Built to Fall

         One reason why I particularly enjoy Realist stories is that, in their efforts to avoid literary conventions and convey life for what it is, they often end up paying homage to the oldest morals in the Western canon. As the previous short readings A White Heron and Belles Demoiselles Plantation proved, you can tell a gritty, down-to-earth, no nonsense narrative and it STILL be a narrative, charged with purpose and beauty (unlike later attempts in the postmodern era to remove such things from the equation). Howell’s The Rise of Silas Lapham is no different, for by the time you’ve read the first fifth of the novel you already have a sense of how the novel’s going to work itself out – namely, a constant internal struggle between ambition and charity, a difficult social romance, and an ultimate moral decision that may or may not result in the loss of material goods in exchange for better reason.  This is because the novel is telling a story that we already know from tradition, but set in a modern age with new language.

          In the first chapter there are constant references to matters of the conscience, the movement from the shared strife that all American businessmen face in climbing the ladder to personal comfort in success, and the belief posed by Lapham that one must “live and learn”. These facets highlight Lapham’s lack of high-minded moral fiber but also suggest that he is driven by personal ethics and a desire to learn, which will form the backdrop of his struggles in the narrative. Elsewhere in the chapter Bartley comments that Mrs. Lapham has “a lovely, refined, sensitive face! And she looks GOOD, too,” to which Lapham responds “she is good”. This sentence continues to suggest that Lapham has a firm grasp on right and wrong by highlighting the dichotomy of Bartley’s perception of physical beauty with Lapham’s knowledge of human value, with the latter knowing which is right to praise.

          Despite his principles he is not without faults, and those are immediately demonstrated in the next two chapters. The narrator tells the reader that the wealthy Laphams not only spent money on garish frescoes and fineries but they also “went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels; they gave both hands to their church and to all the charities it brought them acquainted with; but they did not know how to spend on society”. This sets a very Ecclesiastical (the book, I mean) situation where the reader can already infer that one of two things will happen by the novel’s end: they will either lose all of their wealth and have to deal with the consequences, they will increasingly become disillusioned with their fortune as it consumes them, or a combination of the two. There is another quote in Ch. 3 that, in regards to his architect turning all of Lapham’s ideas of home construction on its head, “when he recovered from the daze into which the complete upheaval of all his preconceived notions had left him, he was in a fit state to swear by the architect.” Although the Laphams lack social grace and custom, they are nevertheless pulled and swayed by the fashions of the day, as well as by the internal sense of what successful American families should do. Note that Lapham “had not yet reached the picture-buying stage of the rich man’s development” (emphasis added), suggesting that Lapham, for all of his originality and personal principles, is nevertheless just another sheep in the bourgeois herd, destined for all the same peaks and valleys as anyone other aristocrat and may end up no more valuable than the rest.

           What good is personal ambition in the face of universal homogeneity, when you’ve already set yourself on path of spiritual destruction? How valuable is the life of a man who willingly sets his desires on the same exact fields and streams as everyone else? This story is rather brief and has been told countless times, and we already know where it’s all heading, the only question is how.