Roundabout to Boston (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) — Inside the Classic

Venice as a Literary Outpost

Howells portrays Venice not as a romantic escape but as a place where he remained tethered to American literary circles through correspondence and visits from travelers like Charles Hale. He notes that Hale had been in Lowell's classes at Harvard, often met Longfellow, and knew Holmes, allowing Howells to talk of his idols. The memoir emphasizes the distance from Boston's literary scene while maintaining a vicarious connection through such intermediaries. Howells also describes turning to prose after poetic failures, writing studies of Venetian life that later became a book, initially offered to the Boston Advertiser after being rejected by more aesthetic periodicals.

The Struggle for a Literary Basis

Howells recounts the precarious nature of freelance writing during the Civil War, noting that few young writers made themselves heard amid the din of arms. He mentions Theodore Winthrop, Forceythe Willson, and occasional poems from Aldrich, Stedman, or Stoddard. The narrative focuses on his search for a steady income—a 'basis'—which he finally found when the editor of the Nation offered him a position averaging forty dollars a week. Howells describes the subsequent months as among the happiest of his life, writing criticisms and a social department, and enjoying the company of literary friends in New York, including the Stoddards, Stedman, and Bayard Taylor.

Anecdotes of Literary Society

Howells provides specific vignettes of New York literary life: Taylor's weekly receptions in East Twelfth Street, dinners at James Lorrimer Graham's house where wit and comic songs abounded, and a poignant moment when Edwin Booth picked up a cast of Lincoln's hand and asked whose it was. Graham feigned not to hear, but Booth persisted, and upon learning the answer, put it down without a word. Howells also notes missing George William Curtis during his first winter in New York, finally meeting him seven years later at Mr. Norton's in Cambridge, where Curtis spent most of the evening discussing an obscure point in Browning's 'My Last Duchess'. These episodes illustrate the blend of camaraderie and gravity in his social circle.

Readers should approach this memoir as a selective reconstruction of Howells's path from Venice to Boston, filtered through the lens of his later literary friendships. The excerpts reveal a writer who measures success not by publication alone but by the personal bonds that sustained him. The narrative's value lies in its specific, often understated details about the mechanics of literary life in the 1860s—the copying of manuscripts, the negotiation of fees, the casual dinners where careers were made—rather than in any dramatic arc.

Reading Howells’s quiet confession of feeling out of step in Venice, I remembered my own small exile in a rented room, and the way Roundabout to Boston made that ache feel seen. The Peak in Darien, With Some Other Inquiries Touching Concerns of the Soul and the Body An Octave of Essays — A Closer Reading once gave me that same strange comfort — that the farthest point of our loneliness is just another view of what we carry home.