Cargoes for Crusoes

i

Willa Cather once made a significant confession, to the effect that nothing which had happened to her after the age of twenty seemed to matter as material for her fiction. On the whole, the statement is strongly borne out by her work; and there is reason to believe that it is true of other women writers. Dangerous as the path of generalization may be, I am persuaded that in such cases as Miss Cather, Zona Gale, Edna Ferber and Edith Wharton, all or nearly all of the writer’s best work is traceable to contacts and impressions in those young years which alone seem to hold an inextinguishable spark for the tinder of imagination. And in the instance of Mrs. Wharton one has only to consider her early life in relation to some of her fiction to feel that she could echo Miss Cather.

For whatever the high merit of much of her fiction, its finished irony, its polished strength, its assurance and ease, where is the work of hers, leaving aside Ethan Frome, which has the robust vitality of her pictures of old New York? It is not a question of accuracy in historical detail; various slips have been charged up against The Age of Innocence. Well, the fact that Keats confused Cortez with Balboa has never diminished the splendor of a famous sonnet. Vitality has little to do with structure or detail, and everything to do with the artist’s feeling for what he is modelling, painting or writing about. Who can read The Age of Innocence, or the four novelettes grouped under the general title Old New York (False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year’s Day) and doubt that it is a return to first loves?

As everyone knows, or should know, she was born in New York in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones; and her mother was a Rhinelander. One grandparent was a Stevens, another a Schermerhorn.[86] In the period before her marriage at the age of twenty-three to Edward Wharton, of Boston, and in spite of much time spent abroad, she was herself one of those sensitive souls who “in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played without a sound,” who found themselves inextricably and by no means unhappily enmeshed in a “cautious world built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders and ship-chandlers,” a world where everybody “lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underneath.”[87] In this society the girl and young woman had need of imaginative sympathy as well as sharpened perceptions if she were ultimately to comprehend what went on. For few can comprehend such things as the affair of Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer,[88] or such behavior as Lizzie Hazeldean’s[89] at the time. Innocence of mind is not in question here, nor observations; it is simply that one has to be older, to have had one’s own experiences, and to be able to relate what one has seen to what one has come to know from life. Then and only then can comprehension come in terms of that sympathy which Mrs. Wharton beautifully defines as a “moved understanding.” One is no longer shackled by exact memory and one is animated by the same strong feeling, in the flood-tide of which one takes the past and fashions from it a story serviceable in meaning for mankind.

ii

It is tempting to speculate whether Mrs. Wharton could have written The Age of Innocence in present-day New York. The thing seems improbable. Not even in the shelter of the National Arts Club, with a window overlooking Gramercy Park, or in one of the old Chelsea houses, does the feat look the least likely. Living in France she could quite readily cross the Atlantic in recollection, sit in a shabby red and gold box at the old Academy of Music and listen to Christine Nilsson singing in “Faust.” “She sang, of course, ‘M’ama!’ and not ‘He loves me!’ since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.” Newland Archer would be in the club box with other men, of whom Sillerton Jackson would be the undisputed social authority. He would sit at the back but Where he could see directly across the house in the box opposite the “young girl in white with eyes ecstatically fixed on the stage-lovers,” May Welland. “It was only that afternoon that May Welland had let him guess that she ‘cared’ (New York’s consecrated phrase of maiden avowal).” And then? Mrs. Wharton is not the one to avoid the delicious opening offered to review Newland Archer’s confused but hopeful visions. His masculine pride, a tender reverence he felt for her “abysmal purity,” the simple vanity which led him to wish May to be as worldly-wise and eager to please as the married woman of his acquaintance (“without, of course, any hint of the frailty which ... had disarranged his own plans for a whole winter”)—these elements of Newland Archer’s feeling are pieced together easily enough now from dozens of young men one grew up with and dozens of young couples one looked on at....

The infatuation of Newland Archer for Ellen Olenska would be gradual, handicapped by the efforts of his sympathy, unaided by any quality of imagination, “to picture the society in which the Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also—perhaps—tasted mysterious joys.” The constraint, like an enormous enveloping pressure, as if everyone in the old New York society lived in the remotest depths of the sea, would overcome both Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer. But, as Mrs. Wharton realized—one feels that it is these two moments for which she wrote—the time would come when Newland would look at his wife and wish she were dead, and the time would come when he would sit as the victim of tribal ceremony.

“Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. As his glance traveled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May’s canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the center of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to ‘foreign’ vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the center of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.

“It was the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

“As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp. He looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife. ‘It’s to show me,’ he thought, ‘what would happen to me—’ and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault.”

Here, indeed, is the novel of character at its finest. One does not have to praise the character novel in a day when the turn of critical taste has caused it to be esteemed above everything. As we know this type of fiction it has passed through several mutations since Jane Austen gave it existence by her novels. Men have seized upon Miss Austen’s lesson and have wrought so prodigiously with it, as in Vanity Fair, in The Egoist, and in The Old Wives’ Tale, that nothing is easier than to forget that the whole business originated in a woman’s mind. But the novel of character is even yet distinctly feminine. It ignores the mysterious and unknown. It says that whatever may be the Unknowable, there is much we do and can explore and know. It baffles the typically masculine effort to reason with the mind, and yields at a touch to the typically feminine approach by sympathy and intuition, by thinking, as it were, not with the mind but with the nervous system. Among the many perversions to which it has been subjected none is more hopeless than a sort of conscientious, wholly masculine realism, a placid apprehension of surfaces, such as triumphed in the work of William Dean Howells. Mr. George Moore said in malice that Henry James went abroad and read the great Europeans, while Mr. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James. It would be at least as true to suggest that Mrs. Wharton, for whatever time she was his “pupil,” chose Mr. James to escape from Mr. Howells. At home was dignity and dullness; abroad was the author of The Portrait of a Lady busy with highly-disguised melodrama. Who—least of all, a woman like Mrs. Wharton—could hesitate?

iii

The four novelettes grouped under the title, Old New York, are doubtless as works of art more perfect than The Age of Innocence, for in each case Mrs. Wharton has selected a subject as a painter might, with a feeling for the effect in certain lights and with a wish to avoid so far as possible the air of having “composed” her figures in their background. The extreme artificiality and rigidity of the society she writes about demands that at least one or two persons—the one or two in the foreground—shall possess a movement apparently unstudied. Therefore her task has been finely and ruthlessly to cut away the richly rambling growth of her recollections, the profusion in this direction or that; it has been to isolate a single crucial situation, or to expose behind the dried leaves and the withered roses of mid-century sentimentality and correctitude the reality of a heart that beat in its pathetic moment of terror or of despairing courage. These are exquisite stories; I do not think it an exaggeration to say they are the finest things Mrs. Wharton has ever done with the exception of Ethan Frome. Indeed, they have something that no work of hers but Ethan Frome has in the same degree, the mood of stirred comprehension and compassionate pity, joined to something that no work of hers but The Age of Innocence has, a rapturously perfect setting.

False Dawn (The ’Forties) begins at a country house which overlooked Long Island Sound at a point now shabby with cliff-dwellings and gas tanks. “Hay, verbena and mignonette scented the languid July day. Large strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs of mint, floated in a bowl of pale yellow”—and young Lewis Raycie, who has hard work to down his punch (“perfumed fire”) is twenty-one and ready for the Grand Tour. The more tender-hearted of his sisters has a habit of going out furtively at daybreak to take comforts to poor Mrs. Poe, the very sick wife of an atheistical poet. The son, secretly in love with an ineligible girl, runs across in his travels John Ruskin, and buys Italian primitives instead of the Raphael and conventional “masters” desired by his father. For this he is cut off from a fortune and left with the collection. We have a glimpse of him and his wife and little girl embraced in poverty while the pictures are exhibited to a New York still totally unready for them. Lewis Raycie, his wife and child are dust when the “dawn” comes.

In The Old Maid (The ’Fifties) Mrs. Wharton deals with a situation so dramatic that I feel the shocking unfairness of disclosing it prematurely to the reader. Although Delia Lovell, wife of James Ralston, and Charlotte Lovell are actually cousins, one comes to think of them as sisters. The faithful but unsparing presentation of what, essentially, is comprised in motherhood grows out of the most intimate glimpses of husband, wife, lover and mistress. “Afterward: why, of course, there was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the reminder of the phrase ‘to obey’ in the glittering blur of the Marriage Service; a week or a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed, the early morning discussions and consultations through that dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence. And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to ‘make up for everything,’ and didn’t—though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.”

Although The Spark is subtitled The ’Sixties, it is more truly a tale of the ’Sixties reflected in the ’Nineties. Hayley Delane, whose “harsh head stood out like a cliff from a flowery plain,” is the supremely good-natured, stupid husband. It is only by slow degrees that the young man who tells the story comes to understand that while Delane is intellectually no different from the other men of his social set, he is morally far in advance of them. Parenthetically, it is interesting to note Mrs. Wharton’s use of the young man as narrator not only in this story but in New Year’s Day, and to compare it with Willa Cather’s use of the same device in My Antonia and A Lost Lady.

The Spark is a story devoted to the exploration of character, an obscure but fascinating task resumed at intervals over the years. The secret of Delane’s character leads back, curiously and astonishingly, to his brief contact as a youth with “an old fellow in Washington” who visited the sick in the army hospitals. Otherwise Delane has never heard of Walt Whitman. I withhold the ironic and perfect ending.

A sample of Mrs. Wharton’s zestful writing comes in the first sentence of New Year’s Day (The ’Seventies):

“‘She was bad ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,’ said my mother, as if the scene of the offense added to the guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing.”

Her son’s mind flashes back to an incident when he was a boy of twelve watching, with older people, the rapid and unbecoming rush of folk from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which was on fire. With her admirable technique, Mrs. Wharton at once slips quietly back to the incident itself, and we follow Lizzie Hazeldean in her progress from the scene of so much confusion—a flight, but a controlled flight. This story holds a surprise for the reader, who will not be likely to surmise Mrs. Hazeldean’s true feeling any more than Henry Prest did. The scene between these two, meeting for the first time after Charles Hazeldean’s death, is incomparably well done.

Surely these four novelettes will be read a half-century hence with as much appreciation as today! For such work, for such New York primitives, one feels there can be no false dawn. I have no doubt that the immediate effect, only partly traceable to the presence in the background of some of the same persons, like Mrs. Manson Mingot and Mr. Sillerton Jackson, will be to set everyone to re-reading The Age of Innocence. Which is entirely as it should be, for they will find that novel fresher, livelier, more wistful and even more beautifully satisfactory today than four years ago.

A NOTE ON EDITH WHARTON

For a full list of Edith Wharton’s books and for reference to several important discussions of her work, see the chapter on her in either Authors of the Day or American Nights Entertainment.

The Age of Innocence is a story of New York society in the ’Seventies. It was published in 1920, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, awarded by Columbia University, as the best American novel of its year (over Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street). The four novelettes called Old New York were published in 1924 (separate volumes, or set) and are: