Realists and Jews

Abstract

William Dean Howells, priding himself on writing fiction was true to life, longed to put Smith into lyric and Jones into tragedy.(1) Along with his friend and fellow realist, Henry James, he succeeded admirably in putting Smiths and Joneses into his magisterial novels, but had difficulty in giving fictional life to Levys and Cohens. Howells in Ohio and in literary Boston, and James in upper-class Old and New England, encountered Jews infrequently. When they met Jews, they were free of vulgar anti-semitism of many of their acquaintances and several of their close friends. Howells was enthusiastic about Henry Harland's stories of Jewish tenement life; he made Harland guest of honor at literary luncheon and later was deeply saddened at news Harland, a good sick fellow, was fatally ill.(2) When Abraham Cahan's stories of New York Jews appeared, he praised them unstintingly. Henry James, although surrounded by infamously anti-semitic friends like Henry Adams and Paul Bourget, nevertheless escaped infection, agreeing with his brother William prejudice one of worst evils afflict humanity.(3) He shared Howells' affection for Harland, and was fond of Theodore Child, his worshipful Jewish admirer. Convinced of Dreyfus' innocence, he called his persecution sinister affaire. Paul Lemaitre's attitudes, James said, were among ugliest ... throughout |Affair' in anti-revisionist and anti-semitic interest.(4) While agreeing with William about evils of conscious prejudice, Henry acknowledged unconscious prejudices were difficult to combat, and when his aesthetic sensibilities were tried, his repressed antipathies came out. He remarked about Theodore Child he is Jew, and has nose, but handsome and looks like Daniel Deronda. He described Lady Rosebery, daughter of Meyer Rothschild, as large, fat, ugly, goodnatured, sensible and kind. Another titled lady he described as very nice, kindly, elderly childless Jewess.(5) It was James' aesthetic prejudices came to fore in his reaction to swarms in ghettos of New York. He was saddened by what he saw as degradation of English language as result of multiplication of so vital group. One should read his much-quoted unhappiness about immigrant populations with an understanding of his hypersensitivity to changes in his beloved language: in light of James wrote, that in light of language ... one stared at this all-unconscious impudence of agency of future ravage. Listening to sounds of the Yiddish he found himself victim in the torture rooms of living idiom.... The accent of ultimate future, in States, he observed ruefully, may be destined to become most beautiful on globe and music of humanity ... but whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English--in any sense for which there an existing literary measure.(6) But despite his aversion to sounds of immigrant speech, James, like Howells, was untained by racial viciousness festers in writings, letters, and conversations of James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Adams, and Paul Bourget. The American realists' treatment of Jewish characters deserves to be regarded against this background of their usual decent tolerance. The few Jews they knew personally were men and women whom they accepted or rejected on basis of their qualities, and not their race or religion. These acquaintances were usually of literary world, or upper class of English Jewry. From their experience in life (and they both were devoted to realist credo of writing from experience) they could get little help in forming their fictional characters. Furthermore, there was little in literary tradition to which they could turn when they sought to portray ordinary Jews. …