First Impressions of Literary New York

Howells claimed that to be published in the Saturday Press was to be in Aldrich's "company."

Howells doesn't refer to him by name, but it's clear from the context that he's talking about Clapp.

Howells claims that Clapp must have stolen the "shredded prose" style of the Saturday Press from the writing of Victor Hugo (63). Howells states that Clapp "brought it back with him from one of those soujourns in Paris which posses one of the French accent rather than the French language" (63).

Howells describes Clapp as "a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that his talk, the first day first day I saw him, was of such a quality that if he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room saying what lurid things he would directly do if anyone accused him of respectibility, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses" (63).

Howells states that he "could not disown" his fascination with Clapp during his first meeting with him, even though Clapp's language caused him "inner disgust" (63).

Clapp preferred the anonymity of writers in New York to the tradition and recognition of Boston writers (63).

Howells feels that Clapp was toying with him when he asked him of his impression and relationship with Hawthorne (63).

Howells discusses Clapp's death: "The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had inspired had ceased to be. He was a man of certain sardonic power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probaby more apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have a feeling that he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping turtle alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side of the ocean as any man would have" (65).

Howells doesn't refer to her by name, but it's clear from the context that he's talking about Clare.

Howells states that "It was said, so far west as Ohio, that the queen of the Bohemia sometimes came to Pfaff's: a young girl of sprightly gift in letters, whose name or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose fate, pathetic at times, out-tragedies almost any other in the history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow cast backward upon Pfaff's, whose name often figured in the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the Saturday Press" (64).

Howells claimed that to be published in the Saturday Press was to be in his "company" (63).

Howells claimed that to be published in the Saturday Press was to be in his "company" (63).

Howells begins a discussion of O'Brien's military career by mentioning O'Brien's literary successes with the story of "The Diamond Lens" and a ghost story. Howells mentions that upon his return to New York he found out that O'Brien had enlisted in the war. Howells claims O'Brien "had risen to be an officer in the swift process of the first days of it" (73).

Howells recounts that O'Brien had shot and killed a man at camp, and the outcome or his punishment was uncertain. O'Brien was cleared of wrong-doing on that account. O'Brien would die of lockjaw from a battle injury (73).

Introduced to Howells by Stedman, Howells states that the Stoddards were in "the glow of their early fame as poets" (72). He also mentions that "they knew about my poor beginnings and were very, very good to me" (72).

Of his friendship with the Stoddards, Howells says "But what I relished most was the long talk I had with them both about authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some wholly irreverent joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatsoever. Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it, from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me she has failed of the recognition her work merits, and which will be hers when Time begins to look about him for work worth remembering" (72-73).

Of Mrs. Stoddard's work, Howells continues, "Her tales and novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like no other, and a personality disdainful of literary environment" (73).

Howells also states "In a time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Browning, she never would write like anyone but herself" (73).

Howells fondly recalls visiting the couple and mentions that they had an appreciation for all literature, including his own (73).

Howells says "I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it" (73).