We Came Along with a Hammer

It’s been lonely, this wending our way through the wilds of the Pulitzer cannon, but things have been looking up a bit lately we’ve been joined on our pilgrimage by fellow bloggers, such as the estimable JW Rosenzweig of Following Pulitzer. (He had some kind words for us, too.) It’s been great fun to read along as someone else suffers throughenjoys some of these rare early winners.

But it was a recent post of his on a better known Pulitzer book, the classic Age of Innocence, that prompted me to post today. Rosenzweig writes that in Edith Wharton’s paper were notes on alternate endings for the Age of Innocence, with two possibilities mentioned — 1) Newland and May break it off, and he marries the Countess, but they grow apart and eventually seperate as she longs for the freedoms of Europe and he’s too stuck in New York society to ever live abroad, and 2) Newland marries May but eventually decides he can’t bear to be without the Countess, runs of to Florida with her for a desperate fling, but he comes to regret his rash action and the Countess comes to realize how boring he is, and again they go their seperate ways.

These alternate ending struck me as really interesting — playing them out in my mind gave me a better sense of how Wharton imagined these characters. Reading the Age that we have, one is left feeling that Newland’s great flaw is cowardice, that he won’t risk his and his family’s reputation even for his one shot at love. But in Wharton’s alternate versions, Newland risks, but ends up unhappy anyway, because love or no love, he’s still the same Newland, product of the same airless Society, still overridden with their concerns, still holding their values — in a word, boring, even as a giddy adulterer, a lover on the run.

And that makes sense to me. It suggests that Wharton considered his failure to bust out of the trap a symptom of his essential flaw, and not its essence, and in a way it makes the ending she went with the happiest possible, for it allows both Newland and the Countess the illusion that but for outside constraints they might have found in each other perfect comity. It reminds me of the character of Stephen in Years of Grace (of which more soon). He is happier than Newland, because he’s less sensitive, less perceptive, less full of yearning. But other than that they’re the same guy, content to spend summer vacation at the same resort they went to with their parents when they were kids, entering the same damn boat race every August. Because their essential question about any activity is “would stopping this tradition disappoint others?” not “do I enjoy doing this?” Contrast that attitude with that of the Countess, whose very entrance into the novel is a declaration that she cares far more for her own happiness than society’s censure, and that she’s willing to risk poverty and ridicule and scandal to obtain art, conversation, and most of all freedom. Newland and the Countess love the same things—and each other—but they value them quite differently, and I think Wharton’s probably right that that difference would always have been an obstacle between them, no matter what form their relationship took if they’d continued it.

Penny said, below:

We know in Age that Newland and Ellen are both sexually experienced: Ellen through marriage, adultery, and whatever else was happening to her across the pond, and Newland through at least one affair with a married woman. But I still think that their entire affair together was conducted without much pleasure. All of the events unfold with their own momentum and that momentum doesn’t seem particularly driven by passion, but by escape from conformity.

See, now you’ve got me thinking about the mechanics of repression, which is what the whole book’s about — I just finished The Master by Colm Toibin, his imagining of Henry James (who was friends with EW in real life.) That book is all about repression too, but somehow you feel in Toibin that his Henry James is repressing himself, that when a young handsome sculptor comes to visit, HJ is consciously limiting his own thoughts about the sculptor, preventing himself from going there, from articulating his desire, even in thought.

After reading “Beatrice Palmato,” I’m not quite sure whether I ought to take Newland Archer the same way, whether what seems to me as a modern to be an absence is merely something unspoken — as almost everything is; every exchange between Newland and the Countess is about nine-tenths inference to one-tenth verbiage.

In many ways that’s what the whole book’s about; everybody infers everything, no one says anything. Newland’s jealousy of Julius Beaufort is all based in inference, not knowledge. That’s how reputations get ruined, in the book; you allow something to appear improper and everybody assumes that it is. The very first crisis in the book demonstrates the mechanics of inference. The Countess’ appearance at the opera prompts Newland’s decision to announce his engagement that same night. The two events have nothing to do with one another, superficially, but the latter is meant to send a message: Society is meant to infer that the link with the scandalous Countess will not cause Newland to regret or hesitate to ally himself with her family, and that the weight of the Archer clan will therefore be brought in defense of the alliance, so don’t no one think about snubbing her or May.

Which is a hell of a lot to suss out from a mere announcement. And as the book progress, and so many small gestures acquire more and more emotional weight, Wharton seems to realize this herself, and we get extraordinary moments like the one at the end of Chapter 26, when Newland has just told May he’s planning to go down to DC for a few days. He tells her it’s on business, but really it’s because the Countess is living there and he wants to warn her about a possible scandal that might involve her:

“The change will do you good,” she said simply, when he had finished; “and you must be sure to go and see Ellen,” she added, looking him straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome family duty.
It was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant: “Of course you understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen, and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort to get her to return to her husband. I also know that, for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement that Ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind of criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably gave you, this evening, the hint that has made you so irritable.… Hints have indeed not been wanting; but since you appear unwilling to take them from others, I offer you this one myself, in the only form in which well-bred people of our kind can communicate unpleasant things to each other: by letting you understand that I know you mean to see Ellen when you are in Washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for that purpose; and that, since you are sure to see her, I wish you to do so with my full and explicit approval—and to take the opportunity of letting her know what the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely to lead to.”
Her hand was still on the key of the lamp when the last word of this mute message reached him. She turned the wick down, lifted off the globe, and breathed on the sulky flame.
“They smell less if one blows them out,” she explained, with her bright housekeeping air. On the threshold she turned and paused for his kiss.

This is rather delicious— all through the book we have (as Newland does) been inclined to see May as rather dim, and here she reveals herself to be a good deal sharp enough to protect her interests— but it’s also bloody ridiculous. No reader could possibly infer from the dialogue all that Wharton lays out in her exposition of the subtext. And yet that moment is extraordinary; far more of the book is like the engagement scene than like this moment, with hints given and relationships sketched out but vast reams of subtextual meaning left as an exercise for the reader. It’s a rare thing for Wharton to cut in like this and provide direct color commentary, though such exposition does become more frequent and explicit as the book picks up the pace and heads for the climax. (Like the moment Penny points to in her post.)

So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not sure how to take Newland and the Countess’ suppressed passion. Do they each know perfectly well they’d like to rip each other’s clothes off and jump bones, and Wharton expect us to infer same from her subtle hints? Or is it supposed to be that Newland and the Countess dare not admit to themselves that they’d like a little sumptin’ sumptin’ and so their love chats feel dry and disembodied, a flirtation of minds alone? Because I do think that their feelings for each other are obviously far more than physical: Each of them recognizes in the other a kindred spirit, someone who cares for art and thought, who sees clearly the limitations of the little world in which they live and longs to be free of them. Thus the passage towards the end of the novel which talks about the Countess living in Newland’s mind as a kind of idol, to whom he bring the offerings of his true self, the person to whom he imagines talking to about all the things he really cares about and feels.

I suppose it all gets down to what Wharton really means by innocence. In some ways, the book made more sense to me if you subtracted about a decade from the ages of all the characters…

Speaking of Wharton’s sense of sexual danger, how does softcore incest grab you?

The whole fur in a hot room motif appears again in “Beatrice Palmatto”, a pornographic fragment found among Wharton’s papers after her death: “The room was warm, and softly lit by one or two pink-shaded lamps. A little fire sparkled on the hearth, and a lustrous black bearskin run, on which a few purple velvet cushions had been flung, was spread out before it.” The cushions aren’t the only thing that ends up flung on the bearskin rug, shall we say.

(The entire 3-page excerpt may be found here in pdf form. Not something you’d want to be found reading at work, unless you work for Cinemax After Dark.)

I heard about Beatrice when I was googling about at bit after finishing the Age of Innocence — I often like to read reviews and criticism of a work just after I’ve done with it; it’s nice to bounce someone else’s ideas off your own — and fortunately Hermione Lee just wrote a new doorstop on Wharton last year, which was much reviewed.

When I heard about it, I immediately sought it out, because I was fascinated to see what the same woman who wrote something as uptight as the Age would make of an attempt to write some explicit erotica. Turns out she can manage to be quite straightforward if she likes. Which was interesting, and a good reminder of something to often forgotten: I think we moderns tend to feel that the people of previous centuries were as ignorant about sex as its utter absence in their published works would suggest, and that ain’t the case.

Obviously we acknowledge that they knew something of the matter: People continued to exist, after all. And because there was a great deal more repression in those days, there was definitely a lot more ignorance , especially for young people, than is the case today, when the most sheltered of sixth-graders is a google and click away from Dan Savage. But I still think there’s a sort general feeling when we read 19th century novels — particularly novels like the Age of Innocence — is that all these meaning glances across the room and opera fans brushing against thighs in apparently unstudied  manner and  glimpses of collarbone which give rise to a hard lump in the throat point to longing for the unknown, the undreamed of, the un-experienced.  When really it’s all solely unspoken, and when Newland eyes the Countess in the scene below

It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were called “simple dinner dresses”: a close-fitting armour of whale-boned silk, slightly open in the neck, with lace ruffles filling in the crack, and tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist to show an Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band. But Madame Olenska, heedless of tradition, was attired in a long robe of red velvet bordered about the chin and down the front with glossy black fur. Archer remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by the new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the Salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with her chin nestling in fur. There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing.

….he’s fully capable of imagining scene as perverse and pleasing as the one Wharton draws in Beatrice Palmatto.

This is a novel that makes life among the swells in Gilded Age New York seem about as appealing to the modern reader as being locked up in your room for the afternoon with nothing to read but the dictionary does to a nine-year old.

Newland Archer is our man. He’s a lawyer at conservative firm for the sake of having something to fill his days, and spends his nights as an adornment to the very select, very closed, very small Society that is old-money (old-ish, anyway) New York in the 1870s. As the novel opens he’s about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a nice young girl of “his set.”

A wrinkle in his smooth little life plan arrives in the form of the Countess Olenska, a first cousin of May’s who’s on the run from a husband back in Europe who is believed to be a mildly nasty piece of work — drinks, gambles, openly cheats on his wife — but then on the other hand it’s rumored that the Countess had some—male—help in getting away herself. Such rumors are enough to send a little frisson of scandal up the backs of the very proper society matrons who rule Newland’s little world—so much so that it looks as if they might cut the Countess dead, thus spattering May with a little disgrace herself. And so Newland is forced to get involved in the Countess’s affairs, advising her about how to navigate through the jewel-spangled piranha tank where he’s swum his whole life. But getting to know the bohemian Countess forces him to confront, and chafe against, the strictures of his familiar Society.

When he realizes he’s fallen in love with the Countess, he is forced to choose whether to follow his heart, break May’s and make himself a pariah, or obey the dictates of duty and custom, and lose his only chance at love. In fact, he’s forced to make that choice several times…

Three needs drive the actions of both Newland and the Countess:

— To be a decent and honorable by their own personal codes, that is, not to betray or to hurt the people who depend upon them and care for them;
—- To follow the customs of the larger society, in order not to make themselves, and more importantly, their families, an object of ridicule and censure;
—-To follow their hearts and their heads, to pursue their own happiness and peace.

The cleverness of Wharton is that she succeeds in the book in braiding all three strands of desire together, twisting the novel plot point by plot point so that just as you think one need will compel the characters to a given action, another takes precedence, and binds them tightly to another course.