Dictionary of Literary Biography on Robert (Welch) Herrick
Robert Herrick was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a genteelly impoverished family that traced its New England lineage back to 1636. Schooled locally, he also graduated from Harvard, where he benefited from a recent interest in encouraging creative writers. For the rest of his life he could impress strangers as the embodiment of Harvard stiffness. After three years as an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he went to the raw, recently established University of Chicago, teaching there until he resigned his professorship of English in 1923. Meanwhile his impetuous marriage to a first cousin had soured before a divorce in 1913 when, of three children, only their son Philip Abbot was still living. The move to the Midwest shook his values less than might be expected. However, after a phase of chauvinism, he reacted to World War I with reflective skepticism; likewise the stock-market crash of 1929, in which he lost heavily, rearranged rather than demoralized his thinking, and he confronted the 1930s positively. Having served effectively from 1935 until his death in 1938 as government secretary of the Virgin Islands, he was buried in York Village, Maine, where he had made a summer home since 1912.
Herrick was a novelist of ideas, contemptuous of his peers who presented easy solutions wrapped in liveliness. Ever conscious of his Puritan heritage, he insisted on finding ethical values for himself and others. In his twenty-one books of fiction the sinners or even the commonplace hedonists rarely escape severe moral reckonings. Given his impatience with the weaknesses of most people it may seem puzzling that he became a novelist. But he desired a vocation that satisfied both the ideal of service and the post-Romantic drive for self-expression. He would be displeased that today he is read usually for social history or as the exemplar of a high-minded ethic that denies reality.
Too slowly learning to conceal his models Herrick drew heavily on not only his personal relationships but also his inner development. Yet, within a repetitiousness of plot from novel to novel, he made wide swings in method and tone though his first and last novels both fit within the pattern of realism set by William Dean Howells. More particularly his first full-scale novel, The Gospel of Freedom (1898), projected themes that would reappear during his career: the duty to attain the self-examined life, the most fulfilling way to define success, responsibility for one's fellows, and the pleasures of mind over those of the flesh. In The Gospel of Freedom these themes gain edge from being advocated by an Ibsenian wife--the first of his many New Women--who divorces a prosperous husband because he will not accept her as an equal.
The Web of Life (1900) cuts across all the social layers. Still Herrick, who resented being classed with any "Chicago school," kept clear of naturalism, and his physician-hero, rejecting the lucrative practice his fiancee's family plans for him, settles down resolutely into a poor neighborhood. Even before Herrick could absorb the reviews complaining about sordidness in The Web of Life, The Real World (1901) waxed eloquent instead about the creative power of the will, which gains strength from every stern victory; its Jack Pemberton, a budding attorney, founds the line of Herrick males who transcend their backgrounds by improving their minds even more than their social graces, winning success and the women attracted to it, and then rejecting both for some high-minded yet practical enterprise. The Common Lot (1904) lowers the tone from melodrama while shifting the wand of righteousness to the wife of an architect--another of Herrick's professional men--who slips into conspiring with shoddy contractors. After one of his apartment houses collapses, she leads him to a spiritual rebirth, so cliched as to submerge the grittier touches of poverty and crime.
Even in hindsight The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905) comes as a surprise. The most lasting of Herrick's novels, it ignores moral conversions, and his only first-person narrator, a rags-to-hardfisted-riches meatpacker, wastes no words on sentiment. Having bought a seat in the U.S. Senate he reviews his career in a plausible, social Darwinist defense and feels no need for the faith healer of psychic ills, such as the one who appears in the novelette The Master of the Inn (1908), Herrick's best-seller. Quasi-mystical vitalism, a febrile faith in a vague but benign life force, also dominates Together (1908), once acclaimed as his Tolstoyan masterpiece with its contrasting of several marriages that exemplify the economic and political tensions of the early twentieth century. To many it seemed to make him our leading serious novelist. Perplexingly, he followed up with A Life for a Life (1910), a febrile allegory that supposedly combined realism about the industrial metropolis with idealism about the exploits of an intellectual giant who transcends Success and the shining maiden linked with it.
Probably driven more by inner rhythms than poor reviews he dropped into a startlingly relaxed irony for One Woman's Life (1913) to let Milly Ridge, a born opportunist, exploit the society that pampers her beauty, assumes she is guided by Victorian decorum, and never suspects her sensuality. To the end, when she leaves for California, she is a happy Emma Bovary. For once holding to the tone of his previous novel, especially in the first half, Clark's Field (1914) endows a shabby adolescent with fifty acres that the urban sprawl suddenly makes valuable. After this skepticism about the sources of a fortune and the shallow uses made of it, Herrick was readier to take a quasi-Marxist view of postwar society than he first realized. Even so, Homely Lilla (1923) almost cheerfully defends a forty-year struggle by a lively girl against a repressive mother and husband and neighbors who disapprove of a woman rancher. Without raising his voice Herrick articulated a balance between free will or autonomy and pragmatic solutions.
Waste (1924) has a different, but dogged tone, a would-be sorrow too deep for tears over the disillusionments of an architect whose inward career replicates the author's. Though some respect-worthy critics praised Waste, it is now less interesting than Chimes (1926), which combines realistic vignettes of the professoriat with sensible idealism about the goals of higher learning. Herrick's friends had needlessly feared a muckraking expose of the academic profession. However, to say that he had mellowed would understate the urbanity of his last novel, The End of Desire (1932), in which a psychiatrist accepts, as long as he can without losing self-respect, the role of satellite to his scholarly yet wealthy and egocentric mistress. Out of a seasoned tolerance and a loyalty to past affection he tries to protect her and her children from her biases rooted in privilege. Much of the same warmth flows from the spokesman in Sometime (1933), a utopian romance that incorporates precepts from Mexican peasants, Amerindians, and Africans and erects a character model interweaving intelligence with spontaneity--except for some human engineering in the name of eugenics.
Herrick left no artistic legacy though The Memoirs of an American Citizen is another always useful model of economy. His literary and even his political essays hold more enduring interest than his twenty short stories, all written before 1916. Histories of the Progressive movement mention him, and specialists in ethics could study him as a disciple of the once prevailing school of self-realization. But, particularly in the four novellas of Wanderings (1925) as well as The End of Desire, he is also worth reading for his treatment of romantic love in middle age and his poignant humanism.
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