Odd Jobs (36 page)

INTRODUCTIONS

T
HOUGH IT PRESENTS
not so broad and conscientiously loaded a canvas as such important Howells novels as
A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham
, and
A Hazard of New Fortunes, Indian Summer
has faded less than most of this author’s immense and once immensely admired oeuvre. It was completed by March of 1884, when the impressions of an extended European trip with his family were fresh in his mind, but was held for sixteen months while
The Rise of Silas Lapham
, composed after
Indian Summer
, ran as a serial in
Century
magazine; accordingly, Howells had more time to polish this novel than he usually allowed himself, and in its text as serialized in
Harper’s Monthly
from July 1885 through February 1886 he found little to improve for book publication. In one inscribed copy of the book, Howells called it “the one
I
like best.” As it happens, I have read
Indian Summer
twice in the last three years, and found it even better on the second reading than at the first. Knowledge of the denouement enhances one’s appreciation of Howells’s foreshadowings and fine shadings. His determined—nay, doctrinaire—fidelity to the inconclusive texture of quotidian life, which can leave his novels diffuse and tepid, here attaches to a colorful locale and a classic situation. The novel examines a sexual triangle, with variations on the Oedipal triangle. Its unity of place, its small cast of characters, its precise evocation of the sights and seasons of Florence, its exceptionally well-honed prose, and something heartfelt in its basic concern with aging combine
to give it the formal concentration whose absence is usually cited as one of Howells’s chief faults.

Indian Summer
is the culmination of Howells’s transatlantic, Jamesian mode. It might be imagined to hold a touch of friendly challenge, of riposte to the narratives of Americans abroad that had brought Henry James his one strong dose of popular success.
Daisy Miller
, when it appeared in
Cornhill Magazine
in 1878, made a considerable sensation, and
Indian Summer
’s young heroine, Imogene Graham, even without the teasing dialogue that openly names James and Howells toward the end of Chapter XIV, would have been recognized as one of Daisy’s sisters, another heartbreakingly uncautious cornfed beauty—an, in James’s phrase, “inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.” Though Howells was six years older than James and during his lifetime came to enjoy the securer hold on the American reading public, he was slower to make his start in fiction, staunchly loyal to James in his capacity of magazine editor, and never averse to learning from other writers. Not only
Daisy Miller
but
The American
(1877) and
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881) may have been in his mind as he settled to the glamorous scenes of
Indian Summer
.

Americans of apparently unlimited means established in foreign apartments; teas and balls in the expatriate community; the rustle of long dresses and insular gossip; exotic customs and colorful native populations gaily viewed from the height of a rattling carriage; meetings in museums; pagan and Catholic monuments somewhat sinisterly redolent in Puritan nostrils—such, since Hawthorne’s
The Marble Faun
, composed a comfortable ground for a romantic novel. Howells was well qualified to write one: he had spent the years of the Civil War as the American Consul in Venice and was a natural cosmopolitan, a learner of languages and a reader of European literature even as a boy in Ohio. What strikes us, however, in
Indian Summer
are its
un
-Jamesian elements, beginning with the American colloquialism of the title. Though Florence and the Italian landscape are described with guidebook thoroughness, it is the fragmentary memories of America that are truly poetic—workaday Des Vaches, Indiana, and its Main Street bridge overlooking a “tawny sweep of the Wabash”; the “untrammelled girlhood” America offers its young females, with strolls and picnics “free and un-chaperoned as the casing air”; and the Spartan New England village of Haddam East Village, whose winter snows still visit the Reverend Mr. Waters in his dreams: “I can still see the black wavering lines of the
walls in the fields sinking into the drifts! the snow billowed over the graves by the church where I preached! the banks of snow around the houses! the white desolation everywhere!” Even the old clergyman’s vanished faith—“pale Unitarianism thinning out into paler doubt”—has in the description an affectionate, nostalgic ring. James’s expatriates rarely strike this note of fond specificity in their memories of the mother country: Fanny Assingham, in
The Golden Bowl
, speaks shudderingly of return to “the dreadful great country, State after State.” Howells’s hero, the dilettante architect Theodore Colville, is credited with the author’s own passionately professional interest in the United States as a site of mental exploration: “It was the problem of the vast, tumultuous American life, which he had turned his back on, that really concerned him.” James’s expatriates are seeking and losing their souls abroad; Howells’s are on holiday.

Nor is the attitude toward the basic issue, the sexual core of romantic maneuver and plot, the same. James regards sex as a force, all right, and concedes it its power to inspire betrayal and social disruption, but he shows little interest in sex itself and little pleasure in tracing its living currents and contradictions; whereas Howells, in spite of the prudery that led him to deplore Chaucer and disdain Dreiser, is fascinated and truthful. The attraction between the forty-one-year-old Colville and the twenty-year-old Imogene is not purely a misunderstanding or piece of folly. Such matings were common enough in an age when men were expected to offer their brides an achieved social substance, and when for respectable women the only permissible sexual experience occurred within marriage. The former could hardly come to the altar too late, or the latter too early.

When Colville, renewing old acquaintance and attending Mrs. Bowen’s soirée, first sees Imogene, dressed in ivory white, he asks his hostess, “Who is that Junoian young person at the end of the room?” Imogene, as their shadow-engagement takes hold, becomes indeed Junoian. She adopts an undeviating stance of cold enmity to her sexual rival, Mrs. Bowen, so recently her surrogate mother, and she begins to explore her new sexual rights with a speed that alarms Colville: “She pulled him to the sofa, and put his arm about her waist, with a simple fearlessness and matter-of-course promptness that made him shudder.” At the basic biological level, a girl of twenty can be a
match
for a man of over forty. Only Colville’s fastidious, facetious distancing and the fortuitous appearance of the attractive young Reverend Morton dampen the spark. Society’s
complicity—Imogene’s mother, it turns out, is prepared to approve the match—combines with Colville’s instincts: “He felt sure, if anything were sure, that something in him, in spite of their wide disparity of years, had captured her fancy, and now in his abasement he felt again the charm of his own power over her. They were no farther apart in years than many a husband and wife; they would grow more and more together; there was youth enough in his heart yet; and who was pushing him away from her, forbidding him this treasure that he had but to put out his hand and make his own.” To an extent of which the author is perhaps unaware, Mrs. Bowen, heaped high though she is with tender epithets, has Juno’s place as the jealous wife forbidding her consort (no Zeus, but a Theodore) his death-defying conquest of a younger woman.

Howells excelled in his portrayals of men in their normal moral indolence. Colville is shown “struggling stupidly with a confusion of desires which every man but no woman will understand.” He passively wallows in polymorphous sexuality as not two but three females compete in lavishing love upon him. The triangle has a fourth corner, the child Effie, whose wish to make him her father exerts the force that tips the balance. The vividness with which this ten-year-old makes her presence felt may be traced to the presence of an actual ten-year-old girl, Howells’s younger daughter, Mildred, on the European trip, of 1882–83, that gave him the refreshed Italian background of
Indian Summer
. If Imogene usurps the consortial love to which Mrs. Bowen feels entitled, Effie seizes the paternal attention for which Imogene pleads when she says: “If I am wrong in the least thing, criticise me, and I will try to be better.… Wouldn’t you like me to improve?”

Colville’s evasive banter is least jarringly tuned to Effie’s prepubescent mentality. An unaccountable gap exists in his masculine make-up—the seventeen celibate and apparently chaste years spent in Des Vaches, with not a whisper of heterosexual involvement, leaving him free to take up his Florentine romance right where he left it, only this time with the alter ego of the original inamorata. Imogene, naïve or not, seems right in divining that Colville’s real love-object is his own youth, and shrewd in offering herself as an embodiment of it: “I want you to feel that
I
am your youth—the youth you were robbed of—given back to you.” Her “sentimental mission” is not misconceived, except in her estimate of Colville’s robustness. She is a match for him, but not he for her.

With all his energy and breadth of interest, there was a nervous delicacy in Howells, a tendency toward depression and breakdown. His novels
invite us to dabble in psychological waters because they are his chosen element, where only partly disclosed elements of his own unresolved psychology float. There is something in process, something not precisely formed about his characters, like—as Dorothy Parker said of the men and women drawn by Howells’s fellow Ohioan James Thurber—“unbaked cookies.” Here the contrast with Henry James tends to be in the other man’s favor, for James’s characters are nothing if not baked—finished, angular, crisp. They jab and scrape against one another where Howells’s characters tend to slide around their oppositions. James had a judgmental sharpness that readily becomes satire. The run-on chatter of his Daisy Miller, for instance, is startling and caricatural and coolly observed and in the end touching. She is full of herself, which makes her courted doom poignant, while Imogene Graham, not quite full and not quite empty, is created to be rescued and consigned to a vague future. Howells’s world may be more lifelike in its ambiguity and inconclusiveness, but James’s feels livelier, for being more aggressively imagined, with more than a glint of snobbery.

Howells’s first imitative enthusiasm was for Heine, and he broke into print—aside from his youthful journalism—as a poet, in
The Atlantic Monthly
. A poet’s light touch and trust in the vagaries of rendering was ever to flavor his approach as a novelist, along with a prose style that remained lucid, nimble, and youthful. Again and again in
Indian Summer
, the felicity of the writing makes us pause in admiration: the brimful inventory of Florentine “traits and facts” at the end of the first chapter; the complex activity of adverbs in such a social image as “some English ladies entered, faintly acknowledging, provisionally ignoring, his presence”; the charming period detail of how the two heroines “stood pressing their hands against the warm fronts of their dresses, as the fashion of women is before a fire”; Colville’s first appraisal of Mrs. Bowen with its culminating simile: “She had, with all her flexibility, a certain charming stiffness, like the stiffness of a very tall feather.” The ubiquitous horses of this premotorized Italy are observed with a sympathy that readies us for the novel’s only incident of physical violence. Colville, having just appraised Mrs. Bowen, notices how the cab that takes her away is pulled by a “broken-kneed, tremulous little horse, gay in brass-mounted harness, and with a stiff turkey feather stuck upright at one ear in his headstall.” In the line of cabs at Madame Uccelli’s, “the horses had let their weary heads droop, and were easing their broken knees by extending their forelegs while they drowsed.” When the horses bringing them
back from their tense journey to Fiesole bolt at the sight of a herd of black pigs, and drag the carriage off the road, it is as if the abused equine species at last claims its revenge.

The natural world with its animal surges is not far from these prim drawing rooms. In the aftermath of a heated exchange between Imogene and Mrs. Bowen, “They looked as if they had neither of them slept; but the girl’s vigil seemed to have made her wild and fierce, like some bird that has beat itself all night against its cage, and still from time to time feebly strikes the bars with its wings.” In contrast, “Mrs. Bowen was simply worn to apathy.” The moods of these two competing women, caught in the entangling wraps of genteel late-Victorian propriety and social duty, are beautifully searched out, and their differences in social wisdom and natural vitality scrupulously kept in account. Howells feels sufficiently master of the feminine heart to dare present, as in the fine tenth chapter, conversation between the two of them, in female intimacy. On the level of manners, Imogene is a Mrs. Bowen in bud, an apprentice society woman, and Colville, as a specimen man, the somewhat erratic instrument of her education: