Source: An introduction to With the Procession, by Henry B. Fuller, The University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. v-xiv.

[In the following introduction to With the Procession, Harris considers the role of the American dream in Fuller's novel.]

Shall we be consoled by the idea that the luxurious misery of the principal persons of With the Procession is the continuing misery of American society—was and will be with us forever—or shall we renew our indignation that such a country was ever begun? The events which pained Henry Blake Fuller, seeming to motivate the composition of this novel, pain us now. His lament is ours.

On the other hand, our dilemma is deepened by our paradox, for we too celebrate this Procession; this march, as Fuller also calls it; this caravan, he says—the very word of Henry Adams in the very connection.

Where will this Procession lead? For one Irish family it has led to the White House. Perhaps that family is related to the Irish cop we meet in Chapter I. The Procession is a dream of that sort of success, and our expectation may be, as we read, that it marches the right way toward the best of history's alternatives.

The Procession is that principle of American freedom promising opportunity for men formerly without hope, political power for men formerly voiceless; wealth, of course; ascension in a single generation to that social class next above one's own. Give us your tired, your poor, yearning to be …

And yet if we can almost see justice, equality, human dignity, and more sweet abundance than any men ever consumed we see also conspicuous anxiety. Tyrannized by mediocrity, something within us may question democracy, making us sound a little snobbish when we ask whether a less flexible society might not improve our anxieties.

Whichever way we stand, we must know at least that the opposite idea exists before we approach With the Procession, for Fuller may be engaging us in a cause not quite our own. Perhaps he has been somewhere we have not—has had his own experience of the Procession, been tempted to join it, detected its dangers to the independence of his art, rescued himself. He was at mid-career, in age near forty, and he had remained alert, observing that increasing powers of workmanship do not necessarily excite popular admiration. His business honestly transacted along the lines of the old ethic—the old art—he nevertheless saw his trade diverted to practitioners who, like the spiritual enemies of his hero, David Marshall, speculated in quick returns.

The year of the novel is sometime in the early 1890s. The place is Chicago, called by Fuller a “great and complex city,” but still sometimes referred to by his characters as “the town,” so youthful is it: its population is two million; twenty years earlier it had been only 300,000.

The action of the novel begins with David Marshall, to whom Fuller gives an extended paragraph, then drops with a line—“But this is no way to begin.” Perhaps this pretense at a false beginning was an afterthought. No matter, the uncertainty warns us that Fuller had in mind another hero, not David. David, after all, is a merchant (“teas, coffees, spices, flour, sugar, baking-powder”). He and Fuller had neither wandered the same routes of the world nor followed similar trades. David was hardly an author's logical disguise.

Presumably, then, it is to David's son, Truesdale, whom we look for Fuller's statement, who ought to assert the meaning of the events through we shall live. Truesdale, we are told, is an artist; like Fuller, he has been enormously impressed by sights abroad. Our logical expectation is that it is he, not his father, who shall tell us our story.

It was also Fuller's logical procedure. But Truesdale, as either an artist in spirit or a painter in practice, fails to persuade. His response to his own outrage is too often limited to the ejaculation Ouf!, as if the author were reluctant to entrust to Truesdale a mature articulation which would have been incongruous against Fuller's fidelity to realism. Where Truesdale at last rises to coherent protest against esthetic chaos it is not in his own language at all, but with an interior monologue paraphrased by the author. Truesdale ironically views a respectable proposal for “a piece of actual architecture”:

Then he festooned it with telegraph wires, and draped it with fire-escapes, and girdled it with a stretch of elevated road, and hung it with signboards, and hedged it in with fruit-stands, and swathed it in clouds of coal smoke, and then asked them to find it; that was the puzzle, he said.

Significantly, this passage is instantly followed by Fuller's recognition that father and son “were dangerously near to the common ground upon which they had never yet met.” Why dangerously? The word is truly inexplicable at that point, and may in fact more accurately refer to the danger Fuller escaped in transferring his sympathies from Truesdale to David than to relationships within the novel.

The speculation is worth the risk, for unless the book is seen as David's we fail to appreciate some of the force of Fuller's dedication to the life of his characters, even at the expense of his own intention. His rescue of himself from his miscalculation is surely a first achievement of With the Procession, and a signal of Fuller's loyalty to craft. (We may also support the speculation by noting the shift of the designation Marshall from Truesdale to David, and the reduction, after the early pages, of Marshall to the boyish Truesdale.)

It is David whose decline and death span the book, and David who utters its cry and appeal, not in the author's voice but in the more difficult voice of a civilized merchant drawn to life. “To David Marshall, art in all its forms was an inexplicable thing. …” Yet it is David whose art is true.

David established, Fuller turns to the Procession itself, and to Truesdale Marshall. Truesdale, younger son of David, is returning at twenty-three from three years of “culture and adventure” abroad, “to catch up again … rejoin the great caravan.” From Truesdale's viewpoint, as we re-enter the city we see an actual caravan suggesting the figurative:

… a long line of waiting vehicles took up their interrupted course through the smoke and the stench … first a yellow streetcar; then a robust truck laden with rattling sheetiron, or piled high with fresh wooden pails and willow baskets; then a junk-cart bearing a pair of dwarfed and bearded Poles … then, perhaps, a bespattered buggy … then a butcher's cart loaded with the carcasses of calves … an express wagon with a yellow cur yelping from its rear; then, it may be, an insolently venturesome landau, with crested panel and top-booted coachman. Then drays and omnibuses and more street-cars; then, presently, somewhere in the line between the tail end of one truck and the menacing tongue of another, a family carry-all …

This carry-all belongs to the Marshall family, and it is likened to them, as a writer a generation after Fuller might liken a family automobile to its owners. But the carry-all personifies David, not his son. David persists in the language of the author's description of the carry-all, where the emphasis falls upon the relationship between virtue and fashion:

It is very capable and comprehensive vehicle, as conveyances of that kind go. It is not new, it is not precisely in the mode; but it shows material and workmanship of the best grade, and it is washed, oiled, polished with scrupulous care. It advances with some deliberation, and one might fancy hearing in the rattle of its tires, or in the suppressed flapping of its rear curtain, a word of plaintive protest. “I am not of the great world,” it seems to say; “I make no pretence to fashion. We are steady and solid, but we are not precisely in society, and we are far, very far indeed, from any attempt to cut a great figure. However, do not misunderstand our position; it is not that we are under, nor that we are exactly aside; perhaps we have been left just a little behind. Yes, that might express it—just a little behind.”

Fuller's scene set, his materials felt, his workmanship is never less than the workmanship of the conscientious artisan who made the carry-all. Scornful of simplification, he creates both heroes and villains too real to bear if we indolently insist upon easy identification. The novel is purest for the impurities of its actors, heroes not purely good, villains never merely bad. Among the heroes, for example, Truesdale is a snob, and sister Jane is a plain girl without prospects. The character Paston, whom we ought not to like, wins a rich reward; Jane has no such luck; David dies; Roger endures. The Procession marches on.

Consider the villains! May we even call them that? Are Mrs. Granger Bates and Roger Marshall really so wicked, after all?

Mrs. Bates appears to us at first as only that passive Mrs. Jones we compel ourselves to keep up with. It was not Mrs. Bates who searched out Jane Marshall, to poison Jane's mind with restlessness; no, it was Jane who sought Mrs. Bates. “I declare, when I called on Mrs. Bates and went over the place and compared their house and their way of living with ours. … When I saw that magnificent style she lived in …” At Mrs. Bates's house the gayest chapters of the book occur. We are disarmed. We find ourselves witness to the first hour of a friendship likely to survive long beyond the period of the book itself.

How can this be bad? Mrs. Bates would be astonished that we name her a candidate for villain. She is certain that she has in mind no thought but Jane's advancement. She teaches Jane to develop much that is best in her, converts her plainness to something closer to her potential beauty, and guides her to the Charity Ball.

Jane's first “glimpse” of Mrs. Bates, and ours, was of “one of the big, the broad, the great, the triumphant; … one of a Roman amplitude and vigor, an Indian keenness and sagacity, an American ambition and determination … one of the conquerors, in short.”

There is no dissimulation, no fraudulence, no misrepresentation on the part of Mrs. Bates. She knows where she has been and where she wants to go.

“… We weren't so very stylish ourselves, but we had some awfully stylish neighbors … ‘We'll get there, too, some time,’ I said to Granger. ‘This is going to be a big town, and we have a good show to be big people in it. Don't let's start in life like beggars going to the back door for cold victuals; let's march right up the front steps and ring the bell like somebody.’ … Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to Granger: ‘Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out some one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there …’ We have fought the fight—a fair field and no favor—and we have come out ahead. And we shall stay there, too; keep up with the procession is my motto, and head it if you can. I do head it, and I feel that I'm where I belong. When I can't foot it with the rest, let me drop by the wayside and the crows have me.”

There is nothing of subtlety to her except that subtlety which is worst of all because it remains unknown to Mrs. Bates herself: she lacks a knowledge not of her actions but of their implications. Not what she does, but what her doing means, remains inaccessible to her. How can she help but admire herself when all her activities are praised and publicized? To a vision so willingly obstructed what's good for one's own vanity takes on the aspect of beneficence.

Jane's initiative liberates Mrs. Bates's initiative, the innocent provoking the villain, though her villainy consists of nothing so patent as conspiracy with any forces except itself. Unconscious, subtlest of all, it characterizes not only Mrs. Bates but the entire Procession, shielding old settler and immigrant from the implications of their actions. With every best intention Mrs. Bates now goes to David Marshall to urge him to invest in a monument for himself:

“… Imagine a man disposed to devote two or three hundred thousand dollars to the public, and giving it to help pay off the municipal debt. How many people would consider themselves benefited by the gift, or would care a cent for the name of the giver? Or fancy his giving it to clean up the streets of the city. The whole affair would be forgotten with the coming of the next rain-storm. … You drive out to the University campus this time next year, David, and you'll see Bates Hall—four stories high, with dormers and gables and things, and the name carved in gray-stone over the doorway, to stay there for the next century or two. I think I shall name it Susan Lathrop Bates Hall …”

It is Mrs. Bates, not Fuller, who places Mrs. Bates on record. In this same disciplined way Fuller presents the second villain, working always within the limits his craft has set for itself. Perhaps he yearned for a more expansive vocabulary, a wider viewpoint. If so, he refrained from indulgence. (Jane's use of the phrase “historical and sociological” is sufficiently extraordinary for Fuller to make a point of it.)

Roger Marshall had none of the liberal advantages of his younger brother, Truesdale.

Roger was held by his family to be above all foibles and frailties; his aunt Lydia had once told him … that he had too much head and not enough heart. It is certain that he had marked out a definite course for himself, and that nothing, so far, had had the power to divert him materially from it; and he had a far-reaching contempt for the man who permitted the gray matter of his brain to be demoralized by the red matter in his veins. … His severe face was smooth-shaven, as he thought the face of a lawyer ought to be, and he could address the higher courts with such a loud and brazen utterance as to cause the court-loungers almost to feel the judges shrinking and shriveling under their robes. His was a hot and vehement nature, but it burned with a flame blue rather than red.

Selected by his father to serve as the family's attorney, Roger's is the final act of the book—the assignment of a portion of David's estate to Jane, rather than, as had been stipulated, to a monument of the sort recommended by Mrs. Bates. If Roger's act is questionably legal it is undeniably brotherly, and we view him here at the last, as we saw him earlier, the defender, the protector, saving his sister from her own sentimentality.

Shall we complain of such a man? How is he a villain? At worst he may be one of the wreckers of civilization, but within the terms of Fuller's novel he is only dull and uninteresting. Every family has its practical son, proud of his own hard code, seldom aware that his assumptions are merely assumptions or that his motivations extend beyond superficial consciousness. Roger is “tough and technical and litigious; his was the hand to seize, not to soothe.” He is the Procession's unconscious theorist.

It may be a weakness of With the Procession that Roger is sometimes indistinguishable from the other men who compose those younger forces surrounding David Marshall, who will carry on the business of business but who are incapable of inheriting David's style. The architect Bingham, whose ambition is in the mold of Roger, argues with David that “the noblest mountain in the world, when you come right down to details, is only a heap of dirt and rocks strewn over with sticks and stones. But if you will just step back far enough to get the proper point of view—well, you know what the painters can do with such things as these.”

But David cannot be deceived: “I can't step back, Bingham. I started here; I've stayed here; I belong here. I'm living right on your mountain, and its sticks and stones are all about me. Don't ask me to see them for anything else; don't ask me to call them anything else.”

“Make your impression while you may,” Bingham urges: “This is the time—this very year. The man who makes his mark here today will enjoy a fame which will spread as the fame of the city spreads and its power and prosperity increases. You know what we are destined to be—a hundred times greater than we are today. Fasten your name on the town, and your name will grow as the town itself does.”

It is the ancient appeal to the artist to exploit, to reduce his vision, to barter his soul for name and fame “today.” But the merchant was unable to be less than he was. “To David Marshall, art in all its forms was an inexplicable thing …” He had no language for it, only a passion, a devotion:

Why did he go to bed at half-past nine? In order that he might be at the store at half-past seven. Why must he be at the store by half-past seven? … because it was the only thing he wanted to do; because it was the only thing he could do; because it was the only thing he was pleased and proud to do; because it was the sole thing which enabled him to look upon himself as a useful, stable, honored member of society.

David, like Fuller—or Fuller, like David—worked within the limits of the material at hand. Neither felt himself responsible for social consequences beyond the work itself: well-made, the object created was its own morality and its own reward. “We have enough to bother us,” says David, “without reporters coming around.” That was the ideal.

As David declined, we are told, the “dismay” of his family “was now such as might occur at the Mint if the great stamp were suddenly and of its own accord to cease its coinage of double-eagles and to sink into a silence of supine idleness.” He is Mint, he is carry-all, the conscience and the clarity of the Procession, set slightly apart.

Conceivably, the values of David Marshall never reigned except within the imagination of Henry Blake Fuller. Conceivably, the Procession is the best of all possible processions, neither so ominous nor so destructive as we may fear. All that is finally certain is that Fuller, having described the conflict of values for himself in his own decades, describes it as well for us in ours. Few literary restorations are more to the present point.