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| New York Review Books, 2005 |
'Yes,' answered Colville. 'Perhaps I've presented that point too prominently. What I wished you to understand was that I don't care for myself; that I consider only the happiness of this young girl that's somehow — I hardly know how — been put in my keeping… Sometimes I think that the kindest — the least cruel — thing I could do would be to break with her, to leave her. But I know that I shall do nothing of the kind; I shall drift. The child is very dear to me. She has great and noble qualities; she's supremely unselfish; she loves me through her mistaken pity, and because she thinks she can sacrifice herself to me. But she can't. Everything is against that; she doesn't know how; and there is no reason why. I don't express it very well. I think nobody clearly understands it but Mrs Bowen, and I've somehow alienated her.'
The Novel: The 1993 edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase 'indian summer' as 'a period of calm dry warm weather in late autumn' and 'a tranquil late period of life.' It is the latter definition that applies to this deliciously ironic, humorously realistic novel first published by the Scottish firm of David Douglas in March 1886. Yet the life of its middle-aged protagonist — an ex-newspaperman named Theodore Colville — could be considered anything but tranquil following his return to Italy after a seventeen year absence, his unforeseen reunion with a widow named Lina Bowen and subsequent romance with Imogene Graham, a 'Junonian' girl of twenty whom it is Mrs Bowen's friendly duty to chaperone while the two ladies tour the Continent together.
Colville has returned to Italy, specifically to the Tuscan city of Florence, for various reasons, none of which are ostensibly connected with the notion of finding himself a bride. A man of talent and intelligence, possessed of a fine dry wit and an amusing turn of phrase, he hopes to rekindle his youthful passion for art after recently stepping down as editor of the Des Vaches Democrat-Republican, an Indiana newspaper he purchased from his brother after being lured west from New York to manage that same periodical many years before.
Colville's plan is to combine publishing the occasional travel article with writing an accessible study of Florentine architecture for English-speaking readers, a project he lacked both the impetus and time to tackle during his previous visit to the city as an inexperienced and naïve college graduate.
It was love that hindered him in that pursuit in the bewitching form of Jenny Pilsbury, a fellow tourist he met in Venice. Unfortunately, the fickle Miss Pilsbury threw him over ('jilted him' is his plainspoken term for her behavior) before he could summon up the courage to propose to her, leaving him 'in possession of that treasure to a man of his temperament, a broken heart.' His decision to return to Florence is as much about making peace with his socially awkward former self as it is about finding new projects with which to fill his time after taking a voluntary leave of absence from his beloved newspaper.
Colville has not been in the city for too long before fate throws him into the path of Mrs Bowen, her precocious daughter Effie and the aforementioned Imogene Graham, a beautiful young woman who had never set foot outside her native city of Buffalo prior to being brought to Europe by her charming chaperone. Mrs Bowen was formerly Lina Ridgely — the traveling companion and closest confidante of the unobtainable Jenny Pilsbury — and is delighted to renew her acquaintance with Colville after so many years, partly because she was always fond of him (albeit in a slightly patronizing way) and partly because she has often regretted the minor role she played in his romantic disappointment. She invites him to visit her at the Palazzo Pinti, the villa she's rented in Florence, to which Colville soon becomes a frequent and always welcome visitor. He also becomes a particular favorite of Effie whom he spoils with attention, affection and gifts, becoming a kind of surrogate father to the amazingly perceptive little girl.
It is at the Palazzo Pinti that Colville makes the acquaintance of the other members of the city's large expatriate community, including a stuffy young minister named Morton and the friendly if somewhat eccentric Mr Waters, an older clergyman who has been studying the life of Renaissance monk Savonarola for many years and has no intention, he says, of ever returning to North America. While Colville is enchanted by Imogene's youth and beauty and enjoys gently teasing her about her idealistic attitudes to art, literature and romance, it is with his former acquaintance Mrs Bowen that he finds himself most at ease.
Within a relatively short span of time he and Mrs Bowen find themselves 'upon those terms which often succeed a long separation with people who have felt kindly toward each other at a former meeting and have parted friends: they were much more intimate than they supposed themselves to be, or had really any reason for being.' With her Colville can joke about his 'lost love' Jenny Pilsbury, now Mrs Milbury and prospering in Chicago, and his own youthful earnestness, relieving himself of some of the regret that clings to the memory of those days — an emotion that does not go unnoticed by Imogene despite her almost complete lack of experience in matters of the heart and the attentions paid her by the love-struck Reverend Mr Morton and a group of exuberant expatriate artists collectively known as the Inglehart Boys.
Imogene's sympathetic fascination with Colville is only slightly dampened after he makes a public spectacle of himself at a ball one night where, coaxed into dancing with her against his will, he commits the embarrassing faux pas of failing to recall the steps to The Lancers, a dance popular during his own long departed youth. Mrs Bowen, fearful of the effect this social blunder may have on his pride, spares Colville the pain of further scrutiny by stepping in and asking him to escort her to the refreshment room.
Despite the efforts made by Mrs Bowen and Imogene to downplay this humiliating episode, the ex-newspaperman nevertheless finds himself full of self-reproach after dropping them off at their palazzo and returning alone to his hotel. 'He regarded now with a supreme loathing a fantastic purpose which he had formed while tramping round on those women's dresses, of privately taking lessons in dancing, and astonishing Miss Graham at the next ball where they met. Miss Graham! What did he care for that child? Or Mrs Bowen either, for the matter of that? Had he come four thousand miles to be used, to be played with, by them?'
Realizing in time that he has no real cause to think such unkind thoughts about his friends, Colville hastens to modify his views lest his supposed grudge against them begin to fester. 'They were ladies, both of them, charming and good, and he had been a fool; that was all. It was not the first time he had been a fool for women.' The memory of losing Jenny Pilsbury, an experience he believed himself to have made peace with after all these years, is suddenly not so remote as he believed it to be when the evening began. He goes to sleep cursing himself for his unwise decision to return to a city that holds nothing but painful associations for him.
Colville seeks relief from his black mood by buckling down to the task of renewing his acquaintance with Italian architecture. Eager to excuse his clumsiness at the ball to Mrs Bowen, he also pays another call to Palazzo Pinti, only to find its mistress out and a remorseful Imogene there to entertain him in her place. They chat as easily as before, his dancefloor disgrace apparently forgotten, and over the next few days Colville often finds the girl and her undeniable beauty intruding on his thoughts.
Imogene is also much on Mrs Bowen's mind as it happens, particularly after a conversation in which the girl makes it plain how special she believes Mr Colville to be. "Nothing escapes him," she enthusiastically declares to her underwhelmed chaperone, "and pretty soon he lets out that he has seen through you, and then you feel so flat! Oh," she gushes, "it's perfectly intoxicating to be with him. I would give the world to talk as he does." These sentiments are indirectly shared by Effie, who adds insult to injury by stating, before being packed off to bed later that night, that she can't decide who is prettier — her darling mamma or their friend Imogene.
Alone again, Mrs Bowen takes a seat by the fire where she attempts to identify and come to terms with her feelings. 'The light of the flame flickered upon her face,' we're told, 'and threw upon the ceiling a writhing, fantastic shadow, the odious caricature of her gentle beauty.' The implication of this is clear. Mrs Bowen is secretly jealous of her young friend and resentful of her interest in the man to whom she herself, unexpectedly and quite against her will, has now formed a disconcerting emotional attachment.
This sets the stage for what, in the hands of less gifted novelist than Howells, would be the worst kind of melodrama, propelled by misunderstandings and false assumptions on all sides. Imogene convinces herself that it's her task to make it up to Colville not only for unwittingly humiliating him at the ball but also for his unhappy youthful love affair.
Colville, his middle-aged vanity flattered by the girl's attentions, nevertheless falls victim to his pride again, reacting coldly to Imogene's suggestion — offered while they're dancing at a veglione, a masked ball held during the city's annual Carnival — that he has merely been 'amusing himself' with her during the past few weeks. After Imogene writes to him the next day to apologize for her impetuous remark, Mrs Bowen turns round and accuses her friend of toying with Colville's affections for her amusement — an accusation which leads Colville, when he hears of it during a party he's attending at an artist's studio, to make plans to leave Florence immediately and, this time, permanently.
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| Dodo Press, date unspecified |
In the end, Colville's plan to leave the city has to be postponed — not because he's experienced a change of heart, but because he lacks the money required to pay his hotel bill and cannot obtain it until his bank re-opens on Monday. He receives a note from Mrs Bowen that same evening, asking him to join herself and Imogene for lunch at Palazzo Pinti the following day and imploring him to behave as though nothing has gone awry between them.
But Colville is in no mood to accept her invitation or to forgive the grave social injury he remains convinced she has done him. He writes back to Mrs Bowen, re-stating his intention to leave Florence at the earliest opportunity, only to change his mind after a philosophical discussion with the clear-sighted Mr Waters (who has hinted during an earlier conversation that his new friend and the widow Bowen might make a well-matched couple) that convinces him it would be cowardly to run away again as he did after being 'jilted' so long ago by Jenny Pilsbury.
Happiness, as Colville sees it, now becomes a simple question of declaring his feelings to Imogene, which he does when they meet, this time by accident, in the same public park where he failed to find the nerve required to propose to his long lost sweetheart so many years before. "Did you think I cared for your being older than I was?" the girl demands of him at one point, the combination of her infatuation with him and his melancholic demeanor too much for her inexperienced heart to resist. "All that I ask," she goes on, "is to be with you, and try to make forget what's been sad in your life, and try to be of use to you in whatever you are doing, and I shall be prouder and gladder of that than anything that people call happiness." Their hands find each other and within moments they are unofficially engaged and on their way to Palazzo Pinti to share their happy news with Mrs Bowen — a visit that results in that lady politely if somewhat coldly distancing herself from the entire unfortunate affair.
After making her disapproval of the match known to Colville, who cannot help but view her coldness as a disapproving comment on his actions, Mrs Bowen composes a letter to Imogene's mother in which she apologizes for not stepping in sooner to prevent the engagement. This letter, which is duly posted along with one from Imogene explaining the situation from her point of view, drives a wedge between the two women, spoiling what should be a joyous event and making Imogene feel quite bitter toward her friend and chaperone.
Colville, in the meantime, almost immediately begins to wonder if asking a girl as young and unworldly as Imogene to become his wife has been a terrible mistake. While Imogene dotes on him — only in private because for now their engagement remains a secret from the gossip-loving expatriate community — he can't help but feel that he is indeed too old for the girl and their marriage, should it proceed, will be bound to end badly. He quickly tires of attending the balls, parties and other 'gayeties' Imogene insists on dragging him to, just as he tires of continually reminding himself not to refer to the disparity in their ages because it upsets her every time he does so. He also revises his previously low opinion of the Reverend Mr Morton, the young clergyman who preceded him in the girl's affections and has recently returned from a short sojourn in Rome. Might not Imogene be happier as the bride of this intelligent and altogether splendid young fellow? And might not he, as Mr Waters once suggested, be happier to take the estranged but unfailingly attractive Mrs Bowen as his bride?
Fate intervenes again the form of a peasant who is driving a herd of pigs along the road, causing the horses drawing the carriage that Imogene, Mrs Bowen and Effie have just entered to become spooked and threaten to send the conveyance crashing into a wall. Colville dashes forward and orders the women to jump into his outstretched arms, which Mrs Bowen and her daughter instantly and gratefully do. Imogene, however, is saved by Morton, who cries out that she's safe just as Colville, tangled up in the horses' reins, is thrown over the wall to the ground beneath, losing consciousness in the process.
Seriously injured in the fall, Colville remains in a coma for two weeks, patiently nursed by Mrs Bowen and frequently visited and fussed over by the ever watchful Effie. When he regains consciousness, it is Mrs Bowen who's at his bedside and she who tells him, when she feels he's strong enough to bear the news, that Imogene's mother is on her way to Italy to speak with him about his engagement to her daughter.
The arrival of the sensible and very forthright Mrs Graham proves to be a blessing for everybody. She tells Colville that his accident and Imogene's subsequent nervous collapse have caused the girl to realize what she, her mother, had suspected since receiving the letter announcing her intention to be married — that her daughter does not love him and was acting more out of pity than out of any genuine sense of affection for him. She then asks Colville to release Imogene from their engagement — a favor he's all too ready to grant after receiving the assurance that doing so will spare the girl unnecessary anguish. Imogene herself appears in his room a few minutes later to beg his forgiveness, only to flee like the confused overwrought child she is after kneeling beside his bed to kiss his hand.
Colville leaves Palazzo Pinti as soon as he's well enough and is soon reunited with Mr Waters who, with his customary kindheartedness, helps him to realize that everything has, in fact, turned out for the best. There remains, however, one loose end to be tied up and that is Colville's postponed final farewell to Mrs Bowen and Effie. He returns to Palazzo Pinti one last time to thank the widow for nursing him and to inform her that he plans to return to his original plan of quitting Florence as soon as possible. Mrs Bowen — whom he calls Lina for the first time before surprising both of them by openly declaring his previously undeclared love for her — agrees that he must go and kisses him goodbye, only to ask him to stay after Effie, whom he has promised to take to a local ice cream parlor, declares that he can't leave because she 'can't bear' the thought of never seeing him again.
Colville and his true love are married shortly afterward in a ceremony conducted by Mr Waters while Imogene, recently returned to her homeland, is now being courted, as she should have been from the beginning, by the altogether more suitable Reverend Mr Morton who, it's revealed, has just accepted a parish in the New York town of Erie not far from her family home in Buffalo.
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| Library of America, 2012 |
For all its complications, Indian Summer is written with a lightness of touch that feels thoroughly 'modern' in the sense that many other novels of the late nineteenth century, North American and otherwise, do not. The self-doubting and occasionally foolish figure of Colville, as prone to trepidation as he is to moments of vanity-inspired weakness, is a marvelously realistic creation whose foibles only serve to make him a more sympathetic and ultimately more credible character.
This, along with Howells's impressive gifts for satire and irony, transform the book into something far removed from the turgid 'marriage novel' it could so easily have become had he focused solely on the themes of thwarted love and poorly concealed jealousy. Instead, Howells treads the fine line between melancholy and humor, aided in no small measure by his masterful handling of the novel's Italian setting. Few writers are able to capture the physical and emotional atmosphere of a city in the way that Howells succeeded in capturing that of nineteenth century Florence. Every detail — from the city's architecture to its hotel life to the manners and mores of its ubiquitous expatriates — is flawlessly described, allowing him to poke gentle fun at his fellow travelers, their habits and their reluctance to have too much to do with the locals whose hospitality they have a foolish tendency to take utterly for granted. It is hard, he suggests more than once, for the foreign visitor to see the true Italy because there are always so many Yankees (and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Russians) standing in the way to block the view.
It's a pity there is no longer an audience for quality films adapted from quality novels of previous centuries as exemplified in the work of filmmakers like James Ivory and screenwriters like the late Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala. Indian Summer is a novel crying out to be transformed into a film or one off television series. Had the book been written by Jane Austen (and perhaps published under the title Condescension and Confusion, which would suit it very well) or by Howells's friend and contemporary Henry James, there is little doubt that it would have been adapted to the screen, large or small, decades ago. Had that been the case, then William Dean Howells might now be considered the equal of those writers and not the largely forgotten pioneer of North American social realism that he was.
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| WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, c 1867 |
The Writer: William Dean Howells was born on 1 March 1837 in the Ohio town of Martinsville (now known as Martin's Ferry), the second child of Welsh immigrant William Cooper Howells and his Irish/Pennsylvanian Dutch wife Mary. William Howells, a printer and publisher whose 'utopian yearnings,' according to one of his son's biographers, 'led him from deism and the Democrats to Swedenborgianism and the Whigs,' was the formative influence on his son's life, introducing him to the world of small, locally run newspapers that was to lead, in 1871, to the younger Howells assuming the editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, the most important and influential North American literary journal of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Howells began working as a typesetter around the age of ten, first in the Ohio town of Hamilton for a newspaper his father had bought called the Hamilton Intelligencer and, from 1848, on a second newspaper called the Dayton Transcript. Neither venture succeeded and the time Howells was obliged to devote to his father's various publishing enterprises, as both typesetter and delivery boy, prevented him from gaining anything resembling a consistent education.
Not until 1852, after he became a printer's apprentice and one of his poems had been published in the Ohio State Journal, did his future finally begin to look a little brighter. For the next five years Howells combined a full-time job as the printer of the Ashtabula Sentinel — an anti-slavery newspaper edited by his father — with a rigorous program of self-education, eventually teaching himself Spanish, French, Latin and German. By 1857 he was writing prolifically (including at least one abandoned novel) and publishing his work in the Sentinel and other Ohio newspapers — a punishing schedule that no doubt contributed to the nervous collapses he frequently fell victim to throughout this period of his life.
In 1858 Howells returned to the state capital of Columbus where he became the city editor of the Ohio State Journal and a popular columnist. In addition to his newspaper work, he also found time to write poems, stories and reviews that were published in prestigious eastern magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, the National Era, the Saturday Press and The Dial, earning him a national reputation further enhanced by a series of sympathetic articles he wrote about the raid on Harpers Ferry led by the recently executed abolitionist John Brown.
Howells's first book, Poems of Two Friends featuring the work of himself and John Piatt, was published in 1859 and was followed a year later by the solo-penned Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamilton. The royalties from this book, which was warmly praised by Lincoln himself, paid for his first trip to New England, where he met several important members of the eastern literary establishment including the editor Oliver Wendell Holmes, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and the poet Walt Whitman.
During a side trip to Vermont Howells became formally engaged to Elinor Mead, cousin of the former abolitionist Governor of Ohio Rutherford B Hayes (who would go on to be elected the nineteenth President of the United States in 1877) whom he had met when the girl had visited Hayes in Ohio the previous winter. The couple were married in Paris on Christmas Eve 1862, by which time Howells had been serving as US Consul in the Italian city of Venice for a year. Their daughter Winifred was born almost exactly one year later, entering the world on 17 December 1863.
Howells spent the duration of the American Civil War in Venice, where he immersed himself in the art and culture of Italy and mastered its language. He also continued to write, publishing a series of humorous 'anti-travel' letters in the Boston Advertiser while searching for markets in which to sell his poetry and fiction. These proved difficult to find with the war reaching its bloody conclusion and for a time he despaired of ever having a successful literary career. He persevered, however, and after having a long article accepted by the North American Review, returned to New York City in 1865 to take up a position as a staff writer at The Nation.
A year later Howells was in Boston, employed as assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly and working hard at the task of recruiting new talent for the magazine. By 1872 he had become its editor in chief, regularly publishing work by his friends Henry James and Mark Twain. Between 1871 and 1880 he also published several books of travel writing, poetry and fiction, including his debut novel Their Wedding Journey (1872) and the Turgenev-influenced tale A Foregone Conclusion (1874) set in Venice.
In 1881 Howells resigned his position at The Atlantic Monthly to write full-time, producing in quick succession what are generally considered to be his three finest novels — A Modern Instance (1882), a runaway success and the first North American novel to directly deal with the contentious subject of divorce, Indian Summer (1883) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1883), a searing indictment of business life and the book many critics believe to be his enduring masterpiece. He also produced a truly staggering quantity of criticism, poetry and travel writing, combining it with social and literary essays — one of which, published in The Century, provoked a transatlantic 'war' over the divisive topic of literary realism. This heavy workload did not prevent him from taking a close personal interest in the care of his eldest child Winifred whose fragile health required another trip to Europe so she could be treated at a spa.
1885 became the turning point of Howells's life on several levels. Guilt about the condition of the poor led him to study the work of Tolstoy and temporarily abandon fiction for essays examining the various inequalities that were (and remain) so glaringly obvious in Western society. Winifred also suffered a relapse which made it necessary to cancel her Boston début and saw him move his entire family — his son John had been born in 1868, a second daughter Mildred in 1872 — from their sumptuous Cambridge home to a suburban hotel. Professionally, it was the year which saw him earn what was, up until that time, the highest advance ever paid to a North American author by the prestigious New York publishing house Harper Brothers. But this success — Howells was soon offered and refused a post at Harvard University — could not save his daughter whose illness, misdiagnosed as 'neurasthenia' (what would now be diagnosed as depression), would kill her in 1889 at the age of twenty-five.
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| WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, 1900 |
The next two decades of Howells's life saw him become even more deeply engaged with social causes and the lives of so-called 'ordinary Americans.' He was the only writer to risk pleading publicly for the lives of the Chicago anarchists wrongly convicted of murder in the infamous Haymarket Riots of 1889 — an unpopular move which could easily have cost him his career — and one of the few brave enough to criticize his country's annexation of the former Spanish colony of the Philippines in 1898.
He also championed the work of a new breed of young and sometimes controversial literary realists, a group which included the novelists Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris. Even more radically, he spoke out in favour of 'marginalized' novelists like Sarah Orne Jewett and the Yiddish writer Abraham Cahan, surmounting what were then iron-clad sexual, racial and religious barriers to help them get their work published and, more importantly, reviewed so that it might find a wider audience. He was awarded an honorary degree in Literature by Oxford University in 1904 and elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters later that same year, becoming the first recipient of its Howells Medal, an award named in his honor and still presented once every five years 'generally in recognition of the most distinguished American novel published during that period.'
1910 saw the death of his friend Mark Twain, closely followed by the death of his wife Elinor who had been taking morphine for several months to treat her worsening neuritis. The loss of his wife was a blow from which Howells never fully recovered, although he did continue to write with his usual industriousness, pouring out novels, plays, short stories and several new travel books inspired by late-in-life visits to the island of Bermuda plus return visits to England and Spain. His final book, a memoir titled Years of My Youth, appeared in 1916 and was followed, eight years after his death from pneumonia on 11 May 1920, by a selection of his letters edited by his surviving daughter Mildred.
Use the link below to read more about the life and work of North American novelist, poet, essayist and critic WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/american-literature-biographies/william-dean-howells
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