The Whole Family: William Dean Howells and a Curious Experiment

 

Anthology films have long been a rare though not unheard-of presence in the industry dating as far back to at least the early 30s. There have been stylistic variations but generally the plot is held together by a common thread. The novelty was often though not always seeing different directors adding their own style to their own portion of the narrative. Unsurprisingly, results varied from film to film but from segment to segment. Perhaps D.W. Griffith succeeded best of all in what is likely the first of its kind, Intolerance from 1916.   If I Had a Million, from 1932, attracted such contemporary masters as Ernst Lubitsch, William A. Seiter and Norman Z. McLeod, each to direct the tale of a different hopeful awaiting their share of an inheritance.  The process was altered in 1942 with Tales of Manhattan in which one director, Julien Duvivier, traced the story of a tailcoat as it changed hands from patron to patron. The mood changes here were derived from a cast as diverse as Henry Fonda, Edward G. Robinson and W.C. Fields. A decade later, Henry Hathaway, Henry King and Howard Hawks all took stab at directing an adaptation of one of O. Henry’s short stories inn O. Henry’s Full House. The process lasted well into the 80s (Twilight Zone: The Movie and New York Stories), the 90s (Four Rooms) and the 2000s with Paris je t’aime.

In the medium of literature, however, the concept is scarcely heard of. Perhaps because authoring a literary work is far more personal and more purely the product of a writer’s vision the exercise, when attempted, seldom works. Film, even works of auteurs, has to contend with a committee before, during and after production.

There have been a few notable instances, however. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins collaborated quite a bit on short story anthologies as well as the play and novel, No Thoroughfare. Perhaps, however, the most enduring example was concocted by William Dean Howells in 1906. Mark Twain had floated a similar idea some years earlier which never came to fruition, but Howells contacted Harper’s Bazar editor Elizabeth Jordan suggesting a work consisting of the magazine’s most prolific authors.

This was the genesis of the novel that would come to be titled The Whole Family. The premise is superficially simple. Peggy Talbert, a young New England girl, returns home from college engaged to a young man she met in the co-ed campus. Different family members and family friends have different reactions, family scandals are spilled, and key details are revealed by passing through the same event through the eyes of different characters.

Jordan was immediately sold on the idea and set about gathering some of her best writers, with Howells leading off with the first chapter and Jordan herself taking over the fifth chapter. Mark Twain was approached (given his prior interest in an unrealized similar project) and offered the comical chapter told from the eyes of Peggy’s child brother. Twain declined, apparently having lost faith in the concept’s success, and that chapter ultimately went to Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews who seems throughout the chapter to be trying (with some success it must be said) to emulate Twain’s spirit.

Edith Wharton, Hamlin Garland and Kate Douglas Wiggin, whose Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was then amongst the most popular books for children, also declined. Despite Jordan’s pessimism about his willingness, Henry James was enthusiastic about the project and became, beside Howells, the only one of the twelve authors involved who is widely remembered today. This, however, may have been what made James’s chapter the most inert. After developing his literary voice so distinctly after half a century of writing he had some trouble adapting it to a shared work. Consequently, his plodding chapter feels out of place compared to the brisk whimsies of the chapters that surround it.

A work of this nature is subject to artistic disputes and the principle one of The Whole Family reflected the societal prejudices of the time. In the first chapter, Howells introduced Peggy’s “old maid” aunt, Elizabeth. Howells, then 70, perhaps could not have conceived of Aunt Elizabeth as anything but a harmless old spinster. However, when Mary E. Wilkins Freeman took control and focus of the character in the second chapter, Aunt Elizabeth turns from a tragic figure into a desirable mature woman, free of spirit and sexually alive (even, unfortunately, to the attentions of Peggy’s fiancé Harry Goward). Freeman, herself unmarried until the age of 49, and to a man seven years her junior, was clearly writing from the heart about a changing world she embraced. Jordan, herself an unmarried woman in a powerful position that would have been nearly impossible less than fifty years earlier, personally embraced Freeman’s contribution, though Howells and Henry Van Dyke, author of the final chapter, expressed discomfort.

Freeman, however, was undeterred, writing to Jordan, “Their single state is a deliberate choice on their part, and men are at their feet. Single women have caught up with, and passed, old bachelors in the last half of the century. I don't think Mr. Howells recognizes this. He is thinking of the time when women of thirty put on caps, and renounced the world. That was because they married at fifteen and sixteen, and at thirty had about a dozen children. Now they simply do not do it.”

Despite the rocky origins of The Whole Family, however, the work plays out surprisingly well. Together the chapters flow well (with the exception of James’s which may have worked better in the context of a solo venture) and the story unfolds in turns delightful, revealing and charming. As an experiment it produced no masterpiece but an overall success. The greatest credit that can be given the many cooks in the kitchen here is to the cohesiveness and smoothness of a collaborative work.