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William Dean Howell’s Indian Summer
Oct. 6th, 2013 08:38 amThe library had a book sale! Most exciting! And more exciting still, while I was perusing the tables full of books (a mere fifty cents a pop), I found a copy of William Dean Howells’ Indian Summer!
William Dean Howells is one of those nineteenth century dynamoes who had fifteen or so different professions. He was ambassador to Italy, editor of the Atlantic monthly, champion of his own brand literary realism, convert to socialism, and popularizer of dozens of young authors, American and otherwise. He particularly liked Russian fiction, Tolstoy and Turgenev (or Tourgeneff, as Howells spells it).
Did he ever sleep? It is entirely possible that the answer is “No.”
In addition to all his other occupations, Howells was an author. As this excellent review of Indian Summer puts it, he wanted “his characters to be honest, ordinary people, as he might find in his strata of society, flawed and well-meaning, good-hearted and self-effacing, bound by the conventions and the restrictions of their day but quietly dreaming of a little local heroism in their souls.”
It’s realism of a sort, but a sort very different from Zola’s: the focus is not on the dramatic miseries of life, but on the everyday. Indian Summer was Howells’ favorite of his own novels.
It’s a meditation on youth and the passing of youth; the main character, Colville, went to Florence in his early twenties to study architecture, left after a failed love affair, and has now returned to Florence after twenty years away. He’s been busy in the intervening years, but he neither pursued architecture nor got married, and there’s a sense that he feels (or fears) the life has passed him by.
Colville goes to Florence looking for direction, and meets two women: Mrs. Bowen, who he knew when they were both young in Florence, and her ward, Imogene Graham.
Howells was a great fan of Jane Austen, and he shares with her the interest in delineating the lives and relationships of a fairly small and select set of characters. But he lacks Austen’s peculiar talent of rendering social rules apparent without spelling them out - I may not always know the nuances of Austen’s characters’ motivations, but the basic outlines are always clear. With Howells, I am sometimes left puzzled because it’s not quite clear why the social rules are making his characters behave in this peculiar manner.
In Indian Summer, for instance, Colville feels that he has led Imogene Graham to believe he loves her, and somehow that means that...he must marry her? He likes her, but he doesn’t love her, and he sees that marrying is a bad idea, but he can’t actually say that because, after all, he led her on, so basically he just has to hope that she’ll realize - on her own, without any help from him - that they should break their engagement.
It’s a classically nineteenth century meditation on the conflict between selfishness, unselfishness, and the misery of badly applied unselfishness. How can things go so terribly wrong when everyone has tried so hard to do right by each other? And how can they break through their own good intentions to find truth and happiness?
It’s a bit difficult to get a hold of; Amazon has a free Kindle edition, but it doesn’t seem to be in many libraries anymore. Still, if it sounds like your cup of tea, it’s well worth looking for. I’ll quote again from the review I linked above, because it sums it up just perfectly: Indian Summer “is gentle and light and kind, a good companion of a novel in times of exile from the thick of life.”
William Dean Howells is one of those nineteenth century dynamoes who had fifteen or so different professions. He was ambassador to Italy, editor of the Atlantic monthly, champion of his own brand literary realism, convert to socialism, and popularizer of dozens of young authors, American and otherwise. He particularly liked Russian fiction, Tolstoy and Turgenev (or Tourgeneff, as Howells spells it).
Did he ever sleep? It is entirely possible that the answer is “No.”
In addition to all his other occupations, Howells was an author. As this excellent review of Indian Summer puts it, he wanted “his characters to be honest, ordinary people, as he might find in his strata of society, flawed and well-meaning, good-hearted and self-effacing, bound by the conventions and the restrictions of their day but quietly dreaming of a little local heroism in their souls.”
It’s realism of a sort, but a sort very different from Zola’s: the focus is not on the dramatic miseries of life, but on the everyday. Indian Summer was Howells’ favorite of his own novels.
It’s a meditation on youth and the passing of youth; the main character, Colville, went to Florence in his early twenties to study architecture, left after a failed love affair, and has now returned to Florence after twenty years away. He’s been busy in the intervening years, but he neither pursued architecture nor got married, and there’s a sense that he feels (or fears) the life has passed him by.
Colville goes to Florence looking for direction, and meets two women: Mrs. Bowen, who he knew when they were both young in Florence, and her ward, Imogene Graham.
Howells was a great fan of Jane Austen, and he shares with her the interest in delineating the lives and relationships of a fairly small and select set of characters. But he lacks Austen’s peculiar talent of rendering social rules apparent without spelling them out - I may not always know the nuances of Austen’s characters’ motivations, but the basic outlines are always clear. With Howells, I am sometimes left puzzled because it’s not quite clear why the social rules are making his characters behave in this peculiar manner.
In Indian Summer, for instance, Colville feels that he has led Imogene Graham to believe he loves her, and somehow that means that...he must marry her? He likes her, but he doesn’t love her, and he sees that marrying is a bad idea, but he can’t actually say that because, after all, he led her on, so basically he just has to hope that she’ll realize - on her own, without any help from him - that they should break their engagement.
It’s a classically nineteenth century meditation on the conflict between selfishness, unselfishness, and the misery of badly applied unselfishness. How can things go so terribly wrong when everyone has tried so hard to do right by each other? And how can they break through their own good intentions to find truth and happiness?
It’s a bit difficult to get a hold of; Amazon has a free Kindle edition, but it doesn’t seem to be in many libraries anymore. Still, if it sounds like your cup of tea, it’s well worth looking for. I’ll quote again from the review I linked above, because it sums it up just perfectly: Indian Summer “is gentle and light and kind, a good companion of a novel in times of exile from the thick of life.”
