Book Review: The Coast of Bohemia
Oct. 1st, 2021 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerCharmian looked at her gloomily. “You strange creature!” she murmured. “But I love you,” she added aloud. “I simply idolize you!”
Cornelia said, half-laughing, “Don't be ridiculous,” and pulled herself out of the embrace which her devotee had thrown about her. But she could not help liking Charmian for seeming to like her so much.”
I read William Dean Howells’ The Coast of Bohemia years ago, but inexplicably didn’t post about it at the time, but I reread it this week and now I intend to make up for lost time.
The thing to understand about this book is that it is braided from three parts, two of which are delightful and one of which is the plot. The delightful parts are the parts about our heroine Cornelia’s life at art school at the Synthesis in New York, and her friendship with her fellow art student Charmian, who in their very first conversation informs Cornelia, “It must have been your pride that fascinated me at the first glance. Do you mind my being fascinated with you?”
Cornelia does not mind Charmian being fascinated with her, although she doesn’t exactly return the fascination. This does not in the least deter Charmian, who has decided that Cornelia is her beau ideal and spends the rest of the book adoring her.
The first time she visits Cornelia in her rooms, for instance, “Charmian pushed impetuously in. She took Cornelia in her arms and kissed her, as if they had not met for a long time.”
(It should be noted that they saw each other just the day before at the Synthesis.)
Then, the first time that Cornelia visits Charmian at her home, “The man held aside the portière for [Cornelia] to pass, but before she could pass there came a kind of joyous whoop from within, a swishing of skirts toward her, and she was caught in the arms of Charmian, who kissed her again and again, and cried out over her goodness in coming.”
Charmian, you will perhaps be unsurprised to learn, has fitted out one room in the luxurious apartment where she lives with her stepmother to look like her ideal of a bohemian artist’s studio, complete with stretching a cunningly painted sheet diagonally down from the ceiling so that the room looks like a garret. It seems to me that Charmian has missed her mark in trying to become a painter (she is, as she cheerfully admits, not very talented in that line), and ought to attempt set design and costuming.
Around here, however, the plot begins to intrude, and by plot I of course mean Cornelia’s romance. Charmian’s stepmother hires a painter, Ludlow, to paint Charmian’s portrait, and as Ludlow is a friend and mentor of Cornelia’s, he suggests Cornelia should paint Charmian too.
The first time I read this book I groaned and settled in for the love triangle, but in fact there is no love triangle at all: Ludlow’s affections remain fixed on Cornelia, and Charmian is totally uninterested in Ludlow, possibly because she’s just uninterested in men all around. As she comments earlier in the book, upon observing a spoony engaged couple, “I shouldn't care for the engagement… That would be rather horrid. But if you were in love, to feel that you needn't hide it or pretend not to be! That is life!”
(I leave it to the reader’s discretion whether Charmian “I love you! I simply idolize you!” Maybough has ever hidden a feeling in her life.)
Anyway, Charmian is thrilled with the romance of it all when Ludlow fails to paint a good portrait of Charmian - because he keeps accidentally making her look like Cornelia. A surefire sign that a painter is in love!
Cornelia, on the other hand, paints a beautiful portrait of Charmian, and Ludlow acknowledges, “She could have a career; she could be a painter of women's portraits. A man's idea of a woman, it's interesting, of course, but it's never quite just; it's never quite true; it can't be. Every woman knows that, but you go on accepting men's notions of women, in literature and in art, as if they were essentially, or anything but superficially, like women.”
Howells is quite aware that this applies to his own writing, too, although it has to be said that he does a far better job of capturing Charmian than Ludlow does. “At first, when I wanted to do her as Humbug, you wouldn't stand it, and now, when I've done her as Mystery, you laugh,” Ludlow complains to Cornelia, who does indeed just laugh at him: she’s been painting Charmian as a human being, with charms and faults, rather than an abstract representation of anything, and that is why Cornelia’s portrait is so good (and why Howells’ portrait is so loveable).
And Cornelia, too, is lovely - outside of the Ludlow/Cornelia romance, wherein she is so trapped by 19th century romantic conventions that she spends most of the book actively fighting against her love of Ludlow. Not because it would get in the way of her artistic career; the book touches on this fact, but it’s not Cornelia’s motivation. She’s acting on a sense of delicacy so very delicate that she thinks she’s unworthy of Ludlow because an odious traveling salesman once courted her. They were not engaged! She was not in love! The fact that he paid court to her and she did not repulse him is, in itself, enough.
Of course Ludlow finds out about this amour in the worst way possible, when said traveling salesman sends him a note that insinuates that Cornelia is far more compromised than she is. Cornelia decides that it is impossible! incompatible with her honor! to clear up the misunderstanding! Charmian solemnly upholds her in this choice.
“Now—now—we can live for each other, Cornelia. You will outlive this. You will be terribly changed, of course; and perhaps your health may be affected; but I shall always be with you from this on. I have loved you more truly than he ever did, if he can throw you over for a little thing like that. If I were a man I should exult to ignore such a thing. Oh, if men could only be what girls would be if they were men! But now you must begin to forget him from this instant—to put him out of your mind—your life,” Charmian exults. “We will take a little flat like two newspaper girls that I heard of, and live together. We will get one down-town, on the East Side.”
But then Ludlow comes round the next morning to clear up the misunderstanding, and Charmian (who really as an excellent wingwoman, quite against her own interests) keeps him around, talking to him about how Cornelia is SO wonderful and truthful and just the soul of honesty, until Cornelia herself comes in and they talk the thing over and Ludlow says what the reader has been screaming all along, which is that the traveling salesman doesn’t matter a bit.
So they marry! Happy end! At least as long as you were not deeply invested in Cornelia’s artistic career, which may or may not continue. The woman’s career ends, the book notes, “in most of the many cases where artists had married artists,” but Ludlow “held that it had happened through the man's selfishness and thoughtlessness, and not through the conditions.” Will Cornelia beat the odds? Who knows!
But one thing is certain: Cornelia's friendship with Charmian will continue. When the honeymooners return to New York, Charmian throws them a real bohemian supper, although she complains that her stepmother ruined it by taking the ladies away to coffee instead of leaving them to smoke with the men. “I should—if I could only have seen Cornelia Ludlow smoking—I should have been willing to die. And now—now, I'm afraid she's going to be perfectly respectable!”
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Date: 2021-10-01 06:36 pm (UTC)It sounds like Charmian doesn't feel particularly jealous of or threatened by Ludlow, which is interesting, especially in the contrast to similar situations in other books (without spoilery details, the bit about the misunderstanding reminds me a little of something that happens in Broster's The Wounded Name, which is... difficult about this kind of thing).
And the thoughts on art and men writing women are also interesting—unusual to see a male author of the period being so self-aware about that, and both Cornelia and Charmian do sound like female characters very much worth reading about.
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Date: 2021-10-01 08:14 pm (UTC)Charmian at some level seems to revel in the one-sidedness of her feelings for Cornelia, which may be why she's not jealous of Ludlow: she can worship Cornelia just as well after Cornelia gets married, after all. And she loves getting a ringside seat to the drama
And yes, Howells' thoughts about Men Portraying Women are so interesting! People often seem to think that no one ever considered the question until Virginia Woolf wrote A Room with a View, but here's Howells musing about it (only briefly) thirty years earlier. I think these things are often in the cultural air, so to speak, much earlier than later generations realize, and often when people say that creators are "ahead of their time," they're actually expressing something that was very much of their time.
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Date: 2021-10-01 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 08:50 pm (UTC)IMO Howells is an interesting figure because he is a progressive - he wrote Abraham Lincoln's campaign biography, worked for fifteen years at The Atlantic Monthly (which published things like Thomas Wentworth Higginson's articles during the Civil War about his work with one of the first Black regiments), wrote a socialist utopian novel, etc. Benjamin Brawley, in his 1921 book The Negro in Literature and Art, comments that "Such an artist as Mr. Howells, for instance, has once or twice dealt with the problem [of presenting Black characters as humans rather than stereotypes in excellent spirit" (which really shows the paucity of the competition tbh, because the Howells' works I have read in this line were not inspiring).
But he's also absolutely at the center of the literary establishment of his day: he knew everyone, he was very successful and widely liked, in short absolutely a man of his time. His characters and his plots are forward-thinking but not radical. Cornelia studies art and has what it takes to make it as a serious artist, but the book ends with her getting married, etc.
Howells was also, as far as I can tell, interested in absolutely everything. Later in life he published a book called My Literary Passions, which is just Howells bubbling merrily about books he likes, and it seems that he likes and has read an infinite multitude. (While also editing The Atlantic Monthly and writing two or three books of his own every year!)
He spent the Civil War as a consul in Venice and learned to speak Italian so well he later translated Italian poetry, and set several books in Italy, including A Foregone Conclusion, which it seems to me OUGHT to feel slashy, but doesn't. I have a burning hope that there is in his vast oeuvre a book as slashy as The Coast of Bohemia is femslashy, but because that oeuvre IS so vast, it's hard to know how to find it.
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Date: 2021-10-01 09:02 pm (UTC)What an interesting figure, and yet he's so forgotten, it seems (could that be partly bc he was a progressive?). He didn't even show up in my Early AmLit classes.
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Date: 2021-10-01 09:25 pm (UTC)TBH I think Howells was not progressive enough, or perhaps progressive in the wrong way (socialism!) for the 20th century literary establishment; it's very hard to read him as Ahead of His Time. And many of his plots turn on characters who become Paralyzed by Ethics, and cannot bring themselves to, say, break an engagement that they never really wanted in the first place, even as the modern reader goes "But wouldn't marrying a woman you don't love be a WORSE thing to do with her than breaking the engagement?" And the characters do get there eventually! It just takes them the whole book to work it out.
Personally I find Howells' books very enjoyable anyway but I realize I have a very high tolerance for this sort of thing. "What interesting insight into the historical context!" I think, when the characters attempt to torpedo their chances of happiness for some borderline incomprehensible reason of delicacy so remote as to be almost inaccessible to the modern reader.
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Date: 2021-10-01 09:36 pm (UTC)And many of his plots turn on characters who become Paralyzed by Ethics, and cannot bring themselves to, say, break an engagement that they never really wanted in the first place, even as the modern reader goes "But wouldn't marrying a woman you don't love be a WORSE thing to do with her than breaking the engagement?"
....I guess most readers' tolerance for that kind of thing gets filled up to the rim with Age of Innocence. CLEARLY what someone needs to do is produce a movie with all kinds of wildly repressed romance and Daniel Day-Lewis in a checked suit. (Or was it plaid?) Pre-modern readers wanted the delicious virtuous thrill of renunciation, modern readers want to get to the stuff pre-moderns lost their virtue for.
I can see how he maybe fell between the cracks of Too Progressive in his day and Not Progressive Enough for future canon-makers. Clearly the other thing for writers to do is make a complete corrected edition of My Best Works and get some sucker publisher to put it out before you die, so after you do, it is all there ready and waiting. (Henry James) (man did I get sick of Henry James after taking a bunch of AmLit classes. We were the Titanic and he was the iceberg) (in one class we read The Ambassadors AND The American! WHY. And did you know Princess Cas has never been adapted for screen, radio, stage, never)
....ANYWAY. What else would you rec of Howells?
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Date: 2021-10-01 10:05 pm (UTC)Possibly Howells also got left out of the literary canon because modernists enjoyed feeling superior to all that old-fashioned Victorian renunciation, and Howells likes to end his books with his characters disgracefully happy. In a Howells book Ellen Olenska would divorce her husband and Archer would (after MUCH travail) break his engagement to May, although the book might leave it hanging whether Ellen and Archer end up together.
To be honest, the only Henry James I ever finished is Daisy Miller, and only because it's SO short. James does too much ethical wittering even for me!
For Howells books: My Literary Passions is delightful, and I also really enjoyed his very short memoir My Life in a Log Cabin. (He wrote a few children's books based on his boyhood, which I really should check out. Maybe that's where the slashy Howells lies! Intense boyhood friendships.) The novels should be taken with a grain of salt, because they do almost inevitably have parts where you're just like WHY, like Cornelia's romance in The Coast of Bohemia; but that's often the price of admission in older books. The Coast of Bohemia is great. A Foregone Conclusion has a woobie Venetian priest.
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Date: 2021-10-01 10:14 pm (UTC)OMFG someone call a medium and get him to write this
To be honest, the only Henry James I ever finished is Daisy Miller, and only because it's SO short. James does too much ethical wittering even for me!
LUCKY YOU I mostly got dragged through Henry James in various classrooms. I do kinda like the Turn of the Screw, except the Nice Guys in the framing device are terrible. And then my parents loved those Merchant/Ivory type movies so I had to sit through the storylines all over again. Remember Christopher Reeve in the Bostonians??
Coast of Bohemia certainly sounds fun! I have Gutenberg'd and Kindle'd it!
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Date: 2021-10-02 02:11 pm (UTC)I hope you like Coast of Bohemia!
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Date: 2021-10-02 10:55 am (UTC)"What interesting insight into the historical context!" I think, when the characters attempt to torpedo their chances of happiness for some borderline incomprehensible reason of delicacy so remote as to be almost inaccessible to the modern reader.
Oh, same here :D
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Date: 2021-10-02 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 10:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 12:30 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-10-01 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-02 04:44 am (UTC)Howells was also, as far as I can tell, interested in absolutely everything. Later in life he published a book called My Literary Passions, which is just Howells bubbling merrily about books he likes, and it seems that he likes and has read an infinite multitude. (While also editing The Atlantic Monthly and writing two or three books of his own every year!)
He spent the Civil War as a consul in Venice and learned to speak Italian so well he later translated Italian poetry, and set several books in Italy,
He was, in short, exactly the kind of fascinating person, otherwise unknown to the wider universe, who gets an obituary in the Economist.
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Date: 2021-10-02 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-10-02 05:09 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-10-02 12:43 pm (UTC)And as other people've said - interesting to hear about Howells! And to read of a male author noticing things like the woman's career ending when two artists marry.
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Date: 2021-10-02 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 10:54 am (UTC)n. I have loved you more truly than he ever did, if he can throw you over for a little thing like that. If I were a man I should exult to ignore such a thing. --Wild applause! (I wonder if WDH, in his own love life, felt this way.)
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Date: 2021-10-03 12:30 pm (UTC)I actually know very little about WDH's love life! I know that he and his wife were newlyweds when they went to Venice for his consulship, but no idea if she had narrowly escaped an engagement with an oily traveling salesman beforehand. At some point I should read an actual Howells biography.