Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (24 page)

The metaphor here is less precise, no doubt deliberately so. We might imagine the destruction of an idol, icon or statue; except that ‘broken bits’ sounds more like pottery – at which point we might recall that Darrow had earlier compared his pursuit of the elusive Anna to the figures on a Grecian urn, vainly chasing one another throughout eternity. Now the urn is in shards. Of course, when people talk of ‘life’ they rarely do anything but generalise from their own experience; so we could take Darrow’s assertion that ‘Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits’ less as authorial conclusion than as special pleading by the man who dropped the pot.

House
. If Anna wants her life with Darrow to be like a house with all the windows lit, we cannot help noticing that she has one of these already. And what a house Givré sounds, lovingly described by Wharton. At best it seems to give off a moral force, with ‘the high decorum of its calm lines and soberly massed surfaces’. But the house is more a mutable character in the novel than a monolithic point of reference; ‘decorum’ is very close to ‘tact’, and the same building may, in other moods, come to represent ‘the very symbol of narrowness and monotony’. A house implies a habitat; this novel is about being emotionally ‘unhoused’ – having your roof blown off.

Racinian
. This word does not appear in
The Reef
, but has been associated with it from early on. Writing to thank the author for her novel in December 1912, Henry James offered this praise: ‘The beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility.’ The same adjective had been applied a little earlier by Charles du Bos, the French translator of
The House of Mirth
, who told Wharton after reading the proofs of
The Reef
that ‘No novel came closer to the quality of a tragedy of Racine.’ It is true that there are a small number of characters; that the action (after Book I) takes place in an enclosed area; that a complex and intensifying
emotional predicament unfolds, binding in ever more tightly the four main characters, so that none can move, or lie, or tell the truth, without a dire chain of consequences – as Anna tells Darrow, ‘We’re all bound together in this coil.’ But we should allow for the tendency of French translators to Gallicise as they applaud; and also that of friendly novelists to approve those aspects of a work which seem most to resemble aspects of their own. The critical line on
The Reef
, started by James’s approval, is that it is Wharton’s most Jamesian – specifically late-Jamesian – novel. Though there are undeniable echoes of the Master, it’s worth remembering that Wharton consistently disliked late James, finding an airlessness in the very sense of enclosure here applauded.

And by Racinian, should we understand also ‘tragic’? Probably not: when the coil finally comes unbound, Sophy is returned to the social and financial position she was in before the novel began, Anna and Darrow get a tarnished version of what they had wanted, while Owen runs away (having at least been spared a perilous marriage). There has, it is true, been a tremendous smash, and the lives of these four will never be the same again: Anna’s unenviable final choice is between the long misery of giving Darrow up and the equally long misery of living with someone whose words you cannot trust. However, compared to, say, that other great and near-contemporary novel of coil-bondage, Ford Madox Ford’s
The Good Soldier
(1915), there is a very low body count.

It is probably the case that the tragic no longer exists in modern life, or therefore in the modern novel. We may take the starting point of the latter as
Madame Bovary
, a work whose influence on Wharton is apparent; also a novel which defines the diminished version of the tragic nowadays allowable – a ruthless chain of events made more ruthless by the rules and forms of society, and also by the expectations, misconceptions and self-destructiveness of the principal character. Ford’s novel does not begin ‘This is the most tragic story I have ever heard’
but ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’ One reason for this is that the gods have been replaced. When Darrow takes Sophy to see a French version of
Oedipus
, the characters make her feel ‘as if the gods were there all the while, just behind them, pulling the strings’. In the absence of these controlling gods, we have the vain illusion that it is
we
, with our famous free will, who pull the strings.
The Reef
is a novel which doubts this: as Darrow remarks to Sophy at the start of it all, ‘What rubbish we talk about intentions!’ And so we do: they are an attempt to impose purpose and rationality upon the flapping laundry of our emotional lives. Darrow invokes the world of Greek tragedy again at the end of the novel, during his key exchange with Anna (Chapter 32). He asks: ‘Is it anything to be proud of, to know so little of the strings that pull us?’ This is the measure of our aloneness, our lack of tragic stature: we are still puppets twitched by strings, but the puppeteer’s box up there is no longer occupied.

Luck
. In tragedy, this used to be called destiny. In our reduced state, we find a lesser word for it. In
The Reef
, the term is attached to Sophy Viner (this is appropriate, for the world of ‘tact’ she is about to explode with her presence does not acknowledge luck much: to do so would be a denial of merit, birth, rank, money).

Though Sophy is unschooled in the classics, when she watches
Oedipus
her role as luck detector enables her to touch the play’s pulse, to feel ‘the ineluctable fatality of the tale, the dread sway in it of the same mysterious “luck” which pulled the threads of her own small destiny’. Of course, by the time
Sophy lightly introduces this concept, the ‘luck’ that is to settle her fate and that of others has already happened. At first it appears mainly the fault of the postal services (always handily at a novelist’s beck and call): if only Darrow hadn’t had Anna’s telegram flung into his compartment just as the boat-train was pulling out … If only Sophy had not left London so precipitately, before any letter from the Farlows detailing their changed plans could reach her … These are certainly factors: but when, hundreds of pages on, after the smash, Darrow is seeking to explain how his trivial, central liaison with Sophy began, he identifies a different hazardous aspect: ‘Perhaps but for the rain it might never have happened.’ He is referring specifically to the day in Paris when the rain makes them return to their hotel earlier than usual. But this in turn alerts the reader (though not Darrow) to earlier rain at Dover when he and Sophy encountered one another. He is scrambling around in a gale when ‘a descending umbrella caught him in the collar-bone’ – an impact, a first proleptic smash, which destroys Sophy’s umbrella, and leads her to shelter beneath his. All the fault of the rain? In the old Greek days, the gods sent thunderbolts to determine our fates; now meteorologists guide our luck.

In the final chapter, Anna broods on whether she can free herself from the inevitability of life with George Darrow; and she becomes ‘vaguely conscious that the inky escape from it must come from some external chance’. Anna, being posh, does not acknowledge luck except by a posher name; but she is correct in deducing that ‘luck’ somehow resides in Sophy Viner. If she can find Sophy and tell her she is renouncing Darrow, there will be no turning back on the decision and she will be free. Anna goes to Paris, but Sophy has already left for India, taking her luck – and Anna’s ‘external chance’ – with her.

Reef
. The word occurs monolithically as the title and we wait for its appearance in the text. We wait in vain. Towards
the end of Book II marine metaphors seem to put us on watch: Darrow is taking a ‘dark dive’ into his difficulties; he feels the ‘sweep of secret tides’; meanwhile, Sophy has been ‘adrift’, while Anna is ‘floating’ on a ‘tide of felicity’. These aquatic hints lead nowhere for the moment. Later, Darrow feels the light of Anna’s eyes moving before him ‘as the sunset moves before a ship at sea’; later, again, Anna has a ‘flood of pent-up anguish’ – and the metaphor seems to have drained away into a formulaic phrase. But just as we might have given up expectations, Wharton craftily produces the held-back image – though not the word itself. Darrow, in his climactic scene with Anna, tries to explain how the smash came about: ‘It seemed such a slight thing – all on the surface – and I’ve gone aground in it because it
was
on the surface.’ Again, we might find the image masculine special pleading (Sophy as a largely inert lump of coral whose only function is to tear the hull out of smart pleasure boats). We might wonder if the metaphor had wider application, and is intended to denote the reef of Anna’s sensual unresponsiveness, on which Darrow also goes aground. And we might wonder if Wharton, having left the image so late, might either have made more of it, or left it out altogether, letting the title do the work by itself.
The Reef
is unusual in Whartonian composition in that the proofs were delayed between America and France (the ‘luck’ of the postal services again), and she did not have time for her normal last-minute reassessment. What might she have altered?

Silence
. The main action of
The Reef
consists of conversation and of ruminations preparatory to conversation (in 1921 Wharton wrote to Mary Cadwalader Jones, ‘How odd that no one should know that there is a play in “The Reef” all ready to be pulled out!’). But as the novel proceeds, it becomes clear that what is not said – and the way in which it is not said – may be as telling as any words. ‘Silence may be as variously shaded as speech,’ Wharton comments. For instance,
Owen’s suspicions about Sophy and Darrow’s relationship are aroused precisely by the fact that when he spots them alone together they are always sunk in silence; had their relationship been as it was presumed, they would have been chatting in some normal social way. Equally, Darrow’s ‘not speaking’, or withholding of an opinion, about Sophy stirs unintended doubts about her capability as a governess. And at the very start of things, when Darrow and Sophy are in Paris together, the moment in their acquaintanceship comes when ‘the natural [sic] substitute for speech had been a kiss’. Sex as a way of not speaking – and also of ‘not having to listen’, as Darrow cruelly remembers. As at the start, so at the end, with Anna looking back over the disastrous chain of events which followed Darrow’s first arrival at Givré:

This is a profound realisation to fall upon lucid and sophisticated people, who use words to define the world, and also to manipulate it, to keep it at bay. ‘The truth had come to light by the force of its irresistible pressure’: perhaps there is an alternative metaphorical title to the novel lurking in here. There is also the recognition that in our own modern version of tragedy – less grand, yet more bleak – we are beyond nobility, beyond the string-pulling gods, beyond Racine, beyond luck, beyond help, beyond even words.

1. The Novelist in the Countryside

T
HEY SAT INFORMALLY
around a stripped-pine kitchen table. Behind him was a matching dresser, opposite him a picture window through which he could see a cluster of damp sheep, then rising pastureland which disappeared into low cloud. It had rained every one of the five days they’d been here. He wasn’t sure this kind of communal living, which had sounded so jolly and democratic in the brochure, was for him. Of course, it was the students who were expected to cook, wash up and keep the place tidy; but since half of them were older than he was, it would have been stuffy not to muck in. So he stacked plates, made toast, and had even promised to cook them a big lamb stew on the final night. After supper they would put on their waterproofs and slog a mile down the track to a pub. Each evening he seemed to need a little more drink than before to keep him stable.

He liked his students, with their earnestness and optimism, and asked them to call him by his Christian name. All did so, except for Bill, a rather truculent ex-serviceman who preferred to address him as ‘Chief’. Some of them, it was true, enjoyed literature more than they understood it, and imagined that fiction was merely autobiography with a tweak.

‘I’m just saying, I don’t understand why she did it.’

‘Well, people often don’t understand why they do things.’

‘But we, as readers, should know, even if the character herself doesn’t.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘I agree. I mean, we don’t believe any more in the, what did you call it, Chief?’

‘Omniscient narrator, Bill.’

‘That’s the ticket.’

‘All I’m saying is, there’s a difference between not believing in an omniscient narrator and not understanding what’s going on in a character’s head.’

‘I said people often don’t understand why they do things.’

‘But look, Vicky, you’re writing about a woman with two small children and what sounds like a perfectly OK husband who suddenly ups and kills herself.’