Being a … course, companion, blog, and book.
In our discussion of Whitman earlier this term, we talked about the way in which Ralph Waldo Emerson served as an inspiration and mentor for the young poet in the years before and just after the publication of Leaves of Grass. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman is reputed to have said, “and Emerson brought me to a boil.”
Abraham Cahan
Abraham Cahan also had a mentor: the novelist William Dean Howells. Cahan had come to the United States in 1881 in order to avoid being arrested as a revolutionary in the aftermath of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. A dedicated socialist, Cahan sought to interpret U.S. culture to his fellow immigrants. He had become a fan of Howell’s writing during the 1880s, when Howells was writing a series of novels that addressed the problems of class difference and poverty; in 1889, Cahan delivered a lecture on “Realism” before the New York Labor Lyceum, in which he presented Tolstoy and Howells as practitioners of realism in literature.
Cahan was a “walking delegate,” a union representative seeking to organize sweat-shop workers, and Howells sought him out as part of his research for his Utopian novel A Traveler from Altruria (1892-93). Howells encouraged Cahan to write fiction and sought to help him have his first novel, Yekl, published. Howells’s own publisher rejected the book, saying that “the life of an East-Side Jew wouldn’t interest the American reader.”
One editor wrote to Howells that “our readers want to have a novel about richly-dressed cavaliers and women, about love which begins in the fields while they are playing golf. How can a novel about a Jewish immigrant, a blacksmith who became a tailor here, and whose wife is ignorant interest them?” Cahan later recalled in his autobiography that Howells comforted him by saying that “even though he had the biggest name, cheap trashy novels sold better than Howells’s best works was discouraged, and reviews of his writings showed that the critics had a quite primitive view of literature.” Cahan translated Yekl into Yiddish, and it was published in 1895 in the Arbeiter Zeitung. Howells made a final attempt, submitting the manuscript to D. Appleton, who accepted it. Yekl was published during the summer of 1896, and Howells reviewed it for the New York World.
William Dean Howells
Howells’s review was titled “New York Low Life in Fiction” and paired Cahan’s novel with Stephen Crane’s latest novel, George’s Mother. Printed between the byline and the text was a special sub-headline: “The Great Novelist Hails Abraham Cahan, the Author of ‘Yekl,’ as a New Star of Realism, and Says that He and Stephen Crane Have Drawn the Truest Pictures of East Side Life.” Howells praises Cahan as “a writer of foreign birth who will do honor to American letters, as Boyesen did,” but his review replicates the distinction between “Americans” and Jews that ran through the various editorial rejection letters that Cahan had received. Cahan is a “Russian,” and because “romanticism is not considered literature in Russia, his story is, of course, intensely realistic” just as Crane’s are. Yet, although “the artistic principle which moves both writers is the same,” Howells implies that Cahan’s writing is more poweful because “the picturesque, outlandish material with which Mr. Cahan deals makes a stronger appeal to the reader’s fancy.” Howells adds, “He has more humor than the American, too, whose spare laughter is apt to be grim, while the Russian cannot hide the relish of the comic incidents of his story.” Implicit in Howell’s review is a kind of cultural essentialism, in which many of Cahan’s strengths as a writer are the result of “the far and rich perceptions of his Hebraic race”; Cahan’s English is “marvelous” because it has the “simplicity and purity” of “a man born to write Russian.”
Howell’s praised Cahan’s next book, The Imported Bridgegroom and Other Stories (1898), equally enthusiastically, and he begins his review by asserting that Cahan is a regionalist writer:
Abraham Cahan’s last book, bears the same topographical relation to the East Side of New York that Miss Wilkins’ bears to New England, or Miss Nicholas’ to Indiana, or Miss Bell’s to the South, or Mr. Gray’s to Western New York. No American fiction of the year merits recognition more than this Russian’s stories of Yiddish life, which are so entirely of our time and place, and so foreign to our race and civilization.
Once again, Cahan’s subject is represented as un-American, and much of its interest lies precisely in the fact that it is un-American, that it is “so foreign to our race and civilization.” Like Chesnutt with his conjure stories, Cahan is being praised for treating an “outlandish” subject realistically. The comparison to regionalist writers, who are typically bringing stories about provincial life to the attention of a metropolitan audience, suggests that there is something provincial about the Lower East Side, even though it lies in the heart of one of the oldest districts of the metropolis. Indeed, Howells concludes the review by wondering whether Cahan will ever tackle a truly American subject: “It will be interesting to see whether Mr. Cahan will pass beyond his present environment out into the larger American world , or will master our life as he has mastered our language.”
Cahan would write only one more literary fiction in English, his 1917 novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, which tells the story of the Americanization of a Jewish businessman and was inspired by Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884). Howells called the book an “artistic triumph,” though privately he felt that the book was “too sensual.”
Previously: On Yekl and baseball
Three endings to the same story. First, the ending to William Wyler’s film The Heiress, adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz from their own 1947 stage adaptation of James’s 1880 novel. Olivia de Havilland won an Oscar for her portrayal of Catherine Sloper, the homely daughter of an overprotective father, played by Ralph Richardson. (As in several other categories, The Heiress‘s supporting actor nomination for Richardson lost out to All the King’s Men. Montgomery Clift, for what it’s worth, wasn’t nominated for Best Actor.)
Here’s another take, from the 1997 adaptation of Washington Square directed by Agnieszka Holland and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Ben Chaplin. Just as Clift was, Chaplin seems too handsome in the final scene: I want to see Morris fat and bald. I don’t remember much else about this adaptation — it’s been years since I’ve seen it — except for my impression that it seemed to get the provincialism of 1850s Washington Square North dead on. The parties seemed so small town. In any case, its final scene:
And here’s how the novel ends:
“You treated me badly,” said Catherine.
“Not if you think of it rightly. You had your quiet life with your father–which was just what I could not make up my mind to rob you of.”
“Yes; I had that.”
Morris felt it to be a considerable damage to his cause that he could not add that she had had something more besides; for it is needless to say that he had learnt the contents of Dr. Sloper’s will. He was nevertheless not at a loss. “There are worse fates than that!” he exclaimed, with expression; and he might have been supposed to refer to his own unprotected situation. Then he added, with a deeper tenderness, “Catherine, have you never forgiven me?”
“I forgave you years ago, but it is useless for us to attempt to be friends.”
“Not if we forget the past. We have still a future, thank God!”
“I can’t forget–I don’t forget,” said Catherine. “You treated me too badly. I felt it very much; I felt it for years.” And then she went on, with her wish to show him that he must not come to her this way, “I can’t begin again–I can’t take it up. Everything is dead and buried. It was too serious; it made a great change in my life. I never expected to see you here.”
“Ah, you are angry!” cried Morris, who wished immensely that he could extort some flash of passion from her mildness. In that case he might hope.
“No, I am not angry. Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong. But I can’t talk.”
Morris stood stroking his beard, with a clouded eye. “Why have you never married?” he asked abruptly. “You have had opportunities.”
“I didn’t wish to marry.”
“Yes, you are rich, you are free; you had nothing to gain.”
“I had nothing to gain,” said Catherine.
Morris looked vaguely round him, and gave a deep sigh. “Well, I was in hopes that we might still have been friends.”
“I meant to tell you, by my aunt, in answer to your message–if you had waited for an answer–that it was unnecessary for you to come in that hope.”
“Good-bye, then,” said Morris. “Excuse my indiscretion.”
He bowed, and she turned away–standing there, averted, with her eyes on the ground, for some moments after she had heard him close the door of the room.
In the hall he found Mrs. Penniman, fluttered and eager; she appeared to have been hovering there under the irreconcilable promptings of her curiosity and her dignity.
“That was a precious plan of yours!” said Morris, clapping on his hat.
“Is she so hard?” asked Mrs. Penniman.
“She doesn’t care a button for me–with her confounded little dry manner.”
“Was it very dry?” pursued Mrs. Penniman, with solicitude.
Morris took no notice of her question; he stood musing an instant, with his hat on. “But why the deuce, then, would she never marry?”
“Yes–why indeed?” sighed Mrs. Penniman. And then, as if from a sense of the inadequacy of this explanation, “But you will not despair–you will come back?”
“Come back? Damnation!” And Morris Townsend strode out of the house, leaving Mrs. Penniman staring.
Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy work, had seated herself with it again–for life, as it were.
I plan to write a little bit about that last line for Wednesday. In the meantime, what do you make of the contrasts between these wrap-ups? Which one do you prefer?
Previously on PWHNY.
Tags: James, The Heiress, Washington Square, William Wyler
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