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Collaborators in Literary America, 1870–1920

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Collaborators in Literary America, 1870–1920

By

Susanna Ashton

COLLABORATORS IN LITERARY AMERICA,

1870–1920

© Susanna Ashton, 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6217–0 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ashton, Susanna, 1967– Collaborators in literary America, 1870–1920 / by Susanna Ashton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–6217–0 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Authorship—Collaboration—History—19th century. 3. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Authorship— Collaboration—History—20th century. 5. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910. Gilded age. 6. Grant, Robert, 1852–1940. King’s men. 7. Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829–1900—Authorship. 8. Matthews, Brander, 1852–1929—Authorship. 9. Whole family. 10. Book history—American. I. Title. PS217.C64 A84 2003 810.9’004—dc21

2003041317

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June, 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To My Family


Con t e n t s

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

The Collaborative Age

Where the Twain did Meet—The Gilded Age of American Authorship

Chapter 2 The King’s Men, or a Parable of Democratic Authorship Chapter 3 Chapter 4

Clubbing, Conversing, and Collaborating: Brander Matthews as Professional Man of Letters Veribly a Purple Cow: The Whole Family and the Collaborative Search for Coherence

Conclusion Appendix

25 55 91 127 167

Author List

173

Notes Bibliography Bibliography of Collaborative Fiction Index

175 191 205 215


Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following for their help in writing this book: Bluford Adams, Sarah Barrash, Kathleen Diffley, Susan Harris, Barbara Heifferon, June Howard, Leon Jackson, Emily Jaekels, Nikki Kirkham, Michael Kiskis, Joseph Kissane, Bart Lawrence, Tom Lutz, Michelle Martin, Alan Swords, Christopher Wilson, and Harold Woodell. I am indebted to the following organizations, institutions, and libraries: the William Dean Howells Memorial Society Fellowship at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Irish Research Council, the New York Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Clemson University, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, Elmira College, Columbia University Libraries, the Mark Twain Society (especially the wonderful people in Elmira), The Brick Row Bookshop in San Francisco, CA, and the University of Iowa. I am grateful for the permission to reprint sections of chapters 3 and 4 that appeared in much shorter versions as essays in Studies in the Novel and Symploke.


INTRODUCTION The Collaborative Age

In the 1873 preface to The Gilded Age, Twain’s first novel and the one that named an era, Twain wrote “This is—what it pretends to be—a joint production, in the conception of the story, the exposition of the characters, and in its literal composition.” Twain’s elliptical aside that the work “pretends to be” a joint production signals the dilemma which this book explores. Was Twain correcting himself, as if to say “This is, or rather, this has the pretense of being jointly done but it wasn’t really,” indicating that the text was not what it appears to be? In his comment, Twain highlights the complexity of the collaborative premise, and acknowledges that a joint production demands explanation. The implications are significant; what understanding of authorship necessitated that the phrase “a joint production” be approached so cautiously? Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s novel has long attracted critics who examined it for insights into Twain’s early career, capitalism, and American individualism. Few scholars, however, have grappled with the implications of The Gilded Age as a collaborative text. Scholars who address the novel tend to do so in the context of Twain’s theories of literary structure rather than in the fuller context of professional authorship in the late nineteenth century. To consider The Gilded Age an aberrant gimmick is to miss its signal importance: Twain and Warner’s novel marked the beginning of an age in which popular authors came together to write collaboratively. From 1870–1920 a tremendous amount of collaborative fiction was published in the United States. No bibliography or history has ever tracked the exact publication figures for collectively authored fiction, but the prevalence of these works at the turn of the century clearly marks out a period in which the writing process was thought of as divisible. America’s Gilded Age was truly a Collaborative Age. But what was it about the period that rendered it so conducive to collaboration? And what can we learn about the turn of the century by

2 / collaborators in literary america, 1870–1920

better understanding how these texts were imagined? Authors who participate in collaborative projects each make a choice to work in a medium which foregrounds, in fact highlights, the production of literature. The writing process defines the genre of collaborative writing. By agreeing to have a part in a collaborative venture, authors put themselves in a position where their crafting, as much as their craft, was available for scrutiny. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collaborative texts were written during a time in which the act of writing was being rapidly redefined. These texts provided writers with a place to juxtapose their writing techniques with that of their peers. The incentive to engage in this sort of comparative practice was generated by a highly competitive literary culture in which there was no longer an easy consensus either about how to understand the activity of writing or about how to understand the relationship this activity had with its final product. I argue that the professionalization of authorship during this period of time transformed and expanded the ways in which a writer could practice and conceptualize his or her work. By examining the ways in which collaborative fictions were assembled and conceived, we can see how the profession of authorship was variously defined and how those definitions were constructed in terms of one another. By writing together, people could learn how they wrote differently from one another, and learn in what ways their writing processes were similar. Collaborative fictions offered a venue in which authors could clarify and assert their own individuality as well as their commonality. Asserting authorial integrity, while simultaneously developing a professional group identity, was a response to the pressures of the mass literary marketplace. As the magazine market expanded during the late nineteenth century, it created a larger market with new opportunities for writers of fiction. Authorial names became increasingly valuable as commodities. After establishing a reputation, authors could sell work on the value of their name alone. More writers were able to support themselves than ever before. This proliferation of people who could and did identify themselves as “writers” served to make the few writers who could break from the pack and become famous, somehow suspect. How could the tremendously successful William Dean Howells really understand the agonies of an unknown magazine writer? Despite his essays full of advice for the novice writer, his personal success was predicated upon an understanding of success as meretricious. He had earned his fame by competing with and succeeding over others. Is alienation the price of success? This question became increasingly pressing during this time because the sheer increase of people who identified themselves as

the collaborative age / 3

writers increased the pressures and incentives to break from the pack. And yet, it was the mass labor force of writers that enabled the founding of Authorship leagues during the 1890s and created a group identity which, in nearly all cases, was concerned with legitimizing the commercial position of the author. As the century turned, writers became increasingly concerned with bridging the seeming gap between their personal identity and their group one. Genius and commerce, too, were locked in their stereotypical battle. Artistry was not necessarily seen as a guarantor of success. The development of collaborative fiction during this period made apparent the desire to assert the author’s personality and integrity, while simultaneously aligning that author with the powerful group identity of a professionalized class. Some writers assumed that any collaborative project entailed an unequal distribution of labor and that credit should not be given equally to all. One of the central issues of this study is the way in which each writer defined the authorial experience, and how that definition in turn influenced the way in which labor was divided. For example, the aptly titled, John Holden, Unionist (1893) is a Civil War novel catalogued by the Library of Congress as having joint authors, Thomas Deleon and Erwin Ledyard. Upon examination, however, Deleon’s name is the only one that appears on the title page. Deleon claims, on the next page and later in the introduction, to have written the book “in collaboration” with Ledyard, but Deleon seems to define “collaborator” only as being a military consultant for the finer points of the story, while the Library of Congress effectively defined collaborator, in this case at least, as joint author (Deleon and Ledyard). While, in other cases authorship might not be in dispute, establishing and ranking different kinds of authorship was a common problem. It was not uncommon for a collaborative novel to list multiple authors and yet highlight the particular contributions of one individual as the plotter, mastermind, or at least editor. A typical example of this situation would be A Novelty Novel—The Story of a Girl Told by Sixteen Other Girls (1889), which notes on its title page that it is “After a Plot by May Hunt.” Sixteen other names are relegated to the next page (Hunt). A less common phenomenon would be the experiences of British writer Walter Besant, who cowrote many popular novels in the 1870s and 1880s with James Rice, another British novelist. Besant claimed to have done much of what is thought of as the actual writing, leaving the negotiations with the publishers and the plotting of the story to his partner.1 For Besant, plotting a story was not part of actually writing, but it was an intrinsic part of “authoring.” As the two names on their title pages attest, managing to get a story into print was


culturally recognized as part of authoring a text, regardless of how writing duties might have been distributed. While the problem of ghostwriters and unidentified or unacknowledged collaborators raises important additional questions about textual authorship, this study focuses almost exclusively on texts that acknowledge joint production by either a dual copyright or multiple names listed on a title page. These public statements of multiplicity challenge cultural assumptions about authorship. Hidden collaborators and ghostwriters are more often bowing to cultural pressures to recognize only one writer. However intriguing these authorial subterfuges may be, they do not assert their novelty to challenge readerly expectations in the same manner as openly collaborative texts. While critics such as Jack Stillinger have examined collective authorship by looking at plagiarism and editorial alterations, I limit authorship to a sense of it as a textual agency that can be distinguished from editorial or compositional contributions. While there is much that is compelling about looking at all authorship as the product of social context that makes all literary production invariably collaborative, I fear that that definition eventually evacuates collaboration of much specific meaning. While I approach this project from the perspective of cultural studies in its broadest sense, I nonetheless argue that by asking the public to see and assess what multiple names on a title page might mean, authors who wrote collaboratively demanded a response, which, more often than not, would assert a belief in the author as a human principle of unity for any text. By looking at how public authorship was variably defined, we can gain insight into how collaborative writers expressed their conception of their craft, and how that conception emerged in response to their cultural milieu. Returning the very real presence of collaborative authorship to literary history not only fills a gap in turn-of-the-century American literary studies and a huge chasm in the field of bibliography, but also demands a rethinking of twentieth-century understandings of the cultural value of writing. The Internet, for example, has exploded conventional ways of thinking about literary property, individual composition, and authorial responsibility. And yet, these ideas might seem more manageable when we assess them in a historical tradition of authorial complications. What Collaborators in Literary America points to, ultimately, is that understanding the literary conventions that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers were themselves aware of, should inform our readings not only of those writers’ own texts, but also of the writings which were singularly composed and conceived of during their time and ours. A thoughtful understanding of how amateurism and professionalism


are merging in contemporary writing practices is predicated upon adequately, assessing one of the most striking cultural manifestations of anxiety over professionalism: collaborative writing. Collaborative Models Much of the fiction and poetry this divisible authorship created was by individuals in sympathy with one another. Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other (1872), for instance, was planned out by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Adeline D. T. Whitney, Lucretia P. Hale, Frederic W. Loring, Frederic B. Perkins, and Edward E. Hale in a session which “baptized [them] into each other’s spirit” (v). In the course of this collaboration Apache bandits murdered Frederic W. Loring. The other writers managed to finish the story without him, but the very real disaster vividly illustrates how the unexpected withdrawal of one author from the project might jeopardize the entire collective and how collaboration could draw a group of friends even closer together. It became increasingly common for one writer to finish another’s unfinished manuscript. After Stephen Crane’s death, for instance, his friend Robert Barr completed The O’Ruddy (1903). And when Emma Marshall died before finishing her novel, Cross Purposes, her daughter took it up for three chapters and finding herself unable to complete it because of illness and grief, found a family friend, Evelyn Everett-Greene to finish it up for her (The Academy 445). Some literary conglomerations were of a more spurious nature. The Boston Globe, for example, ran a collaborative serial in 1891 that was very dubiously attributed to a host of celebrities. According to the publicity hungry Boston Globe, “His Fleeting Ideal,” was written by such luminaries as John L. Sullivan and P. T. Barnum. In the late 1890s, Albert Terhune regularly made money by individually writing “collaborative” serial novels, including one by Ten Beautiful Shopgirls and another by Ten Beautiful Actresses (148). While large groups of writers were somewhat rare, it was quite common for pairs of friends to jointly assemble a novel. Edwin Lassetter Bynner and Lucretia Peabody Hale, for example, were more typical nineteenth-century collaborators. They were both established writers in their own right, but came together as close friends to write a thriller, An Uncloseted Skeleton (1887). Another typical example would be George Cary Eggleston and Dolores Marbourg’s Juggernaut, which appeared in 1891. While writers who participated in collaborative composition tended to have literary reputations apart from their foray into collective authorship, this was not always the case. Under the rubric of


“Two Women of the West,” for example, friends Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant wrote the very clever utopian novel, Unveiling a Parallel, A Romance (1893), but never seem to have published anything substantive before or after. Many collaborative novels were written by husband and wife teams, such as William Sharp and Blanche Howard who wrote A Fellowe and His Wife (1892), or the prolific Agnes and Egerton Castle who cowrote many popular romances of the early twentieth century.2 And almost as common as married couples were the sister teams, such as Susan and Anna Warner who composed several collaborative novels and poems in the 1860s and 1870s. Other collaborative novels were written by authors who had little fondness for one another, such as Edith Wyatt and Henry James, both of whom participated in an ensemble novel of 1906, The Whole Family. Some collaborative texts were assembled amidst good will, but the mutual respect dimmed over the course of time. Owen Wister, for instance, regretted his participation in A Week Away from Time (1887) and wrote his father that he was “disgusted” with the book (Lodge; Wister 97). Some of these projects had high artistic aspirations, and others were motivated by the publicity such projects might achieve. Each project was marked by a different configuration of personalities, goals, and achievements. Of course, collaborative fiction has never been a strictly American phenomenon. In France, there have been a number of well-known collaborative writers. The epistolary novel La Croix de Berny (1857) was a famous instance of this. La Madame Emile de Girardin, Theophile Gautier, Jules Sandeau and Mery ( Joseph Mery) assembled La Croix de Berny. Emile Erckmann and Alexander Chatrian not only published a series of best-selling novels during the 1860s and 1870s, but also vivid historical fiction, such as The Plébiscite: or, The Miller’s Story of the War, by one of the 7,500,000 who voted “Yes” that was often of such sweeping scope that it may well have taken two people to cover such vast terrain. British writer Robert S. Hichens wrote many successful novels in collaboration with a variety of people during the 1890s, and the Irish cousins, Edith Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross (Violet Florence Martin) composed the well-received Experiences of an Irish R. M. and other works in the 1890s and early 1900s. Somerville was so attached to Ross and felt so intellectually indebted to her that, even after Ross’s death in 1915, Somerville continued to list her as coauthor on several novels for the next thirty years. The collaboration between Ford Maddox Ford and Joseph Conrad which resulted in The Inheritors so intrigued The Academy that it published a call for “some clever writer” to take up


“a very good subject, The Collaborators” in response (The Academy. 61 (20 July 1901): 43). And although the propensity for collaborative novels and analyzing the collaborative phenomenon was more common on this side of the Atlantic, British journals were familiar enough with the debate to begin parodying and dismissing the now weary appearance of essays chronicling the collaborative process. “Books written in collaboration are sufficiently common,” explained The Academy, to “not really merit interest anymore” (The Academy. 57 (21 Oct. 1899): 445). By 1909, The Academy could sneer, “To the critic or the student of literature such partnership is like enough to afford more irritation than pleasure” (The Academy. 77 (9 Oct. 1909): 605). The apotheosis of British scorn probably took its form in a comic essay in The Cambridge Review titled “Our Literary Collaboration.” This satirical treatment of the collaborative process opened decisively: “No, I cannot say that we found the system a success, nor can I conscientiously recommend it for adoption by others” (207). As the speaker goes on to describe the horrors that occurred during his collaboration, it becomes quite clear that not only does collaboration seem a foolish process, it seems like a tired one. The British were all too familiar with the problem of multiple authorship and while it might not be a uniquely American phenomenon, they certainly seemed to hope that it was. Furthermore, it must be granted that the impulse to collaborate was not specific to the turn of the century. There were certainly precedents well before The Gilded Age, such as Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other (1872). One might even cite William Irving, Washington Irving, and J. K. Paulding’s Salmagundi (1807–1808) or Fitz Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake’s Croaker Papers (1819) as creative literary works written in collaboration by early Americans. And it is also true that every decade of the twentieth century saw a handful of American novels written in some sort of collaborative form. Almost every literary genre has had its collaborative texts, from romances to spy stories. Even the more arcane literary genres have had collaborators use their particular blend of collective voices to forward their concerns. The team of Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster, for instance, were part of the economic novel phase of the early twentieth century. Their powerful, albeit uneven novels, Calumet ‘K’ (1901), Comrade John (1901), and The Short-Line War (1907) were part of the movement to write about corporate mergers and explosive economic growth. Infused with the rhetoric of proto-Taylorist efficiency, these economic novels featured an understanding of joint labor far removed from the discourse of inspired labor that characterized so many earlier collaborations. The hearty


cooperative dynamics suitable for a modern age were not the same congenial dynamics theoretically underlying earlier collaborative efforts. The collaborative novels of the later twentieth century most frequently tend to be, for reasons that we shall examine later, novels driven by plot. It is not surprising, therefore, that mysteries have always had a disproportionate share of the collaborative market. Collaborative detective novels, such as Naked Came the Manatee (1996) that brought together Florida crime writers, or Yeats is Dead! A Mystery by 15 Irish Writers (2001) were preceded by dozens of detective projects such as Bobbed Hair (1925) or The Fate Of Fenella (1892) (Hiaasen; Parker; Mathers; Reynolds). Aside from mysteries, science fiction has steadily proved to be the most reliable literary genre for people seeking collaborative work and as the field of science fiction has expanded, so have the numbers of works written in collaboration.3 Similarly, manly adventure novels from the turn of the century, such as Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams’s pirate novel The Mystery (1907) and Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood’s The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915) were part of a tradition later picked up by Charles Nordoff and James Norman Hall, who wrote, in tandem, Mutiny on the Bounty (1932) and dozens of other seafaring adventures in the 1930s and 1940s. Little attention has been paid to compositional methods of these masculine collaborations, but more recent collaborative novels written by women have attracted far more meta-criticism, attending to the subversive potential of such collaborations.4 Sara Maitland and Michelene Wandor’s Arky Types (1987) is a recent and powerful example of an acutely self-conscious text forcibly demonstrating its sexual and narrative politics by making apparent the ruptures and slippage offered by collaborative composition. And, in the only case I know of to have received more attention because of the editor’s fame rather than because of the participants’, Ken Kesey’s writing workshop at the University of Oregon cobbled together a novel, Caverns (1990), which received considerable publicity, if not considerable acclaim (Levon). And yet, despite earlier and more recent occurrences of collaborative fiction, the propensity for writers of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America to write together was a distinct phenomenon. As this book will demonstrate, both the successes and the failures of the period’s collaborations affirmed the value of questioning coherence, of interrogating friendships, and of mediating differences. The decline in the twentieth century of these projects may be linked to the demise in the serialization of novels as well; a genre with which collaboration is often linked. Chapter 4, which examines The Whole Family’s


construction as a serial novel as well as a collaborative one, demonstrates how readerly expectations for coherence within serialized novels often made it easier for them to accept the discontinuities often encountered in collaborative fictions. The self-conscious fragmentation within the production of a serial or collaborative text was gradually displaced by a self-conscious fragmentation within the literary text itself. That isn’t to say that collaborative texts were precursors to modernism, but they may have both been conservative reactions to the liberal notions of the limitless self. Of course, the overriding irony of collaborative novels is the relationship between their primary mode of expression and the various schools of literary realism that surrounded them. As I will explain in more detail in my examination of Brander Matthews (chapter 3) and my analysis of The Whole Family (chapter 4), it was rarely writers from the hard-nosed school of realism, such as Jack London and Theodore Dreiser who participated in such projects but virtually all of the other types of writers associated with genres of literary realism during this era (Howells, Twain, James, Freeman, etc.) used at one point or another, this most selfconsciously artificial mode of presentation. Michael Anesko argues that criticism on American realism presumes the form of the novel to be intrinsically connected to its manner of expression: “One might even say that genre and mode have become coterminous, not merely in practice but also in ideological conception” (78). And yet despite relentless critical interest in the relationship between the realist mode and the American novel of this period, no one has considered connections between experimental novels of that era and the predominant mode of literary expression during its time. Quite the contrary, their experimental nature has seemingly kept them, by definition, out of the realist canon. I am not arguing that any or all of the texts I analyze belong under that rubric, but what is peculiarly illuminating about collaborative texts to our understanding of American Literary Realism is how the most significant trait of realism (the attempt to simultaneously represent the real and be the real) was inherently contradictory in just the same way the collaborative attempts at representing coherence and being coherent were. Anesko explains, “This failure of coherence [in realist novels], then, is less of a liability than a source of interest, because it reveals the peculiar instability of realism’s aesthetic and social functions and the multiple ways in which that instability can be registered and analyzed” (82). If registering instability is understood as part of the motivating force behind collaborative texts, we can then return to the notion of early modernist fragmentation as not an outgrowth of collaborative texts


but as speaking to the often reactionary and conservative impulses that underlay the collaborative impulse at the turn of the century. As my analyses of The King’s Men and The Gilded Age will also demonstrate, collaboration was often an ironic way of questioning the limits of democracy. After all, writing in a group invariably highlights inequities, differences, and equality. While officially downplaying differences, collaborative novels more often than not highlighted them: an irony played out quite consciously by writers in all of the works I will discuss. As a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century phenomenon, therefore, collaborative novels can be understood as testing limits of Gilded Age social and political liberalism. Now, in the twenty-first century, collaboration seems to be on the rise again both in practice and in discussion. Contemporary composition theorists and literary analyses are increasingly focusing upon the historical and contemporary implications of literary collaboration, while a spate of collaborative novels in the last few years suggests that, in both theory and practice, collaboration is again at the fore. If earlier patterns can teach us anything, it may well be that—just as collaboration in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was often a cautionary act, warning against the excesses of liberalism—so, too, current interest in collaboration may be a marker of a reactionary cultural phenomenon. Modern communications technology has broken down so many notions about individuality and authorship, that the resurgence of interest in collaboration may not be an embrace of these new challenges to individuality, but may rather be demonstrations about the limitations technology-driven collectivity may have. Similarly, increasing distress over the lack of individual responsibility for corporate crimes may also begin to fuel experimental practices of collaboration that seek to test out and represent the limitations of collective responsibility. Ironically yet again, the contemporary resurgence of interest in collaboration may be a way of resisting the excesses of modern challenges to the notion of the individual. Procedures Collaborators in Literary America proceeds chronologically with a study of writers and projects that, for various reasons, exemplify both the range and patterns of concerns literary collaboration had during the turn of the century. While some texts have received more critical attention and acclaim than others (such as The Whole Family which has recently had an excellent book-length study written by June Howard


devoted to its formulations of family and sentiment), others are more typical of collaborations of the period (such as the many short stories by Brander Matthews that I discuss in chapter 3) and have received little notice or attention. The Gilded Age is shockingly unnoticed in the Twain oeuvre and my analysis of the context of production behind The King’s Men brings to light perhaps not a particularly typical novel, but a deeply idiosyncratic gathering of writers. While I certainly argue in each case about the specificities of production which informed their cultural meanings, I also follow patterns which recur in so many of these collaborative endeavors: the performativity of unease with the writing, the interest in collaboration’s political implications for a modern, democratic world, and the continual testing of boundaries by writers who frequently characterized their own works as culturally conservative. The first chapter looks at the novel which indeed, named the era: Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age (1873) and argues that this joint authorial project was questioning cultural understandings about production and responsibility. The second chapter focuses upon the cultural issues at stake in a novel of 1884, The King’s Men. The third chapter concerns a particular author, Brander Matthews (1852–1929), and his various collaborations. The fourth and final chapter examines The Whole Family, a novel of 1906, and how the discourse of artistic coherency shaped an understanding of narrative structure in a collaborative text. The selected novels and story collections each illustrate different methods that were developed to collaborate. What is more important, these novels and story collections illustrate how collaboration was conceived and how those conceptions were reflective of different understandings of authorship. The handfuls of collaborative texts I have chosen to focus upon are certainly among the best-known examples of collaborative fiction, but my primary criterion for selecting these case studies was thematic. Each book, from The Gilded Age to The Whole Family, foregrounds the interactions of authorial personalities. These interactions, as chronicled within the texts, within the extant correspondence, within reminiscences, and elsewhere, provide the warp and woof of my study. My opening study of Twain and Warner, “Where the Twain did Meet: The Gilded Age of American Authorship,” argues that the infrastructure of the plot and its hesitation about corporate responsibility was embodied in the dissemination of it as a collaborative novel to be sold by subscription. In my second chapter, “The King’s Men; or, a Parable of Democratic Authorship,” I examine the context and production of The King’s Men (1887), a collaborative novel written by Frederic Stimson, Robert Grant, John Wheelwright, and John Boyle O’Reilly.


I contend that literary practice was being increasingly redefined in terms of professional rhetoric and that these writers, all of whom went on to significant literary, judicial, and political careers, used their collaborative novel as an early literary forum to express a rampant unease with a nation that seemed to them far too willing to promote common sense over expertise. My third chapter, “Clubbing, Conversing, and Collaborating: Brander Matthews as Professional Man of Letters,” follows the career of a Columbia professor, prolific critic, collaborative fiction writer, and formidable club man, to demonstrate how the genteel critics of the late nineteenth century survived well into the twentieth century by consolidating their power in informal Authors’ societies rather than formal associations, and generally gathering together in forums which allowed them to reap the advantages of a collective marketplace identity without sacrificing the patrician calling of the nineteenth-century amateur with all of its attendant advantages. By analyzing both the collaborative fiction he produced during this period and his extensive theorizing about the values of collaboration, I argue that Matthews sought to redefine the term “Man of Letters” so that it might have a place in the twentieth century. I further examine the troubled relationships among conflicting approaches to the labor of writing in chapter 4, “The Whole Family and the Collective Search for Coherence.” Here, I focus upon The Whole Family (1908) and the manner in which a variety of prominent authors, reflecting different generations, social positions, and theories of artistic coherence, all tried to assemble a coherent novel. I demonstrate how the writers who identified themselves as “artists” sought to impose their view of the completed work upon its parts, while authors who identified themselves as “writers” concerned themselves with the specificities of “parts” and the interactions and transitions among them. How these respective authors each defined collaboration was in keeping with how they each defined their professional (or amateur) status. If labor is divisible, can the product of that labor be equally divided? By seeing how each author grappled with the oxymoronic implications of a coherent collaboration, I trace out how his or her respective strategies reflected his or her broader understandings of what the labor of writing might entail. If we listen to collaborative texts, what do we hear? In my conclusion, I argue that we hear individual voices. We hear voices vying for attention with an increasing intensity as they become aware of how the traffic of the literary marketplace around them may drown them out.


Collaborative fiction is necessarily the product of relationships and it thereby highlights the way in which relationships are constructed by exchanges and movement, and finally, competition. My readings seek to emphasize the connection between process and product. I ask how these texts were infused with the desire of their authors to work with other people, and how those desires could be figured into an age of competition. These desires were part of a larger cultural anxiety about literary value. That is to say, writers of this period asked: “Is our labor to be taken into account when calculating the literary value of our work?” Collaborative texts did not provide an answer to this question, but they did provide a site for comparing labor practices, for looking at how literary value was accorded, and for testing out whether in union there was strength. Collaborative Talk With a few grand exceptions such as Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, literary criticism has largely been the product of individual scholars, even those who decry the isolationist paradigm of literary creation. There is a certain sense to this. The institutions which support and nurture most scholars today are largely the modern universities which saw their birth in the late nineteenth century, a time in which valuation of the individual scholar, as much as the individual artist, led to a fundamental affirmation of professional activity as intrinsically individuated. Even today, scholarship on collaboration is, more often than not, written alone. Of course, unearthing unacknowledged collaborators is a tremendously popular activity for literary scholars. One might even argue that much of what we call “cultural studies” is, in fact, the study of contextualizing and identifying collaborative factors and forces that are part of the same discourse that produces a given text. Arguing that context is the same thing as collaboration, though, would leave little room for the considerable cultural difference which is accorded collaborative authorship as opposed to other forms of composition. Every text may be—to some extent—collaborative, but that ignores the fact that the decision to collaborate significantly influences the contours of a text. Thus, Collaborators in Literary America assumes premises from cultural studies: namely, that life practices (such as writing) are inextricable from larger networks which make up an individual’s life (such as selling one’s writing), and that high culture can in no way be divorced from an understanding of culture as a way of life. Yet, an understanding of all


cultural contexts as inherently collaborative does not account for the specific ways in which people have historically sought to move away from such a position. Indeed, if context means that everything is collaborative, there would be no reason for two authors to individually sign a work. There would be no reason for anyone to sign a work at all. Struggling to separate oneself from eternal contextualization is, paradoxically, part of collaboration. This conundrum may in part account for the fact that the study of literary collaboration has been largely left to the scholars concerned with composition pedagogy and rhetoric (Forman; Leonard). While the PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) has, in its May 2001 and October 2001 issues, tried to address this gap by publishing numerous articles by literary scholars about theories and methodologies of collaboration, the interest is still largely confined to scholars who explicitly concern themselves with theories and analysis of literary production. The groundbreaking study of collaboration and its attendant vexations Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1990) along with another important publication, Karen Burke LeFevre’s Invention as a Social Act (1987), both posit collaborative composition as an essentially subversive act; collaboration models, at least those which are not “hierarchic,” provide possibilities for subverting traditional ideas about what Ede and Lunsford call “phallogocentric, subject-centered discourse.” These works base their analyses in the study of the social nature of language as seen through specific case studies and, in the case of Ede and Lunsford, writing surveys and sociologic data. While certain kinds of collaboration, particularly what they term “dialogic” collaboration practices, seem to them more radical than others, the basic premise of collaboration indicates to them an important paradigm shift in how we might think about allowing a “contextualized multivocal text to appear” (“Rhetoric” 240). The compelling feminist underpinnings of this critical position are further explored by recent critics such as Holly Laird’s Women Coauthors and Bette London’s Writing Double both of which examine how gender shapes understandings of creative relationships, particularly when it comes to the social meanings of public recognition as an author. Laird looks at pairs of women who have worked together in various formations (editor, reviser, amanuensis, etc.) and sees the broad possibilities of these women’s experiences as effectively dissolving an easy faith one might have in the individual genius. London pushes questions about joint authorship and its role in the public and legal sphere by examining even


collaborations that involved mediumship or communication with collaborators who were long since dead. Far from being a silly or rare phenomenon, these jointly authored productions offered challenges to modernity (such as the automatic writing of Georgie Yeats) and certainly to the shaping of things like copyright law. Viewing collaboration as intrinsically subversive might strike many scientists and business writers as ironic. Collaboration in these disciplines has long been used to promote efficiency, production, and even authority. Many names on a scientific document can enhance its authority. Indeed, in a study of the history of scientific collaboration, D. deB. Beaver and R. Rosen have demonstrated that “both theoretically and historically scientific co-authorship is best and most comprehensively viewed as a reaction to the process of professionalization” (231).5 Since professionalization, by its very nature, is part of a process that defines a bounded community, the increasingly schematized system of authorship lends a scientific article an enhanced sense of authority. This is in part, they contend, because “the increase of authors to a scientific article emphasizes the nature of co-authorship as an acknowledgment of dependency, financial or intellectual, within a hierarchical system of science” (232). With the notable exceptions of Lunsford and Ede, scholars who promote the subversive potential of collaboration rarely employ such subversion themselves. These scholars, such as Karen LeFevre or Jack Stillinger, tend to be in either the humanities or the social sciences discipline. Yet, the scholars who operate within disciplines less concerned with overturning established discourses of power are quite likely to write collaboratively. The relationship between collaborative writing in theory and collaborative writing in practice is evidently more complex than it looks. If collaborative criticism in the humanities does not possess the cultural capital still associated with singly authored texts, multipleauthored fiction fares even worse.6 Ede and Lunsford begin their book with reflections about how collaborative scholarship rated negatively in the eyes of a tenure committee. Making a case for collaborative scholarship is Mary Belenky, a scholar who participated in the influential collaborative study, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (1986). Collaborative work, Belenky argues, “should count double in faculty evaluations. If a work is embedded in a collaborative process, the writers goad each other into endless revisions . . . . The kind of reflection and revising enabled by collaboration brings a quality of depth and scope to a work” (qtd in Ashton-Jones 92). Elizabeth G. Creamer and her Associates (“Associates” being a term itself an intriguing


pronouncement of collaboration) produced a study, Working Equal— Academic Couples as Collaborators, which concludes that faculty productivity is increasingly bound up with scholarly collaboration, in particular the collaborations constructed between married or domestic partners. Creamer notes that these collaborations are especially prominent in the sciences where they are more welcome and accepted than in many other fields. Other scholars, such as Geraldine McNenny and Duane H. Roen, have argued that a propensity for scholars in rhetoric and communication studies to collaborate is often misunderstood by the literary and creative faculty who often share departments or tenure committees with rhetoric and communication specialists. Other critics from this tradition, such as Kathleen Yancey and Michael Spooner, even attempt to underscore the multivocal nature of their collaborative exploration of the academic collaborative process by expressing the dialogic nature of their scholarship with different fonts, typefaces, and paragraphing. The argument that these scholarly productions and relationships deserve new kinds of professional recognition has been making some strides in the Academy. In 1990, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released their “Statement on Multiple Authorship,” which proclaimed that the ethical and logistical problems of attribution and acknowledgment in collaboratively written academic work demanded attention (41). Rather than set out specific guidelines, the AAUP called for candor and clarity in acknowledgments of authorship, but asked that it be self-regulated by the respective participants. Their statement was clearly directed at the kinds of problems that arise in scientific work. One notorious example, for instance, which was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, listed over 200 individuals (including department secretaries) as coauthors of a particular article (International Committee, 424–428). The AAUP’s statement, however, was couched in vague enough terms to apply to all disciplines. And its emphasis upon how collaboration is often especially appropriate to “illuminate increasingly complex subjects of inquiry” may point towards an increasing respectability of the practice across all disciplines (AAUP 41). While scholarly disciplines may be changing their attitudes about collaborative practice, attitudes both popular and scholarly towards collaboratively written fiction seem mired in a tradition of disdain. In her study of how novelist Louise Erdrich collaborated with her husband Michael Dorris, critic Laura Brady concludes that despite an utterly shared writing experience, the book jacket names only one author in “an attempt to avoid the marketing problems often associated


with collaborative works” (306). Brady’s assessment of the situation seems rather hazy, but it acknowledges the popular assumption that no dually authored novel ever sells or is taken seriously. Critics might assess works as if they had been written collaboratively. Michiko Kakutani, for one, reviewed Rupert Thomson’s novel, What’s Soft with such an approach: “Imagine Carl Hiassen & Elmore Leonard teaming up . . . Imagine Quentin Tartantino and Martin Amis collaborating” (12). Yet, collaboration when it actually happens poses quite a different problem for the reviewer. As will be seen throughout the course of this book, reviews have frequently been so caught up in the difficulties of responding to a collaborative text that they frequently chose to avoid the problem altogether. For example, in reviewing The Sturdy Oak, a suffrage novel of 1917, the Dial observed “. . . the personnel of its authors—[authors all listed]—fortunately releases one from any obligation to regard The Sturdy Oak from the point of view of literary criticism; for there is probably not a writer on the list who would advance any claim to literary merit for the book as a whole or for his share in it” (“Notes on New Fiction,” 117). This sort of assessment creates a selffulfilling prophecy. When collaborative fiction does appear, its “novelty value” is usually lauded as its primary selling point. It is not, therefore, surprising that the one genre in which collaborative fiction is common is science fiction, a marginalized field that is intrinsically concerned with structural novelties and innovations. Aside from the significant exceptions of science fiction, mysteries, and hypertext writing, the current scarcity of collaborative texts has also helped to justify their exclusion from critical concern. Yet, one hundred years ago, collaborative fiction was thought of quite differently. Although it was still looked upon as a novelty genre, its prevalence then warrants a reassessment of how critical attention has been allocated. In 1883, Richard Grant White, the most famous American Shakespeare scholar of the nineteenth century, observed that Shakespeare was such a genius that “when he wrote, [he] did not seem to have a self ” (521). Celebrating literature as the outpouring of an inspired genius, in this case an outpouring which White saw as eventually draining away the essential man that was William Shakespeare, has given way to assessing literature as a product of cultural discourse. This giving way is not absolute, as current extremes of opinion on the issue of authorial importance well illustrate. Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, for example, have made references to the “disappearance,” “absence,” or even “death” of the author both casual and commonplace. (Barthes 142–148; Foucault 141–160). Vehemently opposing the idea that authors have no


connection with the significance of a text are critics such as E. D. Hirsch, Jr. who argued for the equation of textual and authorial meaning in Validity of Interpretation (1967). As Jack Stillinger points out in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991), both of these positions operate on the assumption that there is a single author to remove or reify (3). Collaborating, however, problematizes the assumptions of those extremes. As Wayne Koestenbaum writes in Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (1989) double writing serves as “a symptom of the monolithic author’s decline” (8). Collaborative texts epitomize the problems inherent in assuming a text is the product of authorial intentionality. After W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley argued in the 1940s that meaning must exist independent of authorial intention, the rejection of collaborative texts from the scholarly canon became even easier to justify. After all, in collaborative texts readers who look for intentionality must continually sort out just whose intentionality it is they seek. For a New Critic, this highlights the untenable nature of such a project. Moreover, contending that a text means both whatever an author might say it does and is also able to acquire new meanings as readers encounter it (making it both the product of intentional meaning and the product of interpreted meaning) is an essentially hermeneutic point, but one which can nonetheless point to collaborative texts for support. Because collaborative texts are, by their very nature, hard to “sort out,” they embody the variability of intentionality and determinant meaning. Christopher P. Wilson’s influential The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (1985) argues that the explosion of the book and magazine industry at the turn of the century created an ethos of authorship which is traceable in the period’s preeminent literary style, popular naturalism. Similarly, Richard Brodhead, in Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (1993), seeks to understand literary history as “the history of literature’s working conditions—the history of the diverse and changing worlds that have been constructed around writing in American social life” (8). Both understand literary aesthetics by tracing the social conditions that produced such texts. Collaborators in Literary America draws upon such works to analyze the interactions between relatively obscure collaborative texts and the context in which they were created. The frenetic literary marketplace of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was so complex that it is not at all remarkable that new ways to negotiate such terrain were explored, that authors began to engage the services of literary agents to help them navigate the new and disconcerting


environment of the turn-of-the-century literary marketplace or that traces of such explorations can been seen in the literary products of the period. What cultural anxieties, I ask, led to the plethora of collaborative texts? What can these texts tell us about theories of art that cannot be revealed elsewhere? Collaborative texts would seemingly demand consideration of how this interplay of voices might operate to create the vitality of discourse that characterizes a text. Yet scholarship on collaboration often focuses upon how to identify and isolate one individual’s contributions to a work rather than focusing upon such interplay. Mary Wilkins Freeman, for example, wrote An Alabaster Box (1917) with her friend, Florence Morse Kingsley. The major and most authoritative studies of Freeman, however, do not mention who this friend was or how the women worked together. Leah Blatt Glasser, for example, in her otherwise excellent biography of Freeman, merely notes that Freeman and Kingsley’s An Alabaster Box was a “weak story” and never attends to its curious construction (836). In other instances, studies that focus upon a single individual have sought to dismiss collaborative ventures altogether. The preeminent James scholar, Leon Edel, described James’s role in The Whole Family as “A Giant consorting with pygmies,”—clearly suggesting that the novel is therefore unworthy of serious consideration (32). Single-author studies tend to concern themselves with what they see as only part of a given project. Glasser, for instance, quite reasonably dissects the Freeman chapter in The Whole Family and discusses much of the editorial correspondence surrounding that chapter. Glasser does not particularly pursue questions about how the other participants interacted. Presumably, Freeman’s role was discrete and extractable for analysis. Glasser is by no means alone in her assumption. Most nineteenth- and twentieth-century essays about collaboration begin with the premise that identifying the various contributions of different authors is the most productive and intriguing approach one can take to analyzing such texts. Indeed, taking apart a novel in order to identify the contributions was considered an instinctive approach, one that almost precludes any other way of looking at the project. In 1901, the Bookman summed up such an attitude: “Whenever a successful novel or volume of short stories appears as the joint work of two writers there is always a very natural curiosity as to the part that each writer individually contributed toward the whole” (“Methods of . . .” 15). Efforts to extract text from collaborative projects have resulted in some rather odd books. In 1965, for example, Doubleday published The Adventures of Colonel Sellers by Mark Twain. It was billed as “Being


Mark Twain’s share of The Gilded Age, a novel that he wrote with Charles Dudley Warner. Now published for the first time and comprising, in effect, a new work.” Was it a new work? And what, more precisely, is the “effect” in question? Similarly, Owen Wister extracted the story he had written anonymously for Paul Leicester Ford’s A House Party (1901), tinkered with it a little, and published it as a novella titled Mother (1907). As Mother, it was signed with his own name. Was Mother a new work? Was it authored differently? If work can be extracted from a collaborative project does that mean that it was never truly collaborative in the first place? What might answers to these sorts of questions reveal about tinkering, much less writing? The current critical canon will not tell us. The omission of collaborative ventures from the critical canon cannot be blamed solely upon the disinterest of the scholars who have focused their work on a single author’s oeuvre. After all, such analysis would be in fundamental opposition to the basic tenets underlying such studies. Part of the blame can be assigned to genre issues. While certain genres, as we shall see, lent themselves to collaborative composition more than others, collaborative writers came from a variety of backgrounds, few of which are today considered high canon. Writers of romance, science fiction, mysteries, sentimental novels, and many other “marginal” genres were particularly liable to work collaboratively. Collaborative texts from the turn of the century thus feature few characteristics with traditional critical appeal: they frequently feature more than one unknown name; they advertise themselves as incoherent (more about that later); the authors tended to be known for writing in marginalized literary genres; participants were often later ashamed of their activity and avoided speaking about it; and collaborative fiction rarely sold well. The scholarly neglect of this field is due to many legitimate and compelling reasons, such as the ones listed above. The neglect has also been for a reason that I believe to be essentially illegitimate: that there does not seem to be an adequate critical vocabulary to deal with the dilemmas of collaboration, such as the dilemma of pretense expressed by Twain. Writers can be influenced, juxtaposed, and led astray. They can participate in a composite, a melange, and a hodge-podge. If they actually merge, they elude our critical vocabulary. The pronouns won’t fit. Verbs won’t agree. Theoreticians and critics have not yet become easy with freeing themselves from the isolationist paradigm. Collaborators in Literary America looks at how this paradigm was confronted by


examining how collaborative writers understood their community, their isolation, and their craft. In each chapter, I use stories and novels to illustrate differing models for literary collaboration and explain how each of these models exemplify certain developments in the idea of authorship. I ask how each of these texts proffered their visions of artistic creation and look to thematic, metaphoric, structural, and stylistic clues for an answer. While in The Whole Family, for example, characters seem to compete against one another, mirroring many of the authorial rivalries that went into its construction; other texts locate anxieties about authorial coherence in the language itself. In chapter 2, I examine experiments with spelling and typography. In one of Brander Matthews’s and H. C. Bunner’s coauthored stories, for example, there is a pointed replacement of the capital letter “W” with two capital letter Vs (“VV”), demonstrating in its most textual sense the power of recognizing the double “you/U” within a supposedly seamless work. A series of close readings such as this, form the center of each chapter, bolstered by an analysis of biography as text and text as biography. My attention to matters beyond the merely figurative nature of language reveals my allegiance to authorship as ultimately individuated. The entire premise of this singly authored study relies upon this belief because only then can collaboration be seen as a disruptive project. And as the many authors who wrote collaboratively agreed, collaboration disrupted ways of thinking and writing to which they had held for a long time. In each chapter, I pursue the theories of authority and multiplicity as articulated elsewhere in the writings of these individuals. For example, Robert Grant, as a young writer, gleefully participated in The King’s Men with his friends in 1884 in part to pillory the Republican presidential nominee, James Blaine. His later novels, including the tremendously popular and influential Unleavened Bread (1900), extend many of the ideas first broached in The King’s Men. If The King’s Men presented a lighthearted analysis of what might happen if a corrupt democracy ruled Britain, Unleavened Bread analyzed the consequences of that same mediocre democracy ruling in Washington, D. C. John Boyle O’Reilly, who participated in The King’s Men to prove how assimilation and camaraderie could surmount tremendous cultural biases, spent his life writing poetry, novels, and newspaper editorials promoting the responsibility of the intellectually gifted to serve as cultural and political mediators between the less fortunate and the ruling class. Similarly, Brander Matthews collaboratively wrote many stories that provide


ample material for analysis, but which are further illuminated by an examination of the essays and lectures he published, such as “Literature as a Profession” and “The Art and Mystery of Collaboration.” In these works, he aligns himself with a long tradition of collaborative writing, and justifies it as a professional necessity. Sergio Perosa, in American Theories of the Novel: 1793–1903 (1985), notes that the last part of the nineteenth century marked a period in which a uniquely American formulation of the novel developed. Perosa argues that American theorizing of that period had a practical and empirical bias and that this bias justifies his scholarly attention to the poetics and practice of novel making rather than to pure theory. Similarly, American theories of authorship were in marked contrast to their European counterparts. American writers espoused theories that relentlessly emphasized how the day-to-day practice of authorship was the salient feature of authorial theory. Therefore, although many of these writers drew upon a broad spectrum of terms and comparative concepts to analyze their own craft, I look particularly at how writers sought to integrate theories of the nuts and bolts of writing in America with their more abstract reasoning. Who, after everything had been said and done, ended up with the copyright? How, once the requisite platitudes over equal labor were done with, was the money distributed? And who, if anyone, got the final say over the manuscript? By examining collaborative texts we can see how authors defined themselves in relation to others in the most immediate possible sense. And in those varying definitions we can see contradictory impulse— such as the desire to simultaneously assert a sense of individualism and a group identity that would necessarily subsume such individualism. Cultural anxieties over the role authors were going to have in the new literary marketplace surfaced in collaborative fictions as well as in the fictions these authors created for themselves through their correspondence and scholarly writing. These texts, and the writing that surrounded their production, were sites for reconciliation and negotiation among individual ideas about the construction of authorship. Even more significantly, they served as the terrain on which to navigate a path among the various ideas often concurrently held by each of the individuals in question. The motion and activity that characterize such negotiations are crucial to conveying why they occurred in the medium they did. Collaborative texts were, in a sense, a public proclamation of a self that was defined by its activity. Was the activity of writing essentially laborious? When it came down to assigning copyright or simply sending out checks, this question was not at all abstract. The Progressive


Era’s fascination with controlling, liberating, and locating what a labor force was had its parallel in literary production as much as in factory production. Livelihoods were at stake in these discussions, not solely semantics. Collaborators in Literary America justifies such integration of semantics and livelihoods by illustrating that writers of that period sought such integration. This search led many writers to their tremendously consequential explorations into collaborative writing and only by examining the implications of such explorations can we understand the intensively composite nature of American literary culture.


CHAPTER 1 Whe re t h e Twain did M e e t—T H E G I L D E D A G E of American Authorship

Why would two people who describe their joint venture as a complete merger, write a novel that assails corporations for stifling competition? How can we reconcile the image of two writers supposedly writing in concert, wherein hardly a page doesn’t have the hand of both, with the often-conservative attacks in the novel itself on theories of community, democracy, and collective endeavors? Understanding America’s Gilded Age demands a consideration of The Gilded Age (1873). Probably the most well-known collaborative novel, its performance of dual authorship altered the way in which modern books and authors could be marketed to a mass reading audience. Important to both Twain and Warner’s careers, the novel’s joint production signals the dilemmas of discussing authorship of this period. Warner and Twain’s novel epitomized the entire era, not simply because of its topics about greed, land, and American identity but because its very composition embodied post–Civil War concerns over cooperatism, professionalism, and liability. The Gilded Age framed the way in which collaboration came to be seen as a particular marker in the professionalization of writing in the late nineteenth century. It was, for Twain, a move that took him from being a humorist to being a man holding the lofty status of a Hartford writer, a novelist, and a man of letters. While scholars have long analyzed the polarization of Twain’s identities, authorial personas, and fascination with recurring themes of twins, mixed blood, and composite identities, it is the collaborative assembly of The Gilded Age which brought to the fore and laid the groundwork for what was going to be a lifelong fixation: articulating the dualities in American life. The Gilded Age was the first novel written solely for professional subscription sales in the United States.1 Travel books, such as Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, had done extremely well via subscription


publishing, as had nonfiction works such as encyclopedias and reference texts. Bibles, of course, had a long tradition of successful subscription sales. Yet, it wasn’t until The Gilded Age that a novel was constructed specifically for farmers and rural folks to purchase from door-to-door book agents upon a promise of later delivery. A novel that deeply criticized land speculation and the crassness of Western society was nonetheless designed for a largely rural and incipiently populist market. Themes reflecting fears over investments, corruption, and participation in the democratic process were manifest both literally and figuratively in The Gilded Age. While we can trace these themes in the plot of the novel, we can also trace them through the way in which the novel was composed and sold. Analysis of the relationship between the innovative methods of subscription publishing and how such practice invoked the speculative problems figuratively probed in the novel demonstrates how understanding historical practices of authorship shapes a reading of this novel. Twain’s Preface to the London edition of The Gilded Age suggests that duality is more than simple irony; it arises from the very basis of his contemporary culture: In America nearly every man has his dream, his pet scheme, whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily. It is this all-pervading speculativeness that we have tried to illustrate in “The Gilded Age.” It is a characteristic, which is both bad and good, for both the individual and the nation. Good, because it allows neither to stand still, but drives both forever on, toward some point or other which is a-head, not behind nor at one side. Bad, because the chosen point is often badly chosen, and then the individual is wrecked; the aggregation of such cases affects the nation, and so is bad for the nation. Still it is a trait that it is of course better for a people to have and sometimes suffer from than be without. (B. French edition of The Gilded Age 473)

While Twain’s commentary about the advantages of “speculativeness” is unnerving . . . suggesting a perpetually shifting series of references and values that literally and figuratively undermine the world of the novel, his commentary also raises the idea of speculation as reflective thought. Arising from a novel composed in friendship with the fervent belief that difference develops reflection, these themes of speculation and cooperation take on different values in a collaborative age. Few scholars or readers have dealt with The Gilded Age as much more than a novelty novel that had some uneven commentary about manifest destiny or political scandal. The renowned Twain scholar of the 1960s, Henry Nash Smith, even argued that the experience of writing The Gilded Age “did nothing to help Mark Twain find out how to write

THE GILDED AGE

of american authorship / 27

books” (71). This may be true, but it did help Mark Twain find out how to be Mark Twain. And, as the man who more than anyone else of the nineteenth century personified the individuality of the American experience, it is crucial to comprehend how collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner allowed him to become the individual he was. I don’t see authorship here as easily or productively extricable. While some scholars have combed through The Gilded Age to painstakingly examine precisely which section was written by which author, I do not presume such understanding to be possible and neither do I think Warner and Twain were ever comfortable with the idea.2 Scholarship that attends to the details of chapter divisions necessarily assumes an author to be a relatively independent individual who writes with discernable autonomy and, perhaps, intentionality. From this point of view, collaborative authorship is essentially a multiple version of authorship as generally understood. But it fails to take into consideration the confusion Twain and Warner themselves had on this score. As they wrote in their preface, “This is—what it pretends to be—a joint production, in the conception of the story, the exposition of the characters, and in its literal composition.”3 By setting off the clause of uncertainty, “it pretends to be,” the writers underscore the falseness of the collaborative premise as a joint production. It was, perhaps, something else altogether. The hesitance suggests an awareness of an enigmatic alternative model for writing: a third authorial entity—Twain/Warner. To be sure, in later years they both commented about which sections they had written (most particularly when Twain asserted his rights to the character of Colonel Sellers in order to write a play based upon the character), but the overall effect of the novel was to create a sense of the inextricable nature of collaborative ventures. For just as the lines between the authors are perpetually blurred, the relentless theme of The Gilded Age is that while we can point to individual acts and deeds which might lead to events, responsibility is never so cleanly divided. Society’s villains are entwined with society’s heroes and everyone is implicated in the breakdown of the civilized world. The Story of The Gilded Age The story of The Gilded Age sprawls across many states and dozens of characters but there are basically two sets of stories that occasionally overlap: a tale of political and moral corruption that culminates in a sensational murder trial and a tale of romantic melodrama featuring relative innocents who seek to succeed in the corrupt world around them.


In the novel, Squire Hawkins is an impoverished courtly gentleman of the Old South and a gullible believer of “get quick rich” schemes. A kindly man with two adopted children, as well as his own offspring, Hawkins falls under the spell of an eccentric Colonel Sellers whose schemes take the family to Washington, D.C. Hawkins, his biological son Washington, and a variety of other characters become embroiled in political corruption and land speculation schemes—most particularly schemes to widen the “Columbus” river to develop an otherwise useless area of land in rural Missouri and to defraud the government into buying land to construct a university for freed slaves. A Confederate officer tricks Hawkins’s adopted daughter, Laura, into a false marriage. She is abandoned and seeks to regain her status and power by using her beauty to move into the Washington, D.C. social scene as a lobbyist for various dubious projects. Her seducer reappears, remarried to another. He and Laura have another affair before he abandons her again. Laura follows her lover to New York City and murders him. A trial then ensues, and she is acquitted on the grounds of insanity. She defends herself on the premise that she did not “own” her own imaginative passions. Released, Laura tries to capitalize upon her notoriety by appearing on the lecture platform. She is humiliated by failing even at that scheme and dies of heart failure, much saddened and humbled. Other important characters include Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly, two young men who first seek their fortunes out West and then return East to work with speculators and their potential love interests: Ruth Bolton, a Quaker girl who studies medicine and her more traditional friend, Alice. While peripherally involved with the plots about Laura’s crime and the corruption in Washington, these characters throw into relief the involvement and responsibilities of the middle-class everyman. Feckless and shallow, Henry Brierly becomes involved with Laura and although not directly complicit in her murder of her husband, he is on the scene and fails to prevent it. Philip manages to make his fortune through largely (although not entirely) legitimate means and successfully persuades Ruth Bolton to forego her medical career and marry him instead. Individual characters meet closure whether deserved or undeserved, but the fundamental system of corruption and cruelty is never seriously challenged. The gilded age continues on in all of its glinting finery at the end of the novel. Roughing it Out While The Gilded Age was Twain’s first completed collaborative novel, he had actually attempted a collaborative novel a number of years earlier.

THE GILDED AGE


Its failure was satirized in his autobiographical narrative Roughing It (1872). By looking at how this failure was depicted, we can see how audience were taught to expect further failure from any collaborative text—an important expectation Twain and Warner played upon with their novel about ineffective corporate endeavors, The Gilded Age. In Roughing It Twain devotes a chapter of his experiences in Virginia City, Nevada, to a ridiculous literary escapade involving a group authorship of a serial novel. As is always true with Twain, the engagement and distance from which he tells the story reveals much about his simultaneously bemused but intrigued attitude toward the entire event. As Twain tells it, the local newspaper editor decided to start a literary journal, The Weekly Occidental. The Editor, his wife, Twain, and one or two other writers were supposedly engaged to contribute chapters. After the first three installments written by the editor, his wife, and another local newspaperman, . . . there arrived in Virginia a dissolute stranger with a literary turn of mind—rather seedy he was, but very quiet and unassuming; almost diffident, indeed. He was so gentle, and his manners were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that he made friends of all who came in contact with him. He applied for literary work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and practiced pen, and so Mr. F. engaged him at once to help write the novel. (341)

Scholars have identified this dissolute author, or the model for this author, as Charles Henry Webb, a well-known journalist who arrived in Virginia City in March of 1864. But the proclivity of Twain to project his own persona onto others suggests that he may have seen himself, as much as Webb, creating the chaos that ensued. Indeed, the behavior of the “dissolute author” sounds remarkably like something Twain would wish to have done himself. As the anecdote of the serial novels evolves, Twain manages to insert himself into the story after all by essentially appropriating the “dissolute author’s” text and its concomitant glory or ill repute. Twain describes the stranger’s first attempt at a chapter as hilariously incoherent—written in a state of drunken chaos and horrifying the other participants. The stranger agrees to rewrite his chapter. And yet: . . . his imagination went mad. He led the heroes and heroines a wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same convincing air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work . . . . But the chapter cannot be described. It was symmetrically crazy; it was artistically absurd; and it had explanatory foot-notes that were fully as curious as the text. (342)


Despite the impossibility of summarizing the story—Twain goes on to do just that, at great length. In a series of action-packed sentences in which the plot gets progressively more absurd and convoluted, Twain recounts precisely the lunacy of the chapter (complete with a lawyer surviving in the belly of a whale, only to be extricated on the very ship where he can jump out and conveniently interrupt the wedding party of his lover). The rewritten chapter causes “a fiercer storm than ever in the editorial sanctum” and the stranger was “peremptorily discharged, and his manuscript flung at his head” (346). Since the problems with the stranger’s chapter had delayed the whole collective endeavor, the Weekly Occidental was forced to come out without its serial installment. The paper died with that issue and the serial was never completed. Twain’s version of events is, as always, suspect but what is telling about this chapter of Roughing It is the manner in which he recounts the story. For not only is there that troubling moment when he describes the chapter as impossible to describe, while then going on for several pages to do just that, but also there is the portrait of a troublesome author who preempted Twain’s own foray into collaborative writing. Twain never got a chance to write his own installment because the fiasco of the stranger’s chapter precluded his own contribution that was scheduled to be installment no. 5. Hence Twain’s “summarized version” of the stranger’s chapter comes to serve as his own contribution to the project without the attendant responsibility for having written it—a pattern soon to become familiar in his writing. One would think that, by the end of this episode, Twain had milked all the humor out of the disastrous enterprise and that the escape could function as a cautionary tale: Don’t let one of your collaborators possess more imagination and inventiveness than the other. Don’t let one person hold up production. Be sure that everyone is operating with the same road map, and scatter your clichés broadly enough so they don’t overcrowd one another. Twain’s depiction of the pitfalls of collaborative writing here suggests that he would never embark upon it again. Yet, it was within a year of publishing Roughing It that he embarked upon The Gilded Age with Warner. While there were certainly differences between these two projects (The Gilded Age involved only two writers, it was conceived of as a relatively serious undertaking, it wasn’t published before it was completed, etc.), the rapidity of one project following the other is noteworthy. And again, while we only have Twain’s version to go on (prospectuses of the Weekly Occidental’s serial novel exist, but no extant copies of any installments are known), the proclivity of all the contributors

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(not merely the dissolute stranger) to rely upon clichés is significant. For one part of what makes the Twain version of the stranger’s chapter so funny is the self-conscious piling up of stock incidents. A suicide leaves the “customary note”; an identity is revealed by the “usual strawberry mark on his left arm” [italics mine]. While a fascination with satirizing sentimental clichés was constant in virtually all of his writings, the particular opportunities offered by collaborative composition to formally structure such satire are important to note. The burlesque he performs in Roughing It’s “literary chapter” prepared his audience to expect The Gilded Age to be a similar burlesque, likely to be filled with inter-authorial tensions and stock figures drowning under the weight of their clichés. Collaborative authorship was not uncommon in the early part of the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t frequently acknowledged or noticed. Twain’s illustration of the pitfalls of collaboration in the popular Roughing It marks a culturally significant moment in shaping cultural perceptions of authorship. The scenes about collaboration in Roughing It taught that collaboration was a ridiculous premise. So it makes sense that the audience of The Gilded Age expected a novel self-consciously mocking its inevitable goofiness as collaboratively composed text. In the most well-known critical reading of The Gilded Age, Bryant Morey French argued that The Gilded Age was fundamentally mocking the stock plots of contemporary fiction. Indeed, he believed that The Gilded Age was conceived as a commentary on the state of the American novel itself. It was to be, as he saw it, a “burlesque on the contemporary popular novel” (36–37). He supports his case by describing how the clichés of the sentimental heroine, for example, are completely destroyed by the vicious behavior of Laura, and how the very topic of political corruption itself defied the acceptable range of topics for popular fiction. This position has some merit, for The Gilded Age is certainly an erratic and startling book that defies numerous readerly expectations. But when we examine the reception of The Gilded Age in the light of Roughing It’s chapter, the expectations the audience had for The Gilded Age to be a “burlesque novel” make sense in a different way than French understood it. One of the more common reactions was that, while the book had its own strengths and weaknesses, it was a surprise to read such a hardhitting satire from writers known for distinctly different styles of humor. Warner’s writing was well known for gentle irony, while Twain’s previous books had been riotous but often self-depreciating and seemed to comment far more upon the foibles of individuals than upon any


societal structures as a whole. The reviewer for Hearth and Home put it: . . . We confidently expected a treat, and we were not disappointed, though the book turned out to be as unlike what we expected it to be as was possible. We . . . thought the whole would prove an inimitable burlesque of the modern novel peculiarly rich in the characteristics of both its authors. We find . . . instead . . . the satire of the book is pungent enough to have grown on a red-pepper plant, and the accuracy of aim with which it is delivered is not excelled by that of a Wimbledon prize-fighter. (38)

The reason audiences were surprised wasn’t simply because these two men had collaborated. Collaboration itself doesn’t seem to be disturbing. Rather, works like Roughing It had trained audiences to expect absolute nonsense from a collaborative novel. While The Gilded Age certainly had humor and satire in it, the humor was not located in the performativity of the collaboration. The humor in the novel was not at the expense of the form of the narrative, but largely at the expense of the greed that fueled so much of the plot. The surprise was because the form worked and also because the created project didn’t feature the expected characteristics of each author. That is to say, as the Hearth and Home review suggests, The Gilded Age seemed to be the product not of both authors, but of neither; in essence, a third entity of authorial power lay behind the project. It was both the existence and the satiric tone of this third authorial presence that caused such surprise. And thus The Gilded Age was a burlesque on the concept of a novel, but not in its challenge to sentimentalism or popular fiction. Instead, it offered a burlesque challenge to the very concept of the responsibility for authorial production. How it was Written The Gilded Age was the product of a community, not merely the community of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner but the entire community of Nook Farm—the Hartford, CT neighborhood Olivia and Sam Clemens moved to in 1871. Nook Farm was a community designed specifically to attract writers, artists, and intellectuals. The Hooker family (well known for political activism and progressive intellectualism) owned and developed the properties that were quickly occupied by many of the nineteenth century’s most prominent literary and political personalities. Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband, Calvin Stowe were attracted there by her sister, the famous feminist Isabella

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Beecher Hooker who also happened to be Olivia Langdon Clemens’s schoolgirl friend. It was Isabella Hooker who first encouraged the Clemens family to relocate there and rented her own house to them before they built their own mansion adjacent to the Stowe house. Prominent journalist and politician Joseph Roswell Hawley and well-known clergymen such as Theodore Parker and Horace Bushnell lived nearby. Also in this circle was the family of Charles Dudley Warner and his wife Susan. Back in 1868, when visiting his publisher Elisha Bliss, Twain first conceived the idea of buying out the Hartford Courant and moving to Connecticut. When he actually tried to do so, Joseph Hawley and his young editor Charles Dudley Warner categorically refused to sell and thus thwarted his plan. Irritated, Twain settled in Buffalo to run the Buffalo Express, purchased for him by his wealthy father-in-law. Hartford itself, however, retained its appeal. In 1871, after a series of tragedies visited the young couple (Olivia’s father died and a young friend of hers also passed away in their house), they moved to Hartford in part to force a change in their lives. Twain was no longer interested in being a newspaper man, and he now saw living in Hartford as an opportunity to have both congenial company of literary neighbors and easy access to The American Publishing Company, which was located in Hartford. Twain’s new circle recognized his genius, but his was a genius of an alien sort. His Western, uneducated, and sinewy humor was a far cry from the writings of the circles that surrounded him. Many scholars have seen Twain’s collaboration with Warner as an attempt to establish himself as part of community, but it also had the effect of asserting his identity and security as an individual artist. As we will see with many of the collaborative writers of the period, collaborating was a method of asserting one’s identity as an artist who was confident enough in his cultural status that he or she could “risk” the loss of autonomy caused by collaboration. While in Roughing It, collaboration had failed among newspapermen, it succeeded in The Gilded Age, perhaps because it was a project assembled by artists and gentlemen. How The Gilded Age actually came to be written is somewhat unclear. Twain’s biographer and friend, Albert Bigelow Paine, explained that the idea came from a dinner conversation Twain and Olivia had with Warner and his wife Susan. Supposedly, the gentlemen disparaged novels that the ladies admired. The wives then challenged the gentlemen to do a better job themselves. Warner and Twain instantly agreed to the project and decided to develop an idea Twain had been harboring for a long time concerning Washington, D.C. and the figure of his mother’s ne’er-do-well cousin, James Lampton (476–479).


There are indications that Twain had actually planned the venture at a much earlier date and that this impromptu dinner table scenario is suspect. Twain had long wanted to write a book about Washington, D.C. In March of 1871, when his old friend from Nevada, Joseph T. Goodman, the editor of the Virginia City Enterprise, visited him, they too had discussed writing a novel together—a novel likely to be set in Washington, D.C.4 So Paine’s version is problematic. The point in questioning the story of the women’s challenge draws further suspicion onto French’s broadly accepted interpretation of Twain and Warner’s interest in burlesquing the sentimental form. Clearly, the men were engaged in a project that, from its very inception, was concerned with challenging form. But whether this form was in its superstructure or infrastructure deserves analysis. While French, the authority on the compositional history of The Gilded Age, launches his own interpretative framework for the book based upon that observation about it as a “burlesque,” French understands “burlesque” to mean that the characters will themselves rise and fall in accordance with how they should rise or fall according to the framework of a popular novel. (This is particularly relevant in the case of Laura Hawkins who is thus read as a parodic comment upon the stock figures of women’s sentimental fiction.)5 On the other hand, French rather incredibly overlooks the very premise of authorial labor that underlay the novel. For as we have seen from my reading of Roughing It, the very idea of collaborative authorship was not merely liable to invite ridicule, but was consciously invoked to do so! Viewing The Gilded Age through the lens of its collaborative production also helps make sense of one of the most baffling aspects of the novel—its chapter headings or mottoes each written in a different language and contributed by another Hartford neighbor, J. Hammond Trumbull. A local philologist and librarian at Hartford’s Trinity University, Trumbull used a vague plot outline of The Gilded Age to assemble the hopelessly arcane and scattered quotations. Originally published without translations, these mottoes, in languages ranging from Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew to Danish, Chinese, Sioux, and what Trumbull identified as “Chippeway,” served as a mild and satiric commentary on the plot. Yet since the bulk of the quotations were likely unintelligible to the average subscription book reader, it is obvious that they served a number of other functions as well.6 While some of the quotations were at least phoneticized or rendered in the (English) alphabet, others were printed using characters,

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ideograms, or scripts. This obviously lavish attention to fundamentally impenetrable text, underscored the gilt of the literal and figurative text. Subscription readers could feel that they were indeed getting a great deal for their money, including the somewhat overwhelming erudition promised by the chapter headings. And they could also read the randomness of the untranslated mottoes as a manifestation of yet more vapid cultural capital accrued only to demonstrate the irrelevancy of such pretensions. The basic impenetrability of the mottoes underscores the confusion at the heart of the story. The vastness of the corruption portrayed in the story makes it hard to point fingers at a particular conspiracy, much less at an individual who would be responsible. For characters such as Philip, there’s no hope of ever really understanding all the land shenanigans. His best hope is to try to keep some small sense of integrity while not even pursuing the inexplicable conspiracies. Just as the mottoes would regularly interrupt each chapter heading to remind readers of their ignorance, so would the few characters who would try to get to the bottom of things be continually reminded how their world was probably too large to ever be understood. Philip observes at one point that: “a personal fight against a railway corporation was about the most hopeless in the world” (267). The peculiarly American nature of The Gilded Age was also emphasized by the polyglot nature of The Gilded Age text. In this text, readers would encounter a regular babble of voices mimicking an increasingly diverse United States. The labyrinth of languages that open each chapter echo, too, the vast array of characters who themselves become increasingly difficult to keep track of, not to mention the emphasis many voices had upon the dialogic nature of the collaborative production itself.7 Moreover, as Gregg Camfield has suggested, part of the mottoes’ goal was simply in mocking yet another “standard” feature in literary fiction.8 Most significantly, though, the mottoes need to be understood as part of the book’s collaborative production. Twain, Trumbull, and Warner all belonged to the same men’s Monday Evening Club in Hartford that met every few weeks to drink and discuss arts, politics, and theology while sharing originally composed essays. Their intellectual and artistic work was unquestionably an outgrowth of their sociability. While the many illustrators who ended up contributing to the text can certainly be understood as collaborators in some sense, the role of Trumbull and his mottoes particularly underscored the emphasis on multiplicity and divided labor relentlessly forwarded by The Gilded Age.


Delegating Labor Twain has always been associated with the lure of loafing and the rueful recognition of the labor necessary to make loafing possible. From Huckleberry Finn to Tom Sawyer, Twain’s characters repeatedly sought to displace their own labor onto others. One of the most emblematic scenes of Twain’s writings is, after all, the famous fence-painting scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In this scene, our hero makes the chore of fence painting seem to be such an honor that other children end up begging, and even bribing, him for the privilege to assist with the task. The power of the scene lies, of course, in the irony of labor being masked as pleasure but one of the significant themes which arises in this incident is the dramatization of Twain’s relentless interest in the ethical problems of collective and divided labor. Dividing or delegating labor wasn’t always as successful for Twain as it was for Tom Sawyer. Throughout his life he was involved in schemes to lessen his own workload and increase productivity, almost all of which failed dismally or never got off the ground at all.9 At one point he thought he might manage his own lecture tour by hiring a train car to convey him and his friends: William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and George Washington Cable. Part of the idea was to increase the publicity and to work with friends, but a large part of the scheme was certainly to reduce the lecture pressure on any given individual and allow for alternating turns and even substitutions whenever someone was tired. In another attempt to consolidate energies and efficiently produce his travel writings, he hired someone to go to South Africa and write him travel letters that he planned to spin into another best seller. In 1876, he proposed to Howells, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a scheme in which a series of writers beginning with himself and including Brete Harte, Henry James, and perhaps James Russell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, each write a separate short story based on the same skeleton plot. They would thus consolidate their respective personal celebrity with a pre-written assignment and get the maximum publicity with the minimum effort. Although Twain wrote his story, no one else ever did, and this scheme fell apart. It was typical, however, of his continued interest in trying to simultaneously consolidate individual effort and yet capitalize on the individuality.10 He even, as we have seen, dramatized the failure of a collaborative novel project in Roughing It. His lifelong interest in how collective labor might work for a modern writer was not merely the strategic experimentation of a determined and savvy writer expert at publicity and continually desperate for more efficient

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production. His interest in finding new ways to think about writing and production arose in some ways from a cultural tension over individual responsibility and collective guilt. Although his difficult experiences in composing Roughing It were to be a pattern throughout his life (writing at a red-hot pace and then freezing up and having to “shelve” a project away for a period of time), he didn’t yet realize it as a pattern. Hence his frustration at the lurching production of Roughing It may also have fueled his interest in doubling his productivity by taking on a partner. Just when he got stuck, he could turn the project over to someone else. And indeed, he apparently wrote his first eleven chapters at breakneck speed before turning over the next twelve to Warner. The rest of the book saw the collaborators alternating every two or three chapters and, while there were certainly passages and sections written or rewritten together, the narrative functions as primarily two sorts of tales that only occasionally come together. As French describes it, “By a running series of switchbacks the reader goes ahead with one set of characters, then shifts to the first set and brings them up to and beyond the others in a fashion akin to the alternating advancement of checkers on a checkerboard” (81). Collaborative composition enabled the two writers to create an almost 600-page best-seller with astounding speed; between the two of them, they finished the bulk of the book in about four months.11 When, in some nasty reviews, critics accused one writer or the other of having done a disproportionate part of the work, both Twain and Warner objected and in response pointed to their preface which stated: “There is scarcely a chapter that does not bear the marks of the two writers of the book” (vi). How it was Sold The obvious irony of The Gilded Age’s production lay in the fact that it was conceived of as a moneymaking topical novel, ready to exploit the public’s fascination with the political scandals of the day, to exploit Warner’s and Twain’s respective reputations, and—most of all—to exploit what the authors saw as the tremendous potential of subscription sales to earn them millions. While the history of the volume as the first novel to be sold by subscription in the United States gave it a novelty factor, the dual authorship that created it needs to be understood as an extension of its specific material production. Twain’s name and the history of subscription publishing in the United States are deeply entwined but most scholars are content to


assess him as an aberration, rather than as a successful but typical product of the late nineteenth-century mania for subscription sales. The quality of his work was certainly in contrast to many of the dreadful subscription books out there. (Brete Harte remarked that when it came to subscription publishing Twain’s Innocents Abroad was “An Indian Spring in an alkaline literary desert” (qtd. in Tebbel 523).) While travel books, Bibles, encyclopedias, and miscellaneous local histories and directories made up the bulk of subscription catalogs, no novels were put out by any major subscription houses before The Gilded Age and there were few subscription books which have ever received the critical acclaim generally accorded Twain’s writings. Therefore, it is important to understand how Twain’s experience with subscription publishing informed his participation in The Gilded Age, Warner’s experiences with The Gilded Age, the ways in which collaborative authorship was understood and, most significantly, how subscription publishing shaped the interpretative possibilities of the text. To begin with, the very title of the book was brilliantly selected. As William Sexton has noted, nowhere in the book does the actual phrase appear. The term thus could only be understood in the full context of its production. While The Gilded Age certainly has resonant literary illusions (contributors to the Mark Twain Forum listserve have had lively discussions over how “The Gilded Age” may be a play on the title of The Golden Era, a popular magazine) it suggests also the ironic possibilities of its own joint production as a product of a “Guilded” age. Twain and Warner certainly saw themselves as part of an artisan fellowship. And of course, like most subscription books, it was produced with a lavish amount of gilding. The premise or justification for subscription publishing was, as John Tebbel describes it, to “make possible publication of books that might otherwise not be issued because they are too expensive for a publisher to risk his investment on over-the-counter sales” (511). Subscription publishing relied upon thick volumes that promised good value for their price in bulk and appearance, if not in literary quality. Salesmen or agents could offer a variety of bindings and options, which usually resulted in elaborately illustrated, expensively bound, and impressively gaudy productions. The appearance of these books and the manner in which they were sold were often devalued, but it was these two aspects of the books that were essential to their consumer appeal. Twain and Warner’s title was thus constructed with an ironic nod to the audience who would doubtless be both aware and appreciative of the commentary made on the literal and figurative components of the book.

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The other obvious tie between the novel’s production and its figurative existence would be the literary theme of greed so obviously manifest in a book openly calculated to make a great deal of money. As the Boston Literary World remarked, “The book has a strong savor of lucre; it was evidently written to sell, and in the hope of gaining a liberal heap of that money, whose worship it purports to ridicule” (qtd. in French “Mark Twain” 18). Criticizing a book for pandering to the public in its topicality or vulgarity is one thing, but what this reviewer was distinctly responding to was in part the existence of The Gilded Age as a subscription book, slated to fill the parlor shelves of rural households. As an extremely hostile review from the Chicago Tribune pointed out, “. . . it is not as if the work were to be deposited on the shelves of the booksellers, to be sold as called for. It is to be carried from door to door throughout the country, into the rural districts, where a voice of warning from the press usually does not penetrate . . .” (“Review” Chicago Tribune 9). The obvious attempt to cash in on the personal magnetism of the two authors and upon the novelty of their collaboration was seen as hopelessly vulgar. There were certainly weaknesses in the literary construction of the novel, but the critical reactions to the nature of The Gilded Age seem excessive. It is tempting to speculate that some of the critics’ hostility came from the fact that they were skipped over and their usual role of cultural gatekeeping had been slighted. Subscription publishers had established that newspapers rarely reviewed subscription books. And yet subscription publishers needed to drum up interest in books long before they were actually published in order to take orders for manufacturing. Hence subscription publishers flooded newspapers with publicity pamphlets and “notices” but rarely provided review copies. Reviewers were seen as far less important in the process of subscription publishing than they were for the normal bookselling process. By the time that most of the literary reviews of The Gilded Age came out (and there were many more than any other subscription book had ever received), they were largely irrelevant. The American Publishing Company in Hartford had flooded the media with so many puff pieces and notices that the canvassers had had an easy time drumming up hundreds of thousands of orders. Hence the mixed reviews hit the presses after the success of The Gilded Age was already well underway. Furthermore, the personal relationships or the façade of personal relationships which lay at the root of customer–book agent interactions may have seemed threatening to the literary reviewers who could only invoke their authority with the disembodied voice of a distant critic.


The book agents, much like Laura and the other lobbyists in the novel, powerfully invoked the role of personal contact in cultivating cultural capital. Much like modern telemarketers, tenacious book agents were welcome service providers for some and huge annoyances to others. As The New Orleans Picayune in 1873 jokingly reported: “They tried to kill a book agent in Omaha (Nebraska) last week. He was robbed, thrown into the river, knocked off the cars, tossed from a high bridge into the river again, and in two hours was around with Cassell’s Illustrated Bible, trying to get a subscription from the head of the attacking party” (qtd. in Tebbel 513). While Warner never commented directly on the phenomenon, Twain occasionally expressed some unease with the annoying minions who canvassed the country in his name. One of his most memorable jabs at subscription agents came in one of his unpublished projects to rewrite yet another classic. Twain’s interest in Shakespeare manifested itself in many incarnations—from the speeches of Duke and King to his musings over Shakespeare’s authorship—yet few people are aware of how his concerns about bookselling and Shakespeare’s authorship came together in his unpublished and unfinished skit of 1881—a burlesque Hamlet. Well before Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Twain conceived the notion of rewriting Hamlet to include another character. Twain wanted a character who could be on stage throughout all five scenes participating and commenting on the action to the best of his ability, yet being totally ignored by the central characters. And who is more frequently underappreciated and ignored than an itinerant book canvasser? Thus Basil Stockmar was born and William Shakespeare picked up a new collaborator: Mark Twain. The subscription agent in Hamlet was, according to Twain, the son of a poor farmer. Basil Stockmar had shared a wet nurse with Hamlet. Now a grown book agent, Basil has come to Ellsinore to use his connections to get prominent signatures. Accustomed to being greeted throughout Denmark with “Oh, here’s another dam [sic] book agent!” he is determined to use his connections carefully in order to open doors (“Burlesque Hamlet” 56). Basil figures that if the Queen and Hamlet remember him, “they will subscribe for the book I’ve started out to canvass for; and with their names to head my list, I reckon the general public will be in more or less of a hurry to alter their form of salutation to me” (56). While the skit is terribly funny, Twain never got past the second Act. Only the Ghost ever signs up for a book order. The temptation to mock the gall and persistence of the unlettered book agents may have seemed

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tempting, but he wasn’t really able to go through with it. Basil comes off as rather sweet—opening gags with an umbrella suggest that he’s come a long way in the rain to meet with the royals. And since Twain was a great beneficiary of subscription publishing himself, he was very aware that the footwork of thousands of book agents had helped create his success. Most of all, as an owner of his own publishing house by this time, Twain was himself complicit in encouraging the intrusive nature of door-to-door bookselling. As Keith Arbor suggests, Twain may have abandoned the Hamlet revision project in part because he felt conflicted about the book canvassing system (5–37). Some of this conflict is evident in a rather peculiar Gilded Age scene written primarily by Twain in which Laura gets irritated with a bookstore clerk who tries to assist her in selecting a book. She is looking over a copy of Howells’s Venetian Life when she is interrupted with “Now here is a work that we’ve sold a lot of. Everybody that’s read it, likes it . . . ‘The Pirate’s Doom, or the Last of the Buccaneers.’ I think it’s one of the best things that’s come out this season” (330–331). She rebuffs the clerk’s suggestion but more unwelcome recommendations in the same vein continue. The clerk’s evident ignorance and lack of cultural capital surely speaks ironically of the claims booksellers often made about how their clerks were more knowledgeable than unlettered doorto-door subscription sales agents. Yet, Laura’s calmly vicious response to the clerk is so extreme that it succeeds in overcompensating for any offenses the poor bookstore clerk may have made. After the clerk persists, Laura remarks coyly: “Oh, I was perplexed—but I see how it is, now. You must have thought I asked you to tell me what sorts of books I wanted—for I am apt to say things which I don’t really mean, when I am absent minded. I suppose I did ask you, didn’t I?” “No ma’m—but I—” “Yes, I must have done it, else you would not have offered your services, for fear it might be rude. But don’t be troubled—it was all my fault. I ought not to have been so heedless—I ought not to have asked you.” (331)

This speech alone, in its sarcasm and insincere self-depreciation, demonstrates Laura’s nasty character and perhaps justly puts down the overly eager bookstore clerk. But the scene continues with an increasingly sarcastic and bitter edge. Laura sweetly condescends: . . . some people would think it odd that because you, with your budding tastes and the innocent enthusiasms natural to your time of life, enjoyed

42 / collaborators in literary america, 1870–1920 the Vampires and the volume of nursery jokes, you should imagine that an older person would delight in them too—but I do not think it odd at all. . . . Many people would think that what a bookseller—or perhaps his clerk—knows about literature as literature, in contradistinction to its character as merchandise, would hardly be of much assistance to a person . . . . (332)

Booksellers routinely bemoaned the rise of book agents hawking subscription books, suggesting that book agents were responsible for promoting a low grade of literature. The inclusion of this scene indicates that bookstore clerks had no special claim to knowledge or culture—an attitude Twain and Warner’s book agents would certainly have appreciated. Nonetheless, Laura’s reaction is so excessive that it demonstrates well how her snobbery and passions lead her to irrationality and cruelty—weaknesses that eventually lead her to murder. This scene succeeds in reminding readers how bad people can read good books and also how literature, as merchandise, necessarily developed a falsity of personal relationships be they manifest in subscription sales or in bookstore sales. The personal contact that book agents used, however manipulative or deceptive it might have been, made Twain’s fortune. Even though he later went on to found his own publishing company that specialized in subscription books, his personal misgivings were in some ways manifest in The Gilded Age itself. Was joint authorship a misuse of a personal relationship? Was this his ticket to the circles of the genteel literati? This incident of dual authorship was a troubled enterprise in a variety of ways and it is telling that Twain, while always seeking ways to cut corners, never published a novel in collaboration again.12 People read The Gilded Age already aware that they were complicit with the shallowly gilded volume in their hands. Readers understood that they had bought into reputations of a joint-stock operation. They would necessarily read the endlessly false personal relations in the novel through their own guise of falsely personal relationships with their “friendly” subscription sales agent. They could see that the forgery and speculative nature of the book’s history was part and parcel of the literary themes. Most amazingly, however, the history of The Gilded Age’s production demonstrates how the deeply entwined relationship between the material and the imaginative text is perhaps best embodied by not the gilt which burnished the volumes and which obviously masked the corruption portrayed in the story, but instead by the forgery which marked the inception of the very first edition.

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The Dual Forgery When subscription books were distributed, they commonly featured the phrase “sold by subscription only” on the title page to indicate to buyers that their product was indeed an exclusive publication.13 Desperate book agents would not uncommonly “dump” extra or unsold volumes in local bookstores or general stores, hoping to get a couple of sales by commission. Subscription publishers would occasionally print signature numbers, asterisk markings, and sometimes seemingly decorative images such as daggers on the title pages. These signs would indicate that, if such a book was unearthed in a bookstore instead of a private home, the particular agent responsible for the misdirected and illegally sold volume could be traced and held responsible. Unscrupulous book agents who dumped their surplus books at local general stores, for instance, would need to remove the original title page and arrange for the book to be rebound with a forged title page that wouldn’t indicate the black market nature of the transaction. This wasn’t as difficult to do as one might think and for many years first editions of The Gilded Age have frequently been marked by a “variant” title page that indicates no publication restrictions and was printed from types different from those used for the genuine title page. The irony of The Gilded Age, a novel about false truths and feigned selves having often made its initial appearance within a forged volume, seems apt. But appreciating ironic aptness is not sufficient to understand the more complicated truths behind the lies surrounding the manufacture and distribution of this volume. And again, only by understanding the complicated story behind superstructure and infrastructure of a text can we understand the ways in which this experimental collaborative text was received. As detailed study of the material text demonstrates, the “forged” versions of The Gilded Age were not forged at all, but were made to look like forgeries by the American Publishing Company! Apparently the fake leaf was inserted before the book was ever bound and the type used on the fake page was the same type used in some of the original salesmen’s prospectuses. As Jacob Blanck, the definitive bibliographer of American fiction speculates: One can but guess why the publisher cancelled the original title page and inserted another. A logical explanation is that the publishers may have violated their own injunction regarding sales to bookshops and by means of the variant title page hoped to escape detection and at the same time throw suspicion on an agent. But this is conjecture and is offered as such. (184)


In general, publishers were happy to have subscription books sold under any circumstances and as long as it wouldn’t damage their reputation with the subscription buying public, publishers were perfectly happy to see their works distributed in as many venues as possible. In order to distribute and profit from some sales and yet avoid alienating their subscribers, companies would need to suggest the books were illegal bargains. Indeed, the books would have to perform their own corruption in order to persuade buyers that they were getting an exclusive deal on a cut-rate volume; one hitherto only available to subscribers. These proudly black-market books were, as has now been demonstrated, not black market at all and were made for the American Publishing Company to “double-dip.” They could profit from up-front sales and also from the reputation of the supposed black-market deals.14 The upshot of all of this is not simple irony. The American Publishing Company was engaged in a wholesale corporate scam that was designed to look like the result of an individual agent’s corruption. Systematic corporate corruption masqueraded itself as individual greed. While this particular forged forgery was only discovered in the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century reading public was still approaching the book through an ideological lens that assumed deception to be part and parcel of the reading experience. As a later edition of the Chicago Tribune even humorously speculated, “It is confidently asserted that the ‘Gilded Age’ is a gigantic practical joke. It is declared that, wishing to test the credulity of the public, these two notorious wits had the book prepared by several obscure newspaper local reporters” (“Review” Chicago Tribune 5 April 1874). As demonstrated by this casual joke about potential scams, we can see that it was common knowledge that collaboration and subscription publishing emphasized artifice in its literal and figurative forms. As we have seen, the relationship between subscription publishing and the ways in which this book was received were significant in a number of ways. Many critics have noted with glee the irony of a book that criticized greed was itself a moneymaking potboiler designed to take advantage of political hot topics and to capitalize on the success of Twain’s other subscription best-sellers. This certainly is true, but it occludes the fact that people understood The Gilded Age within the discourse and terms already set up for them by the material text itself, its complicated authorship status, and its distribution method. The hucksterism of subscription publishing wasn’t lost on the public, as the newspaper satires quoted earlier indicate. As the nastier reviews which belittled both the book’s subscription status and its dual authorship

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aptly demonstrated, people were willing nonetheless to read the book through the lens of its production. The Incorporated Self As we have seen, the production forced readers to return repeatedly to the themes of multiplicity and enigmatic responsibility. This theme had special resonance for readers in the 1870s because cultural understandings about the very concept of the modern corporate entity were in transition. As outlined by Alan Trachenberg, American corporations and corporate law itself altered significantly throughout the nineteenth century. In the early part of the century, courts were very concerned with and even slightly suspicious of, the fictitious nature of the corporation as “subject” in lieu of the very physical presence of, say, individual board members. By the 1870s, however, the courts had vastly extended the rights of corporations and the liability of board members was drastically decreased (82–85). Thus, in the early part of the nineteenth century, corporations were seen as divisible in a way that they weren’t by the late nineteenth century. The corporate person as entity began to exist as a separate being from the board members, investors, or participants. As a model for authorship, we can see that the joint unit of Twain/Warner was conceived of as an entity separate from either one of the writers and that had a liability and responsibility that was only vaguely understood legally, artistically, and ethically. While in some ways this separate entity offered a possibility for both Twain and Warner to move away from an authorial subject or persona they may have wanted distance from, in other ways it offered a shameful abrogation of responsibility and a vulgar desire for inauthenticity. In The Gilded Age, this question about the dangerous and yet tempting model of joint subjecthood or corporate identity is unresolved. But the actual construction of the text is also a presentation of a flawed but genuinely alternative model for imagining the relationship between individualism and responsibility. Ellen J. Goldner argues persuasively that The Gilded Age portrays the risk of joint ventures and pooled labors by illustrating how the “subjecthood” of characters is dissolved once they become involved in collective ventures. She argues that emergent capitalism in this novel is portrayed as posing a threat to “its own ideology of individualism” (80). The scheme cooked up by Colonel Sellers and his partner, the young and feckless Henry Brierly, to develop and exploit their worthless land in Missouri is her major case in point, for as more and more people


become involved in the scheme, the less and less these two individualists can control even their own dubious schemes. As other companies and banks become involved, Sellers and Brierly discover that once they are themselves cheated out of money, they cannot blame any particular individual entity, much less any particular bank. All of their money, land, and development interest in Missouri are somehow swallowed up in the labyrinth of big finance. This may be justice served. Certainly Sellers and Brierly are hardly held up as heroic figures, but both embody a kind of charm and charisma that suggests that they, at least, by strength of their personality would be able to resist individual incorporation. As their personal bankruptcy follows their collective bankruptcy, however, we see how liability becomes diffuse over the remains of the individual subject. Notions of accountability or responsibility necessarily involve questions not just of effects but also most often of intentions. As Stacy Margolis has argued in her analysis of Huckleberry Finn, Twain was “concerned with the production of effects and the assignment of responsibility for them” (331). She sees Huck’s pivotal decision to go to Hell for helping Jim as less important than the fact that he really does nothing productive to help Jim escape from slavery. Margolis sees Twain as articulating a belief that while intentions may be good or bad, responsibility and culpability for actions are still morally imperative. As she sees it, “Huckleberry Finn is an attempt to imagine accountability even in the absence of malice” (331). Margolis’s reading is useful, for it illustrates how Twain and Warner were “inheritors of a nineteenth-century cultural shift in notions of accountability” that, among other things, involved “the rise of a new legal paradigm (the law of negligence)” (331). Her reading of The Gilded Age’s themes of corporate responsibility allows her to see an otherwise rather random scene in which a jury absolves a steamship company from any responsibility for the deaths caused by an onboard explosion (Their verdict: “NOBODY TO BLAME”), as part of an argument forwarded by Twain and Warner about the increasing confusion over how common sense responsibility needs to be legally recognized (52). The outrage over what Twain and Warner call the “too familiar” sound of the “Nobody To Blame” verdict demonstrates that the technicalities that make the intentions of a corporate entity hard to pin down should not necessarily allow that corporate entity to escape blame. The steamship company may not have intended to hurt anybody but clearly, as Twain and Warner presented it, the ability to mask intentions behind a collective veneer of corporate facelessness was not ethically acceptable.

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The depiction of this explosion drew upon not only the sadly common history of steamboat explosions but also the specific horror Twain had experienced when his younger brother Henry died in just such an explosion. The authors underscored the realism of the fictionalized event by appending an asterix to the jury verdict, saying “The incidents of the explosion are not invented. They happened just as they are told” (52). The lessons to be drawn were clear. Corporate liability was never fully established in that case and yet, much as the fictional explosion of the steamboat Amaranth, the reverberations and effects of such irresponsibility continue for years. And while the Amaranth parent’s company might not have intended to set into motion the tragic future of young Laura and it might be hard to relate the explosion directly to Laura’s terrible future, it was the explosion that left her orphaned. It was such shady irresponsibility that caused much of the suffering to be found later in the novel. While Margolis points out that the theme of corporate responsibility is dramatized powerfully in The Gilded Age, she misses the point that the very construction and authorship of The Gilded Age makes manifest this problem of tension between intentions and effects. The collaborative production itself embodied the terrible difficulty of extricating intentions, results, and liability. Despite Twain and Warner’s protestations in their introduction that they did everything together, we have seen how their tense proclamation illustrates that they were themselves unsure what this meant. When the bad reviews began to come in, the temptation to point fingers at one another must have been overwhelming. And it is important to note that although they kept a “united front” for the months immediately following publication of The Gilded Age, they never wrote together again, they didn’t really remain close friends, and— tellingly, neither of them ever published any collaborative fiction again. Twain is often considered the epitome of American individualism— his heroes tend to be wry observers and outsiders. But just as individualism and personal integrity were terribly important to Twain, his relentless obsession with doubleness, twinning and even contests indicates a desire both to differentiate and include himself in collective endeavors. What we can learn from his collective authorship is consistent with his exploration of intentions and effects in Huckleberry Finn. While intentions may matter, ultimately, effects also engender responsibility. Collectivity functions to mask intentions, but it shouldn’t mask responsibility. This is beautifully worked out in Twain’s novel Those Extraordinary Twins that culminates in a chapter about Siamese twins who share a set of legs. They are put on trial for kicking a man in a fight.


Witnesses, however, cannot satisfactorily establish which twin was responsible for the kick. The twins are eventually absolved of legal or formal responsibility. Since the intentions of either individual twin cannot be established, the legal system absolves both twins of formal and ethical responsibility for the kicking. When applied to notions of authorship we can see how significant discerning the individual authorial “intentions” of one author or the author might be, but we can also see how clearly the authors assert their joint responsibility for any effects the text might produce.15 In The Gilded Age itself, understanding the problems corporate and collective bodies pose to preconceived notions of responsibility makes a number of otherwise inexplicable scenes make sense. In what would otherwise seem like a baffling and randomly gratuitous scene in the novel, Philip gets into a sudden fight with a conductor on a train traveling west. He is tossed out of the train and spends a page or so of the novel deciding whether or not to sue the company. Twain and Warner’s continual probing of issues concerning responsibility and intention, however, makes this scene quite consistent with how the novel works as a whole, for Philip’s curious resolution to his problem holds a key to comprehending what is at stake in incorporation and how responsibility is a diffuse and tricky concept. In that scene, Philip shocks even himself by punching a railway conductor in the face after the conductor has insulted a woman. And despite the mutterings of witnesses, Philip is physically ejected from the moving train: “The passengers, when he had gone, were loud in their indignation, and talked about signing a protest, but they did nothing more than talk” (266). As Philip walked to the next town, he reflected upon his situation: At first he was full of vengeance on the company. He would sue it. He would make it pay roundly. But then it occurred to him that . . . a personal fight against a railway corporation was about the most hopeless in the world. He then thought he would seek out that conductor, lie in wait for him at some station, and thrash him, or get thrashed himself. (267)

In these musings, we see Philip deciding that while the company is “responsible” for his plight, the impossibility of holding it accountable makes simply thrashing the offensive company representative, the conductor, a more reasonable solution. Philip talks with a local justice of the peace about the matter and receives advice that further confuses the issues of accountability,

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responsibility, and intentionality. The man argues: I hain’t a mite of doubt of every word you say. But suin’s no use. The railroad owns all these people along here, and the judges on the bench too. Spiled your clothes! Wal, “least said’s soonest mended.” You hain’t no chance with the company. (268)

If the scene had ended here, we would have a clear portrait of an incident that would illustrate the efficacy of companies in deterring accountability by their mere vast and complex incorporated existence. Warner and Twain, however, were not content to let that scene end with the vague shrug of the justice’s shoulders. Instead, Philip’s musings take a very different turn, focusing upon his own responsibilities in the matter: Still Philip’s conscience told him that it was his plain duty to carry the matter into the courts, even with the certainty of defeat. He confessed that neither he nor any citizen had a right to consult his own feelings or conscience in a case where a law of the land had been violated before his own eyes. He confessed that every citizen’s first duty in such a case is to put aside his own business and devote his time and his best efforts to seeing that the infraction is promptly punished; and he knew that no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more. As a finality he was obliged to confess that he was a bad citizen, and also that the general laxity of the time, and the absence of a sense of duty toward any part of the community but the individual himself were ingrained in him, and he was no better than the rest of the people. (268–269)

I have quoted this passage at length because it walks us through a series of complex ideas: 1 Philip is initially angry and wants revenge against the corporation for his own satisfaction (he seems to have set aside all ideas of revenge against the individual conductor). 2 It then becomes a righteous matter. Even if he doesn’t want to pursue the suit for himself, he should do it because a law was broken and it is a citizen’s duty to uphold justice at any cost. 3 Yet he is lazy and he doesn’t truly feel obligated to a community, only to individuals. Hence, he is like most people. Indeed, he is like the people on the train who muttered vague disapproval at his ejection, but did nothing meaningful to prevent it. Recognizing his own flaws he is content to acknowledge his own selfishness and not pursue the suit after all.


Twain and Warner’s cynicism about the ability of anyone to hold corporate or collective enterprises to standards of responsible conduct could have simply created a work of satire, but their own construction of the novel as a corporate enterprise suggests that their analysis doesn’t end quite so simply. The Gilded Age is not an example of the efficacy or fun of joint production, but it does illustrate how we need to disassociate notions of intentionality from notions of responsibility. As Philip’s problem with the railway company demonstrates, you’ll never be able to prove individual intentionality. Yet being resigned to injustice isn’t the answer either. Gregg Camfield has located the central tension of The Gilded Age as the contrast between individual greed as the root of social ills and the very tenuous faith Twain and Warner had in individual moral behavior to be effective in combating individual greed. Camfield writes: Both authors understand the ethos of individualism they had been raised on was part of the problem, and both understood to some degree that large social forces made individual responsibility seem less important than they had been taught to believe . . . . (23)

Camfield sees this as a thematic paradox that is not only unresolved in The Gilded Age but is also an unresolved theme that haunts Twain for the rest of his writing career. This reading is persuasive, but in light of our examination of the novel’s collaborative authorship, we can see that the tension between individual and collective authorship is even more vexed than Camfield suggests. And yet, as embodied by the considerable success of this joint novel, there may be a model of some sort of resolution offered by the text itself. Individual moral acts can’t do much to combat the seemingly inevitable greed at the root of virtually everyone’s behavior (even our heroes are repeatedly shown to be complicit in corporate speculation), and no collective solution to the ills caused by individualism seems possible. The only option left might be some sort of model involving an unnatural amalgamation of collective and individual. Thus the joint composition of The Gilded Age was an uneasy model proffered with some hesitation by Twain and Warner. This Twain/Warner model they created was a cautionary authorial entity. “It” pulled off a fairly good novel in a rapid period of time. “It” was technically responsible for the formal effects of the novel. (This fact became powerfully relevant when a real man named Eschol Sellers objected to having his name used in the novel. He threatened to sue and subsequent editions referred instead to the Colonel as “Beriah” Sellers. Eschol Sellers’ lawsuit would have held

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Twain and Warner, rather than their publishers, personally responsible for libel.) The book was a cautionary tale about what happens when one hides behind collaborative, collective, and corporate identities. Intentions are hard to discern in collective entities, but that never mitigates the fact that responsibility both technical and even ethical, still exists. Conclusion—The Guilded Age The trial of Laura Hawkins ends with a terrible sense of literal and figurative unease, which is best understood through the lens of collaborative authorship. Although Laura is found “Not Guilty,” the Judge nonetheless sentences her to the “State Hospital for the Insane Criminals.” The next few passages chronicle Laura’s entry into the Hospital but then suddenly, shockingly, the prose is interrupted: —We beg the reader’s pardon. This is not history, which has just been written. It is really what would have occurred if this were a novel. If this were a work of fiction, we should not dare dispose of Laura otherwise. True art and any attention to dramatic proprieties required it. The novelist who would turn loose upon society an insane murderess could not escape condemnation. Besides, the safety of society, the decencies of criminal procedure, what we call our modern civilization all would demand that Laura should be disposed of in the manner we have described. Foreigners, who read this sad story, will be unable to understand any other termination of it. But this is history and not fiction. There is no such law or custom as that to which his Honor is supposed to have referred; Judge O’Shaunnessy would not probably pay any attention to it if there were . . . . What actually occurred when the tumult in the courtroom had subsided the sagacious reader will now learn. (524–525)

Certainly, this scene reminds readers of the multiplicity of possible endings and of the infinite fictional possibilities that go into the structure of a plot. By highlighting how one ending was selected over another, Twain and Warner (although this was primarily Twain’s chapter) make apparent their own dialogic construction of the text. Even more significant, though, is the fact that this performance of authorial multiplicity occurs in a passage explicitly concerned with justice and with the diffusion of responsibility. In a case where, above all, effects need to be considered when intentions are difficult to discern (Laura kills Colonel Shelby—that effect is clear, although her motives are never explicitly articulated), the justice system fails. Indeed, exactly how this works becomes very clear when both endings are shown.


In the “historic,” or real, ending, Laura isn’t held responsible for her acts. She eventually dies after an unsuccessful career on the lecture circuit, but her death is of heart failure and not particularly punitory. Indeed, the prose underscores how empty of punishment it was: “The jury of inquest found that death had resulted from heart disease, and was instant and painless. That was all. Merely heart disease” (551). Yet, in the initial false ending, by condemning Laura to the Hospital for the Insane, Twain and Warner suggest that her deeds merit responsibility, whether or not she controls her actions. Even if she cannot justify, explain, or otherwise make visible her intentions, the result of her acts demands culpability. The ending Twain and Warner cannot use but forward nonetheless demonstrates the themes they have been relentlessly forwarding throughout the novel: effects matter even when the intentions are insane or otherwise impossible to locate. While here with the false ending it is “history” that allegedly allows Twain/Warner out of the lockbox of expectations about outcomes, it is actually the dialogic and dual nature of the text—the multiplicity of its construction—that allows other possibilities to be heard. The authorial collaboration, which itself eludes intentionality, is ultimately concerned with effects, results, and justice. Jeffrey Masten, in his book examining literary collaborations in the Renaissance, proposes that we see collaboration as a dispersal of authority rather than as the consolidation of it. As he puts it, “to reverse the aphorism: two heads are different from one” (19). This difference is marked, first and foremost, by an understanding that normal finger pointing cannot apply when problems arise. And finger pointing is necessarily a component of authorship for, as Foucault famously noted, modern authorship is predicated upon the notion that someone has to be available for punishment when something goes awry. As we have seen, the concept of a third, autonomous and responsible authorial identity is grappled with in the very themes of the novel as much as it is explored within its production history. The construction of the text was mirrored by its infrastructure. The false forgeries, for example, do not merely echo the repeated scenes in the novel in which corporate entities try to frame individuals as guilty of corporate crimes. Rather, the false forgeries and the subscription sales need to be seen as part of the fundamental framing of the figurative as much as the literal text. During a period in which the veneer of gilt was liable to hide true labor and value, the collaborative construction of The Gilded Age worked to remind readers how much labor and responsibility necessarily lay behind the construction of texts. Twain and Warner’s partnership

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created an exemplary novel which demonstrated how much the figurative world is dependant upon the material and how bankrupt the corporate discourse of the period was when it came to valuing results as much as intentions. While the novel certainly lent its name to the era as “the Gilded Age,” it held out a much harder hope in its bitter satire: that of the future as one of a Guilded Age.


CHAPTER 2 T H E K I N G ’ S M E N , or a Parable of Democratic Authorship

The mid-twentieth century revolution in England successfully deposed King George V some seventeen years before the story of The King’s Men: A Tale of To-morrow (1884) begins. This imaginary British Democracy was far from stable, but under the leadership of Lemuel Bagshaw, President of the Republic of Britain, the government had steadied the economy and redistributed a great deal of the property and wealth which had previously been in the hands of the enfeebled aristocracy. Although still looking to the United States for advisors and support, the imaginary Republic of Great Britain seemed to be entering the twentyfirst century with a bright future before it. For the new citizens of this democracy, however, loyalty to history, to nobility, and to all that the monarchy represented was not such an easy thing to shake off. A collaborative, futuristic novel, The King’s Men chronicles a conspiracy of royalists who seek to overthrow the democratically elected leader and reseat their dim-witted King on the throne. The premise of The King’s Men directly or indirectly engages a number of issues: Irish independence, penal reform, Anglo-American relations, and the perfidy of women. Yet, the overarching concern that carries the book along its troubled narrative path is a concern for the parlous state of American democracy. When democracy is so corrupt that misguided royalists become sympathetic characters and pose a serious threat to a democratic regime, things have gotten to a sorrowful state. Despite championing a pathetic excuse for a King, the royalist conspirators stand up for “all those things which have made England famous forever among the nations—the kings, the nobles and the people, advancing like a host from the darkness to the light” (69). The decision of Robert Grant, John T. Wheelwright, John Boyle O’Reilly, and Frederic Jesup Stimson to collaborate in the construction of this novel was, therefore, a momentous one; in their later careers, all four of


these young American writers would go on to explore the problems posed to the talented individual by a corrupt democracy. For these men, particularly for the three who went on to become major cultural and political figures in turn-of-the-century America, this collaborative escapade was more than a literary lark—it was a project which focused their audacious questioning about the working of democracy. As we have seen in The Gilded Age, the fact that this questioning occurred in a medium intrinsically concerned with the interactions of difference—a collaborative novel—was no coincidence. The King’s Men is a product of an elite literary culture profoundly unsettled by its changing relations to what it saw as increasingly populist democratic culture. In The King’s Men, the discord inherent in democracy is viewed with great suspicion. This discomfort with the idea of a populist democracy speaks to a confrontation with late nineteenthcentury liberalism. How could reformers, dedicated to the ideal of intellectual leadership reconcile the tenets of equality with the premise of meritocracy? By voicing this discomfort in a collaborative text, a form predicated upon the staging of differences, these writers sought to exploit the genre in order to demonstrate an alternative to both facile cooperatism and unfettered capitalism. Within the model of collaboration, these writers managed to argue that their devotion to the integral self was strengthened rather than supplanted by cooperative ventures. The plot of The King’s Men ran as follows: Sir Geoffrey Ripon, a deposed Lord, is in love with the pretty Maggie Windsor, an American heiress who has moved into what, before the revolution, used to be Ripon’s estate. Seeking to establish themselves in British society, Maggie Windsor and her father throw a house party. Some of the Royalist guests use this party as an opportunity to recruit Ripon for their upcoming coup. The Royalists have already smuggled the ex-King back into Britain and have hidden him in a dingy hotel to await reinstatement. Ripon agrees to help the King but is most unfortunately observed by beauteous Mrs. Oswald Carey, a woman who is bitter about Ripon’s recent rebuff of her in favor of the winsome Maggie Windsor. Pleased at a chance for revenge, Carey betrays the plot by secretly reporting it to the vulgar President of the new British Republic, Bagshaw. Ensuring that both sides of her bread are buttered, Carey also tips off King George V that the gig is up. The cowardly King escapes from his secret headquarters with Mrs. Carey, the professional beauty he now sees as his savior, and the two quickly sail to Boston, effectively abandoning the betrayed aristocrats who are either shot or imprisoned for the attempted coup d’état. The twentieth-century restoration plot is thwarted.

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Thanks to the pleadings of Liberal Party leader, Robert Lincoln, President Bagshaw agrees to some clemency and does not execute all the conspirators. Sir John Dacre, however, a leader in the Royalist conspiracy, is shot. Robert Lincoln’s daughter Mary, who had been secretly in love with this royalist enemy, dies when she hears of Dacre’s fate. Geoffrey Ripon and three of his fellows are condemned to Dartmoor Prison, a place that apparently makes better men of them all. The aristocrats learn what hard labor is and witness the truth of noble sacrifice when one of their gang decides to stay behind to distract the guards as the others embark upon a harrowing prison-break. Once again a free man, Ripon makes his way to Boston where he renounces the King and finds Maggie. Ripon and Maggie Windsor marry and move back to England once the radical President Bagshaw’s term is over. Their old friend, the responsible British Democrat Robert Lincoln, then becomes the British Republic’s new Prime Minister and the future looks bright for everyone. But despite the happiness of Ripon and Maggie, the novel closes with the words of Robert Lincoln who still mourns the death of his daughter Mary who had died of heartbreak at the death of a royalist. Buried together, he states: “Theirs (Dacre and Mary) is the first alliance in that reconciliation between the few and the many on which the hopes of posterity depend” (270). Despite mediocre reviews, most critics assessed The King’s Men as a surprisingly coherent work. The Literary World remarked, “Their several handwritings are well amalgamated. It would puzzle any one, we think, to separate the manuscript into its four component authorships” (287). Some of the reviewers do talk about the individual sections of the books but they frame their discussions carefully in order to press upon their readers that this consideration of parts is beneath the normal purview of a reviewer. The Dial, for example, grudgingly notes that “(in) Mr. Stimson one good writer was secured, and the one to whom the book evidently owes about all that it has of literary quality” (Payne 207). The Nation cites the Dartmoor prison scenes written by John Boyle O’Reilly as “graphic,” and sees these prison scenes as virtually the only ones not entirely “feeble and purposeless” (315). Yet, even here, the reviewer implies that the scene’s compelling nature is due solely to the verisimilitude O’Reilly (an ex-prisoner of Dartmoor) could vouch for, rather than the crafting of an individual’s literary imagination. Furthermore, by opening the Nation review with the observation that “this could have been written by an Average Man,” the Nation’s bias toward what it felt the problem of the book was, was indicated to those who were familiar with the recent reception of Robert Grant’s novel


An Average Man (1884). It was not simply that William Payne, the Nation’s reviewer, had hated Robert Grant’s recent novel An Average Man, although as his reviews reveal, that was certainly true.1 What comes out in Payne’s little bon mot is a grudging acknowledgment of narrative coherency that implies an authorial coherency. Unwittingly, however, Payne hit upon the ideological crux of the entire novel. For the problematic message of The King’s Men was that the average man was not necessarily worthy of a democracy. And if it took a collective authorial position to articulate this vision, that only further demonstrated how these four authors perceived the strength of their opposition. The clout of a collective might well be necessary to rebut American traditions of popular egalitarianism. And when reviewers disparaged their collective, the dismissals worked right into their collective hands. When the Dial noted that “not much is to be expected of the association of talents that were put into a common stock for the composition of The King’s Men,” it hit upon the very questions these writers were concerned with (207). What might be common about common stock? By writing together these men forced their audience to consider the possibility that collectivity might well be inherently degrading. Ultimately, the professional training, elite status, and expertise of O’Reilly, Grant, Stimson, and Wheelwright qualified them for collective engagement, in a manner beyond the capabilities of the Average Man. And yet their participation in a literary democracy was more of a cautionary tale than an example. While there is no evidence of personal rancor among the four writers, their tale repeatedly demonstrates the unnatural nature of their yoking. The novel was about failure—both thematically (the plot to reseat the King fails) in its story and thematically in its very structure. The novel illustrated why four men might not want to write together—not because they fought or wrote an incoherent novel. Their book was written in great camaraderie and critics didn’t really complain about a lack of coherence. Rather, the four authors’ collective project served to illustrate each of their own mixed feelings about equality and democratic representation. If the accounts of Stimson and Grant are to be believed, The King’s Men was the most smoothly assembled collaborative novel imaginable. Each man wrote a chapter during the week and they met all together on Saturday nights to read aloud their sections over dinner at either the elite St. Botolph Club or at Frederic Stimson’s house during which time they would then assign the next chapters.2 The entire novel was written in this manner over the course of six weeks. It isn’t precisely clear which

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chapters were written by which writers, but the instigating energy behind the plan was likely John Boyle O’Reilly. Stimson specifically recollected that O’Reilly had suggested the idea, while Grant attributed the plan to Charles Taylor, the editor of the Boston Globe. Since O’Reilly was a prominent figure in the Boston Press Club and newspaper circles in general, it seems likely that even if O’Reilly had not been the originator of the plan, he would have been the first man contacted and only then would the others be brought in. Whatever its origin, the premise was clever. The Boston Globe was a large newspaper at the time and under considerable competition. The four recruits were all relatively well-known among the Boston literary community; Wheelwright for his work on the Harvard Lampoon and the satiric Rollo’s Journey to Cambridge (1880); Stimson who, under the name “J. S. of Dale,” had written the successful novel Guerndale in 1882; Grant for his many stories and novels, especially An Average Man (1884); and, of course, the redoubtable O’Reilly who was at that time one of the most flamboyant literary figures in America.3 The four men were each respectively a known quantity and gambling upon their combination must have seemed like a good idea. Furthermore, as was evident to the Boston Globe, the literary sensation that such an undertaking would attract could only be good publicity. The Nation put it dryly; “Readers The King’s Men will probably have since no man can dispute the drawing power of a four-headed baby at a show” (Nation 315).4 Filled to the brim with advertising supplements and popular copy, the Boston Globe catered to as mass an audience as it could construct. If the message of the anti-populist King’s Men was not in keeping with the rest of the paper, it seems to have gone unremarked. And indeed, since at the heart of The King’s Men there was an appreciation, however troubled, for American mass culture (as manifested, for example, by the exiled King living in Boston hotels and making a joyous hullabaloo over the affordability of cigars in America), The King’s Men likely drew an audience from all ranks of readers. While Grant, Stimson, and to a lesser extent, Wheelwright were well-known among the Boston Brahmin community, O’Reilly was spectacularly popular with Irish American readers and The King’s Men was therefore cleverly gauged to draw in readers from a variety of circles.5 The King’s Men may have created a popular buzz, but it was a pesky topic for critics. As a newspaper serial, The King’s Men did not receive much ongoing criticism, (although its popular success was tremendous, with one report rather incredibly declaring that The King’s Men brought 30,000 new readers to the Boston Globe).6 It wasn’t until the novel


appeared in a bound volume that reviewers gave it much consideration, even though, as we have seen, that consideration tended to be dismissive. The reviews of The King’s Men did not contextualize the novel in any of the categories that a modern cultural critic might feel tempted to assign it (political allegory, utopian, romantic adventure, etc.), perhaps because its status as a collaborative text precluded such consideration. What is compelling about The King’s Men, however, is that it not only fits many of these classifications, but it highlights the very idea of overlap, classifications, and shared strengths in a manner that promotes the purity and distancing of an outsider’s vision. Drawing together political allegory, romantic suspense, and farcical melodrama, The King’s Men was a lively literary experiment calculated to amuse. When taken in the context of the four authors’ lives and works, however, it takes on a more compelling shape as petri dish of the antidemocratic stirrings later to haunt these four men. If the collaboratively written The Gilded Age (1873) had been Twain and Warner’s “tale of to-day,” The King’s Men was similarly promoted as “a tale of to-morrow.” Anticipating Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Twain’s own A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The King’s Men was curiously positioned to exploit its curious novel form to the hilt in order to validate its own eccentric excursion into speculative fiction.7 As political allegory, light romance, and troubled political parable, the great tension underlying the plot is the corruption and personal repulsiveness of a democratically elected leader. What are great men to do, our authors ask, when their commitment to freedom necessitates their oaths of loyalty to an oafish leader? This question was no moot speculation but, rather, spoke to specific historical concerns about national politics, most particularly the Mugwump movement. Technically, the Mugwumps of 1884 were the Republicans who left their party to vote for the Democratic Party candidate, Grover Cleveland, but the idea of Mugwumpism during that period encompassed as many social and cultural considerations as mere party affiliations. Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun labeled these independent bolters “Mugwumps,” from an Algonquin word supposedly meaning “great men.” It was originally used with sarcasm to suggest that these men likely thought too well of themselves (McFarland 11). To their enemies, the Mugwump policy of independent voting was an unrealistic attempt to achieve political power and, more pointedly, it defied the patronage systems that had built up the two-party system. Quickly, however, the Republican bolters appropriated “Mugwump” and used it as, if not a point of pride, a relatively neutral term. The singular

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intellectual and cultural cohesiveness of the Mugwump circles, especially the Boston–Cambridge branches were especially strong and, as one scholar has noted, they “depended on the power of the pen to offset their weakness in numbers” (McFarland 3). And thus, as literary and cultural figures, the Mugwumps flexed a great deal of political power. As Mugwump George W. Curtis put it in a Commencement address, “The Public Duty of Educated Men,” the most “intelligent citizens” needed to participate actively in politics in order to prevent power from falling into the hands of “selfish and ignorant or crafty and venal men” (Norton 266). The image of these Mugwumps was thus iconoclastic—they had social and cultural moorings in the highest circles but they moved away from their historical affiliations with the Republicans to work with the Democrats in a singularly self-righteous way. In The King’s Men, President Bagshaw of the Republic of Britain serves as a stand-in for James G. Blaine, the Republican Party Presidential nominee of 1883 and controversies over Blaine echo throughout the novel. Blaine was commonly assumed to have sold his political influence for railroad bonds, and in popular discourse he was associated with both blatant corruption and hopeless partisanship. Blaine’s policies of what Mugwumps saw as “spoils politics,” had alienated so many Republicans that the split led to the 1884 election of the Democratic Presidential nominee Grover Cleveland. The split of 1884 heralded an era of political Mugwumpery in which, brandishing the sword of disinterested magnanimity, thousands of influential younger Republicans joined the Democratic Party. Their ferocious anti-Blaine campaign was surprisingly successful and but for 1,149 votes in the State of New York, Blaine would have been president. Grant, Stimson, and Wheelwright were part of the young, college-educated, urban professionals who left their traditional Republican ticket as an act of protest during the 1880s and all three of them spent many years afterwards campaigning for Mugwump platforms of reform politics.8 O’Reilly came at the Blaine debates from a different angle since he represented an Irish–American Catholic constituency that served as the backbone of Cleveland’s Democratic Party.9 Initially a supporter of James Butler for the Democratic nomination, once Cleveland won, O’Reilly loyally endorsed him. Wary support for Cleveland coupled with anti-Blaine sentiments was thus a great source of communality for Stimson, Grant, Wheelwright, and O’Reilly as can be seen in their joint portrayal of the perils of partisanship.10 In The King’s Men, one of President Bagshaw’s worst qualities, aside from being a “blatant demagogue,” “woman-hater,” “anarchist and


atheist,” was that he had attracted many deposed aristocrats to his cause and with their help was able to defeat soundly the moderate and reformminded candidate, Richard Lincoln. At least one way for the aristocrats to bring down British democracy, it seemed, was for them to carry the vilest candidate to office and see his government dissolve. Unlike the aristocrats of the novel, the Harvard Brahmins behind The King’s Men restrained themselves. Much as O’Reilly had done, Grant, Stimson, and Wheelwright looked beyond their traditional loyalties to vote for the difficult choice (Cleveland) in order to save their country. This difficult choice is perhaps best worked out in the novel when Geoffrey Ripon, having suffered tremendously for the ungrateful crown, renounces his own fealty to the King. Ripon marches into the seedy Boston hotel in which King George was holding his court in exile. “Ripon announced, ‘I return this, which my ancestor more than a century ago first unsheathed in fealty to the house of Hanover.’ He took from its scabbard the sword . . . and snapped the blade in twain” (242). Ripon’s loyalty was admirable but misdirected at an unworthy cause; by destroying the sword of his ancestors he aligns himself with the messier, unsavory, but ultimately more righteous cause of democracy. The dilemma of how to justify one’s distress over the ill-directed will of the people troubled the character of thoughtful reformer, Richard Lincoln. When a British Radical complains that too many monarchists had been elected to democratic positions, the cautiously liberal Lincoln found it necessary to point out that they had been, nevertheless, “elected by the people.” “Yes,” the British Radical replies curtly, “by the uninstructed people . . . . The people are talked to by these fellows with empty titles on one hand and by the demagogues on the other, and they think the only choice lies between the two” (12). For the most radical populist to express despair at the ignorance of the masses was truly a sign of desperate times in the British republic. Like the novel’s corrupt President Bagshaw, democratic candidate Blaine was popular with the public and one scholar has even acclaimed him as the “1st celebrity of American Politics” (Farber 128). Blaine’s magnetic personality and devastating charisma allowed him to carry his campaign directly to the people. He spoke at town meetings and village gatherings, generally making contact with the masses at a far more fundamental level than Candidate Cleveland ever did. Even though he was from Maine, Blaine was especially popular in the Midwest and just as in the novel the high-minded Lincoln couldn’t fathom the attraction of the repellent President Bagshaw, neither in real life could the Mugwumps imagine aligning themselves with Blaine’s demagoguery.

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As the problem with President Bagshaw attracting both the ignorant and the aristocrats illustrates, the novel is rift with contradictory positions about what role these British aristocrats will and should play in the minds of the British populace. By and large the aristocrats in the novel are portrayed as effete elitists, blind to any but the basest motivations and desires; a fitting portrayal by writers who held themselves up as champions of a distinctly American liberal democratic vision. On the other hand, the great hero of the novel, Ripon, is an aristocrat who turns democrat and the suffering the monarchist conspirators later undergo is portrayed as undue and horrifying. In an especially vivid scene, the vindictive President Bagshaw parades the foiled conspirators through the streets in a display of unnecessary cruelty. Led to the Tower of London in chains, the conspirators marched “as part of the policy of Bagshaw’s government thus to march them through the streets, a spectacle, like a caravan of caged beasts, for the populace” (174). In this scene, the vulgar Bagshavian democrats lose whatever moral supremacy they may once have held over the aristocrats. So did Grant, Stimson, and Wheelwright envision themselves as Ripon? Were they American aristocrats converted to a Democratic cause, but with the lineage of greatness making their sacrifices especially tragic? It is difficult to say. But the great success of the Mugwump movement in Boston during the 1880s was often attributed to the uneasy collaboration of Boston blue bloods with the Irish working class. Historian Gerald McFarland, for instance, quotes one observer of the Mugwumps’ YMDC (Young Man’s Democratic Club) as “New England’s most powerful stronghold of Cleveland Democrats thanks to the unbeatable combination of Harvard College and the slums of Boston” (60). The three Harvard King’s Men and their Irish friend O’Reilly perfectly embodied this movement. The gracious pose of disinterest that held one above partisanship was thus a familiar rhetoric for these four authors. A pose of disinterest is a leitmotif in The King’s Men, apparent in both the elemental structure of the work as well as in its narrative flourishes. Distress over direct representation in both a semiotic and a civic sense was part of the overall fear of populist democracy held by these men and their allegiance to nonpartisanship was the result of this distress. Critic Christopher Wilson, for example, traced the evolution of Robert Grant’s novels from the 1880s to 1900, and determined that Grant’s early works portray an “American Landscape paralyzed by ethnic conflict, leisureclass indifference and a polarized class structure.” This assessment is certainly true in general terms as it applies to The King’s Men, and


Wilson persuasively argues that Grant’s later novel Unleavened Bread (1899) articulated fears and hopes for “cultural homogenization and the legitimacy of professional authority” (19). Wilson does not attend, however, to the collective compositional premise of The King’s Men— itself a premise that engages the problems of direct representation in its very structure. Thus foreshadowing, in effect, the concerns for indirect representation and denigration of the “average man” so incisively probed in Unleavened Bread. Just as Ripon and his co-conspirators are distressed by the outcome of direct representation (which results in the corrupt, yet legitimately elected, President Bagshaw), so too are the four authors wary of how they themselves could be representative of a sole author. That is to say, they were concerned about how to imagine themselves as individual writers instead of as a collective one. The collective authorship of The King’s Men was, in essence, an allegory for the impossible logistics of direct representation. Professional expertise, serving as a buffer for direct representation, allows for more thoughtful and genuine, albeit indirect, representation. Direct representation, allowing everyone to tell his or her own story, is an appealing but futile venture. The King’s Men was, in its collective authorship, a case study of precisely the problem of populist democracy. Robert Grant expressed shock that anybody could have even expected The King’s Men to be any good! “The wonder to me was that anyone should imagine it could be (a good novel) . . . the critics viewed it as . . . (a) hodgepodge. How was it likely to be anything else . . .?” (Fourscore 168). By presuming and demonstrating such failure, the authors of The King’s Men promoted a certain kind of authorial professionalism. After all, it was only their professional reputations as individually prominent authors that allowed them the luxury of participating in such amateurish literary hijinks. The individual reputations of the four men were so well known that one newspaper speculated quite specifically on how each of these sections would turn out. Mr. O’Reilly will probably open with a wild and exciting escape of a convict from an Australian chain-gang; Mr. Grant will follow with the introduction of this interesting hero into a fashionable drawing-room, where he will be very ill at ease, pull down his cuffs a great deal and wonder what the other guests mean by the nothings which they utter. Mr. Wheelwright, having been with difficulty restrained from supplying the last chapter with a foot-note to explain in a tricolet that really the aforesaid utterances mean absolutely nothing, will subside, to give Mr. Stimson opportunity. The chances are, however, that Mr. Stimson,

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after certain amount of metaphysical talk, will kill off all the characters, thus reducing his collaborateurs to the direful necessity of either ending the story abruptly, or of devoting the remaining chapters to the alternative invention and extinction of new sets of figures. In all seriousness, however, there is much interest to see whether four of Boston’s brilliant writers can solve a problem, which, like that of squaring the circle, has been held insolvable. (Grant, Scrapbook)

The reactions of one reviewer to the double-barbed satire in The King’s Men illustrates just how effective the staging of authorial failure was and what some of the implications of that success might portend. The Critic complained: The trouble is that it is impossible to decide whether the authors meant us to laugh or not. If we complain of its not being laughable, it is barely possible that they may exclaim, “Why, we never meant you to laugh!” If we complain that they have made fun of a King without elevating the idea of the “People,” it is highly probable that they will find us exceedingly amusing. But readers who find themselves left without any ideas, even in burlesque, will never approve of the author who does it. (136)

Significant here is that the reviewer attempts to locate his distaste for the ambiguous moral of the story in a betrayal of the authorial obligations to the reader. The Critic recognizes the satirical intent of mocking everyone, but interprets the text as more bitter than biting. This bitterness belies any claim the authors might have had for the work as a harmless burlesque. That said, the review hits upon precisely the ethical ambiguity staged in this work. The repellent nature of both “The People” and “The King” is a given, but the tone of the novel is such that a mere dismissal of it as satire is insufficient. The impasse represented by only two ghastly alternatives (“People” or “King”) leaves the readers at a standstill, “without any ideas.” Stranding readers to create their own textual readings is, to the Critic, an abrogation of authorial duty and a reader “will never approve of the author who does it.” Indeed, such abandonment suggests that a professional responsibility has been shirked. To invoke moral uplift as a criterion for aesthetic judgment was certainly par for the course in late nineteenth-century reviewing, but the ability of the Critic’s reviewer to seize upon the impasse staged by The King’s Men demonstrates just how well the staged failure worked. For the ethical impasse staged by The King’s Men led the reviewer to point blame at one author, rather than four. It was “the author” who lost approval of “his” readership. By “betraying” the authorial obligations to point a reader towards an ethical position, and yet shirking easy


allocation of blame by having written as a collective, the four authors behind The King’s Men precisely illustrated the problem of composite identity. Although they intentionally provoke the desire to assign blame, they brazenly frustrate that desire through their collective authorship. Ultimately, the royalist conspirators in the novel are heroes, not because they stood up for and even died for their convictions, but because they had the ability to walk away from them. And once away from their monarchist leanings, at least some of the aristocrats were able to embrace democracy with a healthy suspicion. Ripon’s nobility is heightened by his ability to discard his aristocratic identity. The Nation observed that one of the best moments in the entire novel was the scene in which Ripon renounces his king by breaking his ancestor’s sword and thus breaking “for ever with the miserable last of a line of kings in a manly and dignified way” (315). In this novel, the truest marker of aristocracy is for elites to embrace a modern noblesse oblige, even if those responsibilities are to be taken up in a democratic context. While the novel reads erratically, its mere form allegorizes the pulling together of the talented few. The cover design for the bound version featured four quadrants separating, and yet juxtaposing, a crown and a Phyrigian cap, thus visually tying together the contradiction. Valorizing a small, but loyal band of conspirators highlighted not merely their loyalty, but also their scarcity. The four men who put together The King’s Men saw themselves as a beleaguered band. While here I focus more upon the prolific O’Reilly, Grant, and Stimson, Wheelwright too saw himself as part of a group battling fiercely for romance over common sense, and for a democratic vision of America that would encompass egalitarianism without discarding elitism. John Boyle O’Reilly While The King’s Men brought together four men profoundly concerned with the implications and promise of collective activity for a democratic nation, it was John Boyle O’Reilly who received the most recognition for embodying a cultural role of conciliator and cross-cultural ambassador. Both O’Reilly’s contemporaries and more recent scholars have hailed him as the great go-between for Brahmin Boston and what was rapidly becoming a city of Irish Catholic immigrants. Van Wyck Brooks agreed. He wrote that O’Reilly “did more than anyone else” to bridge the great divide in Boston (311). And when O’Reilly was selected in 1889 to give the main address at a re-dedication of Plymouth Rock over other contenders such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes, he established forever his credentials as a literary luminary in the eyes of

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the Boston Brahmins. This Irishman managed to inspire rather than to threaten. The Boston literary establishment embraced him and held him up as the interpreter of all that was Irish in the United States. Literary prestige gained O’Reilly the toehold he needed to enter the higher social circles and he soon found himself invited to join many of the most prestigious clubs and literary societies in Boston. It was in one of these literary clubs, The Papyrus, that he likely first met the circle of young Harvard writers and despite their differences in age, O’Reilly was quickly taken up by them as one of their own.11 At the time of The King’s Men, O’Reilly was the most established writer of the group, as well as the most famous political figure. As Robert Grant openly acknowledged, O’Reilly had the Democratic party contacts and influence which helped earn Grant his first government post (as secretary to the Mayor’s office) and it seems likely that John Wheelwright may have begun his career with the Public Utilities office, thanks also in part to the influence O’Reilly had with the Boston Irish Democratic political machine.12 Although O’Reilly died far earlier than any of his three young Yankee friends and never lived to see them rise to the influential political and literary positions they later held, O’Reilly was without doubt the riotous force behind The King’s Men conspiracy and likely shaped very powerfully the philosophy these young men had towards pluralistic democracy. Born in Ireland in 1844, John Boyle O’Reilly was apprenticed as a printer’s devil until, at the age of nineteen, he took an oath of loyalty to Great Britain and enlisted in the Tenth Hussars, a British Regiment then stationed in Ireland. As part of the radical Irish Fenian movement, he was arrested for treason against the crown and was sentenced to twenty years at hard labor. It is hard to estimate the effect of a prison life on a person, although many of O’Reilly’s biographers and critics have tried. And although there is much that is contradictory about his career as a prisoner, there is certainly much information, anecdotal and otherwise, about O’Reilly’s experiences under incarceration. For the first few years he was shuffled through various British prisons and occasionally placed under solitary confinement. When later condemned to a chain gang, O’Reilly was chained to two of his fellow Fenian political prisoners. Details are hazy on precisely how it was managed, but on two separate occasions the three men tried to escape from prison (presumably after shedding their shackles) and were recaptured before they could find a hiding place. The three men were then separated and sent to Dartmoor, the high-security prison in Britain, notorious for its appalling conditions


(and used as a model for the prison in The King’s Men). After O’Reilly was again captured in an escape attempt, he was deemed too dangerous for British prisons and he was thereby deported to Western Australia. Chain-ganged again, O’Reilly’s sentence to twenty years hard labor must have seemed definitive. Yet, with the conniving of a local priest who sympathized with the Fenian cause and the assistance of the local warden’s daughter, O’Reilly managed the impossible (Carroll). He escaped, made his way on to an American whaling ship, and was welcomed by Fenian supporters as a hero. With their help he quickly found a post in Boston working for the preeminent Catholic newspaper in America, the Pilot. This would have been the moment at which most men would begin to rest on their well-deserved laurels, but O’Reilly used his arrival on the shores of the United States as a time to commence a new career and forge for himself a new identity based on his citizenship in a democracy. He was rapidly promoted at the Pilot and became editor-in-chief and co-owner of the paper in 1876. From then until his death in 1890, O’Reilly controlled what was probably the second most powerful media outlet in Massachusetts short of the Boston Globe.13 He wrote editorials, hired writers, and built the Pilot up from being a minor Catholic newsweekly run by priests, to being a major newspaper with an international reputation. Elected president of the Boston Press Club in 1879, O’Reilly’s status assured that the “ethnic” papers in Massachusetts would get a serious hearing. By the mid-1880s, O’Reilly’s reputation as a fair-minded man; one who could speak with passion to both liberalminded and essentially conservative populations, doubtless made his participation in the project a key part of Taylor’s decision to run The King’s Men. If his credentials as an Irish revolutionary and increasingly prominent literary figure weren’t enough to give him status in the Irish American community, O’Reilly built up for himself a colorful and manly reputation. He endeared himself to the sports enthusiasts by boxing with John L. Sullivan and he regularly participated in public sporting events (Betts). He also garnered huge popular acclaim when, from Boston, he engineered the daring rescue of five Fenian prisoners held in Western Australia, an event that received considerable press coverage and popular accolades (Pease). His suicide in 1890, at the age of 46, shocked his many friends and admirers but did much to ensure his romantic memory in the minds of Bostonians.14 A statue in his honor was put up on the Boston Fenway and it stands today as a testament to his

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romantic memory and reputation as the greatest ambassador for the Boston Irish. His ambassadorship, however, was of a most particular kind. For, while vigorously arguing for the rights of all, O’Reilly particularly valued the rights of those who could voice such arguments. Attending to the value of what he saw as an articulate elite did not necessarily contradict his devotion to the masses. Rather, this attention to the elite was simply part of his vision of how social uplift might work in a democracy. In all of its contradictions, however, O’Reilly’s attitude reflected a commitment to social reform arising from a classic Mugwump position. As with the other three authors, O’Reilly had mixed feelings about the growing legitimation of professional authority, but basically believed in the Mugwump approach of proto-progressive support of reform issues such as labor arbitration programs. O’Reilly’s fascination with compulsory arbitration was brought on by a commitment to a classic liberal vision of capital/labor relationships. In his many editorials on the subject, he argued that the application of labor on raw materials earned its title to real profit, not mere pittances. But, in keeping with his fundamental belief in the preeminence of intellectual force, the specialized mental labor of management was worthy of consideration as well.15 O’Reilly’s vision of social order was based on an assumption that the neutrality of a mediator, and the justice which the mediator could bestow upon such a situation, was dependent upon the authority the disputing parties would be willing to grant. Simply being an outside and disinterested party wasn’t necessarily enough to earn the authority needed to distribute justice. Authority would have to be earned by persuading both parties that they were not fully capable of articulating their own desires and effectively making themselves heard. To be an effective mediator, therefore, meant that one did not merely need a claim to neutrality and disinterest in the case, but one also had to lay claim to superiority over both parties. As in The King’s Men, disinterested expertise was rightly the privilege of only the exceptionally gifted. O’Reilly’s advocacy of mediators was, as we shall see, part of a fascination with “distanced paraphrasing” that worked itself out in the judicial and literary opinions expressed in Stimson’s and Grant’s writings as well. The consolidation of authority made possible by specific narrative interventions in both judicial reasoning and literary texts involved skilled mediation in every sense of the word. For all four of these authors, expression was best couched by those who could pose as neutral and distanced translators, but who could manipulate the professed stance of either side so skillfully that the victims of such manipulation


would never know it. By seemingly paraphrasing, but intentionally misrepresenting, a narrative authority or judge could practice partisanship under the guise of disinterested authority. Although O’Reilly’s celebrity status was based upon his politics as much as his exploits, what allowed him to truly serve as an informal ambassador for the vast underclass of working Irish–American families in Boston, was his literary work. He had begun writing poetry in prison, and with the Pilot as a ready outlet, O’Reilly was soon waxing poetic with great regularity. His specialty was uplifting verse which, in simple couplets, would call out for freedom and against tyranny. These immensely popular poems, written in a romantic and sentimental tradition promoted a genteel bourgeois sensibility. Nostalgic, often didactic, and essentially proselytizing, these poems appealed to the Irish immigrants who sought assimilation and also to the Proper Bostonians who could read O’Reilly’s verses and see that while all was not well in the world, causes were common and values were shared. The heavy-handed themes of encounter and the painful costs of mediation to be borne only by the specially gifted were fleshed out in O’Reilly’s first novel, The Moondyne: A Story from the Underworld (1877). This story was initially written for the Pilot but thanks to O’Reilly’s international stature, it was soon afterwards published in book form and received considerable international acclaim (Brady).16 The Moondyne was the first novel ever set in Western Australia and, drawing heavily upon O’Reilly’s life experiences, it chronicles the life of an Irish Jean Valjean type, who is convicted of poaching a deer to avoid starvation and is thus banished to the Australian penal colonies. The heroic convict escapes from his chain gang, lives among the aborigines (who nickname him “Moondyne”), finds a gold mine, returns to London and becomes, under a false identity, one of the most powerful men in Britain. When the British government begs Moondyne to reform their penal system, he agrees and graciously returns to Western Australia to eradicate the corrupt convict system. Despite its reckless narrative style and fundamentally ridiculous plot, the heroic individual who is drawn to the aborigines because of his own experience with oppression and incarceration lends The Moondyne an edgy appeal that mitigates its rather uninspired prose style and characterizations. The Moondyne has garnered attention from scholars interested in the cultural intersections and colonial anxieties clearly being worked out in this novel, but as a predecessor to The King’s Men it thematically engages the problems not just of mediation and representation (Who can speak for the suffering convicts? Moondyne, of course), but also it engages the very idea of displacement and neutral party disinterest.

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Charles Fanning, who has studied the Irish–American literary tradition, ultimately dismisses much of O’Reilly’s work because it wasn’t Irish or even American enough. For Fanning, O’Reilly’s choice to focus his literary imagination on Australia rather than Ireland was inexplicably galling: (T)he literary denial of exciting Irish materials is still striking. It must have been rooted in his sense of himself as cultural mediator between Boston’s Irish and Yankees. Too much about Fenians and “the cause” would not have furthered rapprochement. Indeed, The King’s Men is itself the embodiment of that mediation, the bridging of the gap between two so disparate cultures. A noble attempt, this literary alliance of three Yankees and an Irishman was necessarily flawed and fragmented. (165)

Fanning’s insight about The King’s Men itself as an embodiment of flawed mediation helps explain not the denial of Irish materials but the displacement of them.17 The fact that O’Reilly so profoundly identifies himself as a Boston Irish Freedom fighter and yet set his major literary works in Australia, suggests a displacement that is not merely the product of having had so many formative experiences there. Indeed, it seems that Australia served O’Reilly as a seemingly neutral territory where he could construct the great archetypal battles of both man against the natural world as well as man against the injustices of society. The entire premise of invoking a seemingly neutral party, in this case Australia, to provide a space for the most primal issues to be worked out is similar to the premise of calling for outside mediation—a continual theme in his editorials about labor. The message of The Moondyne found a receptive audience. The New Orleans Morning Star and Catholic Visitor gushed: “The lessons conveyed are very noble, and we think this expression . . . is the one grand lesson of the book; ‘Authority must never forget Humanity’ ” (as qtd. by In Bohemia end page advertisements). Received primarily as a novel calling for penal reform, critics nonetheless managed to see broader implications of the book as well. Authority has attendant responsibilities to translate, care for, and guide the suffering masses. John Boyle O’Reilly’s fundamental faith in the narrative pose as one of professional mediation between reader and audience revealed a faith also in the ability and responsibility of the privileged to speak for, rather than with, the downtrodden. He might not have had the Harvard education his coconspirators did, but he bought into their values. Outdoing even the Brahmins when it came to valuing a meritocracy, the authenticity and cachet that O’Reilly lent the group ensured that the four “King’s Men” could


cavalierly attack the values of vulgar populist common sense. O’Reilly’s presence allowed Grant, Stimson, and Wheelwright to appear youthful and rebellious rather than reactionary and staid. And even though at the time of The King’s Men’s composition O’Reilly was an older and more important literary figure than any of the others, the tokenism he represented gave the project an especial claim to fair mindedness.18 And, thanks in part to the inclusion of O’Reilly, their message of literary and social conservatism was persuasively couched in terms of classic American liberalism, terms that would allow themselves to engage the debates of their day from a critical, professional distance. But what was the appeal of such a critical distance? In The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage, Robert Dawidoff argues that American literature and cultural expression, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, frequently articulated an anxiety that was particularly Tocquevillian in its origin. Drawn to and fully implicated by democratic culture, writers such as Henry Adams and Henry James interpreted what they saw as a sense of detachment from democracy as a way of controlling one’s own experience in it. Much as Tocqueville had, in 1831, used his outsider’s vision to elucidate the complexities and threats of democratic egalitarianism, so did these writers seek to confront what Dawidoff terms “the irritating challenge of democratic culture to the traditionally expressed self-consequence of intellect” (xvii). Dawidoff reasons: “Democracy historically interferes with the feeling that smart Americans have that they are better than the rest of us. America inflicts a particular hurt on those with a stake in the non-democratic institutionalization of the expressive” (xvii). While Dawidoff plays this theory out quite persuasively when dealing with artists so profoundly invested in romanticized integrity of the artistic imagination such as James, Adams, and George Santayana, the discomfort of egalitarianism is worked out in a very different manner for writers and artists occupying a tier that was slightly lower in its commitment to such highbrow aims. In this tier, occupied by the likes of O’Reilly, Grant, Wheelwright, and Stimson, detachment often took the form of defensive self-effacement. The calculations behind this self-effacement, however, were often apparent in the guise of literary idioms and rhetorical gestures that invoked an amateur pose in order to shore up a professionalized authority. Stimson’s memoirs, My United States, is a perfect example. While asserting “These recollections are not to be a memoir, but a sort of wormeye view of the U.S.A. as an unimportant, and unobserved observer who has, by luck of a fairly wide experience, been permitted to see them and their great men,” Stimson effectively establishes his authority thanks to his

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amateurish status (48). This pose can be noted in the work of Grant and O’Reilly, but the life of Stimson was particularly entwined in the rhetoric of bemused detachment and throughout his literary and political career, Stimson, more than any other of the conspirators, fancied himself unobserved. Frederic Jesup Stimson As Stimson saw it, all of his causes and ideas had failed by the end of his days: “in my lifetime,” he wrote in his memoirs, “everything I believed in had failed.” By this Stimson meant that women had earned the right to vote, divorce laws had been eased, and World War I had been fought. Although not spelled out, as directly, Stimson was keenly aware that he was part of a cultural movement that had effectively been transformed by the early twentieth century into a form almost unrecognizable to its earliest proponents. From his early years as a lawyer and successful young novelist to his later career as international diplomat and presidential appointee, Stimson epitomized the failures and the successes of his circle’s obsession with curing the ills of popular democracy. When he reflected upon his failures, however, he was not ruing the debacles of a tragic career. Rather, he was assigning them nobility as failed and righteous causes. His aged reflections upon these failures were distinctly presaged by his initial foray into causes and conspiracies with The King’s Men. By painting the royalist plotters in the novel as noble in their dedication to a doomed, foolish, and substantively unsympathetic cause, Stimson called attention to the strivings of all dedicated men, and prophesied, in effect, his own future. Stimson was a Harvard man to the core. He graduated Harvard with an A. B. in Philosophy in 1876 and graduated from Harvard Law School two years thereafter. He taught law at Harvard from 1902–1915, served on Harvard’s Board of Overseers and was granted an honorary Doctoral of Law degree from Harvard in 1922, and heavily mined his undergraduate years at Harvard for his successful novel, Guerndale (1882). Despite his associations with Harvard, Stimson was no closeted academic. His involvement in Mugwump politics and national labor legislation earned him an appointment in 1915 as U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. Over the course of his life this ambassador also wrote many successful short stories, a play, a memoir, and a variety of historical and contemporary novels: one of them the national best-seller of 1896, King Noanett.19 His copious writings on legal language, labor law, Mugwump politics, and even the scholarship systems at Harvard rendered him


a formidable spokesman on cultural issues of his day. Even though his positions all reveal a fundamental distrust of the unlettered, his often-contradictory impulses also reveal a commitment to social change motivated by impulses far more complex than mere noblesse oblige.20 Stimson’s own expertise was never in question. He was one of the foremost legal scholars of his generation. He wrote successful reference works, histories, and casebooks on law as well as teaching law at both graduate and undergraduate level at Harvard. His understanding of the construction of legislation and in the utility value of such knowledge to the mass public reveals not a nostalgic conservatism, nor a progressive theory of populist representation. In his allegiances to certain theories of law we can see how Stimson’s literary idiom was reflective of a profound faith in the detachment and expertise of a professionalized mediator, be it in the form of a narrator or judicial power. Stimson, like Grant, attended Harvard Law School during the 1870s, just when the “case-method” system of law developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell and James Barr Ames was making its way into the legal curriculum. Previously, law had been taught at Harvard and elsewhere as a profession that required grounding in British legal history and the abstract principles of legal development. During the time in which Grant and Stimson attended law school, however, the shift was to teaching law as a practical focus upon legal precedents set by recent court cases. Emphasizing the rational and scientific methodology for establishing judicial decisions, this new method of case law had a profound effect upon Stimson. Even though he had his hesitations about the Langdell system, complaining that a study of an infinite number of case laws was inefficient and occasionally led to briefs that sacrificed principled persuasiveness for cold accuracy, Stimson nonetheless acknowledged the new system’s value. And, as in the incident narrated below, Stimson learned to meld his faith in the case system with his belief in the power of narrative to establish authority. Stimson recalled that Langdell himself was no teacher; and most of the professors had never tried a case in court, but, under the case-system, considered each case as a clean mathematical problem—a tendency which many years later was to call forth a dry criticism of my brief in a cause before the Supreme Court of the United States—my senior, the late John G. Johnson, remarking that “I appeared to have successfully summarized the main points of the case”—I profited by the hint and, when the case was reargued, gave them a treatise and a serial story. (My United States 59)

Stimson learned that the expertise necessary to make a case was not in mastery of the material, but in mastery of the reformulation of the

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material into narrative. Setting out the points in a seemingly factual manner to push towards a particular argument, the expert lawyer needed to hide his inevitable partiality under the guise of narrative. Training in case law was a hallmark of the increasing rationalization of the legal profession. Under this system legal knowledge was gained from studying the practice of law in the real world—other judge’s experiences were seen as the basis for knowledge. Similarly, Stimson’s allegiance to British common law, a theme that repeatedly comes up in his copious legal writings, was also a manifestation of his essentially antipopulist sentiments. What disturbed Stimson about Statute law was its potential for abuse, and its formation at the hands of uneducated masses, totally ignorant of a technocrat’s discipline. Relying upon politicians to create whimsical legislation was, to Stimson, a profound betrayal of the self-determining community of peers/professionals who would collaborate over a long term to construct a rational, principled corpus of knowledge. Stimson’s defense of common law generally rested upon the assumption that too much Statute law making was inefficient and really rather presumptuous. Stimson argued in his book, Popular Law-Making: A Study of the Origin, History, and Present Tendencies of Law-Making by Statute (1910), that to the average man, “statutes have assumed the main bulk of the concept of law as we formulate it to ourselves” (2). This was regrettable but indicative of the erroneous assumptions the uneducated masses are prone to. Stimson elaborates, “The subject of statute-making is not thought difficult; it is supposed to be perfectly capable of discussion by anyone of our State legislators, with or without legal training; and sometimes with lamentable consequences” (2–3). His book on Statute law for the layperson therefore rather slyly sets forth its aim of making Statute law more difficult, and increasingly arcane. Thus, although he certainly valued the contributions of the “common man” to the legal system . . . and doubtless enjoyed the reviews that hailed his books for their accessibility to a lay audience, Stimson’s legal writings nonetheless expressed a profound faith in the legal system precisely because it had been professionalized.21 His popular introductions to the law were far more about educating the masses about the great system of law devised by men of character and culture than it was about giving people the tools to change a law. A consistently successful novelist who wrote best-selling historical novels throughout his career, the novel in which Stimson most compellingly raised questions about narrative authority and the responsibility of the privileged was also the novel that reads today as his most provocative and encompassing narrative. For although Guerndale is in


many ways a self-indulgent memoir of Harvard life in the 1870s, its scope was ambitious without being foolish and studiedly intelligent even when waxing sentimental and nostalgic. Most significant for this study, is that in Guerndale Stimson worked out many of his early thoughts on the profession of literature, the practice of authorship, and the complications of friendship. In doing so, Stimson evidently hit the nerve of an audience evidently eager to read about those thoughts, for Guerndale was successful both with the critics and the market. And although his later novels were published under his real name, in 1884 “J. S. of Dale” was a known commodity and it was this successful author of Guerndale who was invited to participate in The King’s Men, not Frederic Jesup Stimson the young attorney. J. S. of Dale’s preface to Guerndale reads: In these latter commercial days of ours, when a rise of one-eight of one per centum in the rate of discount causes more stir than was anciently felt at the downfall of a religion, and even our passions are regulated by supply and demand; in these days, when the strength of popular emotion is accurately tested in the stock market and not often . . . in all these days it is natural that the character of our fiction should follow the nature of our thought. (iii)

With this preface, Stimson made it clear that his narratorial pose was going to be a topic for the novel as much as any other theme. As J. S. of Dale, Stimson writes: “I am nothing but a plain civil engineer” who is “wont to rely upon the judgment” of an anonymous dilettante and artistic friend (v). When J. S. of Dale asks in his prologue, if poetry had abandoned the world, leaving “us in a desert of common sense,” it is merely a rhetorical question. The project of his tale is to locate the beauty and poetry within the realm of the common and modern world. Stimson, as J. S. of Dale writes: “The evident deed has given place to the complex emotion, the objective to the subjective. We must seek the romantic in thought, not event; in character, not action; in our real selves, not the selves men take with them to the club. And I sometimes fancy that when we do this, we find as much romance in the world as ever” (vii). The story of Guerndale, or, rather, the project of J. S. of Dale, is therefore to recount how romance is part of the modern world, by unmasking the better selves men have within, not the selves they take to the club. Since J. S. of Dale eventually reveals himself to be a character in the novel, as well as a narrator, his authority to carry out such a task is bolstered by his “experience.” Our narrator author “knew” his hero, Guy. They both hailed from the town of Guerndale and attended

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Harvard together. Thus Stimson’s narrator is J. S. of Dale, a man whose authority arises from his presence on the scene of action. That J. S. of Dale is also the supposed “author” of the book and it is his name appearing on the title page lends even more verisimilitude to such an assertion. Stimson’s disappearance from the public eye serves to make Guerndale a seemingly true and incontrovertible narrative. The common sense witness, the man who was never the intellectual that the other characters were, is the teller of the tale. John Strang of [Guern] Dale attends Harvard with Guy, but nonetheless leads a dull, albeit successful, life ending up as a congressman from Denver, Colorado. Strang’s cool detachment from the story is such that for the bulk of the novel it is not at all clear that one of the minor characters, John Strang, is the narrator. Ultimately, Strang’s authority is testament that it takes a detached narrator who is able to balance his first-hand knowledge with the clinical distance required of an expert witness, in order to recount the drama and romance found in the undercurrents of modern life. For this drama is not easily visible to those who would “concern themselves with a rise of one-eight of one per centum in the rate of discount” (iii). Stimson was himself, of course, implicated in the gritty world of writers who necessarily concerned themselves with the rise of the rate of discount. Like Grant, Wheelwright, and O’Reilly, he necessarily pursued more than one career. When a chief justice cautioned Stimson not to “fire too wide” after publishing Guerndale and a law dictionary in the same year, Stimson saw the advice as sadly simplistic for it would have forced him to choose not between law and literature, but between a dogged single-mindedness valorized by the common sense of the masses, and the high-minded loyalty to the complex truths of identity formation. When Oliver Wendell Holmes advised Stimson to not try to “be an all-round man,” Stimson recoiled. He recalled: The counsel of perfection did not control one’s erring ways. In the first place, I think the chief pleasure in life is to be an all-round man . . . . Having done one thing, it is only natural to want to do something different. Great men like Sergeant can drop portraits and turn to landscape—but I could not safely turn, after writing books on statute law, to a love drama of Mediaeval Province. And the world insists that one should do only one thing. So the decision recurs—do you want the world or do you want yourself? (My United States 126)

The tension of maintaining these dual interests, and persuading the world that these interests mutually informed one another, eventually took its toll. Stimson lived a long and full life but, despite considerable


success with his writing throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Stimson finally gave up his creative work for the legal and political career he finally found more compelling. Although his first novel had met with much success, Stimson was compelled to declare: Of course, I loved writing—any writer does—and I thought I could drive the two horses of law and literature side by side. Dizzy could do it in England—novels and politics—but it soon became impossible here, even in New York, which is far less concerned with what its lawyer does in his leisure time than in Boston. If his brains show well in court or council, it does not worry what his avocation is. (My United States 95)

Ironically, the very marketplace pressure that diminished the cultural capital of the romantic writer in New York actually gave the New York lawyer more freedom to pursue his art. While it was in Boston that, for one generation at least, the author/avocats were most culturally prized, it was in New York that they could more successfully exist. According to Stimson, success as a New York lawyer was measured by marketplace standards in the same way that success as an author was measured. Payment equated achievement. This may have had the side benefit that lawyers could more easily participate in moonlighting activities, such as writing novels, but it also meant that they would lose some of the attendant cachet associated with being a Man of Letters in the traditional Bostonian sense. Stimson’s reflections illustrate how the perception of Boston as traditional home for the Man of Letters led to an especially heavy legacy of anxiety for late nineteenth-century writers seeking professional recognition as both individuals, but also as part of an elite caste. Robert Grant Grant’s career was a spectacular example of how the Brahmin caste specifically, and the ideologies of the Protestant upper class more generally, directed concerns about populist democracy and modern culture not in a merely nostalgic and antidemocratic sense, but in a manner which was resolutely forward-thinking; seeking to shape a future which would leave room for the intellectual and those with specialized skills. In many ways, Grant’s work epitomized the tension he saw between a society promoting middlebrow and essentially barbaric values, with its history and potential to promote the values of “higher culture.” During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Grant’s voice was one of the most important ones on the subject of retaining a meritocracy in the

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wake of deadening middlebrow incursions. In both his popular literary work and his important legal writings, Grant articulated a vision of a society led by a government made up of men who would represent the best morals and brains of the community. He saw this as the only alternative to the base democracy that would result from “government by the average” (“Political Optimist” 214–215, 232). In later years, when he became part of the three-man judicial advisory board that reviewed and upheld the Sacco and Vanzetti convictions, he was excoriated for anti-populist and undemocratic decisions. His early work with The King’s Men marked a career forever concerned with upholding American ideals whilst restraining mobs, disdaining populist uprisings, and battling the mediocrity of the common man. Born in 1852, Robert Grant’s childhood was spent in Boston and the summer retreat of Nahant, Massachusetts. Reared in the comfort of an upper-class home, the Grant family did not possess the great wealth that characterized many of Boston’s first families, but his life was nonetheless conducted amongst the upper echelons of Boston society. After graduating from Harvard in 1873, Grant stayed on at Harvard to pursue a graduate degree in literature, earning in only three years the very first Ph.D. in literature ever granted by Harvard. His doctoral degree in English in no way assured him of an academic future. Many in the academic establishment were still suspicious about the value of such a degree and Grant’s doctorate was, as he viewed it, more a product of self-indulgence than of professional training. Upon finishing his Ph.D. in literature he then turned to the law and entered Harvard Law School. He regularly wrote for the newly founded Harvard Lampoon and it was through the Lampoon that he first became friends with John T. Wheelwright and Frederic Jesup Stimson. The success of Grant’s early Lampoon writings was encouraging and even though he began work as a lawyer upon his law school graduation (while sharing a law office with John T. Wheelwright), he continued to write at night and on weekends. And thus at only a year out of law school he published his first novel, The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl: A Story of Fashionable Life (1880). The titillating title belies the somewhat staid story of a young girl who is determined to marry for love, not money. Lovely Alice Palmer floats through the social whirls of New York and Newport and finally marries her suitable suitor, Murray Hill. The confessions, as one might expect, are couched in a series of chatty diary entries for which Grant serves as “editor.” Significant here is the early impetus Grant had for assuming the persona of literary expert with the full knowledge that that


persona was going to become as much of an issue as any story line. The editorial pose was effective not so much because it enhanced the story line but because it highlighted, as one reviewer put it “his own literary diffidence” and contrasted agreeably with “the general pretentiousness of young writers (“Recent Novels, re. of Confessions 83–84). Consistent with his interest in distanced judgment, as well as with his interest in expert refashioning, The Confessions brought Grant some public acclaim beyond his well-circulated Lampoon writings. Deconstructing archetypes continued to be an interest for Grant. His second major novel, An Average Man, chronicled the lives of two close Harvard friends whose lives diverge as they sink deeper into Mugwump politics. Noble Arthur Remington disdains partisanship and holds fast to his ideals. Despite sinking into genteel poverty, Remington manages to promote reform through diligence and dedication and is rewarded by a happy marriage. By contrast, his friend, Woodbury Stoughton, advances through the political system as a Mugwumpish reformer but just as he is about to win a major election, Stoughton bolts the cause. He turns on the Mugwumps and throws the election in order to pander to a corrupt municipal utility office. And if that weren’t enough, Stoughton compounds his sins by abandoning his wife and taking up with another woman. The consequences of such base behavior are dire indeed. In one of the final scenes of the novel, Stoughton’s abandoned wife, Isabel, watches a mob of people fill a public square as they watch election results. “The gaze of this throng seemed to be turned in a particular direction, and every now and then a jubilant and almost savage yell caused their heads to sway like a forest” (285). Isabel observes that the crowd’s distress over the election returns creates a despair so profound that it is channeled into an eerie false jollity. She watched as, Town after town showed majorities in favor of the party out of power. The fever of dissatisfaction with the party in power had spread to such a degree that it was becoming evident a notorious demagogue and trickster had been elected Governor of a neighboring Commonwealth,—a fact which seemed to tickle the humor of the crowds, for they roared with laughter at every additional indication of his success as if it were a huge joke. “A tidal wave has struck us!” shouted some enthusiastic individual, and the vast throng took up the cry with a cheer. (286–287)

This cheer is indicative of a total inversion. The meretricious premise of the democratic process has been so subverted that a huge stereopticon projection of the politicians’ faces on the blank wall of a nearby building results in many of their heads being magnified upside down. Stoughton’s

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sellout alienated his reformist supporters and when faced with a choice only between two equally unsavory options, the crowd’s response is furious and one of sarcastic bitterness rather than mere partisan dissent. As Isabel watches, they laugh at their own destruction. Indeed, “mob” democracy seems ascendant as the natural course of resistance to debased leadership. Just who the average man in this novel was, is never clear. Stoughton? Remington? Their much-vaunted “exceptional” qualities seem to contradict that reading. The book is preoccupied with how these two exceptional men employ their talents. It seems that Stoughton’s abandonment of the reformist cause has left the average man with no options and it is the average man who has the future left in his hands . . . a prospect more frightening than inspiring, if one remembers the violent cynicism of the crowded square. Aside from the obvious thematic issues which mark An Average Man as precursor to Grant’s more fully articulated visions of what trauma is inflicted on the public psyche by political corruption, An Average Man was the first of three novels by Grant which collectively probe the limits of authorial identity and responsibility in the context of representing political turmoil. For while An Average Man began in 1883 to stage a Mugwump allegory, it took two more major projects of the 1880s to complete the experiment. In order to demonstrate how political parables were intrinsic to broader issues about individual representation and responsibility, Grant tried a variety of narrative forms. His three major novels of the 1880s, An Average Man (1883), The King’s Men (1884), and Face to Face (1886) each approach the question of how to reconcile the implications of collective engagement with the premise of individual potential and culpability.22 An Average Man put forth the premise that the story of an Average Man was really the story of a collective. The exceptional men at the heart of the story could, through their decisions shape the future of the public. The King’s Men, as we have seen, embraces an easy cynicism with a genuinely engaged questioning about the medium of difference and what a democratic commitment to excellence might entail. Face to Face (which has had a bit of a second life as a rediscovered labor novel) takes on the issue of individual responsibility in a manner both thematic and structural, and raises the stakes even higher. For if An Average Man could only be painted by an especially talented man, and The King’s Men required four, the novel which most seriously articulated Grant’s understanding of personal responsibility and the relationship between individual and collective engagement needed to eschew conventional authorship altogether. In focusing an


analysis of the average man down to his very features, Face to Face needed to be published anonymously. Grant’s desire to experiment with anonymity arose from many of the same sentiments that had motivated Stimson to write under the name of J. S. of Dale. Like Stimson, he was deeply immersed in a professional career that was politically touchy. Stimson’s desire to write as J. S. of Dale had been in part a desire to manipulate an inside joke, recognizable to all that knew about Blackstone’s hobbyhorse. But Stimson had also used the pseudonym to distance himself as lawyer from his persona as author, and so too did Grant shirk his own name in order to distance himself as writer from himself as aspiring public figure. The authorship question that surrounded Face to Face was not what Grant anticipated. While literary gossip quickly established Grant’s authorship, the issue that intrigued critics was the narrative strategy he employed and how that strategy played up authorial “individuality.” In a somewhat mixed appraisal of Face to Face, the Nation wrote: There is a simple frankness in his use of threadbare argument and a wellworn situation that shows them to be new to him, and makes them as good as new to the reader. The individuality of the author is therefore so interesting that one takes little note of the people whom he employs to display it. (210)

Flaunting his “individuality”—an individuality that was much more pronounced because it modestly sought anonymity, was perhaps the most successful aspect of a novel otherwise poorly received. Grant’s trilogy of the 1880s (An Average Man, The King’s Men, and Face to Face) exhibits his shifting relationship to the authorial structure of his texts as paralleled by a development in his narrative strategy. For while reviewers noted in his early works an urge to separate his narrative from his narrator, they weren’t so sure he had succeeded. In a review of An Average Man, for instance, Grant’s failed attempt at satire was attributed to his failure to separate himself from his work: “[Grant] need not go further back than Thackery to learn that the satirist, of all others, must stand plainly apart from his work. By no possibility should his voice be confused with the voices of those he condemns,” declared the Nation (“Recent Novels” rev. of An Average Man). In The King’s Men, the collaborative structure allowed him to confuse his voice with the voices of other authors and effectively absolve himself of any direct accusation of mingling his own views with those of the characters. The noble Ripon’s views might have been Grant’s, but they might well have been Wheelwright’s. No one could be sure. No individual chapters in The King’s

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Men were ever specifically attributed to anyone. There was simply too much mingling going on for any such differentiation. By the time he wrote Face to Face, Grant’s authorial voice was so apparent that, at least to some readers, it represented an overwhelming individuality, making the characters mere vehicles for heavy-handed sermons or lively positioning on topics of the day. In all of three of these novels, Grant molded his authorial poses to further his thematic goals. As his concerns for the role of American democracy developed through the 1880s, Grant wrote novels and essays that, with increasing urgency, articulated a fear for what American society might come to if democracy came to mean simply government by average Americans. Although this fear is explored at length in his major novel, Unleavened Bread, it was voiced in The King’s Men where we can see an attempt to figure out just how far our responsibility to tolerate mediocrity needs to go. Of course, The King’s Men framed in the question in foolishness, with the debased King being a silly, rather than an evil, character. But the end of the story only sorts out the lose–lose choices between an ignorant populace and a vile king. There is no satisfactory answer to the pressing social problems so painfully staged in the story. The King’s Men’s initial presentation of the problem and its unlikely solutions in many ways set the stage for Grant’s groundbreaking novel of 1899, Unleavened Bread. For in both its thematic structure and its narrative design, Unleavened Bread pushed many of the ideas presented in The King’s Men to their fuller and more serious conclusions. Unleavened Bread has, quite rightly, been viewed as an antifeminist, reactionary novel full of bitter satire and ill will about the New Woman in general and the New Woman from the Mid-west in particular. What emerges from this novel, however, is more than just standard turn-ofthe-century misogyny or regional snobbery. What Robert Grant confronts in Unleavened Bread is the threat of anti-intellectualism; what he saw as the brash conviction that, with common sense and energy, any American can solve whatever problem is put in his or her way. As he traces the career of Selma White from farmhouse to White House, he presents a dystopic vision. Selma begins as an intelligent country schoolteacher who works her way up into various Midwestern social circles through carefully maneuvered marriages. After two husbands she is so secure in her own worth that she instructs the next suitor: “The knights of old won their ladyloves by brilliant deeds. If you are elected a member of Congress, you may come to claim me” (322). Selma White’s narcissism, energy, and rising power are a threat to the future that no drunken resident of Winesburg, Ohio or pathetic, ineffectual Babbitt could


compete with. Her husband, once ensconced as Senator, capitulates to her essential corruption and votes away his soul for political expediency. Unleavened Bread ends with triumphant, conquering images. After listening to her husband’s gubernatorial acceptance speech, Selma gazes forward to a power that seems infinite: “She felt that he was speaking for them both, and that he was expressing the yearning intention of her soul to attempt and perform great things. She stood gazing straight before her with her far away seraph look, as though she were penetrating the future even into Paradise” (431). Echoing The King’s Men’s portrait of a dystopic future, Unleavened Bread lays out in no uncertain terms the threat to elite notions of democracy posed by Middle Americans. To Grant, the Selmas of the world were threatening because they could come close to passing themselves off as both intellectuals and elites. They were joining groups that had trouble saying no to their power, such as Congress or Harvard. And when challenged, Grant explained such folk would resent it as “unpatriotic snobbery” (Fourscore 228). The death of her second husband is even attributed to her insistence that she is as skilled as any hired nurse. The doctor warned her that “Inexperienced assistance, however devoted, would be of no use in a case like this,” and yet she persists (255). That Selma was a woman who had had no access to the intellectual traditions and training so valued by Grant, and hence had only her common sense to rely upon anyway, was of little matter to Grant. He paints her as a crude upstart . . . and a particularly irritating one precisely because she was a woman. Midway through the novel one character finally turns on Selma: I was saying that you were not fit to be a social success, and I’m going to tell you why . . . You’re one of those American women—I’ve always been curious to meet one in all her glory—who believe that they are born in the complete panoply of flawless womanhood; that they are by birthright consummate house-wives, leaders of the world’s thought and ethics, and peerless society queens. All this by instinct, by heritage, and without education. That’s what you believe, isn’t it? And now you are offended because you haven’t been invited to become a leader of New York society. You don’t understand, and I don’t suppose you ever will understand, that a true lady—a genuine society queen—represents modesty and sweetness and self-control, and gentle thoughts and feelings; that she is evolved by gradual processes from generation to generation, not ready made. (243)

The unleavened, half-baked premise of equality as a given American right, rather than an earned American privilege, fueled the hostility that Grant launches towards his heroine. And yet, despite an often-intrusive narratorial presence, Grant launches his attacks, like this one, through the

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mouth of another character, effectively protecting the narratorial voice from being accused of partisanship. This technique, which was hailed by Edith Wharton for its “objective attitude” and its “abstinence from comment, explanation, and partisanship . . .” was part of Grant’s broader interest in justifying the need for professional authority to a populace enamored with its “Know-Nothing” reliance upon common sense (qtd. by Grant in Fourscore 228). When the Dial praised Selma as a character “drawn with extraordinary intellectual detachment,” it assessed Grant’s distanced narration as clear indication of skilled expertise. The narrative design of Unleavened Bread parallels Grant’s political denigration of common sense rule, and, as critic Christopher Wilson argues, this distrust of even readerly autonomy is most powerfully apparent when Grant rephrases his characters’ speeches in a distanced, judiciously authoritative tone. Wilson explains that Private thoughts and rationalizations are recast in a pointedly aloof tone that, often by counterpointing outlandish conclusions with its own “sobriety,” achieves an understated irony. The text is dotted with phrases like “Or rather the case should be stated thus” (26), or “So he thought of her.” (44)

Wilson insightfully assesses this technique as creating a narratorial pose of disinterested expertise. It allows Grant to present troubling, foolish, or problematic opinions in a seemingly just manner, by rephrasing it for the inadequately articulate characters. When the narrator recites and recasts Selma’s statements, for instance, he effectively honors Selma’s position. And yet, as Wilson argues, the narrator manages to avoid “sacrificing an implied narrative dissent,” creating, in effect, “a portrait that lays claim to both an ‘internal’ and a ‘panoramic’ point of view.” Ultimately, Wilson evaluates this paraphrastic device as “the synthesis of the struggle over representation in the plot.” By enacting the commitment to judicious recasting of positions, justifiable thanks to the narrator’s expertise, Grant was writing in a manner consistent with his political beliefs. Wilson concludes Thus Unleavened Bread’s literary form is partly homologous with a rationale central to modern American liberalism. By refashioning his own narrative style, Grant anticipates that form of political expertise that works not by direct representation but by anticipating and reforming the intentions of fundamentally “irrational” voters. (28–29)

Similar to The King’s Men in its apprehensive and ambiguous attitudes toward the future of democracy, Unleavened Bread was in many ways an extension of the experiment in literary form that The King’s


Men had explored. For just as the distanced narrator in Unleavened Bread sought the appearance of invoking a multiplicity of truths by allowing dissenting opinions to be expressed by characters, so did The King’s Men flaunt its collaborative authorship as an experiment in multiple positions and viewpoints of a narrative truth. And yet, in both cases, the assumption of multiple truths is ultimately undermined. In Unleavened Bread, the narrator’s recasting is deceptively manipulative and succeeds in making Selma White look horrific. She sobs with honest emotion when her second husband is ill, but “She was pleased by this rush of feeling on her own part . . .” (260). The narrator in Unleavened Bread, thanks to his disinterest, is able to paraphrase the alternative versions of truth that are presented in the novel, and thus demonstrate through the power of his greater skills and insight, that there is only one truth after all. Similarly, the four authors of The King’s Men engaged in a project that highlighted their potential differences in opinion and a polyvocal notion of truth, but finally enacts an anticipated failure that demonstrates their belief in a singular notion of truth and its responsible representation. Finances, as much as fun, may have motivated Grant’s involvement with The King’s Men, but his work as part of an authorial collective was in keeping with his other interests.23 Grant’s participation in The King’s Men demonstrated, in part, his apprehension of the collective identity offered by such a practice. Stimson recalled that The King’s Men was a “romantic novel” as far as he and O’Reilly were concerned but in its composition, “Bob Grant made light of everything, even our most serious characters; and Jack Wheelwright sprinkled fun throughout the whole” (My United States 124). By highlighting the essential foolishness of the project, Grant boosted the idea that collective engagement could assert individual integrity more than an alternative social model. Furthermore, he voiced the belief that even the individual, the asserted individual would need to earn that self-assertion. Selma’s sense of herself as an individual was an unearned delusion. On the other hand, Grant was fascinated with the potential for an individual as expert to change and shepherd democracy into the next century. Grant’s role in The King’s Men can be seen as his staging of a pervasive societal concern for how we might test out the true mettle of the aspiring experts. How do “King’s Men” differ from faceless, average, and unleavened men? The romantic individualism that lies at the core of these men’s beliefs jostled painfully alongside the committed communitarian feelings they often espoused. While O’Reilly might write editorials seeking justice

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and affirming the common humanity of men of all races, he did so by invoking the rhetoric of romantic individualism: “No race or nation is great except by one test—the breeding of great men. Not great merchants or traders, not rich men . . . But great thinkers, great seers of the world . . . great poets above all” (qtd. in McManamin 241). Stimson championed labor rights but only to the extent that illegal collective activity (such as illegal strikes) could be dealt with as “individual conspiratorial crimes” to fall under a criminal rather than a civil court. The individual man would always be called to account in the most personal way for his crimes. The individual might be the savior of the nation, as O’Reilly envisioned the prophet poet, or the downfall of one, as the false prophet in the form of Grant’s Selma White. In either case, the great personality demands their emphasis. The tension which arose in the political, literary, and legal writings of O’Reilly, Grant, and Stimson was a manifestation of a tension surrounding the question over how to retain the individual voice in a society becoming increasingly commonsensical and prone to imagining the self as easily representable. The troubled integrity of the individual self was such a complicated issue, as these men saw it, that representing a collective of individuated voices demanded a specially trained representative. And hence amid the swirling discourses of collectivity, corporatization, professionalization, and populist government, the voices of Grant, Wheelwright, Stimson, and O’Reilly call out for an expert solution. Collective Expertise The explosion in clubs and societies during the late part of the nineteenth century has traditionally been attributed to the increased leisure that the wealth brought on by late nineteenth-century industrialism provided. And, as we will see in my chapter on Brander Matthews, the formation of private clubs and societies for both purely social and charitable reasons is deeply imbricated with the consolidation paralleled by the discourse surrounding the professionalization movement— consciously invoking clubs and societies to shore up power and define disciplinary difference. Yet the charitably oriented John Boyle O’Reilly Club (founded by Stimson in 1891), the socially impeccable St. Botolph Club, the jovial writers of the Papyrus Club and even the members of the Massachusetts Press Club were also all part of a phenomenon that historian Nathan Shiverick has characterized as a desperate political


strategy underlying the social reorganization of Boston. The Brahmins did not voluntarily retire to the inner fastness of their temples; they were disenfranchised, politically speaking, during the seventies and eighties. The multiplication of charities, of schools, and of other cultural institutions during those decades was a shrewd and successful rearguard action to substitute financial for political power. They lost control of their municipal government to the Irish with the election of Hugh O’Brien as mayor in 1884. They regained control of a number of important public activities by the creation of private charitable corporations and trusts on a scale unparalleled in any other community except perhaps for New York City. (129–130)

The urge to organize private foundations and organizations which managed municipal art museums and libraries was fueled by a broad suspicion on the part of the Brahmins, that the Irish politicians were unlettered and fundamentally uncultured. Certainly the Massachusetts Press Club and the John Boyle O’Reilly club were not Brahmin strongholds. They prided themselves on inclusivity. Yet they were part of a broader national pattern. As Shiverick explains, “Lost of trust in municipal institutions, then was one of the driving forces which led the former ruling class to incorporate museums, orchestras, and the like as private charitable ventures” (132). Moreover, Shiverick speculates that the growth of corporate power was part of the same discourse that surrounded the impulse to form societies and clubs. While partners or joint investors in a high-capital venture would both be, according to most nineteenth-century contract agreements, personally liable for its successes or failures, the explosive growth in corporations during the late nineteenth century was in part due to the legislation that allowed for affiliation without personal liability. Partnership for a modern age could mean sharing a corporate identity and similar interests, but it would not mean sharing the liability. Indeed corporations effectively share liability to such an extent that they effectively dissolve it collectively speaking and they utterly absolve it, individually speaking. The ability of a corporation to flex its collective clout while shrugging off individual responsibility was an appealing concept, and one that was echoed in many seemingly disparate fields. Shiverick argues that the extension of the corporate theory informed the organization of so many clubs and associations in Boston during this era: The corporation was . . . a new tool. It opened up new vistas in the art of organizing productive capacity. Bold men were exploring the beauties of the device, and were finding new uses for it day by day. If it worked to

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build a railroad, or open up a mine, why should it not work to finance an orchestra or an orphanage? Or why should it not be used to finance a polo field, a golf course, or a great French chef? (135)

Or why not author a book? For Stimson, Grant, Wheelwright, and O’Reilly, caught up as they were in the economic and social growth of Boston during the 1880s, the rhetoric of corporate benefits would have been acutely familiar. And yet, as I have argued, The King’s Men was a novel constructed to demonstrate the limitations of collective authorship as much as it was assembled to demonstrate its advantages. Despite being well placed to reap the advantages of the corporate growth sprung from late industrial capitalism in the United States, these men were somewhat suspicious of it as a threat to American social structures. Many of their interests in balancing labor to management arose from this uneasy allegiance to an increasingly corporatized rhetoric. The rise of the individual author out of a history of collective anonymity has traditionally been the primary narrative cohering authorship histories. To understand the development of the modern self we need only to look back at the collectively and anonymously authored legends of primitive societies to see how far our modern, and fully copyrighted, society has come. And if the postmodern demise of the author has brought us in a full circle, then such authorship histories have a neatly conceived send-off for their conclusions. It is similarly tempting to draw a connection between the waning of collective authorship and the rise of collective government, paralleling it with the waning of autocratic government and the rise of singular authorship. Kings have fallen to be replaced by democracies and ever so neatly; coteries and collectives have disappeared to be replaced by the triumph of the modern author. This analysis suggests a displacement of collective authority from a textual to a more governmental realm and the concurrent diminishment of singular authority from a governmental position to a textual one. As Jeffrey Masten points out in his study of just this phenomenon during the English Renaissance, the analogy doesn’t quite work. The premise of collective government is that each individual has a voice that retains its integrity, despite joining in a collective. “Each member within this corporate body,” Masten writes, “is individuated, in a way that they were not in the collaborative process of writing . . . that is, just as collaboration functions and signifies differently within a system organized around singular authorial production, so too might the idea of a political collective” (151). My analysis of how the discourse of corporate responsibility effectively dissolves individuated


selves demonstrates that, in the late nineteenth century, collectivity was indeed signifying differently under a system organized around “singular authorial production.” Moreover, from a longer point of view, the movement from collective authorship in a premodern sense (such as in Renaissance commonplace books) through the romantic author of the early nineteenth century and the thoroughly professionalized expert of the twentieth century, seems smooth. That is, until one considers the smaller aberrations on the chart represented by phenomena such as the clustering of collective novels around the late nineteenth century. The collective novels of this period illustrate why such aberrant events should not be glossed over. The desire to write collectively was profoundly connected to how people saw that seemingly “smooth” development. It was also connected to how people assessed the costs they associated with both the shift from romantic integrity to the professionalized self. It was part, too, of an anxiety many people felt about the political shifts from what many saw as a representative system of governance to an increasingly populist one. In creating The King’s Men, Grant, Wheelwright, O’Reilly, and Stimson brought together a series of concerns about just how difficult those shifts were. Tying together the discourses of political collectivity, corporatization, and the discourse of authorship and professionalization, The King’s Men succeeded in celebrating a foregone failure. Sitting in the Frederic Jesup Stimson files at the Massachusetts Historical Society is an unexplained mock-up of a title page. Written by hand, possibly doodled during a meeting, is the title of a book, “The Middle of Next Week,” with four imaginary authors listed as follows: John Boyle O’Dale, J. T. Grant, Robert O’Reilly, and J. S. Wheelwright. It is hard to know what to make of such a document. Was this the discarded draft of their first brainstorming session? On the bottom of the page is written “Boston, J. R. Osgood, 1884,” which surely indicates that the four authors were already speculating upon book publication and not a newspaper serial. So perhaps it was conceived of as a second collaborative project, capitalizing on the success of their first.24 No other trace or reference to this project seems to exist but the phrase written in under the mixed-up names suggests a wry acknowledgement of the failure, perhaps just the foregone failure they tried to perform in their first project. The title page reads, “Don’t shoot at the Authors—They are doing their best” (“The Middle of Next Week”).

CHAPTER 3 Clubbing, Conversing, and Collaborating: Brander Matthews as Professional Man of Letters

Both the friends and enemies of Brander Matthews attested to his sociability. Clayton Hamilton wrote in 1929 that Matthews had a “genius in the gentle art of friendship,” while his ex-student, the formidable cultural critic, Randolph Bourne, complained that Matthews “seems to have known everybody, and to have felt nothing” (Hamilton 86; Bourne 235). Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, observed that Matthews “knew everybody and everybody knew him” and Mark Twain even jokingly inscribed one of his books, “To B. M. From his only friend” (both as qtd. in “Brander Matthews, Educator” 10). Although Matthews counted among his friends many prominent critics, writers, and politicians (especially notable was his intimate friendship with Theodore Roosevelt), his congeniality and relentless socializing was not part of a program of professional networking. For Matthews, the ability to socialize was part of his identity as a specific kind of cultural figure, that of a professional man of letters. As the cultural prestige accorded the romantic and solitary author waned, Matthews came to embody a phenomenon that assigned cultural prestige to the practice of authorship as an activity most suited for men who could “mix.” Through his collaborative fiction, critical essays, indefatigable socializing, and most importantly, his exchanges with other writers and literary figures, Brander Matthews drew together conflicting theories about the practice of writing in order to bolster the vision of romantic authorship for what he saw as the new and resolutely unromantic twentieth-century literary marketplace. In The King’s Men we saw four men who all had uneasy relationships with their lives of letters, each taking on multiple professions and identities. With Brander Matthews, though, we have an author whose embrace of “letters” as a way of life, demanded collaboration. For Matthews,


collaboration was testament to his bon homie, his cultural status, and his cultural identity. As we saw with The Gilded Age, Twain’s association with Warner was part of Twain’s attempt to simultaneously escape the responsibilities of his individual self, and also to benefit from the genteel associations with Charles Dudley Warner’s impeccable cultural capital. Matthews, on the other hand, used collaboration to shore up his own position as a man of letters, not to benefit from the reputation of others. Columbia professor, collaborative fiction writer, and formidable clubman, Brander Matthews was seen as one of the last Genteel literary critics in America. His life and work epitomized the last stand of writers who sought the cultural status of “the artist” even as they participated in the marketplace. In response to the Progressive era’s emphasis upon professionalization, many writers such as Matthews tried to place the nineteenth-century “man of letters” into a more modern context, creating, in effect, a “professional” man of letters. The clubbing, conversing, and collaborating that Matthews engaged in throughout his life were all part of an attempt to promote authorship as the natural outpouring of an almost spiritual commonality between individuals. Writers of this period, such as Matthews, who embraced the collaborationist paradigm, managed to retain a romantic understanding of authorship as solitary, even though the solitary nature of their vocation paradoxically lent them a communality. In contrast, writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, or the many authors who went on to join the more radical factions of the Authors League of America, did not share the literary or social values of the “genteel” establishment. They exemplified a literary individualism that gave them a different kind of commonality. These more professional writers saw that they had in common an identity predicated upon a particular kind of marketplace status. The tensions between these two visions of literary identity eventually created the great schism that split the Authors League of America in 1916 over whether or not to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. While the Progressive writers saw affiliation as a logical expression of commonality with other groups of writers whose identities also were constructed by marketplace relations, the genteel writers (led by Brander Matthews and his friends) opposed such affiliation because they saw authorial identity as predicated upon a shared reverence for romantic individualism. The collaborations of the 1890s attest to a sociability of authorship promoted to reap the advantages of a collective identity without sacrificing the patrician identity of the nineteenth-century writer. It is no surprise that the critics who most disliked Brander Matthews, such as H. L. Mencken and Randolph Bourne, were writers

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whose fame rested, then and now, upon an iconoclastic and forcefully isolated identity. Matthews’s participation in collaborative writing was part of a concerted effort to promote a vision of authorship that would allow the romance of inspiration to be well paid. Being “well-paid” was a relative term. Matthews was the only son of a millionaire who lost his fortune during the panic of 1873. Enough money remained, however, so that Matthews never had had to rely on income earned as either author or professor. As his old friend Clayton Hamilton put it, Matthews “could practice the profession of a man of letters without ever being required to earn his living by his authorship” (84). Matthews, moreover, “was able to flourish his profession of authorship as a sort of cane,—an ornamental instrument of elegance which was not required seriously for support” (84). Matthews’s spectacular success as a “Man Of Letters” well into the twentieth century, demands a careful understanding of just how “authorship” was involved in such a title, for Matthews was no romantic essayist of the early nineteenth-century tradition. He may have “flourished” authorship as an accessory but he was able to do so precisely because of his professionalism. He lived, by choice, as a professional man of letters, a fact that his friend Hamilton fails to appreciate. By conducting his life as a professional man of letters, Matthews’s career marks a curious development in the cultural understanding of authorship. Professional men of letters used their skills to participate in the marketplace, but their marketplace activity consisted in the trade of symbolic capital as much as it did in monetary exchange. Theories of authorship in the twentieth century have shifted radically from according authority to the author, to according authority to the critic. As critic Seán Burke has summed it up, “the determination of authorial roles” shifted to a “modernist impersonality” which even for critics concerned with intentionality, was defended in “the largely impersonal mode of theoretical analysis and focus upon the principles rather than practices by which the relation of author and text might be assessed” (65). Brander Matthews was the product of a period in which the critic or the intellectual was formulated differently. Historian Thomas Bender points out in his study of intellectual history in New York, that the first generation to consciously identify itself as “intellectual” was made up of precisely the individuals who came to vilify Matthews: most notably H. L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Ludwig Lewisohn.1 Ironically, their choice to identify themselves as “intellectuals” in lieu of “authors” or “critics” or “Men of Letters “ indicated an interest in identifying with a group even farther removed from the marketplace than the genteel writers they despised had been.


To be a man of letters was, for the writers who aspired to such a role, to possess a loyalty to conservative traditions and a certain cultural versatility. In 1908, Barrett Wendall defined the “Man of Letters” as a man who specialized in not specializing in anything: “It is the privilege of the man of letters that he may venture on occasion to discuss matters in which he makes no pretense to be expert” (3). Expertise, at the turn of the century, was an idea weighted down with significance. For declaring oneself an expert was to partake in a modern marketplace culture—one in which expertise was equated with professionalism. According to Wendall’s definition, to be a man of letters was almost precisely the opposite of being a professional. To be “professional” has historically meant that one defined and honed a sphere of knowledge that would then become increasingly esoteric and specialized. A man of letters, with his broad knowledge and vague authority, would necessarily elude any professional status. While Christopher Wilson has demonstrated in his study The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era, that a “professional” writer at the turn of the century defined himself in relation to marketplaces forces, Wilson does not fully account for how symbolic capital was exchanged in this marketplace. To be a professional man of letters, as men such as Brander Matthews sought to be, meant that one was professional inasmuch as one took part in a discourse essentially inaccessible to the mass public. A doctor, for example, is understood as professional in part because he has attended medical school and can employ incomprehensible medical jargon. For a man of letters to professionalize, therefore, he needs to make sure the “letters” appear difficult to master. The professionalizing of a man of letters assumes, moreover, that there are other professional men of letters who have created standards by which the professionalizing task can be judged. As Thomas Strychacz explains in his study of the relationship between early twentieth-century literature and professionalism, if to become professional is to master an esoteric knowledge, it “presupposes the formation of a ‘community of competence’—a group of experts distinguished by their shared competence in a particular body of knowledge” (24). Professionalizing demands the grouping of individuals as much as it demands the grouping of knowledges. By constructing a career around clubbing and collaborating, Brander Matthews assembled individuals in much the same way that he assembled ideas. Tacitly open, yet tautly elite, the circles Matthews involved himself in perpetuated a discourse of literary authorship fraught with anxieties and hopes about what a professionalized literary world could be.


The literary collaborations that Matthews initiated underscored his belief that by banding together one might define a practice of writing. Even if collaborative writing or even cooperative socializing wouldn’t necessarily create art, it would define the practice in which art could be created. This view was proudly elitist and by extension racist, sexist, and classist. The extents to which late nineteenth-century individuals and organizations went to exclude anyone they saw as different, though, is indicative of the extreme pressures these groups felt themselves to be under. By assembling together in order to exclaim how they didn’t really need to do so; men such as Brander Matthews created a vision of authorship that was, in its own contradictory manner, unique to the turn of the century. Disappearance of the Enemy At a testimonial dinner in 1893, Mark Twain caused a scene. Chanting loudly, “B-r-rRANder M-m-ATHews!” Twain declared that the name worked well as a curse, “. . . why it was months after I knew him before I dared breathe his name on the Sabbath day!”2 There was an ugly edge to Twain’s humor. Twain and Matthews were officially friendly and Twain even arranged for Matthews to write the introduction to the Uniform Edition of Twain’s own works, but at the time of the testimonial dinner, calling out the name “Matthews” was beginning to be a curse on the lips of younger intellectuals and writers; a fact which Twain knew perfectly well. And, although he could not have known it at the time, the amicable enmity between Twain and Matthews became so celebrated that Matthews is frequently known today only as the Columbia Professor mocked in Twain’s famous 1895 essay: “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”3 In the histories of literary America, the jovial Twain/Matthews feud has somewhat superseded the many individual achievements that made Matthews so well known during his lifetime. The foremost American drama critic of the late nineteenth century, Matthews wrote several major critical works including French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1881), The Development of the Drama (1903), Molière, His Life and His Work (1910) and Shakspeare as a Playwright (1913). He was a Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University from 1892–1924 and was generally acknowledged to be the foremost expert on dramatic theory and criticism in the United States in the last part of the nineteenth century. Matthews’s position at Columbia was created especially for him and he used that Professorship to teach


creative writing and to promote the radical concept of dramatic literature as a legitimate field of study. For an individual who later came to represent all that was stodgy and genteel in academic life, he was somewhat radical in his early career. His Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896) sold a quarter of a million copies and was one of the very first textbooks in the field of American Literature. His essay on the “Philosophy of the ShortStory” (1901) is generally agreed to be the first significant analysis of the short story as a literary genre, and his other essays on a wide range of literary subjects (including “The Art and Mystery of Collaboration,” which shall receive attention further on in this chapter) reveal a broadbased knowledge and expertise in a huge variety of fields from theories of plagiarism, speechmaking, clowns, bookbinding, and simplified spelling, to Hippolyte Taine, Edgar Allen Poe, Cervantes, and the popularity of Molière. By one scholar’s count Matthews wrote 65 books (which included three novels, many collections of short stories and a number of plays). Eight of his plays were produced and he managed to find the time to edit fifteen volumes of poetry, biography, and literary criticism (Westbrook 272–280). His literary scholarship earned him the French Legion of Honor in 1907, and he was promoted to honorary officer of the French Legion in 1922. His critical writings on an immense variety of topics led William Dean Howells to praise Matthews’s work as “better than that of any other critic of your generation among us” (qtd. in Oliver 95). An eminently clubbable man, even a partial list of Matthews’s club activities is numbing. He helped establish the Player’s Club, the Dunlap Society, and the Author’s Club, while he was an enthusiastic member of the Kinsmen, the Grolier Club, the Century Club, the Nineteenth-Century Club, the Savile Club, the Rabelais Club and the British Athenaeum.4 He helped develop the National Institute of Arts and Letters and served as its president from 1912–1914. He worked to organize the National Institute’s offshoot, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and served as its chancellor from 1920–1924. He was the president of the Modern Language Association from 1910–1911 and was a prominent advocate for improvements in copyright legislation and spelling reform.5 Critic, author, playwright, advocate of literary realism, fan of James Fenimore Cooper, irritating speller—none of these titles individually made up his fame. The stature of Brander Matthews during the turn of the century was dependent upon the powerful combination of his achievements. Born to great wealth, Matthews’s social position gave him


an appreciation for what the exclusivity of club life in nineteenth-century New York could do. His involvement in literary organizations and societies of the period was an outgrowth of his New York high society upbringing; he moved the literary man out of the gentlemen’s clubs and into literary clubs of his own—a move that highlighted the social nature of the artist. Matthews’s clubs and organizations ostensibly championed the poor correspondent and the struggling writer, but they rarely had such folk as members. The possible hypocrisy of this was not much of an issue in the 1880s when he was a young writer, drinking with his friends in the Rabelais Club. But when he used such networking tactics to help defeat a proposed affiliation of the Authors’ League of America with the American Federation of Labor in 1916, or when he used his clout to keep women from belonging to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his conservative understanding of the authorial profession resulted in conflicts which eventually eradicated him from cultural memory. His play, “The Gold Mine,” written with his friend, George Jessop, supposedly sparked Sister Carrie’s first interest in the theater. The narrator in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1901) observes with some rancor that “the play was one of those drawing-room concoctions in which charmingly overdressed ladies and gentlemen suffer the pangs of love and jealousy amid gilded surroundings. Such bon mots are ever enticing to those who have all their days longed for such material surroundings and have never had them gratified” (248). Dreiser’s use of Matthews and Jessop’s play was but a passing reference in Sister Carrie, but it spoke volumes. Carrie’s appreciation for “A Gold Mine” was a testament to her own naiveté and intellectual limitations. Thanks to the work done by Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, George Santayana, and Randolph Bourne, a Turn-of-the-century reference to Brander Matthews immediately conveyed the image of an effete, posturing, and outdated understanding of literature and its construction. For these critics and many other early twentieth-century pundits, Matthews came to embody all that was wrong with literary culture. Yet even as villain, he hasn’t aged well. Contemporary scholars overlook his straw-man status but their very neglect actually testifies to the singular weight Matthews held during his lifetime. This rather extraordinary “absence is presence” argument is predicated upon an understanding of what it was about Matthews that so irritated the group of writers Matthews’s friend Stuart Sherman referred to as “the Mohawks” and what is gained by the effacement of his career (251–260). In this chapter, I have no aim to reclaim Matthews as a neglected critic or historical figure. Rather, I wish to examine how


Matthews’s cultural roles as professor, pundit, agitator, stick-in-themud, and irritant worked together to consolidate such power. Figures of far less consequence than Matthews appear throughout scholarship of the Progressive era. The major books of American literary history that chronicle the turn of the century omit Matthews even from their canon of genteel conservatives. In The Literary History of the United States, Robert Spiller utterly ignores Matthews. Larzar Ziff, in The American 1890s, devotes a chapter to genteel writers titled, “Being Old Fashioned,” but he never notes Matthews’s fame in the field—a man whose front page NY Times obituary called him “One of the last of the ‘eminent Victorians’ of American origin” (“Brander Matthews, Educator” 10). Thomas Bender’s New York Intellect makes only passing references to Matthews and tellingly refers to him as a “Columbia professor-about-town,” evidence of just how hard it was to pin down what Matthews ever did to make himself notable (223).6 Even Lawrence Oliver’s excellent study of Matthews, which is the only full-length treatment of the subject, focuses upon the Theodore Roosevelt–Matthews connection and genteel progressivism. Matthews has, for the most part, disappeared from the literary and historical canon. To the many young moderns who railed against Matthews’s literary, social, and cultural politics, Matthews’s wealth of friendships meant that his powerful connections allowed him to promote a conservative and outdated understanding of literature. His friendships gave him the social legitimacy that allowed him to promote a fundamental disdain for literature as what Bourne called a “comprehension of life” (235). This is a complex accusation. In his essay “On Working Too Much and Working Too Hard” (1916), for example, Matthews admits that the pace of composition is no measure of a writer’s skill but he does say, There are now, there always have been and there always will be, men who write too fast and who write too much, because they are writing chiefly with a desire to make money. These men write themselves out and they write themselves down; and there is no need to waste words over what they do and how they do it. They are beneath criticism, not because they write too much and too fast or chiefly for money, but because they are what they are. Their failure is not due to a defective method; it is due to a deficient character. (“On Working Too Much” 214)

With sweeping statements such as this one, which essentially correlates journalism with corruption, Matthews no doubt alienated both the writers who considered themselves journalists and the many writers who had been journalists at one point in their careers.


In his essay “Literature as a Profession” (1899), Matthews observed: “the boundaries of the profession of literature are not a little vague. Is a college professor a man of letters? Is a lecturer? Is an editor? And, more particularly, is a journalist a literary man?” (194). He generously concluded that editors, college professors, and lecturers were all literary men—not because they wrote more than journalists or even because the quality of their product was intrinsically better than that of a newspaper hack. Rather, it was the intent and attitude when they sat down to write that really mattered. The product of their intent was less significant than the intent itself: “the work of the journalist, as such, is for the day only; the work of the man of letters, as such, is for all time” purred Matthews (196). While Matthews admitted that there was occasionally literary writing in newspapers and nonliterary writing in what were supposed to be literary books, to him the medium of publication mattered less than the temporal goals a writer had for each word he wrote. As Matthews’s reasoning went, the product a man of letters produced was less significant than the manner in which he produced it—an idea quite in keeping with Matthews’s formulation of the “professional man of letters.” For another common standard by which to measure professionalism was production. To be a professional in the late nineteenth century meant that your labor did not result in tangible or easily quantifiable products. Creating a literary reputation based upon witticisms and unpublished satirical poems, for example, would be a perfectly respectable “production” of a professional man of letters. A professional man of letters might well die with little to show for his life in literature, but during his lifetime he would have the moral and cultural clout that journalists or nonliterary writers would lack. Thus, to the young moderns, Matthews was a formidable enemy. Their dismissals of him are fraught with the realization that their own cultural clout was very directly threatened by his presence. Burton Roscoe, for example, believed Matthews wrote “with the crabbed generalities of the merely garrulous and disgruntled” and that Matthews often sounded like a “provincial editorial writer engrossed in another ‘Wither Are We Drifting?’ lamentation.” One of Matthews’s major offenses was, for Roscoe, that he made pronouncements about contemporary literary culture without reading “the columns of the more progressive reviews and newspapers,” papers which were the bread and butter of critics such as Roscoe (223). Not all young writers felt threatened by men like Matthews. Ellen Glasgow, for one, characterized the grand old literary men who had survived into the 1920s as genial buffers, unaware of their waning


status: “the more I saw of these agreeable authors, the more I liked them. The trouble was that I thought of them as old gentlemen, and they thought of themselves as old masters” (141). This sort of bemused but friendly tolerance was likely the most common assessment of Matthews and his crowd during the 1920s. The professionalized men of letters were viewed as ineffectual genteel writers of the nineteenth century rather than as the relatively savvy chameleons they often were. While shored up in universities and clubrooms these “agreeable authors” nonetheless managed to dominate prize committees and popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. Crowing over their demise was thus an important rhetorical move for the many younger writers who could, in part, bring about such demise by pronouncing it prematurely. It is perhaps this feeling of unacknowledged hubris that causes the nervous petulance apparent in the writings of many of Matthews’s critics. Even Mencken begrudgingly acknowledged Matthews’s status. In an attempt to get Matthews’s signature on a petition protesting the censorship of Dreiser’s novel, The Genius, Mencken wrote, “the signature of such an old ass as Brander Matthews would be worth a great deal …” (qtd. in Riggio 1: 258). One must also recall that Randolph Bourne’s assured acerbity spouted from a thirty-two-year old critic while Matthews, who was in his eighties during the 1920s, was busy collecting honorary awards and giving public lectures right up until his death in 1929. In short, Matthews was part of a literary and cultural phenomenon that was tremendously powerful well into the 1920s. When Sinclair Lewis, in accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930, railed against both academism and the genteel writers who had previously dominated American life and letters, he was quite directly attacking men like Matthews.7 Yet, Lewis’s railing was done from the safety of the Nobel platform. The fact that Lewis felt the need to devote his Nobel acceptance speech to attacking the professionalized men of letters stands as testament to the tremendous power of these men, shored up as they were in universities, literary societies, and club rooms. An Eminently Clubbable Man Matthews’s elite standing distressed Bourne and his crowd. It not only gave his pronouncements tremendous clout, but it also put him in the position of defining a profession which seemed to exclude the iconoclastic, independent writer who came to dominate American Criticism in the 1920s and 1930s. These later critics didn’t object to his clubbing; they objected to the way in which his clubbing excluded what they saw


as their profession. It was common, for instance, for the larger New York Society clubs such as the Metropolitan, to include in their charters a formal prohibition of any journalist or newspaper writer on the premises, much less as members (Porzelt 4). The prohibition was ostensibly to prohibit gossip columnists from gaining access to high society events, but had broader implications as well. Even if they were not on the premises in a formal capacity, journalists were not of an acceptable social standing to mingle with the elite. This was no surprise, of course, for membership in these clubs was highly elite and expensive. But for clubs which were supposedly organized around professional affiliations, such as the Author’s Club which Matthews helped found in 1882, excluding reporters and journalists became a much more controversial act and indicated much of the tension surrounding the ways in which the burgeoning profession of writing was being defined. The club scene in New York was not one to be negotiated by the unwary. The late nineteenth century was the boom period for New York clubs, and the intricate social hierarchies of these clubs constantly shifted. Clubs could be formed and dissolved very suddenly and the competition to belong to the most prestigious clubs was tremendous. The changing landscape of the club scene is well illustrated by a look at the roster of names listed in Rossiter’s Club Men of New York, a book first published in 1893 which was the “Who’s Who” of the fabulously rich. Rossiter’s listed 119 clubs in its first issue, and in 1901 it listed 157 clubs with 38,000 members (Porzelt 3). The clubs springing up all over New York were part of the world in which Brander Matthews had been raised. He had the social connections and certainly the cultural leanings to have made himself quite at home in the wealthiest clubs of New York. He was, after all, the ex-millionaire who Lionel Trilling reports “rode a shining coupe drawn by two fat horses” to Columbia from his luxurious West End Avenue home.8 Yet, the clubs Matthews was a member of and helped found were, on the whole, not the most exclusive clubs of the upper society set. They were, rather, the most exclusive “intellectual” clubs founded upon shared interests rather than mere wealth and bloodline. The Century Club, for example, probably the most prestigious of his New York associations, was predicated upon an appreciation of arts and letters. Founded in 1847 by William Cullen Bryant, the Century Club quickly developed into what Mark Twain called “the most unspeakably respectable club in the United States, perhaps” (Mark Twain’s Travels 88). This excruciatingly elite club counted most of the prominent male writers and painters of New York as its members, but


even among such glitterati, Matthews held a special role. One account of The Century during this era described Matthews as “almost the professional jester of the Club” competing for this title with John Kendrick Bangs, Henry Van Dyke, Edward Eggleston, and the many other genteel humorists who regularly dined together (Commage 70). Most of the other clubs Matthews belonged to were considerably less posh and well established than The Century. Some, like the Rabelais Club in London were just drinking and dining groups that would regularly gather in restaurants, while others, like the Author’s Club during its early years, borrowed other club’s facilities. The “floating” clubs obviously didn’t have as much social cachet as the more established ones, but these forums for networking and socializing were nonetheless elite. Dues were tendered and members needed to be voted upon. The more open atmosphere of his “floating” clubs, especially the theatrical ones such as The Players Club, gave Matthews the cachet of Bohemia without really forcing him to mingle with the masses. More than any individual club, however, it was the accumulation of clubs and his ability to move among them all that marks Matthews’s spectacular success at negotiating and consolidating the most powerful cultural circles of the both the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Brander Matthews and the Author’s Club In 1882, when Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of Century Magazine and a prolific poet, decided to invite several friends over to his house in order to discuss the formation of an Author’s Club, Matthews was one of his most important guests. With the launching of the Author’s Club, Matthews became part of a series of pronouncements about what his circle would recognize as the practice of authorship.9 The original policy of the Author’s Club restricted membership to individuals who were either “author of a published book proper to literature or held a recognized position in other kinds of distinctively literary work” (Osborne 5). While “Technical books and journalism” were barred, editors of literary periodicals and authors of periodical literature were still eligible for Author’s Club membership. Although literary editors and periodical writers never joined in significant numbers, the club itself did increase from 25 members in 1882 to 239 members by 1913. In 1896, ostensibly to limit numbers, but clearly intended to retain the nature of the organization, the club’s constitution was altered. The eligibility clause now read that “the candidate must be the author of a published book proper to literature, or of credible literary work


equivalent to such a book” (Osborne 21). Technical writers and journalists were still barred and editors or periodical writers were no longer welcome in the Author’s Club. This move was part of a campaign to identify itself as a craft organization, unlike, say, The Century Club. The new restrictions were still vague enough to allow loopholes for magazine essayists, say, who had never managed to assemble their work into a book, but the restriction made clear that an individual who identified himself primarily as a journalist was not an author and by default, not welcome in the club (Osborne 27).10 Although this restriction in no way prevented journalists and reporters from associating, unionizing, organizing, and networking through other venues, it was indicative of a patrician premise about the definition of authorship held by many of the most powerful individuals in the field of letters. As might have been expected, this policy was rarely enforced simply because its mere presence no doubt served as an effective deterrent. The Author’s Club still held a vote for any individual’s membership, and merely fitting the fundamental criteria as outlined in the charter was still no assurance of acceptance. The “no journalists” clause was thus a purely symbolic statement. A much more significant change in club policy was suggested two years later, in 1898, in what was ranked by the club’s historian Duffield Osborne as “important in its bearing as any incident recorded” in the club’s history. This 1898 change was suggested by members who sought to open the club’s doors to lay people in order to increase revenue and “furnish full club facilities” (24). What Osborne saw at stake in these new proposals was the very nature of the Author’s Club. A small number of members suggested that the clause barring “technical publications and journalism as such” be struck and thus open the doors to a far wider variety of potential members. In this suggestion, the membership rules could still demand “credible literary work” as a criterion for joining and thus the club could still easily exclude anyone they wanted. The members advocating a more open policy argued that more variety in membership would be intellectually stimulating, but the dissenting members retorted that “authorship was as often an avocation as a vocation” and that the bulk of the men in the club were already practitioners of other professions anyway. They pointed to the fact that the club as it was included clergymen, statesmen, bankers, professors, and merchants. The proposal failed by a landslide. Despite the club’s protestations to the contrary, what emerges from this discussion is that being able to support yourself with your writing alone was suspect. As Matthews points out, among the seven founders of the Author’s Club, “only one of them was then supported wholly by literature” (“Literature


as a Profession” 203). Since virtually every club member in 1898 could identify himself with another profession, to be an author meant that you had an identity predicated upon a twofold participation in society: you practiced your middle- or upper-class vocation to make a living and plied your writing only inasmuch as it afforded personal satisfaction. By 1912, the Author’s Club became even stricter about their admissions. Previously (in accordance with the 1898 revision) an individual needed to have written a literary book or “enough credible literary matter to constitute a book,” but by 1912, members were concerned that these terms were dangerously vague (Osborne 36). Osborne writes: “it was felt that, while there had been no tendency to take improper advantage of such equivalents, and no abuses of the alternative clauses, there was, still a dangerous laxity in any that could be devised.” The problem was not in the definition of literary matter, but in the idea of what might constitute “enough” and “credible.” What might the threatening “equivalents” be? Could they include a series of essays that occasionally use an artfully turned phrase but were otherwise simply technical literature? It is difficult to imagine just what the danger might be, but the alterations of 1912 eliminated the phrase “or enough credible literary matter to constitute a book” and replaced it with a requirement that every candidate need to have published a book which was “proper to literature, science or art” (Osborne 36–37). Work might be “credible” as literary (as had been defined in the earlier charter), but according to the 1912 charter, that did not necessarily render it “proper to literature, science or art.” To be “credible” was thus constructed as virtually the antithesis of being true and proper to literature. A book that was “credible” as a literary work was not necessarily an actual literary work, and thus the writer of it had no business calling himself an author. To be credible was to be believable, not necessarily to be true. Thus the Author’s Club in 1912 further refined and restricted their notion of authorship: to be an author was to create a work that was genuinely literary. And to be literary defied specificity. The best definition the club could come up with at this point was to demand “published book authorship of a work that involves the elements of literary construction and diction.” By refusing to categorize the aspects of a work that would make it credible or not literary, the club fortified its position as an organization that simply recognized authorship when it saw it: as an ineffable, transcendent phenomenon. Understanding literary work as transcendent or simply of a quality that defied description did not mean, however, that the Author’s Club was promulgating a romantic view of authorship. The motivation for


writing might be important, but it was nonetheless required that an individual publish a book in order to join. Essentially, the club left it to the arbiters of the marketplace, the publishers and editors, to deem who was and who was not an author. The Author’s Club used its membership criteria to articulate an understanding of authorship as both romantically ineffable and precisely documented. The modern author was, to the Author’s Club, a professional man of letters. Professional both because he had recourse to other vocations, but also implicitly professional because he had successfully negotiated the literary marketplace. Although the Author’s Club members organized many copyright lobbying activities and sought to regularize and normalize many publisher/ author contractual relations—even to the point of keeping histories of author/publisher disputes on record for the public—their primary concern was socializing among themselves. Promoting an identity constructed around an affinity for literature, rather than a commercial dependence upon it may have been the factor that allowed the Author’s Club to survive. While organizations that focused upon specific legislation often fizzled out once their particular bill was voted for or voted down, the clubs and organizations based upon personal affinity, rather than professional affinity, tended to last far longer. Thus, by making the “professional” aspect of a professional man of letters refer to extra-literary activities, Brander Matthews and his circle at the Author’s Club could ensure a continuity of association among like-minded men. Admittedly, the Author’s Club was a small organization and it would be irresponsible to use their shifting membership criteria to argue for a broad-based national antagonism toward journalists. Even by 1912, the Author’s Club had only 239 members. But these 239 members were choice. Their influence on the national scene cannot be discounted.11 Henry James, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Samuel L. Clemens, Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and James Russell Lowell were some of the most prominent members. Matthew Arnold was an honorary member, as were Oliver Wendall Holmes and John Greenleaf Whittier. Andrew Carnegie, who was an honorary member and frequent guest at the club, donated a suite of rooms for their use as testament both to his own abiding interest in all things literary, and to the club’s cultural importance. This cultural importance was significant, for although there were other Authors organizations in the United States, the Author’s Club represented something very special to the public at large. According to an essay titled “Questionable Means of Selling Books” that appeared in Publisher’s Weekly, for example, members of the Author’s


Club were often sent complimentary copies of books or other “valuable gifts” as “bait for their own subscriptions or to bait hooks for the unwary public with their testimonials” (976). The men who belonged to the Author’s Club were, by virtue of their supposed disinterest in the market, perceived by at least some book marketers as having a special “authority” to pronounce the fitness of books to succeed in the literary marketplace. While the Publisher’s Weekly may have found this method of securing endorsements troubling, the practice reveals a popular understanding of how the cultural clout of the Author’s Club could be marketed commercially. As the bastion of Victorian gentility, their clubrooms gathered publishers and writers who willingly embraced and promulgated a highly charged definition of what it meant to be an author. The threats that caused the Author’s Club to work over their membership criteria so many times were clearly coming from a powerful cultural movement. Despite what the elite authors of the club might say, the mere fact that the gentlemen of the Author’s Club had to resort to the rhetoric of the marketplace (say, the judgment of publishers rather than to the historical survival of greatness) meant that writers who identified themselves as literary workers, were making their presence known. And even though the younger generation of writers in the early twentieth century were excluded from the kinds of clubs Brander Matthews helped form and support, Progressive era writers forced the traditionalists to engage with them in terms that would have been anathema to the Romantic writers of an earlier era. Although predominantly a social organization, the spectacular cultural clout wielded by the Author’s Club circle was illustrated in 1916 when another group, The Authors League of America (ALA), sought to affiliate itself with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The proposed affiliation was to protect writers against contractual exploitation and generally show support for the labor movement. Unlike the patrician Author’s Club, many of the people involved in the ALA were young radicals. Muckraker Ida Tarbell, for example, was one of the earliest members. The ALA though, was a broad centrist organization and Brander Matthews signed on to the ALA as an honorary Vice-President as did several of his close friends, including Theodore Roosevelt and Hamlin Garland. When the vote to affiliate with the AFL came up, the old-guard writers—many of whom were Author’s Club members— campaigned hard against the proposition. Former radical Hamlin Garland was firmly opposed to the affiliation. He wrote to Matthews: “[Our Opponents] may call us all Old Foagies but I don’t feel any call


to line up with engineers and cloak makers” (qtd. in Oliver 176). This observation was quite probably anti-Semitic, as well as genuinely disdainful of trade, and is indicative of the general disdain the Foagies seem to have felt for the working classes in general, and for the writers who identified with them in particular. Matthews, who wrote petitions, solicited letters, and threatened to resign from the ALA if the vote went through, used his Author’s Club friends and connections to successfully beat down the proposed affiliation. The ALA, in various formations, survived far longer into the twentieth century than the Carnegiesponsored Author’s Club, but was for many years controlled by a group of self-professed “Old Foagies.” The hullabaloo raised over the 1916 affiliation vote swung the ALA so far to the right that the ALA’s 1919 Program Committee action plan set goals that read more like the Author’s Club’s charter than like a labor federation’s. The ALA wished to raise “the standards of literary criticism” and to secure “for American Books the attention undoubtedly due them.” It even proposed that “admission to the League itself should be in the nature of an honor conferred on those who have ‘arrived’ or who have done notable and prideworthy work in literature or art.”12 Although the ALA’s pendulum was to swing left again, the networking promoted by the Author’s Club circles kept organizations such as the ALA from disseminating a vision of authorship as trade for quite a long time. Besant, James, and Matthews: The Art of Collaboration In 1890, Matthews wrote to his friend, Sir Walter Besant, about the possible establishment of an Author’s Club in Britain.13 Besant, who had founded the British Society of Authors, replied: “I do not think that a club of Authors would do any good here. It is as much as we can do to get a firm hold for the Society which exists for the defense of their material interests” (Letter to Matthews 22 Feb. 1890). Besant didn’t see how in Britain a smaller and less formal group might also be used to alter both the material circumstances of authorship and the social position of the professional man of letters. While various American Authors’ Organizations rose and fell with great rapidity throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the British Society of Authors remains a major force in British letters even today. Yet the success of the Author’s Club was unmatched by any club in Britain. The Author’s Club’s avowed belief that “friendly association has power for mutual inspiration, and is the hardly less potent spur to generous rivalry” was


part of a distinctly American literary history (Osborne 3). Despite the occasional political lobbying for causes as diverse as the Dreyfus affair and copyright reform, the Author’s Club promoted validation of a shared cultural identity as much as it ever promoted a particular cause or activity. Besant may not have been ready for an Author’s Club in part because his understanding of the profession of writing arose from a different set of assumptions than those which governed Matthews. Moreover, Besant’s conception of the nature of fiction itself arose from a faith in art as a composite of discrete and mechanistic properties. Since this concept came from one of Britain’s most famous collaborative authors, the contrast between Besant’s notion of collaborative practice and the art of fiction, and Matthews’s understanding of the same, demonstrates how the theorizing of the collaborative act was inextricably meshed with an understanding of the profession of writing. In Besant’s autobiography only seven pages are devoted to James Rice, his collaborative partner with whom he wrote twelve novels. This might seem surprising, but Besant looked back at his twelve years of collaboration with regret and his sparse discussion of Rice may have been a part of his attempt to put the collaborative experience behind him. He rued that “it ever went beyond The Golden Butterfly,” their popular fifth novel first serialized in 1876.14 Besant’s regrets do not seem to stem from any particular personal animosity, nor does he seem to bemoan issues of literary quality or artistic production. It does seem that he had depended upon Rice to handle all business transactions during their writing relationship and as Besant grew more sophisticated in his own understanding of how the literary marketplace worked he became less and less impressed by his former partner’s business acumen. This is not to say Besant was unhappy at the division of labor which collaboration had allowed. He might not have been happy with James Rice’s decisions to sell all of their mutual copyrights, for example (a decision which lost them a great deal of potential revenue), but Besant never enjoyed dealing with publishers himself and spent much of his life avoiding what he considered a vital, but annoying, part of “authoring.” After Rice died in 1882, Besant regularly employed agents to operate as middlemen between himself and the literary marketplace. He believed that the British publishing industry of the late nineteenth century was so complex and antagonistic to authors that outside help was needed in order to retain the artistic integrity necessary to write. But even with his newly hired middlemen, Besant’s plunge into professional literary dealings was traumatic. So traumatic, in fact, that as Historian Simon Eliot


speculates, it gave him the necessary impetus to become England’s most vocal advocate for authorial professionalism. Within a year after Rice’s death, Besant founded the British Society of Authors to help regularize and represent author’s rights in the literary marketplace, and it certainly appears that the trauma of losing his personal cushion against the marketplace forces spurred him onto such organizing.15 While Eliot is hesitant to push his speculations too far, the connection between collaboration and advocating literary professionalism is suggestive. Did Besant become involved in the Society of Authors because collaboration had taught him just how poorly prepared an individual was for dealing with rapacious publishers? Did his experience with collaboration teach him that literary success is predicated upon literary association? Or might a proclivity for experimentation and innovation have led him to both collaborative writing and later to imagining new societal roles for authors? While it is difficult to answer with certainty any of these questions, it is illuminating to compare Walter Besant’s theories of collaboration and the kinds of author’s groups he went on to found with the parallel theories advocated by his friend Brander Matthews and the kinds of organizations he became involved with on the other side of the Atlantic.16 Although the two men were friends and clearly considered themselves colleagues, some significant differences mark their conceptions of authorship; differences which make clearer their respective positions on the subject. After Matthews had published his essay, “The Art and Mystery of Collaboration” in 1890, he received a letter from Besant who was considering an essay on the same subject. Besant wrote Matthews in 1892 that they agreed “in the main” but differed on one crucial point (Letter to Matthews, 4 Feb. 1892). Matthews had spent much of his essay arguing that the imaginative labor involved in planning a story was so profoundly shared that the hand which eventually wielded the pen was no less and no more the hand of an author, than the hand of the partner who had never been near ink. “In a genuine collaboration,” Matthews wrote, “when the joint work is a true chemical union and not a mere mechanical mixture, it matters little who holds the pen” (160). In reply, Besant wrote: “Where I think I may disagree with you is your doctrine that it doesn’t matter who writes the thing” (Letter to Matthews, 4 Feb. 1892). Besant argued in his own essay on collaboration that “We must hear—or think we hear—one voice” (“On Literary Collaboration” 204). For Besant, in order to achieve the effect of one voice, there must always be a dominant and a subordinate “author” in the collaborative process.17 “I think that in every kind of partnership,


and especially in literary partnerships, one of the two must be in authority: one of the two must have the final word . . .” (“On Literary Collaboration” 204). While Besant appears to hold a relatively conservative or traditional theory of labor division (human competition inevitably leads to subordinate and dominant roles), he actually is proposing a more challenging concept: there can be a total merging of two selves in order to come up with that one voice. Besant wrote “the very essence of literary partnership is that the result must appear just as spontaneous, just as entirely individual, as if it had been the creation of a single mind and the work of a single pen.” Matthews’s essay, on the other hand, was designed to disabuse the public of the common notion that collaborative writing was inherently unequal. Matthews positioned himself as a debunker with the radical theory that complete partnership could be attained by the camaraderie of sharing: “Sometimes I may have thought that I did more than my share, sometimes I knew that I did less than I should, but always there was harmony, and never did either of us seek to assert a mastery . . . . When a final choice was made of what seemed to us best, the mere putting on paper was wholly secondary.” With this kind of point, Matthews’s argument was, in many ways, more conservative than Besant’s was. Ultimately, for Matthews, sharing in collaboration resulted in an assertion of integrity. This may seem paradoxical but the logic runs as follows: equality demands respective integrity. Besant’s theory that at least one collaborator is necessarily subsumed by another means that the submissive partner loses, in effect, his or her integrity. In his autobiography, Besant reflected upon the inevitable breakdown of an integral self in the collaborative process: There will come a time when both men fret under the condition; when each desires, but is not able, to enjoy the reputation of his own good work; and feels, with the jealousy natural to an artist, irritated by the loss of half of himself and ready to accept the responsibility of failure in order to make sure of the meed of success [italics mine]. (“On Literary Collaboration” 188)

Collaboration is “a sort of marriage” for Matthews, but that marriage is one in which any child is genetically beholden to both parents: “any endeavor to sift out the contribution of one collaborator from that of his fellows is futile—if the union has been a true marriage” (“Art and Mystery” 159). After all, Matthews asks: “Who shall declare whether the father or the mother is the real parent of a child?” (161). Despite his little rhetorical flourish, Matthews’s real interest lay in the relationship


between the parents more than in the child they produced. It is not, therefore, surprising that Matthews never expected much out of his own or anyone else’s collaborations. He wrote: no great poem has ever been written by two men together, nor any really great novel . . . . Collaboration fails to satisfy when there is need of profound mediation, of solemn self-interrogation, or of lofty imagination lifting itself freely toward the twin-peaks of Parnassus . . . . A task of this delicacy belongs of right to the lonely student in the silent watches of the night, or in solitary walks under the greenwood tree and far from the madding crowd. (162)

The value of collaboration was limited: it could produce amusing stories and good conversation. Whatever other values it had lay chiefly in its ability to promote individualism of authorship though personal writing relationships. A self-consciously humble form, collaboration proves by its very self-effacement, that real art is created by individuals, a conclusion Besant shies away from. Besant’s collaborative experiences had other, even more far-reaching effects on the development of modern authorship theories. His 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” so irritated Henry James that it spurred James to write his own “Art of Fiction” (1884) in reply. By contrasting the ideas of authorship in these two works we can better see the poles amidst which Matthews was situated. In his famous rejoinder to Besant, James castigated Besant for vagaries and contradictions. Most crucial for this analysis, the very notions of form and content that had evolved from Besant’s experiences with collaborative composition, were the ones that James attacked. Besant, for example, claims that the plot of a novel is separate from the rest of what makes up a novel and the story a work of art conveys is understood as the most important part by everyone except for the professional literary critics. “It is the story I look for first,” he asserted (Autobiography 183–184). Besant may have thought that way and both composed and read accordingly, but James was horrified. In mock mystification, James wrote: I cannot see what is meant by talking as if there were part of a novel which is the story and part of it which for mystical reasons is not . . . . The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommend the use of the thread without the needle, or the needle without the thread. (40)18

The jibe about the guild is, as Simon Eliot points out, an obvious dig at Besant’s Society of Authors, but it raises an even more serious question


(“His Generation” 52). Was James implying that writing is a practice that cannot be compartmentalized into discrete activities (plot writing, descriptions) and thus the idea of organizing into a guild or a Society was fundamentally foolish? James himself, as shall be discussed at length in the next chapter, did experiment with literary collaboration and is known to have frequented clubs, literary salons and organizations that promoted authors’ legal rights. He was, after all, one of the most prominent members of the Author’s Club. A truly social man, James did not disdain association for convivial or political purposes. His reactions to Besant’s facile generalizations about the mechanics of art speak thus to a characteristic bemusement regarding what he saw as a lay comprehension of writing as task, not craft.19 While Besant does not directly attribute his understanding of composition as divisible into ideas and forms to his experiences with collaboration, it seems likely that collaborative experiences informed such a belief, for Matthews professed a similar literary theory and quite specifically tied it to his collaborative experiences. As we shall see, Matthews did this most convincingly with his discussion of the relationship between drama and collaboration. Matthews argued that collaborative texts, which necessarily relied upon plot, gimmick, structure, and conversation, were far less likely to ever be art than other forms of writing. Besant who not infrequently compared himself to Dickens and other “great masters” seems to have had more aspirations for the potential of collaborative writing. James, as we have seen, so valued the total intermeshing and coherence of an imaginative authorial presence that he couldn’t envision writing as a piecemeal practice at all. For Besant, the art of fiction was so divisible that he could proclaim: “There is nothing at all in Wilkie Collins or Charles Reade that might not have been written in collaboration. That is because these writers are first and foremost, and always, storytellers” (“On Literary Collaboration” 204). For James the idea was absurd: I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative, a passage of dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive, . . . a novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will be found, I think, that in each of these parts there is something of each of the other parts. (“Art of Fiction” 36)

The difference here arises from an urge on Besant’s part to make fiction a divisible task. Besant likened writing to painting and thought


that: “laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion” (“Art of Fiction” 1). James asserted that the mechanistic breaking down of writing into separate tasks was indicative of an urge to equate writing with practice and not art. It can be argued that James spent much of his life trying to “teach” the art of fiction, but his fundamental antipathy to the idea of regulations arising from the discrete properties of literary art did little to endear himself to educators seeking to institutionalize the craft of writing. Matthews, on the other hand, who shared a faith with Besant in the discrete properties of literary art, devoted much of his life to the innovative task of teaching writing in a classroom. He had been one of the very first English professors in the United States to obtain his position on the merit of his creative writing as much as his scholarly work. As his friend Hamilton even argued: “Brander Matthews was called to a professorship at Columbia, because of his established reputation as a man of letters …. He had had . . . no special preparation for a scholarly career; but, for almost the first time in our academic history, a professional writer was invited to lecture on the art of writing” [italics mine] (86). That is not to say Matthews taught because he had collaborated. It is apparent, however, that believing literary writing could be dissected and taught arose from the same understanding of authorship that made collaborative writing an appealing proposition. Matthews differed from Besant on some key issues—primarily that literature ultimately demanded an ineffable organic structure that eluded divisibility. But for Matthews, lesser writing or lower forms of art might be divided up without harm. Matthews commented that while no great art has been written collaboratively, “[c]ollaboration has served the cause of periodical literature; a cause presumably less noble than that of great art” (“The Art and Mystery” 162). Since writing could be legitimately broken down and broken up, practicing authorship by writing with others was a perfectly respectable venture. To be an author and truly create art was, as James would have agreed, a more individual process. When Matthews suggested to Besant that Besant form an Author’s Club in Britain, it is therefore not surprising Besant could not really see the use. The American Author’s Club was not an artists’, or even an artisans’, guild. Rather, it was part of a cultural phenomenon in which association was used to promote a paradoxical vision of authorship, both professional in its exclusivity but self-consciously amateur in its openness to the supposed infinite variations of individuality and originality. Matthews was not a critic of the acumen or grace that James, or even Besant was, and this analysis has in no way tried to promote him as such.


By using these two critics to frame an understanding of Matthews’s work, however, we can better see how he promoted an ineffectual bridge between two enormously diverse theories of composition. In agreement with Besant on the divisibility of the task of writing, a belief doubtless fueled by his own successful experiences with collaboration, Matthews experimented with his own fiction to divide up the writing task in different ways. Matthews’s continual musings on collaboration (he published several variations of his essay on the theories of collaborative composition) need to be understood as part of a discourse seeking to identify, if not regulate, the rules for the art of fiction.20 James’s formulation of the intermeshed nature of writing was not utterly incompatible with collaboration for, as we shall see later, he did change his position on the subject and participated in a collaborative novel of 1906, The Whole Family. But in the 1880s, at least, James represented a pole opposite of Besant. In contrast, Matthews’s position was that the individuality of authorship leads to art. Collaboration was valuable only inasmuch as it led to the personal relationships that fostered the individual practice of writing. Matthews wrote: Collaboration has always been very attractive to me; and it has always been the result of the intimacy of friendship with its corresponding sympathy of interest . . . It is a fact that the “artistic temperament” is jealous and touchy . . . . It may be that I am lacking in the “artistic temperament,” since my varied associations only cemented the friendships which preceded them. (These Many Years 252)

With this rather coy approach, Matthews admits that it may have been his own limitations that forced him to understand writing in such a way, but his artistic limitations let him hone his true talent, that for friendship. Matthews’s essay, “The Art and Mystery of Collaboration” was written in 1890 and to this day it is still one of very few scholarly treatments of the principles, history, and significance of literary collaboration. In it he sets forth an analysis of collaboration that is largely anecdotal and often contradictory. He details some of his own experiences in coauthoring literary works and ultimately assesses collaboration as a marginal and, with the exception of dramatic collaboration, light literary game. As Matthews explains: “no great poem has ever been written by two men together, nor any really great novel” (162). Yet Matthews’s interest in collaboration was not simply to justify or explain his own collaborative ventures. His essay reveals a series of assumptions about authorship that


combine to paint a picture of it as an activity demanding contradiction. Despite being somewhat of a game, Matthews saw that collaboration could nonetheless tap into deep-seated issues surrounding the mythology of authorship. But what do we really learn from his theories of collaborative writing? Brander Matthews admits that he really had no idea how collaboration worked. His essay postpones the question until nearly the end of the essay in order to first illustrate how a number of historically successful pairs theorized and practiced their collaborations. By the time he moves into a discussion of “how it is done,” Matthews admits, “such an explanation is at best a doubtful possibility” (167). The vagueness stems out of what he sees as an essentially mystical relationship. He sets out as if to define a genre, but ends up engaging in a lengthy description of practice. What can best be gleaned from his essay is a belief that two authors, in partnership, could be true collaborators and could create serious work, if not great art. Larger gatherings were merely “curiosities of literature” (159). Matthews’s disdain for such gatherings, if not already obvious, was made even more pointed by the financial metaphors he invokes to describe what has ceased to be an intellectual effort: “Nothing of real value is likely to be manufactured by a joint stock company of unlimited authorship . . . The literary partnerships whose paper sells on ‘Change at par [sic] have but two members’ ” (159). He describes the work of several authors on one piece as “a woeful waste of effort” (207). For the son of a millionaire who had lost his fortune in speculation, images of the Stock Exchange carried an especially heavy semiotic burden. By invoking the marketplace language, Matthews suggests that the whole point of collaboration can be lost when too many writers engage in it. If collaboration was supposed to be a vacation from the marketplace, it certainly shouldn’t have to be described in marketplace language. And even more significantly, if collaboration’s great virtue was to provide an opportunity to reinforce one’s faith in the individuality of the literary, the involvement of too many writers in collaboration could cause chaos, rather than clarity. The dispersal of literary activities over a broad sphere smacked of a Taylorist approach to literary activity: a virtual assembly line in which the minutia of tasks could be delegated with such efficiency that no single task would require much thought or effort. Matthews explains that despite whatever advantages collaborative writing might offer, collaboration should not be undertaken under the illusion that less work


is required in the production of a given text: Not the saving of labour, but the improvement of the work should be the reason of partnership. Two minds working upon the same idea, having the same object in view, and agreed upon the group of characters to carry out the plan of the piece, ought to arrive, more certainly and more clearly than one mind alone, not only at the possibilities but also at the certainties. (207)

The point of collaboration was not, therefore, to reduce labor. Instead, collaboration served to generate a text that would be the result of “certainties.” Certainties might manifest themselves best in concise plot lines or vivid dialogue, but the final implication of Matthews’s point is that as valuable as certainties might be, they shut down possibilities. And it is the infusion of possibilities, the engagement with the truly imaginative aspects of literary work, which leads to the riskier work of creating art. Because collaboration was, for Matthews, a method of asserting how individuality conceives genius, it would be reasonable to assume that the more participants, the better his point could be made. But that is not the case. As we have seen in his distaste for “joint-stock companies of unlimited partnership,” for Matthews, “combination ventures” were demonstrations of “intellectual poverty,” not extensive individualism (158–159). This is consistent with his belief that the exclusivity necessary to determine professionalized knowledge needs to be defended. Collaboration might be amateurish enough an activity to attract writers who recognize their own weakness, but it is not an activity in which the talentless man could make his way into the world of letters. Both Besant and Matthews fill their discussions of collaboration with cautionary tales. It might not be for the greatest authors, but it was not to be taken up by the masses either. The Documents in the Case If the individuality of genius was to emerge in collaboration, writers needed to work together with an understanding that their joint labor would result in literature able to hide the specific traces of its assembly, but would never be able to entirely smooth over its intrinsic nature as a joint production. As his actual collaborative short stories illustrate, Matthews steadily exploited the gimmicks and goofiness of collaborative literature to demonstrate the method’s shortcomings as well as its virtues.


After collaborating with humorist H. C. Bunner on the short story “The Documents in the Case,” Matthews and his friend sent a copy of their story to Emile Zola stating with juvenile disingenuousness, that Zola’s interest in Naturalism as approached through the novelist’s study of “human documents” had influenced the construction and theorizing behind their own collaborative piece.21 Zola, fortunately, wrote back that he was unable to read English and the stupidity of the joke had therefore been lost. The joke lay in the fact that Bunner and Matthews conceived the project as a series of documents that when juxtaposed would tell a story. The conceit in “The Documents in the Case,” that a pile of newspaper clippings, pawn tickets, telegrams, and correspondence could single-handedly tell the tale of an American romance, was nothing particularly original. Both Gothic traditions of layered narration and the eighteenth-century epistolary novel had long worked with similar ideas. “The Documents in the Case” merits examination though, because not only was it Matthews’s first foray into collaborative composition and set a precedent for many of the concerns to appear in his later collaborative ventures, it also contains a number of particular features that play upon its collaborative origins. By highlighting its origins, “The Documents in the Case” presents an understanding of authorship and responsibility that became part of Matthews’s broader theories about the cultural position of the writer for the late nineteenth century. The story follows a missing British nobleman who is tracked to the American West. He dies and his young daughter is kidnapped by Indians and then later adopted by a troupe of traveling actors. The story chronicles attempts by lawyers and private detectives to follow a paper trail that will lead them to the missing heiress. Much of the humor derives from the juxtaposition of the formal British documents pertaining to the legal search with the awkward language of the American frontier. An obituary from the Illustrated London News opens the story by announcing in the most dignified of language the “lamented death” of a Sir William Beauvoir, while later excerpts from “Bone-Gulch,” California, boast the arrival of the “Hon. Mr. Beaver” who “has come here to stay permanently añd forever [sic].” The discord of such difference is sounded throughout for comic effect. The naiveté embodied by the American vernacular, is further highlighted by the many visual and typographical ploys Bunner and Matthews use to underscore the constructed nature of the text. Not only does the Bone-Gulch newspaper, The Palladium, lack a complete set of type and hence must replace the letter “n” with “ñ,” but it also lacks a letter “w” and prints the letter “w” using two “v”s instead, a move


which the rival town’s newspaper notes with glee. “[T]he Palladium’s eleven unhappy readers, . . . are getting very tired of the old type cast for the Concha Mission in 1811, which tries to make up for its lack of w’s by a plentiful superfluity of greaser v’s.” The contrivance of note here is obviously the dissolution of the “w” (double u) that signifies the naturalized merging of two entities, two “u”s (YOUS) that is. No such facile glissando is possible for the Bone-Gulch newspaper. The naive readers, because of their limited cultural resources, force the separation of what should be a natural double u (w) into an awkward awareness of the two “u”s that actually compose the illusion of singularity (uu). The joke is rather simple really, but it is indicative of the emphasis the story puts on the distance between two individuals. The letters join and function effectively, but they necessarily make evident their forced construction. Collaboration in this story emphasizes the joints in joint activity. Was there something distinctly unnatural about collaboration? In the stories he composed with British author Walter Herries Pollock, Matthews offered different models for coping with the unnatural aspects of collaboration. In several of his collaborative stories Matthews relied upon magic tricks to provide the momentum of the story. One such example would be “Edged Tools; A Tale in Two Chapters,” although coauthored with Pollock, it was based on a play Matthews wrote alone. In this story, an American and an Englishman watch a magician’s performance which seems to be spiraling out of control.22 Monsieur Blitzini’s tricks are occasionally run-of-the-mill conjuring, but some of them (such as when a shower of gold coins suddenly turns into a shower of short cudgels which pelt the frightened performer with sharp blows to his back) seem to be genuinely magical and ominous. The two heroes, who know a great deal about magic tricks, soon realize that real spirits have become involved in Monsieur Blitzini’s act. As the magical pranks become increasingly malicious, the heroes fear the real spirits will “spirit” away the conjurer entirely during the feat called the Mage Invisiblique. Helpless to intervene, the two friends watch as the conjurer vanishes from the stage during his trick. The second chapter, which is supposed to be an account of the second performance, consists solely of a statement that the second performance never took place—leaving the audience and reader to ponder the mysteries of the spirit world. Were Matthews and Pollock setting up parallels between the gimmickry of collaboration and the sleight-of-hand practiced by a conjurer? Between the genuine mystique of artistic inspiration and the spiritual world? Might the gimmickry of collaboration create a facsimile of art in the same manner that sleight-of-hand only mimics real magic? These questions are


further developed in Pollock and Matthews’s “Mated by Magic: A Story with a Postscript.” Similarly divided into two sections, it also shares the earlier story’s false division. The bulk of this story occurs when two friends devise a scheme to help a young couple persuade a reluctant parent that the young lovers were destined for each other. The friends, experts at magic tricks, fool the father into approving of the marriage by deceiving him with a sleight-of-hand trick and a little mumbo jumbo. In this case, the two friends are able to speak from the spirit realm simply because they have managed to masquerade themselves as in touch with the supernatural, although, as the postscript explains, everything they did was mere gimmickry. The false “authority” the two friends managed to invoke suggests that not all “authority” is false, but that through teamwork, an effect of authority can be achieved. In a like manner, “Three Wishes,” the story Matthews wrote with F. Anstey, features two young boys who are convinced they have met a genie who grants them the requisite three wishes.23 Although their wishes all seem to be conferred, a logical explanation at the end assures the reader that the children were merely misinterpreting a series of fortuitous coincidences with only a small hint that maybe, just maybe, they had encountered something magical. Matthews and his collaborators used magic to advance the plot of their works, but delighted in unmasking the trick to reveal its workings. Nonetheless, as in “Three Wishes” and “Edged Tools,” when the man behind the curtain is exposed, a mystery might remain. Access to the eternal realm of creativity or genius might be faked or rationalized, but there would always remain an inexplicable aspect; one which no amount of gimmickry could account for. In “One Story is Good Until Another is Told” which Matthews wrote with George Jessop, the necessity of joint composition is made apparent by the juxtaposed narratives.24 The first half of the story is an account by an indignant photographer of his random assault at the hands of a “brutal Irish ruffian.” The second half of the story is by the ruffian in question who, in a long comic monologue, explains how an unlikely series of events convinced him that the photographer had stalked him. His attack on the photographer was merely in self-defense. This story features some of the better traits found in Matthews’s other New York City stories; there is a lively sense of the ways in which city streets serve as crossroads between the rich and poor; the setting of slums and saloons is convincingly rendered; and the alienation of the city’s poor from the advantages of the “modern” world as represented by the photographer’s portable flash camera is convincingly portrayed. What really carries the story along, however, is the suspense created by the fact


that not until the very end is it quite clear how the photojournalist and the ruffian ever crossed paths. Understanding the shared aspect of storytelling is, as the title presaged, the “reward” offered at the end. One story is good only until the other is told. The desire for closure, indeed for coherence, necessitates an appeal to a broad concept of authority; a concept that includes more than one storyteller. “One Story is Good Until Another is Told” shares traits seen in many of Matthews’s other collaborative ventures; gimmickry that seems like magic, an exploration of the power of juxtaposition and connections, and proving the necessity of collaboration by repeatedly pointing to the necessity of multiple actors/multiple authors. Even though, as the title points out, “One Story is Good Until Another is Told,” the merit of the second story (that of the Irish ruffian) is predicated upon the existence of the first story (that of the assaulted photographer). One story may supersede another, but multiple stories need to exist and they best arise from multiple authors. The Division of Labor It is difficult to know just how copyright was assigned for Matthews’s collaborative fictions. Often it seems that the copyright was sold to the periodical that first published the story and the one-time proceeds were divided equally. Extant correspondence between Matthews and his collaborators is remarkable for the lack of logistical or financial discussions. Yet, in correspondence with his publishers Matthews exhibited a hard head for bargaining his literary wares and promoting his own business dealings. Unhappy with the way in which Scribner’s was promoting one of his books, for example, Matthews wrote to cancel his contracts. Although Charles Scribner tried to put their dispute into personal terms, Matthews would have none of it. He wrote to Scribner: I suggested a closing of our contracts, not because I was deeply offended, but because I did not believe that it would be advantageous to either of us for you to continue to publish my books—under the present circumstances. And in spite of the kindly tone of your letter of yesterday, I am of the same opinion still. (qtd. in “Brander Matthews” The House of Scribner 206)

Matthews might remain courteous but he was under no illusion about the relationship he wanted to have with his publishers. As a member of the American Copyright League and the ALA, Matthews had, of course, always advocated the formalization of relations between publishers and writers.


Yet, firm handshakes in The Century Club were likely Matthews’s most common method of formalizing his creative literary relations. Since his collaborations were based upon friendship and honor, there seems to have been little attempt to formalize his literary partnerships by contracts. His system must have worked, since Matthews claims never to have had any friction with his coauthors, I can declare unhesitatingly that I have never had a hard work with a collaborator while our work was in hand, and never a bitter work with him afterward …. There was no dispute as to our respective shares in the result of our joint labours, because we could not ourselves even guess what each had done when both had been at work together. (“The Art and Mystery” 69)

There is little evidence any of his coauthors felt differently. George Jessop even wrote Matthews in 1890: “My sister was most amusingly indignant at the ‘Standard’ referring to you as ‘Chief Author.’ I assured her that you would be much more annoyed thereby than I was and she was placated as far as you are concerned” (Letter to Matthews, 23 July 1890). Matthews’s partnership with Jessop, like his many others, seems to have run smoothly thanks to a pattern of gentlemanly assumptions. Of course, it may also have been made easier by the fact that Matthews outlived almost all of his collaborators and had, therefore, the final say on the matter. Matthews himself used to quote Andrew Lang who would advise “young men entering on the life of letters . . . to find an ingenious, and industrious, and successful partner; stick to him, never quarrel with him, and do not survive him” (qtd. in Matthews “The Art and Mystery” 170). At what point did the pooling of labor merit the label of collaboration? Many books in Brander Matthews’s personal library had supplementary comments designed to specify his own otherwise indiscernible contributions to a work. In his copy of On the Lightship (1909) by Herman K. Vielé, Matthews noted “I suggested to Vielé the germ of ‘the Monstrosity’ but only the vague germ of it.” Similarly, he explained that Whist nuggets, being certain whistographs historical critical and humorous (1893) was “by me suggested to G. H. Putnam, to whom I supplied much of the material.” In A History of Columbia University, 1754–1904 which had no attributable author, he jotted down: “Planned partly by B. M. Prefatory note written by B. M.” And most intriguingly, he wrote on the flyleaf of Between the Lines (1891), a novel attributed to his longtime friend and collaborator Walter Herries Pollock with Alexander Galt, “In the making and inventing of the plot of this, I collaborated


with Pollock.” Presumably, whatever Galt did was more meaningful than “making and inventing” the plot, for Galt—and not Matthews— is the acknowledged coauthor.25 Certain aspects of a mutually assembled text merited collaborative accountability and others did not. The turn of the century saw many popular plays turned into novels, for example, but collaborative playwrights rarely translated their work into prose with one another. In the prefatory note to Judge Lynch; a romance of the California vineyards (1889), for example, George Jessop wrote “I take pleasure in thanking here Mr. Brander Matthews for permission to use in this novel the characters and situations of a play written by us in collaboration.” No such formal acknowledgment of collaborative labor occurs in Jessop’s Where the shamrock grows; the fortunes and misfortunes of an Irish Family (1912). In his own edition, Matthews added the comment that “This is based on the play ‘Liscarrick’ by B. M. and G. H. J.” Whether Matthews was writing these notes in his copies for posterity or for his own personal satisfaction we cannot know, but what these marginalia do demonstrate is that being able to assign or point to discrete examples of labor, does not meant that real authorship is in contention. There is no evidence, for example, that Matthews ever claimed to have been cheated out of his due when Jessop was listed as sole author of Where the shamrock grows. Authorship of a work had nothing to do with the division of labor and everything to do with the nature of the personal relationship of the two participants at that particular time. Collaborative Theatrics As the infamously unsuccessful plays by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James attest, there was a tremendous interest during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing for the theater even among those least suited for it. The lure was partly financial— successful plays could earn a great deal of money. Another attraction was surely the thrill of writing for a different audience and gaining a different kind of authorial capital. As Marcia Jacobson argued in her study of James and the mass market, James was eager to bring his name and his work to a different literary audience and redefine himself as an author with broad appeal. Then, as now, plays were rarely read, published or purchased in any significant numbers. For a playwright to make any money, he or she must therefore be especially attuned to pleasing a great number of people in order to have the show produced. While an average periodical writer of the 1880s might only need to interest one or two


editors in order to place his or her piece, a playwright would need to interest a number of backers, producers, and directors. Before the play could even be staged it would need to be envisioned as a group project. And once the staging, acting, and directing were underway, other levels of collaborative activity would be apparent. Hence, it is not surprising there has always been a special affinity for collaborative composition among playwrights. Matthews never speculated upon the advantages collaborative play writing might have had in the marketplace or how much more likely collaborative plays were to be produced than singly authored plays. But, he does explain that collaboration works better in drama than in fiction “because a play calls primarily for forethought, ingenuity, construction, and compression, in the attainment of which two heads are better than one” (“The Art and Mystery” 162). This is consistent with his belief that structure was separate from substance and as his short collaborative fiction illustrates, he continually relies upon what he describes as “the novelty of construction” to highlight whatever there was of value in a story (These Many Years 250). This obsession with delineating how a story or a play’s “structure” reflects its collaborative underpinnings or would benefit from several pairs of hands, is another manifestation of Matthews’s ideas about the integrity of authorship. Because he sees in drama the “rigid limitations on time and space” that preclude unexpected developments such as would be appropriate in meditative or artistic works, Matthews argues that “scientific” planning must lie behind everything in a play. Although this planning is best done by two people, it does not mean they are coming together to mesh an imaginative vision into a particular framework. Rather, the “scientific” nature of their partnership asserts their respective integrity. It may not be especially conducive to the unexpected rushes of inspiration he saw as leading to great art, but the scientific nature of theatrical collaboration is a necessary evil and prevents the subsumation of one artist to another. The integrity of an artist or the individuality of genius is asserted by collaborative play writing in other ways. Matthews argues, for example, that when a true poet tries to create a play, chaos results: If the poetic drama has any future on our stage, it must owe this in a measure to collaboration, for the technic of the theatre is nowadays very elaborate, and few bards are likely to master it satisfactorily . . . Had Browning taken advice before he finally fixed on his action, and while the form was yet fluid, A Blot in the Scutcheon might have been made into a great acting play. (“The Art and Mystery” 166)


A bard is better off employing a mechanic as collaborator to help him shape his work for the theater. This method of collaboration ensures that the bard is not unsullied and that watchable drama is created. As Matthews often observed, collaboration draws on conversation more than actual writing. When writing with a partner he explained that: the subject was always thoroughly discussed between us; it was turned over and over and upside down and inside out; it was considered from all possible points of view and in every stage of development. When a final choice was made of what seemed to us best, the mere putting on paper was wholly secondary.26

And although he never explicitly theorized it, it seems likely that the singular importance he placed upon conversation was directly connected to his fondness for dialogue, friendship, and his willingness to entertain a collaborative effort in attaining his literary goals. Conclusion Matthews’s mediocrity is surprisingly central to my argument. His inability to publish anything that was acclaimed as a great book or which radically changed the course of literary criticism actually indicates what was significant about his role in the transformation of the idea of author in the nineteenth century. Matthews’s identity and success was predicated upon the authority of his position as a Professional Man of Letters. His position at Columbia University was touted on the title page of virtually every one of his books, yet he wasn’t heralded as an academic. Matthews was the embodiment of a reactionary critic, but his reactions were well enmeshed in powerful cultural tradition. When the critics of the 1920s mocked him (“Professor Matthews was and is as naïve as Jackie Coogan” sneered an anonymous essayist for The Bookman in 1923), they mocked someone they thought of, with some justification, as an outdated Victorian (“The Literary Spotlight” 434). It was, after all, the quintessentially Victorian Matthew Arnold who nominated Matthews to the British Athenaeum. Yet, despite his predilection for nostalgia, Matthews was more Rooseveltian than Victorian, as ably demonstrated by scholar Lawrence Oliver who devotes much of his book on Matthews to putting Matthews into a “Rooseveltian” tradition of practical idealism. Yoking “practical” and “idealism” together was a specifically finde-siècle ideology, one in which the inconvenient incursions of the modern world (women, Jews, journalists), could be ignored, while the


new opportunities the modern world presented for men of letters (professorships, and well-paid editorial soapboxes) could be exploited. It was a precarious pretense and did not survive in its pure state very long. But it was openly acknowledged as an innovative bridge spanning two worlds. Matthews recognized this precarious duality, which he saw as an outgrowth of the modern university system. He described himself when he noted that at Columbia a new kind of professor had emerged; one who “is both urban and urbane, who is not only a gentleman and a scholar, in the good old phrase, but also more or less a man of the world and even on occasion a man of affairs” (These Many Years 411). Henry May, in his study of the period singled out Brander Matthews as the epitome of the Columbia professor. According to May, Matthews “brought to the campus a special New York flavor combining, as one could now do with caution, the gentleman’s club and the most respectable Bohemia” (63–64). The need to yoke together these two worlds demonstrates that an increasing gap was seen between them. This void seems to fit what many critics have characterized as a prevailing anxiety of the period; an anxiety stemming from a nagging feeling that the restructuring of the Gilded Age had resulted in well organized spheres of knowledge, but these spheres only masked massive slippage of cultural assumptions. In the words of T. J. Jackson Lears, As the rationalization of American economic and social life unfolded in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, professional groups arose to manage new corporate and bureaucratic structures of power, and in the process attained a powerful economic and social status. The authority achieved by professionals, however, was limited by their complicity with the structures of corporate capitalism they sought to guide and control. As supposedly expert guides to new and disorienting social structures, professionals were themselves subject to widespread fears of a “weightless” existence. (xi)

When Brander Matthews and his friends wrote together, they were doing so out of the same urges that led them to form clubs, rather than unions. The collaborations of the 1880s and 1890s were part of an attempt to connect in a meaningful way; to form a chain or a link which would, in effect, prevent a man of letters from fully disappearing into the void of weightless professionalism. The schism between a genteel understanding of authorship and a “professional” understanding of authorship was never really bridged by Matthews’s promotion of the Professional Man of Letters. But


Matthews’s attempts to build such a bridge with his tireless conversing, clubbing, and collaborating signifies the extent to which the professionalization of authorship was seen as a threat to be combated on many fronts. Collaboration was, in many ways, a last stand against the increasingly hostile divide between the two visions of writing. By collaborating, writers who believed in inspiration and a vision of the writer as apart from the world could demonstrate an engagement with like-minded individuals.

CHAPTER 4 Veribly a Purple Cow: T H E W H O L E FA M I LY and the Collaborative Search for Coherence

We have all, unconsciously become a “family.” We have our general loyalty and particular preferences. We have said we were a purple cow and the result is that we veribly “be” one . . . I await the developments with an interest bordering on insanity. —A letter from Alice Brown to Elizabeth Jordan (27 Feb. 1906)

As attested to by its very name, The Whole Family was a project concerned with coherence. Published serially in Harper’s Bazar from 1907–1908, this collaborative novel was a remarkable instance of narrative structure assembled by its editor, Elizabeth Jordan. Featuring chapters by William Dean Howells, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary Stewart Cutting, John Kendrick Bangs, Henry Van Dyke, Alice Brown, Mary Heaton Vorse, Edith Wyatt, Mary Shipman Andrews, and Elizabeth Jordan herself, the novel garnered considerable critical attention when it first appeared, with the acclaim usually citing The Whole Family’s surprisingly holistic qualitites as key to its success (“The uniformity of style is remarkable” remarked one wondrous reader) (C. F. S. 1182). And, despite the Nation’s assessment of it as “pure vaudeville,” and Jordan’s own description of it as “a mess,” The Whole Family engaged the very idea of coherence as criterion for artistic success in a manner that marked a particular historical moment (“Current Fiction” Nation 553; Jordan, Three Rousing Cheers 258). The appearance of The Whole Family during a period characterized by the rapid professionalization of authorship brought together an assessment of coherency with a troubled assessment of artistry. The idea of artistic coherence as necessarily made up by representations of shifting subjectivities offered a provocative alternative to a fixed understanding of coherence as seamless. With the idea of the autonomously inspired Romantic author


under siege, the production of The Whole Family provided a forum for demonstrating how authorial integrity might be singularly reinvigorated in a collective enterprise. Other chapters in this study have looked at particular book projects and authors to illustrate cultural anxieties over capitalism, democracy, professionalism, and friendships. This chapter asks how the production and marketing of a collaborative novel could illustrate particular concerns about the nature of art and about the process of creating it. Was art about representing coherency? What if the creation of art was anything but coherent? And with the dawning of the twentieth century, how was fragmentation imagined for writers not usually associated with modernist conceptions of simultaneity or cacophony? And how could a self-consciously “unnatural” project represent anything associated with “realism” as it was discussed at the turn of the century? By looking at how a “family” was constructed for the modern era, we can see how collaboration brought to the fore issues usually kept out of the public eye. Harper’s Bazar as Family Circus As with any family, The Whole Family’s particular pathology may forever remain elusive, but we can track how the project was initially imagined and coordinated. The Whole Family was part of a project to invigorate and garner some excitement for the newly revamped Harper’s Bazar. In 1900, Elizabeth Jordan, who had previously been working at the New York World, took over editorship of Harper’s Bazar, a women’s weekly magazine. She promptly began to shepherd its transformation into a livelier literary periodical. The Whole Family project, therefore, was part of her vigorous efforts to generate excitement and publicity for the magazine as a literary forum. Intended as a “showplace for Harper’s family of authors,” Jordan designed it “to bring together what P. T. Barnum would have called the greatest, grandest, most gorgeous group of authors ever collaborating on a literary production” (Jordan, Three Rousing Cheers 258).1 The provocative juxtapositioning of so many disparate writers certainly garnered much attention, but it further succeeded as a showplace for vigorous discussions over the meaning of authorial integrity. William Dean Howells sketched out the initial plot and Jordan was then left to supervise and implement the scheme. As envisioned by Howells, the novel was to be about the process of marriage and its ramifications for the family circle. As the “father” of the project, he duly took on the first chapter. The narrator, Ned Temple, is actually the neighbor

veribly a purple cow / 129

of the Talbert family and in conversations between him and Mr. Cyrus Talbert we learn that the middle daughter, Peggy Talbert, has just become engaged while away at college. The family doesn’t yet know Peggy’s fiancé, Harry Gower, but they are all hoping for the best. Everything seems to be proceeding well until Chapter Two when Howells turns over the story to Mary Wilkins Freeman who wrecks havoc with the initial plot. Assigned the “Old-Maid Aunt,” Freeman chose to make her an intensely attractive and sexually aggressive thirty-one-year-old woman who confesses to a previous amorous entanglement with Gower, her young niece’s fiancé. Gower arrives in town but before he can answer any questions about where his loyalty lies, he disappears to New York . . . throwing the family into an uproar. A letter from Gower soon arrives but the “School-Girl” sister, created by Elizabeth Jordan, accidentally obliterates the name of the addressee on the front of the envelope. Nobody dares open it until it can be established whether the letter was intended for Peggy or Aunt Eliza. In the meantime, Aunt Eliza also disappears and everyone fears an elopement with Gower has taken place. Charles Edward, Henry James’s “Married Son,” muses on the situation, and then goes to New York to break his little sister’s engagement for her. As the book continues, other characters also converge on New York, variously trying to distract Aunt Eliza with other suitors, and to sort out numerous loose ends and minor plot lines. In the penultimate chapter, author Alice Brown hastily introduces a stable new suitor, named Stillman Dane. In a desperate deus ex machina, the troublesome OldMaid Aunt Eliza discovers she has psychic powers and leaves the family to begin a professional career working with a “Mediumistic Divulge” and Stillman Dane finally whisks young Peggy off to Europe as his bride. Although most collaborative texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tend to be light romances, The Whole Family defies such easy labeling. The machinations of the narrative reformulate and subvert generic romance parameters. Although all comes out well in the end, the plot gets inordinately complicated. Aunt Eliza’s erotic volubility quite forcibly reminds readers that a sentimentalized marriage plot is sufficient neither to explain nor to represent human experience. The romances of eighteen-year-olds, Freeman suggests, are often less interesting than the romances of Old-Maid Aunts. The requisite happy ending in The Whole Family that successfully marries Peggy off, does not suffice to banish memories of the Freeman chapter; a chapter in which the idea of a clichéd marriage plot most certainly demands reconsideration. Furthermore, Aunt Eliza poses a threat to the family precisely


because of her curiously unattached state. Her individuality is so extreme that she has not managed to establish a codified or respectable “relationship.” This unfettered female eludes the family’s vision of her behavior. More than one author asked if they could simply declare the Old-Maid Aunt insane and thus be done with her. “Who would have thought that the maiden aunt would go mad in the second chapter?” asked Van Dyke (Letter to Jordan, 31 Dec. 1907). Or, as Brown wondered: “If she is mad, she can be grappled with. We can pack her off to a symbolic asylum and let the erotic fervor that follows her tracks die with the fancy that created it. Or is she sane?” (Letter to Jordan, 10 Feb. 1907). The ten inheritors of the Aunt Eliza problem did their best to pack her off. Nonetheless, her startling break from the pack renders her by far the most memorable character in the novel. Freeman defended her chapter as necessary impetus to a hopelessly prosaic start, stating: “To tell the truth such an innovation in the shape of a maiden aunt rather frightened me, but the old conception of her was so hackneyed, and I did think some plot ought to be started, and I could see no other way” (Letter to Jordan, 26 July 1906). Freeman’s individualized vision of both the character and the project caused the collaborative venture, inasmuch as it reflected a shared conception of coherence, to effectively collapse. Its collapse, however, left a great deal in its wake. For The Whole Family proved to be a case study of how the conditions of textual production were seen by readers, critics, and writers as relevant to the text’s success or failure as an artistic creation. In one such instance, the North American Review observed: Just as a game of chess, if perfectly played, proves in the end to be a complete, organic structure, despite the fact that it is born anew with every move of the players, so this story, which is created afresh by each author in turn, develops into a consistent and artistic form, because it obeys throughout the basic laws of fiction and of life. (Gaines 927)

The North American Review describes the success of the project as “despite” its curious production. Yet, this review also describes the production in positive terms. The story is “created afresh” and by implication, it is this freshness that actually contributes to the consistency of its “artistic form.” Life is equated with consistency and—by extension— coherency. The underlying assumption is that life itself is unified enough to be representable, and that such representation is the goal of art. This assumption was not, however, shared by the writers who composed


this particular work of art. Indeed, this may be one of the rare cases in which authors disagreed with their own good review. Unified representation of a unified life was, in fact, an idea directly confronted by the many authors. They used their chapters as forums from which to muse upon the unity of a collaborative text and, indeed, upon the unity of any text. Establishing Inequality When Howells originally conceived the project, he planned to make coeducation one of the primary themes. “Young people ought to know at least the workings of the male and female mind as fully as they can,” he wrote. “Their natures are diverse enough, though not so diverse as we like to pretend, and the difference is exaggerated by the separate training” (Letter to Jordan, 4 June 1906). Howells’s aim was to abolish such ideas of separation. For Howells, the driving theme of The Whole Family was certainly gender issues, but only in order to demonstrate how better mutual understanding of gender issues could create a harmonic state. Despite Howells’s disgust with the way in which Freeman’s chapter changed the tenor of the entire novel, the situation posed by Freeman’s Aunt Eliza chapter was in keeping with the general premise Howells had set. And, as might be expected, the “problem” of Aunt Eliza has appealed to many critics because she so clearly raises compelling questions about representations of women. Critic Dale Bauer, for example, forcefully argues that the Freeman chapter radically challenged patriarchal premises of narrative structure as much as they challenged dominant assumptions about women. Bauer points out that what she terms the politics of collaboration or the battle for control of the plot, “determines in large part the form and ideology of the text” (120). In her analysis, Freeman’s chapter succeeds in “establishing the terms of the subsequent debate,” thus rendering The Whole Family a text which enacts challenges and defenses to essentializing notions of the family. Another contemporary critic, John W. Crowley, assesses The Whole Family as a narrative experiment in variable points of view. He too analyzes the gender politics informing the project. In addition to the problems posed by the Freeman chapter, Crowley persuasively argues that when Edith Wyatt contributed an unpopular chapter (one which Jordan forced her to significantly rewrite), the ensuing discussion among the other eleven writers reveals an attempt by men to maintain masculine narrative predominance.2 With this in mind, both Bauer’s and Crowley’s analyses are productive and persuasive, but somewhat incomplete. They fail to address the


tensions within each author and among the various authors over the idea of multiplicity and the production of art. Although The Whole Family certainly addresses competing strategies of gendered representation, it is able to do so because of the willing cacophony and the open engagement with the idea of inequality on the part of all the writers. Dissecting attitudes toward the representation of women as markers for how inequality was constructed in The Whole Family, is a useful project, but it does not account for the other manifestations of inequality that reveal much about how literary workers of the time invoked differences to different ends. Inequality was a basic premise and an intrinsic part of the creative risk in writing The Whole Family. The gender issues, the conflicting professional rivalries, and even the conflicting views on the role of art (the realists pitting themselves against, say, the genteel traditionalists), were all part of the tension which was willingly embraced in order to collectively come up with a shared coherence. The success of the project was dependent upon acknowledgment of cacophony as harmonic. Coherence was achieved because of competing visions, not despite them. The men and women who participated in The Whole Family were concerned both with fusion and with dominance. The collaborative strategy of The Whole Family underscores this. Unlike collaborative texts written by authors who compose and edit concurrent with their writing, or even unlike authors who plan together but write separately, the runwith-then-pass-the-baton collaborative strategy of The Whole Family made it more of a contest than a shared enterprise. The writers seem to have lost a sense of themselves as being on the same team. This contest metaphor is no forced trope, for collaborative texts of the period were frequently structured as contests. A House Party (1901), for example, was a collaborative novel written in the manner of the Decameron. It featured twelve anonymously written chapters and offered a prize for the reader who could correctly identify the respective participants.3 In another marketing ploy, the same publishing house illustrated Evalyn Emerson’s Sylvia: The Story of an American Countess (1901) with portraits of the heroine by twelve different artists. Readers were invited to compete for a “novel prize” of five hundred dollars by selecting and ranking their favorite pictures. The reader whose list most closely concurred with the opinions of the majority of contest participants would win.4 For these types of projects, competition was constructed as part of an engaged dialogue between readers and their texts.5 The contestatory nature of The Whole Family was manifest from the beginning. No installment was accompanied by its author’s name.


The readers of Harper’s Bazar were instead invited to guess who might be responsible for any given chapter. By the third month, Harper’s Bazar was regularly publishing letters from readers venturing preliminary guesses, although they received neither denial nor confirmation from the editors.6 Not until the last installment in 1908 were the chapters attributed. While the point is that the contestatory nature of both the infrastructure and superstructure of this text underscores the tensions between dominance and collaboration, even more significant here is the choice to openly represent and play upon such anxieties. By marketing the competition and using the mysterious outcome as a device to encourage sales, Elizabeth Jordan was quite openly relying upon the contrast between the valuation of coherence as a literary standard and the readerly activity that might be invoked to disassemble such coherence. Once the serial was over and Harper’s Bazar began to announce the upcoming appearance of The Whole Family in book form it noted: “The Book may be bought because twelve distinguished authors have written it. It will be read because it is well worth reading” (“Books and Writers”). While Harper’s Bazar touted The Whole Family’s coherence, it also encouraged readers to nonetheless disassemble and reconstruct the novel. The marketing plan for The Whole Family sought to exploit its contradictory nature, however coherent that nature actually turned out to be. Readers eagerly embraced such dissection. One writer foresaw “endless discussion,” but saluted the project by saying, “. . . let the good work go on, I say, if it makes us read good books” (Mary Brown 210). Scrutinizing difference was seen as a method to gain a coherent sense of literary art. Another reader, a self-professed member of the “big BAZAR Family,” suggested that women’s clubs could benefit from dissecting The Whole Family: “Tell each woman to read the chapter, and, when she has had her guess as to its author, to read some stories by that author and study out the reasons why she came to her decision—the elements of literary style which point to the writer. What better study in current literature could she have?” (H. B. A. 210). As the writer who imagined the “big BAZAR Family” recognized, interrogating the communality of readership could lead to personal growth of an individual. Harper’s Bazar was selling a communality, a family of readers, with the premise that within such a family better understanding of the individuality of interpretation could be embraced. Emphasizing the dissecting possibilities offered by The Whole Family was in keeping with the very premise that underscored the entire project—that of inequality. By encouraging readers to rank or identify their favorite writers, the editors at Harper’s Bazar encouraged inequalities


and differences to be highlighted. Since Howells had originally established the very idea of coeducation and the manner in which collaborative learning might foreground gender differences, he managed to set the basic terms of the discourse within and surrounding the text. Tacitly searching for differences in the text would, in effect, highlight inequalities in the text. Now, the premise that collaboration is based upon inequality is not a particularly radical one. Collaborative writing emphasizes that an exchange is always taking place within the act of reading or the act of writing. So it is the invocation of collaboration as a premise founded upon equality and yet dependent upon inequalities, which is telling. The teasing out of this tension, by marketing The Whole Family as a shared contest of some other such oxymoronic product, highlighted a contradiction that promised revelation. What it delivered was a contradiction subsumed. The threat of dissolution became itself a unifying factor. Constituting Inequality Any sense of disjunction and separation between the participants troubles critics who reason that the success of a collaborative effort is measurable not by the resultant product but instead by the equity of the production process. In a study of different collaborative writing techniques, critic Laura Brady decisively ranks The Whole Family as a failed collaborative text because it was assembled in defiance of any cooperative principle that would ensure conversation and dialogue among the writers. Instead, she sees it as “a composite portrait of competitive family members” (303). Brady’s argument, which is compelling inasmuch as she points out the ways in which the writers refused to listen to one another and the ways in which competing visions of the work clashed, does not allow for an idea of coherence as anything more than a shared sensibility. And by her admission that the writers were part of a “family”—albeit a squabbling one—she undermines her portrayal of them as intrinsically unconnected. To begin with, although much of the extant correspondence indicates frustration and irritation among the writers, the letters indicate that the various writers were in closer touch than Jordan’s memoirs suggest. Jordan repeatedly states that she tried to keep everyone’s responses confidential, but she evidently did a poor job of it. For while Alice Brown begged, “How I wish I could know what Mr. Howells says and what Mr. James says and what ‘they all say.’ Do let me hear anything I may know” (Letter to Jordan, 10 Feb. 1907). Edith Wyatt writes


knowingly “I am perfectly willing to take my turn after the mad seizure Mr. James anticipates from re-reading the words of the grandmother and the aunt” (Letter to Jordan, 14 Nov. 1906). Clearly, some of the writers were in touch with one another and were well attuned to literary gossip. While Brady’s taxonomy of models of collaborative writing may or may not be apt, her equation of a monologic project as a failed collaboration is indicative of the problems that The Whole Family explores. Both the participants and their characters repeatedly attest to the pleasure of chaos, the intrinsic definition of self that arose from dissension. Lorraine, the daughter-in-law created by Mary Stewart Cutting, introduces herself as a product of difference: “I have never identified myself with my husband’s family, and Charles Edward, who is the best sort ever, doesn’t expect me to” (80). This sort of dissent is typically portrayed with loving exasperation. Lorraine complains about her mother-in-law but admits that she is “very fond of her” (84). Even when family members gripe about one another, it emphasizes their relative standing. Failed harmony highlights the exchange and motion that make up a text, and thereby calls attention to a kind of coherence after all. The thematic concern for inequality among the characters was mirrored in the correspondence of the various writers who brought to bear upon the question of participation, a host of concerns about how such participation would be shaped by different patterns of literary inequality. Many of the lesser-known writers were delighted at the opportunity to work with such venerated masters. Mary Wilkins Freeman, for example, wrote: “I have read Mr. Howell’s [sic] chapter with great interest and admiration, as I read always the chapters of that Past Master of his Art, and I feel very small and incompetent tagging directly after him, but I will tag for my life, since I am so honored as to be given the chance” (Letter to Jordan, June 1906). Others, however, felt that the inevitable inequality of the participants might well tarnish their reputations. Howells wrote Jordan at an early stage of the project—“I think that if you find the scheme does not commend itself to the more judicious and able among the writers to whom you propose it, you had better drop it. I should not like to appear in cooperation with young or unimportant writers, and the affair would be a failure unless it were made to succeed brilliantly” (Letter to Jordan, 4 June 1906). Like Freeman, many of the contributors were pleased to be considered equal to those with whom they felt themselves unequal. Their willingness to consort with their supposed betters (or their inferiors) demonstrates an engagement with the facade of equality, perhaps in


hope that the appearance of equality would move everyone closer to such a reality. Alice Brown wrote some twenty years after the fact “Henry James! I think he’s the funniest figure possible among us amount-to-nothings, like Dr. Johnson at a village sewing circle . . . Why did he go picnicking with us!” (Letter to Jordan undated, 1930s?). Brown, even if she privately saw the conglomeration as somewhat odd, obviously took pleasure in such disparity. If, like Howells, the authors were themselves wary of reckless associations, they overcame such unease for a greater and totalizing goal. Inequality was construed as the factor that would make or break the success of the project. Selling Collaboration Egos were not the only issue informing decisions to participate in the project. Many authors located their concerns elsewhere. Confident in their own marketability, but not necessarily concerned with craft or reputation, they felt that the project posed problems of an altogether different nature. Holistic collaborative production posed less of an artistic problem for Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, for example, than it did for many of the other writers. Her hesitation about participating in the project stemmed from financial and health concerns, not artistic differences. And with the querulous confidence of a woman who claimed to have collaboratively produced one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century (she claimed to have written The Gates Ajar [1868] as stenographer for an angel), Phelps told Jordan that she would be happy to collaborate with her husband on a chapter for The Whole Family: “We work together with remarkable ease, although we do not often do it, and although in this case he has no especial wish to do it, since you did not ask him, and would only consent to help you and me out of the difficulty in case I should fail” (Letter to Jordan, 18 Feb. 1907).7 Although her husband’s literary reputation was slight, Phelps justified his inclusion because of his skills in assembling plot lines. She wrote, “He is a much better plotter than I am, and some of the best work that I have ever done has been done with him” (Letter to Jordan, 18 Feb. 1907).8 Phelps saw plot, rather than psychological motivation or aesthetic exploration, as the most significant aspect of literary production for a collaborative novel. The ability to make connections and forward a storyline was an ability derived from logistical abilities. For Phelps, collaborative projects were necessarily plot driven. Phelps’s eagerness to forward her husband as an inter-collaborator indicates a conception of artistic craft that was in keeping with her broader ideas


about the role of literature. “I never work for Art’s sake,” she elaborated, “I don’t believe in it. I work for life’s sake, and for truth’s sake; for God’s sake when I can” (qtd. in Coultrap McQuin 183). For Phelps, questions of artistic integrity were irrelevant—moral integrity provided a sufficient coherence. Or, perhaps the $750 she ultimately received for her singly authored chapter provided adequate integrity. By contrast, it was the logistics of collaboration that deterred Kate Douglass Wiggin, author of the best-selling Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), from participating in The Whole Family. She recognized that the marketplace, geared as it was to the literary products of individuals, had few stratagems to cope with the fiscal complications of joint authorship. She wrote Jordan: How about royalty on the book. Is it to be distributed in twelfths? If (a large “if ” in this case) the majority of the authors did really clever work and produced anything like solidarity and cohesive work, growth & development,—the book ought to have a handsome sales, appealing to the twelve author’s [sic] particular adherents and admirers. (Emphasis added) (Letter to Jordan, 21 June 1906)9

Wiggin’s concern for the mechanisms of finance was valid. Jordan appears to have dealt with the copyright issue by paying the authors a one-time assignment fee and allowing all book royalties to remain with Harper’s. Yet, Wiggin’s analysis of the relationship between sales and what she terms “solidarity and cohesive work” is revealing. Her implicit assumption is that the appeal of the work would not rest on its unity. This demonstrates a very particular understanding of both the commodity and the audience. While the novelty of The Whole Family project was clearly part of its attraction, it was evident to Wiggin that the work must demonstrate some “solidarity” and “cohesive work” in order for the respective authors to benefit from each other’s marketplace value. The niche in the marketplace occupied by each author is difficult to gauge. The Whole Family project featured authors at the end of their careers, such as Howells and Phelps, as well as much younger and lesserknown figures such as Jordan and Cutting. While Van Dyke received $600, James commanded only $350 for his chapter, and Howells— because he was already under contract to Harper’s and Brothers— received nothing outside of his regular salary. The variable rates each author commanded speak to the perception of their marketplace clout and also to the nature of American book and periodical culture at the time.


Although the secret contract negotiations demonstrated Jordan’s canny readings of each participant’s marketplace worth, the design for the 1908 bound edition demonstrated just how secret that assessment was to be. For, in keeping with the premise of equality, the names of the authors are imprinted in a circular design, with no name taking precedence over another. The variability of authorial clout is well illustrated by a comparison of this version with the reprint edition of 1986. In the reprinted edition of 1986, James, Howells, and Freeman are listed above the title, while the other writers are listed in the order of their chapters: Phelps, Vorse, Cutting, Jordan, Bangs, Wyatt, Andrews, Brown, and Van Dyke. Jordan saw herself as part of a new literary management system, one that was overturning the genteel tradition of her predecessors.10 As one of the first well-known female journalists of her time (she had come to prominence with her coverage of the Lizzie Borden murder case), Jordan had left Joseph Pulitzer’s Sunday World to accept the editorship of Harper’s Bazar after the massive bankruptcy and reorganization of the Harper’s firm at the end of the 1890s. It was quite a change for both Jordan and Harper’s. “I had been living in an atmosphere where the news of the world broke over me like pounding breakers,” she remembered, “The contrast of the academic calm of Harper’s sometimes depressed me” (Three Rousing Cheers 171). By assigning a newspaper journalist as editor of what had been a relatively sedate women’s magazine, Colonel George Harvey of Harper’s made a statement about the changing literary marketplace in which the nuances of marketplace clout would be assessed by the editor and publisher, rather than the authors themselves. This was not, in itself, a particularly new idea. But in giving Jordan, a relatively young woman, complete control of such an important magazine, Harper’s was making a statement about what it took to be able to make that kind of assessment. Unlike the editors who had, in their proverbial studies, overseen the great nineteenth-century magazines such the Atlantic or Harper’s Monthly, Jordan had little literary clout of her own. She had published many short stories and articles in newspapers, to be sure and at the time of her resignation, had been a major editor at Pulitzer’s Sunday World, but her reputation was negligible compared with that, for example, of the aged William Dean Howells.11 Jordan’s journalism had been largely confined to “women’s issues” and even her famous coverage of the Lizzie Borden case, marked Jordan as an important “female journalist” rather than as simply an important journalist. Jordan’s authority was in part derived from her youth and energy. This may have lent her authenticity or given her value


in the eyes of those such as Colonel George Harvey, who sought a professionalized workplace, but it did little to give her clout in the eyes of the older and more famous writers. Although there is no evidence that she was undervalued or ignored by these writers, her lack of strong literary credentials place her dealings with them in a different light. In one instance, for example, she tried to persuade Mark Twain to write the chapter on the small boy. She was turned down, and looked to Howells as both an old friend of Twain’s and as a man of tremendous literary heft, for assistance in cajoling Twain into changing his mind. Howells refused, saying: “A Friend of his youth should not afflict him in his age” (Letter to Jordan, 8 Aug. 1906). This may have been a sensitive response on Howells part, but it was also the response of a man personally entwined with a literary associate. Although a supporter of Jordan, Howells was part of a different professional tradition: one that used such clout more charily. On the other hand, when Jordan overruled Howells in the Aunt Eliza controversy and went forward with the offending chapter, she effectively asserted the primacy of modern literary management, as well as a different standard of literary taste. She sought other opinions about the Aunt Eliza chapter, but ultimately asserted her professional abilities and confidence in making the final decision herself. In contractual negotiations, Jordan’s professional confidence was called upon continually. She had to juggle demands for personal attention with demands for consistent treatment. She could not allow literary stars to threaten either her own editorial power or her cohesive vision of the entire piece. Jordan claimed in some frustration that the fame and literary distinction of some of the authors rendered editorial criticism “impossible” and even financial discussions tricky (Three Rousing Cheers 280). Much of the extant correspondence pertaining to The Whole Family involves lengthy offers and counter offers regarding the commissioned prices. These clashes stemmed from more than just the expected tensions over who was to fix the price of a given article. They arose from differing viewpoints over who was competent to assess the labor that went into a piece and whether the labor should be part of a price at all. The correspondence of Mary Stewart Cutting, who wrote the Daughter-In-Law chapter, is an important case in point, for it reveals the manner in which a relatively minor writer of the period sought to control the recompense accorded her work.12 Even more significantly, Cutting addresses the issue of collaborative composition, what kind of labor collaboration entails, and how it differs from and yet draws upon her previous experiences. The situation was as follows: although the letter is not extant, Jordan seems to have made Cutting an initial offer


of less than $300. Cutting responded that in previous correspondence with the editors at Harper’s Magazine, “The price I stipulated for, $300, for a story anywhere from 4000 to 5000 words (I have seldom made my price by the word as it is often harder to write a good very short story than a longer one) was accepted without question” (Letter to Jordan, 6 June 1907). Furthermore, Cutting wrote that she had been receiving so many opportunities to publish elsewhere that Jordan would have to make The Whole Family chapter a more appealing venture in order for Cutting to set aside the time to participate. Cutting continued: In spite of the company of geniuses in which “The Whole Family” is (ILLEGIBLE WORD) itself, an individual like myself is swamped in the Whole, and can’t get any particular credit for it, or use it in her own works—in consideration of all this (though indeed I feel the honor) it seemed to me that the higher price was amply justified. (Letter to Jordan, 6 June 1907)

When Cutting points out that she is swamped by the “Whole” she is arguing that her minor reputation actually makes her work more valuable. Her labor will be that much more laborious simply because her reputation is slighter. She doesn’t need to be paid on the same level as the other authors were just because her chapter will be equal in length to theirs; rather, she needs to be paid in accordance to the labor involved. Her price isn’t calculated in comparison with other writers. Indeed, there is no evidence that she is aware what other writers were offered for their chapters. It is comparative labor that interests her. Because of her minor reputation, Cutting argues that she will have to work much harder to stand out and avoid being swamped. For Cutting, talent doesn’t demand recompense, but labor does. Finally, Cutting pulls out the ace from her sleeve by revealing that she has had previous experience with collaborative writing: And now after all this explanation, dear Miss Jordan, I will come down to the original $300 for the present story, and for that will guarantee to try and do my best. I am supposed to be able to cater to another person’s idea and carry it out—(ILLEGIBLE) a little serial for Good Housekeeping, “Treasure Cottage,” written in the same way, and begun by me. They came to me frantically at the last moment to write the final chapter also as Mrs. Briscoe Hopkins had altered hers three times and was further off from the original plan at each trial. (Letter to Jordan, 6 June 1907)

With this note, Cutting points out that not only has her especial expertise been sought for similar collaborative ventures (finishing the


“Treasure Cottage” serial), but that the burden of relying upon someone else’s inspiration and ideas is such that her labor increases. The inspiration of an individual author lessens the labor involved. The absence of one’s own inspiration increases the labor. The more labor required, the more recompense it demands. And since Cutting’s labor was especially skilled (she had been “frantically” contacted to clean up whatever sort of mess Mrs. Briscoe Hopkins had made of the Good Housekeeping serial), it seemed logical to her that her labor be especially well compensated. The negotiations Cutting went through with Jordan are somewhat nebulous. Jordan’s side of the correspondence does not exist and although jottings in Jordan’s personal papers suggest that Cutting was eventually offered $300, it is not entirely clear how successful Cutting was in raising her market price by the above cited arguments. Nonetheless, Cutting’s letter demonstrates how the particular problems and challenges raised by collaborative composition provided opportunities for discussing not only how writing should be paid, but also what it was about writing that made it worthy of payment at all. Now this interest in compensating labor over the product would not be remarkable in the history of any worker/management relationships, but the figuration of writing as a specific form of labor was constructed at a period of time when writers felt especially defensive about their practice. Many shared the opinion of William Dean Howells that often readers are of a “wholly unliterary sort, who do not know apparently how books come to be, or how they differ in origin from products of the loom or plough” (“Novel-Writing and Novel Reading” 12). In order to remedy this sort of ignorance, the Author’s League of America, Inc., which was organized in December 1912, explored affiliating itself with the American Federation of Labor. Freeman, who served as Honorary Vice-President of the Author’s League from 1913–1921, expressed support for this affiliation in a letter of 1916: . . . It certainly strikes me that it might be very desirable if authors can thereby convince people that authorship is labor. I have never been able to accomplish that. Perhaps affiliation may protect authors from being levied upon by the press for unpaid symposiums, etc. Also from demands to write one’s life history and a truthful confession of one’s soul’s aspirations for a paper to be read at a woman’s club. Also for an account of one’s ancestors unto the third and fourth generation. Also from the possible preferment of oversea performances to those of our native land. (Letter to the Authors’ League, June 1916)13

Freeman’s list of protections are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to be sure, but her concern for impressing upon the world just how much labor


went into composition (indeed, so much labor that writers don’t have time for unpaid symposiums), was more than just the classic complaint of a bitter writer. In the case of Freeman and many other turn-of-thecentury authors, emphasizing labor was one of their few bargaining chips in a transaction with the powerful magazine conglomerates they saw, rightly or wrongly, as communicating on an impersonal basis. The communal and family feel, which Jordan had used to make The Whole Family proposal appeal to both readers and participants, effectively glossed over the issues of individualized labor compensation which dominated the actual The Whole Family correspondence. As we have seen, when a project such as The Whole Family was assembled, it became a site of tremendously complicated personal and professional negotiations. It is significant, however, that none of these writers used literary agents to negotiate their contracts. Literary agents had begun to practice widely during the 1890s and both James and Freeman, for example, used agents on other occasions—Jordan herself even worked as an agent in later years—(Hepburn). Yet, The Whole Family was assembled through personal haggling. Despite the existence of good logistical reasons, which I shall discuss below, for avoiding the use of literary agents in The Whole Family negotiations, the confidence with which these twelve authors discussed their fees illustrates a culture in which literary properties were held to be individually manageable— a curiously paradoxical development considering that this individuated nature of their work was made possible by the sense of a friendly literary community that presumably had no need for literary agents as gobetweens. There were many good reasons for not employing an agent: initially the contract must have seemed simple. The copyright was to be totally under Harper’s control and the Harper’s payment was a one-time fee, whether or not the story was reprinted, serialized, or bound in book form. Furthermore, as Cutting’s letters attest, most of these writers were sufficiently professional to handle even reasonably complex negotiations with finesse. Most important, however, is that the sense of community Jordan and Howells had constructed as part of The Whole Family’s appeal went against a “professionalized” ethos, even while it built associations. The use of agents might well have undermined the feeling of camaraderie Jordan had attempted to invoke. If the authors were a “family,” quibbling might seem normal, but if the enterprise was viewed as a purely professional one, the quibbling took on more serious connotations. When James complained about Wyatt’s chapter, was he, for example, suggesting that the incompetent writers not be paid? It seems likely. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to not take him seriously.


On the other hand, when we read that Alice French, a writer who was initially part of The Whole Family scheme, commented “I want to get acquainted with my husband and children,” the joke resounds with a cheery famili-arity (Letter to Jordan, 17 Mar. 1906).14 The interactions which characterized the construction of The Whole Family bring to the fore the way in which writers were combining new ways of talking with one another as both professionals and as friends, as both solitary artists and as socialized workers. The turn-of-the-century magazine marketplace was marked by a far greater emphasis upon speed and commissioned labor, especially in-house labor, than earlier magazines had generated. Under Jordan’s guidance, The Whole Family exemplified this new production process. Each chapter needed to be written swiftly in order to move the plot along for the following writers before they could plan and commit their own time. This directed pace was unappealing to popular novelist Margaret Deland. She indignantly refused Jordan’s invitation: “I am no smart New York author, that can reel off stories and papers every few minutes; I am nothing but a Bostonian, who plods, and plods, and plods; and it would certainly take me a summer and probably a winter, to write a short story for any magazine” (As qtd. in Three Rousing Cheers 261).15 Deland’s comments reflect a horror at the modern ethos of a literary marketplace in which centralized planning could direct the pace of production. Deland had achieved tremendous success with her novel John Ward, Preacher (1888) and was soon to do well critically and financially with The Awakening of Helena Richie (1906) but she nevertheless saw herself as part of a threatened literary tradition. Her mode of production was under siege. Deland further objected to the mere premise of equality suggested by the collaborative project: “. . . I am dazzled at the distinguished names that have entered your domestic circle; but it doesn’t seem to me that you are, any of you, taking the rank that belongs to you in literature when you make yourselves this pleasant sandwich” (261). To maintain a facade of equality was demeaning to all. Group production might be pleasant, but it was not a meal and certainly not a substantive one. If Jordan was going to attract other writers she would have to hope that such sensitivities were not prevalent. Assembling a collective novel was such a tremendous undertaking in merely logistical terms that it is incredible it was managed at all. The manner in which The Whole Family was put together illustrates how the turn-of-the-century marketplace was perceived by different individuals. For Phelps, it was a site where she could make money and, upon


occasion, do God’s work. If that involved using her husband to achieve this end, that kind of coordination was completely legitimate and no particular emphasis upon “authorship” one way or the other mattered. For Wiggin, copyrights and royalties were complicated enough without involving eleven other parties. For Cutting and Freeman, contract negotiations were necessarily predicated upon a shared understanding of how much labor went into any writing, and especially projects which demanded shared inspiration. And for Jordan, who was at the center of it all, these differing perceptions had to be catered to equitably. Jordan’s success in guiding her project to final publication was due to her skillful management of the logistics underlying the project, and her ability to balance the tradition of genteel literary mentoring with modern literary hectoring. Serialization and Coherency While The North American Review had commented upon the very smoothness of The Whole Family, the novel can strike the modern viewer as terribly disjointed and it is tempting to conclude, in the manner of Brady, that because of this disjointed quality, the project failed. Yet, the project was the creation of writers very much concerned with textual unity and their understandings of what unity and coherence entailed were built upon cultural assumptions specific to the turn of the century. One of these assumptions was that the audience of magazine fiction was simply less disconcerted than modern readers might be by interruptions, breaks, and what we might term stylistic jolts. The nineteenth-century tradition of serializing fiction created a sense of the novel that included long temporal breaks between segments, often meaning that a novel would dominate the pages of a given magazine or periodical for up to two years. The reliance the audience had in the continuation of the style provided a steady base of expectations for the magazine each month. And yet, the breaks opened up possibilities for starting anew with each installment. Without the earlier installment fresh in their minds for comparison, audiences might well have been more willing to accept the new installment as the controlling voice, and not the voice that had been established previously. The Whole Family was published serially before it was reprinted as a novel and most of the writers who participated in the project had published their own novels in such a manner. Serialization had its hazards, to be sure, but like any other literary form, serialization provided writers with particular advantages as well. James, for example, found


serialization to be “a pleasant provocation from ingenuity” and he made up his mind to “regularly exploit and enjoy these often rude jolts” (preface, The Ambassadors 8). The ways in which authors dealt with the particular challenges posed by serial composition of course varied tremendously, but the overwhelming effect of the serial construction of novels was that internal interruptions were not disruptive, but were integral to the very form of collaborative narrative structure (Lund; Ashton). While serial authors had honed various literary techniques for carrying readers over from one installment to another, The Whole Family posed a new kind of challenge to serial structure. More than in most novels, the separate chapters making up The Whole Family needed to stand out as self-contained units, if only to assert the integrity of each author’s style as well as the fundamental differences in perspectives originating from each individual character. After all, the appeal of The Whole Family was largely derived from the assumption that a whole was only comprehensible if significantly different perspectives were brought together. The opening and closing lines of each chapter installment in The Whole Family were to be the thresholds in which continuity and difference needed to be most forcefully established. This was done in a variety of ways. Edith Wyatt, for example, emphasized the solitariness of the mother’s musings by opening her chapter with “I am sure that I shall surprise no mother of a large family when I say that this hour is the first one I have spent alone for thirty years” (219). And Van Dyke’s Friend of the Family ends the entire novel by telling the Married Daughter firmly: “Your father and mother are going to lunch with me at Delmonico’s— but we don’t want the Whole Family” (315). The Friend does not wish to be mistaken as part of the whole. Much harder than asserting difference was connecting those serial installments that could, without paradox, both relate to and break with the past. In a traditional serial novel, calling a reader back into the thick of things after a month’s break could be managed in many ways. One favorite technique was to open an installment with a recounting of the previous events woven into an opening paragraph. Doing this in The Whole Family, however, would necessarily raise certain problems: since there was no omniscient narrator, previous events could only be filtered through a new character’s point of view, a character who had not yet proved him or herself to be reliable. In her segment, Alice Brown rather cleverly got around this problem by opening the second to last chapter in the novel with the following


observation made by Peggy, the Unmarried Daughter: “Remember,” said Charles Edward—he had run in for a minute on his way home from the office where he has been clearing out his desk, “for good and all,” he tells us—“remember, next week will see us out of this land of the free and home of the talkative.” (264)

By breaking the quote from Charles Edward (“Remember,” . . .), Brown directs readers to think back and recall for themselves just what had happened. The speaker, Peggy, calls upon the reliability of the reader rather than invoking her own reliability. The reliability of readerly activity is further emphasized with the rest of Charles Edward’s quote. By pointing out the imminent end of the novel (“. . . next week will see us out . . .”), Brown draws attention to the placement of the chapter and the uncontrollable nature of the entire project. Some characters themselves openly acknowledged the difficulties of serializing a series of monologues. Mary Shipman Andrews’s Small Boy, for example, highlights the problem of orderly narrative by opening his monologue with a couple of rambling anecdotes. It takes a couple of paragraphs before the Boy catches himself: “Golly, I forgot. Lorraine said she’d cut down the cookies if things weren’t told orderly the way they happened. So I’ve got to begin back” (241). Much like Andrews’s Small Boy, the authors of The Whole Family seemed to have, for the most part, assumed that the narrative breaks in their stories disrupted a fiction world that was necessarily linear. Whatever coherency was to be achieved through the chaos of multiple voices could only be achieved by invoking a sense of linear order instead of simultaneous consciousness. It is clear from the above that the construction of a collaborative serial, such as The Whole Family, was faced with certain unique structural challenges; whatever cohesion was to be achieved would necessarily have to overcome temporal and authorial breaks. It is perhaps with that in mind that Jordan and Howells decided to organize The Whole Family with separate points of view in each chapter, thus highlighting the very multiplicity of the project that was to define its coherency. Yet, when Edith Wyatt’s first draft of her chapter supposedly written by the Mother abandoned the first person monologue form which the other chapters had followed and instead employed a series of letters written by a number of different characters to the Mother, she was nearly dismissed from the project. Not only were there severe objections to her writing, but also her attempt to further the idea of multiplicity amidst controlled consciousness was met with horror.16 Wyatt defended her draft by arguing that the Mother was so selfless she would naturally be continually


thinking of other people. Using letters the Mother had received to express the Mother’s point of view would be the ultimate testament to the Mother’s selflessness. Judging from Wyatt’s responses, Jordan seems to have complained that Wyatt had broken from the basic format or premise of the book as a series of monologues. This hardly seems fair, since Howells had never really set up any precedent. His own opening chapter was written in the voice of Ned Temple, a character in conversation with the Father of the Family. Howells’s projected vision of the Family was predicated upon viewpoints from unexpected vantage points. Yet, Jordan had evidently directed the rest of the chapters to be in monologue form; in breaking from this premise, Wyatt created a serious problem which Jordan, as a professional editor would have been especially sensitive to. The selfless consciousness Wyatt was trying to construct would be hard indeed to convey in a serialized novel. Accustomed as they were to internal interruptions, audiences may not have been ready—at least according to Harper’s Bazar, for interruptions that occluded the fundamental structure of the work. Understanding that coherency in a novel was predicated upon assumptions which made allowances for internal interruptions does not mean that audiences wouldn’t have been disconcerted by a stream of consciousness or even an epistolary novel. Quite the contrary—exactly because the serial was a familiar cultural phenomenon, adherence to the conventions of serialization was expected. The Whole Family appeared at a point in which the serial novel in America had almost disappeared. Although the serial form had been the ubiquitous literary genre of the nineteenth century, taking on a serial novel for a long period of time was a risky venture that the magazine industry was increasingly less willing to embrace. If a novel went on too long for a publisher’s taste, it was hard to cancel without irritating readers. Furthermore, the 1891 copyright law which required American publishers to pay British authors for their works also meant that the practice of pirating lengthy British novels to fill a periodical’s pages for years at a stretch was no longer a lucrative trick. Publishing short stories, which required less immediate outlay and less long-term risk, became the norm for early twentieth-century magazines. The Whole Family was truly a product of the end of the serial era. Thus, although The Whole Family appeared at a moment in which a coherent state was not solely defined by a bound volume with continuous pagination, the alternating points of view which made up The Whole Family, pushed the serial structure form to its limits. Moreover, as Edith Wyatt’s experience testifies, it challenged a general consensus that variable viewpoints within a narrative could only go so far.


Howells, for example, had no particular problem with serialization, having published serially throughout much of his career. But he was nonetheless suspicious of an audience’s unlimited ability to absorb chaos. In a lecture of 1899, Howells told of how a young lady once wrote to him that she was reading several novels simultaneously in serial form as well as reading several novels from the circulating library. Although she seems to have told him this for comparative purposes (she liked his, “above all”), Howells did not embrace the chaos as a testament to the young lady’s juggling ability. I thought it was very kind of her, and I could not help wondering what the inside of her mind could be like. But the mind of youth, before the world has yet filled it, is hospitable to many guests, and perhaps with all the people of all those stories in it, the mind of this young lady was still tolerably empty. (“Novel-Writing” 11)

Howells granted that it was probably better to read many serials simultaneously than to not read novels at all, but he had a rather low assessment of that kind of audience. Howells compared the empty-minded young lady with another one who read through his novels only for the “love-parts.” Whether or not this is misogyny on Howells’s part or a general disdain for people who skim, we cannot know. But he certainly was suspicious about the people who chose to focus upon multiple and simultaneous narratives. Even if Howells raised an eyebrow at the idea of simultaneous narratives, it was clear that they sold and sold well. And therefore, not only would the audience for The Whole Family have been perfectly at ease with controlled interruptions, but also the very discreet nature of the project lent itself to such a medium. If the challenge posed by a serial novel was to be original and compelling enough to retain long-term interest despite interruptions while also being formulaic enough to ease audiences over the rough patches around temporal interruptions, The Whole Family met that challenge with aplomb. Leaving the Family The great charm of The Whole Family lies in its self-referential nature. Almost every character takes time to muse upon his or her own status as a character and such reflections indicate a variety of understandings about textuality itself. As critic John W. Crowley argues, The Whole Family “strains against its own inscription in the codes of popular romance” by repeatedly calling attention to its own fictionality (109). He sees this


pattern as “a conspiracy of the literary order to keep the novel in place within conventional boundaries” (109). Crowley’s point is that the metafictional aspects and the often coy references within the text to its status as a collaborative novel draw attention to the inevitable failure any text will have in defying its own limited status, even while bravely trying to assemble itself collectively.17 I agree with Crowley’s point that the metafictional aspects of The Whole Family necessarily comment upon the idea of fiction itself, but the ultimate effect of self-referential moments in The Whole Family is not to highlight its failure but is to, in yet another manner, highlight how coherence demands visible scar tissue. As Mark Currie has laid out in his examination of metafiction as a genre, there are three basic problems in the very idea of metafiction, which make it difficult to talk about. To begin with, if metafiction is defined as fiction which is self-conscious, metafiction thus presumes a kind of self or agency for a text which many contemporary critics are not willing to allow authors, much less texts, to have. How can we claim self-consciousness for The Whole Family? If it is conscious, can’t it make that claim for itself? Second, if it is able to make such a claim, it must therefore be aware of itself as metafiction: a concept that falls into a spiraling logic and renders the idea almost meaningless. And most difficult of all, in my mind, is imagining metafiction as a literary object, which can, as Currie writes, “perform a critical function” (1). There is, therefore, a profoundly disturbing illogic in metafiction. The Whole Family, by invoking metafiction on a number of different levels, normalizes such illogic in the name of coherence. This has the convenient effect of normalizing other “illogics.” Hence the self-referentiality in the novel comes across as no stranger than the fact that several authors collectively wrote the novel. As critic Patricia Waugh has argued, metafictional novels imply conventional forms in order to force a reader to “draw on his or her knowledge of traditional literary conventions when struggling to construct a meaning for the new text” (42). In this case, The Whole Family masquerades as a singly authored novel, while making sure everyone knows it is only wearing a costume. Cyrus Talbert, the Father created by Howells, defended the propriety of placing his daughter’s wedding announcement in the local paper. He pointedly remarked “I consider the reader of the Banner a part of the family” (29). This decisive pronouncement, which ends the opening chapter, sets the stage for exploration throughout the rest of the text as to where the family does indeed begin or end. As John Kendrick Bangs’s Son-in-Law discovers, establishing familial parameters is a


formidable task. He remarks: On the whole I am glad our family is no larger than it is. It is a very excellent family as families go, but the infinite capacity of each individual in it for making trouble, and adding to complications already sufficiently complex, surpasses anything that has ever before come into my personal or professional experience. (124)

When these types of quasi-independent reflection occur, and the novel is rift with them, they are not merely defying the parameters of the story and making modest claims on readerly attention. Instead, these moments force upon us what seems to be an inventive artistic vision of a limitless text. In its concern for defiance of narrative limitations and its attempt to expand its narrativity into the infinite world of symbolic meanings, this attention to metafictionality induced by multiple authorship nonetheless reveals a desire for coherence. Even at their most expansive, the reflective metafictional moments ultimately need to reassert meaning as relational. Meaning demands context and framing. In order to break boundaries the text needs to recognize that there are boundaries at all. Thus, when Charles Edward, the Son created by James, muses upon his disaffected state, his thoughts demonstrate a threefold process. His sly reflections draw attention to his individual position among relations, his status as a fictional character, and finally his status as part of an inescapable whole: The aspects of our situation multiply so in fact that I note again how one had only to look at any human thing very straight (that is with the minimum of intelligence) to see it shine out in as many aspects as the hues of the prism; or place itself, in other words, in relations that positively stop nowhere. I’ve often thought that I should some day like to write a novel; but what would become of me in that case—delivered over, I mean, before my subject, to my extravagant sense that everything is a part of something else? (167)

Charles Edward is able to speculate about expansion of subjective existence. He imagines an individual experience able to “shine out” in “relations that positively stop nowhere.” When Charles Edward queries: “What should we do if we didn’t hold out, and of what romantic, dramatic, or simply perhaps quite prosaic, collapse would giving in, in contradistinction consist for us?” his answer is implicit (147–148). The infinite potential of such an expansive vision is thwarted, like metafiction itself. This meditation leaves the reminder that once denied parameters, individuality and meaning cease to exist.


To what does this metafictional conceit lead? Assessing the work as a text that concerns itself primarily with defying its own parameters is all very well, but the metafictional attempt to defy narrative conscriptions engages issues of coherence and integrity. By repeatedly calling attention to its own status as a composite text, each character/chapter/moment/ text actually asserts its own independence, its own subjectivity. By openly musing upon the interaction of roles, Van Dyke’s Friend of the Family, for example, valorizes his own existence as a separate consciousness. The Friend of the Family describes the Father’s approach to composition: Cyrus had a late-Victorian theory in regard to the education of children, that individuality should not be crushed . . . [thus] . . . each child had a secret illusion of superiority to the parental standard, and not only made wild dashes at originality and independent action, but at the same time cherished a perfect mania for regulating and running all the others. (296–297)

But even while this musing promotes the Friend as an outside, omnipotent viewer—someone who is individual enough to escape the text and make clever observations about everyone else’s failed attempts to escape from relational definitions—it simultaneously reasserts his own parameters as part of a contingent reality. Metafiction in a collaborative text is an extreme case of extension and inward collapse. The parameters of the text will draw even the most independent aspect back in. If an individual’s chapter is invariably drawn back into a fictive world, then so, we are forced to realize, will any bid for independence. Every voice, every word, and every image in the text is relational. Just as the writers cannot escape their status as collaborator, so can the mechanisms of the text do nothing but remind us that they are meaningless without the relational trajectory of meaning that readers give them. Forced to be especially aware of the infinite or especially aware of the threat posed by an untrammeled text, the metafictional moments in a collaborative text necessarily reassert textual parameters. Literature as practice necessitates an examination of it as responding thematically and stylistically to the specific set of problems surrounding its construction at a given time. The Whole Family presented a complex interplay among thematic and stylistic elements, all of which grapple with questions about production and result. The self-reflexive aspects of The Whole Family are the supreme manifestation of this. These moments function as a response to the collaborative idea itself and its attendant anxieties. Collaboration highlights the exchange and motion that characterizes literature and art; it highlights the shifting meaning of


symbolic forms. But by doing so it also implies that such shifts are graspable and manageable, indeed part of an organic whole. Metafictional musings embedded within any text imaginatively extend the parameters of a text, but only inasmuch as they remind the reader that it is indeed a text they are reading. Metafiction does not succeed in allowing unfettered imaginative expansion. Critic David Lodge sees metafiction as a technique that allows modern writers to express their unease at being weighted down by literary antecedents (207). When a text is commenting upon its own fictionality it is, by extension, commenting on the idea of fiction itself, its own history. This history might be the millions of books that have preceded it, or as in the case of a chapter in The Whole Family, it might be a very immediate predecessor that seems especially threatening to textual authority. Thus, it should not be surprising that metafictional techniques mark The Whole Family’s production. When self-conscious asides appear in a collaborative text they quite effectively disarm criticisms by anticipating them. These asides are part of a concerted effort to strengthen connections within the text. When the Grandmother in Mary Heaton Vorse’s chapter observes that “Elizabeth Talbert is one of those women who live on a false basis,” the reader is reminded that the entire novel is structured around the question of the validity of individual interpretations and the relationship of individual interpretations to “the real” (68). Was Aunt Eliza really vain or were men continually after her? There is never a definitive answer. The proposition that events are inseparable from their interpretations is thus enacted on a number of textual levels. Since metafiction is essentially a “borderline discourse” informed by fictional and “real” discourse, and making the boundary itself the subject of issue, it highlights the fundamental premise of The Whole Family; that there is a blurring between reality and representation and that this blurring is what coherency is all about (Currie 2). In the private correspondence of many of these writers, there is evidence to suggest intense engagement with the question of textual parameters and how the parameters could frame or define coherency. Many of The Whole Family writers, for example, quite consciously referred to themselves as their characters. Van Dyke wrote to Jordan, “. . . if the Friend of the Family comes to town next week, Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, will you take tea with him?” (Letter to Jordan, 31 Dec. 1907). The familial identification was even a comfortable move for critics: “. . . out passes Mr. Howells in the middle of a sentence, with a mild glance of wonder at the gay figure which brushes by him


and gains the middle stage,” wrote the Nation’s critic who then extended the image by remarking: “This is Miss Wilkins, who has conceived the old maid aunt as a belated siren, and so plays her” (“Current Fiction,” 3 Dec. 1908, 553). Not surprisingly, when discord arose, the temptation to translate it into familial terms was overwhelming. Jordan wrote in Harper’s Bazar that one participant threatened “If—brings about any more complications, I shall complain to father!” (“With the Editor” 1248). Invoking Howells, the Dean of American Letters, as patriarchal arbiter was hardly facetious. Even though Jordan overruled him after he urged her to not publish the Freeman chapter (“Don’t, don’t let her ruin our beautiful story,” he implored) his opinion still held weight for the other writers (qtd. in Three Rousing Cheers 264). “What will Mr. Howells say?” exclaimed Van Dyke in horror after reading the Freeman chapter (Letter to Jordan, 27 Aug. 1906). But the tensions that ran through the familial relationships in the story do not mirror a simple pattern in which the lesser-known writers were cringing under the reputations of the better-known ones. As we have seen, Cutting had tried to work her lesser status to her own advantage in bargaining. And Phelps, for one, was quite open about her dislike of James’s chapter. “I have read Mr. James’s chapter. I think it long and heavy” (qtd. in Three Rousing Cheers 277). Fissures ran along a variety of fault lines; fissures marked out by the metafictional moments in the text. The collaborative endeavor forced writers to rethink and assert their respective positions both artistically and professionally. Self-pronounced “Realists,” such as James or Howells, both of whom had crafted elaborate literary philosophies regarding the responsibility of a text to reflect the real, were in a position of participating in a project which in its very form, repeatedly called attention to itself as an artifice. The writers who had literary loyalties elsewhere (such as Henry van Dyke, who was known for his genteel fiction and criticism) had also to deal with a form that defied strictures romantic or even modernist.18 For whatever genre The Whole Family might fit into, its authorial conceits would undermine its own status. As a venture, The Whole Family was successful in the fundamental goal it set for itself. By mirroring “the laws of fiction and life,” as the North American Review had commented, The Whole Family defied categorization in its variable views on just what those laws might be. Although Howells might rail at its failure, and James describe himself as “very red in the face” at having participated, the text itself demonstrates a witting interaction between artifice and truth telling (Letter to Jordan, 2 Oct. 1907). The self-referentiality that characterized The Whole Family lent it an air of bemused indifference. It called attention to the “artificial” nature


of the project. Implicitly, it relaxed any claims The Whole Family might have had to being great art. The Whole Family “knew” it wasn’t great art. Yet, the impulse to referentiality is perhaps the clearest evidence we have for why the turn of the century saw such a flurry of collaborative novels. The Whole Family’s very foolishness, its very unreal nature, made a statement by default about the nature of the real. Although, The Whole Family was not a project that had pretensions to “realism” per se, it was the product of a time period in which questioning the value and nature of the real dominated literary culture. The writers who sought to make apparent their presence in the text implicitly underscored what they saw as their very real labor that had composed The Whole Family. Fits and Starts: Collaborating in the Real One of the traits most noticeable in texts traditionally grouped together as case studies of American Realism is their focus upon the presence of the writer. Howells’s novels are rift with writer protagonists (Bartley Hubbard in A Modern Instance (1882), Basil March in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), etc. . . .), as are stories by Sarah Orne Jewett, Jack London, Hamlin Garland, and many others. Although this observation has spurred many reflections upon the cause, Amy Kaplan’s argument in The Social Construction of American Realism is especially compelling because she notes how these depictions enact the inherent contradictions in so much realist rationalizing. She notes that to position oneself as a writer of realist fiction implies that one has special access to the real. The prevalence of author/protagonists in realist fiction is a claim to referentiality that exposes both fictionality and a truth of fictionality— indeed a reality of the fiction of representation. Writing may create fictions, but it is, itself, real. This understanding of the referentiality of realist writing at the turn of the century is relevant to understanding yet another aspect of collaborative fiction.19 As we have seen, the metafictional musings throughout The Whole Family served to first assert individual subjectivity and then reassert the supremacy of meaning as inevitably relational or connected. In collaborative texts, even those such as The Whole Family that made few claims to seriously engage with representations of the real, the very selfconsciousness of the text served to incorporate the reader into the text and hence make the text entwine itself with a kind of readerly reality. For Howells, this reality was defined by its activity. A realist, to Howells, would find inspiration “wherever men are at work, from wherever they are truly living” (“Editor’s Study” 825). As Kaplan explains,


this kind of attitude equates reality with work “which is viewed not simply as an occupation but more importantly as a system of value which privileges industriousness and self-discipline as the basis of communal life” (Kaplan 17). In his famous essay “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” Howells exulted that “It ought to be our glory that we produce something, we ought to feel the tie that binds us to all the toilers of the shop and field . . . as a mystic bond uniting us to Him who works hitherto and evermore” (430). Howells both sacralized and normalized the labor of writing by comparing it with the labor of humanity and the labor of God. Siting labor at the foundation of reality means that art that had pretensions to the real could not be static. Movement might ultimately make up a coherent whole, but the realist commitment to conveying that activity means that a whole is incomplete without recognizing its internal construction. In most cases, the realist commitment to recognizing labor took the form of focusing upon the lower classes (such as in the works of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, or Abraham Cahan) or focusing upon the idea of class structure itself (exemplified perhaps by Edith Wharton). As a work that depends upon representing activity as production, The Whole Family shares a characteristic that shows evidence of itself as a product of writers engaged with questions about realism. It both commodifies and makes real its own self. As commodity, though, wouldn’t a text be more appealing to a consumer if it were whole and hid the traces of its own production? The answer to that question lies in a consideration of the fragmented nature of the text and how such fragmentation was related to its period of production. Peter Conn, in The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898–1917 (1983), constructs his entire study of turnof-the-century American culture on the premise that “a profound internal dialectic” marked an era which contained a “cultural contrariety of unusual intensity” (1, 5). For Conn, this contrariness ran through everything. The dialectic he saw marking out the era was essentially an engaged acknowledgment of a kind of structured cultural fragmentation. The neatness of Conn’s divide has been challenged by writers such as Kaplan who asks, “Is realism part of a broader cultural effort to fix and control a coherent representation of a social reality that seems increasingly inaccessible, fragmented and beyond control?” (8). Can Kaplan’s question legitimately be posed to the collaborative projects of the period? I would think not. Collaborative texts were not a broadbased cultural exploration into the nature of art and life, in the way that realism was imagined to be. Admittedly, as Michael Davitt Bell has outlined in The Problem of American Realism (1993) realism was so


variably invoked and inconsistently defined that it is almost as difficult to assess what it was not as much as what it was. Throughout the critical consensus, from Walter Berthoff ’s reflective theory of literary realism which explained that literary realism was awkward because the times which produced it were awkward, to Walter Benn Michaels’s New Historicist position that realist and naturalist literature are actively reshaping history as much as they are reshaped by it, the emphasis has been consistently upon the inconsistent cultural patterns of the period. For writers of the period, the discourse of fragmentation was equally familiar. Invoking social realities as increasingly fragmented and beyond control would have been a common plaint known by all the writers involved in The Whole Family. Normalizing fragmentation was very much what The Whole Family was trying to do. Through a medium that laughs at its own rigidity, The Whole Family authors mapped out a pattern of fragmentation that was neither threatening nor disconcerting. Fragmentation is composed of beginnings and endings that do not fit into preconceived patterns of the totality that they fragment. There must be a shared understanding about how the stream of relationships from one segment of a whole to another connect in order to establish just how a fragment may break up that whole. In The Whole Family, chapters were necessarily unresolved fragments with each writer openly dependent upon the next for development. “I cannot tell how it will end” remarks Freeman’s Aunt Eliza in the final line of her chapter (59). Wyatt’s Mother ends her chapter praying “. . . oh, how I hope everything will come right for them!” (239). These sorts of parting words are more complicated than they seem, for although they mark the ending of a section, they imply that as the story continues, the separate consciousness of the Mother character or the Aunt Eliza character will still exist outside of the text, hovering about it with good wishes. These moments mark closure but also mark continuity. They delineate a fragment and set it apart from the rest but also use the expression of their hopes (such as the final lines of Mary Heaton Vorse’s Grandmother, who remarks, “I shall be sorry for Elizabeth Talbert if she has been making mischief ” (79)) to project their fragment throughout the whole. In light of this, the irresolution at the end of The Whole Family is easier to understand. Van Dyke, who had the unenviable task of finishing up all that had been started did a reasonably good job but left a number of plot lines unaccounted for.20 It is telling, therefore, that Van Dyke found it necessary to have his Friend of the Family remark in the last lines of the novel: “Your father and mother are going to lunch with me at Delmonico’s—but we don’t want The Whole Family” (315).


Even the happy ending of the novel had to call attention to the problems of entertaining a whole. It is a commonplace that realist novels have rotten endings. Not only do the characters tend to die horrible deaths at an alarming rate, but the few who survive are often fated to lives that are banal at best and tragic at worst, even more frequently, tragic in their very banality. Even worse for the critics though, is that the endings seem drawn out, as in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and often have an awkward sense of closure tacked on, as in Frank Norris’s The Pit (1903). Kaplan, for one, explains the infamous endings of realist novels as evidence for their social construction and inherent contradictions. She sees the unresolved nature of these endings as demonstrating cultural desires for clean resolution—that is to say, stilted and gruesome endings not only reflect the true nastiness of the world, but their essentially unresolved nature highlights the fact that the desire for resolution is one of the most “real” things going. Lack of control, she suggests, may or may not be real, but the desire for control, most definitely is. The Whole Family ends happily enough with Peggy married off to her stalwart college psychology professor, Stillman Dane. There are no suicides to speak of and while the future life of the family certainly promises to be banal, there is no implication that this banality is anything to be fretting about. The “tacked on” ending comes off as a nice try and the overall effect of the last chapter is amusing, if uninspired. Yet the messiness of endings in collaborative novels is not just coincidentally a trait of realist texts as well. In both cases, these are narrative articulations of ideological problems. Normalizing fragmentation and highlighting the self-referentiality of collaborative composition were traits shared by many realist texts during the period in which The Whole Family was assembled. The impulses that led to such traits in realist texts were not entirely different from the reasons that led to their appearance in The Whole Family. Most important in understanding the ways in which the seemingly frivolous Whole Family was connected to the realist discourse of writers during that time is the premise that it takes a community of writers to compose a book. No one works in a vacuum and, in its own erratic fashion, The Whole Family’s community of authors demonstrated a truly social construction of reality. Imagining Multiplicity James felt frustrated that much of what he felt had been set up in his chapter was not followed through by other authors. Admittedly, James


acknowledged the inherent unfairness of such an expectation. He wrote “One of course can’t do such a piece at all without one’s imagination projecting a coherent sequel and consequence (to one’s own Part—as if one were to do it all one’s self )” (Letter to Jordan, 18 Feb. 1907). In Henry James and the Experimental Novel, Sergio Perosa notes that in his chapter, James “envisaged and at the same time checked all possibilities” (108). Despite being almost twice as long as any other chapter, in true Jamesian style, very little actually happens to the plot itself. Jordan also felt that a pull to project an individual vision of the whole was inevitable. “When it came to the point of considering the book as a whole, the authors were very much like members of a theatrical cast listening to the reading of a new play. Each judged it from the viewpoint of his own part and each had grave doubts of the abilities of some of his associates” (Three Rousing Cheers 280). This statement, much like that of James, illustrates a valuation of the attempt to control such imaginative projection. The activity of attempting to control one’s own imaginative processes against the monumental draw of a unified, coherent art, was an activity that invigorated, rather than undermined, the final product. Crowley, with retrospective assurance, posits The Whole Family as inscribed “in the margins of pre-modernist discourse” (113). For him the variable viewpoints prefigure modernist experiments in narrative perspectives. While the conjunction of disparate visions is superficially akin to much modernist discourse, I argue that the multiplicity informs coherence but it is the attempt to understand the multiplicity that generates the coherent whole. The competition that energized The Whole Family served to glue it together. In the 1930s, when Jordan told Brown that she was working on her memoirs of The Whole Family experience, the irrepressible Brown suggested “Why don’t you write a parody of what it would have been if H. J. had done it all? . . . I think it would be ‘excellent fooling’ to do it— and might give our own little parochial world a merry moment . . .” (Letter to Jordan, 1930s). To imagine the paragon of artistic unity, the embodiment of the aesthetic vision, intentionally constructing a text that would mock and exploit disjunction and dissonance for comic effect was almost unfathomable. The Nation, for one, fancied that only hypnosis could have led James to such a project, causing him to “produce an excellent parody of himself, as if in spite of himself ” (“Current Fiction” 553).21 For both Brown and The Nation to hit upon the very same joke demonstrates a capacity for imagining a coherent strategy informing a collaborative work. James, of course, was no more


responsible for the totality of The Whole Family than any other writer was, but that is precisely the point. By the end of The Whole Family project, “coherency” could be imagined in other ways. What Brown’s “fooling” presumes, therefore, is a rueful recognition that all were culpable and none were responsible. When Brown described her amazement at the transformation of the apocryphal purple cow from vision to reality, she was expressing precisely the anxieties manifest in varying conceptions of coherence and artistic process.22 Invoking a purple cow as trope for collaborative authorship allowed her to indicate the overdetermined nature of the scheme, while simultaneously lauding the success of the illusion. Being able to imagine a purple cow may have been the trait that enabled these writers to participate in the project, but it was not what drew them to it. In every case, The Whole Family was in keeping with the interests of the authors who participated. While Perosa includes his discussion of The Whole Family in his book on the “experimental novel” and many of the actual authors laughed at the seemingly incongruent gimmickry of the project, The Whole Family did not exist as a novelty project. It was disavowed as such but it could not have come into being if the novelty of it wasn’t a shared value. As we shall see, through the particular examples of James and Freeman, imagining multiplicity was part of an impulse to find new metaphors for intersections as well as differences. Mary Wilkins Freeman in Her Entirety The obsession each of the authors had with picking up loose ends of the plot and pulling it all together reflects an understanding of coherence as accounting for a totality. When Aunt Eliza proved a slippery character to pick up after or even “pack off ” as Brown suggested, differing ideas of coherency began to emerge. Was Freeman, in writing her chapter on Aunt Eliza, hoping to present an insoluble situation or was she hoping for a coherent solution in which the unfettered, unattached aunt could be considered part of a new kind of coherent family? Freeman, who had won a prize for her collaborative mystery “The Long Arm” (1895), was distinctly interested in exploring the ways in which “loose ends are tied up.”23 Freeman recognized the pleasure of the hunt or the search for closure but she did not necessarily write to create pleasure in closure itself. She wrote detective fiction, but it was never as critically or financially successful as her other forms of writing. Freeman’s short fiction drew more upon character sketches and community portraits than it did


to spectacular endings or revelations in the style of Du Maupassant or O. Henry. Indeed, the rubric most of her writing does fall under, that of “local color” literature, is a category that seeks to take the marginal and connect it to a whole. Freeman’s stories never sought to centralize New England or small towns in New England as the embodiment of allAmerican values. What she did do, though, was remind her readers that Metuchen, New Jersey was just as much a part of the total United States as any other place. To be unfettered, isolated, or even unaccountable, did not mean that one did not have a fundamental connection to the whole. After all, Freeman’s character may have been a rival to the young heroine, Peggy, but she was nonetheless irrevocably an aunt. I am not trying to argue that a national literary canon necessarily relied upon local color literature to make up the parts of its whole in the same fashion that shameful and distant family members were figured in The Whole Family. Aunt Eliza doesn’t equal Vermont or even Texas. Yet, the steady concern so many of these writers had with the idea of envisioning just how the idea of a United States might be created went beyond clichés. The consolidation of both gender and class concerns manifested itself in the development of regionalist fiction which itself was predicated upon defining a counterworld—a world which was neither local nor colorful. In the regionalist vision, the female-centered, lower-class society was defined by its difference from the sophisticated, urban (and less feminine) world in which the separation of gender spheres was never in practice as effectively as it was imagined.24 The fact that Mary Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown, Mary Stewart Cutting, and William Dean Howells were involved in The Whole Family together suggests that the questions that led to so much local color writing were not unlike the questions about coherence which led to so much collaborative composition.25 The writers, who wrote or theorized extensively about the connections regional fiction had with a broader concept of American literature, were pursuing questions about the very ability of any individual artist to participate in a broader scheme of defining a national literature. Does the participation of all these local writers render The Whole Family a truly national American novel? The British or European novels of the nineteenth century tended to paint huge scenes of humanity in their works, while American writing of the nineteenth century has commonly been held up as epitomizing individualism. From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Emily Dickinson, from Herman Melville and to Harriet Jacobs, the transcendental loner—the figure who is apart from society has been seen as the unifying trait of American literature.


Perhaps then it is not foolish to see the composite novel, which was a largely American phenomenon, as a specifically American phenomenon. The collaborative novels of turn-of-the-century America forcibly embodied the tensions between wayward, subjective visions and collective, objectified ones. Through her character of Aunt Eliza, Freeman pursued the question of how an independent character might stand in relation to a whole family. In doing so, however, she asked questions about how the very idea of “Whole” was constructed. And however a “whole” might be constructed, as Freeman’s chapter certainly pointed out, it could never be conclusive. Freeman’s chapter, after all, was only chapter 2 out of twelve. It offered up no closure or resolution. Moreover, Freeman’s chapter was infused with contradictions that further elaborated problems inherent in conceiving of a whole in relation to its parts. For example, as her biographer Leah Glasser points out, despite all of her vivacity and freedom, Aunt Eliza “admits that she is not wholly contented” (90). Aunt Eliza muses: I have what is left to me—the little things of life, the pretty effects which go to make me pretty (outside Eastridge); the comforts of civilization, traveling and seeing beautiful things, also seeing ugly things to enhance the beautiful. I have pleasant days in beautiful Florence. I have friends, I have everything except—well, except everything. That I must do without. I will do without it gracefully, with never a whimper, or I don’t know myself. (47)

Aunt Eliza distinctly expresses regret for something. But, as Glasser observes, the “everything” which is missing is left ambiguous (91). Marriage would certainly be a logical candidate for the “everything” Aunt Eliza lacks. Yet, the ambiguity suggests that marriage and the connection it promises to another individual, is not the necessarily or sole interpretation for the missing “everything.” While Glasser argues that what Aunt Eliza does have (moral superiority, curiosity, free will, beauty, etc.) sets her up in contrast to the other characters as indeed possessing “everything,” I argue that Aunt Eliza’s “everything” was deliberately left ambiguous to suggest that the whole—or “everything”—only makes sense when it is considered an open system. For the character of Aunt Eliza, coherence might be uneasy. One lives in the constant state of missing something, of thinking connections to others are not fully realized, but it is that very unconnected state and the contradictory assessments of it, which construct a sort of coherence many of the other contributors to The Whole Family did not appreciate.


This is not because the other participants had a facile view of coherence, or views that did not explore the ways in which coherence might be obtained by breaking, rather than framing, boundaries. If Freeman’s Aunt Eliza had indeed married and created a family of her own, she would have partly broken out of the original “Whole Family,” constructing an overlapping circle of relationships. While Howells seems to have imagined a more closed system, one which would demonstrate how “family ties, which held us very loosely in youth, or after we ceased to be children, are really almost the strongest things in life,” Freeman explored the familial relationship in this novel to conclude that no system is ever as closed or concentric as it may seem (Howells, Letter to Jordan, 6 June 1906). Uneasy Consciousness: The Problem of James When Henry James discussed the crafting of his chapter, he too pursued the idea of concentric circles and breaking of frames.26 He wrote to Elizabeth Jordan: I am deep in The Whole Family—quite up to my neck—and buffeting the flood as best I can. I shall not sink, I shall swim, and scramble out on some coral strand. Also I shall not keep you waiting long . . . . Yet now that I am at it tooth and nail my hopes are high. My difficulty is only, alas, that I verily tend to burst my bonds or my frame; to blow, that is, the roof off the house. But to prevent this uneasy consciousness I should have had to do them all myself! (11 Jan. 1907)

The “uneasy consciousness” which so unnerves James is not simply caused by the limitations of only being able to write one chapter instead of twelve, although that was certainly an issue. A bound consciousness is aware of its roof. That is to say, a bound consciousness is aware of where it itself begins and ends. To be conscious in this manner is to be aware that something exists outside of oneself. While James was clearly irritated by the directions the novel took after his section, his initial participation was nonetheless in keeping with his broader interests in the framing of consciousness, and in authorial control. Just as James had regularly exploited the serialization of his novels for artistic effect, he participated in the collaborative project with an eye to juxtaposing an expansive consciousness with disconcerting breaks and conflicts. James was interested in establishing where the boundaries of consciousness lay for both his characters and his readers in order to better establish how the drawing of that boundary could give rise to


a new kind of awareness. This interest is most clearly evident in his otherwise inexplicable willingness to participate in The Whole Family. During the time he was composing The Whole Family, James was hard at work assembling his oeuvre for the famous New York editions. In his preface to Roderick Hudson (1907), James explains that “really, universally, relations stop nowhere.” The problem of the artist is thus to “but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so” (xv). As David McWhirter notes, this observation sets up a powerful question: “is the circle drawn where relations ‘appear’ to stop? or where the appearance that ‘relations stop nowhere’ is successfully rendered?” (11). The tension of this question and its basically irresolvable quality is manifest in even the small project that The Whole Family was for James during that January of 1907. Sergio Perosa analyzes The Whole Family with an eye to how this “deviation” reveals much about James’s theories of composition. Perosa grants that this “deviation” merits analysis because James’s “deviations are sometimes more rewarding in the insights they offer into his workshop and his craftsmanship than the finished projects” (107). Yet, Perosa, despite a compelling analysis of how James’s interest in representing reality by demonstrating how subjectivity is limited, never extends his analysis. Perosa fails to see that James’s chapter in The Whole Family was a manifestation of his fascination with how to use a literary representation of the self in order to achieve representation of something beyond the self. To begin with, Perosa looks to James’s goals. James wrote “She [Aunt Eliza] is the person, in the whole thing, to have been, objectively, done; Miss Wilkins making her, to my sense, too subjectively sentimental. My own restricted effort, with C. E., was frankly, to objectify them all as much as possible.”27 Perosa argues that James “objectified” The Whole Family “in a typical mixture of subjective statements, characterizing touches, and as little action as possible” (113). Perosa continues: Objectifying was clearly for him a way of showing characters in action according to the guideline provided by a limited, subjective point of view. For James, outward reality could be represented only in terms of a personal vision; but the subjective vision itself, the limited point of view, was not so much an aim in itself as a means to present reality in its objective features. Objectivity was to be reached through the view of the self; his chapter was not only narrated from the point of view of the Married Son, but in the first person. (113)

I find Perosa’s reading of James quite convincing. In his letters to Jordan, James steadily expresses just such a desire for controlling


differing visions in order to—through multiplicity—get at the objectivity that is outside of representation. That is to say, James was interested in being so subjective in his portrayal that he would be objective . . . he would get beyond the boundaries of consciousness. It was in keeping with this idea of getting beyond a single consciousness that James expressed a wish to also write a chapter for Harry Gower, the Engaged Youth. James imagined the Engaged Youth “reporting on C. E. from his view, on all the rest of it, and above all, on the frolic Aunt” (Letter to Jordan, 25 Jan. 1907). Harry Gower represented, for James, a way to multiply attack the objective nature of the story as a whole. Now this is not to say that James simply wanted to create a sense of multiple narration, even though James also expressed a wish to write from the mother’s point of view as well. What was interesting for James was where each viewpoint ended. While Perosa analyzes the interest James has with “objectifying” his representations, Perosa doesn’t push these observations to their fuller implications. In order to get this “objective” reality, the subjective nature of narrative viewpoint must end at some point. Just where and how this line is drawn is the intriguing question. James finds it difficult to control his own desire to “project a coherent sequel” precisely because the end of subjectivity is so hard to imagine. Yet it is that which is hard to imagine, like a purple cow, which so compels James’s experimentation with juxtaposing subjectivities. In short, James was an author concerned with how the consciousness of a character might interact with the consciousness of a reader. If the consciousness of his character was expansive enough, it would seriously threaten the consciousness of the reader. This threat of one consciousness overwhelming another, could create a friction that generates awareness of that which is outside of these two consciousness (the character’s and the reader’s), that is, an objective reality. This led him rather logically to a project which was not merely collaborative, but which lined up so many competing viewpoints. The Whole Family was not merely a series of chapters written by different authors, but was a compilation of first person narratives jockeying for the totalizing authority to define reality. James’s fascination with using The Whole Family to pursue how a point of view could be simultaneously individual and relational emerges in his letters to Jordan. He wrote “I see a thing of the highest value—for the Whole—to have been done, in fine, with the Mother—the Mother on what C. E. has done, the Mother in respect now to Eliza, to Maria, to the Father &c, the Mother above all in respect to C. E. himself


(which his part was all a preparation for ‘leading’ up to the effect of ).” In retrospect, James places the Mother at the center of the Whole, not because of an inherent matrilineal authority, but because her selflessness renders her the best at setting up a totalizing consciousness.28 Despite critical characterization of James as an intensely solitary writer (Perosa, for instance, writes: “He was by long practice and inner conviction a solitary author”), The Whole Family venture seems to have been part of a steady interest in how an artist’s viewpoint was shaped by context (107). Understanding art as the product of a community, and as the product of a cultural context was central to his theories of composition. In his discussion of Hawthorne, for example, James wrote: The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things, of course, have been done by solitary workers but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances. The solitary worker loses the profit of example and discussion; he is less apt to make awkward experiments . . . . (“Solitary Workers” 48–49)

These observations, written in his discussion of Hawthorne in 1879, were not directly in reference to collaborative writing in the sense that I have been employing, and I suspect James was in no way envisioning a project such as The Whole Family in his future. Yet, the awkward experiment of The Whole Family was less experimental than Perosa might think. Indeed, it was perfectly consistent with James’s interests in the mass market, in playful composition, and in the serious probing of how an artist’s viewpoint is necessarily connected to a community. And when James’s most devoted critic, Leon Edel, describes James as “an archsolitary of literature” who “would have regarded collaboration as an abandoning of sovereign ground, the most sacred ground of his life,” Edel too reveals his own lack of sensitivity to the singularly collective nature of turn-of-the-century literary culture (Edel, 318). Toward Closure The Whole Family’s fame rests almost entirely upon the reputation of the contributors, rather than any critical acclaim. Yet the project brought together important ideas, as well as interesting writers, and it is both the friction and the occasional convergence of these ideas that tells us so much about literary culture of the time. From contract negotiations to


retrospective musings, the writers who worked on The Whole Family shared a concern for what they saw as the inherent contradictions of reality. That is not to say, that many, or any, of them agreed about what reality, much less realism, might be: rather, they recognized that through their own juxtapositioning, a shared capacity for imagining a new kind of coherence might be possible. Now, defining coherence as the combination of fragments is not a very exciting metaphor, but the mere fact that they saw such definition as necessary, tells us something. It tells us that the consuming nature of a whole was culturally assumed and that this assumption did not reflect what they saw as their own experiences in the creation of art. Thus when The Whole Family showed its seams in surprising places, it served to make a statement about how the consuming whole might be resisted. Seams and fissures were part of movement, part of the labor of writing. By making writing as active a verb as possible, and by never letting it fall into the past tense, The Whole Family as a text managed to keep moving. Characters could keep discussion going among themselves. By shamelessly calling attention to itself, this collaborative novel asserted its own reality and made that reality one of motion and productive labor. This effect was not part of a calculated effort to overthrow American narrative tradition, but instead was the logical outcome of a conglomeration of authors, all of whom were actively associating and competing with one another. Increasing professionalization meant that authorial identity was tied up into definitions of labor, definitions many of the writers felt uncomfortable about. On the one hand, writers wanted to explain their work and the labor it involved to the general public. On the other hand, the intense privacy and personal nature of writing as craft was still invoked in order to justify older images of the inspired artist as conduit for art. By identifying themselves with their characters, writers suggested that they had “naturalized” the imaginative experience so much that expressing that character’s viewpoint would no longer be so difficult. After all, they “were” that character. The appeal of simultaneously naturalizing the writing process while also professionalizing it was felt by all of The Whole Family authors, and through their chapters as much as through their other writings, we can see how collaboration allowed for such contradictions to circulate freely. Finally, if collaborating was an attempt to test out a shared identity, it had the striking by-product of also asserting the individuality of each participant. Asserting an intensely subjective viewpoint, as each of them had to do in their chapters, became the means to assert a shared one. Thus, the professional effect of shared association allowed each to become, in his or her respective chapter, more of an artist.

Conclusion

An achievement in art or in letters grows more interesting when we begin to perceive its connections; and, indeed, it may be said that the study of connections is the recognized function of intelligent criticism. —Henry James, “Pierre Loti” 1888

When Edward Everett Hale was editing Old And New, a short-lived religious and literary magazine, he decided to run Six of One by Half A Dozen of Another, a collaborative novel of 1872 that was really an affair of his whole family. His sister Lucretia was his first recruit. They had already written A Struggle for Life together in 1861 and she later used her collaborating skills to write An Uncloseted Skeleton (1887) with her friend, the novelist Edwin Lassetter Brynner. Edward Everett Hale was also able to call upon the capable hands of his brother-in-law, Frederic B. Perkins and his own wife’s aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe. It is likely that Six of One by Half A Dozen of the Other made an impression on young Robert Grant, who was working at the time as an assistant editor to Edward Everett Hale. The “Lend a Hand” movement, a Christian social project launched in articles appearing in Old and New, may have also made its mark on the young Grant, for traces of Lend-A-Hand solutions to labor problems can be found in Grant’s novel of 1886, Face to Face. Grant, as we know, went on thereafter to lend a hand in The King’s Men (1884), a collaborative text which worried intensely about just who was obliged to help whom. “The fashion of collaborating,” wrote the Critic in 1884, “seems to be spreading” (“The Lounger” 113). Indeed, and pursuing an analysis of it leads to a practice not unlike the “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. For just as a reference to any movie cast mentions someone who worked in a movie with someone who (eventually) was in a movie with the actor Kevin Bacon, the connections among collaborators were clearly reinforcing and circular. The bound 1884 Scribner’s edition of The King’s Men featured advertisements for other popular books of that year and it quite logically


promoted a new collection of stories by the genial New Yorkers, Brander Matthews and H. C. Bunner, titled In Partnership (1884). Brander Matthews, who later turned down an invitation to participate in The Whole Family (1906), did nonetheless collaborate with various other people, including F. Anstey and Walter H. Pollock. Walter H. Pollock wrote with Walter Besant, who was, of course, a collaborator with James Rice and a good friend of Brander Matthews. F. Anstey went on to participate in the sensational Fate of Fenella created by A. Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and a British conglomerate of mystery writers in 1892. Matthews found himself publicly joined with Grant again in 1901 when The Homecoming of Jessica (1901) was published. This volume was not a collaborative text, but it did consist of stories by only three writers: Brander Matthews, Robert Grant, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. The juxtaposition of Matthews and Freeman was nothing new. They never wrote together but Matthews was once placed second in a national mystery writing contest while Freeman’s collaborative story, “The Long Arm,” came in first. Robert Grant, like Matthews, was pestered by continuous invitations to participate in group schemes. He, too, had been on Howells’s short list to join The Whole Family. Grant never joined the “family,” perhaps because he hadn’t been happy with his experiences in A House Party, a collaborative text of 1901, where he worked with Paul Leicester Ford, the young novelist and scholar who had, with youthful brio, once sniffed that Matthews’s prestigious Author’s Club was filled with nonentities. A House Party also brought The Whole Family’s son-in-law, John Kendrick Bangs in contact with Octave Thanet (Alice French), who later served as understudy for Edith Wyatt in The Whole Family disputes. John Kendrick Bangs was, by 1901, one of the foremost American Humorists. He had first come to national prominence, though in 1884, when fresh out of Yale he had been hired to edit Life, the magazine Brander Matthews and his friend John Ames Mitchell had first talked about starting in 1883. Matthews pulled out from editorial involvement with the scheme but he was one of Life’s earliest regular contributors and his drama reviews appeared alongside satirical essays and stories by John T. Wheelwright, Robert Grant, and J. S. of Dale (Frederic Jesup Stimson). Owen Wister, who graduated from Harvard in 1882, drew upon the tradition of Frederic Jesup Stimson’s Guerndale to also write a novel of Harvard life: Philosophy 4 (1903). Wister hadn’t moved in the Lampoon circles of Wheelwright, Grant, and Stimson, but before he became known for his popular western, The Virginian (1902), he too had participated in A House Party. Wister’s contribution to A House Party was

conclusion / 169

merely a short story, “Mother,” designed to fit into a framing conceit. Yet, his participation at all was rather remarkable considering how bitter Wister had been over his involvement with a previous collaborative text, A Week Away from Time (1887). Perhaps he joined the party because of the familiar crowd. Sarah Orne Jewett had contributed a chapter to A House Party and if there had been cautionary tales circulating about the horrors of collaborative writing, Jewett would surely have heard about them from her friend, the writer and artist Sarah Whitman or from Jewett’s long time companion, the literary matriarch of Boston, Annie Fields. Fields and Whitman had, with others, come together for A Week Away from Time in 1887 and while Owen Wister might have regretted his participation in that project, the other six writers seemed to have enjoyed themselves. And Jewett, whose name never appeared on the list of contributors to A Week Away from Time, nonetheless confided to friends that she was “in the secret” and “had much to do with it” (qtd. by Blanchard 225). Although she never admitted it, Jewett may well have written the one chapter in A Week Away from Time that was never attributed to anybody. There was, during this time, a lot of congenial writing going around. The circles that these paragraphs sketch out demonstrate how certain sites of connection (Harper’s, Harvard, Nook Farm, The Century Club, Life) and some less predictable sites (The Papyrus Club, The John Boyle O’Reilly Club), brought together a rather uncertain cultural coalition. There were tremendous affinities among these writers, to be sure, but there were such shocking and substantive differences that it is difficult to imagine any such coalition being anything other than short-lived. How could one categorize Henry James and, the undoubtedly charismatic but poetically challenged, John Boyle O’Reilly, under the same rubric? Neither of them ever collaborated with one another. Yet, for writers even as disparate as James and O’Reilly, Stimson and Phelps, or Matthews and Freeman, we have seen connections. Often these connections were created by personal affiliations or political interests (The Young Men’s Democratic Reform Club of Boston comes to mind). Sometimes they were the product of publishing decisions (say, binding together short stories by Matthews, Grant, and Freeman). And these connections often resulted in, as much as they were created by, collaboration. Authors banded together during this period to reap the benefits of a collective and professional identity, while concurrently maintaining the cultural capital accorded the romantic authors of the early nineteenth century. By focusing upon both the literary communities which created


these works (The Authors’ Club, The House of Harper’s, Nook Farm, The Papyrus Club) and also upon the differing perspectives on labor which various writers (Mark Twain, Henry James, Mary Wilkins Freeman, William Dean Howells, Mary Stewart Cutting et al.) brought to their projects, we can see that consolidation of cultural power often allowed writers to reap the advantages of a collective marketplace identity without sacrificing the patrician ethos of nineteenth-century amateurism with all of its attendant advantages. The implications of collaboration’s private history for our understanding of literary professionalism and its resultant cultural reorientations of the Gilded and Progressive Eras are many. The growing pluralist conception of modern cultural politics as a conglomeration of separate social languages owes more than a nod to these curious amalgamations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. If the fractured self became paradigmatic of the modern era, efforts to assert a singular ego by proclaiming it in a collaborative venue seem distinctly fin-de-siècle. Collaborative writing was, paradoxically, an assertion of integrity. Now, as this turn of the century looms and concerns for the integrity of collective authorship become more prevalent, the collaborative projects of an earlier time seem distinctly familiar. In 1876, Roberts Brothers, the Boston publishers, began to issue volumes in a series known as “The No Name Series.” Each book was to be written by a prominent novelist and would be published anonymously in order to pique the public’s interest and cause curious readers to flood bookstores with demands for the anonymous texts. The series did indeed succeed in getting favorable publicity. The New York Graphic wrote: “The name business in literature is terribly overdone.” Now readers would be forced to “trust more to their own taste and judgment, and rely less on reputations” (qtd. by Stern 376). Harper’s expanded upon this point to explain: “The idea is a good one, not only because it will pique the curiosity of the reader, but also because it will put the writers on their mettle to do their best, and absolutely prevent that trading on reputation which is the greatest vice of American litterateurs” (qtd. by Stern 376). The No Name Series lasted from 1876–1887, and although it marketed a corporate identity, its much advertised family of anonymous but assuredly talented and famous writers meant that its corporate identity was metaphorically predicated upon a secret, but genuine, group of fine writers hiding in the back room. This was not the kind of corporate identity predicated by many Dime Novel collections, for example, in which the name of an author tended to be of far less marketing value

conclusion / 171

than the name of the Dime Novel publisher. What made the No Name Series possible was also what led to the rise of relentless collaborating in the late nineteenth century: the explosion of the literary marketplace meant simply that there were many more writers available to commodify. Collaborative novels, like the No Name Series, were testament to the cultural anxieties over “the greatest vice of American litterateurs”: the trade in reputations. Along with the rapidly growing number of American authors during the late nineteenth century came a concomitant confusion over the trade in authorial names; confusion not merely for the public, but for the authors themselves. The collaborative novels of this period gave readers ways to organize their own classification systems and reassure themselves that they knew (and, in the case of the guessing contests, could identify) the writers which a variety of cultural gatekeeper had given the imprimatur of being the best. The Whole Family, for instance, was “the greatest, grandest, most gorgeous group of authors ever collaborating on a literary production” (Jordan, Three Rousing Cheers 258). For the writers, facing a marketplace that simultaneously demanded and belittled their names, writing together gave them community and it gave them clout. It strengthened their sense of themselves as professionals and refined their definitions of just how that professional field might be bounded. Each writer was, of course, motivated by a different set of motivations to participate in collaborative fictions. Yet, their work consistently illustrates the paradox represented by the self in culture. What is it to be contextualized? What is it to be equal? And how does writing alone and in groups, allow one to articulate those questions? The collaborative models of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century offer a rich collection of answers. While the conceptual challenges which collaborative writing poses to a faith in the single author are many, ultimately collaborative authorship from the turn of the century recalls us to the very real social world in which writing actually got done.


APPENDIX Author List

The Gilded Age (1873) Mark Twain Charles Dudley Warner The King’s Men (1884) Robert Grant John Boyle O’Reilly Frederic Jesup Stimson John T. Wheelwright Brander Matthews’s Collaborators: Walter Herries Pollock H. C. Bunner F. Anstey George Jessop

The Whole Family (1907–1908) Mary Shipman Andrews John Kendrick Bangs Alice Brown Mary Stewart Cutting Mary Wilkins Freeman William Dean Howells Henry James Elizabeth Jordan Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Henry Van Dyke Mary Heaton Vorse Edith Wyatt


Notes

Introduction 1. For one opinion of Rice and Besant’s respective contributions to the writing project, see Boege. For a more complex evaluation, see Eliot. 2. Marriage is surprisingly uncommon among acknowledged writing teams, although unacknowledged literary collaborations are doubtless common among married couples. Indeed, the scholarship that has been directed towards unearthing unacknowledged women as partners to male authors (usually a husband or lover) has likely spurred much of the contemporary feminist scholarship upon the dynamics of acknowledged collaborations. The metaphor of marriage is hard to escape in these discussions. For one example, see Marriage of Minds: Collaborative Fiction Writing, a how-to-book about collaborative fiction writing, written by a married couple. This book chooses to use the metaphor of marriage and courtship throughout their manual about writing—a writing contract is described, for instance, as a “prenuptial agreement.” See McGoldrick and McGoldrick. 3. For an introduction to the field of collaboration in science fiction, see Pronzini and Malzberg. 4. Wayne Koestenbaum’s study, Double Talk, is to date the primary study of the theoretical implications of exclusively male collaborations. He limits his analysis, however, to fin-de-siëcle British literary collaborations and the nascent rhetoric of homosexuality. “Bluntly stated,” he argues, “men who collaborate engage in a metaphorical sexual intercourse, and . . . the text they balance between them is alternatively the child of their sexual union, and a shared woman” (3). This argument, although useful, does not adequately address the many other impulses surrounding the construction of collaborative texts in different eras and situations. Koestenbaum does not address the differences between collaboration that is publicly performed and that which is privately practiced. This conflation confuses the implications of such practice for the broader issues surrounding authorship as a profession which are the implications I am most concerned with in this study. 5. For an overview of issues pertaining to collaborative authorship in a wide variety of fields, see Harsanyi. 6. No Pulitzer Prize, for example, has ever been awarded to a collaboratively composed novel or poem. Out of the 139 prizes the Modern Language Association has awarded to scholarly studies in the humanities, as of 1999, only seven were ever given to multiple-authored texts. All of these winning texts were awarded prizes in the area of educational pedagogy and the teaching of literature.

176 / notes

1

Where the Twain did Meet—The Gilded Age of American Authorship

1. While satire and humor had long been a staple of subscription publishing (the Connecticut Wits frequently published their work by subscription in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century), full-length novels are not to be found on subscription lists until The Gilded Age. And so while the claim of The Gilded Age to be the first novel ever to be written and sold by subscription seems suspicious, I have not been able to find any informed challenge to this fact. See Farren for a thorough overview of eighteenthcentury subscription publishing. 2. Bryant Morey French’s interest in Twain’s contributions are the chief example of this, but scholars such as Hill, Leisy, and Martin have also worked with manuscripts, letters, and vocabulary analysis to establish precisely what they see as Twain and Warner’s discrete work. 3. Preface, vi. This citation and all citations that follow are to the Oxford edition of The Gilded Age, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin unless otherwise noted. 4. On 30 April 1871 Twain wrote his brother Orion: “Joe & I have a 600 page book in contemplation which will wake up the nation” (Fisher and Frank 386). 5. Bryant Morey French is most responsible for the extended treatment of The Gilded Age as a parody of the novel form in general. Susan K. Harris persuasively argues that Twain used sentimental discourse to contain what he felt was an increasingly threatening and uncontained female character. 6. Twain evidently regretted the joke, for in 1880 he wrote in A Tramp Abroad that he had “a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the author considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment,—but if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment” (146). 7. This was so true that Twain and Warner themselves lost track of their characters. Twain and Warner added an afterwards at the end of The Gilded Age apologizing for having “lost” Laura’s father and that whole sub-plot somewhere along the way. “Perhaps some apology to the reader is necessary in view of our failure to find Laura’s father. We supposed, from the ease with which lost persons are found in novels, that it would not be difficult. But it was; indeed it was impossible; and therefore the portions of the narrative containing the record of the search have been stricken out. Not because they were interesting—for they were; but inasmuch as the man was not found, after all, it did not seem wise to harass and excite the reader to no purpose” (575). 8. This joke may have been carried out to far better effect in works such as Puddn’ head Wilson in which the headings are so vibrantly funny and telling that they almost supercede the story. Gregg Camfield observed in the Mark Twain Forum: “Twain and Warner were parodying the prevailing practice of beginning chapters with quotations. They upped the ante, so to speak, in showing off worthless erudition.”

notes / 177 9. Jeffrey Steinbeck discusses the labor-saving techniques Twain developed or tried to develop and terms them “The Mark Twain Machine.” 10. The Atlantic Monthly recently published a good account of this scheme as well as the long undiscovered manuscript of Twain’s story itself. See Blount’s two essays and Twain’s “A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage.” 11. Mark Twain’s writing was often marked by heartache and trauma—often causing him to set aside projects for years. This occurred most famously with Huckleberry Finn. He began it in 1876 and didn’t finish it until 1887—taking a seven-year hiatus. 12. Twain did assert his rights to a dramatization based upon Sellers. A decade later he persuaded William Dean Howells to work with him on a play about Sellers, “Colonel Sellers as a Scientist.” This was a flop but the play inspired Twain to compose, in 1891, The American Claimant, a sequel to The Gilded Age that revolves around Colonel Sellers’s claims to a British earldom. When approached to work onThe Whole Family, a collaborative novel of 1906, he refused. See chapter 4 of this book. 13. Occasionally, the title pages would get even more specific. On the title page of Roughing It, the American Publishing Company issued a statement reading “Not for Sale in Book Stores.” See Blanck. 14. While Twain later had great problems with the way in which The American Publishing Company conducted business, there is no evidence that this particular practice bothered him, as long as he was aware of it. There is certainly evidence that he was aware of subscription book “dumping.” In a letter to James R. Osgood concerning sales of The Prince and the Pauper, written on 12 February 1882, Twain wrote: “. . . it might be a good thing to cut under the unfaithful gen’l agents by shoving books into the stores at a little cheaper terms than they can afford—doing this either openly or clandestinely as shall seem most judicious” (qtd. in Blanck 185). By 1885, Twain’s patience with forgeries and unauthorized sales ended and he sued a Boston bookstore for selling sub rosa copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Thus, when he was aware of it, he didn’t object, but when it was done without his knowledge, he would sue. See MacDonnell. 15. In 1894, Twain’s publishing firm, Charles L. Webster & company declared bankruptcy. Although Twain was not legally liable for all of the firm’s considerable debts, with his wife’s strong encouragement he worked furiously for the next four years to pay back all of the firm’s debts in full. His fascination with the ethical responsibility in discharging debts that had been taken on by an incorporated body and which clearly had never been intended to fail, illustrates clearly his dedication to resolving the problems of effects irrelevant of intentions.

2

The King’s Men, or a Parable of Democratic Authorship

1. Some representative observations from this review are as follows: “Mr. Grant’s [work] is but a puppet show, in drapery and setting that look faded and distorted when thrown into such imperative comparison with

178 / notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

things as they are . . . all the people talk alike. It would be something if they were clever, but the author throughout is in the same strait as his own good hero: ‘The wished-for epigram failed to respond to his need.’ . . . The scene with the crucifix in Ethel Fielding’s house is sacrilege—nothing less.” (“Recent Novels,” rev. of An Average Man). The St. Botolph Club was Boston’s answer to New York’s exclusive Century Club. The St. Botolph Club was designed to advance the contacts for gentlemen with an interest in literature and the arts. As for the contract: although the copyright for the entire novel was held solely by Robert Grant, his memoirs indicate that the Boston Globe’s assignment fee was $5,000 to be split four ways. Selling the royalty and re-publication rights to Scribner’s for $5,000 dollars more meant that, presumably, each writer received a total of $2,500 for his role in The King’s Men project. Unlike the others, Wheelwright pursued a quiet career in law and public service for the rest of his life. He wrote from time to time on historical issues and, not surprisingly for a literary collaborator, he went on to found an exclusive Boston club, The India Wharf Rats. Stimson’s decision to use the pseudonym, J. S. of Dale was actually part of an elaborate legal joke. Although he incorporated the name into the story of Guerndale, “J. S. of Dale” was actually the name of a character taken out of Blackstone’s Commentaries, perhaps the single most important law book in the history of British and American jurisprudence. As Stimson later recalled, this was not a very effective means of preserving his identity, since the joke allowed him to be “rapidly traced” (My United States 114). A “John Stiles of Dale” was repeatedly invoked in William Blackstone’s textbook as a hypothetical landowner who needs have his immensely complicated family tree sorted out for inheritance purposes. The difficult life led by J. S. of Dale was often remarked upon in parodies of the omnipresent Blackstone and since every law student or scholar in the US would likely have been familiar with Blackstone’s Commentaries, the joke would have been easily recognizable. This proved so very true that most appropriately in 1890 another collaborative serial was run by the Boston Globe that featured a chapter supposedly written by P. T. Barnum. It is unlikely that Barnum or any of the other celebrity contributors actually wrote the sections attributed to them, but the mocking hyperbole and invocation of sideshow hucksterism only underscored the obvious fraud. See John L. Sullivan, Pauline Hall, P. T. Barnum, Inspector Byrnes, Howe & Hummel, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Mary Eastlake, W. H. Ballou, Alan Dale, Maj. Alfred Calhoun, Nell Nelson, and Bill Nye, “His Fleeting Ideal; or, A Romance of Baffled Hypnotism.” Historians often refer to upper class Bostonians of the late nineteenth century, especially those with prestigious pedigrees, as “Brahmins.” As Ronald Story explains, the term “Brahmin” “at times connotes an ineffectual literati, alienated from the economic barons of the realm. But by 1870 the term meant the rich and well-born as well as the cultivated; was used interchangeably with ‘upper-class’; and was a sign, accordingly, of distinctiveness as well as attainment, the achievement of a degree of secularity, cultivation, and arrogance that struck observers as noteworthy, if not unique” (xiii).

notes / 179 6. The authors received $5,000 for the work, which was said to have increased the circulation of the Boston Globe, in which it appeared serially, “to the extent of thirty thousand subscribers” (Roche 241). 7. O’Reilly in particular was sympathetic to the ideas of social reform promoted by Edward Bellamy although he found them ultimately paternalistic. See O’Reilly, editorial response to Looking Backward. 8. Stimson became a big player in the Massachusetts Democratic organization throughout the early twentieth century and into the progressive era. He was eventually awarded an ambassadorship to Argentina as reward for his lifetime service to the conservative democratic Mugwump cause. John T. Wheelwright was a member of the Young Men’s Democratic Club of Massachusetts which historian McFarland links to Wheelwright’s later appointment as Massachusetts Gas and Light Commissioner and Assistant Corporation Counsel of Boston. See McFarland for how Grant, Wheelwright, and Stimson perfectly fit the profile of the essential Mugwump in every respect. 9. Another factor often attributed to the defeat of Blaine was an incident in which Blaine received a Protestant clergyman who complained to him about the Democratic Party as being one of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Blaine did not publicly refute this statement, and the Democrats seized upon the insult to attract offended Irishmen to Cleveland. See McFarland, 28. 10. O’Reilly loathed Blaine for many reasons, but he was particularly riled up about what he saw as Blaine’s shoddy support of Irish–American interests— a betrayal made particularly bitter because of Blaine’s own Irish heritage. Blaine had served as the Secretary of State under Garfield and O’Reilly, and as a good Irish–American Democrat devoted many editorials to accusing Blaine of utterly ignoring the rights and interests of Irish Americans during his tenure. 11. At the publication of The King’s Men in 1884, O’Reilly was forty, Stimson was twenty-nine, Wheelwright was twenty-eight, and Grant was thirty-two. 12. The combination of classic old boy networking, the Irish Political Machine, and the commission-style governance which was a hallmark of Mugwump politics, enabled Grant, Stimson, O’Reilly, and Wheelwright to all progress rapidly through various offices of Civil Service. The close association all four of these men had with the Mugwump politicians served them well. Grant served as a private secretary for Mayor Samuel Green, was later appointed to the city’s Water Commissioner, and eventually obtained his position as Judge of Probate Insolvency of Suffolk County through the influence of William Russell, the ultimate Mugwump politician. (Russell was a Harvard man who went on to become prominent as a Reform Democrat in both local and state politics, eventually serving as Governor of Massachusetts from 1890–1893.) In addition to Wheelwright’s early position with the public utilities office, he was later appointed chairman of the Board of the Massachusetts Gas and Electrical Light Commission in 1893. Grant wrote: “It was through Boyle O’Reilly’s and Charles H. Taylor’s generous solicitation from Mayor O’Brien that I was appointed a Water Commissioner in 1888 in place of Horace T. Rockwell, who had resigned. The success of this gracious advocacy, actuated by liking for me and my

180 / notes

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

writings and sympathy because of my father’s failure, found me a grateful but astonished office-holder.” (Grant, Fourscore 172.) Reports vary regarding the circulation figures, but during the 1870s the circulation was certainly over 40,000 and one scholar reports that the paper seems to have been aiming at an audience of 100,000. For a history of the Pilot, see Lord. For specific treatment of this period and O’Reilly’s immediate successor on the Pilot, see Lane, 341–363. Although O’Reilly’s death was termed as “heart failure” by the Catholic Archdiocese and by his friend, James Roche, as a “tragic accident,” John Ibson argues in his dissertation that “O’Reilly’s death was not only a suicide, but was commonly known to have been one.” He claims that O’Reilly’s death was the consequence of an “intolerable tension” arising from an agony that was culturally specific. According to Ibson, O’Reilly “was not enticed by the promise of America into assimilation and success; he was intimidated by American cultural pressures into submission” (111). O’Reilly’s vision was that, although men had a right to cooperative associations and collective bargaining, both the brains of and the risks taken by management meant that the stratified profit distribution was, ultimately, right and just. In one editorial he proclaimed “Any system of arbitration which will tend to bring about a fair settlement of the respective claims of labor and capital to the combined fruits of both will be a blessing to both. The present system is only a makeshift, seldom satisfactory to either and almost never so to equity” (“Hard Times for Labor”). O’Reilly’s demands for compulsory arbitration and his call for the creation of a special mediator were consistent with his dedication to advancing collective identities in such a manner as to not crush what he saw as essential American individualism. Although many of these reviews may have been puff pieces, the 1886 edition of In Bohemia features an advertising supplement on its end pages, promoting Moondyne. In the advertising supplement, they quote sixteen different positive reviews appearing in a broad spectrum of newspapers and periodicals. Thomas Brown is likewise troubled by O’Reilly’s refusal to explore Irish–American assimilation or the immigration experience in his literary works: “O’Reilly remained silent about that which he knew best. Had it been otherwise, he might today have a place in the body of American literature” (90). There are many examples of Brahmin Boston’s view of O’Reilly as the token Irishman. In one such instance, Oliver Wendall Holmes congratulated O’Reilly for having delivered his poem, “America” at the June 1882 reunion of the Army of the Potomac. Holmes wrote “I am thankful you are with us as a representative Americanized Irishman” (qtd. in Roche 214–215). Stimson reports that before international copyright law, “American letters at the time—. . . were commercially, perhaps, at their lowest level. The Franklin Square and other cheap paperback editions pirated everything English for ten or twenty cents; and so the American public deemed it extravagant to pay $1.25 for an American novel bound in cloth. So when

notes / 181 Guerndale sold its poor four or five thousand in six months, it was deemed a huge success” (My United States 94). Stimson collaborated with O’Reilly twice: once with The King’s Men and for a second time with the far more successful King Noanett. King Noanett, which was a best-selling book of 1896, was published three years after O’Reilly’s death but Stimson had planned the book out with O’Reilly during their many canoe trips together (Hart 310). Stimson announced his debt to O’Reilly in King Noanett’s dedication which read, “To the Memory of / John Boyle O’Reilly / This Book / so often planned together and now executed/ Alone.” This poignant dedication was almost unnecessary, for even without the dedication, the story itself clearly shows the O’Reilly influence. One can sense some of O’Reilly’s vivid personality throughout this work. As the reviewer for the Nation noted, in reference to the character of Miles Courtenay, “His delightful ‘Irishry,’ as his friend puts it, keeps one recurring to the dedication,” and although the reviewer complains of the hokey historical dialect, he admits that “. . . it has been a hard task to keep a wild Irishman strictly antique in his language, and it is not surprising to find him ‘muchly tickled,’ . . . ” (“Recent Novels” rev. of King Noanett 400). 20. One example of this would be how he dealt with O’Reilly’s death. Stimson was an especially close friend and after O’Reilly’s death, Stimson channeled his grief in the best manner a Boston Brahmin could: he helped John Wheelwright and others found a John Boyle O’Reilly Club dedicated to “bring the Puritan Yankee into sympathy with the Irish Catholic” and carry forth the ideals of cross cultural ambassadorship. O’Reilly’s friends did this because “until the Catholic and Protestant, Irish and Italian and Yankee, can get together and work for the perfect commonwealth, Massachusetts will not show the way this century to the perfect State, to civic government, as she showed it in the last century and the two before, to civic liberty” (My United States 116). This impulse was still persuasive almost forty years later, when a reviewer of Stimson’s memoir commented that the motivations that founded a John Boyle O’Reilly Club were precisely what was needed to cure society’s ills. “The truth is that the best thing for Boston would be to have all the most exclusive clubs and organizations take in the best of every race of strangers within the gates, so that the community, if it must divide at all, should divide on the horizontal lines of merit and not vertical lines of race” (Nutter 373). Under such a system, Boston’s touted meritocracy could continue to operate with the assurance that all concessions to justice and democracy were made. 21. “The book well supplies a need with that class who do not care for an exhaustive or very technical treatment of the subject.” (Rev. of Hand-Book to the Labor Law of the United States 127.) 22. Grant’s Face to Face (1886) was likely a reference also to Edward Everett Hale’s novel of 1878, Back to Back, which dealt with how the surplus of labor and the surplus of capital in America must be brought together by men known as “capitalizers.” Hale saw these “capitalizers” as middlemen, able to solve America’s social and economic woes. Grant worked with Hale during the late 1879s on Hale’s magazine venture, Old and New and was doubtless familiar with the issues Hale was promoting during this time.

182 / notes 23. Or at least The King’s Men project had many professional benefits. Grant recalled that “. . . my correspondence with Charles [Scribner] concerning The King’s Men was the initial step in an association of nearly fifty years” (Fourscore 172). 24. The King’s Men may have inspired other ventures as well. Stimson wrote his close friend Barrett Wendell in 1879 with a reference to his composition of an unpublished story written in collaboration with Wendell’s wife, Edith. “I put a burlesque finish on the cooperative novel and sent it to Edith from Cambridge. The plot was ingenious enough to deserve more elaborate development, which you can give it, if you like. Why don’t you do literary work together? Her conversations would be admirable, & you might stick in an occasional epigram” (Letter, Wendall papers).

3 Clubbing, Conversing, and Collaborating: Brander Matthews as Professional Man of Letters 1. H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) satirist, iconoclast, journalist, critic, essayist and editor of The American Mercury from 1923–1933; Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) often termed the “spokesman of his generation,” known for his radical politics, pacifism, and anti-sentimentalism; and Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955), novelist and critic who wrote many novels about marriage, about the experience of Jews in America, several studies of modern drama, and various sociological studies of Zionism. 2. Twain’s speech continued: “You can curse a man’s head off with that name if you know how and where to put the emphasis . . . To have overcome by the persuasive graces, sincerities and felicities of his literature the disaster of a name like that and reconciled men to the sound of it, is a fine and high achievement; and this, the owner of it has done. To have gone further and made it a welcome sound and changed its discords to music, is a still finer and higher achievement; and this he has also done. And so, let him have full credit. When he got his name it was only good to curse with. Now it is good to conjure with” (“Dinner Speech” 269–270). Like Twain, Brander Matthews had selected a name for himself that he had not been born with. Brander Matthews was christened “James Brander Matthews” in 1952 but dropped his first name early in his career. He also occasionally wrote drama criticism under the pseudonym “Arthur Penn.” 3. After quoting Matthews’s fulsome praise for Cooper, Twain opens his scathing essay with “It seems to me that it was far from right for. . . the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, . . . to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it.” See “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 180. 4. There was great inconsistency about the use of an apostrophe “s” at the end of Author’s Club, even in the publications authorized by the club. I have standardized all references to the club throughout this essay. 5. Matthews was a Simplified Spelling proponent and irritated many of his readers with idiosyncratic spellings in his novels and essays. This particular

notes / 183

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

hobbyhorse prompted Rudyard Kipling to exclaim in irritation: “WHY do you spell after the manner of the Savage and the Insane?” (qtd. in Barrineau 16). Reviewers of Matthews’s books frequently commented upon his idiosyncratic spelling. For example, the reviewer for Yale Review wrote: “Mr. Matthews is interested in Spelling reform, a subject that singularly agitates the reformers, while leaving the rest of the world cold. In his otherwise well-printed pages the reader stumbles on ‘thru’ and ‘thoroly.’ . . . ‘thoroly’ seems to need reform as much as the word it is destined to replace” (Perry 644). Much of this scholarship or the omissions and inaccuracies in the scholarship were called to my attention by Lawrence J. Oliver’s discussion of Matthews’s status in the literary canon (xiv–xv). I would like to call attention here to the great debt my essay owes to the careful research and analysis found in Oliver’s writings. Lewis recounts meeting an unidentified Brander Matthews-ish Professor who was a famous member of the American Academy of Letters and a much published essayist of the old school. Lewis recalled with disdain, “from these essays I learned, as a boy, that there is something very important and spiritual about catching fish, if you have no need of doing so” (Lewis 10). Brander Matthews may well have been on the committee to award the Pulitzer Prize in the 1920s. Membership was kept secret but the members were largely drawn from Columbia University. Lewis, who had turned down the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 as a public show of disgust for the values and taste promoted by the Pulitzer committee, would likely have known Brander Matthews and his circle quite well. If not Matthews, another candidate for inspiring Lewis’s disgust might be Robert Grant, who served on the Pulitzer committee for several years, wrote books on fishing as well as collaborative novels, and embodied a Bostonian version of the professional man of letters. Trilling reports that “Lloyd Morris, who as a student knew Matthews . . . gives us the engaging picture of the shining coupe drawn by two fat horses in which the professor was driven twice weekly to the University . . .” (Trilling 24). The original seven were Matthews; Gilder (1844–1909); Charles de Kay (1848–1935), a poet and art critic; Noah Brooks (1830–1903), who although originally a newspaper and magazine journalist also wrote a popular boy’s book, The Boy Emigrants (1877), a local color collection, Tales of the Main Coast (1894), and various historical studies; Edward Eggleston (1837–1902), best known for The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), also wrote many melodramatic western romances and historical texts and was a notable lobbyist for American Copyright issues; Lawrence Hutton (1843–1904), a New York drama critic who wrote over fifty books on travel and the theater; and Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908), a well known genteel essayist and poet as well as a successful Wall Street broker. Membership records are not entirely clear but Harriet Beecher Stowe was the only woman awarded honorary membership before 1912 and I have not seen any other indication that women were included in the club. Explicitly

184 / notes

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

ethnic names, with the exception of the Norwegian–American writer Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, are notably absent from the Author’s Club roster and there seems to have been little internal or external effort to alter this state of affairs. Prominent members may have lent their name to the Club, but it is hard to say if they regularly attended meetings. Although most mentions of the Author’s Club testify to the lively encounters of prominent writers, I have come across at least one account that was not impressed. After attending one of his first gatherings of the Author’s Club, popular novelist Paul Leicester Ford wrote in a private letter to his mother “. . . it seems to me that the men were for the most part of small calibre minds, and there were painfully few men one had ever heard of before. But that may be my painful ignorance of the new poets and authors” (Ford). The Program Committee Action plan of 1919 is quoted in Richard Fine’s excellent overview of the early history of the Author’s League of America in James M. Cain and the American Authors Authority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 62–68. Sir Walter Besant (1836–1901) was knighted in 1895 for his work as a social reformist and philanthropist rather than for his popular fiction. One of the most prolific writers in Britain at the time, Besant wrote dozens of successful novels in collaboration with James Rice and on his own. He wrote several works in collaboration with Walter Herries Pollock, a British writer who also wrote collaboratively with Brander Matthews. As a tireless advocate of the rights of authors, Besant founded the British Society of Authors in 1884 and served as its first chairman. His observation about his regret at having continued to write seven more books with Rice is in Sir Walter Besant, Autobiography, 189. Eliot surmises that the publishing house’s steady “under-valuation of Besant’s literary property” left “a bitter taste in the author’s mouth and was to lead, indirectly and as a form of psychological compensation, to Besant’s campaigns for improvements in the financial conditions of authorship. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that Besant inaugurated what was to become the Society of Authors only a year after his long apprenticeship to Rice had been dissolved by the latter’s death in 1882” (Eliot, “Unequal Partnerships” 74). For information about the history of the Society of Authors, see Bonham-Carter. Although not within the scope of this study, it is intriguing to note that Eugene Scribe (1791–1861), the nineteenth-century French playwright who regularly wrote in collaboration and is discussed by Matthews in “The Art and Mystery of Collaboration,” also spearheaded an attempt to found an Authors’ Association in nineteenth-century France. See Vessillier-Ressi, 26. There was never much doubt in anyone’s mind about who was the dominant partner in the Rice, Besant relationship. Who was to be the sole author, however, was frequently an issue. As Eliot points out, this confusion resulted in some rather absurd situations. In 1882, Rice and Besant’s own publisher advertised All Sorts and Conditions of Men as written by Besant at the top of the advertisement and as written by Besant and Rice at the

notes / 185

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

bottom of the very same page. See Eliot, “His Generation Read His Stories” 26. For further discussion of James’s theories of authorship in the context of professionalization see Culver, 114–136; Anesko; and Jacobson. For a thorough discussion of the “Art of Fiction” debate, see Spilka 101–119. Matthews was evidently pleased with his collaboration essay for his thoughts on the subject were reprinted in a number of different forms. It originally appeared in an 1890 issue of Longman’s magazine, was reprinted in his 1891 collection of collaborative fiction With My Friends: Tales Told in Partnership, and was later included in his 1896 essay collection Aspects of Fiction. None of this, of course, is surprising for an author who also wrote an essay titled “On the Right of an Author to Repeat Himself ” (1926). One of Brander Matthews’s closest friends, H. C. Bunner (1855–1896), edited and wrote for Puck magazine through the 1880s and early 1890s, establishing himself as one of the foremost American humorists of the late nineteenth century. “Edged Tools, A Play in Four” was first published by Brander Matthews in 1873 but he seems to have re-written it as a short story with Pollock. This was a reversal of the more common technique of taking collaboratively written plays and “novelizing” them under the name of only one author. Matthews wrote an essay on the subject, of course, titled “The Dramatization of Novels” (1894). Matthews’s other collaborator, George Jessop, created several novels out of the plays he and Matthews had written in collaboration. Walter Herries Pollock (1850–1926) wrote with Matthews and Besant and also collaborated with Andrew Lang on a satiric novel titled “HE” (1887) mocking Rider Haggard’s “SHE” (1887). F. Anstey was the pen name of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856–1934), a highly successful British author of fantasy fiction for adults and children. George H. Jessop (d. 1915) also collaborated with Matthews on two plays, On Probation and A Gold Mine. Jessop, who was an extremely prolific author in his own right, individually wrote a novel, Judge Lynch (1889), based upon On Probation. For bibliographic information about Matthews’s extensive personal library and book collections, see Matthews, The Bookshelf of Brander Matthews. Matthews, “The Art and Mystery,” 170.

4

Veribly a Purple Cow: The Whole Family and the Collaborative Search for Coherence

1. William Dean Howells suggested a number of authors who did not end up participating, some of whom were especially appealing candidates because they had previously participated in collaborative projects, among them— Robert Grant and Brander Matthews. (See chapters 2 and 3 for further discussion of these writers.) Matthews declined, explaining that he was too busy to participate. No extant letters report Grant’s reaction. See Matthews, Letter to Elizabeth Jordan, 12 June 1906.

186 / notes 2. James was particularly disgusted with Edith Wyatt’s chapter. He wrote Jordan: “the Mother treated as she actually stands seems to me—I confess to you brutally—a positive small convulsion of debility!—without irony, without fancy, without anything! Does your public want that so completely lack-lustre domestic sentimentality?” James, Letter to Jordan, 13 Aug. 1907. For a fuller discussion of James’s letter and its possible implications, see discussion in Crowley. 3. This collection featured chapters by Paul Leicester Ford, Bertha Runkle, John Kendrick Bangs, Robert Grant, Frank R. Stockton, Octave Thanet (the pseudonym of Alice French), Sarah Orne Jewett, Ruth M. Stuart, Owen Wister, Mrs. Burton Harrison, Stockton, George Washington Cable, Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts. 4. Promotional advertisement for Evalyn Emerson, Sylvia: The Story of an American Countess, located on the back pages of A House Party. 5. It was not uncommon for magazines of the 1890s and early 1900s to use contests to encourage participation in the magazine. See Garvey. 6. The one exception to this editorial silence on the subject occurred when Jordan was clearly unable to resist responding to “S. F. of Brooklyn” who wrote: “even the most careless reader must recognize your first chapter as the work of Henry James.” The editorial reply was “Our correspondent has handsomely cleared herself of the suspicion that she may be a ‘careless reader.’ The first chapter of ‘The Whole Family’ was not written by Mr. James.” See H. B. A. “As to ‘The Whole Family,’ ” letter, and Jordan, “As to ‘The Whole Family,’ ” reply. 7. Although she signed most of her correspondence with her married name, Ward, her professional writing was published under her maiden name, Phelps. 8. Although her The Whole Family chapter was written alone, previous collaborations with her husband had been relatively successful. Youth’s Companion selected their collaborative book, A Lost Hero, as the best juvenile story of 1890. In that same year, the husband and wife team collaborated on “The Master of the Magicians,” a story about the Biblical Daniel, and on Come Forth (1891), a novel based on the story of Lazarus. 9. The letter is signed Katharine Riggs, but her professional writing was generally published under “Kate Douglas Wiggin.” Despite her hesitations about this project and about joint composition in general, Wiggin had previously published a collaborative novel, The Affair at the Inn (1904), written with Mary Findlater, Jane Findlater, and Allan McAulay. This group later composed another collaborative novel, Robinetta (1910–1911). 10. The Genteel Tradition is a reference to George Santayana’s understanding of the American literary tradition as having split artistic life into a feminine and masculine mentality. The supposed feminine mentality was idealistic and controlling and prevented the vital energies of the masculine author from being expressed. See Cyganowski. 11. In her autobiography, Jordan reports that Joseph Pulitzer heard her observe that at Harper’s Bazar she “felt as if I had died and gone to heaven” (Three Rousing Cheers 166). Pulitzer was angry at her ingratitude and Jordan claims he cut her out of a $10,000 legacy because of her remark.

notes / 187 12. Mary Stewart Cutting (1851–1924) published a series of short story collections about married life in a small New York suburban town, including Little Stories of Married Life (1902), Little Stories of Courtship (1905), and Just the Two of Us (1909), perhaps reflecting a continuing interest in the differences between individual and collaboratively shared experiences. 13. Freeman later publicly retracted this support presumably because of what she saw as the unseemly activities of labor unions. She wrote: “In view of the recent labor doings, I have changed my mind absolutely about the advisability of Affiliation of the Author’s League with the Federation of Labor, and wish to go on record as opposing any such affiliation.” This may have been surprising for those who had been familiar with her labor novel of 1901, The Portion of Labor, but the Author’s League affiliation was a tremendously controversial issue and there was intense lobbying from many interested parties. See chapter 3 for a discussion of the Author’s League of America. In 1919, Freeman again voiced her frustration at how writing wasn’t popularly understood: “Writing is very hard work, as you know, although nobody among the laboring ranks, or the resting ranks, thinks authors labor.” Freeman, Letter to The Author’s League of America, June 1916; Letter to The Author’s League of America, Nov. 1916; and Letter to Fred Pattee, as qtd. in Kendrick 353, 355, 384–385. 14. Regionalist writer, Alice French, who seems to have been contacted to replace Edith Wyatt whose first draft had been found wanting, expressed her initial enthusiasm by writing, “I like the company and I like the idea . . . Please send the proofs as soon as you can. I want to get acquainted with my husband and children.” French added a postscript explaining, “I feel quite in the mood for the character; because I am just helping my younger sister to be married in June and I am to have the wedding” (Letter to Jordan, 14 March 1907). Edith Wyatt’s second draft was found to be acceptable and Alice French did not end up participating in The Whole Family. French (1850–1934), who often wrote under the name “Octave Thanet,” was a minor local colorist who published stories largely set in the west often focussing upon labor issues. 15. Jordan’s memoirs include letters that were considerably edited or altered from the original but in this case the original Deland letter is not in the Jordan Papers at the New York Public Library, so Jordan’s version is the only source for these quotations. 16. Frederic Duneka, the general manager of Harper and Brothers, wrote Jordan: “The chapter of The Whole Family is simply awful—confused, dull, stupid, vapid, meaningless, halting, lame, holding up action and movement of the story which has run along splendidly thus far” (Letter to Jordan, 19 Dec. 1906). 17. The term “metafiction” is generally agreed to have been coined by William Gass (Gass 25). 18. Van Dyke’s reputation as spokesman for genteel writer was seared into posterity by Sinclair Lewis, whose 1930 Nobel Prize acceptance speech attacked Van Dyke for having stymied American literary achievement by his genteel posturing.

188 / notes 19. June Howard has devoted an entire book to The Whole Family and how it illuminates cultural values particularly pertaining to understandings of the family and literary realism. See Howard. 20. The most egregious example of this occurs when Elizabeth Jordan hints that the Daughter-in-Law, Lorraine, had some sort of emotional entanglement with Lyman Wilde, an old suitor of Aunt Elizabeth’s. This rather disturbing and incongruous plot line is never resolved. 21. Although The Whole Family was the only truly collaborative venture Henry James is known to have participated in, he lent his name to “The Ghost,” a play largely written by Stephen Crane in 1899. This play, for which there are no extant copies, was supposedly written in collaboration with James, H. G. Wells, Rider Haggard, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, Robert Barr, H. B. Marriot-Watson, Edwin Pugh, and A. E. Mason, but was most likely written only by Crane who asked the authors “to write a mere word—any word ‘it’, ‘they’, ‘you’,—any word and thus identify themselves with this crime.” There is some indication that James once considered collaborating with his good friend, Constance Fenimore Woolson, on a play. Unfortunately, James burned most of their correspondence after she died in 1894 and hence there is little evidence the play was ever written. See Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years. At this same time, around 1892, James wrote a short story, “Collaboration,” which concerns the relationship between a French poet and a German composer who both reject their families, their lovers, and their national loyalties in order to compose an opera together. Whether or not James had seriously considered collaborating with Woolson, he was certainly interested in various permutations of the idea. See Aswell. 22. Brown is referring to the popular nonsense rhyme of 1895 by Gelett Burgess: “I never saw a purple cow, / I never hope to see one; / But I can tell you, anyhow, / I’d rather see than be one.” Its very adaptability led Burgess to later write “Ha, yes, I wrote the ‘Purple Cow’—/ I’m sorry now, I wrote it! / But I can tell you, anyhow, / I’ll kill you if you quote it” (24–25). Brown’s quotation of Burgess was especially apt, for Burgess also wrote a short story titled “A Collaboration; A Story.” 23. In 1895, Freeman wrote “The Story of Sarah Tompkins” for the Bacheller, Johnson & Bacheller Syndicate’s detective story contest. Her friend, Joseph Chamberlin, suggested that they use the Lizzie Borden murder case as a model and he evidently revised the “Sarah Tompkins” story so that it could fit the technical requirements of the contest. They split the $2,000 prize for the story which, once revised, they called “The Long Arm.” See The Infant Sphinx, 122. 24. For further discussions of how the autonomy of the regional enclave is imagined only as a response to a variety of broad social determinants in addition to the gendering of separate spheres, see Brodhead and Donovan. 25. Several writers who did not end up participating but were invited to do so were local color writers, among them: Brander Matthews, who wrote New York City local color stories and also criticism on the genre of local color; Alice French, who published extensively under the name of “Octave

notes / 189 Thanet”; Hamlin Garland, who wrote a short story collection, MainTravelled Roads (1891) as well as Crumbling Idols (1894), the famous series of essays reflecting upon the role of veritism and regional writing in American Literature; and Mark Twain, whose many novels, especially Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), were essentially local color fiction. Indeed, almost every writer involved in The Whole Family could be considered a writer who at least dabbled in local color writing. This testifies not merely to the broad definitions of the category and to the incredible popularity of the local color form, but to the proclivity of local color writers for collaborative projects. Frances Hodgson Burnett, the well-known author of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), was invited to join the Family. “Fluffy” Burnett, even though she was a good friend of Jordan’s, declined because she felt the project was too American. “it would be an impertinence for an outsider to meddle with it” Burnett, Letter to Jordan, 20 Aug. 1906. 26. Leon Edel noticed a certain similarity between the narrative problems of The Whole Family and the problems James remembered having had with The Awkward Age. Edel cites the following passage from James’s preface to vol. 9 of the New York Edition: “I remember that in sketching my project . . . I drew on a sheet of paper . . . the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of rounds disposed at equal distance about a central project. The central object was my situation, my subject itself, and the small rounds represented so many distinct lamps, as I liked to call them, the function of each of which would be to light up with all due intensity one of its aspects.” See Edel and Powers, eds., Howells and James: A Double 32, fn4. 27. He refers to his character, Charles Edward, as CE. He refers to Aunt Elizabeth as Aunt Eliza (Letter to Jordan, 25 Jan. 1907). 28. James elevated multiplicity to such an extreme to see if it might be possible to get beyond the subjectivity of viewpoints. It is especially ironic, therefore, that he utterly failed to appreciate Wyatt’s first draft of the infamous “Mother” chapter. Wyatt too, with her epistolary framework, had attempted to construct the mother as an amalgam of other points of view. It seems likely, though, that this was just too formulaic and forced an approach for James to accept as genuinely objectifying a character.


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bibliography / 203 ——. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Wilson, Christopher P. “Unleavened Bread: The Representation of Robert Grant.” American Literary Realism 22.3 (1990): 22–23. Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–488. Wister, Owen. Letter to Owen Jones Wister. 29 May 1887. Qtd. in Darwin Payne. Owen Wister—Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985. 97. ——. Mother. New York: Dodd Mead, 1907. Wyatt, Edith. Letter to Elizabeth Jordan. 14 Nov. 1906. Jordan Papers. New York Public Library. Yancey, Kathleen and Michael Spooner. “A Single Good Mind.” College Composition and Communication 49.1 (February 1988): 45–62. Ziff, Lazar. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation. New York: Viking, 1966.


Bibliography of Collaborative Fiction

The following works illustrate well the perils of categorizing collaborative fiction; for while some are anonymously written, others are written under composite names. This list in no way pretends to be exhaustive but it should at least give a sense of the variety and number of collaborative fiction published by Americans at the turn of the century. Several British, Irish, and other international authors may have slipped into this list, often as the result of having participated with an American colleague. A number of more contemporary works are included because they were used elsewhere in the text as a point of contrast or reference. The Secret of Table Rock. A Composite Tale, Written by Members of the Winter Evening Reading Club, of Saint Albans, Vermont. Saint Albans, VT: Roy A Brush, 1904. Adam, G. Mercer and A. Ethelwyn Wetherald. An Algonquin Maiden— A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada. Montreal, Canada: John Lovell and Son, 1887. Askew, Alice and Claude. The Shulamite. New York: Bretano’s, 1907. Austen, Edward J. and Louise Vescelius Sheldon. The Lost Island. Cincinnati, OH: Fells Fund of America, 1892. Authors, Several American. Tales of Glauber-Spa. Vol. 1. New York: J. and J. Harper, 1932. 2 vols. Baker, Robert and John Emerson. The Conspiracy. New York: Duffield and Company, 1913. Balmer, Edwin and Philip Wylie. After Worlds Collide. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1933. Bangs, John Kendrick and Charles Raymond Macauley. Emblemland. New York: R.H. Russell, 1902. Bangs, John Kendrick and F. D. Sherman. New Waggings of Old Tales. By Two Wags. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1888. Banks, Charles Eugene and George Cram Cook. In Hampton Roads. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1899. Barr, Nevada, J. D. Robb, Nancy Pickard, Lisa Scottolin, Perri O’Shaughnessy, J. A. Jance, Faye Kellerman, Mary Jane Clark, Marcia Talley, Anne Perry, Diana Gabaldon, and Val McDermid. Naked Came the Phoenix: A Serial Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Barr, Robert. The Mutable Many. 2nd ed. New York: Stokes, 1896. Becke, Louis and Walter Jeffery. The Mutineer. A Romance of Pitcarin Island. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1898.

206 / bibliography of collaborative fiction Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. Ed. John L. Thomas. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1888. Bentley, Charles S. and F. Kimball Scribner. The Fifth of November. A Romance of the Stuarts. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1898. Bickford, Luther H. and Richard Stillman Powell. Phyllis in Bohemia. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone, 1897. Biggers, Earl Derr and Robert Wells Ritchie. Inside the Lines. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1915. Binchy, Maeve, Anne Havery, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, Kate O’Riordan, Deirdre Purcell, Clare Boylan, and Emma Donoghue. Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel. Ed. Dermot Bolger. New York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, 2000. Bishop, Farnham and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. The Altar of the Legion. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1926. Boone, Henry Burnham and Kenneth Brown. Eastover Court House; a Novel. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1901. Boone, Henry Burnham and Kenneth Brown. The Redfields Succession; a Novel. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903. Bowering, George, Angela Bowering, David Bromige, and Michael Matthews. Piccolo Mondo. Toronto, Canada: Coach House Books, 1998. Boyles, Kate and Virgil D. Boyles. The Homesteaders. Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1909. Boyles, Kate and Virgil D. Boyles. Langford of the Three Bars: A Fighter of the Right Sort. Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1907. Brady, Cyrus Townsend and Edward Peple. Richard the Brazen. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1906. Broughton, Rhoda and Elizabeth Bisland. A Widower Indeed. Leipzig, Germany: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1891. Brown, Demetra and Kenneth Brown. The Duke’s Price. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910. Brown, Elizabeth Jewett and Susan Jewett Howe. Nell Beverly, Farmer: A Story of Farm Life. New York: The Rural Publishing Company, 1908. Brugiere, Sara Van Buren and Adeline Brady. The Major’s Niece. New York: The Abbey Press, 1903. Buchanan, Robert and Henry Murray. The Charlatan. Chicago: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895. Burdick, Eugene and Harvey Wheeler. Fail-Safe. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962. Burgess, Gelett and Will Irwin. The Picaroons. New York: McClure, Phillips and Company, 1904. Cabot, Arthur W. and Howard Coghill. Two Gentlemen of Gotham. New York: Cassell, 1887. Cantwell, Fredericka Spangler and Dora Eastwick Martyn. The High Commission. London: F. Tennyson Neely, 1899. Casey, Patrick and Terence Casey. The Wolf-Cub. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1918. Castle, Agnes and Egerton Castle. Flower O’The Orange and Other Tales of Bygone Days. New York: Macmillan, 1908.

bibliography of collaborative fiction / 207 Castle, Agnes and Egerton Castle. The House of Romance—Certain Stories, Including La Bella and Others, Recollected by Agnes and Egerton Castle. 2nd ed. New York: Stokes, 1901. Castle, Agnes and Egerton Castle. Love Gilds the Scene. London: John Murray, 1925. Castle, Agnes and Egerton Castle. My Merry Rockhurst. London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1907. Castle, Agnes and Egerton Castle. The Pride of Jennico—Being a Memoir of Captain Basil Jennico. New York: American News, 1897. Castle, Agnes and Egerton Castle. The Star Dreamer—A Romance. 3rd ed. New York: Stokes, 1903. Chamberlain, Esther and Lucia Chamberlain. The Coast of Chance. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1908. Chambers, Barbara and Becky Gardiner. New York—A Story of the Titan City, Adventure, Heart-Throbs, and Romance. New York: Jacobsen-Hodgkinson Corporation, 1927. Chetwood, Edith and Edward P. Thompson. M.E. Hearts Atour. New York: The Evening Post Job Printing Office, 1910. Clark, L. B. and C. Bliss. When Knights are Cold. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1927. Cooke, Grace MacGowan and Annie Booth McKinney. Mistress Joy; a Tale of Natchez in 1798. New York: The Century Company, 1901. Crane, Stephen and Robert Barr. The O’Ruddy; a Romance. New York: Stokes, 1903. Currie, Barton W. and Augutin McHugh. Officer 666. New York: The H.K. Fly Company, 1912. Davies, Acton and Charles Nirdlinger. The First Lady in the Land or When Dolly Todd Took Boarders. New York: The H.K. Fly Company, 1912. DeLeon, Thomas Cooper and Erwin Ledyard. John Holden, Unionist, a Romance of the Days of Destruction and Reconstruction. St. Paul, MN: PriceMcGill, 1893. Doyle, Roddy, Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph O’Conner, and Colm Toibin. Finbar’s Hotel. Ed. Dermot Bolger. San Diego: Harvest, 1997. Eggleston, George Cary and Dolores Marbourg [Mary Schell Hoke Bacon]. Juggernaut. New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1891. Elbrecht, Joyce and Lydia Fakundiny. The Restorationist Text One: A Collaborative Fiction by Jael B. Juba. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Engstrom, Elizabeth and Alan M. Clark. The Alchemy of Love: A Collaborative Endeavor. Eugene, OR: Triple Tree Publications, 1998. Field, Charles K. and Will Irwin. Stanford Stories: Tales of a Young University. 1900. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Fitch, Thomas and Anna Fitch. Better Days or a Millionaire of Tomorrow. San Francisco: Better Days Publishing, 1891. Ford, Paul Leicaster, Bertha Runkle, John Kendrick Bangs, Robert Grant, Frank Stockton, Thanet Octave, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ruth M. Stuart, Owen Wister, Mrs. Burton Harrison, George Washington Cable, and Sir Charles George

208 / bibliography of collaborative fiction Douglas Roberts. A House Party: An Account of the Stories Told at a Gathering of Famous American Authors. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1901. Freeman, Mary Wilkins and Florence Morse Kingsley. An Alabaster Box. New York: Appleton, 1917. Freeman, Mary Wilkins, Robert Grant, and Brander Matthews. The Homecoming of Jessica. Springfield, OH: Crowell & Kirkpatrick, 1901. Freeman, Mary Wilkins and J. Edgar Chamberlain. “The Long Arm.” The Long Arm and Other Detective Stories (by others). London: Chapman and Hall, 1895. 1–66. Gautier, Theophile, Mrs. Emile de Girardin, Jules Sandeau, and Mery. La Croix De Berny. Paris, France: Librarie Nouvelle, 1857. Glass, Leslie, Gini Hartzmark, John Katzenbach, John Lescroart, Bonnie MacDougal, Phillip Margolin, Brad Meltzer, Michael Palmer, Lisa Scottoline, and Laurence Shames. Natural Suspect: A Collaborative Novel. Ed. William Bernhardt. New York: Ballentine Books, 2002. Golden, Richard and Mary C. Francis. Old Jed Prouty. New York: G.W. Dillingham Company, 1901. Grant, Robert, John Boyle O’Reilly, J. S. of Dale, and John T. Wheelwright. The King’s Men; a Tale of To-morrow. New York: Scribner’s, 1884. Guerrier, Dennis, and Joan Richards. State of Emergency; a Novel of Alternatives. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Hale, Lucretia and Everett Hale. Struggle for Life. Boston: Walker, Wise, 1861. Hale, Lucretia Peabody and Edwin Lassetter Bynner. An Uncloseted Skeleton. Boston: Ticknor, 1887. Halleck, Fritz-Greene and Joseph Rodman Drake. Poems by Croaker, Croaker & Co. and Croaker, Jun. “Croaker Papers.” Trans., 1819. Hanshaw, Mary and Thomas W. The Riddle of the Mysterious Light. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1921. Harland, Marion and Albert Payson Terhune. Dr. Dale. A Story Without a Moral. New York: Dodd Mead, 1900. Hastings, Wells and Brian Hooker. The Professor’s Mystery. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1911. Hemingway, R. D. and Henry de Halsalle. Three Gentlemen from New Caledonia. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915. Hetherington, Helen F. Gullifer, and H. Darwin Burton. Paul Nugent, Materialist. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1890. Hiassen, Carl, Dave Barry, Les Standiford, Paul Levine, Edna Buchanan, James W. Hall, Carolina Hospital, Evelyn Mayerson, Tananarive Due, Brian Antoni, Vicki Hendricks, John Dufresne, and Elmore Leonard. Naked Came the Manatee. New York: Putnam’s, 1996. Hichens, Robert and Lord Frederick Hamilton. “A Tribute of Souls.” Bye-Ways. New York: Dodd Mead, 1897. 89–167. Hichens, Robert and Wilson Barrett. The Daughters of Babylon. London: John Macqueen, 1899. Hichens, Robert S. “The Collaborators.” “The Folly of Eustace” and Other Stories. New York: Appleton, 1896. 138–175.

bibliography of collaborative fiction / 209 Holmes, Mary J., Helen Corrine Bergen, W. Everett Wing, Oscar F. G. Day, Alice I. Jones, Minna Irving, Frank B. Harris, Austyn Granville, W. C. Burckhart, Henry Willard French, Will L. Visscher, Clarence M. Boutelle, William Wilson Knott, Maude Meredith, and Chas. W. Slater. A Cunning Culprit, or, A “Novel” Novel. A Composite Romance by Twenty Different Popular Writers. Ed. Mrs. Nash Morgan. Chicago: Hobart Publishing Company, 1895. Hood, Thomas, Thomas W. Robertson, Thomas Archer, William S. Gilbert, William J. Prowse, and Clement W. Scott. A Bunch of Keys, Where They were Found and What They Might Have Unlocked—A Christmas Book. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1865. Hood, Thomas, T. W. Robertson, W. J. Prowse, W. S. Gilbert, C. W. Scott, and T. Archer. Rates and Taxes and How they were Collected. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1866. Hosmer, Margaret and Julia Dunlap. Under the Holly; or, a Week at Hopeton House. A Book for Girls. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1869. Howard, Blanche Willis and William Sharp. A Fellowe and his Wife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892. Howells, William Dean, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jordan, John Kendrick Bangs, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown, and Henry Van Dyke. The Whole Family. 1908. New York: Ungar, 1986. Huebner, Fredrick D. Methods of Execution: A Novel. New York: Gold Medal Books, 1995. Hunt, May, Josephine G. Cochrane, Georgia Hodgkins, Ida Semans, Eunice K. Dresser, Emma S. Thayer Cutler, Kate L. Adams, Alice Carter, M. Evelyn Church Wilbur, Katherine De Witt, Isabella Hyde, May E. Sanford, Bertha Von Schrader, Marion Shepperd Trimmer, Mary S. Loomis, and Alice Balch Abbot. A Novelty Novel. New York: W. L. Downs, 1889. Hunter, Peter Hay and Walter Whyte. The Crime of Christmas-Day: A Tale of the Latin Quarter. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1885. Hunter, Peter Hay and Walter Whyte. My Ducats and My Daughter. London: K. Paul, Trench, 1884. Ilgenfritz, Alice and Ella Merchant Jones. Unveiling a Parallel, a Romance. Boston: Arena, 1893. Irving, Washington, J. K. Paulding, and William Irving. “Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others.” Trans. Printed from the original ed. with a preface and notes by Ed. Evert A. Duyckinck ed. New York: Putnam, AMS Press, 1973. James, G. P. R. and Maunsell B. Field. Adrian; The Clouds of the Mind. A Romance. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1852. Jepson, Edgar and Maurice Leblanc. Arsene Lupin. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1909. Jocelyn, Lydia A. and Nathan J. Cuffee. “Lords of the Soil” A Romance of Indian Life Among the Early English Settlers. Boston: C.M. Clark Publishing Company, Inc., 1905. Kaufman, Herbert and May Isabel Fisk. The Stolen Throne. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1907.

210 / bibliography of collaborative fiction Kraus, Nicola and Emma McLaughlin. The Nanny Diaries. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Lambton, Arthur and Seymour Fitzroy Ormsby-Gore. The Maternal Instinct; a Society Novel. 2nd ed. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914. Lang, Andrew and Walter H. Pollock. He: A Companion to She: Being a History of the Adventures of J. Theodsiu Aristophano on the Island of Rapa Nui in Search of his Immortal Ancestor/with Map and Numerous Illustrations. New York: Norman L. Munro, 1887. Lloyd, Josie and Emlyn Rees. Come Together. London: Random House, 1999. Lodge, James, Mrs. James Lodge, Annie Fields, Sarah Whitman, Owen Wister, E. Ellerton Pratt, Josiah Quincy, Mrs. G. D. Howe, John W. Field, and Dr. Algernon Coolidge. A Week Away from Time. Boston: Roberts, 1887. Maitland, Ella Fuller and Sir Frederick Ollock. The Etchingham Letters. London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1899. Marsh, George Turner and Ronald Temple. The Lords of Dawn. San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1916. Mason, A. E. W. and Andrew Lang. Parson Kelly. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899. Mason, Grace Sartwell and John Northern Hilliard. The Bear’s Claws. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1913. Mason, Grace Sartwell and John Northern Hilliard. The Golden Hope. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916. Mathers, Helen, Justin H. McCarthy, Mrs. Trollope, A. Conan Doyle, F. C. Philips, Mrs. Lovett, Cameron, Florence Marryat, Mrs. Hungerford, G. Manville Fenn, F. Anstey, “Tasma,” May Crommelin, “Rita,” Joseph Hatton, Bram Stoker, Frank Danby, Mrs. Edward Kennard, Richard Dowling, and Arthur A’Bec. The Fate of Fenella. Leipzig, Germany: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1892. Matthews, Brander and George Jessop. A Gold Mine: A Play in Three Acts. New York: French, 1908. Matthews, Brander and George Jessop. A Tale of Twenty-Five Hours. New York: Appleton, 1892. Matthews, Brander and H. C. Bunner. In Partnership—Studies in Story-Telling. New York: Scribner’s, 1884. Matthews, Brander, H. C. Bunner, Walter Herries Pollock, George H. Jessop, and F. Anstey. With My Friends: Tales Told in Partnership. 1891. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. McCarthy, Justin M. P., and Mrs. Campbell-Praed. The Right Honorable. A Romance of Society and Politics. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896. McLennan, William and J. N. Mcllwraith. The Span O’Life: A Tale of Louisbourg & Quebec. New York: Harper & Bros. Copp Clark, 1899. Megargel, Percy F. and Grace Sartwell Mason. The Car and the Lady. New York: The Baker and Taylor Company, 1908. Merwin, Samuel and Henry Kitchell Webster. Calumet “K”. New York: Macmillan, 1901. Merwin, Samuel and Henry Kitchell Webster. Comrade John. New York: Macmillan, 1907.

bibliography of collaborative fiction / 211 Merwin, Samuel, Harry Leon Wilson, Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield, Kathleen Norris, Henry Kitchell Webster, Anne O’Hagan, Mary Heaton Vorse, Alice Duer Miller, Ethel Watts Mumford, Marjorie Benton Cooke, William Allen White, Mary Austin, and Leroy Scott: theme by Mary Austin; the chapters coll. The Sturdy Oak: A Composite Novel of American Politics. New York: Henry Holt, 1917. Merwin, Samuel and H. Webster. The Short-Line War. Ed. Clarence Gohdes. Boston: Gregg, 1901. Moffat, Cleveland and Virginia Hall. Glint of Wings; the Story of a Modern Girl who Wanted Her Liberty—and Got it. New York: James A. McCann, 1922. Moon, Grace and Carl Moon. Lost Indian Magic. A Mystery Story of the Red Man as He Lied Before the White Man Came. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1918. Morris, Gouverneur and Charles W. Goddard. The Goddess. New York: Hearst’s International Library Co., 1915. Morrison, Lester M. and Richard G. Hubler. Trial & Triumph; a Novel about Maimonides. New York: Crown Publishers, 1965. Murray, David Christie and Henry Herman. The Bishops’ Bible; a Novel. Lovell’s international series, no. 89. New York: J.W. Lovell, 1890. O’Conner, Joseph, ed. Yeats is Dead! A Mystery by 15 Irish Writers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Oliphant, M. O. W. and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The Second Son; a Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888. Parker, Dorothy, Carolyn Wells, Alexander Woolcott, Louis Bromfield, Elsie Janie, Edward Streeter, Mead Minnigerade, H. C. Witver, Sophie Kerr, Robert Gordon Anderson, George Barr McCutcheon, Gerald Mygott, George Agnew Chamberlin, John V. A. Weaver, Kermit Roosevelt, Bernice Brown, and Walla. Bobbed Hair. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1925. Peattie, Donald Culross and Louise Redfield. Up Country. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1928. Pedler, Kit and Gerry Davis. The Dynostar Menace. New York: Scribner’s, 1975. Perkins, David, ed. Pete & Shirley. The Great Tar Heel Novel. Asheboro, NC: Down Home Press, 1995. Phelps, C. E. D. and Leigh North. The Bailiff of Tewkesbury. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Company, 1893. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart and Herbert D. Ward. Come Forth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart and Herbert D. Ward. A Lost Hero. 1890. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart and Herbert D. Ward. The Master of the Magicians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890. Philips, F. C. and C. J. Wills. The Fatal Phryne. Collection of British Authors. Vol. 2589. Leipzig, Germany: B. Tauchnitz, 1889. Phillpotts, Eden and Arnold Bennett. The Statue, a Story of International Intrigue and Mystery. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908. Power, Susan Anna. Cinderella. Providence, RI: Hammond & Angell, 1867. Power, Susan Anna and Sarah Whitman. The Sleeping Beauty. Providence, RI: Hammond & Angell, 1868.

212 / bibliography of collaborative fiction Preston, Harriet Waters and Louisa Dodge. The Guardians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888. Prichard, Kate and Hesketh Prichard (E. and H. Heron). A Modern Mercenary. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1902. Pronzini, Bill and Barry N. Malzberg, eds. Shared Tomorows: Science Fiction in Collaboration. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. Rankin, J. L., Jane Clunies Ross, Walter Murdoch, Ethel Turner, and Ruth Bedford. Murder Pie. Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson, 1936. Read, Opie Percival and Frank Pixley. The Carpetbagger; a Novel. Chicago: Laird and Lea, 1899. Reade, Charles and Dion Boucicault. Foul Play. A Novel. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1869. Reade, Charles. Hard Cash. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870. Robinson, Edward A. and George A. Wall. The Disk: A Tale of Two Passions. Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1884. Royale, Edwin Milton and Julie Opp Faversham. The Squaw Man. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1908. Saberhagen, Fred, and Stephen Donaldson, Connie Willis, Roger Zelazy, Poul Anderson, Ed Bryant, Larry Niven. Berserker Base. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1985. Savage, Col. Richard Henry and Mrs. Archibald Clavering Gunter. His Cuban Sweetheart. New York: The Home Pub. Co., 1895. Sawyer, Edith A. and Alice Freeman Walmsley. Madge at Camp Welles, or, Summer Holidays on a New Hampshire Lake. Boston: W.A. Wilde, 1911. Scribner, Frank Kimball and Charles S. Bentley. The Fifth of November: A Romance of the Stuarts. Chicago: Rand, McNally and Company, 1898. Sheehan, Perley Poore and Robert H. Davis. “We Are French!” New York: George H. Doran Company, 1914. Smith, F. Hopkinson and F. Berkeley Smith. Enoch Crane. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916. Southern, Terry and Mason Hoffenberg. Candy, a Novel. New York: Putnam, 1964. Spofford, Harriet Prescott, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Alice Brown. Three Heroines of New England Romance. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co 1894. Stanton, Bob, Sandi Branum, Gary F. Izzo, Dedra Torelli, and Nina Wade. The Devil’s Rood: A Group Novel About America’s First Serial Killer. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Corportaion, 2000. Stephens, Robert Neilson and George Hembert Westley. Clementina’s Highwayman. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1907. Stephens, Robert Neilson and G. E. Theodore Roberts. A Soldier of Valley Forge: A Romance of the American Revolution. Boston: L. C. Page and Company, 1911. Stephens, Robert Neilson and Herman Nickerson. The Sword of Bussy or: The Word of a Gentleman. Boston: L. C. Page and Company, 1912. Stevenson, Robert Louis and Five of his Friends. An Object of Pity. Or The Man Haggard. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1900.

bibliography of collaborative fiction / 213 Stimson, Frederic and John Wheelwright. Rollo’s Journey to Cambridge. Boston: A. Williams, 1880. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Adeline D. T. Whitney, Edward E. Hale, Lucretia P. Hale, Frederic W. Loring, and Frederic B. Perkins. Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872. Sultan, Faye and Teresa Kennedy. Help Line: A Portia McTeague Novel of Suspense. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Sultan, Faye, and Teresa Kennedy. Over the Line. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Tarkington, Booth and Harry Leon Wilson. The Man from Home. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1908. Taylor, Bert Leston and W. C. Gibson. Extra Dry being Further Adventures of the Water Wagon. New York: G.W. Dillingham Company, 1906. Taylor, Bert Leston and Alvin T. Thoits. Under Three Flags. A Story of Mystery. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1896. Thorne, Paul and Mabel Thorne. The Secret Toll. NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922. Thorne, Paul and Mabel Thorne. The Sheridan Road Mystery. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922. Train, Arthur and Robert Williams Wood. The Man Who Rocked the Earth. Eds. R. Reginald and Douglas Menville. 2nd ed. 1915. New York: Arno, 1975. Van Buren, Sara and Adeline Brady. The Major’s Niece. New York: Abbey Press, 1903. Wagner, Harr and E. T. Bunyan. The Street and the Flower. San Francisco: San Francisco News Co., 1883. Walter, Eugene and Arthur Hornblow. The Easiest Way. A Story of Metropolitan Life. New York: G. W. Dillingham Co., 1911. Warner, Susan and Anna Warner. Carl Krinken: His Christmas Stocking. New York: G. P. Putnam and Company, 1853. Warner, Susan and Anna Warner. The Gold of Chickaree. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876. Warner, Susan and Anna Warner. Say and Seal. Collection of British authors. Vol. 498. Leipzig, Germany: B. Tauchnitz, 1860. Wheelwright, John T. and Barrett Wendell. Poison, a Farce as Performed at “The Hasty Pudding Club” of Harvard University. Boston: W. H. Baker, 1882. White, Stewart Edward and Samuel Hopkins Adams. The Mystery. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1907. White, Stewart Edward and Harry Devighne. Pole Star. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1935. Wiggin, Kate Douglas, Mary Findlater, Jane Findlater, and Allan McAulay. Robinetta. New York: A. L. Burt, 1911. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, Pauline Hall, P. T. Barnum, Inspector Byrnes, Howe & Hummel, John L. Sullivan, Mary Eastlake, W. H. Ballou, Alan Dale, Maj. Alfred Calhoun, Nell Nelson, and Bill Nye. His Fleeting Ideal. A Romance of Baffled Hypnotism. New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1890. Wilkins, W. H. (W. H. De Winton) and Herbert Vivian. The Green Bay Tree. A Tale of Today. New York: J. Selwin Tait and Sons, 1894.

214 / bibliography of collaborative fiction Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. The Car of Destiny. New York: McClure, 1907. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. The Chaperon. New York: A.L. Burt Co., 1908. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. The Golden Silence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1911. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. It Happened in Egypt. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. The Lightning Conductor. The Strange Adventures of a Motor-Car. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1903. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. Lord Loveland Discovers America. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. The Motor Maid. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1911. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. The Night of the Wedding. New York: George H. Doran, 1923. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. The Port of Adventure. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. The Princess Passes. A Romance of a Motor-Car. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1905. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. Set in Silver. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909. Williamson, C. N. and A. M. Williamson. A Soldier of the Legion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914. Woodward, R. Pitcher. Trains that Met in the Blizzard: A Composite Romance, Being a Chronicle of the Extraordinary Adventure of a Party of Twelve Men and One Woman in the Great American Blizzard, March 12, 1888. New York: Salmagundi, 1896. Yager, Fred and Jan Yager. Just Your Everyday People: Suspense Novel. Stanford, CT: Hannacroix Creek Books, 2001. Yager, Fred and Jan Yager. Untimely Death: A Novel. Stanford, CT: Hannacroix Creek Books, 1998. Young, Rida Johnson and Gilbert P. Coleman. Brown of Harvard. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907. Zangwill, Israel and Louis Cowan. The Premier and the Painter: A Fantastic Romance. London: William Heinemann, 1899.

Index

AAUP (American Association of University Professors), 16 accountability, 45–49, 122 Adams, Henry, 72 Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 8 Adventures of Colonel Sellers, The (Twain), 19–20 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 46–47 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain), 36 ALA, see Authors League of America Alabaster Box, An (Freeman and Kingsley), 19 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 36 Amaranth (Steamship), 47 American 1890s, The (Ziff ), 98 American Academy of Arts and Letters, 96, 97 American Copyright League, 120 American Federation of Labor, 92, 97, 106–107, 141 American Literary Realism, 153–157 American Publishing Company, 33, 39, 43–44 American Theories of the Novel (Perosa), 22 Ames, James Barr, 74 Amis, Martin, 17 Andrews, Mary Shipman, 127, 138, 146, 173 Anesko, Michael, 9 anonymous publication, 82 Anstey, F., 168, 173

Apache Bandits, 5 Arbor, Keith, 41 Arky Types (Maitland and Wandor), 8 Arnold, Matthew, 105 “Art of Fiction, The” (Besant), 111 “Art of Fiction” (James), 111, 112 “Art and Mystery of Collaboration, The” (Matthews), 22, 96, 109, 113, 114, 121, 123 Author’s Club, The, 96, 101, 102–109, 112, 113, 168 lobbying within ALA, 106–107 membership criteria, 102–106 Author’s League of America, 92, 97, 106–107, 120, 141 authorship leagues-history, 3 Average Man, An (Grant), 57–58, 59, 80–82 Awakening of Helena Richie, The (Deland), 143 Bangs, John Kendrick, 102, 127, 138, 149, 168, 173 Barr, Robert, 5 Barthes, Roland, 17 Bauer, Dale, 131 Beardsley, Monroe C., 18 Beaver, D. deB., 15 Belenky, Mary, 15 Bell, Michael Davitt, 155 Bellamy, Edward, 60 Bender, Thomas, 93, 98 Berthoff, Walter, 156 Besant, Sir Walter, 3, 107–116, 168

216 / index Betts, John Boyle, 68 Blaine, James G., 21, 61, 62 Blanck, Jacob, 43–44 Bliss, Elisha, 33 Bobbed Hair (Parker, Wells, Woolcott, Bromfield, Janie, Streeter, Minnigerade, Witver, Kerr, Anderson, McCutcheon, Mygott, Chamberlin, Weaver, Roosevelt, Brown and Walla), 8 Bohemia, In, 7 book agents, 38–45 Borden, Lizzie, 138 Boston Globe (newspaper), 5, 59, 68 Boston Press Club, 59, 68 Bourne, Randolph, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100 Brady, Laura, 16–17, 70, 134–135 Brahmin, 59, 62, 66, 71, 78, 88 British Anthenaeum, The, 96, 124 British Society of Authors, 107, 109–110, 111 Brodhead, Richard, 18 Brooks, Van Wyck, 66 Brown, Alice, 127, 128, 130, 134, 136, 138, 144, 145, 158–159, 173 Brown, Mary, 133 Bryant, William Cullen, 101 Buffalo Express (newspaper), 33 Bunner, H.C., 21, 117, 168, 173 Burke, Seán, 93 burlesque (rhetorical technique in The Gilded Age), 31–32, 34 “Burlesque Hamlet” (Twain), 40–41 Bushnell, Horace, 33 Butler, James, 61 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 91 Bynner, Edwin Lassetter, 5, 167 Cable, George Washington, 36 Calumet ‘K’ (Merwin and Webster), 7

Camfield, Gregg, 35, 50 Carnegie, Andrew, 105 “case-method” system of law, 74–75 Caverns (Levon), 8 Century Club, 96, 101–102, 103, 121, 169 Century Magazine, 102 chapter headings, 34–35 Chatrian, Alexander, 6 Chicago Tribune (newspaper), 44 Chopin, Kate, 92 Clemens, Henry, 47 Clemens, Olivia Langdon, 32–33 Clemens, Samuel L., see Twain, Mark Cleveland, Grover, 60, 61, 62 clubs, 67, 87–88, 91–124, 125, 133 Collins, Wilkie, 112 Columbia University, 12, 91, 92, 95, 98, 101, 113, 121, 124, 125 Commage, Henry Steele, 102 Comrade John (Merwin and Webster), 7 Confessions of a Frivolous Girl: A Story of Fashionable Life, The (Grant), 79 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain), 60 Conn, Peter, 155 Conrad, Joseph, 6 contracts, 136–144 Cooper, James Fenimore, 95 copyright, 4, 15, 22, 89, 96, 105, 108, 120, 137, 142, 144, 147 corporate liability, 45–51 Coultrap McQuin, Susan, 137 Crane, Stephen, 5, 92, 155 Creamer, Elizabeth G. and Associates, 15–16 Croaker Papers (Halleck and Drake), 7 Cross Purposes (Marshall and EverettGreene), 5

index / 217 Crowley, John W., 131, 148–149, 158 cultural studies, 13–14 Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America (Brodhead), 18 Currie, Mark, 149, 152 Curtis, George W., 61 Cutting, Mary Stewart, 127, 135, 137, 138, 139–141, 142, 144, 153, 170, 173 Dana, Charles A., 60 Dartmoor, 67–68 Dawidoff, Robert, 72 De Leon, Thomas, 3 Development of the Drama, The (Matthews), 95 Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in American, 1898–1917, The (Conn), 155 “Documents in the Case, The” (Matthews and Bunner), 117 Doland, Margaret, 143 Dorris, Michael, 16 Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (Koestenbaum), 18 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 168 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 7 drama and/or plays, 27, 36, 47, 51, 60, 73, 77, 95, 96, 97, 112, 114, 118, 122, 123, 124, 150, 158, 168 Dresier, Theodore, 9, 92, 97, 100, 157 Dunlap Society, 96 Ede, Lisa, 14–15 Edel, Leon, 19, 165 “Edged Tools; A Tale in Two Chapters” (Matthews and Pollock), 118–119 Eggleston, Edward, 102

Eggleston, George Cary, 5 Eliot, Simon, 108–109, 111 Emerson, Evalyn, 132 Erckmann, Emile, 6 Erdrich, Louise, 16 Experience of an Irish R.M. (Somerville and Ross), 6 Face to Face (Grant), 81, 82, 83, 167 reviews, 82 Fanning, Charles, 71 Farber, Mark Sherman, 62 Fate of Fenella, The (Mathers, McCarthy, Trollope, Doyle, Philips, Lovett, Cameron, Marryat, Hungerford, Fenn, Anstey, “Tasma,” Crommelin, “Rita,” Hatton, Stoker, Danby, Kennard, Dowling, A’Bec), 8, 168 Fellowe and His Wife, A (Castle, A. and Castle, E.), 6 Fenians, 67–69 “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (Twain), 95 Ford, Ford Maddox, 6 Ford, Paul Leicester, 20, 168 forgeries, 52 Forgeries in Subscription Book Sales, 43–45 Foucault, Michel, 17 Fourscore (Grant), 64, 84, 85 Freeman, Mary Wilkins 9, 12, 19, 127, 129, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 138, 141, 142, 144, 153, 156, 159–162, 163, 168, 169, 170, 173 French, Alice, 143 French, Bryant Morey, 31, 34, 39 French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (Matthews), 95 French Legion of Honor, 96

218 / index Galt, Alexander, 121–122 Garland, Hamlin, 106–107, 154 Gates Ajar, The (Phelps), 136 Genius, The (Dreiser), 100 genres, marginal status, 20 Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage, The (Dawidoff ), 72 Gilbert, Sandra M.,13 Gilded Age, The (Twain and Warner), 1, 10, 11, 19–20, 25–53, 56, 60, 92, 173 plot summary, 27–28 Gilder, Richard Watson, 102 Glasgow, Ellen, 99–100 Glasser, Leah Blatt, 19, 161 Golden Era, The (magazine), 38 “Gold Mine, The” (Matthews and Jessop), 97 Goldner, Ellen J., 45–46 Goodman, Joseph T., 34 Grant, Robert, 11, 21, 55–90, 78–87, 167, 168, 169, 173 profile, 78–87 Grolier Club, 96 Gubar, Susan, 13 Guerndale (Stimson), 59, 73, 75, 77, 168 Hale, Edward Everett, 5, 7, 167 Hale, Lucretia P., 5, 167 Halleck, Fitz Greene, 7 Hall, James Norman, 8 Hamilton, Clayton, 91, 93, 113 Harper’s and Brothers, 137, 138, 143 Harper’s Bazar (magazine), 127, 128, 133–134, 138, 147 Harper’s Magazine, 140, 169 Harte, Brete, 36, 38 Hartford Courant (newspaper), 33 Harvard, 59, 62, 63, 67, 71, 73–75, 76, 77, 79–80, 84, 168, 169 Harvard Lampoon (magazine), 59, 79, 80, 168

Harvey, Colonel George, 138–139 Hawley, Joseph Roswell, 33 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 165 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (Howells), 154 Hearth and Howe (journal), 32 Henry James and the Experimental Novel (Perosa), 158, 159 Hiassen, Carl, 17 Hichens, Robert, 6 Hirsch, E.D., Jr., 18 “His Fleeting Ideal” (Sullivan and Barnum), 5 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 36, 66, 77, 105 Homecoming of Jessica, The (Matthews), 168 Hooker Family, 32 Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 33 House Party, A (Ford), 20, 132, 168 Howard, Blanche, 6 Howard, June, 10 Howells, William Dean, 2, 9, 36, 41, 96, 122, 127, 128, 127–166, 168, 170, 173 Huckleberry Finn (see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) (Twain) Hunt, May, 3 Inheritors, The (Ford and Conrad), 6 Innocents Abroad (Twain), 38 In Partnership (Bunner and Matthews), 168 Internet, 4 Introduction to the Study of American Literature (Matthews), 96 Invention as a Social Art (LeFevre), 14 Irving, Washington, 7 Irving, William, 7 “J.S. of Dale” (pseudonym for Stimson), see Stimson, 59, 76–77 Jacobson, Marcia, 122

index / 219 James, Henry, 6, 9, 12, 19, 21, 33, 36, 72, 105, 111–114, 122, 127, 129, 134–135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 144, 150, 153, 157–159, 162–165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173 Jessop, George, 119–120, 121, 122, 173 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 154, 169 John Boyle O’Reilly Club, 87, 88, 169 John Holden, Unionist (1889) (Book title) (Deleon and Ledyard), 3 John Ward, Preacher (Deland), 143 Jordan, Elizabeth, 127–164, 171, 173 Juggernaut (Eggleston and Marbourg), 5 Kakutani, Michiko, 17 Kaplan, Amy, 154–155, 157 Kesey, Ken, 8 Kevin Bacon Game, 167 King Noanett (Stimson), 73 Kingsley, Florence Morse, 19 King’s Men, The (Wheelwright, Grant, Stimson, and O’Reilly), 10, 11, 21, 55–90, 91, 167, 173 plot, 56–57 reviews, 57–58, 65 kinsmen, 96 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 18 Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era, The (Wilson), 18, 94 La Croix de Berny (Girardin, Gautier, Sandeau, Mery), 6 Laird, Holly, 14 Lampton, James, 33 Lang, Andrew, 121 Langdell, Christopher Columbus, 74

law, 15, 45, 46, 49, 51, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 113, 130, 147, 153 Lears, T.J. Jackson, 125 Ledyard, Erwin, 3 Le Fevre, Karen Burke, 14, 15 Lend A Hand Movement, 167 Leonard, Elmore, 17 Lewis, Sinclair, 100 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 93 Life (magazine), 168, 169 “Liscarrick” (drama by Matthews and Jessop), 122 literary agents, 18, 142 Literary History of the United States, The (Spiller), 98 “Literature as a Profession” (Matthews), 22, 99, 103–104 local color, 159–160 Lodge, David, 152 London, Bette, 14 London, Jack, 9, 154 Lang, Andrew, 121 “Long Arm, The” (Freeman and Chamberlain), 159 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 60 Loring, Frederic W., 5 Lowell, James Russell, 105 Lunsford, Andrea, 14, 15 Madwoman in the Attic, The (Gilbert and Gubar), 13 Maitland, Sara, 8 man of letters, 12, 25, 78, 91–124, 125, 155 “Man of Letters as a Man of Business, The” (Howells), 155 Man Who Rocked the Earth, The (Train and Wood), 8 Marbourg, Dolores, 5 Margolis, Stacey, 46 Marshall, Emma, 5 Martin, Violet Florence, 6 Massachusetts Press Club, 87–88

220 / index Masten, Jeffrey, 52, 89 Matthews, Brander, 9, 11, 12, 21–22, 87, 91–124, 168, 169, 173 feud with Mark Twain, 95 personal library, 120–122 short story analysis, 116–120 May, Henry, 125 McFarland, Gerald, 60–61, 63 McManamin, Francis, 87 McNenny, Geraldine, 16 McWhirter, David, 163 Mencken, H.L., 92, 93, 97, 100 men of letters, 93, 94, 100, 125 Merwin, Samuel, 7 metafiction, 148–154 Metropolitan Club, 101 Michaels, Walter Benn, 156 “Middle of Next Week, The” (Grant, Stimson, Wheelwright, O’Reilly), 90 Mitchell, John Ames, 168 Modern Instance, A (Howells), 154 Modern Language Association, 96 Moliére, His Life and His Work (Matthews), 95 Monday Evening Club, 35 Moondyne: A Story From the Underworld, The (O’Reily), 70–71 reviews, 71 “Mother” (Wister), 20, 169 mottoes, 34–35 Mugwumps, 60, 61, 62, 63, 69, 73, 80, 81 Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Stillinger), 18 “Muted by Magic: A Story with a Postscript” (Pollock and Matthews), 119 Mutiny on the Bounty (Nordoff and Hall), 8 Mystery (White and Adams), 8

My United States (Stimson), 72, 74, 77, 78, 86 Naked Came the Manatee (Hiaasen, Barry, Standiford, Levine, Buchanan, Hall, Hospital, Mayerson, Due, Antoni, Hendricks, Dufrense, Leonard), 8 National Institute of Arts and Letters, 96 New England Journal of Medicine, 16 New Orleans Picayune (newspaper), 40 new woman, 83 New York Intellect (Bender), 98 New York Sun (newspaper), 60 Nineteenth Century Club, The, 96 “No Name Series”, 170–171 Nook Farm, 32–33, 169 Nordoff, Charles, 8 Norris, Frank, 155, 157 Norton, Charles Eliot, 61 Novelty Novel A—The Story of a Girl Told by Sixteen Other Girls (1889) (Hunt), 3 Old and New (magazine), 167 Oliver, Lawrence, 96, 98, 124 “One Story is Good Until Another is Told” (Matthews and Jessop), 119–120 “On Literary Collaboration” (Matthews), 109, 110, 112 “On Working Too Much and Working Too Hard” (Matthews), 98 O’Reilly, John Boyle, 11, 21, 55–90, 169, 173 profile, 66–73 Osborne, Duffield, 102, 103, 104, 105 “Our Literary Collaboration”, 7

index / 221 Paine, Albert Bigelow, 33–34 Papyrus Club, The, 67, 87, 169, 170 Parker, Theodore, 33 Paulding, J.K., 7 Payne, William, 58 Pease, Z.W., 68 Popular Law-Making: A Study of the Origin, History, and Present Tendencies of Law-Making by Statute (Stimson), 75 Perkins, Frederic B., 5, 167 Perosa, Sergio, 22, 158, 159, 163–164 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 127, 136–138, 143, 153, 169, 173 “Philosophy of the Short Story” (Matthews), 96 Pilot, The (newspaper), 68, 70 Pit, The (Norris), 157 Player’s Club, 96, 102 Plebiscite, The: or, The Miller’s Song of the War by one of the 7,007,500,000 who Voted “Yes” (Erckmann and Chatrian), 6 PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America), 14 Poe, Edgar Allan, 96 Pollock, Walter Herries, 118–119, 121–122, 168, 173 Problem of American Realism, The (Bell), 155–156 pseudonyms, 90 Pulitzer, Joseph, 138 “Questionable Means of Selling Books”, 105–106 Rabelais Club, The, 96, 97, 102 Reade, Charles, 112 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Wiggin), 137

Rice, James, 3, 108, 115, 168 Roderick Hudson (James), 163 Roen, Duane H., 16 Rollo’s Journey to Cambridge (Wheelwright), 59 Roosevelt, Theodore, 91, 98, 106, 124 Roscoe, Burton, 99 Rosen, R., 15 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard), 40 Ross, Martin (pseudonym for Violet Florence Martin), 6 Roughing It (Twain), 29–32, 33, 34, 36 Russell, James, 36 Sacco and Vanzetti, 79 St. Botolph Club, 58, 87 Salmagundi (Irving, Irving, Paulding), 7 Santayuna, George, 72, 97 Saturday Evening Post (magazine), 100 Savile Club, The, 96 Scribner, Charles, 120 Sellers, Eschol, 50–51 serialization, 8, 144–148, 162 Sexton, William, 38 Shakespeare, William, 17, 40 Shakspeare as a Playwright (Matthews), 95 Sharp, William, 6 Sherman, Stuart, 97 Shiverick, Nathan, 87–88 Short-Line War, The (Merwin and Webster), 7 Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (Ede and Lunsford), 14 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 97, 157

222 / index Six of One by Half a Dozen of Another (1872) (Stowe, Whitney, Hale, Loring, Perkins, Hale), 5, 6, 7, 167 Smith, Henry Nash, 26–27 Social Construction of American Realism, The (Kaplan), 154 “Solitary Workers” (James), 165 Somerville, Edith, 6 spelling reform, 21, 96 Spiller, Robert, 98 Spooner, Michael (author w. Kathleen Yancey), 16 “Statement on Multiple Authorship” (AAUP), 16 Stillinger, Jack, 4, 15, 18 Stimson, Frederic Jesup, 11, 55–90, 73–78, 168, 169, 173 Profile, 73–78 Stockton, Frank R., 105 Stoker, Bram, 168 Stoppard, Tom, 40 Stowe, Calvin, 32 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 5, 32, 167 Struggle for Life, A (Hale, E. and Hale, L.), 167 Strychacz, Thomas, 94 Sturdy Oak, The (Merwin, Wilson, Hurst, Canfield, Norris, Webster, O’Hagan, Vorse, Miller, Mumford, Cooke, White, Austin, and Scott), 17 subscription publishing, 11, 25–26, 34–44, 51, 106 Sullivan, John L., 5, 68 Sunday World (newspaper), 138 Sylvia: The Story of an American Countess (Emerson), 132 Taine, Hippolyte, 96 Tarantino, Quentin, 17 Tarbell, Ida, 106 Taylor, Charles, 59

Tebbel, John, 38 Terhune, Albert, 5 These Many Years (Matthews), 114, 123, 125 Thomson, Rupert, 17 Those Extraordinary Twins (Twain), 47–48 Three Rousing Cheers (Jordan), 128, 138, 143, 153 “Three Wishes” (Matthews and Anstey), 119 Trachenberg, Alan, 45 Train, Arthur, 8 Trilling, Lionel, 101 Trinity University, 34 Trumbull, J. Hammond, 34–35 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 1, 2, 9, 11, 19–20, 25–53, 60, 91, 92, 95, 101, 105, 122, 139, 170, 173 feud with Brander Matthews, 95 “Two Women of the West” (pseudonym for Jones and Merchant), 6 typography, 21, 117–118 Uncloseted Skeleton, An (Bynner and Hale), 5, 167 Unleavened Bread (Grant), 21, 64, 83, 86 Unveiling a Parallel, A Romance (Jones and Merchant), 6 Van Dyke, Henry, 102, 127, 130, 137, 138, 145, 151, 152, 153, 156, 173 Validity of Interpretation (Hirsch), 18 Venetian Life (Howells), 41 Virginia City Enterprise (newspaper), 34 Virginian, The (Wister), 168 Vorse, Mary Heaton, 127, 138, 152, 156, 173

index / 223 Wander, Michelene, 8 Warner, Anna, 6 Warner, Charles Dudley, 1, 6, 11, 20, 25–53, 105, 173 Warner, Susan Dudley, 6, 33 Waugh, Patricia, 149 Webb, Charles Henry, 29 Webster, Henry Kitchell, 7 Week Away from Time, A (Lodge, Lodge, Fields, Whitman, Wister, Pratt, Quincy, Howe, Field, and Coolidge), 6, 169 Weekly Occidental (journal), 29–30 Wendall, Barrett, 94 Westbrook, Perry, 96 What’s Soft, 17 Wheelwright, John T., 11, 55, 79, 168, 173 White, Richard Grant, 17 White, Stewart Edward, 8 Whitney, Adeline D.T., 5 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 66, 105 Whole Family, The, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 114, 127–166, 168, 173 reviews, 127–128, 130, 144, 153

Wiggin, Kate Douglass, 137, 144 Wilson, Christopher P., 18, 63–64, 85, 94 Wimsatt, W.K., Jr., 18 Wister, Owen, 6, 20, 168–169 Women Coauthors (Laird), 14 Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (Belenky), 15 Wood, Robert Williams, 8 Working Equal- Academic Couples as Collaborators (Creamer), 16 Writing Double (London), 14 Wyatt, Edith, 6, 127, 131, 134–135, 138, 142, 145, 146, 147, 156, 168, 173 Yancey, Kathleen, 16 Yeats is Dead: A Mystery by 15 Irish Writers (authors), 8 Yeats, Georgie, 15 YMDC (Young Man’s Democratic Club), 63 Ziff, Larzar, 98 Zola, Emile, 117

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