Forty-One False Starts (16 page)

If the spooky Bertha—whose first malign act is to queer Lily's chances for marriage to the boring, priggish but extremely rich Percy Gryce—has the one-dimensionality of evil characters in fairy stories, dreams, and modernist satires, the tragic Lily is similarly “unreal” in her preternatural beauty and passivity. She is the fairy-tale heroine patiently waiting to be rescued, but help never comes.
The House of Mirth
is Wharton's bitterly ironic retelling of the Cinderella story, in which the fairy godmother is a dour and stingy woman named Mrs. Peniston, the aunt who grudgingly doles out Lily's clothes allowance to her and ultimately betrays her; the prince is a plump, “shoppy” Jew named Simon Rosedale, to whom Lily is finally reduced but who will marry her only on the condition that she do something dishonorable; and Lily herself is a sad little party girl whose vanity, craving for luxury, and pathological fear of what she calls “dinginess” make her vulnerable to the machinations of Bertha.

Cynthia Wolff, in her extraordinary analysis of
Ethan Frome
, sees Ethan as an embodiment of the death instinct, and this reading is germane to Lily Bart as well. Lily's death by an overdose of sleeping potion is a logical extension of her life, of the Sleeping Beauty existence from which she is never roused. Throughout the book, Wharton has planted—like small hidden road signs to the nirvana that is Lily's destination—descriptions of the luxurious, soft, dimly lit guest bedrooms through which Lily passes on her journey. The first of this series of wombs is contrasted to the harsh, rough world outside:

As she entered her bedroom, with its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish's cramped flat, with its cheap conveniences and hideous wall-papers. No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings.

Gerty Farish represents the alternative to Lily's futile, parasitic existence in fashionable society—she is a plain young woman who lives in a small flat on very little money and works with the poor—but she actually is no alternative at all, for according to the novel's strict archetypal code, the plain and the beautiful simply belong to different universes. When Gerty is held up to Lily as an exemplar of the independence that Lily has claimed to be impossible for money-less young women like herself, Lily cruelly points out, “But I said marriageable.”

“Being a very normal person, she preferred men to women, and often terrified the latter with a cold stare,” Mrs. Gordon Bell, a friend of Wharton's, recalls in Percy Lubbock's waspish memoir,
Portrait of Edith Wharton
, adding, “Many women who only knew her slightly have said to me, ‘She looks at me as if I were a worm.' ” With Undine Spragg, the antiheroine of
The Custom of the Country
(1913), Wharton takes her cold dislike of women to a height of venomousness previously unknown in American letters, and probably never surpassed. Undine's face is lovely, but her soul is as dingy as Gerty Farish's flat. Ralph Marvell, one of her unfortunate husbands, reflects on “the bareness of the small half-lit place in which his wife's spirit fluttered.”

Undine is one of the Invaders, as Wharton calls the people with new money who are taking over New York from the gentle, enervated old aristocracy. Her simple, indulgent father, Abner Spragg, comes to New York from a town called Apex with Mrs. Spragg and Undine and sets up residence at the Stentorian Hotel, on the West Side, to launch Undine in society. Underneath Undine's small-town naïveté and her vulgarisms and gaucheness lies a vast destructive energy that propels her toward her improbable social goals. In turn, she marries Marvell, a member of the Old New York aristocracy; Raymond de Chelles, a French aristocrat; and, finally, Elmer Moffat, a raucous fellow-Invader from Undine's hometown who has become so rich and powerful that he has taken to collecting art.

As the nepenthean guest bedrooms of
The House of Mirth
set that novel's tone of deadly languor, so does a series of airless, hideously ugly, and decreasingly luxurious American hotels to which the elder Spraggs are reduced by Undine's voracious demands for money provide
The Custom of the Country
with its most mordant trope of alienation. We meet the family in the “sodden splendour” of the Stentorian breakfast room, a

sumptuous stuffy room, where coffee-fumes hung perpetually under the emblazoned ceiling and the spongy carpet might have absorbed a year's crumbs without a sweeping. About them sat other pallid families, richly dressed, and silently eating their way through a bill-of-fare which seemed to have ransacked the globe for gastronomic incompatibilities; and in the middle of the room a knot of equally pallid waiters, engaged in languid conversation, turned their backs by common consent on the persons they were supposed to serve.

At the end, the Spraggs are in the Malibran, “a tall narrow structure resembling a grain-elevator divided into cells, where linoleum and lincrusta simulated the stucco and marble of the Stentorian, and fagged business men and their families consumed the watery stews dispensed by ‘coloured help' in the grey twilight of a basement dining-room.”

Undine is Becky Sharp stripped of all charm, spirit, and warmth, the adventuress pared down to her pathology, but a pathology that is invested with a kind of magical malignancy. Undine's name, as Mrs. Spragg earnestly informs Ralph during his courtship of her daughter, comes from “a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born . . . It's from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping.” But Undine is also the name of a legendary water sprite, and by presenting her tacky protagonist as a creature of the deeps—a cold, bloodless being, a Lorelei luring men to their deaths—Wharton seeks to make it credible that any man of substance would look at her twice. The attempt is not wholly successful.

Like George Eliot's Rosamund Vincy, Undine inspires in her creator a kind of loathing that makes the reader nervous even as it powerfully works on him; like Eliot's account of Lydgate's sufferings at the hands of Rosamund in
Middlemarch
, Wharton's account of Marvell's sufferings at the hands of Undine has less the evenhandedness of omniscient authorship than it has the partisanship of love—love for the castrated male. Unlike Eliot, however, Wharton offers no alternative; no wonderful woman—no Dorothea Brooke—appears in
The Custom of the Country
or in any other Wharton work. Ellen Olenska, the heroine of
The Age of Innocence
(1920), is supposed to be a wonderful woman, but in fact she is a fantasy figure—an idea, a spirit as disembodied as Bertha Dorset. She seems to be drawn from Anna Karenina, but she has none of Anna's elating and heartrending actuality. Throughout the novel Ellen remains frozen into a kind of simulacrum of the vision of the charming and radiant Anna that Vronsky first fell in love with; the character never develops beyond that vision. Ellen's fan of eagle feathers, her monkey-fur muff, the artistic atmosphere of her house, her exotic flowers and unconventional clothes are the stuff of which she is made; she is almost pure sign.

The true “heroine” of the book is Newland Archer (several critics have pointed out the name's connection to James's Isabel Archer), who, like Ralph Marvell in
The Custom of the Country
and Lawrence Selden in
The House of Mirth
, lives a dilettantish half-life of longing (“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life,” Archer reflects at the novel's powerful end) and is the culminating figure in Wharton's pantheon of unmanned men. (In Newland's case, the castrating female comes in the guise of the conventional “nice” young woman of good society who traps him into loveless marriage.)

George Darrow, the suave hero of
The Reef
(1912), deviates from the formula in being a seducer and manipulator of women, rather than their victim; but Wharton—as if herself under his spell—extends to him the same sympathy she extends to Marvell, Selden, and Newland.
The Reef
has been called Wharton's most Jamesian novel, but it is merely her least cleverly plotted one. James would never have committed the solecism of narration that Wharton commits in
The Reef
—telling the story of a secret relationship forward instead of backward in time, thus bringing into glaring relief the incredible coincidence by which the characters of her eccentric fable of sexual guilt are brought under one roof. James would have begun the novel with the characters securely in position.

The second place in
A Backward Glance
where Wharton reveals more about her art than she appears to realize is a passage criticizing the late novels of Henry James, whose close friend she became in middle age. (“His friendship has been the pride and honour of my life,” she wrote with moving truth to a friend during James's last illness, in 1915.)

She says:

His latest novels, for all their profound moral beauty, seemed to me more and more lacking in atmosphere, more and more severed from that thick nourishing human air in which we all live and move. The characters in “The Wings of the Dove” and “The Golden Bowl” seem isolated in a Crookes tube for our inspection: his stage was cleared like that of the Thêâtre Français in the good old days when no chair or table was introduced that was not relevant to the action (a good rule for the stage, but an unnecessary embarrassment to fiction). Preoccupied by this, I one day said to him: “What was your idea in suspending the four principal characters in ‘The Golden Bowl' in the void? What sort of life did they lead when they were not watching each other, and fencing with each other? Why have you stripped them of all the human fringes we necessarily trail after us through life?”

With uncharacteristic obtuseness, Wharton goes on to describe James's profound puzzlement at her words—for the void that Wharton describes is, of course, not James's, but her own, and it is precisely where she has pruned the fringes of naturalism most ruthlessly that she achieves her most powerful and individual effects. Her strongest work (
Ethan Frome
,
The House of Mirth
,
The Custom of the Country
) has a stylization and abstraction, a quality of “madeness” that propels it out of the sphere of nineteenth-century realism and nudges it toward the self-reflexive literary experimentation of the twentieth century. In the primal horror of
Ethan Frome
, in the brittle pathos of
The House of Mirth
, and in the satiric surrealism of
The Custom of the Country
, Wharton most commandingly comes into her own as a literary artist. If she is an artist from whom we shrink a little and to whom we finally deny the highest rank, she remains—as Q. D. Leavis very fairly put it in her 1938 essay on Wharton in
Scrutiny
—“a remarkable novelist if not a large-sized one, and while there are few great novelists there are not even so many remarkable ones that we can afford to let her be overlooked.”

*
The Library of America single-volume edition of
The House of Mirth
,
The Reef
,
The Custom of the Country
, and
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton

SALINGER'S CIGARETTES

2001

When J. D. Salinger's “Hapworth 16, 1924”—a very long and very strange story in the form of a letter from camp written by Seymour Glass when he was seven—appeared in
The New Yorker
in June 1965, it was greeted with unhappy, even embarrassed silence. It seemed to confirm the growing critical consensus that Salinger was going to hell in a handbasket. By the late fifties, when the stories “Franny” and “Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” were coming out in the magazine, Salinger was no longer the universally beloved author of
The Catcher in the Rye
; he was now the seriously annoying creator of the Glass family.

When “Franny” and “Zooey” appeared in book form in 1961, a flood of pent-up resentment was released. The critical reception—by, among others, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, and John Updike—was more like a public birching than an ordinary occasion of failure to please. “Zooey” had already been pronounced “an interminable, an appallingly bad story,” by Maxwell Geismar
*
and “a piece of shapeless self-indulgence” by George Steiner.
†
Now Alfred Kazin, in an essay sardonically entitled “J. D. Salinger: ‘Everybody's Favorite,' ” set forth the terms on which Salinger would be relegated to the margins of literature for doting on the “horribly precocious” Glasses. “I am sorry to have to use the word ‘cute' in respect to Salinger,” Kazin wrote, “but there is absolutely no other word that for me so accurately typifies the self-conscious charm and prankishness of his own writing and his extraordinary cherishing of his favorite Glass characters.”
*
McCarthy peevishly wrote: “Again the theme is the good people against the stupid phonies, and the good is still all in the family, like a family-owned ‘closed' corporation . . . Outside are the phonies, vainly signaling to be let in.” And: “Why did [Seymour] kill himself? Because he had married a phony, whom he worshiped for her ‘simplicity, her terrible honesty'? . . . Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?”
†

Didion dismissed
Franny and Zooey
as “finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger's tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as
Positive Thinking
for the upper middle classes, as
Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue
for Sarah Lawrence girls.”
‡
Even kindly John Updike's sadism was aroused. He mocked Salinger for his rendering of a character who is “just one of the remote millions coarse and foolish enough to be born outside the Glass family,” and charged Salinger with portraying the Glasses “not to particularize imaginary people but to instill in the reader a mood of blind worship, tinged with envy.” “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. ‘Zooey' is just too long.”
§