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

The first time that I lectured on Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in Writing New York, I worked from the Bedford Cultural Edition, despite the fact that we’d elected to order a cheaper Signet paperback edition for the students to use.

I wanted to show the students how Crane made use of dialect in the novella, and I wanted to highlight the tension between the novel’s “naturalism” and Crane’s fanciful, almost expressionist, use of color imagery.

I began talking about the first paragraph, as it appears in the Bedford edition:

A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.

His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.

“Run, Jimmie, run! Dey’ll get yehs,” screamed a retreating Rum Alley child.

“Naw,” responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, “dese micks can’t make me run.”

Howls of renewed wrath went up from Devil’s Row throats. Tattered gamins on the right made a furious assault on the gravel heap. On their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus.

The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other side. His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features wore a look of a tiny, insane demon.

On the ground, children from Devil’s Row closed in on their antagonist. He crooked his left arm defensively about his head and fought with cursing fury. The little boys ran to and fro, dodging, hurling stones and swearing in barbaric trebles.

From a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman. Some laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and regarded the fight. The engineer of a passive tugboat hung lazily to a railing and watched. Over on the Island, a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a building and crawled slowly along the river’s bank.

A stone had smashed into Jimmie’s mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel. His roaring curses of the first part of the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter.

In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil’s Row children there were notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery. The little boys seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood upon the other child’s face.

I finished reading, glanced up, and saw that the students had puzzled looks on their faces. It was then that I suddenly remembered that there were two versions of Maggie: the original version that Crane had published himself in 1893 and the version published by D. Appleton in 1896, which was altered to make it more palatable (or so it was thought) to the general public.

Here’s what the students had in front of them:

A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row, who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him.

His infantile countenance was livid with the fury of battle. His small body was writhing in the delivery of oaths.

“Run, Jimmie, run! Dey’li git yehs!” screamed a retreating Rum Alley child.

“Naw,” responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, “dese mugs can ‘t make me run.”

Howls of renewed wrath went up from Devil’s Row throats. Tattered gamins on the right made a furious assault on the gravel heap. On their small convulsed faces shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus.

The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other side. His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features looked like those of a tiny insane demon.

No “great, crimson oaths.” Among the things that Crane edited out of the 1896 edition was much of the color imagery that I wanted to discuss! Let’s just say that I had to adapt my planned discussion quickly on the fly! The following year, we adopted the Bedford edition, which has the virtue not only of using the 1893 text, but also of providing useful contextual materials including pieces by Jacob Riis that we would assign in addition to Maggie in subsequent years.

The biggest change between the two versions is the omission from the 1896 of the “huge fat man in torn greasy garments” who approaches Maggie at the end of Chapter 17, the last time that she is portrayed alive in the novella. Readers of the 1893 text have often taken the text’s focus on this unsavory character to imply that he is eventually involved in Maggie’s death. In his absence, the 1896 text suggests that Maggie’s death is a suicide rather than a murder.

I offer this anecdote up as an interesting moment in the history of American literary naturalism and a cautionary tale to instructors who order editions of texts that differ from the ones that they’ve been used to using. Sometimes the new texts have been reset and re-paginated; at other times, as I discovered, there can be more significant problems. Best to discover those somewhere other than the lecture podium!

In Theodore Winthrop’s novel Cecil Dreeme, Washington Square is rechristened “Ailanthus Square,” and NYU makes its appearance as “Chrysalis College.” The name is apt: in 1862, when Winthrop published his novel, the university was only 31 years old and still in its infancy, still a chrysalis, not yet the butterfly that it aspired to become.

And it did have big aspirations, which the novel gently mocks. Our narrator, Robert Byng, has decided to accept his friend Harry Stillfleet’s invitation to borrow his digs in the Chrysalis College’s Gothic building while Stillfleet is out of the country.:

“There I live,” said [Stillfleet]. “It’s not a jail, as you might suppose from its grimmish aspect. Not an Asylum. Not a Retreat. No lunatics, that I know of, kept there, nor anything, mysterious, or out of the way.”

“Chrysalis College, is it not?”

“You have not forgotten its monastic phiz?”

“No; I remember the sham convent, sham castle, modern-antique affair. But how do you happen to be quartered there? Is the College defunct?”

“Not defunct; only without vitality. The Trustees fancied that, if they built roomy, their college would be populous; if they built marble, it would be permanent; if they built Gothic, it would be scholastic and medieval in its influences; if they had narrow, mullioned windows, not too much disorganizing modern thought would penetrate.”

“Well, and what was the result?”

“The result is, that the old nickname of Chrysalis sticks to it, and whatever real name it may have is forgotten. There it stands, big, battlemented, buttressed, marble, with windows like crenelles; and inside they keep up the traditional methods of education.”

“But pupils don’t beleaguer it?”

“That is the blunt fact. It stays an ineffectual high-low school. The halls and lecture-rooms would stand vacant, so they let them to lodgers.”

“You are not very grateful to your landlords.”

“I pay my rent, and have a right to criticize.”

“Who lives there besides you?”

“Several artists, a brace of young doctors, one or two quiet men about town, Churm, and myself.”

The novel reminds us that NYU was part of the artistic culture of Greenwich Village from close to its beginnings, that its Gothic main building was at least in part a Bohemian space. The Gothic building was replaced in 1892 by the present structure, first called Main Building, recently renamed Silver Center.

Of course, Stillfleet’s comment — “No lunatics, that I know of, kept there, nor anything, mysterious, or out of the way.” — proves, by the novel’s end, to be deeply ironic. But the description of NYU as an “ineffectual high-low school” cuts pretty close to home — arguably, it was an apt description of NYU when I arrived in 1993. Now, I’d argue, NYU has metamorphosed into something else, and I fully expect that in its incarnation as a “global network university,” it will finally emerge from its chrysalis and become the butterfly it has always wanted to be. But we might keep in mind Winthrop’s comments about the building “roomy”: just building it isn’t enough. A cautionary tale, from one century to another.

Greetings to all vWNYers from the pink city of Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan in India. My family and I are spending NYUAD’s Eid al-Adha break in India. Sorry for missing m post last Wednesday when we were on our way to Delhi. I’ll do a make-up at some point.

Meanwhile, it’s very odd to be thinking about Theodore Winthrop’s (1862) novel Cecil Dreeme while I’m nine-and-half time zones away from New York, because it’s always seemed to me to be such a local novel. Such an NYU novel. It’s set, after all, in a lightly fictionalized version of Washington Square. Winthrop calls it “Ailanthus Square,” because Of the ailanthus trees planted there. Henry James refers to the tree in one of our favorite paragraphs from his novel Washington Square (1880), which we will be reading later in the term:

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare–the look of having had something of a social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step, and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailanthus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.

The trees make another appearance late in the book, when the protagonist’s aunt looks out her window on a July evening and thinks about the countryside.

In It Happened on Washington Square, Emily Kies Folpe notes that “only one very large ailanthus tree now remains in the Square, near the edge of the dog run.” (I’m assuming it has survived the renovation!) She adds, however, that the plant is stubborn and that “numerous others shoot up like weeds in courtyards and cracks of sidewalks all around the village.”

But here’s the rub, which makes my present vantage point a little less incongruous: the Ailanthus is actually native to Asia and Australia. (The Indian version is Ailanthus excelsa, but the most common variety is Ailanthus altissima, native to China and known as the “Tree of Heaven.” In North America, it’s considered an invasive species. Apparently, it was introduced to the U.S. in 1784 by a gardener in Philadelphia and, because it’s such a hardy plant, it was introduced into industrial cities like New York in the early nineteenth-century. [Click here for a fascinating article about the tree by Shiu Ying Hu.]

Bryan’s already posted about the novel, and we’ll have more to say about it later in the week.

[The picture of the University Building at the head of this post is from a watercolor and engraving by A.J. Davis, c. 1833. [For more information, click here. The illustration accompanying the quote from Washington Square is an 1881 lithograph. The view is roughly from the south, and you can see University Building and next to it the Southern Dutch Reform Church at the right. I'd like to think that it pictures Ailanthus trees. For more information, click here.]