowl’s Adam Verver to establish a grand public art gallery, may its inherently questionable motives be transmuted into worthy outcomes. In Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, editor Basil March can hardly be unaware that the doubtful source of the philanthropy that makes his new literary venture possible—the profits that capitalist Jacob Dryfoos sweats out of his workers—gives the lie to the critical “detachment” he wishes to claim for it. Howells suggests the circumstances under which artistic independence may survive philanthropy in the character of Alma Leighton—a freelancer who accepts sponsorship but declines to be grateful. Twain sends a Yankee into King Arthur’s court bearing managerial capitalism as his gift and blind to the devastating impacts of his “scientific philanthropy” on that society; such philanthropy becomes “relatively innocuous, perhaps even promising” only in comparison to the depredations of free-trade imperialism limned in such late Twain essays as “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (133). In The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt leads Colonel French to the realization that well-intentioned northern philanthropy serves only to exacerbate violence in the southern town he had hoped to help in its refusal to address fundamental questions of social and racial justice. Chesnutt holds out the hope that a return to those fundamentals could enable a productive philanthropy. Dreiser shows that his financial titan, Frank Cowperwood, is dependent upon dense “networks of connection” in navigating a market system that, far from “free,” works “through carefully constructed and nurtured patronage systems” (183). For all his manipulative ability, Cowperwood’s philanthropic successes are ironic, his real achievements other than what he intended them to be.

Sawaya’s tracing of the operation of philanthropy in the works of these American masters highlights the fiction of the “free market”—dependent as it as on philanthropic and other interventions for its survival—to which American society remains enthralled. Her explorations likewise reveal the fond fiction of a free, meritocratic market in literary production, showing that the production of these authors relied on complex webs of friendship and sponsorship.

Bell Julian Clement
The George Washington University
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