Annie Howells and The Vacation of the Kelwyns

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 10,Number 2, Fall, 1979 Annie Howells and The Vacation of the Kelwyns James Doyle William Dean Howells' posthumously published novel The Vacation of the Kelwyns (1920), as Richard Chase has pointed out, is a charming narrative with a "pervasive quality of reminiscence, calm wisdom, and idyllic pleasure in life."1 Based loosely on the author's recollections of the summer of the American Centennial, the novel was obviously inspired by the same overwhelmingly retrospective mood reflected in his five volumes of personal reminiscences beginning with A Boy's Town (1890) and ending with Yearsof My Youth (1916). In form and style The Kelwyns is very discursive and informal, although its leisurely digressions and frequent authorial comments consort quite agreeably with the languid atmosphere which pervades the work as a whole. It is possible, furthermore, to discern considerable unity in the three motifs \\'.hich Howells brings together into a suggestive, interconnected pattern. These three motifs include the familiar study of commonplace people and incidents which was Howells' most prominent stock in trade, a semi-allegorical love story ending in a reconciliation of contrasting character types, and certain extraordinary elements which seem related to the literary traditions of the romance. Parallels and antecedents for these three elements can be found in varying proportions in Howells' earlier work, and theoretical justification for their use in The Vacation of the Kelwyns can be discovered in hiseclectic statements about the art of fiction. But the unusual form and tone of the novel can also be partially explained by an appeal to its biographical background. Specifically, the meaning of The Vacation of the Kelwyns is 126 James Doyle illuminated by various records relating to the author's relationship with his younger sister Annie. In April, 1907 Howells wrote his friend Charles Eliot Norton that he had been working "at odd times during the winter on a longish, slowish sort of New England idyl which I call The Children of the Summer." When including this letter to Norton in her father's Life in Letters, Mildred Howells appended the editorial comment that this title referred to the work published thirteen years later as The Vacation of the Kelwyns. 2 Howells thus began the novel soon after he had made the first visit in thirty years to the home of his sister. In 1877, while living with her father who was American consul at Quebec City, Annie Howells had married a Canadian poet, journalist and civil servant named Achille Frechette, and had settled in Ottawa, where her husband pursued a long and distinguished career in the translation department of the House of Commons. Although Annie corresponded regularly over the years with her brother and made frequent trips to the States to visit him and his family, Howells had never found the opportunity to visit Ottawa, until 1906. By this time Achille Frechette held the senior civil service post of chief translator of the House of Commons, and he and his wife were among the leading members of the small but cultured professional community in the Canadian capital. As Howells' letters of 1906 reveal, the novelist had a delightful time at his sister's home, meeting various Canadian dignitaries -including the prime mmister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier- and exulting in Annie's distinguished social position. After returning to New York his increasingly dominant mood of retrospection obviously took possession of his imagination, and he set to work on a new novel which hearkened back thirty years to a contrasting period in the lives of his sister, himself and America, a period when the prospects for prosperity and contentment seemed far from certain. In the summer of 1876 the people of the United States found themselves paradoxically celebrating the Centennial of their political independence while their country was in the midst of the most devastating economic recession it had ever experienced. Howells, as editor of the Atlantic Monthly and as a successful novelist, was enjoying personal prosperity, but he could not but be affec.ted by the general atmosphere of uncertainty and gloom. To add to his uneasiness, Howells and his family had to suffer for several weeks the petty discomfort and embarrassment...