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Howells's Obscure Hurt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
‘ Every loyal American who went abroad during the first years of our great war felt bound to make himself some excuse for turning his back on his country in the hour of her trouble ’, wrote W. D. Howells in 1881. It is a striking coincidence in American literary history that four major writers of the late nineteenth century – Howells, Henry James, S. L. Clemens, and Henry Adams – all failed to serve in the Civil War. Whether or not they believed that they had turned their backs on their country, each made some excuse in his published work. The most notorious is Henry James's statement in Notes of a Son and Brother that ‘ a horrid even if an obscure hurt ’ had prevented him from volunteering to fight.
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References
1 A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories (Boston: Osgood, 1881), p. 3Google Scholar. Other quotations are documented in the text.
2 There are several studies of the attitudes of these writers towards the Civil War. The most recent and comprehensive treatment is in Aaron, Daniel's excellent The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1973). chs. 6–9Google Scholar. Earlier discussions of Howells and the War are: Parks, Edd Winfield, ‘A Realist Avoids Reality: W. D. Howells and the Civil War Years’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 52 (1953), 93–7Google Scholar; and Wagenknecht, Edward, William Dean Howells: The Friendly Eye (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 210–12Google Scholar. Wagenknecht also considers Howells's general attitude toward war.
3 Quoted in Edel, Leon, Henry James: The Untried Years (New York: Lippincott, 1953), p. 173Google Scholar. For a penetrating psychological analysis of James's war guilt, see Rosenzweig, Saul, ‘The Ghost of Henry James: Revised, with a Postscript, 1962’ in Modern Criticism: Theory and Practice, eds. Sutton, Walter and Foster, Richard (New York: Odyssey, 1963), pp. 401–16Google Scholar.
4 Cady, Edwin H., The Road to Realism: The Early Years 1837–1885 of William Dean Howells (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956), p. 89Google Scholar. See pp. 54–60 for a discussion of Howells's neuroricism.
5 Cady, p. 89.
6 Years of My Youth (1916), ed. Nordloh, David J. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 201Google Scholar.
7 Letter of 26 May 1861. All Howells MS. material is quoted by permission of the Harvard College Library and William White Howells for the heirs of the Howells Estate. No re-publication may be made without the same permissions. In a draft of Years of My Youth Howells gave another version of his non-enlistment: ‘But with varying accesses of irresolution I still thought of volunteering, and one night, as Price and I sat waiting for the latest despatches, I was in question so extreme that I said to my fellow-editor, “Price, if you will volunteer, I will.” “ Well,” he answered, “I won't,” and that, for such reason as it was, seemed to close the question. If in all this I seem to be accusing myself, it is only partially an appearance; I am also excusing the innumerable majority of my contemporaries who also failed to volunteer’ (p. 404). This passage was deleted by Howells before publication.
8 Aaron, p. 122.
9 Years of My Youth, pp. 200–1.
10 This distinction is implicit also in Howells's review of John W. DeForest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty: ‘Our war has not only left us the burden of a tremendous national debt, but has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely. Every author who deals in fiction feels it to be his duty to contribute towards the payment of the accumulated interest in the events of the war, by relating his work to them; and the heroes of young-lady writers in the magazines have been everywhere fighting the late campaigns over again, as young ladies would have fought them. We do not say that this is not well, but we suspect that Mr. De Forrest [sic] is the first to treat the war really and artistically’ (Atlantic Monthly, 20 [07 1867], 121)Google Scholar.
11 Quoted in Cady, p. 73.
12 Poems (Boston: Osgood, 1873), p. 133Google Scholar.
13 Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Howells, Mildred (New York: Doubleday-Doran, 1928), 1, 33Google Scholar.
14 Letter of 22 May 1861.
15 A Foregone Conclusion (Boston: Osgood, 1875), p. 3Google Scholar. Other quotations are documented in the text.
16 Lynn, Kenneth, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 229, 232Google Scholar.
17 Life in Letters, I, 60.
18 ‘A Difficult Case’ in A Pair of Patient Lovers (New York: Harper, 1901), p. 160Google Scholar.
19 The Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Meserve, Walter J. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), pp. 200–4Google Scholar. Other quotations are documented in the text.
20 Poems, pp. 134–5. ‘The Two Wives’ was inspired by the actual experience of Colonel, later General, John Grant Mitchell during the battle for Atlanta in 1864. Mitchell was married to Laura Platt, a cousin of Elinor Howells.
21 See Carter, Everett, Howells and the Age of Realism (New York: Lippincott, 1954), p. 231Google Scholar. Carter states that Gearson dies ‘miserably in Cuba’, but this location is his interpolation.
22 As Editha watches George's train depart, she reflects, ‘What she called her God … would watch over him and keep him and bring him back to her. If with an empty sleeve, then he should have three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be his for life. She did not see, though, why she should always be thinking of the arm his father had lost’ (p. 138).
23 ‘Editha’ in Between the Dark and the Daylight (New York: Harper, 1907), p. 139Google Scholar. Other quotations are documented in the text.
24 Quoted in Wagenknecht, p. 208.