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Reality and Actuality in the March Family Narratives of W. D. Howells
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
When William Dean Howells was preparing the Library edition of his works in 1909, he gathered together four of the stories in which the March family had appeared and laid them aside with the hope of publishing them in one volume. In his preface to this collection, which was never in fact published, Howells thanked Isabel and Basil March for the part they had played in nine of his stories. He also supplied the reader with a suggestion as to how he dealt with the problem of actuality and reality in the novel, which it is the purpose of this paper to explore.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959
References
Mr. and Mrs. March, who appear and reappear in the stories forming this volume, and lend them such unity as they have, are the Basil and Isabel who were the easily imagined hero and heroine of my first mature fiction, Their Wedding Journey. I had always a liking for them, perhaps because they always lent themselves so willingly to my purpose as witnesses of the events in which they were seldom afterward prominent actors. They came to the end of their usefulness by a sort of superannuation in Their Silver Wedding Journey, but they are still alive in my fancy, and are mainly retired from active service because I had come to realize that some of my readers did not share my affection for them. I will not attempt to persuade their love here, while I protest my own as justly founded in the amiable qualities of these characters.2
1 It has been suggested that Howells may have taken the names Isabel and Basil from the title of Keats's poem, “Isabella, or The Pot of Basil.” It is also possible that a painting, “The Pot of Basil” (John W. Alexander), presented to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by Longfellow's son, may have suggested to Howells the names of his hero and heroine. March was borrowed from the name of Francis Andrew March, professor of philology at Lafayette College (letter to me from Miss Mildred Howells).
2 “Howells's Unpublished Prefaces,” ed. George Arms, New England Quart., xvii (Dec. 1944), 585–586.
3 New York, 1920, p. 2.
4 New York, 1916, p. 178.
5 Their Wedding Journey (Dec. 1871), p. 3. In the Atlantic (XXVIII, 30) we are told, merely, that the Marches left their home in Boston during “that terrible storm of last June.” When Their Wedding Journey appeared in book form late in 1871, the exact date was substituted. That Howells had an actual storm in mind is suggested by the description of such a storm by Horace C. Hovey, “The Hail-storm of June 20th, 1870,” American Journal of Science and Arts, l (1870), 403–404.
6 New York, 1911, p. v.
7 “The Shadow of a Dream,” Harper's Monthly, LXXX (April 1890), 772.
8 The other 2 stories recounted by Basil March are The Shadow of a Dream and “A Circle in the Water.”
9 Quotations from A Pair of Patient Lovers are from Harper's Monthly, Vol. xcv (Nov. 1897).
10 Unpublished letter, Houghton Library, Harvard.
11 Howells told of this trip in “Niagara First and Last,” in The Niagara Book (Buffalo, 1893). See also Pt. I, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York, 1900).
12 Quotations from Their Wedding Journey are from the Atlantic, Vol. xxviii (July–Dec., 1871).
A newspaper clipping (paper unnamed and undated) in the Howells Collection, Houghton Library, comments on a water color by Elinor Gertrude Mead, and says of the artist, she “was born in Chesterfield in 1837. She went to Brattleboro with her parents in 1839. Her father was Larken G. Mead, sr, who practiced law in Chesterfield a number of years before going to Brattleboro. Elinor Mead married William Dean Howells, in 1862, when he was United States consul at Venice.”
13 Quotations from A Chance Acquaintance are from the Atlantic, Vol. xxxi (Jan., 1873).
14 The year was 1862. In Niagara Revisited Basil was 42 and the date of the tale was June 1882.
15 Quotations from The Shadow of a Dream are from Harper's Monthly, Vol. lXXX (March, April, May 1890).
16 The fact that the Howellses were next-door neighbors to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on Beacon Street between 1884 and 1888 makes one suspect that Howells is here telling a tale suggested to him in his conversations with Holmes. The words with which Basil described Dr. Wingate might be used as well by Howells of Dr. Holmes: “I never saw him, with the sunny, simple-hearted, boyish smile he had, without feeling glad; and it seemed to me that he liked me, too.” Holmes's interest in the use of abnormal psychology, as shown in his novel A Mortal Antipathy, is reflected in this story, the most tragic, as well as the richest in neurotic implications, that Howells ever wrote. Basil found in Dr. Win-gate “a sympathy for human suffering unclouded by sentiment, and a knowledge of human nature at once vast and accurate, which fascinated me far more than any forays of the imagination in that difficult region.” Howells here shows his own growing interest in the knowable truth about our subconscious minds, an interest which he attributed to Basil, who was no longer the romantic observer of other people's love affairs.
17 Cf. Edward Bellamy, The Religion of Solidarity, ed. Arthur E. Morgan (New York, 1944). For a discussion of “complicity,” see Introd., Representative Selections, William Dean Howells, Clara M. and Rudolf Kirk (New York, 1950), pp. cxiii–cxiv.
18 “Niagara Revisited, Twelve Years After Their Wedding Journey,” Atlantic, li (May 1883), 609; repub. as a separate pamphlet in 1884. See Clara M. Kirk, “Niagara Revisited,” Columbia Library Columns, vii, ii (Feb., 1958), 5–13.
19 Quotations from “A Circle in the Water” will be found in Scribner's, Vol. xvii (March, April 1895).
20 Tedham had just been released from prison, where he had served a 10-year term. When he entered prison we know that Tom and Bella were born, for Isabel reminded Basil that at that time Tedham “tried to put suspicion on your wife and children.” The crime, then, was committeed in 1875, and the year of the release was 1885. Since Bella was born in 1873, the crime might have been committed, of course, any time after that date. For want of further evidence, however, we accept Basil's word that the crime took place 10 years before the telling of the tale in 1895.
21 In Ch. ii Bella “threw her arms round his neck with the exuberance of her fourteen years”; in Ch. xii, Basil said to Lindau, “It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, but I've got a son nearly as old.” Since Bella was born in 1873 and Tom in 1871, the children are 14 and 16 at the opening of the novel, which was, then, 1887. In the 19 October 1889 issue of Harper's Weekly (xxxiii, 830), Basil remarked to Isabel, “Here I am, well on my way to fifty.” Quotations from A Hazard are from Harper's Weekly, Vol. xxxiii (March–Nov. 1889).
22 Fulkerson, on the opening page of A Hazard, spoke of having met Mr. and Mrs. March and their children on the Quebec boat. The trip must have been the one described in Niagara Revisited, and the date 1882, since this is the only journey taken by the Marches with the children. Fulkerson was never mentioned in any earlier account of the Marches at Niagara; in the final chapter of A Hazard we are told that Fulkerson took his bride to Niagara on the same boat on which he had met the Marches.
23 Fulkerson's reference to “the principle of cooperation” might have been suggested to the author by Gronlund's Cooperative Commonwealth, which Howells had recently reviewed for Harper's Monthly, LXXVI (April 1888), 801.
24 The Howellses retained their house in Boston until 1889. They returned to Boston in December 1889, and remained there until their final move to New York in 1891. Howells actually signed his contract with Harper's in 1885; when he wrote, in the opening chapter of A Hazard, that the Marches' point of view was singularly unchanged, and “their impressions of New York remained the same that they had been fifteen years before.” In 1870 the Howellses had visited New York while on Their Wedding Journey.
25 See “The Street Railroad Strike in New York,” Harper's Weekly, xxxiii (9 Feb. 1889), 102–103; also “How the Police Handle a Strike,” ibid., p. 107.
26 When Isabel said firmly, “We are Unitarians” (The Shadow of a Dream and “A Circle in the Water”), she was probably reflecting the religious leanings of the Howellses before they left Boston. Howells' interest in religion was strong from the days when his grandfather talked with him of Quakerism and his father of Swedenborgianism. Howells' son John told me in 1951 that Howells used to attend the Congregational Church in Kittery, Maine. We know that Howells was buried from the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in New York. In an editorial on Howells, which appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle of 11 May 1920, the anonymous writer reported, “He joined the Church of the Carpenter in Boston, in an effort to exalt the life of Jesus above the creeds of the churches.” According to Bishop Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr., of the Diocese of Massachusetts, there is no record of the confirmation of Howells in the Church of the Carpenter, which was an Episcopal mission. He had, however, attended the services of the Church of the Carpenter and had associated with the group of men who were from 1889 to 1891 advocating Christian Socialism. These men included W. D. P. Bliss, Lawrence Gronlund, Edward Bellamy, R. Heber Newton, Hamlin Garland, and E. D. Hale. See the forthcoming article by Clara M. and Rudolf Kirk, “Howells and the Church of the Carpenter,” New England Quart. (March 1959).
27 See John K. Reeves, “The Way of a Realist: A Study of Howells' Use of the Saratoga Scene,” PMLA, LXV (Dec. 1950), 1035–52. Howells made 3 known visits to Saratoga, the first in August 1887, the second in August 1890, and the third in July 1894. Reeves draws a parallel between the Marches and the Howellses and indicates that Howells was basing his realism on his own experience.
28 Quotations from An Open-Eyed Conspiracy are from Century, Vol. LII (July–Oct. 1896).
29 Kendrick, in discussing the ages of the Marches with Miss Gage, guessed that “they must be nearly fifty” (Ch. xii). Basil remarked, referring to young Kendricks, “The difference between his objective sense and my subjective sense was the difference between his twenty-seven years and my fifty-two” (Ch. xvii). Though we know from A Hazard that Kendricks was 27 years old, we realize that Basil was in his 50th year in 1889. Howells, however, was 52 when he was writing A Hazard and it is himself, rather than Basil, of whom he was thinking when he wrote An Open-Eyed Conspiracy, and imagined himself back in the earlier period.
30 Quotations from Their Silver Wedding Journey are from Harper's Monthly, Vols. xcviii–c (Jan.–Dec. 1899).