LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS

By tradition, the act of writing is an isolated one. Webster's English Dictionary (1858) defines an author as "One who produces, creates, or brings into being; as God is the author of the universe." Such godlike creation implies self-sufficiency, autonomy, and apartness, a Romantic conception of the literary artist still common in the early twenty-first century despite the revisionary critical moves that followed Roland Barthes's landmark essay, "The Death of the Author" (1968). In his later years, Herman Melville wrote in solitude, lacking social contacts and largely forgotten by the reading public. Emily Dickinson also became increasingly reclusive, as evidenced in her correspondence with the critic and feminist Thomas Wentworth Higginson—a potentially sympathetic adviser but one who was unable to respond to her fully either as a person or a poet.

But the myth of the isolated artist is easily exaggerated. Male companionship was of intense importance to Melville. Evert A. Duyckinck, a close lifelong friend of Melville's, oversaw publication of his first book and introduced him to Nathaniel Hawthorne. And Dickinson had her friendships (with Helen Hunt Jackson, for instance), even in her later years. Writers undoubtedly stand reflectively apart from society, imaginatively engaged with life's essentials, critiquing commonly held assumptions and illustrating the rifts in ideological systems that others take for granted. But they are, at the same time and to lesser or greater extent, engaged and functioning members of that society. Indeed, this peculiar sense of standing both within and without social, conceptual, and ideological boundaries also defines the artist's role and identity. Henry James powerfully allegorized these two sides of the creative artist in "The Private Life" (1893), in which two (literally) different Clare Vawdreys are represented. The one "talks . . . circulates . . . [and is] awfully popular." The other lives apart from the world and dedicates himself completely to his "genius," his literary art (pp. 23–24).

Friendships are as important to the writer as they are to anyone else. The most valuable literary friendships in terms of artistic development and sustenance have often been with fellow writers. In some cases, this has involved—either on the part of one or both—revising, editing, or publishing the literary productions of the other. The whole business of authorship, however, has meant that others who are not creative writers themselves but who work professionally alongside them as secretaries, researchers, publishers, and editors must also be included within the definition of literary friends.

One form literary friendship can take is that of an unequal relationship between an established writer and an apprentice or unknown, often younger, colleague. In such a case, the former might provide support, advice, and encouragement at the start of the other's career. At this level, the term "friendship" is not inappropriate but may tend to overstate the nature of a relationship, which is not necessarily based on deep personal intimacy but rather on one party's generosity and sense of professional responsibility. The title of William Dean Howells's memoir, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), suggests a line between such categories. It is, however, necessarily a blurred one.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND HIS ROLE IN AMERICAN LETTERS

At its most effective, the literary support offered by an established writer can have a twofold function. First, it can consist in the giving of practical advice on matters of form, style, and content and in assisting in the publication of the work, and second, it can help develop the career trajectory of the junior partner. The more influence the senior writer has in the publishing world, the greater potentially the effect of his or her assistance. William Dean Howells (1837–1920) established himself in such a role as perhaps the most significant literary figure in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century America. Known by the early 1900s as "the Dean of American Letters," it is probably fair to say that Howells had more power in the American literary marketplace than any American author before or since. Howells was the influential editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1871–1881), editor and contributor for Harper's New Monthly Magazine from 1886, book reviewer and literary commentator, and also a respected novelist. His expertise coincided with a unique convergence of historical and cultural circumstances in which rapidly developing systems of mass consumption and communication still (just about) went hand in hand with a more traditional respect for high cultural forms and their representatives. When Howells moved from Boston to New York in 1888, he signaled a national shift in the balance of cultural power. He was also at the forefront of the move against sentimentalism and the neo-Romantic in America in favor of the more vigorous and radical literary forms of realism and naturalism.

Somewhat paradoxically, Howells's politics lay naturally on the side of caution, despite a real unease with contemporary social injustices. His recognition of the importance of European literary developments and his fostering of the talents of a diverse range of new and younger American writers illustrated both a catholicity of taste and a selfless commitment to what he saw as his wider literary obligations. A host of young writers owed him a distinct debt, as he encouraged and helped publish their work, among them Harold Frederic, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Sarah Orne Jewett. It was, for instance, his first enthusiastic review of Garland's Main-Travelled Roads (1891) that helped boost its nationwide success.

But there was a negative side to this literary philanthropy. For, as John W. Crowley pertinently notes, such cultural power also had its effect on those, such as Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser, whom Howells chose not to praise: "the deepest cut of all was for The Dean not to speak ex cathedra about a promising writer" (p. 76). Moreover, as the representative of hegemonic authority in the (white male) American publishing world, his influence could be construed—whatever his actions and motives—as working against the deepest needs and aspirations of marginalized cultural groups. Howells, however, can be defended here. The range of his literary encouragement is, to the modern critical imagination, compromised by its selective nature and the form that it sometimes took. But, from a turn-of-the-century perspective, and given the nature of his position, it is difficult to imagine how much more differently or positively he could have generally responded.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) later accused Howells of doing "irrevocable harm" by encouraging his work in dialect verse, a form that—in Dunbar's case—tended to foster demeaning racial stereotypes. But Howells's recognition of the value of the vernacular tradition can be read in other ways, in that it helped free American literature from a reliance on the discourse of white middle-class respectability and anticipated the Harlem Renaissance's later celebration of distinctive African American cultural difference.

Yet Howells did not do as much as he could have done to further Charlotte Perkins Gilman's (1860–1935) literary career. His recollection of the publication history of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" sounds a noticeably ambiguous, and even puzzling, note when he says that he agreed "with the editor of The Atlantic at the time that it was too terribly good to be printed" (Karpinski, p. 227). There is also evidence to suggest that Gilman's radical feminism and emotional intensity struck the wrong note in terms of Howells's more cautious and conventional gender politics. Although Howells conformed to conventional patriarchal models in this respect, he was influential in getting the now-famous story published in New England Magazine in 1892 through his influence over the editor, Edwin Mead (if his own account of the matter is to be accepted). And he did believe in gender equality to a degree unusual for the men of his period and offered considerable support to American women writers of his time, especially to local colorists such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman.

Howells had, then, a disproportionately large influence on his period. The literary acquaintances and friendships he formed were in large part allied to his recognition that new literary forms were a necessary response to changing American social and intellectual conditions. But his work and reputation would soon be demolished (as too bourgeois, timid, and "feminine") by the modernist generation that followed.

HOWELLS AND TWAIN

Howells's role as an editor and "literary mentor" suggests that distinctions must be made between various forms of literary friendship. His position as a figure of cultural authority and the encouragement and literary patronage he gave to lesser-established and often younger writers bred respect and loyalty. Eventually, though, intergenerational rivalry and the (necessary) displacement of the symbolic literary father attenuated his influence. But there was a different quality to the friendships he made with writers of roughly his own age and background and a closer emotional connection, too. Here, other qualities of friendship supplemented relationships that could still involve editorial assistance and joint adherence to a particular set of literary principles. These included factors such as the intimacy of shared experience, including ideological values and professional interests, and the extension of friendship to the larger family group. The close friendship between Howells and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain, 1835–1910) illustrates this point.

Howells's affection for Clemens was immensely strong and vice versa. Clemens was not always an easy man to get on with and had a reputation both for a quick temper and for fallings-out with former friends. Bret Harte (1836–1902), for instance, was close to Clemens in San Francisco in the mid-1860s and (in Clemens's words) "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently" (p. 28) as he began his literary career. But Clemens was never entirely at ease with Harte's condescending elegance and foppish ways, and after a rupture in their friendship in early 1877, his opinion of Harte plummeted. The references Clemens made to Harte became correspondingly vitriolic: "Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery" (Smith and Gibson, p. 235). In contrast, the relationship between Clemens and Howells lasted for a forty-year period and was still staunchly intact at the former's death in 1910.

Theirs was a many-faceted friendship and one that brought real pleasure to both men and much literary benefit to Clemens in particular. Howells spotted Clemens's talent early and fostered it through generous and prominent reviews of his novels and short stories and the publishing opportunities he gave him. Clemens (rightly) saw Howells as "the recognized Critical Court of Last Resort in this country" (p. 64). Howells used this authority to bolster his friend's reputation at every opportunity. Famously, it was his acceptance of "A True Story" for publication in the November 1874 Atlantic Monthly that first signaled Clemens's acceptance by the American literary establishment as more than just a "low" comedian. As Clemens appreciatively commented, "The Atlantic audience . . . is the only audience . . . that . . . don't require a 'humorist' to paint himself stripèd & stand on his head every fifteen minutes" (Smith and Gibson, p. 49). Howells also acted as editor, literary adviser, and even proofreader for Clemens. He checked the proofs of Huckleberry Finn at the point that the book's author had lost all patience for the task, and he did so with absolute graciousness: "If I had written half as good a book as Huckleberry Finn, I shouldn't ask anything better than to read the proofs; even as it is I don't. So send them on" (Smith and Gibson, p. 499).

In turn, Howells's realist tenets influenced Clemens and to an extent not sufficiently recognized. Like Howells—but because of his role as humorist, in a different way—Clemens could never quite reconcile the need to appeal to a mass audience with a higher set of cultural aspirations. The two men also worked together on several projects. Most, such as Colonel Sellers as a Scientist (1887), the stage comedy based on one of Clemens's most successful created characters, brought little success. Clemens's first novel, The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900), proved a more successful example of how friendship could be successfully combined with literary collaboration. In his affectionate memoir My Mark Twain (1910), Howells recaptures something of the self-delusion that affected them both as they got caught up in whatever project was at hand. Writing of the Sellers play, he says, "We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of the thing out. . . . I still believe the play was immensely funny. . . . But this may be my fondness" (p. 24). He then, though, confirms that this latter was indeed the likely case in admitting that no theater manager or actor would take the play. But, for whatever reason—perhaps because of certain similarities in their earlier lives, perhaps because of the patient and gentle good humor Howells brought to their relationship—this was the strongest of friendships and one that worked as well on a personal as on a professional level. Both men shared domestic sorrow, suffering the bitter blow of losing much-loved young daughters and emotionally sustaining and consoling each other as they were able. But there was also a great deal of sheer fun in the friendship too. And Howells was entirely sincere when he wrote to Clemens, "I would rather see and talk with you than any other man in the world, outside my own blood" (Smith and Gibson, p. 607).

Clemens and Howells's relationship is paradigmatic in illustrating some of the factors on which literary friendships can be based. The two men liked and trusted each other and enjoyed each other's company. They gave support to each other throughout their artistic careers (though Clemens was the primary beneficiary). They shared similarities in terms of background and experience. Both had nostalgic tendencies, which were usually held in check by a more critical and realistic habit of mind. The gulf between pre–Civil War boyhood and an adult life in a fast-modernizing postwar American world led each to construct affectionate versions of that earlier time. And each responded enthusiastically to the other's literary vision. Howells told Clemens that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was "altogether the best boy's story I ever read. . . . I wish I had been on that island" (Smith and Gibson, pp. 110–111). And when Howells published A Boy's Town (1890), Clemens answered in kind: "'A Boy's Town' is perfect—perfect as the perfectest photograph the sun ever made" (Smith and Gibson, p. 633).

JACK LONDON, SARAH ORNE JEWETT, WILLA CATHER

Literary friendships carry over from conventional models of friendship but often with an additional dimension stemming from the specific interaction of personal and professional concerns. To separate out such friendships' various orders is first to recognize—as previously shown—that different friendships fulfill different functions. Jack London's (1876–1916) friendships with three other writers show something of this. His relationship with Cloudesley Johns was based on mutual artistic appreciation. It took the form of an honest but supportive appraisal of each other's writings, the shared articulation of an aesthetic philosophy, and a joint pleasure in each other's literary successes. His friendship with the poet George Sterling (1869–1926) relied more on their close sense of personal intimacy, husbands and wives together sharing time both at London's California ranch and at the artists' colony in Carmel. Their use of nicknames—London's "Wolf" to Sterling's "Greek"—further suggests their easy companionship. London's relationship with Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was apparently based partly on philanthropy. For London helped the younger and struggling writer financially by buying plot ideas from him. But their relationship was not one-sided. The plotlines bought from Lewis helped London offset his own shortcomings, for as he wrote to Cloudesley Johns in 1900, "I can't construct plots worth a dam, but I can everlastingly elaborate" (London). London's use of Lewis in this way suggests that, like the title character in his Martin Eden (1908), he took a more pragmatic attitude to the business of writing than earlier novelists. More generally, one sees some move away from the idea of the lone artist in the growing professionalization of writing at this time.

Literary friendships can serve as the locating ground of a set of overlapping activities. Such friendships are the place where prejudices are aired and special interests fostered, where personal and artistic assumptions are confirmed or altered, where feedback on writing practices is received, and where psychological and emotional support can be given. Writers of a particular class, ethnic group, or gender whose marginal status gives them little voice in the larger social and artistic dialogue can gain confidence and sustenance from such alliances. Sarah Orne Jewett's (1849–1909) encouragement of the young Willa Cather (1873–1947) was, accordingly, a turning point in the younger writer's life. Both were unconventional in their own gender practices, and each made the gender/power nexus a central theme of her work. Cather's dissatisfaction with her early stories, "so poor that they discouraged me" (Cather), was countered by the praise and advice she received from the elder writer, who encouraged her both in the pursuit of a full-time writing career and in the representation of women's relations with other women. As Cather wrote: "Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them and about where my work fell short. She said, 'Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. . . . Make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, don't let that frighten you. . . . Write the truth and let them take it or leave it'" (Cather).

LONDON, PARIS, MODERNISM

Literary friends can serve as a sounding board for new artistic forms. In the early years of the twentieth century, groups of writers and artists came together—and especially in the two artistic capitals of London and Paris—to jointly engage in varieties of modernist experimentation. Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), whose rue de Fleurus apartment in Paris became one of the best-remembered artistic salons of the period, saw the expatriate urge in terms of the poverty of American cultural life: "Of course they all came to France a great many to paint pictures and naturally they could not do that at home, or write they could not do that at home either, they could be dentists at home" (Bradbury, p. 31). The American Scene (1907) by Henry James—whose earlier expatriation and circle of literary friends in Europe and America anticipated his modernist successors—tends to support such a reading. But perhaps a growing sense of the limitations of local and national cultural identifications and a recognition of a wider and international sense of creative artistic ferment provide an equally powerful explanation (if a less witty one than Stein's).

For Stein, who moved to Paris in 1903, "Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth century art and literature." For Ezra Pound (1885–1972), London—where he arrived in 1908—initially had a similar importance: "London, deah old lundon, is the place for poesy" (Witemeyer, p. 13). Although the American literary world was relatively disparate geographically following the earlier preeminence of Boston, these two capitals provided the locations for a series of close literary and artistic friendships where the shape of modernist writing was formed. But this movement was by no means contained within these settings and among these particular groups. Pound's collaboration with Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, was one notable example of the way new ideas of poetry were propagated on a transatlantic scale, while his correspondence with William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), whose life was mainly spent in Paterson, New Jersey, formed not just "an unparalleled documentary record of developments in modern literature and culture" but also a long-lasting if variable friendship, "an unpredictable saga of collaboration and conflict" (Witemeyer, pp. vii–viii).

Pound's friendships might have been volatile—the American poet John Gould Fletcher spoke of his "pugnacious virility"—but his publicizing, encouraging, and marshaling of fellow writers was quite extraordinary, as together they reshaped the artistic boundaries of their time. He and Hilda Doolittle (H.D., 1886–1961) were centrally involved in the founding of the imagist movement and the writing of its 1908 manifesto. Then, in 1914, with Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), he became propagandist and prime mover behind vorticism and Blast, the journal that publicized it. In that same year, he met T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), beginning a friendship in which Pound took on the roles of publisher, editor, adviser, career manager, and financial sponsor. Indeed, the editing he did of The Waste Land (1922) is a strong reminder of the real artistic benefits that literary friendships can provide. It was Pound, too, who recognized James Joyce's (1882–1941) talents and who played a central part in putting him on the literary map, publishing A Portrait of the Artist in The Egoist (of which he was literary editor) in 1914.

Meanwhile something similar was happening in Paris, if without the factor of Pound's particular dynamic intensity. Before the war, Gertrude and Leo Stein's friendships with Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and other European artists made their apartment a forum for those working at the cutting edge of modernist art. It was here, too, that other Americans in Europe, such as Mabel Dodge and Carl Van Vechten, gathered. After the war, the household, now run by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, became a place where writers and artists such as Pound (who moved to Paris in 1920), Paul Robeson, Virgil Thomson, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, and others talked and worked together to encourage and widen the ongoing thrust of modernist experimentation. Stein's own relationship with Toklas was the intimate one of partner and lover. But the relationship also provided Stein with literary material (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933) and undeniably helped prompt Stein's slyly subversive critique of patriarchal language and assumptions. Artistic identity, literary style, and radical gender politics were thus directly linked to this particularly intense form of literary friendship.

FLOWERS OF FRIENDSHIP?

Richard Lingeman writes that "literary friends walk on eggshells" with "the demons of jealousy, envy, competitiveness lurking" (Donaldson, p. 272). Literary friendships have many positive benefits, but some of the comments previously made about Clemens and Harte and Pound and Williams hint at other possibilities. The artistic ego can be sensitive, even paranoid, and aggression toward present or past friends who are also literary rivals is a commonly recognized pattern as—to slightly alter part of the title of Stein's famous poem, "the flowers of friendship fade," in either a temporary or permanent way. Stein's own relationship with Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) is a case in point. In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway looks back to the 1920s and "the way it ended with Gertrude Stein." He describes calling at 27 rue de Fleurus, waiting for Stein to come down and hearing "Miss Stein's voice come pleading and begging [Alice], saying, 'Don't, pussy. Don't. Don't, please don't. I'll do anything, pussy, but please don't do it. Please don't. Please don't, pussy'" (p. 118). Hemingway leaves the house, reporting, "that was the way it finished for me," and that though the relationship with Stein was later resumed, "I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head" (p. 119). The story is, of course, part of Hemingway's mythic narrative of artistic independence as he brings issues of writing (what Stein had taught him, "valid and valuable . . . truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition" [p. 17]) and sexuality together, revealing his homophobia as he confirms his own separateness and masculine self-sufficiency.

Literary friendships, then, can be of considerable importance in the encouragement, sustaining, and development of the creative impulse. But the tensions that can also exist in such relationships are integral to the very business of being a writer. Robert Sward quotes a contemporary poet "for whom the phrase 'writers' friendship' would seem an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, like resident alien or small crowd" (Sward). Aggression and competition can be a basis for literary production as well as encouragement, intimacy, and support. If literary friendships have their great rewards, they also run such risks.

See alsoLiterary Colonies; Literary Marketplace

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cather, Willa. "Willa Cather Talks of Work." Interview by F. H. in the Philadelphia Record, August 10, 1913, soon after the publication of O Pioneers! Available at http://www.willacather.org/InterviewsLettersetc/InterviewOPioneers!.htm.

Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain). Mark Twain's Letters1867–1875. Available at http://mark-twain.classicliterature.co.uk/mark-twains-letters-1867–1875/.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribners, 1964.

Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910.

James, Henry. "The Private Life." 1893. In Henry James:Selected Tales. London: Dent, 1982.

London, Jack. Jack London to Cloudesley Johns, June 16, 1900. Jack London, Author and Adventurer. Literary Friendships. Huntington Library, 2002. Available at http://www.huntington.org/LibraryDiv/friends.html.

Smith, Henry Nash, and William M. Gibson, eds. MarkTwain–Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells 1872–1910. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1960.

Witemeyer, Hugh, ed. Pound/Williams: Selected Letters ofEzra Pound and William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1996.

Secondary Works

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Expatriate Tradition in AmericanLiterature. Durham, U.K.: British Association for American Studies, 1982.

Crowley, John W. The Dean of American Letters: The LateCareer of William Dean Howells. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Donaldson, Scott. Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise andFall of a Literary Friendship. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1999.

Karpinski, Joanne. "When the Marriage of True Minds Admits Impediments: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and William Dean Howells." In Patrons and Protegées: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, pp. 212–234. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Marchalonis, Shirley, ed. Patrons and Protégées: Gender,Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Stoneley, Peter. "Rewriting the Gold Rush: Twain, Harte, and Homosociality." Journal of American Studies 30, no. 2 (1996): 189–209.

Sward, Robert, comp. and ed. On the Nature of Literary Friendships. Web Del Sol/Perihelion. http://www.webdelsol.com/LITARTS/Robert_Sward/Writers_Friendship/introtoc.html.

Peter Messent