Angel of Desolation

...The republication of Ethan Frome is certainly justified, but the space devoted to large, dissevered chunks of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence (both readily available in toto in cheap reprints) might better have been turned over to less available products of Edith Wharton's career—such as the remarkable nouvelle, "Summer," or some of her travel writing, perhaps a little of her criticism, a scattering of significant letters, perhaps some of her journalism on her observations as a visitor to the front in World War I, and a few more poems and good short stories...

...the large double-bed...

...And as Auchincloss so truly says of the suspense story, "A Bottle of Perrier," its "final sentence is like a screaming chord from Strauss' Salome...

...The Old Maid," a nouvelle of her mature years which was successfully dramatized during her lifetime, would have made a fine Bette Davis-Olivia de Havilland costume vehicle of the early '40s, something harsh, tearful and unreal...

...Had she invited the private risks of a George Sand (who fascinated both her and James), or taken the experimental freedoms even of James's own Princess Casamassima, she might have found in art the form of the power of her own womanhood, which was indeed very great...

...She is referring to the court of feminized dilletante bachelors of her own class that she began early to accumulate round her and to the salons that she worked so hard to establish, as Mrs...

...And as she did so, as if in mockery of the simulacrum of significant life that she had set her mind and will to creating, "Teddy," her bluff, simple, sportsman husband had begun his slow praecoxic downward spiral into dementia...

...Such blundering improprieties of style seem to be one with her compulsively close observation of Zeena Frome's lingual manipulations of her false teeth, her panting cataloguings of the vast feasts of which "old New York" was capable, her unsparing and discomforting evocations of the clumsy obtrusions of sex upon the hothouse- nurtured virgins of that same world, as in her description in "The Old Maid" of the young bride's "startled, puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring...

...Bell's book is remarkable both as scholarship and as a kind of scholar's work of art, too...

...And yet in these years she had half-consciously projected her deep frustration in Lily Bart of The House of Mirth, who rejects out of pride the love of the only character in the book with strengths and passions like her own, the warm and conscious but vulgarly assertive Jew, Simon Rosedale, who values her not for what she represents or can bring him as a wife, but for what she is...

...Bunner Sisters" and "False Dawn," the former a prolix and shuffling naturalist-like tale of the tragic disillusion of spinsterly romance, the latter an inflated anecdote of cultural misprision and the paradoxes of esthetic entrepreneurship, fail, and thus bore, because they are inherently short stories and ought to have been respectively compacted, perhaps, in the manners of Flaubert and de Maupassant...

...She missed her rightful place, one feels, among that small sisterhood of modern women writers, from the Brontes and George Eliot to Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, and very lately Doris Lessing, whose art constitutes a meeting and challenging of experience—"the world"—by the revolutionary energy of their sexual identities...

...Edith Wharton was proud, a snob, alas, about the rights and properties of the class into which she was born, and these included the rights of "sensibility" and the property of the arts, both of them traditionally assigned by the society (or Society) she knew to women and feminized men...

...But only in Ethan Frome, and one or two other works like it, where her material is uncorrupted by the cultural vanity of the class she was born into and professed so confidently to see beyond, is she able to turn a mere note into a vision, a vision into major art...

...James understood her, it seems, as no one, including her charmingly sentimental memorialist and worshiper Percy Lubbuck, has understood her before...

...And a society that gives such a book to its high school students to read (if it still does) cannot be wholly false, lost and dead...

...Bell understands her better than anybody since James, and prints for the first time large swatches from these letters...

...Bell's book makes clear, at "The Mount" in Lenox and in Paris...

...In her late volume of reminiscence, A Backward Glance, she remembers her early "longing to break away from the world of fashion and be with my own spiritual kin...

...It is not, after all, material ambition or outer "circumstance" that destroyed Lily, but an abject commitment to an empty ideal of "fineness" vulgarly promulgated by the very class whose general vulgarity she holds in contempt, and which is best represented in the limp of her reluctant soul-mate, Lawrence Selden...

...But from the shadow relationship of one to the other, from beneath the high spirits and rodomontade of his evocations, comes another dimension of the portrait, a dimension touched with the pathos, despair, even the horror of what James called "her general eagle-pounce or eagle-flights . . . her devouring or desolating, ravaging, burning or destroying energy...

...But it is so much better than that—more like Hardy or Lawrence, yet so cleanly free of their proprietary abstractions of fate or phallicism...

...the terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirtsleeves . . . ." There is a kind of blunt directness of response in this woman's writing, a thick-fingered, almost tactile immediacy, a sensuousness, even a sensuality...

...She uses up everything and every one either by the extremity of strain or the extremity of neglect —by having too much to do with them (when not for them to do), or by being able to do nothing whatever, and passes on to scenes which blanch at her approach...

...She is deft, subtle, expressive, yet self-effacing, as she quite literally "composes," out of material which has by and large not been used before, a most suggestive and interesting dual portrait...

...Mrs...

...A tragically felt tumescence of unfulfilled passion, the terribleness of its waste and thwarting, is her distinctive note whenever she is writing seriously...

...Edith Wharton's penchant for the sweeping view and the leisurely "chronicle" structure (which Millicent Bell, in Edith Wharton and Henry James, aptly identifies as one of the major characteristics distinguishing her art from that of her supposed master, Henry James) seems to have led her to do some slack work in the nouvelle form...

...and at times a dark and powerful if laced-up passion that continually defies and disrupts the slender and conventional resources of her "art...

...For one thing, she had an uncomplicated and uncritical taste for the melodramatic, the sensational, the lurid...

...The ceaseless comings and goings, the hungry consuming of people and places, the insatiable appetite for some ever-undefined possibility of life and experience...

...In its context it shows powerfully and truly what life for men and women is about, what the ultimate natural choices are...

...Angel of Devastation," James called her, or "Angel of Desolation," his humorously exaggerated designations for the huge and restless energy of her mature life...

...And yet, looking backward from the vantage point of age and experience, Edith Wharton can write, "From a childhood and youth of complete intellectual isolation—so complete that it accustomed me never to be lonely except in company— I passed, in my early 30s, into an atmosphere of the rarest understanding...

...His late letters, "old-heaped-up pyramidal jokes, huge cairns of hoarded nonsense," as Edith Wharton herself called them, create her as a character, understand her as she never was able to understand herself...

...And there is too often in her work a heaviness of effect where lightness seems to have been what was wanted—a coarseness, almost, of tone that imposes itself where implication rather than insistence, wit rather than archness, airy irony rather than sarcasm, were the effects sought: "A tow-headed boy came out of a swinging door suggestive of conviviality...

...His letters accumulate into a brilliant high-comedy portrait—of her, of course, and also of him...

...Auchincloss's Reader, however, is perhaps the least satisfactory of the Scribner Readers so far published...

...Reviewed by RICHARD FOSTER Author, "The New Romantics" Louis Auchincloss' Edith Wharton Reader confirms and sharpens a rather lazy judgment I have harbored for a long time, namely, that Edith Wharton was not a very remarkable artist...

...No question—she has written a fascinating and important book...

...and only rarely was she empowered to elevate such material from the level of an O. Henry or Fitz-James O'Brien to that of a George Eliot or Henry James...

...Clearly, Mrs...

...It is as if," writes Auchincloss of Ethan Frome, "Tennessee Williams came to Cranford...

...There is no scene in literature to match that sledding scene, with its tragically oblique sexual ecstasy twice consummated, and with variations, before the gates of life-in-death clang to...

...In his remarkably acute sense of what she was as a woman, James hints at what she might have been, freed from the trivial cultural vanity and the constricting life-style of her class, as a writer...

...A tendency to illustrate Grimm's law in the interchange of his consonants betrayed the clock-maker's nationality...

...Lily, who dies a suicide, is thus self-slain in a way that Edith Wharton only half perceived but nevertheless found herself compelled to write about again and again...