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"He was a poor, cheap sort of a creature. Deplorably smart, and regrettably handsome. A fellow that assimilated everything to a certain extent, and nothing thoroughly. A fellow with no more moral nature than a base-ball. The sort of chap you'd expect to find, the next time you met him, in Congress or the house of correction." Howells A Modern Instance, 1881

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Cosmopolitanism is a Modern Vice, and We're Antique

William Dean Howells Interlude!

On the heels of Infinite Jest, I'm reading A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham, both as a dutiful continuation of my fall seminar on The Novels of Boston, and as a delicious restoration of solidity after Wallace's wild vapors (more on them to come). I now have an unshakeable conviction that Howells, the preeminent novelist of "the vast, natural, and unaffected dullness" of real American life, as he called it, should always be read immediately after Wallace, the preeminent novelist of the vast, unnatural, and highly affected dullness of unreal American life.

In any case, since here's a Bostonian in A Modern Instance waxing indulgently about his town:

" 'Now that Athens and Florence and Edinburgh are past, I don't think there is any place quite so well worth being born in as Boston... It's more authentic and individual, more municipal, after the old pattern, than any other modern city. It gives its stamp, it characterizes. The Boston Irishman, the Boston Jew, is a quite different Irishman or Jew from those of other places. Even Boston provinciality is a precious testimony to the authoritative personality of the city. Cosmopolitanism is a modern vice, and we're antique, we're classic, in the other thing. Yes, I'd rather be a Bostonian, at odds with Boston, than one of the curled darlings of any other community.' "

130 years later, this still doesn't seem to be a half-bad window into the Boston worldview: a complacent provincial's defense of provincial complacency, complete with an exalted self-image, unexamined conservatism, and collegiate logic-chopping. But kind of clever, all the same.

It's also a very different kind of animal than Philadelphia provinciality, which in my experience is neither so preeningly smart nor so grandly narcissistic. No true Philadelphian, for instance, would ever dream of comparing his city to Athens or Edinburgh (I won't say that no true Philadelphian would ever have heard of Athens or Edinburgh.) But after eight years of Philly's genuinely anti-cosmopolitan "authoritative personality," a few months of Boston faux-antiquity might not be such a bad thing, I think.

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