Edith Wharton and the Pulitzer Prize

In my haste to publish my last article, I forgot that I had wanted to mention some things about the Pulitzer Prize, which was awarded in 1920 to The Age of Innocence. As with other artistic awards, the Pulitzer Prize in the non-journalism categories has almost always been played down by the better writers themselves, and, taking the cue from them, in our days this damping of enthusiasm has spread to much of the reading public. In prestige it is my sense that it has been surpassed by the National Book Award, which looks over time to have a better track record, at least for picking things that later critics and writers have favored; still, the advantage is slight, and it is not something that serious people allow themselves to get overexcited about. The Pulitzer still carried some middlebrow cache in the 60s however--my encyclopedia list duly notes when one of its selections was thus honored, and they did choose 13 fiction winners and 9 drama winners from the 1920-1955 era for inclusion. In 1920 the fiction prize was being given for just the 3rd time, but evidently it was a big enough deal that many of the big writers of the time were aware of it and considered it worth noticing--Pulitzer himself of course had been a titan in the business of the printed word, which meant nothing to purer literary spirits like Ezra Pound, but any kind of prize bearing his name would likely have piqued a certain amount of interest in anyone who wrote at least in part with an eye towards getting or maintaining an upper middle class income.

The point of all this being that according to the chronology of Edith Wharton's life given in the Library of America, the Pulitzer committee actually chose Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (which also appears on this reading list later on--1920 was an exciting year for books in America) as the winner, but the trustees of Columbia University, to which Pulitzer had left the money for and administration of the prizes (and which still administers them, by the way), rejected that selection as too controversial and awarded the prize to Wharton, who, it is said, was appalled by this cowardice and began a correspondence with Lewis which continued for many years afterwards. Wharton was evidently not so appalled that she refused the prize, as Lewis himself would do in 1925 after winning for Arrowsmith (he appears to be the only one who has done so however, for fiction anyway; I had thought it was a more regular occurrence. On the other hand there have been three posthumous winners). Perhaps she was not aware she could do so.

All this information is really nothing to the point, but I had wanted to mention it. It tells us nothing about the meaning of the book. I usually know nothing about the meanings of books, though in this particular instance I think I have slightly more of a grasp on it than usual, because its main themes resemble impulses and feelings that most people living in any kind of conventionally structured society will have. But I would have trouble disconnecting what I think is going on in the book from my personal feelings and experience, and I don't want to go into that on a blog at this time.

Edith Wharton--The Age of Innocence (1920)

Despite the constant high level of renown and critical acclaim that has attended this book in both the high and middling levels of literary society almost since the day it came out, and even though I purchased my own edition of it (Modern Library, ed 1950, green cloth cover with black title box) in 1986, I had never gotten around to reading it until now. While I had never dreaded its coming up eventually, I had never gazed upon it with any very lustful anticipation either. My expectation was that it was going to be like weaker Henry James, perhaps slightly less dense, but similarly dry, with the action driven by arch insinuations and subtle cuts that require a great deal of sophistication on the part of the reader to feel the full force of. Also I had read Ethan Frome a few years back for my "A" reading list, and while that book had enough, with its repressive New England setting, to engage my interest and not put me off of Edith Wharton altogether, it was grim enough that I was not running to the library even in my imagination to get at the rest of her ouevre. But while The Age of Innocence is a little like Henry James, and somewhat less like the repressed rural New Englanders of Ethan Frome, I had no trouble staying awake for my nightly fifteen to twenty pages as I have been having with some other recent books on the list, and I even found much of it to be entertaining, though I was not wholly sold on the intensity of the supposed passion between the Countess Olenska and the decidedly room temperature-blooded Archer, especially on her end. That said, my nightly readings of this book provided me the satisfactions and consolations of nostalgia, and the charms of the better parts of the old literature and the old world, bad as we all know that these things for the most part were, that I was looking for when I began to follow this "B" list.         

My favorite thing about this book are the descriptions of 'Old New York'. Not so much the society of the best ancient Anglo-Dutch families, though even that was more tolerable than I thought it was going to be, but the geography and topographical references to streets, districts, parks, brownstones, etc, with which we are all familiar, in the particular ways in which they are described here. Even given the extreme wealth of the milieu here, I think the depiction of the scenes and rooms here as I imagine them in reading is more romanticized and more modern than probably even Edith Wharton could have visualized. The majority of the book is set in 1875, with at the end a brief denoument thirty years forward, when the city was considerably more crowded, ethnically diverse, technological, etc, than it had been in the earlier year, and the old elite were having to adapt to the new circumstances, though adapt in this case seems to mean acknowledging their existence, as Archer and his circle continue to hold political and cultural influence, such as serving on the board of the Metropolitan Museum, in 1905, though the forms in which they carried out these offices were somewhat altered. Anyway, as I read the book I imagine the city as an old Hollywood set would have depicted 1870s-1890s New York (or London or Paris of the same period), floodlit, clean, and less incidentally occupied by people or refuse of any kind than it possibly could have been. I think of those houses and streets and squares that have proven, on the whole, so elusive to me to spend any time in at all, and how wide open and easy it always seems to penetrate and live one's whole life in in books. And the same goes of course for London and Paris too.  

The Challenge

A very good challenge this time:

1. In Cold Blood--Truman Capote.................................................954
2. A Hero of Our Time--Mikhail Lermontov...................................91
3. Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood
    He Left Behind--Gavin Edwards..................................................68
4. Quidditch Through the Ages--Kennilworthy Whisp....................40
5. Stanford Wong Fails Big Time--Lisa Yee....................................24
6. Under These Restless Skies--Lissa Bryan....................................10
7. Iola Leroy: or, Shadows Uplifted--Frances Ellen Watkins...........6
8. The Voice of the People--Ellen Glasgow.......................................2
9. No Laughing Matter--Angus Wilson.............................................1

Those titles getting the goose egg include The Problem of Cultural Transformation and Individual Integrity in Edith Wharton's Novels by Ihsan Durdu, The War by Christabel Pinkhurst, The Ancient Law by Ellen Glasgow, Female Warriors Volume 1 by Ellen Clayton, & Henrietta Temple by Benjamin Disraeli.

When that quidditch book turned up on the list I figured it was impossible it would not win, so I was pleasantly surprised there. I've always been interested in reading Lermontov, several of Ellen Glasgow's novels (though neither of the two listed here) are actually on this B-list, and I am sure I would like the Angus Wilson book, which "chronicles the end of the bourgeois way of life as seen through the lives of the six M-- children and their dysfunctional middle class family". Wilson was born in Bexhill-on Sea in Sussex in 1913, went to Winchester College and Merton College Oxford, worked as a librarian at the British Museum and as a code-breaker during World War II, wrote satirical novels with a liberal humanistic outlook, and seems to be quite well known in England. I can't believe only one reader has reviewed his book.

However, as the Capote book was the big winner, and as it is famous, and I had never read it, and as Capote, though I have never read anything by him, seems like he would be a kind of writer that I would like, I thought I would give it a look. I was apprehensive about the fact that it was about a real murder and trial and execution, and not only this, but that I thought it was nearly 1,000 pages on the subject. I evidently had gotten it confused with Norman Mailer's book on a similar theme (real-life murderers) which actually is over 1,000 pages. In Cold Blood however is only 343 pages, and my library had it in the hardcover Modern Library edition, with its handsome size and typeface, and I was sold on giving it a go. So far I am on around page 58 and I like it. Of course the graphic stuff has not happened yet. It's been mostly background, the prosperous farmer and his family in 1950s Kansas, with a little bit on the criminals. But the style and tone remind me of the books I liked when I was an adolescent. So the challenge does work sometimes.

Our findings this time produced a pretty good movie challenge as well. Truman Capote swept both events in this competition, pulling off the impressive feat of defeating the movie version of the host book in that contest:

1. Capote...............................612
2. The Age of Innocence........239
3. Baby Face.............................0

I ended up putting all three of these movies in my queue. Even though no one on Amazon has deigned to review Baby Face, it's quite famous among those in the know, a pre-code Barbara Stanwyck picture from 1933. True film connoisseurs love Barbara Stanwyck--I have seen several claim that she is the greatest movie actress of all time--and they also love the (extremely short-lived) pre-code era, which particular designation seems to be restricted to certain daring early talkies from about 1930-33. I have not ventured much into this period, nor into the work of Barbara Stanwyck, other than Double Indemnity, which is a great movie, though I have never have the sense that Barbara Stanwyck's fans consider it an especially great Barbara Stanwyck movie, perhaps because it is fairly well known among the mediocre general public. But anyway, I am going to, hopefully, begin to become initiated in this knowledge and whatever value it possesses.

New York (State)

1. New York..................24
2. Westchester...............12

3. Bronx..........................7
4. Suffolk........................6
5. Queens........................5

6. Rockland.....................4

7. Erie..............................3
    Otsego.........................3
9. Chemung....................2
    Columbia....................2
    Essex...........................2
    Kings...........................2
    Onondoga...................2
14. Albany.......................1
    Allegany......................1
    Dutchess......................1

    Greene.........................1
    Madison.......................1
    Montgomery...……….1
    Nassau.........................1
    Rensselaer...................1
    Richmond....................1
    Saratoga.......................1
    Ulster...........................1
    Warren.........................1
    Washington..................1

Paris

1. 20th Arrondissement..11.5
2. 1st...……………........11

3. 5th.............................7
4. 4th.............................5

5. 6th.............................4
    8th.............................4
    14th...........................4
    18th...........................4
    Unknown..................4
10. 2nd..........................3
    9th.............................3

    16th...........................3
13. 7th...........................2
14. 3rd...........................1
    10th...........................1
    15th...........................1
    17th...........................1
18. 11th.........................0.5

 

Ile-de-France

1. Paris (Ile)......................70

2. Val d'Oise..........................4
    Yvelines.............................4

4. Essonne...........................3
5. Seine et Marne................2

6. Hauts-de-Seine................1

7. Neuilly-Sur-Seine...….....1