A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Lyuba Vinogradova’s Defending the Motherland: The Soviet Women Who Fought Hitler’s Aces, which suffers the indignity common to books I actually own, which is that I started it and then it languished for months as library book after library book took precedence. An unjust fate for this book, which is fascinating, although also sometimes bleak, as books about the Eastern Front are wont to be.

I also discovered that I had misremembered the fate of Lilya Litvyak from Elizabeth Wein’s book about Soviet women flyers: I had carried away the impression that her body was found decades later by one of her comrades (who later taught school in the area and for years organized the schoolchildren to search for downed planes). As it turns out, this intrepid woman and her schoolchildren found lots of other downed planes and often did manage to identify the pilots, but they never found Litvyak’s. Someone else apparently found a plane with a female pilot in the area, which presumably was Litvyak’s, female pilots being not too thick on the ground; but it wasn’t investigated properly at the time, so we’ll never know for sure.

Also Lisa See’s latest, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, which in contrast I read over the course of one afternoon! As this sprint perhaps suggests, I really enjoyed this book. ( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

In Chantemerle, we have just been introduced to another fair cousin, who has had a tendresse for Gilbert ever since they met eight years ago in Somerset. A prophecy: Gilbert will marry this Somerset cousin, leaving Louis and Lucienne free to marry!

Also continuing on in William Dean Howells’ Italian Journeys. Howells is taking a cab to the quai when a stranger hops on the front seat and starts directing the driver, whereupon Howells starts mentally composing the notice of his death that will likely appear in the next morning’s paper. Howells and I are so different in many ways, and yet we are also the same person.

What I Plan to Read Next

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Flight of the Falcon. I have had this book out of the library for MONTHS and I am DETERMINED that I shall finally read it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Dean Howells’ London Films, a travel memoir that was somewhat slow overall, but speckled with interesting information, like the fact that in 1904 or so England briefly adopted Thanksgiving to their own use, although they bunged it down in September. (It sounds an awful lot like the harvest festivals described in the Miss Read books, which may have been a later and re-christened metamorphosis.)

Also, Howells gives us this sublime description of the Oxford-Cambridge race: “I noticed that the men rowed in their undershirts, and not naked from their waists up as our university crews do, or used to do, and I missed the Greek joy I have experienced in New London, when the fine Yale and Harvard fellows slipped their tunics over their heads, and sat sculpturesque in their bronze nudity, motionlessly waiting for the signal to come to life.”

Howells. Howells. HOWELLS. “Greek joy.” EXPLAIN YOURSELF SIR.

I also finished Gerald Durrell’s The Picnic and Other Inimitable Stories. The first story remains my favorite (Gerald’s brother Larry is simply a gold mine of hilarity), but I enjoyed them all, particularly the reappearance of Ursula Pendragon-White, Durrell’s malapropism-spouting girlfriend from Fillets of Plaice.

As everyone warned me, the final story “The Entrance” is quite creepy. It reminded me of the underground banquet in Pan’s Labyrinth, the bit where Ofelia sneaks a grape and the creature at the head of the table sticks his eyes in the center of his palms and starts to stalk her. It’s not like that in any of the details—but in the atmosphere somehow.

And finally, I finished Maylis de Kerangal’s Eastbound (translated from French by Jessica Moore), a slim novella about a conscripted soldier on the Trans-Siberian Railway who decides to desert, and the Frenchwoman who almost accidentally decides to help him. The style is what I think of as very modern literary – long, winding, sometimes unnecessarily elliptical sentences – but the story grows engrossing, which is not always what I associate with that style.

What I’m Reading Now

The Montgomery readthrough is on hold till Jane of Lantern Hill comes in at the library, so in the meantime, I’ve picked back up my long-neglected Austen reread with Mansfield Park. Maria Bertram has just married Mr. Rushworth in order to show Henry Crawford that she doesn’t care a twig about him, a wonderful reason to get married which certainly will not backfire spectacularly.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am prepping my reading material for my trip to Paris! Contemplating whether I ought to download more Biggles books for the plane ride. On the other hand, I have Biggles Buries a Hatchet, Biggles Takes a Hand, and Biggles Looks Back, and perhaps it would be a mistake to dilute the general Biggles/von Stalhein of it all with other Biggles books.

I’ve also just gone through my Kindle to gather up books that I downloaded at one time or another which fell through the cracks, which fall in more or less three categories:

Classics I Definitely Haven’t Read: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon

Have I Already Read This?: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards’ Queen Hildegarde

I Have No Memory Why I Have This Book: Kaje Harper’s Nor Iron Bars a Cage, Mary Jane Holmes’ Tempest and Sunshine, Jane Louise Curry’s The Ice Ghost Mystery, Andrea K. Host’s Stray Patricia C. Wrede’s Caught in Crystal (technically book four of a series, possibly chronologically the first, maybe they are all standalones?)

If you have insight into any of these – particularly the last section, as I’m sure some of these were recommendations – please share!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Dean Howells’ Tuscan Cities: Travels through the Heart of Old Italy, a collection of Howells’ travel writings about a trip he took through Tuscany in 1883. I approached this with trepidation because I found his earlier travel book, about his time as consul to Venice during the Civil War, rather dull. But either my tastes have changed or Howells hit his stride as a travel writer in the intervening twenty years, because I really enjoyed this one—maybe it helped that I’ve visited many of the cities he’s discussing? I particularly enjoyed his description of walking the walls of Lucca and peeping into the gardens below, because I did the exact same thing.

He’s also uncompromisingly anti-Medici, which is refreshing. Sure, the Medici were generous patrons of the arts, but Howells is not going to let that blind him to the fact that they toppled the Florentine republic and tyrranized over its people! (Next installment of “How to Be a Better Dictator”: suborn the artists! People will be eager to whitewash your reign if only it produces a few sublime paintings or maybe a nice concerto.)

I also just finished Doris Gates’s Lord of the Sky, Zeus, which retells a smattering of the more famous Zeus-related legends. (Also some legends that Gates just felt like retelling, I think. Zeus doesn’t play a big role in the story of Daedalus, but here it is regardless.)

As I’ve been looking into the library holdings of these various mid-century authors, I’ve discovered that an astonishing number of them wrote mythology retellings and biographies. (I suspect that writing biographies in the mid twentieth century was way more fun than writing a biography now, as there was no need to bother one's head about footnotes.)

What I’m Reading Now

There have been GRAND REVERSALS in Sir Isumbras at the Ford. ( Spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

Hard to say! I am planning a trip to France, so perhaps it is time to start rounding up France-related books to enrich my journey.

William Dean Howells’ A Boy’s Town is a memoir about his boyhood in a small Ohio town in the 1840s and early 1850s, written for “Harper’s Young People” (presumably the youth branch of Harper’s Magazine?) in 1890 and chock full of fascinating detail not only about boyhood in antebellum America, but also about American society generally at that time.

Howells notes, for instance, that his grandfather “brought shame to his grandson's soul by being an abolitionist in days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free. My boy's father restored his self-respect in a measure by being a Henry Clay Whig, or a constitutional anti-slavery man.”

(Throughout the book he writes about himself in the third person as “my boy.” Why? Who can say. I’m almost certain I’ve seen other 19th century autobiographical writing take on this gossamer gloss of non-autobiography, although of course I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head.)

Howells grew up in southern Ohio, which, like southern Indiana and southern Illinois, was settled mostly by southerners crossing the Ohio River, hence the intense local disfavor toward abolitionists. Howells’ father later sold his Whig newspaper in outrage when the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican-American War and presumed pro-slavery man, although he had to eat humble pie and return to the Whigs when Taylor turned out to be an anti-slavery man after all…

In some ways, the boys’ world was quite separate from the adult world, with its own strange exacting codes more scrupulously observed than any written law. For instance, one of the ways the boys showed affection was by throwing rocks at each other: “They came out of their houses, or front-yards, and began to throw stones, when they were on perfectly good terms, and they usually threw stones in parting for the day.”

And yet the boys’ world also reflected the adult world, as in this example of stone-throwing as an act of hostility (it could be either! Totally context-dependent!): “There was a family of German boys living across the street, that you could stone whenever they came out of their front gate, for the simple and sufficient reason that they were Dutchmen, and without going to the trouble of a quarrel with them. My boy was not allowed to stone them; but when he was with the other fellows, and his elder brother was not along, he could not help stoning them.”

The Howells family seems to have worked hard to imbue their children with respect for people regardless of race, creed, nationality, etc., but they were fighting an uphill battle against the tides of the time - hence young Howells’ embarrassment about Grandpa’s abolitionism, joining in when the other boys throw stones at the Germans, etc. In the long run, however, the home training seems to have stuck: Howells later on took a deeply unpopular stand against the Haymarket Riot trials, joined the Anti-Imperialist League with his friend Mark Twain in 1898, marched in favor of votes for women, and so forth and so on.

Lastly, two examples of the nineteenth century usage of “in love”:

“The son of one of the tavern-keepers was skilled in catching [frogs],...and while my boy shuddered at him for his way of catching frogs, he was in love with him for his laughing eyes and the kindly ways he had, especially with the little boys.”

Then, in the very next chapter, Howells informs us that “he was in love with the girl who caught her hand on the meat-hook, and secretly suffered much on account of her. She had black eyes, and her name long seemed to him the most beautiful name for a girl; he said it to himself with flushes from his ridiculous little heart.”

Are these the same kind of being in love? Who could say! Perhaps, as with throwing rocks at people, the exact meaning of “in love” is context-dependent. Either way, Howells definitely informed the entire 1890 readership of Harper’s Young People that as a child he was in love with the tavern-keeper’s son, and nobody batted an eye.

I was rereading William Dean Howells' Indian Summer, as one does, and in the context of Howells' slashy books this passage struck me.

(I should note that Colville spends most of this book in a love triangle with two women - "the ladies" mentioned at the end of this passage, fellow Americans he has befriended in Florence, and will later take to a masquerade ball that causes much mischief, as masquerade balls are wont to do in 19th-century novels.)

"Colville went experimentally to one of the people's balls at a minor theatre, which he found advertised on the house walls. At half-past ten the dancing had not begun, but the masks were arriving; young women in gay silks and dirty white gloves; men in women's dresses, with enormous hands; girls as pages; clowns, pantaloons, old women, and the like. They were all very good-humoured; the men, who far outnumbered the women, danced contentedly together. Colville liked two cavalry soldiers who waltzed with each other for an hour, and then went off to a battery on exhibition in the pit, and had as much electricity as they could hold. He liked also two young citizens who danced together as long as he stayed, and did not leave off even for electrical refreshment. He came away at midnight, pushing out of the theatre through a crowd of people at the door, some of whom were tipsy. This certainly would not have done for the ladies, though the people were civilly tipsy."

I had high hopes for William Dean Howells’ The Undiscovered Country, because his books Mrs. Farrell and The Shadow of a Dream were such treasure troves, and also because John Crowley quoted SUCH an intriguing passage in The Mask of Fiction, albeit a passage that Howells cut before publication:

"And,--I'm fascinating?" asked Ford.

"Oh yes,--to women, and to undecided men like myself. Didn't you know it?", Phillips tells him.

“DID HOWELLS CUT IT BECAUSE IT WAS TOO GAY?” I cried hopefully.

But having read the book, I have sadly concluded that Howells cut it because the book ended up moving in an entirely different direction: that passage is clearly from Ford & Phillips’ first meeting, and the book as it stands now begins long after their friendship is established. In fact the book mostly concerns Ford’s romance with Egeria Boynton, whose honest but monstrously egotistical hypnotist father is exhibiting her as a spiritualist medium. (Howells often calls Egeria’s psychic powers “psychological powers,” which took some getting used to.)

However, eventually Mr. Boynton realizes that he has made a mistake in attempting honest spiritualist research among the mediums of Boston, who are mostly frauds (the rationalizations by which he first excuses and then excoriates this fraud are fascinating), and flees the city with the hope of continuing his research among the Shakers.

I love the Shakers and am always happy when they make an unexpected appearance. This is only the second book I’ve read where they’ve done so, and in Susan Coolidge’s Eyebright they showed up for a mere chapter, but HERE we get chapter upon chapter set in the Shaker community! Oh my God. What have I done to merit this blessing?

So ultimately I felt that I was well recompensed, even though my original hopes for the book were disappointed: Phillips only appears a few times, and the friendship doesn’t actually seem all that attached.

(Phillips is however interesting because he seems like an early iteration of what would become the upper-class Oscar Wilde stereotype of a homosexual. The book was published in 1890, years before Wilde's trial, but given that Howells knew everyone in the literary scene he may well have met Wilde.)

Such men as Phillips consorted with were of the feminine temperament, like artists and musicians (he had a pretty taste in music); or else they were of the intensely masculine sort, like Ford, to whom he had attached himself. He liked to have their queer intimacy noted, and to talk of it with the ladies of his circle, finding it as much of a mystery as he could… He bore much from him in the way of contemptuous sarcasm; it illustrated the strange fascination which such a man as Ford had for such a man as Phillips. He lay in wait for his friend’s characteristics, and when he had surprised this trait or that in him he was fond of exhibiting his capture.

The tie that bound Ford, on his part, to Phillips was not tangible; it was hardly more than force of habit, or like an indifferent yielding to the advances made by the latter.

At times Ford’s indifference and Phillips’ irrepressibility are actually rather funny, as here, when Phillips has at last succeeded in browbeating Ford into going on a trip with him:

“Oh, I’ll go with you,” said Ford listlessly.

“Good!” cried Phillips. “This is the fire of youth. If we get sick of it, we can send the mare back from any given point, and take to the rails. That is one of the advantages of having rails. It makes travel by the country roads a luxury, and not a necessary. I fancy we shall feel almost wicked in the pursuit of our journey,--it will be such unalloyed pleasure.”

Unfortunately for Phillips, this journey deposits them at the self-same Shaker community where Egeria and her father are staying. After much rigmarole, Ford and Egeria fall in love, to which Phillips responds at first with indignation (“'Going to marry her!' cried Phillips,") and then resignation: “I suspect I’ve done my last talking to Ford.”

And Phillips is quite correct: the marriage ends the friendship, if “friendship” is quite the right word for a relation that was pretty well one-sided from the beginning.“It has been observed by those who formerly knew him that marriage has greatly softened him, and Phillips professes that, robbed of his former roughness, [Ford] is no longer so fascinating. Their acquaintance can scarcely be said to have been renewed since their parting in Vardley...”

In conclusion, a fascinating book if you’re interested in nineteenth century views of spiritualism, Shakers, the decline of religious feeling in the wake of Darwin, or the slow decay of the countryside as young people flock to the cities for industrial jobs. Much less gay than Mrs. Farrell, The Shadow of a Dream, or The Coast of Bohemia, however.

“It’s quite like such a man as Faulkner to want a three-cornered household. I think the man who can’t give up his intimate friends after he’s married, is always a kind of weakling. He has no right to them; it’s a tacit reflection on his wife’s heart and mind.”

“Yes, I think you’re quite right there,” I said… and we went over together the list of households we knew in which the husband supplemented himself with a familiar friend. We agreed that it was the innocence of our life that made it so common, but we said all the same that it was undignified and silly and mischievous. It kept the husband and wife apart…

I wish that I had read William Dean Howells’ The Shadow of a Dream before I wrote The Threefold Tie, because you’d better believe that I would have had a field day with the fact that a man, his wife, and his intimate friend apparently a common enough household arrangement in the nineteenth century that it had a name: a “three-cornered household.” Mr. and Mrs. March may consider the practice mischievous, but they nonetheless can name a list of such households - a whole list! - and it clearly hasn’t even occurred to them that they might cut the acquaintance. (Recall that this was a time when divorce could force the divorcee out of society: when Marcia gets divorced in A Modern Instance, she basically goes into seclusion.)

Our three-cornered household consists of Douglas Faulkner; his intimate friend the Rev. Mr. James Nevil, “the matter-of-fact partner in a friendship which was very romantic on Faulkner’s side, and which appeared to date back to their college days… very handsome, with a regular face, and a bloom on it quite girlishly peachy, and very pure, still, earnest blue eyes”; and Faulkner’s wife Hermia Faulkner (nee Winter), who at first “had been jealous of [the friendship], but now she had got used to it; and though [Faulkner] did not suppose she would ever quite forgive Nevil for having been his friend before her time, she tolerated him.”

She has a lot of tolerating to do, because when Faulkner takes ill, he and his wife head to Europe for a yearlong sojourn - with Nevil by their side. But Faulkner’s decline continues unabated, and by the time they return to the US, where they settle in a seaside cottage near Boston, it’s clear that the end is near.

(This is when the Marches appear on the scene to have the conversation at the beginning of this entry.)

By this time, Faulkner has become obsessed with a recurring dream. The exact content of the dream we don’t learn till near the end of the book, but based on Faulkner’s strange antipathy toward his wife, the reader can guess that the dream suggests she’s moved far beyond mere toleration of James Nevil.

One of the curious things about this book is that a lot of the action is, as it were, subterranean. Mr. March admits, much later, that he and his wife guessed the basic outlines of the dream almost at once. But at the time this lurking suspicion is expressed only in the vehemence with which Mrs. March rejects it: “that ridiculous friendship was entirely between him and Faulkner. I think it was as silly as it could be, and weak, and sentimental in all of them. She ought to have put a stop to it; but with him so sick as he was, of course she had to yield, and then be subjected to - to anything that people were mean enough to think.”

Anything could mean, well, anything. One implication, made explicit only in the last pages, is that people might meanly think that Nevil and Mrs. Faulkner are having an adulterous affair. Another, never explicitly stated but seething just under the surface, is that people might think the same of Nevil and Mr. Faulkner.

This one comes nearest to breaking through when Nevil gets engaged (to a woman who is not Mrs. Faulkner) just a few months after Faulkner’s death. When Mr. March hears the news, he jocularly “threw myself forward in astonishment. ‘What! Already! Why it isn’t six months since - ’”

The joke is that Mr. Nevil shouldn’t get engaged after Mr. Faulkner’s death till he’s observed an appropriate period of mourning - as if he were Mr. Faulkner’s widow. And Mrs. March certainly understands the implication: “ ‘Basil!’ cried my wife, in a voice of such terrible warning that I was silent. I had to humble myself very elaborately after that…She tossed [the letter] across the table to me with a disdain for my low condition that would have wounded a less fallen spirit.”

The engagement is broken, and after a more suitable interval for their widowhood, Nevil and Mrs. Faulkner get engaged. Then they learn the content of Mr. Faulkner’s dream, and then break up on the grounds that they must have been adulterously in love (unbeknownst to themselves) if Mr. Faulkner could dream about it. March urges the idea that they’re just as morbidly fixated as Faulkner was, and ought to marry and be happy, and in a different Howells book they might be allowed; but as it is, Nevil gets hit by a train, and Mrs. Faulkner dies a year later of a broken heart.

This is an interesting contrast to Mrs. Farrell, where no one dies at all, despite broken hearts all round and equally clear implications of gay passion. It seems to be the shadow of adultery that dooms them here (as it blights Ben Halleck’s life in A Modern Instance, although he lives through the book); that, or the fact that Howells wrote this book right after his daughter Winifred died after a decade-long decline, and may have been in a vengeful mood.

Or perhaps a reflective one, painfully fixed on the unfairness of human suffering. It seems, he muses, “abominably unfair that they should suffer so for no wrong; unless, indeed, all suffering is to some end unknown to the sufferer or the witnesses, and no anguish is wasted… or else we must go back to a cruder theory, and say that they were all three destined to undergo what they underwent, and that what happened to them was not retribution, not penalty in any wise, since no wrong had been done, but simply fate.”

Friends! Romans! Countryman! As you may recall, I set out in search of a William Dean Howells' book as slashy as The Coast of Bohemia is femslashy, and I have a lead! In fact, TWO leads! John W. Crowley's The Mask of Fiction helpfully lists two Howells books that feature romantic friendships between men: "Private Theatricals" (later published as Mrs. Farrell, under which title it is available on Gutenberg) and The Undiscovered Country, which does NOT appear to be available on Gutenberg, but never fear! I shall track it down.

Crowley quotes this passage from The Undiscovered Country, which Howells cut before publication. I will have to read the novel itself to decide if Howells cut it because he thought it was Too Much or if he just thought he'd hit the YOU ARE SO FASCINATING note too many times. (Note that fascinating is also Charmian's word for Cornelia in The Coast of Bohemia.)

"And,--I'm fascinating?" asked Ford.

"Oh yes,--to women, and to undecided men like myself. Didn't you know it?"...

"Now you are flattering me," said Ford, with an ironical smile. "Be frank; you don't mean it."

"I'm doing you simple justice," returned Phillips. "And can't you see what an irresistible attraction you must naturally have for a man like me?"

"I've never been at pains to formulate you," said Ford. "I don't know what sort of man is like you."

I just!!!! Exclamation points times a thousand!!!!!!!

I am also delighted to inform you that Crowley says that Howells enjoyed romantic friendships himself in his youth. (However, one of his sources is My Literary Passions, which I have read, and I'm not sure I agree with Crowley's assessment of that friendship as romantic. So this perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt.) He also details Howells' friendship with Charles Warren Stoddard, nowadays a literary nonentity who is remembered (insofar as he is remembered) for having written a VERY gay book called South-Sea Idyls, which Howells loved and helped shepherd to publication. He also wrote a lengthy and favorable review, which I attempted to look up in the online Atlantic archives, but APPARENTLY the Atlantic has not digitized every single one of Howells' reviews, possibly because they want to break my heart.

(I should note that Howells did this sort of thing for MANY writers in the American literary scene: he appears to have known literally everybody and enthusiastically boosted many of them. He also championed Charlotte Perkins Gilman, personally finding a home for "The Yellow Wallpaper": "I could not rest until I had corrupted the editor of The New England Magazine into publishing it," Howells crowed. Years later he brought it back from obscurity by printing it in The Great American Short Stories, which also included a sketch by Stoddard.)

Stoddard was apparently a favorite of the whole Howells family, and Howells and Stoddard have a cute kind of flirtatious correspondence: "Whenever we feel gay or sad, we say, we wish Stoddard was here. Does everybody like you, and does it make you feel badly? Are you sure that you are worthy of our affection? If you have some secret sins or demerits, don't you think you ought to let us know them, so that we could love you less?" Howells teases, to which Stoddard responds with a LENGTHY account of his schoolboy crush on a classmate: "Me he ignored utterly even while I worshiped silently in his presence and secretly wished that I might die for his sake," Stoddard sighs. He continued to worship until the object of his adoration made some sign of returning his feelings - at which point Stoddard turned him down flat!

Howells replies, agreeing that Stoddard did quite right to turn on his idol. An idol has no business becoming human!

In 1901 Howells wrote a book called Literary Friends and Acquaintances, which cut off chronologically before he met Stoddard, so Stoddard wasn't in it. Concerned that Stoddard's feelings might be hurt, Howells sent Stoddard a poem:

If you are not in this book
My dear Stoddard, turn and look
in the author's heart, and there,
lightening, sweetening all its care,
mirrored in its most sacred place,
you shall see your own dear face.

Now, Howells was married and had three children and also writes about women the way that men who are attracted to women write about women (the mores of the time do not allow anyone to breast boobily, but there are moments when you just feel him posing his women characters and thinking "GOD she's looking fine"). ​He's just, like, enjoying a cute little flirtation with his friend, and apparently reading the resulting correspondence aloud to the whole family, to the enjoyment of everyone. (Stoddard meanwhile was sleeping his way across three continents and BREAKING FRANCIS MILLET'S HEART, as detailed in Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Stories, not that I'm bitter on Millet's behalf or anything. So Stoddard's not eating his heart out over Howells, but if he WAS, it was a well-deserved taste of his own medicine.) Apparently that was just something that straightish nineteenth century guys did sometimes. The more you know!

Charmian 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!”

I have finished a draft of the historical note for The Threefold Tie! Which at 1500 words is, perhaps, longer than a historical note ought to be, and that’s after I cut the list of My Favorite Would-Be Utopian Communes of 19th Century America, and also at least half the Howells’ books I wanted to talk about. I really mourn the loss of The Coast of Bohemia, but one has to draw the line somewhere.

Possibly it ought to be drawn somewhere before I recount the entire adultery-in-his-HEART plotline of A Modern Instance. Perhaps, actually, I should just stick with the Oneida Community infodump and leave the Howells books out of it?

***

In my rough drafts of this book, the Oneida Community infodump was much longer, and it still didn’t include everything I wanted to share because quite a lot of it happened after the book is set. This is of course the sort of situation that historical notes were made for, so here are all the Oneida Community facts that didn’t fit in the book.

The Oneida Community, founded in 1848, was a Christian perfectionist commune - perfectionist in the sense of "We can achieve sinless grace on earth!", not its modern meaning. They practiced:

1. Bible communism. Everyone in the community holds all goods in common; the community takes care of everyone and everyone does work for the community. All kinds of work are held to be holy.

2. Complex marriage. All the men and women in the community are heterosexually married to each other. People at the time often figured that there was a constant orgy going on in the mansion, but in fact sexual contact had to be carefully negotiated, usually through an intermediary, and anyone had the right to say no. (As Sarah Vowell recounts in Assassination Vacation, Charles Guiteau, who later assassinated President Garfield, lived in the Oneida Community for five years and could not get laid.) You'd think women would be getting pregnant all the time, except the community also practiced

3. Male sexual continence. Men were not to ejaculate during sex. This apparently worked really well as a birth control method - there were only forty pregnancies in the group's first twenty years of existence - possibly because incorrect ejaculation would come up during

4. Mutual Criticism. During Mutual Criticism, the whole community would gather, one person was put on the hot seat, and everyone else was allowed - nay, encouraged! - to tell you all your faults (for instance: “You ejaculate during sex”) so you could try to correct them and thus approach nearer to spiritual perfection. This sounds excruciating, but Pierrepont Noyes, in his memoir My Father’s House: An Oneida Childhood, comments that “because members had the opportunity to criticize each other openly, Community life was singularly free from backbiting and scandalmongering,” so perhaps it's a case of ripping off the bandaid all in one go rather than taking it up millimeter by excruciating millimeter.

Everyone except John Humphrey Noyes, the community’s charismatic founder, underwent Mutual Criticism, so any impulse toward harshness must have been tempered by the knowledge that the criticizer might soon be the criticized.

The Oneida Community lasted until 1881. As Noyes grew older, he suffered from a disease that destroyed the beautiful voice so central to his charisma, and a faction of malcontents began to mutter about deposing him.

Then Professor Mears from Hamilton College launched a moral crusade against Oneida. Noyes fled to Canada to avoid prosecution for adultery, and in exile in Niagara he suggested that community members should marry so as to avoid prosecution as well. So they did, and that was the end of Bible Communism: once people had their own families to take care of, they wanted their own stuff.

And then Oneida became a joint stock company and eventually transformed into a silverware manufacturing giant.

***

Those prospective adultery prosecutions are a reminder that most nineteenth century Americans viewed marriage as the line between moral and immoral sex. For a man to fall in love with another man’s wife was a moral disaster, as evidenced in William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance. The book, published in 1882, was one of the earliest American novels to sympathetically portray a divorce, which was considered a daring and outre subject for a novel at that time.

Soon after their marriage, Marcia and Bartley Hubbard move to Boston, where they run into an old friend of Bartley’s, Ben Halleck. Ben Halleck falls in love with Marcia, and he is so horrified by this sinful love that he flees to South America to escape it. Indeed, he finds his own love for a married woman so shameful that he can’t even bring himself to tell his family why he’s fleeing the country.

Years later, Ben returns to Boston. Marcia and Bartley do divorce, whereupon Bartley jocularly suggests to Ben that he should marry Marcia, which sends Ben into a tailspin of self-loathing, because he’s a nineteenth-century Bostonian and that’s just what they do. How dare he covet a married woman? Sometimes he wished that Bartley would die so he could marry Marcia, and doesn’t that make him a murderer in his heart? Doesn’t his passion for Marcia undermine the sanctity of all marriages everywhere in its refusal to respect the inviolability of the marriage bond?

A few years pass, and Bartley dies, freeing Marcia from her marital bonds. But didn’t the divorce do that, you say? Well, kind of sort of not really. The divorce meant that she and Bartley didn’t have to live together anymore, but apparently to a nineteenth century Bostonian, it didn’t actually leave her free to marry anyone else. But now Marcia’s a widow and can definitely remarry!

But Ben is afraid that his earlier illicit passion has disqualified him as Marcia’s potential husband. Does the fact that he fell in love with Marcia while she was still married to another man means that his love is forever soiled and he can never marry her and should just continue pining hopelessly from afar?

He puts this question to his friend Atherton in a letter, and Atherton reads the letter aloud to his wife who thinks the whole thing is nonsense and Ben should ask for Marcia’s hand, while Atherton is like, no no, Ben is right! His love is SOILED FOREVER. And there the book ends, Ben’s letter unanswered, because clearly Howells knows that Mrs. Atherton is right and it IS too cruel to tell Ben to pine till he dies, but he also knows that ending the book with a divorcee marrying a man who fell in love with her while her husband yet lived (and thus committed adultery in his heart) would be just a bridge too far for the average reader of 1882.

Another Howells book I found invaluable was My Year in a Log Cabin, a short memoir about a year in Howells’ boyhood in the 1850s when his family lived in a log cabin in southern Ohio. By the 1850s, log cabins were no longer common in Ohio, and Howells recalls having the delicious sense of having moved into one of his father’s stories about his own childhood. Poor Mrs. Howells perhaps found it less delicious, as she was reduced to cooking on a crane over an open fire rather than using a stove - a detail I borrowed for Jonathan’s old-fashioned aunt and uncle.

One more Howells book. My Literary Passions has no real relevance to The Threefold Tie, but I have to mention it simply because I so enjoyed reading Howells’ exuberant reminiscences about his favorite books and musings about books still left unread. “Perhaps I shall be able to whisper to readers behind my hand that I have never yet read the Aeneid of Virgil; the Georgics, yes; but the Aeneid, no,” he confides. “Some time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That is often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.”