The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Edith Wharton suffered throughout her marriage to the Boston bon vivant, Teddy, as he was called. Teddy was worldly, liked the pleasures of dog and stream and wine cellar. He had no interest in scholarship, high or low, but took over a good deal of the management of houses and practical affairs and that went well, until it didn’t. The two seem to have been a poor sexual match. Edith had her three-year affair with Fullerton, her strong affections for Henry James and others, especially for Walter Berry—a New York Van Rensselaer, an expert in international law and widely considered a snob, in her own vein. She was buried by his side, in Versailles.

  Morton Fullerton, Harvard, son of a minister in Waltham, Massachusetts, became a political and cultural journalist, at one time the correspondent from France for the London Times. Fullerton seems to have been an attractive, perhaps we could say a lovable, young man. In his love life, he is something like a telephone, always engaged, and even then with several on hold. Whether he wished so many rings on his line is hard to tell; perhaps he was one of those who would always, always answer. In any case, among his callers were, in youth, Ronald Gower, a homosexual and friend of Oscar Wilde; Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak; his cousin, Katherine Fullerton Gerould; Victoria Chambert, whom he married and with whom he had a child while living with a Mme. Mirecourt—and Edith Wharton.

  When you have decided that Fuller likes older women—the Ranee and Mme. Mirecourt—he takes up with those younger, his cousin and Victoria Chambert. At the time of his affair with Mrs. Wharton there was a balance with no special signification: she was forty-five and he was forty-two. The Fullerton women tracked down thus far by academic prurience seem to have been of a forgiving nature and remained friendly to him throughout the years. Mme. Mirecourt clung like a burr and, as an expression of her enduring affection, was quite troublesome.

  Teddy Wharton fell into the care of psychiatrists and into mood-swing follies, even going so far as to set himself up with a girl in a Boston apartment. He ran through his wife’s money, and his increasing instability led to divorce. Twenty-eight years they had together, and, insofar as one can know, most of them were useful if not “satisfying” in the current sense. But then how satisfying could the dear love of the ambivalent Walter Berry have been? Edith Wharton appears to have been a type found in abundance on the contemporary scene: surprisingly sexy when the availabilities allowed, but owing to a dominant attraction to stylish amusements, happily surrounded by homosexuals, always, of course, of the right sort.

  Once the deed was done, the divorce signed, she seemed to settle with a forward-looking fortitude. Even in her day, divorce was common in the best society, and it might be thought she held on to the prohibition mostly as a literary device to serve as a dramatic expression of the old manners—a necessary addition to the appointments of the house and the seating at the table. She used divorce again and again in her fiction, even sometimes seeming to entertain a certain moral nostalgia for its rigors. There is no doubt it was a handy circumstance for exile and for “cutting.” The bald fact was that there were not many other stands to be taken in her created world, where the virtues were birth, the grand style, if suitable, with the rich Van der Luydens; good taste and modesty of pretension, the old bourgeois style, with the Marvells.

  Edith Wharton had never been “modern” as a writer and had few theoretical questionings about the shape of the novel. “I certainly don’t think Edith often read,” Percy Lubbock wrote. Visiting her, he sometimes felt “a book had a scared look as she carried it off, as though it knew what it was in for.” Yet she was a celebrated novelist, bore many honors, and experienced the threat of displacement in the clamorous, avant-garde elation of the 1920s. The Waste Land did not receive her favor, and Ulysses was to be named “school boy drivel.” Living in upholstered exile, in the manner of Mrs. Wharton and Bernard Berenson, may have the gloomy effect of attaching one to intransigence in the arts, against the uprooted impertinence of modernism.

  Mrs. Wharton had her turf, that almost forgotten sepia New York, to be turned over and over again, like setting the plow to the family farm every spring. A group of four short novels, under the title Old New York and boxed together, appeared in 1924. At the time of writing them, she was living in her final grand house, Pavillon Colombe, in Saint Brice, France, not far from Paris.

  False Dawn, subtitled The ’Forties, proposes the adventures of a young man sent out on the civilizing Grand Tour and deputed to bring back works of art for his father’s collection: Guido Reni, Carlo Dolci, and the like. Instead, spurred on by the development of a friendship with a young Englishman, who, we are asked to believe, is John Ruskin, he purchases Carpaccio, Fra Angelico, Giotto, and Piero della Francesca. The choices lead to his being disinherited by his father and scorned by old New York. Complacency and backward taste appear to be the indictment. “Carpatcher, you say this fellow’s called. . . . Something to do with those new European steam-cars, I suppose, eh?” the outraged father cries out. Satiric dialogue, engaging enough in conversation, is a crash of dissonance on the Wharton page. And she likes to preen a little, to glide up on Ruskin and sneak up on the unlikely Piero purchase as if they were two cups of tea at Doney’s.

  In The Spark, a crusty old New Yorker claims to have learned human wisdom from a talkative fellow while being nursed in a Washington hospital after Bull Run. It is the dear bard Whitman himself. The Old Maid, another of the novellas, is a skillful melodrama set in the 1850s and telling of the sadness of an unwed mother’s having to pretend to be a devoted aunt as she watches her child grow up, a condition as common in the villages as in the city.

  The Old New York volumes are anecdotal fictions. There is not much air in them. Throughout Edith Wharton’s work the society is small and its themes repetitive. The reader will become a sort of cousin of the blood as the defining names appear again and again. Memory has been emptied out by the long years abroad, and a certain perfunctoriness and staleness hang over the scene. Christine Nilsson will be singing Faust at the Academy of Music; the carriage will give way to the coupé. Characters go to balls and dinners and stop by to drink tea. They scarcely set foot on more than a few predictable blocks and on the way do not pass restaurants or saloons or thieves or workmen going home. Manhattan is a “set” but with no sense of crowds.

  An early story, “Bunner Sisters,” was rejected by an editor and put aside for many years before being offered in a collection. It is one of the author’s most interesting works and an extraordinary wandering from the enclave. The sisters make trimmings and sew on ribbons in their dismal tenement; they meet a dreary opium addict, a wreck of a German who fixes clocks and who devastates their miserable struggle. The details of existence are vivid; the author knew at one time that people took streetcars, bought a few pennies worth of food with fierce concentration upon the cost, made pitiful journeys to the wastes of New Jersey. Gradually, the feel and the spell of the city were lost and only interiors remained, the stuffs of definition.

  Ethan Frome is a village tragedy, and the tale is cut to the measure of rural New England as a strong popular image. The village is named Starkfield; Ethan is a melancholy, silent, and longing country man, ruined by the slow agony of life with his complaining, “sickly” wife, the kind whose neurosis is colored by a run on patent medicines. His hope for redemptive love by way of the young servant girl, Mattie, is thwarted, and their attempt to commit suicide by sledding down a dangerous hill on a splendid snowy night produces not death but a crippled, altered Mattie to be taken in by the now triumphant wife, and the three to be left to their eternal rural isolation and misery. There is less experience of life in this story than in “Bunner Sisters.” Short as Ethan Frome is, it is heavily designed and shows the difficulties encountered in the telling, the structure. It is operatic, opera verismo, with the power to retain its grip on the memory, as the long popularity of the work indicates.

  Dreiser’s Sister Carrie was written in 1900, five years before The House of Mirth and twenty years before T
he Age of Innocence. Dreiser, from the Middle West, went over the city on foot, as it were, striking out from the first ring of the city’s chimes, the trainman’s call of “Grand Central Station!” The first flat is on Seventy-eighth and Amsterdam, and soon Nassau Street is mentioned. The horns of the ferryboats sound in the fog; there is Broadway to give its lessons, and the glaring celebrity of Delmonico’s, and Sherry’s, too; serge skirts at Lord and Taylor, lights on Plaza Square, and dinner for $1.50, rooms set apart for poker, casinos, barbershops, advertisement billboards, Wooster Street, a half pound of liver and bacon for fifteen cents, chorus girls, soldiers on the street, a strike, significant in the plot. And, of course, the Bowery and Potter’s Field for Hurstwood. Carrie at the end will rock in her chair in the Waldorf, the golden monument of the period, and try to read Père Goriot, urged upon her by an ever-upward Ralph Marvell sort.

  The plebeian “tinsel and shine” of Carrie’s destiny and the bankrupt disaster of Hurstwood are not Edith Wharton’s world, nor must it have been so. Still, she works with her own tinsel and is a recorder of dreams much less true to the city, as history, than those of Sister Carrie. Density of experience is lacking and not, we gather, lamented. In her novels, Manhattan is nameless, bare as a field, stripped of its byways, its fanciful, fabricated, overwhelming reality, its hugely imposing and unalterable alienation from the rest of the country—the glitter of its beginning and enduring modernity as a world city.

  1988

  ON WASHINGTON SQUARE

  THE JAMES family came from New York State, the father having been born in Albany. Whether they are New Yorkers in the sense of the city is not altogether certain since they fled it early and did not like it much when they came back from time to time. Still the city, its streets, its fluid, inconstant, nerve-wrung landscape, had a claim upon Henry’s imagination, even if the neglectful civic powers did not properly return the claim.

  In any case, Henry James was born in New York City in 1843, in a house on 21 Washington Place, a street adjacent to Washington Square, itself a small park announcing the end of lower Fifth Avenue and adorned by an ambitious bit of architecture that James would describe as “the lamentable little Arch of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington Square—lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unsupported and unaffiliated state.” That was in 1904, when the sixty-one-year-old author returned from abroad to write The American Scene, his prodigious impressions of his homeland from New England to Palm Beach, impressions fresh, he hoped, as those of a curious stranger but still “as acute as an initiated native.”

  He would, of course, return to Fifth Avenue and to Washington Place. There, he found what he called a “snub.” The birthplace of 21 Washington Place had been “ruthlessly suppressed” in one of those early convulsive seizures of destruction New York City to this day does not see as a defect in the municipal nervous system so much as an explosive, rather pagan, celebration of the gods of engineering and speculation. James, viewing the “amputation” of the birthplace, is led to confess that he had somehow imagined on Washington Place “a commemorative mural tablet—one of those frontal records of birth, sojourn,or death, under a celebrated name.” This is an affecting aside of family and personal pride, a controlled twitch of chagrin, from which he retreats by observing the supreme invisibility of a plaque, acknowledging some long-gone worthy, placed on an apartment door in a fifty-story building, one of the “divided spaces” that were to be the principal habitations in the city.

  •

  The novel Washington Square, published in 1880, when James was thirty-seven years old, is an early work, at least early in style and in the untroubled presentation of its strong and thoroughly lucid plot. The novel is not strikingly under the domination of its place name, but we note that the author allows himself a moment of autobiographical diversion, an insertion more or less of his private relation to the title:

  I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early association, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look . . . the look of having had something of a social history. . . . It was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude. . . . It was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailantus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the square.

  In the opening pages of the novel, Dr. Sloper has set himself up in a new house on Washington Square. The doctor is a credible, highly interesting man of the professional class who has achieved the status accruing to the serious practice of medicine. He is busy, successful, intelligent, witty—an engaging figure on the city scene, and while learned in the medical arts he is not “uncomfortable,” by which it is meant that Dr. Sloper is one of those popular physicians whose personal attractiveness will somehow soothe the tortures of treatment. He has a well-to-do clientele and is passed by referral from one “good family”to another in the way that was usual before the age of intense specialization.

  The doctor has moved to Washington Square from a house near City Hall, a part of the city being turned into offices and other structures of business. In moving uptown, he is following the direction of residential preference in the early 1880s—one of the details of metropolitan dynamics that interested “old New Yorkers” such as James and Edith Wharton. With a rather vagrant historicism, these authors like to follow, in a mood of amusement, the displacements of fashion as they try to place their characters on the city map. Thus, we are told that the doctor’s dead wife had been “one of the pretty girls of the small but promising capital which clustered around the Battery and overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated by the grassy waysides of Canal Street.” The doctor has now made his own move uptown, but his drama is not residential; it is familial, an intense battle, almost military, of strategy, retreat, and attack, fought with his daughter, Catherine Sloper.

  The doctor is in his fifties, and, while not a man to offer futile protests against the devastations of fate, he has endured two painful wounds, or perhaps we should say three. He lost a treasured son at the age of three and then lost a much-loved wife—a beautiful woman with a fortune, social standing, and every domestic charm—lost her at the birth of a second child, “an infant of a sex which rendered the poor child, to the doctor’s sense, an inadequate substitute for his lamented first-born, of whom he had promised himself to make an admirable man.”

  His was a genuine grief, with the added gall of a professional frustration in having been unable to ensure the survival of his family. But there is the surviving daughter, Catherine, now grown into a robust, rosily—rather too rosily—healthy young woman. Facing this last, lone Sloper, the doctor can assure himself that “such as she was, he at least need have no fear of losing her.” The “such as she was” is the plot of Washington Square: the destiny of the daughter and the father’s tone in his relations with her.

  The beginning pages are written in a comedy-of-manners style, and each turn is amusing, calmly and confidently expert. Such a style will command, with its measured cadences and fine tuning, a bit of benign condescension toward the cast and toward the friendly modesty of the New York social landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus, it is said of the doctor, “He was what you call a scholarly doctor, and yet there was nothing abstract in his remedies—he always ordered you to take something.”

  Washington Square was written after James made his literary and social “Conquest of London,” as Leon Edel phrases it in the title of the second volume of his James biography. The author had breakfasted with Turgenev, met Tennyson, Browning, and Gladstone, visited the great country houses, and indeed, as a cosmopolitan, wrote most of Washington Square in Paris. It is a perfect novel of immense refinement and interest, and one feels the execution gave James little trouble�
�that is, if one keeps in mind the breathless deliberations of the fictions that were to follow. Of course, the moral and psychological insinuations of this early work are not finally so self-evident as they appear to be on the lucid pages.

  At the time James was devoting himself to the portrait of Catherine Sloper leading her life in her father’s “modern, wide-fronted” house on lower Fifth Avenue, he was already thinking of the more challenging American girl, Isabel Archer, and the complex duplicities of The Portrait of a Lady, published soon after. In any case, when he was gathering the New York edition of his novels, which began to appear in 1907, he unaccountably excluded Washington Square. Perhaps it seemed to him a small, provincial tale after he had sent heiresses to Europe to test themselves and their American dollars on the ferocious competitions of the international scene. The American girls in the “large” novels are weighted with nuance and with the fictional responsibility to live up to their rather inchoate but grand attributions. Catherine, housebound in New York and incurious about the great world beyond, may have appeared a sort of vacation, one that allowed James a wonderfully relaxed compositional tone when compared with that of The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl.

  Catherine Sloper is an heiress but not a beguiling “heiress of the ages”; she is heir only to money. Indeed, the early descriptions of Catherine are composed with such a boldly discounting eye, such intrepid divestment, that the reader feels a wince of discomfort. Catherine is large and homely, but, at the beginning, a contented, virtuous girl of her class. She is guileless, affectionate, docile, and obedient. She has a “plain, dull, gentle countenance,” and, although drastically without coquetry, she wishes to please, most of all to please her father. “She was not quick with her book, nor, indeed, with anything else.” Along the way of depiction, James himself seems to draw back from the distance imposed by the manner of composition. If he does not quite retreat, we can say he takes a short little step to the side before persevering to write, “though it is an awkward confession to make about one’s heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton.”