My professor for American Realism and Naturalism was James Colvert, a big jowly fellow who always taught in a suit. He was an older gentleman with some Old School connections. One day he brought to class a man I recall being presented as the last surviving Nashville Agrarian (it must have been Andrew Lytle). I was too dense to appreciate what that meant, just as I was when another professor brought Gwendolyn Brooks to class. Colvert’s obituary reveals that he was in the Air Force during World War II and flew 27 combat missions over Germany. I don’t recall that he ever talked about that experience in class. I do remember that when he was lecturing Dr. Colvert loved to use the word “resonate”, not in the gooey way people use it now (“I can really resonate with that”) but as an emphatic verb to name what a great text can do. If a book was quality, it resonated, by god. He said that word in a growl, shaking his cupped right hand in front of him as though he was personally activating the novel's resonance. The curriculum of that class centered on late 19th century American novels that proudly endeavored to depict life as humans actually live it, “by the light of common day” (I believe that was the phrase), as opposed to the kind of uncommon day where characters can hit nail heads with musket balls from 100 yards and other preposterousnesses that comprise romanticistic fiction. We read Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage (Colvert was a Crane expert), Sister Carrie, McTeague, and I expect some Jack London, too.
And of course, given the subject matter, we had to read the work of William Dean Howells, the paragon of American literary realism. Colvert chose for us what is probably Howells' best-known work, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). The eponymous protagonist, a successful manufacturer of paint, is of humble origins in rural New England, a man both wealthy and coarse, trying to navigate (along with his wife, Persis, and their daughters) life among old, elite Bostonians who regard them as gauche. The novel features two big crises. The first is when Tom Corey (an energetic Brahmin scion who has gone to work for Lapham) falls for one of the Lapham daughters (the clever one) when everybody thought he had his heart set on her sister (the pretty one). The second is when Lapham’s business begins to fail and he scrambles to reverse the collapse. In the end, despite lots of melodramatic consternation, Tom and his beloved Penelope wind up together, and Lapham loses his business and his family’s prosperity but preserves his conscience. That’s the rise of the title: he declines in material wealth and social status but he rises in moral stature. Get it?
The phrase I think of when I recall our study of this novel is "economy of pain." It comes from a scene when the Laphams consult wise Reverend Sewell for his views on what they ought to do about the love triangle. The sisters and their parents seem bent on the idea of all three parties walking away from the entanglement, practicing noble self-denial, embracing tragedy. Sewell calls that idea appalling - what you want is “economy of pain.” Tom and Penelope should marry. That way one person is miserable instead of three, and the one miserable person won’t be that way forever. Pretty utilitarian stuff for a man of God, but Sewell is up-to-here with romantic self-sacrifice, a bogus ideal whose prevalence he attributes to the toxic influence of sentimental fiction like that popular novel Tears, Idle Tears. Famous book. There's a long wait for it at the library. Everybody’s reading it, much to Reverend Sewell's exasperation. I knew the title, and quickly found the well-known Tennyson poem of that name, but it turns out there is no such novel as Tears, Idle Tears. It is the Rochelle Rochelle of The Rise of Silas Lapham, a work that never existed in real life but allows the creator to mock a genre he finds ridiculous without getting in trouble with anyone who actually works in that genre.
On a few other occasions when I have reread a book that was wasted on my much younger self, I have found comedy where I never perceived it before. For example, it turns out that Madame Bovary is hilarious. Well, a lot of it is. I am not here to claim that The Rise of Silas Lapham is a wacky farce about what happens when some monied hicks move to the Back Bay and upset the snobs, but there are some funny bits. I wasn’t far into the book when I recalled one of the running gags: Lapham has marketed his product by painting his company name on rocks throughout New Engand, a landscape defacing form of tackiness that elite Bostonians love to sneer at. This time around I was tickled by Howells’ characterization of Tom’s father, Bromfield Corey, a languid aristocrat dispensing ironic commentary from the comfort of his library, in some ways like Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet. And Penelope Lapham has some of Elizabeth Bennet's wit in her. Upon meeting the Coreys for the first time, she quips to her sister, “You’ve just missed the most delightful call. So easy and pleasant every way. Not a bit stiff! Mrs. Corey was so friendly! She didn't make me feel at all as if she'd bought me, and thought she had paid too much.” Her drolleries are one of the qualities that make Tom fall for her. Unfortunately, some of the novel’s humor has not aged well. Howells has a taste for patronizing “Wives, am I right?” commentary that probably wasn't any funnier in 1885 than it is now. There are quite a few of those passages. I would fast forward past them if I read this book a third time.
One reason I chose this book is that it answers a scarcity in the world of literature that I never noticed until I had been teaching a few years: detailed, complex depictions of the world of business. It's tough to find a businessman protagonist in great literature who isn't a bit like Montgomery Burns. Commentators have noted that when Howells conceived Silas Lapham, the figure of the self-made capitalist was a relative newcomer on the American scene, and what we get is a character who is about as round as round gets I like that Lapham is a paint manufacturer. Paint is good, right? He's not selling pet rocks or guns or patent medicine or financial scams or products made from slave labor. Everybody needs paint, and Lapham is rightfully proud of his business. He works hard and he's faithful to his family. Yes, he's rich and ambitious, but he's no robber baron. Of course that could be because he hasn't yet had a chance to be one. His flaws are genuine. When we first meet him he’s being interviewed for a newspaper profile (in our time it would be for a cover story in Fortune), and Howells uses this interview to introduce the extent to which Lapham has vainly bought in to his own self-made man mythology. Not just vainly but potentially self-destructively. How long before his ego and ambition undercut him? That's the question as Howells engagingly narrates the ins-and-outs of Lapham’s operation of his business. When bad luck and bad decisions bring him to the brink of ruin, he has a chance to make a dirty deal that would save him, a piece of ruthless fraud he would probably get away with. But he can’t bring himself to do it, an ethical struggle that Howells depicts in a strikingly down to earth way: it's an unschooled man's crisis of conscience (with a stalwart wife in his corner). It is not so much an ethical struggle – the right thing to do is obvious – but the struggle we all know of to find our backbone when we’re presented with an easy but corrupt way out of trouble. Lapham plays it straight and he loses everything. The novel's characters who know him recognize and appreciate the ironic "rise" of the title, and he embraces the consolations of having behaved honorably, but those consolations have a lot of work to do in light of the severity of his crash.One of my favorite scenes in The Rise of Silas Lapham is at a dinner party hosted by the Coreys. Beforehand Lapham and Persis, eager but conflicted social climbers at this point, fret about attire and etiquette, wavering between telling themselves that they’re just as good as the elite and quaking in anxiety that they'll embarrass themselves with their cloddishness. After dinner the men (all of them Harvard-educated except for Lapham) retreat to a separate room for cigars. Lapham drinks wine (something he usually avoids) and listens as they talk philosophically about the recent Civil War and the battlefield experience and its place in public memory. There’s lot of highfalutin talk about heroism and patriotism and sacrifice and manly behavior. Lapham (one of only two veterans present) listens and drinks and finally tells, in his plain rural New England speech, the unromanticized story of the battlefield death of one of his soldiers, a friend from his hometown:
He said to me before the last action we went into, 'I should like to turn tail and run, Cap. I ain't comin' out o' this one. But I don't suppose it would do.' 'Well, not for you, Jim,' said I. 'I want to live,' he says; and he bust out crying right there in my tent. 'I want to live for poor Molly and Zerrilla'--that's what they called the little one; I dunno where they got the name. 'I ain't ever had half a chance; and now she's doing better, and I believe we should get along after this.' He set there cryin' like a baby. But he wa'n't no baby when he went into action. I hated to look at him after it was over, not so much because he'd got a ball that was meant for me by a sharpshooter--he saw the devil takin' aim, and he jumped to warn me--as because he didn't look like Jim; he looked like-- all desperate and savage. I guess he died hard.
“The story made its impression”, writes Howells. I love that understated way of saying that the uncouth man's candidly told war experience has hit home with his patrician audience. And then poor Lapham, unaccustomed to alcohol, has another glass, and then another, and then he starts bragging about his success and holding forth on subjects he knows nothing about, and his social triumph becomes an embarrassment. I would not have had the scene end so cringely, but there’s something quite real about it, something of the genuine human complexity that Howells and his cohort were after. It really does resonate.
If I could meet Dr. Colvert again, I’d ask him how the old bomber pilot in him experienced the scene of Silas Lapham telling his truth about the war. I wonder what he would say.
Next: Ben Jonson's Volpone
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