Lily Bart knows what she knows, coquetry for the most part, and to have been prepared otherwise would have been another novel. At one point, Lily explains that people think one can live on the rich, when the fact is that it takes money to live with the rich. To be without sufficient money is like diving into the concrete of a drained swimming pool. This novel is Edith Wharton’s finest achievement because money is the subject, of greater significance than the crippling, if amusing and charming details of convention in a small, historically perhaps attractive but insignificant stockade. That at least was true of Manhattan even when it was “old.”
2.
New York: No novelist in his or her volumes has set out to be the social historian of the actual city, this restless monster of possibility and liability. It is not easy to imagine a voraciousness to consume the remarkable, shapeless scope or, even in a practical condensation, to imagine a Zola tramping through the warehouses of meat at dawn or trailing the garment workers home to some godforsaken borough in the evening. The city itself has never been a whole as the other great cities were until recently, when New York’s peculiar instability and visionary tribalism became a worldwide condition: Turks in Berlin, Arabs in Paris, colonials in London. New York literature is the literature of the precinct, whether it be the Mafia, Hell’s Kitchen in Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, or Salinger’s Glass family on Central Park West. A great claim is usually made for Edith Wharton as a social historian, although how that can be confirmed by so intensely hermetic an imagination is a puzzle.
The gorgeous innuendo of Henry James’s New York pages in The American Scene, the lilting metaphors of distress and dispossession: It was 1904 when the chagrined pedestrian made his way through the fatally designed “streets intersecting with a pettifogging consistency.” He spent some hours on Ellis Island, the utopian gateway, and cautioned the unwary against doing the same. To witness the “inconceivable alien” in their herded numbers was to have “eaten of the tree of knowledge and the taste will be forever in his mouth.” But the effulgent language of James’s wounded curiosity can be said to redeem the space of his withdrawal, to honor the gross elaboration and “untempered monotony” of the Waldorf Astoria and to fix in a glance the very topography of the city lying in its rivers and “looking at the sky in the manner of some gigantic hair-comb turned upward.”
New York, with its statistical sensationalism, is a shallow vessel for memory since it lives in a continuous present, making it difficult to recall the shape of the loss deplored, whether it be the gray tin of the newsstand or the narrow closet for the neighborhood’s dry cleaning, there and gone over a vacation. As for people, the rapid obsolescence of deities makes its point each season; or, if surviving the gleeful erasure of fame, the penalties pursuing society’s accommodation can be severe, or so it is often asserted by the fatigued famous.
In my time, the preservationists say, men got up when a woman entered the room. When poor Blanche DuBois, passing the louts at the poker table, says, “Don’t get up, I’m only passing through,” how is that to be understood without “tradition”? There’s a bit of that in Edith Wharton.
The Custom of the Country (1913) was for the most part written in France. It is a curiosity of a hybrid kind. Here we have a fierce scold not of the alien from Odessa or Sicily but of the natives undertaking an interior migration from Apex City to Manhattan. Their landing, ready for absorption, is a twofold pain: their pockets are lined with cash, and they don’t know when to get up and when to sit down. The mode of the composition is split in the middle: one half a description of the invaders in a satiric accent, the other a whirlwind of folly and destruction on an international scale.
So we open to the Spragg family from Apex. Spragg, wanting to transpose itself to Sprague or something, but efficient, perhaps in suggesting many backcountry impediments and wonders of maladaptation not unlike those of Ring Lardner’s hicks in The Big Town, or his Mrs. Gullible finally achieving her wish to meet Mrs. Potter Palmer, doing so in a hotel corridor, and being asked to bring more towels.
Mr. and Mrs. Spragg are woebegone pilgrims, and the old father with his “lymphatic patience” brightened only by the Masonic emblem on his waistcoat is as unlikely a trader on Wall Street as the man behind the pickle barrel in the corner grocery. But he has made money in some way and the hajj to Mecca is, you might say, made on the roller skates of his daughter, Undine, who for a good while has been dreaming about Fifth Avenue in her Apex backyard. The choice of this family to bear the history of new money in the metropolis carries more of the tone of parody than of a serious imaginative decision.
William Dean Howells created similar migratory birds in A Hazard of New Fortunes. His Dryfoos tribe hits town with a fortune made from natural gas in Northern Ohio and Indiana. Natural gas would seem to be a very happy source for American finance, but the boomtown alteration of fortune does not decorate the newly rich man’s psyche. In New York, old Dryfoos wails, “I ain’t got any horses, I ain’t got any cows. I ain’t got any chickens, I ain’t got anything to do from sun-up to sun-down.” Dryfoos and his strike have, like the Spraggs, been transported by ravening daughters who want to bust into New York society.
It is no doubt prudent to have daughters if one would display in fiction the barbarities of social climbing and portray in all its anxious athleticism a passion for shopping. Of course, consumption and insatiability are the overhanging atmosphere of the city itself, gathering all classes, top to bottom, in its dreamy, poetic smother.
Undine Spragg arrives on the scene with youth, natural, and beauty, extraordinary, and every moral and practical liability a golden girl from the heart of the country can fold in her trunks. She is an infection, a glassy, little, germ-filled protagonist. We meet her set up with her family in the Hotel Stentorian, in rooms that go by the name of the Looey Suite, to be furnished with a good deal of oversized mahogany and gilt and laughable hangings on wall and window. Undine gets “round” right off and meets, without giving him notice, a young man, Ralph Marvell. Soon, she receives from his sister an invitation, which she throws in a basket, but which is rescued by a Mrs. Heeney, masseuse and manicurist, who cries out, Marvell! His mother is a Dagonet, and they live with old Urban Dagonet down on Washington Square!
Mrs. Spragg chews on this: “Why do they live with somebody else? Haven’t they got the means to have a home of their own?” Undine, perplexed and suspicious, questions why a sister should have written and why the invitation should ask the mother’s permission when it is Undine who is asked to dine and why dine instead of have dinner and why write the note on plain white paper when pigeon-blood red is all the rage?—that kind of thing. Go steady, Undine, Mrs. Heeney advises.
Not long after, Undine is married to Ralph Marvell, and the plot advances to the lamentable results of this—for him. The Marvells are old New York, impeccable in birth and manners, not rich, living in their comfortably shabby houses on Washington Square, three generations within. Ralph is bookish and perhaps will himself write books; he is quiet, charming, has been to Harvard and Oxford, tried law but didn’t have a flair for it, and now does nothing apart from reading and living according to his nature.
The European wedding journey is the first foreign experience for Undine, and it proves to be an experience foreign to Ralph Marvell’s previous life. Undine despises Siena, altogether too slow and too hot. When asked if the summer wasn’t hot in Apex, she replies that she didn’t marry to go back to Apex. In Paris, the Comédie is “stuffy,” and the husband attends alone while she is busy and, surreptitiously, having the family rings reset and buying a lot of clothes without the money. In fact, the couple doesn’t have money for the passage home, and there are turns of plot attendant upon that. Undine is piling up the wreckage, flooding the banks of the river, and leaving the Marvell heritage and finances tumbled down in the mud.
Ralph Marvell is a creation of the novelist’s art, and his attractiveness is evident on the page. His marriage to Undine is, howeve
r, a sort of haystack of implausibility stuck in the middle of urban life. She is given only one quality and that is great beauty. Beauty will always be an assertion the reader is compelled to accept but cannot keep his mind fixed upon. The hair—was it red?—and the “glow” when some diversion pleases the beauty are not exactly traits to be probed so much as color floating and drifting without a trace.
Undine, the character, is a witch of ignorance, insensitivity, vanity, and manipulation. She is mean to her parents, indifferent to the child she finally bears, and impossible to imagine as anything other than tedious. Whatever negotiable assets she has are practical only to certain vulgar sensualists, of which there are quite a few on the scene. She divorces Ralph Marvell without asking his permission and imagines after making herself fully available that she will cause Van Degen, a rich and decadent member of the Marvell set, also to get a divorce and to marry her. But the canny Van Degen thinks better of it and does not come forth.
Along the way, a most fantastical marriage for Undine does come about. She unites with the Comte Raymond de Chelles, a handsome young nobleman with ancient credentials, a house in the Faubourg, a château in Burgundy, little money to combine with Undine’s less, since old Spragg has not prospered on Wall Street for all the reasons sufficient from the beginning.
Why must Edith Wharton and, in a different manner, Henry James decorate their pages with ancient titles to confound the romantic history of their Americans? Undine inflicts appalling indignities upon the poor Comte, but she is strangely imagined to be fidgeting about in the cold halls of a turreted castle. What is so interesting about Gilbert Osmond, the fortune hunter in The Portrait of a Lady, is that he acts like a prince of the realm but is indeed quite recognizable as an insufferable American expatriate, long resident in Florence. Prince Amerigo, in The Golden Bowl, fortunately does not flourish the papal title, and he is mostly seen maneuvering about London offering his fate to Americans, too many of them as it turns out.
But how peculiar it is to have the delightful, candid Christopher Newman in The American set off in pursuit of the daughter of the noble De Bellegarde family. The ancient Europeans will be cut from the cloth, stamped out one after another without distinguishing shapes, a bit like the weird American manufactures from which Newman made his finally unsuitable millions. The titled Europeans represent mystery, inflexible pride, hidden motive, inscrutable manners, melodrama, and unreality: trappings, fuss, and feathers that must stand in the place of the author’s having real knowledge or observed experience of the character and intimate life of Europeans so high.
Howells in A Hazard of New Fortunes has one of the odious Dryfoos shopping, primping daughters make a similar leap into the European bog. Christine Dryfoos meets her fate in the person of a French nobleman “full of present debts and of duels in the past.” It is added that the father and his natural-gas dollars can manage the debts, but the duelist had better watch out for Christine, “unless he’s practised with a panther.”
The international novels are in fact novels of traveling Americans meeting each other abroad with a few natives thrown in. In The Golden Bowl, the Ververs cast their immense fortune at the foot of a prince, but the prince is a passenger, and the motors of the action are in the hands of the Ververs and the American, Charlotte Stant. Mme. Merle, so mysterious, is finally just another American, like the radical-chic Princess Casamassima, another visitor like the Touchetts, whose gifts will buy for Isabel Archer a fantasy of native blood, Gilbert Osmond, decorated with impecunious winters abroad, a little collection of things, and the hauteur of his meaningless displacement.
Undine at last finds a perch on Fifth Avenue as the wife of Elmer Moffat of Apex, an old pal to whom she had been briefly married as a girl. The discovery of her concealment of this fact is a contingent reason for Ralph Marvell’s suicide. So Undine will travel from the picket fence to Fifth Avenue on the back of Apex Elmer, loud and red-faced as a fire truck. Elmer is now a railroad magnate, like—can it be?—Commodore Vanderbilt. The much-used bride is to be largely rewarded, and when the dispenser is Edith Wharton the loot will be lavish and banal. Undine is to have “a necklace and tiara of pigeon-blood rubies belonging to Queen Marie Antoinette, a million dollar cheque . . . a new home, 5009 Fifth Avenue, which is an exact copy of the Pitti Palace, Florence.”
As a social historian, Edith Wharton does not pause to get it just right, on the dot. She proceeds from a very generalized memory and an often commonplace fund of attitudes. The Custom of the Country has placed its points at extremities that undermine the evolutionary rush of the actual city. The invading Visigoths with their rude instruments of fortune, like Spragg’s marketing of a hair-waver from which comes Undine’s name and his later having a worthless parcel of land upon which Apex was to build its water system, are not the usual transfers to Manhattan. The middle-sized towns of the Middle West would be more likely to claim the powers of Spragg and to contain the gossip-column ambitions of dressing-up Undine. The old Spraggs’ rustic souls are fashioned out of impermeable materials, and the city casts its stones of enlightenment their way without making a dent.
New York City is a frame in these novels, not a landscape: 5009 Fifth Avenue? Even less well foretold is the failure to understand the magical progression of taste, so hasty, in the newly rich of the city. For what is easier than the acquisition of acceptable responses? Culture, as society finds it, is not saturation but an acquaintance with the labels of things valued, be it the Parthenon or white walls. The culture of consumption is infinitely accommodating, and the terms of cultural dissemblance are an available cosmetic, another pot of rouge. Very few Undines would scorn Siena or the Comédie Française, scorn out loud. Quickly, the proper patience appears, no matter how deep the stab of boredom in an actual confrontation.
The Marvell house on Washington Square, the seat of the genteel opposition, is one thing, but in New York “divided space” is preeminent, and the hotel and apartment living the hick Spraggs embrace cannot be thought of as retrograde. Was there in old New York an aristocratic style, an intimate weave of obscure inherited practice and value? Perhaps, but the style as it has come down to us was always drowning in the city’s hyperbolic congestion of effects, the glare of the futuristic, the fantastical democratizing compulsion of Manhattan’s eternal newness.
When Henry James set up his house in Washington Square, he did not force the historical inappropriateness of the terms found in the novels of Edith Wharton. He placed in his house, a memory dear to him from his youth, a member of the professional upper classes, with no worrisome tics about who might be a Dagonet, who a Van der Luyden. Dr. Sloper is an intelligent, hard-nosed, serious practitioner in a useful arena of knowledge, a possible New Yorker. True, the doctor is said to have married into one of the “best” families, but this has no dizzying command over the rather surgical common sense with which he approaches family affairs. What has its woeful effect upon him is that his wife has died and left him an improbable daughter. This chagrin is not unreasonable, or unthinkable perhaps, for a metropolitan gentleman. Catherine is dear, awkward, unfashionable, and indeed would seem to have many qualities of a Boston girl transplanted carelessly to New York. In Boston, among the Yankees, Catherine’s modesty and the plainness and wish to please would not be impediments in a girl of good family.
In New York, Catherine is a perturbation. When the selfish, false idler, Morris Townsend, begins to court her, the doctor’s intervention is cruel and practical. He is shrewd about Townsend and with his oily, ironic efficiency is not mindful of the fruits of his shrewdness in the broken heart of his daughter. The novel is a perfectly faceted diamond, clear in its icy progression. The drama sits on its corner downtown as confidently as the house Dr. Sloper built for himself. Social habits, conventions, prohibitions of the group have no part in the dilemma. Dr. Sloper knows his objections to Townsend as frankly as if the young man had come begging with a tin cup. Townsend does not care for Catherine, wishes only to marry her money, and w
hile the sophisticated doctor can no doubt understand both, he sees that the conditions promise to be baneful down the road.
Wharton’s Age of Innocence has great appeal because of the charm of the two figures, Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer. If it has a definition, an engine, it is divorce as a social stigma, a disability not to be incurred by a woman. She must, no matter what provocation, hang on legally, even if at a distance. She must not for a mere wish to be free of it all act on her own behalf. Ellen Olenska, a Mingott connection, has married a titled swine of a Pole. She has left him and returned to New York; he will take her back, but there is no thought of his swaying from whatever disgusts have been his pleasure. If she divorces, there will be scandal, and she will lose her money brought to the marriage and what is spoken of as “everything else.”
The scandal of the intriguing Countess, with her irregular escape from her husband, combined with the powerful Mingott clan’s displaying her in the family opera box, bring forth the beginning gasps of curiosity and social dismay. It is not a very weighty casualty, and yet Edith Wharton must find something to give reality to the deputed social standards. Good manners and the family plate are not sufficient for drama. Hindrance and exclusion are needed to give the old dominion coherence, to act as a sort of velvet rope in a museum protecting the plunder. Of course, there is great provincialism afoot here, since we know from Proust that a great French aristocrat can drop his Croix de Guerre on the floor of a male brothel without diminishing his prestige.
A good deal of the plot is concerned with who will come to a dinner in honor of the Countess, who will visit her, and so on. The loyalties of the old families are tested, and the best, the oldest, the most valued come forth bravely to smile over the canvasback ducks and to shame the timid, the complacent, and the insecure.
Ellen Olenska is glamorous and in tribute to her cosmopolitan life a bit exotic, a bit of a bohemian in her “little house” on an unfashionable New York street. She reads Paul Bourget, Huysmans, and the Goncourt Brothers. Newland Archer, conventionally reared by doting, placid women, a cousin to everyone who is anyone, has just married an unimaginative, nice young woman of his own set. Archer and Ellen Olenska fall in love, and it is a flaming passion that almost sends the lovers to a hotel room. The consummation is withheld, the Countess Olenska, divorced, returns to Europe, and Archer grows into a husband and father with bittersweet memories, recorded in one of those codas that span the years and might well have been forgone.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 50