Edith Wharton's semiotics - they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs…  (Ch. 6)

This line is not from an essay on semiotics, but from The Age of Innocence (1920), so in a sense, yes, from an essay on semiotics, but ahead of its time is what I am saying.

Newland Archer is the smartest and most sophisticated member of the tiny social elite of New York circa 187-, but that does not stop him from getting into a little bit of trouble with an interesting and exotic woman.  It almost stops him, and the behind-the-scenes scheming of that society, his family and fiancée and a number of others, including the interesting woman, does stop him.

This is a classic 20th century story, used in many novels.  The smart guy is not as smart as he thinks he is, and the dumb people around him are not as dumb as he thinks they are.  The point of view stays very close to Newland, allowing me to share and enjoy his surprise and defeats.

This is all a representation of Wharton’s world, but she would have been in her teens at the time.

Newland’s sophistication is shown, again and again, by his interest in poetry.  There is quite a lot of signification of taste in The Age of Innocence.  Just a few lines after the “hieroglyphic” quotation, Wharton shows us Newland training his fiancée in the proper understanding of Tennyson:

(She was advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King, but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.)

This is how Wharton undermines sympathy in Newland, with whom I, the reader, am stuck.  His taste is perfect, correct, but geez.  “His boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books” (Ch. 9).  Or how about this, an unboxing video, without the video: “That evening he unpacked his books from London,” finding Herbert Spencer, Alphonse Daudet, “and a novel called ‘Middlemarch,’ as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews” (Ch. 15).

One of the novellas, thankfully only one (“False Dawn”), in Old New York (1924) is entirely about the arbitrary signifiers of taste.  A young American does his Grand Tour with a big budget for paintings, but he has the misfortune of encountering, in Switzerland, the young John Ruskin, who corrupts his tastes and leads him to blow his money on obscure antique painters like Giotto and Fra Angelico rather than Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa, which poisons his relationship with his father – poisons his father – “it was the affair of the pictures that head killed him” (Ch. 7) – and eventually his life.

The giant, crashing irony is that although it would not be so bad to own (and sell) a Rosa, Ruskin and his pre-Raphaelite pals had led the young sap to the “right” paintings, worth a fortune in 1924 (and still today).  This irony is rubbed in on the last page, but you, educated and sophisticated in art history, will have gotten it long before that.

I do not know if “False Dawn” Is good, exactly, but it was fascinating to see Wharton deal with Ruskin and the arbitrary signifiers so directly.  It was clearly on her mind for some reason.

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.

reading some famous U.S. novels of the 1920s - in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man

Not writing is a lot easier than writing, but I have some things I at least imagine I want to write, so I guess I will see if I remember how to write.  American books, Mimesis, British books, French books.  I am tired of being ignorant in private, so I will return, for a while, to being ignorant in public.

I feel that I do not know American literature especially well, but of course I know it better than any other; the feeling of not knowing it is an illusion caused by being surrounded by the stuff my whole life.  I also feel that I have recently immersed myself in American literature of, mostly, the first half of the 1920s, although when I add it up it is not really that many books.  Another illusion, caused by reading not just a pile of novels but also Langston Hughes’s great memoir of the ‘20s, The Big Sea (1940) and Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light (1952), like I am really digging in.

But many of the books – well, the fiction, not the poetry, whole ‘nother world there – are famous ones, sizable Humiliations that I have avoided for decades, so famous that they seemed all too familiar even if I did not really know exactly what was in them.  The Age of Innocence (1920), An American Tragedy (1925), Babbitt (1922) and F. Scott Fitzgerald, some Willa Cather novels – they seemed maybe a little dull.  They're not really so dull.

I am not used to reading such popular books.  They were big best-sellers, top 10 of the year, or close.  Cather was not in that game, although she sold pretty well, and Dreiser’s novel does not make the Top 10, but it made him instantly wealthy, allowing him to spend the rest of his life trying to write a “book of philosophy entitled The Formula Called Man” (Library of America timeline, 1935) and advocating for Stalinism.  Terrific.

Learning about Fitzgerald’s finances explained half of his life to me.  In 1919, he is almost unpublished; in 1920 he is selling stories, several of them, to the Saturday Evening Post for $3,000 a pop*. How much would that be today?  $39,291.61 – holy cow!  Plus he is getting movie money, options and so on, although at this point Fitzgerald and Dreiser and Wharton make as much money from selling books, not the rights to books.

Lewis was a hack writer who with Main Street (1920), which I have not read, hit on a perfect satirical comic formula, perfect for his audience but more importantly perfect for his talent.  Every couple of years he could write one on a new topic: business, religion, science, politics.  Let me fill out the magnificent quotation from Babbitt I put in the title:

“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!” (Ch. XIV.iii)

The irony goes a couple of different directions there, doesn't it?  Another irony is that this, or something like it, wins Lewis a Nobel Prize.  Dreiser was a real possibility for a Nobel, too, for that big clunker of all things.  Plenty of prizes, plenty of prestige, are attached to these books, along with the cash.

I’ll wander through American literature for a few days and see what I remember.  Then it will be back to the booze and spaghetti.

* I made a grotesque error of memory here, which I corrected in a later post. Fitzgerald quickly hopped to $900 per story, and pretty soon "Benjamin Button" earned $1,000 - but not $3,000. Still, the basic point, about the huge amount of money suddenly dropped on Fitzgerald, is intact. Just not so much per story

Some American literature I read recently - Edith Wharton, Thornton Wilder, George Saunders

The Custom of the Country (1913), Edith Wharton

Wharton’s divorce novel.  She had gone through it herself, but here she uses it as a comic tool in the ruthless social climb, rung by painful rung, of Undine Spragg, a worthy cousin of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Trollope’s Lizzie Eustace.  An American cousin.  Her ruthlessness mixed with her genuine American innocence, or ignorance, or both, is a great source of comic energy.

Plenty more comedy.  As a language student, I enjoyed the American traveler “in command of but a few verbs, all of which, on her lips, became irregular” (Ch. 12).  Wharton also occasionally finds some fine descriptive language, this hot August day in New York City, for example: “Swirls of dust lay on the mosaic floor, and a stale smell of decayed fruit and salt air and steaming asphalt filled the place like a fog” (Ch. 22).

But it is Undine who keeps this novel moving.  The final chapter is magnificent, turning the book into some kind of dystopian novel.  A triumph; a plunge into the abyss.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), Thornton Wilder

Here I find an early use of the Winesburg, Ohio device, with stories connected by place and time.  A bridge collapses, inspiring a priest to learn about the victims.  He hopes to learn something about the problem of God and the existence of evil.  The stories that follow have a lot to say about how to live well, but of course almost nothing about theodicy, nothing the reader did not already know.  Maybe I am wrong about this.  Good for book discussion groups, I guess.  Still good.  See – do not read, but see – the last chapter of The Goldfinch (2013) for a current example.

The bridge is near Lima, and collapses in 1714.  Wilder reconstructs his Peru entirely from books and his imagination, which lets him think big.  I especially liked the third story, about an actress and her manager, or maybe a manager and his actress, the greatest actress in the Spanish-speaking world.

They went to Mexico…  They slept on beaches, they were whipped at Panama and shipwrecked on some tiny Pacific islands plastered with the droppings of birds.  They tramped through jungles delicately picking their way among snakes and beetles.  They sold themselves out as harvesters in a hard season.  Nothing in the world was very surprising to them.  (“Uncle Pio”)

It is almost fantasy, or at least grand opera.

Tenth of December (2013), George Saunders

I have not read any other Saunders, not a word.  In this collection, he is a lot like Kurt Vonnegut except not as funny.  Or to be precise, this book is not as funny as four of the five Vonnegut novels I have read.  Bluebeard (1987) was a dud.  The book is not as funny as that of his student Kathleen Founds.  But funny is not everything.

Several stories have light science fiction conceits, like memory-altering chemicals or the odd business in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” in which young immigrant women from difficult circumstances are used by faddish Americans as yard decorations, voluntarily, for pay.  I guess this one is also good for discussion, although I could not work out the allegory in any direction that was interesting.

The critic Robert Scholes wrote that Vonnegut put bitter coatings on sugar pills, and boy does Saunders ever do the same.  Nothing here seemed very hard to deal with, ethically or linguistically.

I thought the title story, the last one, was unusually good.  The conceit, or gimmick, is only linguistic.  A man with brain cancer wants to commit suicide before he becomes incapacitated.  He is losing his language.  As his consciousness streams along it has trouble:

With every step he was fleeing father and father.  Farther from father.  Stepfarther.  What a victory he was wresting.  From the jaws of the feet.  (230)

Punning as psychology, with the man’s despair a response not just to his own illness but to the frightening illness and death of his beloved stepfather.  A human-scaled story, with little comedy beyond the tone, the voice.  If it sounds dark, well, just let the pill dissolve a little.

reading some best sellers (from a hundred years ago) - "I want to get a general view of the whole problem"

Strange sensations reading American fiction lately.  Positive and negative.  The negative is that I am having a bit of an allergic reaction to The Custom of the Country (1913), both to its subject and style.  First, some impatience with the problems of shallow rich people, and second some with the best-sellerishness of the novel, although I do not know how much of a best seller it really was.  It was not a smash like The House of Mirth (1905).

The list of the best sellers of 1913 is a glimpse of an unknown world.  I have heard of maybe six of the books from the decade's best sellers, and read none.  What am I talking about?

I mean scenes like the one that begins Chapter XV, where two minor characters discuss the Problem of Divorce for four pages, in dialogue worthy of the future Hollywood films that presumably use quality authors like Wharton as their models:

“Are there sides already?  If so, I want to look down on them impartially from the heights of pure speculation.  I want to get a general view of the whole problem of American marriages.”

Or see an earlier scene, in Chapter X, in which two (other) minor characters discuss some financial scandal that presumably affects the plot later – I’m only halfway through the book – I hope everything works out well for everyone.  Wharton is vague about the financial details, understanding them about as well as I do.  The dialogue is pretty much screenplay-ready.

None of this has much to do with most of the novel, the good part, Undine Spragg’s rung by rung climb up the society ladder, at whatever the cost (to others).  All of this is terrific, and fiction is often at its best discovering the inner lives of shallow people, but I am enjoying it from a distance.

The Custom of the Country is the eighth Wharton book I have read within the last year or so.  Most of them have been short story collections.  Perfect commercial American magazine fiction of the first decade of the 20th century.  I enjoy it quite a lot, but I should probably take a break from it once I finish this novel.  Although the next thing Wharton does, chronologically, is to become a great French war hero.  Here I am whining about books about shallow people.

The commercial ideal, come to think of it, was also visible in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first collection of stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), where it was immediately obvious why he scored such a hit (This Side of Paradise, his first book, is from the same year).  These stories pop with energy.  They are zingy.  Specifically, the young women, the flappers, are enormous sparkly fun even if the story is fundamentally idiotic.  “The Offshore Pirate,” as an example, in which the flapper is captured by a pirate, ready for an actress to be dropped into the role.    Some kind of parable about Scott wooing Zelda probably.  Anyways, nonsense.  But I can see how readers of the Saturday Evening Post would be pleased to see that the new issue had a Fitzgerald story, just like the Scribner’s readers would feel when they say a Wharton story in the table of contents.  Yes, here’s the good stuff.

And then the book’s so full of tenderness – there are such lovely things in it about flowers and children : Wharton criticizes an age of festering pessimism and decadent depravity

Two more Edith Wharton stories from The Descent of Man (1904).  That ought to do it.  They are a pleasure to revisit.

Two New York stories, both comic stories about writers.  Wharton had been publishing almost a book a year since 1899; five years on is about the right time to start mocking writers.

“The Descent of Man” is practically relevant.  An entomologist – “the distinguished microscopist” – has become disgusted by pop science books, particularly their specious ethical arguments and palliative attempts to prove that God is not dead and so on.  He writes his own, but as a parody, a hoax.  It becomes a best-seller. 

“Why you fit in everywhere – science, theology, natural history – and then the all-for-the-best element which is so popular right now.  Why, you come right in with the How-to-Relax series, and they sell way up in the millions.  And then the book’s so full of tenderness – there are such lovely things in it about flowers and children.”  (26)

Wharton perhaps expresses some contempt for the reading public in this passage.

The microscopist begins “’a series of “Scientific Sermons” for the Round-the-Gas-Log column of The Woman’s World.” He gives “hundred-dollar interviews on every subject.”  He does product endorsements – “his head passed in due course from the magazine and the newspaper to the biscuit-tin and the chocolate-box.”  Only the last move seems outlandish, from a different world.  Richard Dawkins does not have a line of snacks (he doesn’t, does he?).

The man of reason is ruined by his success, poisoned by money.  The descent Wharton saw in Charles Darwin’s title is entirely ethical.

“Expiation” gives us a lady novelist, her first book just published.  It has a racy title, Fast and Loose, and “’handle[s] the subject without gloves’” whatever the daring subject might be (she “show[s] up the hollowness of social conventions”).  Mrs. Fetherel fears that her book will be “’denounced by the press,’” by which she means she hopes it will be a scandal, and therefore a success.  The first obstacle comes with the first review:

“’In this age of festering pessimism and decadent depravity, it is no surprise to the nauseated reviewer to open one more volume saturated with the fetid emanations of the sewer ---“’

Fetherel, who was not in the habit of reading aloud, paused with a gasp…

‘”Of the sewer,”’ her husband resumed; ‘”but his wonder is proportionately greater when he lights on a novel as sweetly inoffensive as Paula Fetherel’s ‘Fast and Loose’…  Let no one be induced by its distinctly misleading title to forego the enjoyment of this pleasant picture of domestic life, which, in spite of a total lack of force in character-drawing and of consecutiveness in incident, may be described as a distinctly pretty story.”’  (97-8)

Poor Mrs. Fetherel!  Earlier, she had been “so afraid of being misunderstood,” since she was “in advance of my time… like poor Flaubert” (83, ellipses in original), like “Ibsen or Tolstoi.”  But things will work out all right with the help of her uncle the Bishop, who is also an author (“’The Wail of Jonah’ (twenty cantos in blank verse)” – Wharton has so much fun in this story that she is not averse to hideous puns and other jokes.

The Bishop was very fond of his niece Mrs. Fetherel, and one of the traits he most valued in her was the possession of a butler who knew how to announce a bishop.  (86) 

At this point, comic Wharton is my favorite Wharton mode, and writers are endlessly mockable.

the evils of desultory reading - Edith Wharton shocks me

The two most shocking stories in Edith Wharton’s 1904 collection The Descent of Man are “The Mission of Jane” and “The Other Two,” one about adoption, the other about divorce or really about remarriage.  I make Wharton sound like a social issue novelist.  Perhaps she was, a little.

In “The Mission of Jane,” a couple decides – or the wife decides and the husband surrenders – to adopt a child to save their marriage:

‘A baby?’

‘Yes.’

‘A – human baby?’

‘Of course!’ she cried, with the virtuous resentment of the woman who has never allowed dogs in the house.  (164)

Little Jane, “preternaturally good,” grows up to be an unbearable pill – “there was something automatic and formal in her goodness, as though it were a kind of moral calisthenics which she went through for the sake of showing her agility.” She develops the habit of lecturing adults, including her parents:

She proved to him by statistics that he smoked too much, and that it was injurious to the optic nerve to read in bed[!].  She took him to task for not going to church more regularly, and pointed out to him the evils of desultory reading[!!].  (180)

The parents pray for a suitor, but when one finally appears, the mother feels obligated to warn him away (her husband “thrilled at his wife’s heroism”).  The last few pages are a comedy of parental anxiety – will something go wrong – will they be stuck with Jane forever?  “But if the bride was reluctant her captor was relentless,” and she is gone.  “Jane had fulfilled her mission after all: she had drawn them together at last” (194).

The father never especially likes his daughter, while the mother eventually learns to dislike her.  The reader has no reason or obligation to like any of them.  The great Sympathy Project of 19th century fiction is dying.

In “The Other Two,” Waythorn has just married a woman who has been twice divorced.  Much of the early part of the story describes the flexibility of the ethics of Wharton-world which makes divorce a problem in the abstract but understandable, socially forgivable, in this specific case.  Waythorn, though, discovers that he is much less cool with the idea of the ex-husbands than he had expected.  The first husband is legally allowed to visit his sick daughter in Waythorn’s own house; the second is in Waythorn’s professional circle.

Sometimes Wharton seems to be writing about an arcane, archaic sub-culture, and at other times, I mean in the same story, she might be writing about people alive today.

Waythorn’s first adjustment is to regard the ex-husbands as “a lien on the property” (66).  He is horrified to realize, and for a time denies, that they are part of his wife’s history, her identity.  He is horrified to realize that she has an identity independent from his own.  But he learns, he adjusts, he is gently mashed into a new shape.

In the final scene, Waythorn accidentally encounters the vulgar first husband in his home.  Well, there is nothing to be done.  He offers a cigar.  He means to leave, but “after all the little man no longer jarred on him.”  Then the middle husband appears – business.  Never before have all three been in the same room.  Another cigar.

He held out the case he had just tendered to Haskett, and Varick helped himself with a smile.  Waythorn looked about for a match, and finding none, proffered a light from his own cigar.  Haskett, in the background, held his ground mildly, examining his cigar-tip now and then, and stepping forward at the right moment to knock its ashes into the fire.  (73)

Now enter Mrs. Waythorn. Everyone has a cup of tea.

The cigars almost shocked me; “proffered a light from his own cigar” actually shocked me.  That Collier’s magazine was publishing such smut!  But I was not shocked to see Wharton confirm that the story was about what I thought it was about.

What a scene it was! - Edith Wharton's styles

Let’s look at The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), Edith Wharton’s sixth book, if I am counting correctly – three books of stories, a novel, and two novellas.  The next book is The House of Mirth (1905).

The Descent of Man is a better book than Wharton’s first collection, The Greater Inclination (1899), which was already better than the usual magazine fiction.  Just five years later, Wharton had successfully 1) specialized and 2) diversified.  A specialty in what everyone thinks of as Wharton-world, the domestic life of monied New York, but when she wanted she good write a good story set somewhere else.

So there’s a Hudson Valley ghost story (“The Lady Maid’s Bell”), a romance of the Italian revolution (“The Letter”), and a boy’s adventure story set in Venice (“A Venetian Night’s Entertainment”).  I would put “The Dilettante” in this alternative category, too, since it is in style a Henry James parody set in Wharton-world, .  “Perhaps her most shocking story” writes Roxana Robinson in The New York Stories of Edith Wharton (p. xviii).  Perhaps!  But I was more shocked by at least two other stories in this very collection, particularly the scene in “The Other Two” where three men married to the same woman rub their phallic symbols together.  Not expecting that!  While a story about a man quietly but cruelly manipulating a woman who loves him, that I have seen before.

By “James parody” I mean that it is propelled by the kinds of little emotional moves that Jamesians call “subtle” and that it is written like this:

It surprised Thursdale to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure; and though his sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to any conscious purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his sentimental economies had left him such a large surplus to draw upon.  (269, page references to original edition)

Wharton catches James’s metaphorical mode:

The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which, at any moment, a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere.  It was as though a grand opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.  (277)

If “strained the acoustics” sounds odd, it is.  A paragraph earlier, the narrator interrupts a character’s impassioned speech to note that “she mixed her metaphors a little” (277), which might even be a dig at someone.  Not James.  Jamesian characters.

By contrast, the boy’s adventure story, “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment,” where the energetic all-American lad is set loose on Venice:

A moment more and he was in the thick of it!  Here was the very world of the old print, only suffused with sunlight and colour, and bubbling with merry noises.  What a scene it was!  (319)

Or:

Tony was no chicken-heart.  He had something of a name for pugnacity among the lads of his own age at home, and was not the man to stand in Venice what he would have resented in Salem…  (324)

Wharton’s stylistic adaptability is impressive.  Tomorrow, though, I will stay in Wharton-world, where Wharton sounds like herself.

the lines have the value of color - a Wharton short story rummage

I  had thought that  the only Edith Wharton I had read until now was Citizen Kane, but no, I had read but forgotten the story that leads off The Greater Inclination, Wharton’s first book.  The story is “The Muse’s Tragedy” (1899), and it is notable as, from the title on to the end, as a commentary on or parody of Henry James.  A young poet meets the still young muse of a great old, deceased poet.  What effect will she have on him?  Poems, a book about the older poet?  Instead they fall into a love affair, in Italy, where else.  “The Aspern Papers” meets “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’” meets a number of other James tales.

The story is written like James, too, early James, not like the contemporary What Maisie Knew or The Turn of the Screw but James from twenty years earlier.  The first line:

Danyers afterward liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of her – she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph to the most privileged – and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and cultivated as her friend, he had extracted but the one impressionist phrase: “Oh, well, she’s like one of those old prints where the lines have the value of color.”

It is also the first paragraph, though, which is not so Jamesian.  Wharton’s Jamesianism is simplified, or is the right word clarified, not just in style but character, theme.  The muse’s tragedy is that her story is not her own, so Wharton gives her a story of her own.  Although, strictly speaking, it is also an invention.

“Souls Belated” is a divorce story, one of several I have come across recently.  A couple is vacationing in Italy, traveling as husband and wife, not married yet, but waiting for a divorce to be finalized.  Even in 1899, Wharton does not treat this situation as especially shocking.    More shocking is the person in their train compartment, “a courtly person who ate garlic out of a carpet-bag” – not at all Jamesian.  Sometimes Wharton sounds more like Oscar Wilde:

“That’s the worst of it.  She’s too handsome.”

“Well, after all, she can’t help that.”

“Other people manage to,” said Miss Pinsent skeptically.

How about “Eleanor  is porous, and I knew that sooner or later the unnecessary truth would exude through the loose texture of her dissimulation”?  That is from “The Rembrandt,” a preposterous story about a museum curator who overpays for a painting out of cowardice and guilt.  I jotted the line down purely for its odd poetic qualities, its vowels sounds, all of those “u”s, ooh ooh ooh.

There’s some of this, there’s some of that.  “The Rembrandt” is from Wharton’s second collection, Crucial Instances (1901), which I sampled but did not read as a whole.  No, the titles of her story collections are not so good.  Reading Wharton’s short stories as a whole seems like a good project for someone else, as much as I enjoyed the ones I tried.

the cedar-chest of indifference, the grace of artificiality - some early Edith Wharton stories

Early Edith Wharton short stories, those are things I have read recently.  I went so far as to read an entire book of them, in non-book form, the 1899 The Greater Inclination.   It is Wharton’s first book, and contains most, not all, of the stories she published during the 1890s, commercial magazine fiction of the time, of the better sort, although that is an easy judgment, since I have an idea of what is to come later.

But no, these stories are good.  One dud in The Greater Inclination, a two scene play about a man who asks his wife to rekindle an old love affair to help him get a political favor.  She is offended – enter old flame – she changes her mind.  French twaddle.  A bit where the characters flirt via metaphor is excruciating although hilarious:

Isabel:  If one has only one cloak [cloak is metaphorical] one must wear it in all weathers.

Oberville:  Unless it is so beautiful and precious that one prefers to go cold and keep it under lock and key.

Isabel:  In the cedar-chest of indifference – the key of which is usually lost.  (“The Twilight of the God”)

That “cedar-chest of indifference” is transcendently bad.  Two lines later there is “an auction sale of fallacies.”  All dialogue, please remember.  A parody of French twaddle, perhaps.  Let’s assume that.  And I remind myself, the sole dud.

More typical is the kickoff of the next story, “A Cup of Cold Water”:

It was three o’clock in the morning, and the cotillion was at its height, when Woburn left the over-heated splendor of the Gildermere ballroom, and after a delay caused by the determination of the drowsy footman to give him a ready-made overcoat with an imitation astrachan collar in place of his own unimpeachable Poole garment, found himself breasting the icy solitude of the Fifth Avenue.

So efficient – name, place, social status via a small but meaningful confusion.  As much as commercial magazine fiction has changed, mostly by becoming much less commercial, there is plenty that does not sound so different.  Well, no one would write “the Fifth Avenue.”

“A Cup of Cold Water” turns out to be a noir.  I mean, “In the unventilated coffee-room they found a waiter who had the melancholy air of being the last survivor of an exterminated race, and who reluctantly brought them some tea made with water which had not boiled,” Raymond Chandler might be okay with that one.  Desperate to marry a woman in the cotillion set, wearing much too nice of a coat for a bank clerk, Woburn has gambled heavily and embezzled a bundle from his bank.  He needs to be on an ocean liner to Europe, but spends the night finding excuses to not skip out quite yet.  The psychology of the character is quite good. 

Later in the night, he meets a dame in distress, and the story suddenly fills up with noir clichés, which were all I know were not yet clichés.  Perhaps they are inexorably generated by the form.  I prefer this description of the rich woman who does poor Woburn in:

Miss Talcott’s opinions had no connection with the actual; her very materialism had the grace of artificiality.  Woburn had been enchanted once by seeing her helpless before a smoking lamp: she had been obliged to ring for a servant because she did not know how to put it out.

This is closer to the Wharton her best readers know, right?  It should be assumed that I am an ignoramus about Edith Wharton.

The Best Books of 1913 - Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare / On, on upward thro' the golden air!

This was a strange year for anniversaries.  It is usually the births and deaths of writers that are commemorated, but this year I noticed a lot of attention to books – two books, I mean, Pride and Prejudice and Swann’s Way (for that matter, the Gettysburg Address fits the pattern).  Perhaps this tells us something about what these books have become, how their meaning has expanded beyond their texts.  Austen and Proust both have industries around them.

Proust, or Swann’s Way, or at least the “Combray” section of Swann’s Way, deserves the honor of Best Book of 1913, I think, so I have no complaint about the attention it receives.  It is one of the great novels of the century.  Yet there is something arbitrary to its celebrity.  At least one more of the century’s greats was published in the same year, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, a novel that is innovative like Proust’s book but has a tense thriller plot, including terrorists and a ticking time bomb.  Yet it is a cult novel in English.  I have no idea why.  It is not like English readers have been averse to Russian novels.

If you polled readers or critics fifty years ago, asking them which novel would get the most attention at its centennial, Swann’s Way or D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, I wonder if Lawrence would not top the poll.  How he has fallen.  Or how Proust has risen.  Some of both.  Sons and Lovers is doing all right for itself.

Perhaps a French reader can let me know if Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes has gotten much centennial celebration in France, where it is as well-known as, I don’t know, its titular cousin The Great Gatsby.  In English, another cult book.

I am never sure if I should do a Best of 191X post.  For the 19th century, I have read more of the books I am mentioning, so I know what the books are, not just how they are known.  In 1913, I see Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which I have not read (nor have I read the Lawrence novel).  I just started the Cather, out of a sense of shame.

1913 was a deeply interesting year for poetry.  It produced a crop of first or second books by major poets, a number of which may well not be major books themselves – see above, haven’t read them – but remind me how quickly poetry was changing.  Maybe not as quickly as painting, but close.  D. H. Lawrence, again, Georg Trakl, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will, Guilliame Apollinaire’s Alcool, William Carlos Williams.

Subscribers to the hot new magazine Poetry would read Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” alongside (more or less) Ezra Pound’s  “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition     of these faces     in the crowd   :
Petals     on a wet, black     bough    .

(for those who do not know it, that’s the entire poem) and Vachel Lindsay’s rather different “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”:

Hallelujah! It was queer to see
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free.
Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare
On, on upward thro' the golden air!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

You’re supposed to sing this, accompanied by bass drum and banjos.  Pound and Lindsay support Kilmer’s argument, since neither poem is as lovely as a tree, although they have other virtues.  There is another line from the Lindsay poem that I was tempted to use as my title: “But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.”  That was the poetry of 1913.  And the music.  And the painting.  And some of the novels, too.

Giorgio de Chirico’s The Transformed Dream, picked almost at random from a superb year of paintings, can be seen free of charge at the Saint Louis Art Museum.  How interesting, André Breton owned it for a long time.

Please clue me in to good Moroccan books

Ma femme and I are thinking of going to Morocco is January. She has been doing the reading, not me. I do not, it turns out, know where to start.

When I made my Senegalese reading list, I was pretty ignorant. But not as ignorant as I am about Moroccan literature. There are degrees. When I look at the bibliography of Tahar ben Jelloun, a big deal, I know that, the titles mean absolutely nothing to me. The Sand Child (1985) and The Sacred Night (1987) have been translated into the most languages, so maybe that's a clue. I don't know. An unusual number of the most famous books are memoirs, which may mean something.

As I have noticed with other young literatures, Moroccan books are generally short, so the cost of just diving in is low. That's what ma femme has been doing. She has not found the masterpieces yet. Plenty of good books, yes, but nothing really great. I think her favorite so far has been Tahir Shah's In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams (2008), in which Shah mixes Moroccan storytelling traditions with his own family story (he's the son of Sufi expert Idries Shah).

Sometimes, she has been more unfortunate. Stay away from Edith Wharton's In Morocco (1920) if you want to retain respect for that writer. Her grand pronouncements about "the Oriental mind" are best buried and forgotten.

If anyone has suggestions about good Moroccan books, they would be most appreciated. Books by Moroccans, or books about Morocco. If they're really, really good, that would be even better.

One disclaimer: feel free to recommend, advocate, praise, and sing to the heavens books by William Burroughs and Paul Bowles. But I ain't readin' 'em. Not for his trip.