Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton in 1880, aged 18 years.

Edith Wharton made the list twice, for Ethan Frome (1911) and The Age of Innocence (1920). The author's ages at the publications of these books were 49 and 58, which is a late age for a famous writer to turn out her most celebrated works. The IWE blurb on Frome is not one of their better-written efforts:

"It may have been only surprise that Edith Wharton, whose life was one of wealth in New York's excessively formal society, could write so well about poverty and simplicity on a New England farm where only poverty and simplicity were known; but for whatever reason, critics acclaimed this novel when it was published and have generally rated it her best work. That is a high rating, Edith Wharton was one of the most important American novelists of her times."

The introduction to Innocence appears to take its inspiration from the popular image of Wharton as an unsmiling, frigidly correct Henry James-like snob, which persona was not at the height of its esteem in the middle of the last century:

"Edith Wharton wrote of life as she knew it personally--the life of rich and socially prominent families in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. Her depiction of the manners and mores of the times is accurate, revealing, and often exasperating to those whose lives began later than the lives of the characters in her books...(Innocence) is not a light novel and demands a modicum of understanding and sympathy from the reader--but it is an excellent portrait of life and persons in its time."  

The copy of The Age of Innocence pictured above is the only stand alone Edith Wharton book I own. I have not yet read it, which is unusual with me in that I usually only buy books I intend to read right away. However the library in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, which is where most of my family lived, and still lives, and where I lived on and off myself for several years earlier in my life, used to have great book sales in its basement, lots of Modern Library editions for a quarter or 50 cents, which on the particular day I got this must have seemed too good to pass up. This is going to come up on my current reading list, which in November I will have been following for 18 years, at some point--I have seen it--though it does not look like that point is going to be anytime in the next five years, at least. I did read Ethan Frome sometime in late 2010. I do not own a separate copy of it because being quite short it is included in its entirety in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, where it only takes up about 60 pages, and I read it there. I thought it was a good book, well worth reading, especially perhaps if you are familiar with the part of the world where it is set, in which the landscape and basic village geography are in many places even today not much different from what is depicted in the novel  (Western Massachusetts specifically, but much of Vermont and Northwestern Connecticut also fit this profile). The toll that the climate and isolation, especially in the years when you get a traditional New England winter (i.e., not so much this past year), takes subtly on your ability to project any warmth or sensuality towards other people over the course of several decades, which is still a real phenomenon, is illustrated as starkly and economically in Ethan Frome as I have found it anywhere, at least since I have been able to note the same process happening to myself. I only made a few little notations in the book while I was reading it, but I will reproduce a few of them here to provide a fuller impression of my feelings about the book (because after spending twenty fruitless years attempting to understand the world by means of thinking, this blog is going to be about the only thing that ever existed for me, my feelings).

The description of the vicissitudes of the male lover's (Ethan's) inarticulate romantic feelings are quite good. From Chapter V:

"Her tone was so sweet that he took the pipe from his mouth and drew his chair up to the table. Leaning forward, he touched the farther end of the strip of brown stuff that she was hemming. 'Say Matt,' he began with a smile, 'what do you think I saw under the Varnum spruces, coming along home just now? I saw a friend of yours getting kissed.'

The words had been on his tongue all the evening, but now that he had spoken them they struck him as inexpressibly vulgar and out of place."

This is pretty much my life story.

Some more description hitting painfully close to home, from Chapter VIII:

"Here he had nailed up shelves for his books...hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham Lincoln and a calendar with 'Thoughts From the Poets,' and tried, with these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a 'minister' who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at Worcester."

Ouch. Almost as deflating as the time my picture got a 3.41 rating on Hotornot.com. The aspirations of people like me to books and other cultural things are so humorous/absurd to people for whom the knowledge and understanding of these things is second nature. The heavy emphasis on the inarticulateness of country, or common, people in Ethan Frome is not a mere matter of the book's being 100 years old. If you ever peek into some contemporary fiction from the Ivy League/Manhattan based crowd (not that there is any great necessity to do so), the gap in literary and artistic sensibility and intelligence between people in or connected to Manhattan who care about such things and those outside that world who imagine they care about such things is still perceived to be enormous (and not, incidentally, to the denigration of the Manhattan people). How huge are these gaps, especially at the level of people who are not widely famous, and why are they thus huge? It is obviously the constant reinforcement one gets from the positive identification of oneself with the life and culture of the city and its all-conquering institutions--if one can swing the identification part in one's favor once and for all. When you are wholly outside of this, and especially outside of any scene at all reasonably approximate you can read and write and think and drink cocktails and maybe even occasionally try to hit on arty-looking girls in dingy alt-rock bars, you just can't get the reinforcement that any of it is getting you anymore, and everybody can see it in your confused and overeager demeanor.

Edith Wharton was born at 14 West 23rd Street in Manhattan in 1862. Most biographical accounts note that she was born into "Old New York"--the WASP/Dutch high society whose power and influence and numbers were diminished I guess by the floods of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in the latter   19th and early 20th centuries, though I thought there were a few of them still around (Aren't they the characters populating Whit Stillman movies?) The building she lived in appears to still be standing, though it has been renovated so many times that most accounts of the site describe the Wharton house as hiding within the shell of the current facade. As of 2011 a Starbucks was installed on the ground floor. This address is near 5th Avenue and Madison Square Park. The Flatiron Building, which is a favorite of mine, can't be more than a few doors away. That whole neighborhood is one of my favorite (as in top 15) in town. According to another article from 2011 a commemorative plaque is supposed to be placed on the building in honor of Edith Wharton, who was known by the delightful sobriquet of Pussy Jones (Jones was her maiden name) when she lived in the house. Subway: 23rd Street at Broadway (N & R Lines)

The great Edith Wharton-themed tourist attraction is her opulent Berkshire house The Mount, physical address 2 Plunkett Street in Lenox, Massachusetts, 5 minutes from Exit 2 off the Mass Turnpike. I am delighted to see that The Mount appears to be open again, as I remember reading a few years back that they had had to close for a time due to financial problems. I should really try to get down there and see it, though Western Mass can be surprisingly far from anywhere. The Mount is 3 hours and 15 minutes drive from my house in New Hampshire. It is even an hour and 45 minutes from our camp in Brattleboro, though that would be doable as a day trip.

Here is a 12 minute video introduction to the Mount which it looks like the stewards of the property have put out themselves. I put it up here as a resource for anybody whose interest has been roused by the tone of this or any other of my modest articles

Edith Wharton was a 1% type from birth, so it is hardly surprising that the desirable geography where she was concerned would be extended onto the grave, her interment being at the Cimitiere des Gonsards in Versailles. Actually I could be wrong about the desirability of the location, but it sounds desirable. Besides the palace, which looks to be within strolling distance of the cemetery, my impression of the modern town is that it is a prosperous, haute bourgeois locale. One could make a decent day of the visit, I should think. The cemetery is very near the Versailles-Chantiers RER station. I can already picture myself trying to buy a ticket for this station and having the attendant assure me that I really want to go to Versailles-Rive Gauche, because that is right outside the gates of the palace and is where all the tourists want to go (the line appears to split right before it comes to these stations, so getting off a station early to satisfy one's petty desire to do things the way one wants to do them is not an option). The palace is only an 18-minute walk from the Chantiers station according to Google maps anyway.

Trailer for the rarely-seen 1934 film of The Age of Innocence starring Irene Dunne. Wharton herself was still alive at this time--she died in 1937--which I thought of interest because though one always associates her with a seemingly much earlier and more remote time than the 1930s, she of course was not.

I have never much warmed to serious literary adaptations featuring A-list Hollywood stars post-1980 or so, and I have never seen the 1993 Martin Scorcese version of Innocence, but I will put a clip from it on here because it is supposed to fairly good. Also I find I miss Winona Ryder now that she isn't around much anymore. She was never much of an actress, but she was ubiquitous, or seemed to be, for a while, and she was attractive in an earnest way that being soft of heart I always found rather endearing.

There is a pretty recent movie of Ethan Frome starring another favorite Generation-X era starlet, Patricia Arquette--who didn't like her?--but I cannot find anything snippet-sized from that production that I would want to put on here. I have not seen this movie either.

My French tutor in college, the late Douglas Allanbrook, who was a composer of some renown, wrote an opera based on Ethan Frome. Excerpts here. I have not listened to much of it--the time required for even a one hour and 48 minute recording somehow seems daunting to me nowadays--but I thought I ought to include it in the catalog, for Mr Allanbrook was one of the few serious adult men who didn't openly hate me that I have had the opportunity to engage with on a day to day basis, and I am pretty confident that his work contains some merit.

Aesop

"For so many years all fables were called 'Aesop's Fables' that none can be definitely attributed to Aesop himself, who lived early in the 6th century B.C. For literary purposes Aesopian is a better word than Aesop's and two criteria should be applied to the fables: Each must have sentient animals as characters and must lead to a 'moral' as a conclusion; and each must have been included in the collection made by Phaedrus, first-century Latin poet. This is not to say that all or even any of the fables in Phaedrus's collection were necessarily written by Aesop."--IWE World's Greatest Literature Supplement, 1958.

Main encyclopedia article on subject from the same source:

"Aesop was a writer (1) who lived 2,600 years ago in ancient Greece. His stories, called fables, were so clever and amusing that they are still read today...

...Aesop lived on Samos (2), a Greek Island in the Aegean Sea. He is said to have been a slave (2) who was freed by his master (3). The exact time or reason for his death is not known (4), but some writers of history say that he angered a mob of people in the Greek city of Delphi and they threw him over a cliff."

Here, a more up-to-date quotation from the English classical scholar Martin Litchfield West:

"The name of Aesop is as widely known as any that has come down from Graeco-Roman antiquity [yet] it is far from certain whether a historical Aesop ever existed...in the latter part of the fifth century [BC] something like a coherent Aesop legend appears, and Samos seems to be its home."

(Not my personal copy of the book. I don't have one.)

Some additional notes on the second passage above:

1. Seeing as there is considerable uncertainty as to whether "Aesop" refers to an actual person, stating that he was a writer of some kind when neither original writings attributed to him nor specific, creditable references to the existence of such writings in literary, or book, form survive, is obviously taking a bit of a liberty.

2. Most ancient sources appear to agree that the supposed Aesop lived in Samos and was a slave at some point. His place of birth on the other hand was much disputed among these same sources: claims were made more Mesembria in Thrace, the city of Sardis in Lydia (Western Asia Minor), and the country of Phrygia, which was east of Lydia, in present-day west-central Anatolia. None of these places appear to have a stronger claim than any of the others. There does seem to be some consensus, tentatively approved by modern scholarship as at least the most likely dates if there are to any at all, that Aesop would have been born around 620 B.C. and died around 564. More on this in a later note.

3. Plutarch, supposedly in the Life of Solon (I don't remember this), relates the story of Aesop's death in Delphi (more below), in which he states that Aesop was in Delphi on a diplomatic mission from King Croesus in Lydia. This is the primary source of the speculation that Aesop was at one point freed from slavery.

4. I am going to quote from the Wikipedia article re this one: "[Aesop scholar Ben Edwin] Perry...dismissed Aesop's death in Delphi as legendary; but subsequent research has established that a possible diplomatic mission for Croesus and a visit to Periander are consistent with the year of Aesop's death."

There is also a long tradition of speculation that Aesop may have been of black African origin or descent, based on descriptions and depictions of him as swarthy and of otherwise unusual appearance.

So I have never read through one of the serious compilations of Aesop's Fables. Aesop may also be the only ancient Greek content originator on this new list that was not read, and maybe even not talked about, at SJC Annapolis, though it is possible sentences or fragments from him were used as exercises in our Greek manual/textbook Still, now that we have our first ancient Greek on board the site, as well as an Italy-based ancient Roman, it is starting to really feel like the monument to lost ambitions and lost possibilities I have hoped to build up here. We still need to get some of the French in here especially, and the Germans and Russians as well, for the mausoleum of my mind to attain something like its full form, but I am beginning to see it coming into shape.

I am going to include Samos and Delphi, as the places most associated with the life and death of Aesop, on the travel list. They are places one would want to see anyway, and the excuse for giving them the official imprimatur of being on the List and therefore priority destinations, is too convenient.

1947 short film of "The Tortoise and the Hare". The matter of interest to me in this is that the movie is a Encyclopedia Britannica/University of Chicago production. I did not know that they dabbled in filmmaking at this time, and of course this is right during the period when they were cranking up all the Great Books stuff. The film has its charm, though I am surprised at how gratingly Middle American the voice of the narrator was. I was anticipating maybe one of the myriad genius European professors that were on campus at the time, or at least a top-shelf graduate student.

Publius Vergilius Maro

"Virgil has by many scholars been considered the greatest of all poets and the Aeneid was his greatest work...Virgil wrote in the classical Latin of the Golden Age." (IWE)

The Aeneid was the only work of the great poet's to be chosen for the 1958 reading list, however. It is also the only one of his that I have read as yet, though I am convinced that there is considerable greatness in the Eclogues and the Georgics, though like the Aeneid, the better part of this greatness is probably lost on anyone who is not very much at home in the Latin language. It is my impression that hardly anyone, at least who has a prominent public presence, knows Latin this intimately anymore, and even most among the super-educated do not seem to consider it a pressing issue. One result of this is that Virgil, one of the pillars of the Western intellectual tradition for two millenia, is rapidly becoming lost to the Culture (in an old post on the other blog relating to this same issue I used the phrase "any communal, non-specialist human consciousness" in place of Culture, to describe what he had been lost to), along with other Roman poets, Horace perhaps most prominent among these. I of course do not know enough Latin to read its literature without a translation myself. At this point I suspect most people hold some variation of the opinion that this kind of reading does not in most cases provide tangible value to a person's development--it is true I think that the amount of immersion and mastery that is necessary with regard to these studies to attain such tangible values as may be found therein is far greater than is generally appreciated even by people who would earnestly be interested in seeking them. Still, we are speaking of the widely acknowledged pinnacle of the literature of the language of the Roman Empire, the central language of Western thought for over a millenium after that empire's demise, one of the five great epic poems, traditionally considered to be the highest of all literary achievements, of Western/European history, a source of episodes and myths that recur throughout art and thought down through the ages. Surely all this would be of interest to some class of serious person...

My collection of Virgil books. The first time I read The Aeneid, which was at the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I used the old Scribner's edition with the Rolfe Humphries translation, which I do not appear to have anymore. I have no idea when I jettisoned it. Maybe I didn't like it, although in my memory I had a fondness for it at the time, and the fairly clear memory I have of the physical book anyway would seem to confirm the truth of this. I also remember my wife, who would also have had to read this stuff, has having a copy of the Robert Fitzgerald translation, but we don't have this anymore either. Perhaps at one point a determination was made that one household only needs so many copies of Virgil, though this is not a usual position for us to take. The Brittanica Great Books set was part of another collection that someone (someone apparently quite wealthy, as I found a pay stub for $34,000 wedged into the pages of the first volume of Gibbon) had set out by the side of a rural road around where we live, and which we took up of course, because for us it is so reminiscent of school. On getting the books home though, we did discover that the Rabelais and Pascal volumes were missing; so the set is not complete. The Modern Library edition I think I bought at a library sale in Pennsylvania--I've had it for a very long time. I collect these, especially the ones from the 30s, 40s and 50s, not obsessively, but if I find a stray one in a box for a dollar, I'll pick it up. The translator of the Great Books edition is Rhoades, and that of the Modern Library is Mackail. I have not read either of these, though my impression from such contact with scholars and translation snobs as I have had is that they are not especially well-regarded.

The two red books obviously are from the Loeb Classical Library. In the summer of 1993, having a lot of idle time on my hands as I did not understand that I should be organizing my plans for after college, I came upon the harebrained scheme of trying to teach myself Latin by working line by line through the Aeneid. As I am very slow to catch on when things are not working, I did keep at it for a fairly long time--I did not finally abandon the effort until around the middle of Book Seven--but neither my knowledge of Latin nor understanding of Virgil progressed very far beyond dim child stage. The green book on the lower right is an Oxford University Press publication intended for the more advanced student. It is the Latin text of Book 2 only, with extensive notes on the grammar, word choices, disparities between manuscripts, comparisons with similar passages in other poets, and the like. I suppose I thought it would be some help to me.

This is a view of the train station in Mantua (Mantova), in Lombardy, taken from the window of a room on one of the upper floors of the ABC Albergo Hotel across the street, on March 2, 1997. Our poet was born in the village of Andes, which no longer exists and has for all intents and purposes long been absorbed into the city of Mantua, which is well established in the popular mind as the hometown of Virgil. At this time I was resident, I suppose it could be said, in Prague and had taken, during the winter break there, a trip to Italy, the prelude and beginning of which I wrote about here. After Venice we moved onto Florence for about four nights, after which it was Saturday, and sometime after lunch we finally made our departure from that city to start back towards Verona, where the bus that had brought us from Prague was awaiting to take us back there Sunday around 3 p.m. I generally like to take my time when visiting places and not try to cram too much in, but I noted that Mantua was only about thirty miles from Verona so as we had walked around the center of Verona on the first day I thought it would be a great idea to spend the last night in Mantua, look around on Sunday morning and zip over on the train in time to catch the bus in the afternoon. This was before one arranged everything on the internet beforehand, or at least before I did, but it seemed easy enough...

The above is supposed to be a likeness of Virgil. The building, which is the Palazzo Broletto, according to my book, or the Palazzo del Podesta, according to the internet, dates from the 1200s, which impresses me, though it is nothing in this part of the world.

We arrived in Mantua sometime in the evening, probably seven or eight. We wandered around for quite a while searching for what was to me an acceptably cheap hotel, but there weren't any, for Mantova is one of the richest cities in the richest region in Italy. Thus we ended up at the hotel across from the train station, which was 95,000 lira, or less than $50 as it was, but that was a veritable fortune to me at the time. There was a freaking telephone in the room! In truth we were running low on funds at this point, but we were able to get a pizza and some cheap wine in a place equal parts pleasant and raucous adjoining the train stations. I love train station restaurants; of course everything--the station, the surrounding district of the town, and the restaurant--has to be old, the way it would have been before 1965, where they frequently serve as settings in movies and novels. Many of the old cities in Italy have happily not had their ancient plans, at least in their central parts, as much improved upon in recent decades as those elsewhere have.

Picture of me back when I was at least thin underneath Virgil's niche, and a slightly expanded view of the palazzo. I am still favoring the shapelessly fitted earth tones that were the fashion among some people in the early 90s. Spring of '97 was about the time all of that really began coming to an end, though those kinds of shifts are way too subtle for me to pick up on in real time. When seeing youthful pictures of myself like this, I am happy that I at least had the opportunity to go to some of these places when I was still young, and I have some good memories of them, but they are always accompanied by the knowledge that I did not begin to make the most of those opportunities in any way. This is off-topic, but I was watching the movie Chariots of Fire recently, and wondering why it had such a powerful effect on people of middling intelligence and accomplishment, myself included, but induced diffidence at best in most people who operate at a world-class level, and it struck me that the appeal of the movie to middlebrows was that it shows people who appear to be maximizing their potential, in various areas of life, at every instance of those lives that is shown on the screen, which is actually quite rare in movies, but are at the same time not doing anything in a way that seems completely inaccessible to bourgeois audience members. Holding one's own with the toffs at Cambridge seems (in this movie anyway) like a skill one could learn if one was exposed to them enough and had the right kind of instruction at the necessary stages of life. Anybody could be as devout a Christian as Eric Liddell--there isn't  even competition involved to prevent you from attaining this goal--if it were possible for him to derive satisfaction from that kind of life, which most people will dismiss out of hand. Even winning the Olympics is not such a daunting task when the only people you have to beat are graduates of elite universities from about eight countries, and the likes of Usain Bolt aren't going to be walking through the door. Anyway, in most of the important areas of life--the physical, the intellectual, the sensual, the social, the active useful--I spent most of my formative years watching from the fourth row back on the sideline.

The above is the main square in old Mantua, with the duomo on the left and the palazzo of the doge, or duke, or whatever the person was called that ruled the city back in the Medieval/Renaissance era. As you can see hardly anyone is out, because it is Sunday, and places like Mantua completely close down on Sunday in Italy, as well as much of the rest of Europe. This particular visit, pleasant though it was in many ways, was a reminder that one should always plan on Sunday to be in or on the way to a big city, or at least a fairly popular one. Nothing was open. We had to go back to our pizzeria of the night before but we only had enough cash left (after buying our train tickets) to get a tiny plain pizza and tap water--ATMs in the provinces did not work for foreign bank cards on Sundays at that time either.

Statue of Rigoletto. This house had a connection with Verdi. He used it as a set model for many of his operas. I don't know why, however, which would be a slightly more interesting tidbit to know.

Mantua is an ancient city, and there are blocks of medieval streets and buildings that are not exactly obsessively preserved. There were, as I have noted several times, very few people out on the streets, and the majority of the population that one did see were senior citizens. Even at that time the birthrate in the prosperous areas of northern Italy were historically low--less than 1 child per woman in nearby Bologna, and I doubt it was much more than that in Northern Lombardy and one saw very few children, and these almost always single children accompanied by three or four adults. The preponderance of old people was very noticeable.

This is part of the modern Virgil monument, which was apparently commissioned by Mussolini in 1927, though I was not aware of this at the time, or did not make the connection. I can't make out the verse inscribed on the plinth anymore, but I am going to make a guess that the figures represented here are supposed to be Aeneas and Turnus (or perhaps Mussolini and Georges Clemenceau, whom the Turnus figure somewhat resembles).

I've always wanted to slip this disclaimer in in one of my blog posts, that I am aware I have a terrible whining problem, and always have, and that most people from St John's, and this is one of the qualities I find most admirable in my old schoolmates, are, like my wife, most decidedly not whiners, and are generally competent and achieve above-average success as adults. It is a very fine school for people who understand how to work and have a strong connection to areas of life outside of the college. Our students of this description tend to do very well in the world, and contribute to society in substantial ways. The college even helps its many alumni who are lazy, delusional, emotionally needy and frightened of most aspects of regular American society to lead a far more bearable life than they would likely have been able to manage without it; but it can only do so much.

The whole of the Virgil monument. I did think this commanding depiction of Virgil seemed a little out of sync with his traditional reputation as a lover of the quiet, rural life. This is located in a large park adjacent to the old part of town. It was the last thing we saw before heading back to the train station.

My ingenious plan to make it back to Verona in time for the bus did not proceed entirely smoothly. First of all, even though the two cities are just 30 miles apart, the main train lines that they lie on are separate. There is a branch line that runs between the two cities as a kind of local. However it only runs a couple of times on Sunday. Then of course, Mussolini not being in charge of the country anymore, the trains did not run on time, and as there was no one else waiting in the station, including, at that point, the people in the ticket booth, this girl was not too happy with me, and was dubious that any train was going to Verona that day at all, though the posted schedule in the station indicated that one indeed ought to be arriving imminently.

I wait in the empty station. Needless to say the train did come, and we did make it to Verona on time, though barely--the other passengers were already seated on our bus when we pulled in. The ride between the two cities through the farmland of the Po Valley was ungodly beautiful and evocative of myriad things about Europe and Western Civilization that I had presumed to be over, and that I still presume will be over soon enough, but boy did it take its time getting there. This was not one of those high-speed trains zipping across the Euro-countryside that so much is made of. No, this was decidedly retro.

Behind the Chiesa di Santa Maria di Piedigratta in Naples (near the Mergellina subway station, it looks like) there is a Roman grotto in which one of the monuments is traditionally called Virgil's tomb. It is not, actually, but it has been referred to as such since the 1100s, and it is still maintained with a certain amount of reverence, so I am going to count it. Besides, I don't have a lot of sites in Naples on my list, and I want all the excuses to make it there someday that I can get.