A Critic At Large --
A Rooting Interest --
By Jonathan Franzen
c2013,
The New Yorker 2/13/12
The
older I get, the more I'm convinced that a fiction writer's oeuvre is a mirror
of the writer's character. It may well be a defect of my own character that my
literary tastes are so deeply intertwined with my responses, as a person, to
the person of the author—that I persist in disliking the posturing young
Steinbeck who wrote "Tortilla Flat" while loving the later Steinbeck
who fought back personal and career entropy and produced “East of Eden,"
and that I draw what amounts to a moral distinction between the two—but I
suspect that sympathy, or its absence, is involved in almost every reader's
literary judgments. Without sympathy, whether for the writer or for the
fictional characters, a work of fiction has a very hard time mattering.
So
what to make of Edith Wharton, on her hundred-and-fiftieth birthday? There arc
many good reasons to wish Wharton's work read, or read afresh, at this late
literary date. You may be dismayed by the ongoing under-representation of women
in the American canon, or by the academy's valorization of overt formal
experimentation at the expense of more naturalistic fiction. You may lament
that Wharton's work is still commonly assumed to be as dated as the hats she
wore, or that several generations of high-school graduates know her chiefly
through her frosty minor novel "Ethan Frome." You may feel that,
alongside the more familiar genealogies of American fiction (Henry James and
the modernists, Mark Twain and the vernacularists, Herman Melville and the
post-moderns), there is a less noticed line connecting William Dean Howells to
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis and thence to Jay McInerney and Jane
Smiley, and that Wharton is the vital link in it. You may want, as I do, to
re-celebrate "The House of Mirth," call much merited attention to
"The Custom of the Country," and reevaluate "The Age of
Innocence"—her three great like-titled novels. But to consider Wharton and
her work is to confront the problem of sympathy.
No
major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did.
Although she was seldom entirely free of money worries, she always lived as if
she were: pouring her inherited income into houses in rich-person precincts,
indulging her passion for gardens and interior decoration, touring Europe
endlessly in hired yachts or chauffeured cars, hobnobbing with the powerful and
the famous, despising inferior hotels. To be rich like Wharton may be what all
of us secretly or not so secretly want, but privilege like hers isn't easy to
like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage. And she wasn't privileged like
Tolstoy, with his social-reform schemes and his idealization of peasants. She
was deeply conservative, opposed to socialism, unions, and woman suffrage,
intellectually attracted to the relentless world view of Darwinism, hostile to
the rawness and noise and vulgarity of America (by 1914, she had settled
permanently in France, and she visited the United States only once after that,
for twelve days), and unwilling to support her friend Teddy Roosevelt when his
politics became more populist. She was the kind of lady who fired off a
high-toned letter of complaint to the owner of a shop where a clerk had refused
to lend her an umbrella. Her biographers, including the estimable R. W. B.
Lewis, supply this signal image of the artist at work: writing in bed after
breakfast and tossing the completed pages on the floor, to be sorted and typed
up by her secretary.
Edith
Newbold Jones did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't
pretty. The man she would have most liked to many, her friend Walter Berry, a
noted connoisseur of female beauty, wasn't the marrying type. After two failed
youthful courtships, she settled for an affable dud of modest means, Teddy
Wharton. That their ensuing twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely
sexless was perhaps less a function of her looks than of her sexual ignorance,
the blame for which she laid squarely on her mother. As far as anyone knows,
Wharton died having had only one other sexual relationship, an affair with an evasive
bisexual journalist and serial two-timer, Morton Fullerton. She by then was in
her late forties, and the beginner-like idealism and blatancy of her
ardor—detailed in a secret diary and in letters preserved by Fullerton— are at
once poignant and somewhat embarrassing, as they seem later to have been to
Wharton herself.
Her
father, a benign but recessive figure, died when she was twenty, after
suffering from the financial stresses of providing a luxurious life style for
his wife. Wharton, all her life, had only bad things to say about her mother;
she also became estranged from both her brothers. She had relatively few
friendships with women and none with female writers of her calibre— more
strikes against her, in terms of sympathy—but she forged close and lasting
friendships with an extraordinary number of successful men, including Henry
James, Bernard Berenson, and Andre Gide. Many were gay or otherwise confirmed
in bachelorhood. In the instances where her male friends were married, Wharton
seems mostly to have treated the wives with indifference or outright
jealousy. The fine quip of one of
Wharton's contemporary reviewers—that she wrote like a masculine Henry James—
could also be applied to her social pursuits: she wanted to be with the men and
to talk about the things men talked about. The half-affectionate,
half-terrified nicknames that James and his circle gave her—the Eagle, the
Angel of Devastation—are of a piece with their reports on her. She wasn't
charming or easy to be with, but she was immensely energetic, always curious,
always interesting, always formidable. She was a doer, an explorer, a bestower,
a thinker. When, in her forties, she finally battled free of the deadness of
her marriage and became a best-selling author, Teddy responded by spiraling
into mental illness and embezzling a good part of her inheritance. She was
distraught about this, as anyone would have been, but not so distraught that
she didn't force Teddy to pay up; three years later, with firm resolve, she
divorced him. Lacking good looks and the feminine charms that might have
accompanied them, she eventually became, in every sense but one, the man of her
house.
An
odd thing about beauty, however, is that its absence tends not to arouse our
sympathy as much as other forms of privation do. To the contrary, Edith Wharton
might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages,
she'd looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy; and nobody was more
conscious of this capacity of beauty to override our resentment of privilege
than Wharton herself. At the center of each of her three finest novels is a
female character of exceptional beauty, chosen deliberately to complicate the
problem of sympathy.
The
reader of “The House of Mirth” (1905) is introduced to its heroine, Lily Bart,
through the gaze of an admiring man, Lawrence Selden, who runs into her by
chance at Grand Central station. Selden immediately wonders what Lily is doing
there, and he reflects that "it was characteristic of her that she always
roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching
intentions." To Selden, it's inconceivable that a woman in possession of
as much beauty as Lily would not be forever calculating how to use it. And
Selden is right about this— Lily, strapped financially, is constantly forced to
draw upon her one sure resource—but he is no less wrong. Lily's predicament is
that she is never quite able to square those far-reaching intentions with her
momentary desires and her tentative moral sensibilities.
On the
surface, there would seem to be no reason for a reader to sympathize with Lily.
The social height that she's bent on securing is one that she herself
acknowledges is dull and sterile, she's profoundly self-involved and incapable
of true charity, she pridefully contrasts other women's looks with her own, she
has no intellectual life to speak of, she's put off from pursuing her one
kindred spirit (Selden) by the modesty of his income, and she's in no danger of
ever starving. She is, basically, the worst sort of party girl, and Wharton, in
much the same way that she didn't even try to be soft or charming in her
personal life, eschews the standard novelistic tricks for warming or softening
Lily's image— the book is devoid of pet-the-dog moments. So why is it so hard
to stop reading Lily's story?
One
big reason is that she doesn't have "enough" money. The particulars
of her shortfall may not be sympathetic—she needs to dress well and gamble at
bridge tables in order to catch a man who can enable her to dress well and
gamble for the rest of her life—but one of the mysterious strengths of the
novel as an art form, from Balzac forward, is how readily readers connect with
the financial anxieties of fictional characters. When Lily, by taking a long
romantic walk with Selden, is ruining her chance to many the extremely wealthy
but comically boring and prudish Percy Gryce, with whom she would have had the
bleakest of relationships, you may find yourself wanting to shout at her,
"You idiot! Don't do it! Get back to the house and seal the deal with
Gryce!" Money, in novels, is such a potent reality principle that the need
for it can override even our wish for a character to live happily ever after,
and Wharton, throughout the book, applies the principle with characteristic
relentless-ness, tightening the financial screws on Lily as if the author were
in league with nature at its most unforgiving.
What
finally undoes Lily, though, isn't the unforgiving world but her own bad
decisions, her failures to foresee the seemingly obvious social consequences of
her actions. Her propensity for error is a second engine of sympathy. We all
know how it feels to be making a mistake, and the deliciousness of watching
other people make one—particularly the mistake of marrying the wrong person—is
a core appeal of narratives from "Oedipus" to
"Middlemarch." Wharton compounds the deliciousness in "The House
of Mirth" by creating an eminently marriageable heroine whose mistake is
to be too afraid of making the mistake of marrying wrong. Again and again, at
the crucial moment, Lily blows up her opportunities to trade her beauty for
financial security, or at least for a chance at happiness.
I
don't know of another novel more preoccupied with female beauty than "The
House of Mirth." That Wharton, who was fluent in German, chose to saddle
her lily-like heroine with a beard—in German, Bart—points toward the
gender inversions that the author engaged in to make her difficult life livable
and her private life story writable, as well as toward other forms of
inversion, such as giving Lily the looks that she didn't have and denying her
the money that she did have. The novel can be read as a sustained effort by
Wharton to imagine beauty from the inside and achieve sympathy for it, or,
conversely, as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl
she couldn't be. Beauty in novels usually cuts two ways. On the one hand, we're
aware of how often it deforms the moral character of people who possess it; on
the other hand, it represents a kind of natural capital, like a tree's perfect
fruit, that we're instinctively averse to seeing wasted. Ticking along through
the novel, as inexorable as the decline in Lily's funds, is the clock on her
youthful good looks. The clock starts running on page 1—"under her dark
hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she
was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable
dancing"—and it continues to heighten the urgency of Lily's plight,
inviting us to share in it emotionally. But only at the book's very end, when
Lily finds herself holding another woman's baby and experiencing a host of
unfamiliar emotions, does a more powerful sort of urgency crash into view. The
financial potential of her looks is revealed to have been an artificial value,
in contrast to their authentic value in the natural scheme of human
reproduction. What has been simply a series of private misfortunes for Lily
suddenly becomes something larger: the tragedy of a New York City social world
whose priorities are so divorced from nature that they kill the emblematically
attractive female who ought, by natural right, to thrive. The reader is driven
to search for an explanation of die tragedy in Lily's appallingly deforming
social upbringing— the kind of upbringing that Wharton herself felt deformed
by—and to pity her for it, as, per Aristotle, a tragic protagonist must be
pitied.
But
sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader's direct
identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my
admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral
courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov), or, most
interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don't
admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction—and the quality
that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art form—is that we
experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn't like in real life,
Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley maybe a sociopath, the
Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a
disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with
murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no
doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of
imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case,
though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary
dislike of "bad" people into sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a
novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to
get away with murder) and I, as a reader, become helpless not to make that
desire my own.
In
Wharton’s "The Custom of the Country" (1913), as in "The House
of Mirth," an unfit member of old New York society fails to survive. But
here the harshly Darwinian "nature" is the new, industrialized,
nakedly capitalist America, and the victim is certainly not the protagonist,
Undine Spragg. The novel reads like a perfect, deliberate inversion of
"The House of Mirth." It takes the same ingredients of sympathy and
applies them to a heroine beside whom Lily Bart is an angel of grace and
sensitivity and lovability. Undine Spragg is the spoiled, ignorant, shallow,
amoral, and staggeringly selfish product of the economically booming American
hinterland; she's named for a hair curler mass-produced by her grandfather.
Wharton was working on the novel in precisely the years when she was preparing
to forsake the United States permanently, and its grotesquely negative cartoon
of the country—the lecherously red face of the millionaire Van Degen, the
fatuous pretensions of the celebrity portrait painter Popple, the culpably
feeble traditions of old New York, the vacuous pleasure-seeking of the
arrivistes, the corrupt connivance of business and politics—reads like a
selective marshalling of evidence to support her case. The country that can
produce and celebrate a creature like Undine Spragg is not, Wharton seems to be
arguing to herself, a country she can live in.
But Undine's story is one you absolutely have to
read. “The Custom of the Country" is the earliest novel to portray an
America I recognize as fully modern, the first fictional rendering of a culture
to which the Kardashians, Twitter, and Fox News would come as no surprise.
Lewis's "Babbitt" and Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" not only follow
directly from it but seem, if anything, somewhat less modern. The nexus of
money and media and celebrity, which dominates our world today, appears in the
novel's opening chapter in the form of the press clippings that Mrs. Heeny
(Undine's masseuse and early social adviser) carries with her everywhere, and
the clippings become a leitmotif, a recurring measure of Undine's progress.
Ignorant though Undine is, she's smart enough to know that she has exactly what
reporters need, and she proves remarkably adept at manipulating the press.
Along the way, she anticipates two other hallmarks of modern American society,
the obliteration of all social distinctions by money and the hedonic treadmill
of materialism. In Undine's world, everything can be bought, and none of it
will ever be enough.
The
novel's most strikingly modern element, however, is divorce. "The Custom
of the Country" is by no means the earliest novel in which marriages are
dissolved, but it's the first novel in the Western canon to put serial divorce
at its center, and in so doing it sounds die death knell of the "marriage
plot" that had invigorated countless narratives in centuries past. The
once high stakes of choosing a spouse are dramatically lowered when every
mistake can be—and is, by Undine—undone by divorce. The costs now are mostly
financial. And Wharton, who could see the inevitability of her own divorce when
she was working on the book, again does nothing by halves. The story is
saturated with divorce; it's what the book is relentlessly about. Whereas The
House of Mirth," a story of irrevocable mistakes, ends with the guttering
of the feeble flame of Lily's life, “The Custom of the Country," which is
a story of mistakes without lasting consequences for their maker, ends with the
cartoonishly pure spectacle of Undine's marrying die soon-to-be richest man in
America and still not being satisfied. You don't have to admire Undine Spragg
to admire an author with the courage and the love of form to go for broke like
this. Wharton embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov
embraces pedophilia in "Lolita."
Undine
is an extreme case of the unlikable person rendered perplexingly sympathetic by
her desires. She's almost comically indestructible, like Wile E. Coyote. The
interest I take in her ascent, her Coyote-like survival of the seeming wipeout
blows that her divorces deliver to her social standing, may be akin to the
fascination of watching one spider in ajar prevail over other spiders, but I
still can't read the book without aligning myself with her struggle. This, in
turn, has the odd effect of rendering secondary characters who might be
sympathetic (her second and third husbands, her father) less so. I feel annoyed
and frustrated with these men for thwarting a progress I've become engrossed
in; their scruples, though admirable in theory, contrast unfavorably with
Undine's desires. In this regard, Undine may remind you of Wharton herself,
whose success and vitality finally crushed her husband, and whose two great
romantic love objects (Berry and Fullerton) it's hard not to think less of,
when you read her biography, for not being equal to her love. Undine's sole
motivating appetite, which is to have a certain kind of flashy good time, may
bear little resemblance to Wharton's sophisticated hunger for art and foreign
travel and serious talk, but Undine is nevertheless very much like her creator
in being a personally isolated woman doing her best to use what she was given
to make her way in the world.
Here,
indeed, is a portal to a deeper kind of sympathy for Wharton. Despite all her
privileges, despite her strenuous socializing, she remained an isolate and a
misfit, which is to say, a born writer. The middle-aged woman tossing her
morning pages onto the floor was the same person who, beginning at the age of
four, was prone to falling into trancelike states in which she would "make
up" stories. She was raised to care about clothes and looks and
maintaining proprieties in an elite social milieu, and she spent her twenties
and thirties dutifully playing the role for which she'd been bred, but she
never stopped being the girl who made up stories. And that girl, perverse,
yearning, trapped, is inside all her best novels, straining against the
conventions of her privileged world. As if aware of what an unlikable figure
she herself cut, she placed unlikable women in the foreground of these novels
and then deployed the storyteller's most potent weapon, the contagiousness of
fictional desire, to create sympathy for them.
In her most generously realized novel, The Age
of Innocence" (1920), written well after her affair with Fullerton, and after
the Great War had made the decades preceding it seem suddenly historical,
Wharton told her own story more directly than she ever had before, by spitting
herself into a male and a female character, dividing beard from lily. The
novel's protagonist, Newland Archer, embodies Wharton's origins: he's an
isolated misfit who is nevertheless inextricably enmeshed in the social
conventions of old New York and inescapably adapted, despite his yearning not
t» be, to the comforts and norms of a steady, conservative world. The object of
Newland's grand passion, Ellen Olenska, is the person Wharton became: the
self-sufficient exile, the survivor of a disastrous and disillusioning
marriage, the New York-born European free spirit. They attract one another
intensely because they belong together the way two sides of a unitary
personality belong together. And so, for once, the problem of sympathy for
Wharton's characters isn't a problem at all. There's no making of mistakes
here, and money is a minor issue. Ellen is simply pretty and in trouble, and
Newland simply wants her but, being married, can't have her.
The
beauty of "The Age of Innocence" is that it takes the long view. By
setting the main action in the eighteen-seventies, Wharton is able, at the end,
to bring Newland and Ellen into a radically altered world in which their
earlier plight can be seen as the product of a particular time and place. The
novel becomes the story not only of what they couldn't have—of what they were
denied by the velvet-gloved conspiring of their old New York families—but of
what they have been able to have. Its great heartbreaking late line, which
takes the measure of Newland's unfulfilled desire, is delivered not by Newland
or Ellen but by the woman whom Newland has stayed married to. Wharton, in the
novel, certainly shines what she once called "the full light of my
critical attention" on the social conventions that deformed her own youth,
but she also celebrates them. She renders them so dearly and completely that
they emerge, in historical hindsight, as what they really are: a social
arrangement with advantages as well as disadvantages. In so doing, she denies
the modern reader the easy comfort of condemning an antiquated arrangement.
What you get instead, at the novel's end, is sympathy.
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