Letters Home. William Dean Howells

      My Dear Margaret:

      I am afraid it will not do, and that you will have your brother-in-law back on your hands again, for the winter, or lose him indefinitely. I do not mean, lose him to New York; far from that; as far as Europe, in fact; for if I were to take stock (the local commercialism instantly penetrates one's vocabulary) of my emotions, I suspect I should find myself evenly balanced between the impulse to board the next train for Boston and the impulse to board the next steamer for Liverpool. The things are about equally simple: the facilities for getting away from New York compensate for the facilities for getting to New York; and I could keep my promise of amusing your invalid leisure by letter as well from one place as from another. Wherever I am to be, I am not to be pitied as one taxed beyond his strength in keeping a rash promise. Your rest-cure may be good for you, or it may not; but for me I am sure it will be good if it gives me back that boon period of life, when T wrote letters willingly and wrote them long. I have already a pleasing prescience of an earlier time; in the mere purpose of writing you, I feel the glow of that charming adolescence of the world, in the eighteenth century, when everybody, no matter of what age, willingly wrote such long letters as to give the epistolary novel a happy air of verisimilitude.

      I wish I could be more definite as to the reasons of my doubts whether I shall stay here or not. , Certainly the meteorological conditions have nothing to do with the matter. Up to the present date these have been the greatest amiability. About Thanksgiving there were some days of rough cold, which with our native climate still in my nerves, I expected to last for a week at least; but with the volatility of the New York nature, it all blew away in forty-eight hours. The like has happened several times since; a sort of corrupt warmth has succeeded the cold, affecting one as if the tissues of the season had broken down through sympathy with the municipal immorality. I should like to stay, if for nothing else, to see what the reformers will do in the way of an honest climate after they get into power at the end of the year, but I do not know whether I shall be able to do it. In the meantime, I like the mildness, though I can never get over my surprise at it; I enjoy it, as I suppose I should enjoy standing in with Tammany, in some enormously wicked deal that turned over half the streets to me for, say, automobile speedways, I had really forgotten what a Florentine sky New York often has in mid-December, by night and by day, with a suffusion of warm color from the sunsets, which is as different from the shrill pink of our Back Bay sunsets as the New York relaxation is from our moral tension. You have been here much later and oftener than I, and I dare say you take for granted all the unseasonable gentleness which I am finding so incredible, and so acceptable. But as yet I am not accustomed to it, and I have a bad conscience in celebrating it.

      The whole place is filthier, with the pulling down and building up, the delving for the Rapid Transit, and I do not know what else, than I have seen it since poor Waring first taught Father Knickerbocker (as their newspaper cartoonists like to figure the city), the novelty of purging and living cleanly like a gentleman, and I suppose it is the sense of the invasive, pervasive dirt that has much to do with my doubt whether I can stand it. Now and then a rain comes and washes it all away, and makes the old sloven look endimanche, but the filth begins again with the first weekday, and you go about with your mouth and eyes full of malarious dust, as you did before. Of course, you will remind me that Boston is always pulling down and building up too; but her vices whiten into virtues beside New York's in that way. Then the noise, the noise! All the money from all the stocks and bonds centering their wealth into the place, cannot buy exemption from it. Boston is noisy, too, but there are large spaces in Boston where you can get fairly well away from the noise, and I know of none here, though there is said to be one block up and down next the Riverside Drive which is tolerably free from it; but no one that is any one lives there, for New York is in nothing more anomalous than in having the east side for her fashionable quarter. Everywhere the noise buffets you, insults you; and the horrible means of transit, that add so much to the danger and the dirt, burst your ears with their din.

      I am no longer young, and I am not very well; you are quite right on both of these points; but I am not a dotard quite, or quite an invalid, and I do not exaggerate the facts which you beautiful creatures in your later forties make so light of. I fancy there is a dreadful solidarity in New York. I dare not trust myself to the climate, for instance, which I know is doing me good, for fear there is something behind it, something colossally uncertain and unreliable, and that later I shall pay with pneumonia for the relief from my nervous dyspepsia.

      Just now, indeed, we are in one of those psychological moments when there ought to be great safety for me. The better element, as it diffidently calls itself, has been given charge of the city, you know, by the recent election, and the experiment of self-government is to be tried once more by people who have apparently so little interest in it. As nearly as I can make out from chance encounters at the Perennial Club (where Malkin has had me elected a non-resident member; he left town as soon as he had done it), there seems to be what I should call an unexpectation in the general mind: a willingness to take things as they come, to wait on providence in a semi-cynical resignation, which in the last analysis might prove a kind of piety. They have been reformed so frequently, these poor New Yorkers, and then unreformed, that they have rather fallen into the habit of taking the good with the bad as if it might turn out the bad. The newspapers keep shouting away, but that does not count; there are only two or three of them that are ever regarded seriously; and the people at the Perennial, who do not get their politics from London quite so entirely as some of our fellows, are very placid about the municipal situation. They seem to rely altogether on the men who have been put into office, and not the least on those who put them in; in fact the government of New York is almost as personal as that of Germany.

      You can read this to Walter; and tell him that the Perennial is certainly a club to be put up at if you must come to New York. There are interesting heads, inside and out, here; the house is wonderfully cozy and incredibly quiet, an oasis in a desert of noise; and the windows look out over two miles of woodland in the Park, where I have already begun to take my walks. You will say, Here are the elements of a pleasant sojourn; and I do not deny it; but they are only the elements. The chemistry of their combination is wanting; and what I fear is that at the end of the winter, I should look back over my experience, and find in it nothing but the elements of a pleasant sojourn.

      Yours affectionately,

      Otis.