**{: .break one} ** I would like to walk you down Twenty-third Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and wake you up to the fact that you have got a country. Only you would think you were dreaming, and it is a dream. What impresses me most is the gratis exhibition that goes on all the time, the continuous performance of the streets that you could not get for money any where else, and that here is free to the poorest. In fact, it is for the poor. There is one window on Fourteenth street where the sidewalk is a solid mass of humanity from morning till night, entranced by the fairy scene inside; and most of the spectators look as if they had not been to breakfast or dinner, and were not going to supper. But they are enraptured; and that is the great secret of New York; she takes you out of yourself; she annihilates you and disperses you, and you might starve to death here without feeling hungry, for your mind wouldn’t be on it. **

The overlap of fantasy and hard fact in writing about New York is distinctively Howellsian: you have a country, and it is a dream. Early in “The World of Chance,” the writer hero, Ray, sees the city for the first time, “with a sense of the beauty struggling through the grotesqueness of the huge panorama, and evoking itself somehow from the grossest details”:

**{: .break one} ** The ferry-boats coming and going; the great barges with freight trains in sections in them; the canal-boats in tow of the river steamers; the shabby sloops slouching by with their sails half-filled by the flagging breeze; the ships lying at anchor in the stream, and wooding the shore with their masts, which the coastwise steamboats stared out of like fantastic villas, all window-shutters and wheel-houses; the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond, and hulking high overhead in the further distance in vast bulks and clumsy towers, the masses of those ten-storied edifices which are the necessity of commerce and the despair of art, all helped to compose the brutal and stupid body of the thing, whose soul was collectively expressed in an incredible picturesqueness. Ray saw nothing amiss in it. This agglomeration of warring forms, feebly typifying the ugliness of the warring interests within them, did not repulse him. He was not afraid. He took a new grip of the traveling-bag where he had his manuscript, so that he should not be parted from it for a moment till it went into some publisher’s keeping. **

The play of domestic particulars and unashamed hyperbole gives these passages their life: New York is a spectacle but it is unrecorded, even by painters, and perhaps unrecordable; you are left inarticulate before it. It is magical in a way, but it also awaits a magician; it is organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance of life. New York is stupid and brutal, and it is incredibly picturesque.

This might be no more than a mass of Walter Winchell-style clichés—New York is a fancy lady but she’ll turn on ya, etc.—if not for the charm of the particulars evoked (that lovely use of “wooding,” or, later, the “train that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor”), the play of opposites, and the odd lack of conventional drama. In all these novels, the hero’s first impression is not adjusted by experience, leaving him sadder but wiser; it is the experience, an unchanging truth to which he must adjust. In this respect, Howells’s New York writing—the evoked impression of the Brooklyn Bridge or the elevated train—is closer to Hart Crane’s poetry than to Edith Wharton’s prose. The passing show is the deep point.

Of the three novels, “Hazard” is by far the best known, on the whole the most successful, and the only one still in print. Its great subject, however, is easy to miss: the permanent precariousness of the middle classes in New York. Those, more than the largely faceless immigrants and proletariat with whom Howells sympathizes but whom he hardly knows, are the focus of pathos. Even the upper middle classes in America are in more precarious shape than the plutocrats want them to know; in New York, they come closest to knowing. It is made plain for them by, among other things, the miseries of apartment hunting and holding: you are what you have, and you will not have a single square inch, or a single shaft of light, more than you can afford.

Yet the other novels have their odd modernity, too. The conversations in “The World of Chance” about the threat of large stores to small books happened this morning, and the way in which the hero insinuates himself as an author before actually writing anything is slyly done, and echoes Howells’s theme that in New York the sign comes first and the thing signed for second. (In Henry James, the sigh comes first and the thing sighed for second.) Ray’s novel, “A Modern Romeo,” is obviously very, very bad—and Howells lets us know this without taking sides against his hero—yet we feel for his despair. His emotions at the manuscript’s rejections, and his surprising lack of emotion at its eventual acceptance, and improbable success, are deeply understood. (Ray’s novel succeeds because of one slightly tendentious and off-the-point rave review, and Ray both glories in it and feels guilty about it.)

This submission to hazard and chance as the only deities produces, at the novel’s end, a fatalism that strangely touches the edge of nihilism. Ray gets on a train to go back to his home town, to take a victory lap after his New York triumph:

**{: .break one} ** He began to wonder if life had not all been a chance with him. Nothing, not even the success of his book, in the light he now looked at it in, was the result of reasoned cause. That success had happened; it had not followed; and he didn’t deserve any praise for what had merely happened. If this apparent fatality were confined to the economic world alone, he would have been willing to censure civilization, and take his chance dumbly, blindly, with the rest. He had not found it so. On the contrary, he had found the same caprice, the same rule of mere causality, in the world which we suppose to be ordered by law—the world of thinking, the world of feeling. **

What happens is what happens, and though we console ourselves with the thought that there might be a Providence lurking someplace, we know that it is a secondhand idea, and that in the end there is just oblivion. This increasing sense of the randomness of social order—the belief that how we do is determined largely by a throw of the dice—is inextricable from Howells’s growing political radicalism in those years. Goodman and Dawson take great trouble to make us understand the extent and, in his own time, the significance of Howells’s transformation into a “practicing radical” in the eighteen-eighties and after. He was one of the very few writers to speak against the execution of the unjustly convicted Haymarket anarchists. “It blackens my life,” he wrote. “I feel the horror and the shame of the crime which the law is about to commit against justice”—this at a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans thought of the anarchists exactly as they think of terrorists now, as aliens with large-scale massacre on their minds. (And not without reason: the anarchist leader Johann Most, who spent time in New York, had published a pamphlet called “Revolutionary War Science: A Little Handbook of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerin, Dynamite, etc.,” which openly advocated the extermination of the middle classes.) Howells, like Twain, then watched with disbelief as the Spanish American war, with a toxic cocktail of deliberate manipulation (he knew both Pulitzer and Hearst, and rated them correctly), imperial appetite, and a kind of primitive tribalism, dishonored the country he loved and thought he knew.