On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature (Harvest Book) Paperback – by Alfred Kazin

Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Kazin rounds up the usual suspects in this 1942 survey of American literature. Though many of the authors discussed went on to greater glory and hence more in-depth studies after its publication (Steinbeck, Hemingway, etc.), the book still has its value for students of fiction. This edition contains a new, reflective introduction by the author.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Alfred Kazin has lectured and taught at many prestigious universities in both the U.S. and Europe. His books include A Walker in the City, The Inmost Leaf, and Starting Out in the Thirties.
 
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On Native Grounds
An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature
By Alfred Kazin
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Copyright © 1995 Alfred Kazin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-15-668750-8
CHAPTER 1
THE OPENING STRUGGLE FOR REALISM

"They will have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree; and when it shall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all."

— W. D. HOWELLS

When, early in December of 1891, William Dean Howells surprised his friends and himself by taking over the editorship of the failing Cosmopolitan in New York, he thought it necessary to explain his decision to one of the few friends of his early years surviving in Cambridge, Charles Eliot Norton.

Dear Friend: I fancy that it must have been with something like a shock you learned of the last step I have taken, in becoming editor of this magazine. ... The offer came unexpectedly about the beginning of this month, and in such form that I could not well refuse it, when I had thought it over. It promised me freedom from the anxiety of placing my stories and chaffering about prices, and relief from the necessity of making quantity. ... I mean to conduct the magazine so that you will be willing to print something of your own in it. I am to be associated with the owner, a man of generous ideals, who will leave me absolute control in literature.

Lowell, for whom Howells had been "Dear Boy" even at fifty, and who had corrected his Ohio ways with gentle patronizing humor down the years — though no one could have become more the Bostonian than Howells — had died that year, and Howells now requested from Norton, as Lowell's executor, a poem on Grant Six months later Howells suddenly resigned. The experience had proved an unhappy one. It was the climax to a series of publishing ventures and experiments through which he had passed ever since he had left the Atlantic Monthly in 1881 and taken the literary center of the country with him, as people said, from Boston to New York.

For ten years after leaving Boston — and Howells was perfectly aware of the symbolic effect of his leaving — he had flitted in and out of New York, writing for the Century and Scribner's, conducting a column in Harper's, supporting himself in part by lectures, and growing older and more embittered than his friends and family had ever remembered him. Leaving Boston had been the second greatest decision of his life, as going to Cambridge in 1866 had been the first; and it had not been easy to tear up his roots in the New England world which had given him his chance and beamed upon his aptitudes and his growing fame. Now he could no longer return to that world even to accept the hallowed chair once occupied by Longfellow and Lowell, though it was pleasant to be asked and exhilarating to learn that the self-educated Ohio printer and journalist had become so commanding a figure in American letters. New York excited and saddened him at once; he once wrote to Henry James that it reminded him of a young girl, "and sometimes an old girl, but wild and shy and womanly sweet, always, with a sort of Unitarian optimism in its air." He clung to the city distractedly. "New York's immensely interesting," he had written to a Cambridge friend in 1888, "but I don't know whether I shall manage it; I'm now fifty-one, you know. There are lots of interesting young painting and writing fellows, and the place is lordly free, with foreign touches of all kinds all thro' its abounding Americanism: Boston seems of another planet." To James, whose every letter evoked the great days in Cambridge in the eighteen-seventies when they had dreamed of conquering the modern novel together, he wrote that he found it droll that he should be in New York at all. "But why not?" The weird, noisy, ebullient city, which in his novels of this period resounded to the clamor of elevated trains and street-car strikes, nevertheless suggested the quality of youth; and Howells, old at fifty, delighted in the Bowery, walks on Mott Street, Washington Square, and Italian restaurants. He had strange friends — Henry George lived a street or two away, and they saw each other often; he went to Socialist meetings and listened, as he said, to "hard facts"; he even entertained Russian nihilists. Indeed, he now called himself a Socialist, a "theoretical Socialist and a practical aristocrat." To his father he wrote, in 1890, "but it is a comfort to be right theoretically and to be ashamed of oneself practically."

A great change had come over Howells. The eighteen-eighties, difficult enough years for Americans learning to live in the tumultuous new world of industrial capitalism, had come upon Howells as a series of personal and social disasters. The genial, sunny, conventional writer who had always taken such delight in the cheerful and commonplace life of the American middle class now found himself rootless in spirit at the height of his career. Facile princeps in the popular estimation, the inspiration of countless young writers — was he not a proof that the selfmade artist in America was the noblest type of success? — financially secure, he found that he had lost that calm and almost complacent pleasure in his countrymen that had always been so abundant a source of his art and the condition of its familiar success. To James he could now joke that they were both in exile from America, but acknowledged that for himself it was "the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun; and I suppose I love America less because it won't let me love it more. I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social ideas; but after fifty years of optimistic content with 'civilization' and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality." Never before had he missed that equality in American life; raised upon a casual equalitarianism and a Swedenborgian doctrine in his village childhood whose supernaturalism he had abandoned early for a religion of goodness, he had always taken the endless promise of American life for granted. His own career was the best proof of it, for he had always had to make his own way, and had begun setting type at eight. Now, despite his winning sweetness and famous patience, the capacity for good in himself which had always encouraged him to see good everywhere, his tender conscience and instinctive sympathy for humanity pricked him into an uncomfortably sharp awareness of the gigantic new forces remaking American life. Deep in Tolstoy — "I can never again see life in the way I saw it before I knew him" — he wrote to his sister Anne in November, 1887, that even the fashionable hotel at which he was then staying in Buffalo caused him distress. "Elinor and I both no longer care for the world's life, and would like to be settled somewhere very humbly and simply, where we could be socially identified with the principles of progress and sympathy for the struggling mass. I can only excuse our present movement as temporary. The last two months have been full of heartache and horror for me, on account of the civic murder committed last Friday at Chicago."

The "civic murder" — stronger words than Howells had ever used on any subject — was the hanging of Albert Parsons, Adolf Fischer, George Engle, and August Spies in the Haymarket case. They had been found guilty in an atmosphere of virulent hysteria not — as the presiding justice readily admitted — because any proof had been submitted of their guilt or conspiracy, but because their Anarchist propaganda in Chicago had presumably incited the unknown assassin to throw the bomb that killed several policemen and wounded several more. Howells, who was perhaps as astonished that there were Anarchists in America as he was that legal machinery and public opinion could be mobilized to kill them, exerted himself passionately in their defense. He sought the aid of Whittier and George William Curtis, offered himself to the defendants' counsel, and published a plea for them in the New York Tribune on November 4, 1887. But without avail. "The thing forever damnable before God and abominable to civilized men," as he described the execution to a New York editor, shocked him into furious anger and disappointment. In letter after letter of this period, he poured out his vexation and incredulity. To his father he wrote, soon after the execution: "All is over now, except the judgment that begins at once for every unjust and evil deed, and goes on forever. The historical perspective is that this free Republic has killed five men for their opinions." To his sister, a week later: "Annie, it's all been an atrocious piece of frenzy and cruelty, for which we must stand ashamed forever before history. ... Some day I hope to do justice to these irreparably wronged men." A year later Hamlin Garland, Howells's young Populistic disciple, could joke that Howells had become more radical than he. Garland, who was enthusiastic about Henry George and the single tax, noticed that Howells was lukewarm to it because he did not think it went deep enough. A year after the Haymarket executions, Howells was writing in deep solemnity of the "new commonwealth." "The new commonwealth must be founded in justice even to the unjust, in generosity to the unjust rather than anything less than justice. ... I don't know yet what is best; but I am reading and thinking about questions that carry me beyond myself and my miserable literary idolatries of the past."

Abused by the pack for his stand in behalf of the Anarchists, Howells suddenly found himself in disfavor for other reasons. In those fateful years, 1886–92, when his social views were brought to a pitch of indignation and sympathy he had never known before and was certainly not to retain after 1900, he was conducting a campaign for the realistic novel in the "Editor's Study" column of Harpers. Realism had been his literary faith from his earliest days, his characteristic faith ever since he had known that his profession lay in the commonplace and the average. "Unconsciously I have always been," he wrote once, "as much of a realist as I could." He had absorbed realism from a dozen different sources — the eighteenth-century Italian dramatist Goldoni, the Spanish novelists Benito Galdos and A. Palacio Valdés, Turgenev and Tolstoy, Jane Austen (along with Tolstoy a prime favorite), Daudet, Mark Twain, and Henry James. He had been a practising, virtually an instinctive, realist long before the word had come into popular usage in America — was he not the Champfleury of the novel in America? — and he could say with perfect confidence that realism was nothing more or less than the truthful treatment of material. Bred to a simple, industrious way of life that accepted candor and simplicity and detestation of the hifalutin as elementary principles of democratic life and conduct, he had applied himself happily for twenty years to the portraiture of a happy and democratic society.

Howells had, as Van Wyck Brooks has said, a suspicion of all romantic tendencies, including his own; his interest in sex was always so timid, his prudishness and modesty so compulsive, that he was as incapable of the romanticist's inflation of sex as he was unconcerned with the naturalist's "scientific" interest in it. His interest was in the domesticities of society, homely scenes and values, people meeting on trains, ships, and at summer hotels, lovers on honeymoon, friendly dinners, the furrows of homespun character, housekeeping as a principle of existence, and the ubiquitous jeune file who radiated a vernal freshness in so many of his early novels and whose dictation of American literary taste he accepted, since men notoriously no longer read novels. Howells had therefore no reason to think of realism as other than simplicity, Americanism, and truth. Painters like Tom Eakins and his friend George Fuller — Howells had a strong feeling for painters, architects, mechanics, careful craftsmen of all types — worked in that spirit and wrought what they saw. Could American writers do any less? Was realism any less exciting for working in the commonplace, or less moving? Like Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts, another Yankee craftsman, Howells might have said, "Truth is so rare, it's delightful to tell it." When Matthew Arnold visited America on a celebrated lecture tour to pronounce America lacking in distinction and "uninteresting," William James laughed — "Think of interesting used as an absolute term!" Howells, characteristically, accepted the term gladly. What greater distinction was there than fidelity to the facts of one's lack of "distinction," to the savor and quality and worth of what was abiding and true?

Now, as Howells's views on society deepened, his allegiance to realism, his characteristic feeling for it, took on a new significance. The novel had swiftly and unmistakably, from the late seventies on, become the principal literary genre, and in the wave of renewed interest in the novel which filled the back columns of the serious magazines, Howells's sharp and stubborn defense of realism, seen in the light of his own social novels of this period, made him a storm center. His most ambitious works were disparaged by the romanticists, his judgments as a reviewer ridiculed, and his reputation seriously challenged. Zola, whom Howells had always espoused with lukewarm enthusiasm, could by the middle eighties claim for his work in America a certain tolerance, even a grudging admiration; but Howells, infinitely less dangerous, who never quite understood naturalism and had to the end of his life a pronounced distaste for it, was subjected to extraordinary abuse. One fashionable literary sheet, the Literary World, said as late as 1891 that many of Howells's realistic dicta were "as entertaining and instructive as that of a Pawnee brave in the Louvre." When Howells pleaded with young novelists to stick to life in America as they knew it, Maurice Thompson, a leader of the "romanticists," charged that Howells had said that mediocrity alone was interesting, and "a mild sort of vulgarity the living truth in the character of men and women. ... All this worship of the vulgar, the commonplace and the insignificant," Mr. Thompson whimpered, "is the last stage of vulgarity, hopelessness and decadence."

One reader wrote complainingly to the Atlantic Monthly in 1892 that to read the books Howells recommended was "gratuitously to weaken one's vitality, which the mere fact of living does for most of us in such measure that what we need is tonic treatment, and views of life that tend to hopefulness, not gloom." Eminent critics of the nineties wrote bitterly that they were tired of fiction which wrestled with all the problems of life. F. Marion Crawford, the most successful, intelligent, and cynical of the romanticists, laughed that realists are expected "to be omniscient, to understand the construction of the telephone, the latest theories concerning the cholera microbe, the mysteries of hypnotism, the Russian language, and the nautical dictionary. We are supposed to be intimately acquainted with the writings of Macrobius, the music of Wagner, and the Impressionist school of painting." Howells, who did not know that the attacks upon him were more often attacks upon the naturalism to which his disposition was equally alien, was stung when the romanticists in full pack accused him of triviality and dullness. In November, 1889, he wrote bitterly in Harper's:

When you have portrayed "passion" instead of feeling, and used "power" instead of common sense, and shown yourself a "genius" instead of an artist, the applause is so prompt and the glory so cheap that really anything else seems wickedly wasteful of one's time. One may not make the reader enjoy or suffer nobly, but one may give him the kind of pleasure that arises from conjuring, or from a puppet show, or a modern stage play, and leave him, if he is an old fool, in the sort of stupor that comes from hitting the pipe.

(Continues...)
Excerpted from
On Native Grounds
by
Alfred Kazin
. Copyright © 1995 Alfred Kazin. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; First Edition (April 15, 1995)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 572 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 015668750X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0156687508
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.74 x 5.58 x 1.38 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,921,401 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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