Coventry

by Rachel Cusk

  At an international writers’ seminar recently, the talk turned during a panel discussion to the subject of creative writing. A number of foreign novelists were expressing concern about the anglophone domination of creative writing provision, towards which overseas students were being inexorably drawn, even at the cost of having to express themselves in a language not their own. They wondered what the consequences of this trend would be for native literatures, and why their universities could not validate and run courses themselves. One of them, clearly infuriated by this discussion, suddenly delivered himself of a tirade.

  Why, he wanted to know, were writers giving encouragement to this abysmal creative writing trend? Why were they perpetuating the fallacy that writing can be taught? Did they really want writing to become a kind of occupational therapy, a tragic pastime for old ladies and bored housewives – yes, he repeated, old ladies and housewives bored of staring out of their windows all day! By now the audience, composed largely of women, was in fits of laughter. Many of them had spent the day attending writing workshops organised around this public event. Yet the more he denounced them, the more they laughed: it was easy to put them – and us – to shame. Thinking about it afterwards, it seemed to me that this mocking discourse is increasingly becoming obsolete. In a way, it is a form of cultural self-hatred. It was that writer’s own insecurity that required him to distinguish himself from old ladies and housewives, to be the ‘real’ writer, the centre of attention. He had forgotten to honour the principle of freedom that had permitted him to become who he was. If creating writing culture represents only that – freedom – it is justification enough.

  III: CLASSICS AND BESTSELLERS

  Edith Wharton

  The Age of Innocence

  The Age of Innocence was Edith Wharton’s last great novel. She wrote it in 1919, at the age of fifty-seven. She was by then a rich and famous author long domiciled in France, whose every emotional and practical link to her native New York had effectively been severed. Nonetheless, America had lain at the heart of her most enduring fictions – as her mentor, the novelist Henry James, cleverly foretold that it would when he advised the young Edith to commit herself to the ‘untouched field’ of the study of contemporary American life.

  But unlike her other major novels, The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence is not a story of contemporary America. The New York that is its subject was as dead, when Wharton wrote it, as the generation wiped out before her eyes in the fields and trenches of France. And yet, in the devastation and bleakness of 1919, it was the morally constricted, privileged New York of her childhood that Wharton felt drawn to consider, as perhaps many others at that time were considering the vanished world – the lost innocence – of the past. Set in the 1870s, but written through the sober perspective of the war, The Age of Innocence is a commentary on the loss of a social era, of a whole mode of life and its attendant ways of being. Wharton’s own feelings of discontinuity act, in this novel, as the perfect prism for those of the wider human community as it stood in the wake of an unprecedented destruction of its terrain and values, and in the shadow of the coming modernism. It was, of course, her faculty of capturing the universal in the personal that earned Wharton her writerly riches and fame, and The Age of Innocence achieves this synthesis with particular intensity. The novel is both private meditation and public avowal, for Edith Wharton was not alone, at that moment in history, in considering the past to be a place of greater innocence. What the moral value of that innocence was – in the largest as well as the most personal and intimate sense – is the question the novel sets out to answer.

  Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862, third child (after a twelve-year interval) of George and Lucretia Jones. Her parents were rich, well-to-do denizens of the ‘old’ New York that is the setting of The Age of Innocence, a place that in its rigid proprieties and inflexible notions of class amounted to a microcosm of Victorian England. Yet it is clear that America was far too new a country to tolerate such inflexibility for long, and in her novel The Custom of the Country Wharton demonstrates the frailty of this ‘old’ order in the face of the more vigorous spirit of enterprise and aspiration that was burgeoning unstoppably across America at the turn of the century. ‘Old’ New York had no muscle by comparison; its only value, in The Custom of the Country, lies in the momentary satisfaction yielded to the rich arriviste who succeeds in penetrating and buying up its insubstantial mysteries. The genteel snobs of Wharton’s childhood faded away in the glare of new money, or else married into it; New York itself changed and expanded beyond recognition, the quasi-parochial town rapidly devoured by a throbbing, indiscriminate metropolis. It is impossible that Wharton herself should not have felt some sadness at this vanishing of the landscape of her youth, and in the opening paragraph of The Age of Innocence she delineates with great precision the complex nature of that emotion. Reporting that the shabby old New York Academy of Music is to be replaced by a new opera house ‘which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals’, Wharton is careful to note that the ‘world of fashion’ is slightly afraid of this grand improvement:

  [they were] still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historical associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics.

  Thus the unmistakable note of tragedy – for the opera house, as the reader of 1920 knew, was built – is sounded with the first appearance of the innocence which is the novel’s theme. This ‘world of fashion’ is innocent indeed: childlike, fearful of change, clinging to its old institutions as the child clings to the security of home. The story that the novel unfolds is calculated to show these children at their absolute worst. Newland Archer, young, carefree, favoured, and of good ‘old New York’ family, is engaged to May Welland, ditto; an alliance by which their respective (respectable) clans are overjoyed, having silently but implacably required it to occur. Newland Archer is unusual in one respect. Unlike his carefree and favoured contemporaries, he has a troublesome splinter of sincerity in his soul. While considering himself to be gloriously in love with May, he nonetheless suspects that his choice of her was no choice at all; that it was determined, at the deepest level, by the values and expectations of their social and familial habitat. He is reasonably content to be driven and directed by this force, expectation. All the same, he knows that it is a force; and so he wonders, privately, what would happen if he chose to contradict it, while of course never contradicting it in the slightest. Newland considers himself to be superior, somehow, to the men of his acquaintance, ‘but grouped together they represented “New York”, and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral. He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome – and also rather bad form – to strike out for himself.’

  The appearance of a cousin of May’s, now called Ellen Olenska, on Newland’s social circuit marks the beginning of a series of events that will test not only Newland but every compartment of his world ‘in all the issues called moral’. The fifty-year hindsight of Wharton’s narration gives a striking anthropological flavour to her presentation of these events. She had been reading The Golden Bough and Freud, and found in the concepts of tribalism and taboo a whole language in which the behaviour of ‘good’ society towards a woman with neither money nor a home of her own, who has in addition had the temerity to leave her husband, could be expressed. Ellen Olenska, emanating the whiff of scandal and degeneracy that New York vaguely classifies as ‘European’, has run away from the cruel Count Olenski and returned to her homeland, where she affects to believe that society is kinder and more compassionate – more innocent – than the older, aristocratic civilisation in which she has spent her unhappy marri
ed life. ‘Everything here is good that was – that was bad where I’ve come from,’ she explains to a riveted Newland Archer, who has been mulling over the ‘mysterious authority’ of her beauty, so complex and experienced by comparison with May Welland’s wholesome, scrubbed prettiness.

  Newland, whose vanity it has been to consider himself ‘different’ from the men of his acquaintance, finds this difference crystallised in the ‘otherness’ of Ellen Olenska. As he is ineluctably drawn away from the propriety-bound rituals of his own life towards the social and moral ambiguity of hers, his behaviour begins to alert his ‘tribe’ to a danger threatening their most sacred causes. The hoary old chiefs – the van der Luydens, Mrs Manson Mingott – are mobilised; there is an attempt to integrate Ellen, and hence neutralise her; and Newland’s wedding to May is hurried through, against the established ‘prehistoric’ custom. But marriage to May merely intensifies the taboo – and its attraction – of his feelings for Ellen. He finds May vapid company on their honeymoon, and despairs at the alacrity with which she settles down to the role of housewife on their return. Most of all, Newland’s discovery that he is constrained makes the constraint impossible to bear. The ‘old New York’ he used to look on with slightly patronising fondness has become his unmistakable adversary. He has realised that he is not free.

  It is through the character of May Welland that Wharton accomplishes her most masterly portrait of the values – and value – of this vanished society, in whose obsolescence even the reader of 1920 could perceive the ambivalence of the author’s tragic design. May is conventional and unimaginative, but she is also ferociously determined as she pits herself against the moral chaos of passion and liberty – and wins. Unlike Newland, May is not motivated by personal desire, by vanity or jealousy. In her behaviour lie the interests of her community and way of life; whereas in Newland’s only the self and its urges are considered. The extraordinary dinner-party scene in which these events are concluded, in which May recaptures her husband and presides over Ellen’s expulsion from their social world, is the ultimate expression of this group consciousness:

  There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe … [Archer] guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation of himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied around 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 is necessary, perhaps, to examine Wharton’s own experience in those years to comprehend the novel’s deeply nuanced conclusion, in which the corpse of that old moral order is looked on with a kind of bewildered awe, its power to control human behaviour now utterly mystifying. As a young woman, Wharton was in love with a man called Harry Stevens, scion of another powerful New York family. Their engagement was announced, but for reasons that are unclear their marriage did not take place. The two young people were resolutely separated by their respective clans and by the social machine, almost, it appears, without being consulted. Shortly afterwards, Harry Stevens tragically died, and Edith consented to a more ‘acceptable’ marriage with Teddy Wharton, a union whose lack of natural love and passion was to torment her for nearly thirty years, until it became possible for her to divorce him and for her life as a free, rich, independent woman belatedly to begin.

  So it is, perhaps, Wharton herself who looks back at the novel’s end on all that correctness and self-denial with such powerfully mixed feelings; who views it with hindsight, like Newland Archer, from a world in which the individual is now ascendant, a world where the ‘standards that bent and bound’ people have vanished like mist. How is one meant to make sense of all that obsolete suffering? How is one meant to feel anything other than victimised and abused, when the ‘rules’ that entailed so much personal pain turn out not to have been rules after all? At the novel’s end Newland Archer is fifty-seven, the age Wharton was when she wrote it. And one can consider his answers to these questions to be hers. To traduce the suffering, he realises, to disrespect it, would be the greatest waste of all. Archer, looking at the new world, offers himself one consolation: that no passion of today’s free-and-easy youth could match the intensity of the previous generation’s thwarted loves. ‘The thing one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat so wildly?’ In The Age of Innocence Wharton likewise embraces the pleasure and pain of her own early life, the innocence that was its sacrifice, the experience that was its bittersweet fruit.

  D. H. Lawrence

  The Rainbow

  The Rainbow came into the world more or less without literary antecedents. Nothing like it had been written before: Lawrence’s novel defined new territories that enabled the representation of human experience to move forward into the modern age. The same, of course, can be said of Joyce’s Ulysses, with which The Rainbow was contemporaneous and with which it shared the fate of being disowned and vilified by the literary establishment and the general public alike. Both were banned immediately, though Joyce’s erudition and Lawrence’s passion could hardly be more distinct from one another. Though both are books of truth, what yokes them together is in fact mere frankness; frankness about the life of the body in its most pedestrian, its most recognisable, its most universal form.

  Lawrence is a writer still identified in the general mind as controversial, and controversial he was, but the highly sexed pornographer of public imagination bears no relation at all to the man whose modes of thought and self-expression still retain the power to provoke violent disagreement. The damage done to his reputation almost a century ago has proved curiously permanent; justice – even the famous overturning of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the Old Bailey in 1960 fixed his libidinous image still more firmly by associating it with the mores of that decade – has an uncanny way of eluding him. It was his tragedy, and it remains his tragedy as each successive generation of readers comes to Lawrence with preconceptions about his life and character that are the very opposite of true. His was a cold, harsh, short life filled with rejection, poverty and sickness, in which every comfort of social, family and intellectual life was denied. That such conditions could produce the supreme work of generosity and empathy that is The Rainbow is mysterious and miraculous in equal measure; and indeed the mystery and the miracle of creation is what this literary masterpiece sets out both to evoke and to immortalise in its place at the core of ordinary life.

  ‘One is not only a little individual, living a little individual life,’ Lawrence wrote in a letter at the time of The Rainbow’s composition. ‘One is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind.’ The brevity and the vastness of this statement may be taken not only as the exposition of itself but as the articulation of Lawrence’s ambitions for his tale of a Nottinghamshire family’s generational movement out of a timeless agrarian communality towards the individualism, alienation and selfhood of life in an industrialised society. This was the movement of history itself; the journey of man out of the fields and into the cities, his emancipation from physical labour by machines, the new forms of mental life this emancipation made possible, the new – often problematic – possibilities for relating it offered, the changes in relationship itself it provoked. What The Rainbow offers is an account of how the old world became the new, how the Victorian era gave way to the modern age, but Lawrence’s statement implies far more than this, both morally and artistically. The Victorian novel routinely used individual characters to emblematise wider social and geographical realities, to the extent that its concept of character often strikes the modern reader as stylised and lacking in reality. Dickens,
George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell: despite their interest in social change, regionalism, community, the position of women, these great English novelists have nothing in common with Lawrence at all. In The Rainbow Lawrence does more than part company with the Victorian modes of narration – he destroys them by completely inverting the literary and actual function of ‘man’ as a representative of ‘mankind’. ‘One is in oneself the whole of mankind’: in this assertion of the total significance of the self, Lawrence is seeing the future not just of the novel but of modern Freudian consciousness, and in the story of the Brangwen family he begins to imagine what the texture of this consciousness might be.

  The Rainbow was originally conceived as a much longer novel, to be called The Sisters and ultimately written as two novels, the second of which is Women in Love. It is important to note that Lawrence’s definitions of ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ at the outset of this project not only incorporated woman but were chiefly preoccupied by her. He regarded his novel as ‘do[ing] my work for women, better than the suffrage’. In a letter he wrote in 1913, he remarked: ‘It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman – who is much of a woman – is that in the long run she is not to be had. She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honour, duty, worth, work, salvation – none of them – not in the long run.’ What she wanted was, he said, satisfaction: ‘physical at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul’. In The Sisters he set out to unravel ‘the woman question’ – ‘it is the problem of the day,’ he wrote, ‘the establishment of a new relation, or the re-adjustment of the old one, between men and women’ – by interrogating the deepest sources of this satisfaction and its denial through the destinies of the two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen; an unravelling so lengthy, requiring such a profound investigation of the origins of female character, that one novel could not encompass it. The Rainbow, then, is the story of those origins; of woman as the sempiternal life-giver who through time and change is finally driven to give birth to herself.