The Age of Innocence and so on - the French war hero has her jokes

I have been reading quite a lot of Edith Wharton lately, but I took the wrong notes, so what can I say?  Let’s see.

Wharton was in France when the war started in 1914.  Let’s look in the Library of America Chronology to see what she did: “establishes and directs American Hostels for Refugees,” “organizes Children of Flanders Rescue Committee,” “helps establish treatment program for tubercular French soldiers,” etc.  “Made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor” – Edith Wharton, who was 52 when the war began, was a genuine French war hero.  A wealthy woman, she spent quite a lot of her own money on her humanitarian efforts, aside from foregoing income she could have earned writing fiction.  If anyone deserved a best-seller, it was Wharton.  The Age of Innocence (1920) made her a million bucks, in today’s money, over the next few years.

Plus, it’s her best book, which does not hurt.  Best as, you know, literary art.  Best I’ve read of The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and almost but not quite all of her short fiction and novellas published through Old New York (1924).  I do not know why I became so invested in Wharton’s short stories, except that I was out of the country, the collections are in the public domain and available on the internet, and she is consistently good.  Probably a book like Anita Brookner’s Collected Stories of Edith Wharton makes more sense than reading everything.  Everything, almost, has not been bad, though.

For a long time, decades, the only Wharton I had read was the schoolboy punishment Ethan Frome (1911) which has turned out to be, whatever its frigid virtues, deeply unrepresentative of Wharton.  I should have read one of the famous novels as well.  All three are pretty great.

Because of the war, or her age, or who knows what, in the 1920s Wharton went back in time, with Age of Innocence beginning in the 1870s, I think, and the Old New York stories in the 1840s.  This leads to my one complaint about Age.  She cannot resist prophetic jokes.  Our hero and heroine are having an illicit rendezvous.  They choose a new institution, because no one goes there:

Avoiding the popular “Wolfe collection,” whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered down a passage to the room where the “Cesnola antiquities” mouldered in uninvited loneliness…

“It’s odd,” Madame Olenska said, “I never came here before.”

“Ah, well–.  Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum.”

“Yes,” she assented absently.  (Ch. 31)

Or from a bit earlier:

... he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels.” (Ch. 29)

Maybe I am wrong and this is not a lapse of taste and Wharton should have piled on more of these jokes.  Those are marvels.  It is a great museum.  Have your fun.