American Literary Centers | Page 4

AND LIFE--American Literary Centers
by William Dean Howells

AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES

One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear
to a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a
literature of our own, we have no literary centre. We have so much
literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a
literary centre. We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Where
there is so much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fireplace.
But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, we
deceive ourselves. Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we have
kindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have a
dozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of a literary
centre is concerned, if it is not worse.
I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some papers which I
wrote several years ago; but it appears, from a question which has
lately come to me from England, that I did not carry conviction quite so
far as that island; and I still have my work all before me, if I understand
the London friend who wishes "a comparative view of the centres of
literary production" among us; "how and why they change; how they
stand at present; and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to
other such centres."

I.
Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garment
which this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I
have a fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather
too succinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than
Italy or than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not
be taken at my word. I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told that
in those countries there is now a tendency to such a centre, I can only
say that there is none in this, and that, so far as I can see, we get further
every day from having such a centre. The fault, if it is a fault, grows
upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life is centrifugal,
and just so far as literature is the language of our life, it shares this
tendency. I do not attempt to say how it will be when, in order to
spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach the
blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our
eight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred at
some capital; that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writing

literary history, on a very small scale, with a somewhat crushing sense
of limits.
Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an American literary centre: at
Philadelphia, from the time Franklin went to live there until the death
of Charles Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New York,
during the period which may be roughly described as that of Irving,
Poe, Willis, and Bryant; then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years
illumined by the presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne,
Emerson, Holmes, Prescott, Parkman, and many lesser lights. These are
all still great publishing centres. If it were not that the house with the
largest list of American authors was still at Boston, I should say New
York was now the chief publishing centre; but in the sense that London
and Paris, or even Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with a
controlling influence throughout England and France, Spain and Russia,
neither New York nor Boston is now our literary centre, whatever they
may once have been. Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may note
that when New York seemed our literary centre Irving alone among
those who gave it lustre was a New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad;
Bryant, who was a New Englander, was alone constant to the city of his
adoption; Willis, a Bostonian, and Poe, a Marylander, went and came
as their poverty or their prosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt
here unbrokenly, and Poe did not even die here, though he often came
near starving. One cannot then strictly speak of any early American
literary centre except Boston, and Boston, strictly speaking, was the
New England literary centre.
However, we had really no use for an American literary centre before
the Civil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began
to have an American literature. Up to that time we had a Colonial
literature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New