Romney by Owen Wister, James Butler (Editor)

From the Publisher

Owen Wister is known to most Americans as the creator of the heroic cowboy in The Virginian (1902). Despite his success as a Western novelist, Wister's failure to write about his native city of Philadelphia has been lamented by many for the loss of a literary "might-have-been." If only, sighed Wister's contemporary Elizabeth Robins Pennell in 1914, the novelist could understand that Philadelphia was as good a subject as the Wild West. Hence the surprise when James Butler uncovered a substantial fragment of a Philadelphia novel, which Wister intended to call Romney. Here, published for the first time, is the complete fragment of Romney together with two of his other unpublished Philadelphia works.

Even in its incomplete state -- nearly fifty thousand words -- Romney is Wister's longest piece of fiction after The Virginian and Lady Baltimore. Writing at the express command of his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister set Romney in Philadelphia (called Monopolis in the novel) during the 1880s, when, as he saw it, the city was passing from the old to a new order. The hero of the story, Romney, is a man of "no social position" who nonetheless rises to the top because he has superior ability. It is thus a novel about the possibilities for meaningful social change in a democracy. Although, alas, the story breaks off before the birth of Romney, Wister gives us much to savor in the existing thirteen chapters. We are treated to delightful scenes at the Bryn Mawr train station, the Bellevue Hotel, and Independence Square, which yield brilliant insights into life on the Main Line, the power of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the insidious effects of political corruption.

Wister's acute analysis in Romney of what differentiates Philadelphia and Boston upper classes is remarkably similar to, but anticipates by more than half a century, the classic study by E. Digby Baltzell in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979). Like Baltzell, Wister analyzes the urban aristocracy of Boston and Philadelphia, finding in Boston a Puritan drive for achievement and civic service but in Philadelphia a Quaker preference for toleration and moderation, all too often leading to acquiescence and stagnation.

Romney is undoubtedly the best fictional portrayal of "Gilded Age" Philadelphia, brilliantly capturing Wister's vision of old-money, aristocratic society gasping its last before the onrushing vulgarity of the nouveaux riches. It is a novel of manners that does for Philadelphia what Edith Wharton and John Marquand have done for New York and Boston.

Kirkus Reviews

An unfinished third novel, with three additional essays, about a contentedly corrupt belle epoque Philadelphia-where the famed Wister (1860-1938) went west to cure his depression after William Dean Howells rejected his first attempts at fiction. The result of that hegira, The Virginian, is considered America's finest western. In his introduction, Butler (English/LaSalle) contends that Wister's third novel, which biographers have mistakenly called Monopolis (after Wister's name for his fictional Philadelphia), was intended to be Wister's reply to friend Theodore Roosevelt's objection about the xenophobic cynicism in Wister's second novel, Lady Baltimore, an Edith Wharton/Henry James critique of southern aristocracy. Wister wrote Roosevelt that Dividends in Democracy, later titled after its hero, Romney Hythe, was to be, in Wister's words, "a picture of Philadelphia, and its passing from the old world to the new order; the hero of no social position, married to a wife of good social position elsewhere, and turning out to be superior to his wife." The 48,000-word fragment he produced-before abandoning it after WWI journalism, unsuccessful forays into politics, and the death of his wife sank him again into despair-begins in 1911, then flashes back to1880s Philadelphia, rooting the entanglement of early Main Line society in the greed and corruption surrounding the Pennsylvania Railroad. Alas, Romney himself, though discussed, remains unborn when the pages run out. Like Wharton's best work, the unfinished Romney, along with Wister's essays about Philadelphia society, remains striking for its examination of American social pathologies that, despite changes in ethnic, cultural and technologicalcomposition, remain virulently prevalent today.

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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

In which Aunt Carola gives a warning to her nephew, who gives another to the reader.

"Augustus, I desire to speak to you in the library for a few moments."

    When Aunt Carola said this to me the other day as we rose from the lunch table, my cheerfulness fell at once a number of degrees. So does it always fall when my Aunt addresses me in this particular formula. She has never varied it since I was eight. No doubt she used it still earlier, but that day I remember clearly. I had been found in the pantry; it was a matter of disobedience connected with a pot of apricot jam, and Aunt Carola's disagreeable footman (the butler would never have done it) told her. The look of her back as she preceded me, the tone of her voice, and the sort of time I had in the library, have been recurring for thirty-two years without any change either in them or in the apprehensive faintness of my stomach.

    "Oh Lord!" thought I, "what has she found out now?" When a man is forty he is never innocent. I left Uncle Andrew picking out a cigar and pouring out a glass of cognac for himself at ease, and I slowly followed after Aunt Carola with the forlorn and hang-dog spirit that I had inherited straight from the days of apricot jam.

    "Sit down, Augustus, if you please."

    Of course I did so, and in silence, as the footman came in.

    My Aunt remained standing, and took a cup of coffee from his tray; I took one also, and the man, who had brought it upstairs behind us, departed, shutting thedoor with a quietness that seemed to increase my apprehension.

    Aunt Carola had been looking out of the window as if I wasn't there; she now turned her eyes upon me. "Have you understated your age again?"

    When my relative begins obscurely, like this, it is apt to portend that she will presently rise to her chilliest heights. I drank my coffee all down at once, set the cup on the table, and resorted to flippancy. "Well, who do they say is the lucky girl now?"

    "It is no question of your being engaged, Augustus, I wish it were—if the choice were fitting. So much depends upon your having children, and your Uncle Andrew is disposed to be so generous. No; think a little." She had shaken her head at me all through this lecture. "Think," she repeated.

    "I can't. I'm too alarmed."

    This failed to soften her. "I liked nothing in that whole book so little, Augustus, as your not being candid about your age."

    This speech started in my mind a glimmering both of hope and of relief; but it wasn't yet bright enough, and I sat in suspense unrelaxed, looking at her during the pause she made before she continued:

    "In that account of your visit to Kings Port, you said that you were twenty-eight." Again my Aunt paused; then finished sternly: "and you were actually thirty-five. Thirty-five that March."

    Shameless pleasure now relaxed me. "People did often take me for twenty-eight then, you know."

    She gave me a cold gleam of reproof—but I didn't care, I pranced on:

    "And they often take me for thirty-five now. It's my nature to be well preserved."

    "Psha, Augustus!"

    "All right, Aunt."

    "In a woman," said she, "concealments about age are nonsensical enough, but one expects them. In a man—."

    She allowed me to imagine her opinion of such a man—but what did I care now? Aunt Carola comes undiluted from the old New York families of the Hudson River, and when she chooses, she can call a spade a spade just as nakedly as if Queen Victoria had never lived. One or two delicate matters had started up from the cushions of my softly upholstered conscience—but she didn't mean these, after all. I knew now what was coming, and I was braced for it—it needed but little bracing.

    Yet still she didn't come out at the place where I was ready for her. "Speaking of being engaged, Augustus, I suspected once or twice from the letters you wrote me while you were in Kings Port, that the girl—that very nice girl who made the cake, and of whom you seemed to see so much—that she might turn out to be the one, you know. It would have been acceptable to me—very."

    "Alas, Aunt Carola, it wasn't acceptable to her!"

    "Well; well; such disappointments may be wholesome for a conceited young man. What is this I hear about your having written another book ?" She had come out now!

    "I have."

    "I am told that it is about—ourselves."

    "It is."

    I don't think she had looked for such prompt acknowledgement on my part, she did not speak at once, and something of speculation came into her steady eyes, rendering less keen the penetrating glance she had been fixing upon me.

    "Now ourselves at the time of the Revolution," she said presently, "with George Washington and all those picturesque figures introduced—that would be something I could understand."

    "Dear Aunt, you wouldn't have me try to rival Hugh Wynne?"

    "But Augustus, what can you find to-day in this dismantled town?"

    "What can I find? Good gracious, what can't I find! Don't you see that it swarms and teems with things that for interest make the Revolution look absolutely evaporated in comparison?"

    "No," declared Aunt Carola decidedly, "I don't see at all."

    "Well, to me the present spectacle is vertiginous. The ferment, the unrest, the transition, the ebb of the old, the flood of the new, the uprooted tradition, the quickened pace, the diminishing serenity, the increasing roar! Where else in such abundance as here can you find Autumn and Spring so intermingled—the exquisite hues of decay stirred right in with the strong, glaring tints of the coming thing—the beautiful old colonial house torn down to make way for three dozen or four dozen or five dozen up-to-the-minute American 'homes'? No Declaration of Independence signed in any of 'em—but they've got a bath-room on every floor! Why the very insurance companies are a barometer of the times. They register the economic destruction of the old American family, and the invasion of the Hun, the Vandal, the Croat, and all the rest of the steerage. The 'perpetual' insurance policy that everybody used to put on their houses, has been entirely supplanted by the 'five-year' policy, because nobody feels sure he's going to be able to stay anywhere longer than that any more. Don't you think all this pretty interesting?"

    As I came down from my flight of enthusiasm, I noticed that Aunt Carola's face had become rather fixed and rather pale.

    "The exquisite hues of decay," she repeated very quietly to herself, and sat a little while without speaking. "The exquisite hues of decay!" And she nodded. Then her face regained its usual quality of decision, and so did her voice.

"Well, Augustus, I think I should prefer George Washington and the battle of Monmouth Court House, even if you put in the strong language he used to General Lee upon that occasion." "Oh, my hero can swear!" I laughed.

    "Can he indeed!" exclaimed Aunt Carola with a note of disapproval, as if she felt that the oath revolutionary was permissible because it was a long time ago, but that the oath contemporaneous should be discountenanced. "And who, if you please, may your hero be?"

    "Then you haven't heard that? Rummy Hythe is my hero. Of course I shall not print all the words that he—and most of us—will sometimes use during intimate talk."

    "Romney Hythe!—That's a nice nick-name you give him."

    "He got it in college—not that he drank so awfully much, but because Romney, as the family pronounce it, naturally suggests Rummy to the undergraduate mind. I believe he tried to object, but they told him he deserved it for pronouncing Romney like the famous marsh instead of like the famous painter."

    "But you surely have not dared to tell the story of that—that very" (my Aunt sought for an adjective and found it) "that odd young man?"

    "Oh yes I have?

    "You haven't gone into the whole thing?"

    "The whole thing. There's not one of the Ten Commandments that isn't broken, I believe. And at least two female reputations are cracked into fragments and powdered to the finest dust."

    My Aunt thought it over—or seemed to be thinking of it. "I cannot see how a hero is to be made of that—odd—young man."

    "Perhaps that's because you don't know him, Aunt. I've known him for a long while, and I'm very fond of him."

    It struck me now that there was less attention in my Aunt's face, and I began to feel that perhaps she hadn't come out with everything yet, that something still remained behind. Her eyes had become singular, and her tone was not quite so direct as is usual with her—especially when she speaks to me.

    "What else have you told?" she inquired.

    "Oh, things—things—lots of things."

    "You can't publish it till you're dead."

    "Dear Aunt, I've been dead for a number of years, but I don't wish it generally known."

    "There would be a great deal to tell, I suppose," my Aunt musingly remarked, "if one came to think it over. A great many people, agreeable and otherwise, have lived in Monopolis. And there have been many sorts of occurrences—better worth recording than your Romney Hythe, I should think. But perhaps you have?" She said this last searchingly.

    I still felt that something more was coming, and still I failed to guess what it was.

    "Coming from another place and society to live here in Monopolis," Aunt Carola pursued, "enables me to look at the town in a more detached way than if I had been a native. I can see, for instance, that here none of our respectable people are enterprising and none of our enterprising people are respectable."

    I laughed heartily. "I wish I'd made that remark!" I cried.

    But she hadn't made it with any idea of laughter, she remained serious and musing, and now and then her small, steady eyes looked at me hard. "Monopolis has produced a number of types," she said. "Characteristic types. Types with background."

    I said nothing; a new glimmer was suddenly twinkling in my mind as she proceeded:

    "It's a pity that these types will all be gone in a very few years.—I don't see how you can know the whole story of this Mr. Hythe."

    "Remember how well I know him."

    "Well enough for the intimate secrets he must hide?"

    "No, but I have heard a good deal too, and the rest is easy to infer. Whatever may perish of our types, the Gossip is deathless."

    Aunt Carola listened to my words, but she wasn't really attending to them: this I knew because I was watching her with increasing secret entertainment; I had guessed what she was still holding off from, what was her real point.

    She now manufactured one last piece of conversation. "I don't know any town richer in its people—by people I mean personages, Augustus—than Monopolis has been. And I don't understand what has changed this. One would suppose that in a society easily five times as large as it used to be when I was a girl, there would be more instead of fewer people—individuals, I mean—but everybody is getting just like everybody else."

    To this I did not choose to manufacture any answer. She wouldn't have listened to me—and she wasn't listening to herself. Her pretty hands had been folded in her lap as she sat on her sofa delivering herself of these sentiments; she now placed her hands at each side of her, slightly grasping the sofa's edge, and so rocked herself forward and back about an inch, while she spoke.

    "Your book has a great many characters in it, I suppose, Augustus?"

    I simply nodded, watching the sparkle of her rings on her fingers. That last remark had much less of manufacture about it; she still rocked back and forth, and the point was upon us.

    "Augustus."

    "Yes, Aunt?"

    "Augustus, have you put me into this book?"

    "Yes, Aunt." I brought it out whack! like that.

    The rocking stopped. She folded her hands in her lap again, and sat far back in the depths of the sofa. My guessing was quite at an end; what turn our interview would now take, I made no attempt to surmise; only one thought seemed to be in my head, and this was, that it would mar the book lamentably if Aunt Carola had to be taken out of it.

    "Well, Augustus!" This was what she next uttered, very quietly, with a long exhalation of breath upon which the words floated across our silence.

    No; it would be impossible to leave her out, I thought.

    "I suspected something of this directly the rumor reached me." This she said in a tone so little expected by me, that I raised my eyes to her face. Would you believe it? She wore an expression—yes, it was something like gratification—as of one who had merely received a tribute that was due to her station and prominence.

    I thought that she would keep to the point, now that she had so successfully come to it, but she didn't, she veered off—I suppose to give herself a little more time for thinking it over.

    "You say you know the whole story?" she observed. "Do you know, then, the truth about his grandmother, and how that all came about?"

    "But that wouldn't exactly be the story of Romney, would it?"

    "I think it would probably be much more romantic and better worth while than—anything about me, for instance."

    "But dear Aunt Carola, any true picture of Monopolis couldn't do without you. They'd all be inquiring where you were!"

    "She never got over the foreign accent, did she?"

    "The old lady? Romney's grandmother? No."

    "It must have been a romantic story—how she ever came to cut herself loose from all those great Austrian relatives, and renounce her place in the highest society of Europe for the sake of that American nobody—a mere commercial buccaneer."

    "Well, Aunt, you know that they say that when he was twenty-five, he was the handsomest creature that anybody ever saw. And probably he had something about him that to her—with her strict continental bringing up, and the sort of men whom she was allowed to see—must have been wild and—well, engulfing."

    "Engulfing indeed!" my Aunt assented with emphasis.

    "They say she wasn't nineteen," I pursued. "And what with reading Chateaubriand, and growing exalted over the antislavery agitation here, she fell in love with the idea of America and freedom—"

    "Psha!" interrupted my Aunt. "It was the buccaneer."

    "Well, she was ready for him to appear—and he appeared."

    "But how was she ever allowed to see him?"

    "Business relations with her father, I believe. The family was poor, American enterprises were a temptation, the buccaneer was seeking foreign capital, they had him freely at the palace or castle or whatever it was—it never entered their heads that he would dare to look at a daughter of that house, or that a daughter of that house would deign to look at him. So it all flared up suddenly between the young people. She ran off with him. I don't really know much about it; nobody does."

    "It ended everything between her and her people, didn't it?" asked my Aunt.

    "I believe so. And the buccaneer's venture failed too—the financial scheme."

    My Aunt nodded her head in silence. "She had her lover," she then said slowly, "and great poverty in a strange land for many years, and at last great riches. But when these had come, the lover"—she didn't finish this sentence, but said to me: "Now that would be a story worth writing down."

    "It has but a single objection, Aunt—my well-nigh total ignorance of it—until the grandson appears on the scene."

    "Oh, your Romney! Well, he's a great improvement on his nameless grandfather."

    "Hardly nameless, do you think?"

    "You know what I mean, Augustus, Society never accepted that scamp."

    forgotten there was one, when she rather suddenly brought us back to it.

    "Well, Augustus, if you're ridiculous about your age, you've been straight with me about your book."

    "Thank you, Aunt."

    "And now—when are you going to show me your book?"

    "Whenever it shall be your pleasure to name the day."

    "Don't you think you had better bring it to me soon?"

    "Certainly I will."

    "Because I'd like to see what you have done with—me."

    "Yes."

    "Perhaps mine is one of the female reputations that you have 'cracked to fragments.'"

    "Oh, Aunt Carola!" But she was now in such a gracious humor that I ventured to add: "Yes, I've reduced you to powder." Whereat she laughed. "Hadn't you better wait," I continued, "until I can get it type-written?"

    "Nonsense, Augustus. Your hand-writing is one of the few legible things about you. Bring it this afternoon, and I'll read it after dinner. Bring it this afternoon, Augustus, if you please."

    To this command—for it was nothing less—I responded: "With all the pleasure in life, Aunt. But don't imagine you can finish it in one evening—or in five—unless you sit up all night."

    "I hardly expect to pay you that compliment," said my Aunt.

    "I wish I could think that the book deserved it," I replied.

    "And so I can't finish it in five evenings?" she remarked. Her eyebrows were raised as much as she ever raises them; she doesn't allow her face to express much. "Isn't that a pretty long book, Augustus?"

    "I've not written it for people with the head-line habit," I said. "Or for the tired business man."

    "But don't you risk having a very limited audience?"

    Then I broke my reserve. "I've written it at leisure for readers of leisure. If the organ of attention of the entire American people has atrophied into a mere non-functioning survival, like the vermiform appendix,—why then I'll have no readers, except you!"

    "And perhaps I may not be able to finish it," suggested Aunt Carola.

    "I dare only hope for the best. I think, at any rate, that you wouldn't agree with the up-to-date critic who saw Othello somewhere out West and wrote in his review next morning that three hours had been wasted in what could have been told in three lines: 'Jealous Othello, colored, husband of Desdemona, white, instigated by scheming Iago to suspect his wife and her young military friend Cassio, smothers the innocent lady, afterwards committing suicide!' That was all he said."

    My Aunt smiled. "No, I don't agree with that. But I am more likely to finish your book than to wish to see that terrible play again. I'm too old for tragedies." She rose from the sofa. "I think I hear the carriage. I must get ready to go out with your Uncle Andrew."

    I looked out of the window. The victoria was there, clean and bright, the handsome harness shone, the coats of the horses were sleekly resplendent; with the coachman and footman in their sober, suitable livery, the whole made as excellent and dignified a turn-out as could be seen. It was almost the last of its kind in Monopolis.

    "Augustus!" Aunt Carola was shaking a finger at me, though not seriously. "If I find you have given me a vulgar automobile in your book, all is over between us.—This afternoon, Augustus. Don't forget."

    Many laws have I disobeyed, but seldom my Aunt. (She is my Great-aunt by marriage, to speak strictly, but she has been so long a severe yet affectionate corrector of my ways, that I count her a parent and hardly ever remember that the same blood does not flow in our veins.) Therefore, even before she had returned from driving, I had carried round to her house my bulky manuscript, wrapped up preciously; and thereafter much expectation daily filled my spirit, for I will confess something here: I wanted somebody to read my book very much! I wanted praise, I wanted appreciation, I wanted to discuss it. Nobody had seen this thing that I had toiled over during so many hundreds of hours, though I hadn't been able to help speaking of it now and then to a friend. Aunt Carola might help me to see and correct some faults. Unless she had demanded that I should bring her the book, I had never dared to do so. So my obedience to her word was not reluctance on this occasion—it has been reluctant pretty often!

    did, we weren't allowed to read them. Imagine dear Sir Walter!—but I'll not pretend to be a judge."

    "But you did finish it?"

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ROMNEY by Owen Wister. Copyright © 2001 by The Pennsylvania State University. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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