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.