Through the Children's Gate Read Online Free PDF Page B

to try to bring my family home after five years abroad, I found myself walking in fact, and then in spirit, through all these apartments, again and again. As a distraction, I picked up a book I had packed for the journey, William Dean Howells's
A Hazard of New Fortunes.
A little over a hundred years old, it's still the best book about middle-class life—or is it upper-middle? anyway, the lives of salaried professionals—in New York, a great American novel. Instead of fussing about hunting whales or riding rafts or fighting wars, or any of those other small-time subjects, it concerns something really epic: a guy in the magazine business looking for an apartment in Manhattan.
    Howells is out of favor now. All literary reputation-making is unjust, but Howells is the victim of perhaps the single greatest injustice in American literary history. The period from 1880 to 1900, Henry Adams once said, was “our Howells-and-James epoch,” and the two bearded grandees stood on terms as equal as the Smith Brothers on a cough-drop box. But then Howells got identified, unfairly, with a Bostonian “genteel” tradition, nice and dull. Now James gets Nicole Kidman and Helena Bonham Carter, even for his late, fuzzy-sweater novels, along with biography after biography and collection after collection, and Howells gets one brave, doomed defense every thirty years. Yet Howells, though an immeasurably less original sensibility than James, may be the better novelist, meaning that Howells on almost any subject strikes you as right, while James on almost any subject strikes you as James. Howells's description in
A Hazard
of New York, and of New York apartment-hunting, at the turn of the century comes from so deep a knowledge of what capitalism does to the middle classes, and how it does it to them, that it remains uncannily contemporary. We've spent billions of dollars to prevent our computers’mistaking 2000 for 1900;
A Hazard of New Fortunes
suggests that the error may have been a kind of truth.
    In the novel, a diffident and ironic literary man, Basil March, sublets his house in Boston and comes to New York to edit a new magazine, a fortnightly to be called
Every Other Week.
It is to be the first “syndicate” magazine, with the contributors sharing in the profits. (These days it would be an Internet launch.) Gradually, we learn that the money behind the magazine comes from a backwoods Pennsylvania Dutch natural-gas millionaire named Dryfoos, who, newly arrived in New York, has invested in the magazine as a worldly diversion for his unworldly son, Conrad, who dreams of becoming a priest. (How-ells began writing
A Hazard
in the late eighties, when he moved to New York from Cambridge, after editing
The Atlantic Monthly
for ten years.)
    Although the action of
A Hazard
eventually takes in the more “panoramic” material of strikes and riots, Howells's genius was to devote the first hundred or so pages of his book to the Marches’ apartment-hunting. Isabel March, Basil's wife, who is an old Bostonian, joins him for the search, leaving the children behind in Beantown. They begin with the blithe certainty that it will take a couple of days. “I cut a lot of things out of the
Herald
as we came on,” she tells her husband at their hotel on the first morning, taking “a long strip of paper out of her handbag with minute advertisements pinned transversely upon it, and forming the effect of some glittering nondescript vertebrate.” She goes on, “We must not forget just what kind of flat we are going to look for”:
“The sine qua nons are an elevator and steam heat, not above the third floor, to begin with. Then we must each have a room, and you must have your study and I must have my parlor; and the two girls must each have a room. With the kitchen and dining room, how many does that make?”
“Ten.”
“I thought eight. Well, no matter…. And the rooms must all have outside light. And the rent must not be over eight hundred for the