Into this enclave, old New York society, Edith Wharton was born. She took her positioning seriously, and the old stock with its thumb in the dike of Manhattan was one of her themes as a novelist. It might be said of this theme what Henry James wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne: “It is only in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life, that the fact of one’s ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element of one’s morality.”
Being from New York, rather than from Salem, Massachusetts, Edith Wharton was not a Yankee and not a lingering Puritan conscience inhabited by ghosts and provincial scruples. She grew up a cosmopolitan from the first, early traveling abroad with her parents; she married after the usual biographical unsteadiness in the matter of broken engagements and again traveled abroad, then settled on Park Avenue and in Newport and, much later, built herself a grand house in Lenox, Massachusetts, kept traveling, finally sold the house, divorced her husband, Edward Wharton—“cerebrally compromised Teddy,” as Henry James called him, summing up this wild manic-depressive who gave her a lot of trouble. Along the way, she had a three-year affair with the romantically overextended seducer Morton Fullerton. And then in 1913, after the divorce, she settled permanently in France. Yet there was more to it than that.
Edith Wharton was twenty-nine when her first short story was published and thirty-seven when her first collection appeared in 1899. Two years before, The Decoration of Houses, written with the architect Ogden Codman, had been published. Even though starting late, Edith Wharton quickly became a professional writer in the best sense of the phrase. She wrote steadily, novel after novel, made money, and spent money with a forthright and standard-bearing loyalty to those twins of domestic economy, taste and comfort.
She liked expensive motorcars and once told Henry James that the last of these had been purchased with the proceeds from The Valley of Decision, a two-volume mistake about eighteenth-century Italy with characters named Odo and the Duke of Monte Alloro that showed Italy can be as dangerous for certain English-language novelists as the vapors from the undrained marshes. (To the point: Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, a weary and unsuitable surrender to the moist murk a gloomy eye might discover in the beautiful country. Hawthorne himself did not make the common surrender to Italy and complained of “discomfort and miseries,” found the Roman winter an unadvertised blast of chills, and could not countenance nudity in sculptures.)
Henry James, looking at Mrs. Wharton’s motorcar purchased by the assault on Italy, and referring to The Wings of the Dove, is reported to have said, “With the proceeds of my last novel, I purchased a small go-cart, or wheel-barrow, on which my guests’ luggage is wheeled from the station to my house. It needs a coat of paint. With the proceeds of my next novel I shall have it painted.”
There is a tradesman’s shrewdness in Edith Wharton’s work. She knows how to order the stock and dispose the goods in the window. She was a popular author, or, to be more just, her books were popular, not always the same thing. (Even in her day there were writers, many of them women susceptible to sentiment, who trafficked in novels in the present-day manner—more soybeans on the commodities market.) Edith Wharton is free of lush sentiments and moralizing tears. In The House of Mirth, her triumph, she is not always clear what the moral might be and thereby creates a stunning tragedy in which the best and the richest society of New York reveals an inner coarseness like pimps cruising in Cadillacs.
Nevertheless, she is often caught up in contrivance as a furtherance of product. And she likes the ruffled cuff and transcontinental glamour, interesting enough in itself but speeding to pointlessness. The novel is viewed as a frank transaction between elements, elements to be laid out and pasted down like tiles in a frame. A “situation” is of course the necessity of fiction. Yet what of the cracks, the anxiety we sense in greater novelists about the very intention of the careful arabesques so purposefully designed and all of a sudden baked hard as rock?
In a story by Chekhov called “Terror,” a young man has been flirting with the wife of his good friend, and she has been sighing in the Russian manner for him. Somehow, he at last takes her to his room, which the husband enters to get his cap left there earlier, set up, we would say, by the dramatist’s art. At the end, the young man wonders: “Why has it turned out like this and not differently? To whom and for what was it necessary that she should love me in earnest and that he should come to my room to fetch his cap? What had the cap to do with it?”
Neatness of plotting; balancing of the elements by a handy coincidence beyond necessity: That is the way it often goes with this prodigious worker, busy at the morning’s pages. She tends to lay hold with some of the gregarious insistence she displayed as the sort of hostess who organizes trips after lunch. Too many caps to be retrieved at the bedside of indiscretion, too much of a gloss. It’s the last slap of the polishing cloth and then forge ahead in a majorful fashion.
The Reef, for instance: The young man is hoping to marry the recently widowed woman he has long loved. She puts him off with family affairs in her mother-in-law’s château in France and with problems relating to her young child and to her stepson. All are Americans, but the château somehow appears as naturally as if it were a deed to a woodlot. In a fit of chagrin, the young man has an affair in a cheap Paris railroad hotel with a penniless American girl trying her hand at this and that abroad. This manifestation of impatience over and done with, the widow and the young man recombine, so to speak. And soon the girl from the railroad hotel turns up and will become engaged to the stepson, heir to the château and all the rest. The plot is suspenseful and executed with considerable gallantry and many Jamesian pauses in articulation—questions that are not quite asked, answers that hang in the air, the cues in the matter of a dialogue to a moral dilemma. The convenience of the young girl’s turning up to be promptly fallen in love with by the heir is too brilliant, too tidy.
The Mother’s Recompense: A mother has abandoned her husband and daughter, and New York society has erased the blot of her existence as if she were a smudge to be washed off a window. She lives abroad rather shabbily unanchored but has for a time the pleasant anguish of an affair with a younger man, who proves to be the great love of her life. When the old members of the New York family die, the daughter brings her mother back. It’s a lottery ticket for the bolter: everything forgiven, luxury, and social reestablishment. Soon, the young man drops down on the scene; the daughter falls in love and means to marry him. You turn a corner, or rather a page, and there he is, or there she is. Moments of social comedy set out as deftly as the knives and forks; dramatic encounters in the splendid old arks of the Hudson Valley or in the mansions moving upward on Fifth Avenue.
Edith Wharton is a challenging figure just now. In her finesse and talent, her glamour and worldliness, she shares in some of the renewed affection for the threatened New York City architecture of the Beaux Arts period. Even her snobbishness and spendthrift ways are not remote from the activities of the haute couture ladies that daily fill the pages of the city’s newspapers. With Edith Wharton, it was always an “approach up a red carpet,” as the English man of letters Percy Lubbock says in his courteous but sly memoir of their friendship. She was, in most of her writing life, not one to loiter with curiosity about the crude crunch of New York, and she cannot even be claimed as an old-stock patriot since she fled the frontier and the American presence with its “vainglory, crassness and total ignorance.”
In line with the contemporary appetite for tawdry revelation, the grande dame received a boost in her literary ratings thanks to R. W. B. Lewis’s biography and the publication of a very knowing fragment of pornography found among her papers. She composed, yes, a father-daughter scene, a frankly hot exercise in appreciative specification not unlike Auden’s “The Platonic Blow”:
Letting herself downward along the divan till her head was in a line with his middle she flung herself upon the swelling member, and bega
n to caress it insinuatingly with her tongue. It was the first time she had ever seen it actually exposed to her eyes, and her heart swelled excitedly: to have her touch confirmed by sight enriched the sensation that was communicating itself through her ardent twisting tongue. With panting breath she wound her caress deeper and deeper into the thick firm folds, till at length the member, thrusting her lips open, held her gasping, as if at its mercy.
The House of Mirth was written while Edith Wharton was still living in New York in 1905—or partly living in New York on Park Avenue when not at the new house in Lenox or in Newport or abroad. The tragic force of this ambitious early novel—early in her career at least—has to do with the broadness of conception, the immediacy of the strokes and scenes, rather than, as was so often later the case, a concentration upon details of manners, such as divorce for a woman. (It is interesting that in this novel one woman who seems to be invited everywhere has been divorced twice.)
It is a society novel of city mansions and great country houses, expensive bridge games, Paris clothes, and lavish weddings. Into this, the author has placed a perfect center, Lily Bart, a spectacularly resonant creation, trying to keep afloat after a very realistic collapse of the foundation of the part she was designed to play. Lily is spoiled, pleasure-loving, and has one of those society mothers who are as improvident as a tornado. The father comes home one day from “downtown,” and while Lily is chattering about the need every day for fresh flowers in the house at twelve dollars a dozen, the weary man replies: “Oh, certainly my dear—give him an order for twelve hundred.” There is a sardonic stress to his reply, and the father is asked if he is ill. “Ill—No, I’m ruined,” he says.
Quite soon both parents are dead and Lily is sent to live with an aunt, an old goose in good society and well-heeled but dull and stingy in everything except an allowance for clothes. At the opening Lily is twenty-nine, beautiful, clever, an adornment for dinners and weekends that demand expenditures, at the bridge table for one, which she cannot afford and for which she is secretly in debt. It is clearly time for her to marry, after having foolishly turned down respectable offers. Marriage to a rich man is her aim, and early in the book she has her chance with a plodding, timid young heir, but certain acts of impetuosity and the news of her gambling debts frighten him away.
That is the way it goes. Every move Lily makes, whether innocent or calculating, leads to disaster and compromise. Her efforts go on very much in the manner of a continental farce. Although she is chaste, she tends again and again to be discovered in a sort of rumpled state. Men, married and otherwise, pursue her and, when rejected, blackmail her. Each scene is interesting, and if observers are always on hand to find her walking in the park when she’d rather not be seen or coming out of a house at the wrong hour, no unfortunate arrangement of circumstances is altogether without credibility.
The brilliance of the characterization lies in Lily’s self-knowledge. She is never unaware of her own motives, and when her manipulations fail she does not impugn the self-interest of others working against her own. As one who has been on the town too long and who is poorer than anyone knows, Lily quite understands self-interest. She loses every gamble, and each opportunity snaps back like a trap. Her acquaintance with luxury is a fatal habituation. “Of luxury, the fruit is luxury,” as Thoreau phrased it. At last, disinherited by her aunt because of “gossip,” she sinks into irreversible poverty, an urban slide something like that of a luckless courtesan, although Lily Bart is only a New York society girl without means and without connections except of the kind that issue invitations. In the end, she takes an overdose of sleeping medicine.
Surrounding this personal debacle is a large society, not a representation of the city so much as a society that twists and turns upon itself, within the list, the mostly rich and sometimes dull and overfed. The predatory sexuality, the heartlessness, and the coarseness are quite startling when viewed against the more mildly rebuked, nostalgic renderings of the old guard in the later works.
For instance, Gus Trenor, whose credentials we cannot doubt since “with all his faults, Trenor had the safeguard of his traditions, and was less likely to overstep them because they were so purely instinctive.” Of course, the “instinctive” graces are often out to lunch when life, here and elsewhere, scratches with its small and large irritations. Still, the rather glum and fumbling needs of poor Gus bring to mind instincts of the old urgency.
His wife is Lily’s best friend, with all the relevant modifications of both words, and gives parties and weekends on Long Island, or is it up the Hudson? Mr. Trenor has appeared harmless enough but is insufficiently attended to. On one of the occasions, social, at Bellomont, his estate, he hears of Lily’s desperate situation and offers to invest her last thousand dollars. Not long after, he presents her with ten thousand dollars, supposedly profit from a tip. Having gone to this trouble, Trenor turns as ornery as a ward boss. He gossips about the money and insinuates that there was no market tip; there was only his generosity, for which he wants womanly attentions of the usual concreteness. He sends her a telegram in his wife’s name, summoning her late in the evening to his mansion on Fifth Avenue. Of course, the telegram is a trick of the most benighted asininity and Trenor is alone. He makes a clumsy effort to seduce Lily, but clumsy or not the intention is altogether realistic. Edith Wharton is bold about sex, even something of a nudging procuress when the plot allows. “Hang it, the man who pays for the dinner is generally allowed a seat at the table,” the overheated man growls when he is rebuffed. (Lily’s last act before committing suicide is to return, in the manner of Socrates before the hemlock, the profit from Trenor’s “investment” on her behalf.) But where are the gentle manners, the agreeable repressions attendant upon civility learned at the tables set with the “du Lac Sèvres” and the “van der Luyden Lowestoft” and the “Dagonet Crown Derby”?
The House of Mirth in its flashlighting around New York casts its beam upon a Mr. Sim Rosedale. In the practice of the period, Rosedale is referred to as a “little Jew” and weighted down, as if by an overcoat in summer, with a thickness of objectionable moral and physical attributes—each readily at hand for the confident satirist. The fellow has made a lot of money downtown, and thus his path crosses that of the more or less well-bred Wall Street New Yorkers, who find him useful since their own capacities, with the help of spendthrift wives, are thinning like the hair on their heads.
Rosedale is ferociously set upon entering the society described in the novel; he has the money and is determined to have the dance. It must be said he comes upon the scene as free of family, traditions, religious or otherwise, as bereft of community as a scout on the plains. Rosedale is no slithering continental sybarite like August Belmont, but instead a shrewd, if uncouth, trader, and from history it might be doubted that he would be so quick to wish this particular dilution of himself and his fortune. The author understands it is fate and probity that lead the dull, rich Mr. Gryce to pass over Lily Bart and to unite his pile with that of the dull, rich Evie Van Osburgh. Edith Wharton would not, however, have known of Rosedale’s possible familiar life, and so his muscular push into smart society must be taken as, well, natural.
In any case, the advancing Sim Rosedale is an important figure in this plot of threatening circumstance. Since Lily is beautiful, unmarried, and as fashionable as satin, Rosedale has settled upon her as the mate to show his accumulations to advantage. She refuses him, with “repugnance.” But as her opportunities wither and her desperation augments, she decides to take the florid Rosedale and his millions after all. In a powerfully executed scene, Lily faces up and says, “I am ready to marry you whenever you wish.” The crafty usurper turns her down. Her rotten luck, those scandal-mongering observers of her trek here and there on the stairs of a bachelor-filled apartment house and on a yacht in the Mediterranean and the compromising reportage they have engendered, are a fund of disadvantage. She is no longer a good investment.
Lily Bart is a flawed, self-absorb
ed, and, oh, yet decent beauty of the kind that tests the novelist’s art. Sympathy is aroused by the honesty of her impulses, and she has an emotional clarity that makes even an occasional charity believable. Emotional clarity—honesty, in fact—is less efficient in society than garrulous self-justification. With Lily, this clarity is like a pinch of arthritis in her manipulating hand.
Her helplessness in poverty may be laid to society’s withholding from the clotheshorse beauty the proper training for independence as a woman, independence being knowing how to work and forgo the dressmaker. There is a suggestion of the sadness of laboring incapacity in the exposition Edith Wharton has supplied. Certainly, Lily Bart is not a pioneering candidate for Radcliffe College; indeed, she cannot trim a hat, one of the occupations girls fallen from prosperity attempt in this as in other novels. Yet the author knows the lamentable inadequacy of “the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair” as a preparation for a paycheck. And, above all, what she stresses is the blight of a conditioning for luxury without the means.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 49