An Hour on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

I am devoting exactly one hour tonight to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, because I want to spend the evening reading more Edith Wharton.

There are few things I would rather do than read Edith Wharton.  I planned to  reread one of her books for her 150th birthday, but didn’t get around to it till last Saturday when I bought a used copy of a Library of America edition of four of her novels.

Waving “Good-bye” to my husband, who was embarking on a cross-country ski expedition and wondering if I didn’t want to go along (I sacrificed myself briefly to wifely folly on cross-country skis for a couple of hours in 1989, only to learn that I am not a winter sportswoman), I smiled bravely at my sacrifice of staying home alone and curled up in bed with The House of Mirth.

Some hours later I was agonizing over the heroine, Lily Bart, the kind of woman who is your friend, but who falls in society, and there is little you can do to help her.

"The House of Mirth," with Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz

In fact she reminds me a little of Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls.  Both go down the druggy path eventually, because they are anxious and can’t sleep.  (And, yes, this comparison is probably as outrageous as Jonathan Franzen’s saying in The New Yorker that Edith Wharton would be more sympathetic if she looked like Grace Kelly, but Jennifer in Jacquelyn Susann’s novel actually is like Grace Kelly, a star who at one point is married to a prince.)

Sharon Tate as Jennifer in "Valley of the Dolls"

The House of Mirth is very painful to read.  Lily, a beautiful, intelligent, tactful heroine, doesn’t have money, but she lives with a wealthy, respected aunt in a comfortable house. And Lily is so attractive that she is constantly invited into the wealthiest, most exclusive society.  She cannot, however, pay her way on her small income, and goes into debt for clothes and losing at bridge.

She needs to marry, and she needs to marry rich, she thinks.  But she is very self-destructive, not a marrier.  Just as she is on the edge of getting engaged to a rich man, she blows it.  She doesn’t really want to marry Percy, an inarticulate city bumpkin.  So she takes a long walk with Lawrence Selden, whom she very much likes, a brilliant lawyer with bibliophilic and artistic tastes, and when Percy learns she has spent the afternoon with Selden, he drops her.

This kind of thing happens again and again to Lily.  Lawrence Selden has plenty of money, but not enough for Lily’s dreams.

And when she speculates with her money, on the advice of her best friend Judy’s husband, Guy Trenor, it takes time for her (and us) to realize that she is $10,000 in debt.  He expects her to become his mistress.

And thus, though she remains chaste, she falls down, down, down several classes because of scandal, and because she alienates one of the most powerful women in her set, Mrs. Bertha Dorset, who tactically ruins Lily’s reputation to save her own.

Often I write very good notes, but I got so carried away with reading The House of Mirth that my notes look like this:

“116, Miss Farish,” “245, new set.”

Hmm.  Glorious!  “116 Miss Farish” simply tells me that here Wharton contrasts Gerty Farish, Lily’s poor, unfashionable, plain, philanthropic friend– indeed, almost her only friend, as we learn later–with Lily in every way.  Lily is shallow compared to Gerty, but Gerty is unsophisticated. Gerty inspires Lily with her mission to “provide comfortable lodgings, with a reading room and other modest distractions, where young women in the class employed in downtown offices, might find a home when out of work, or in need of rest…”  And Lily makes a difference to some of these women, encouraged by Gerty.

Ironically, Lily needs these services later, but doesn’t get them.

 Gerty Farish would make a good subject for a novel.

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For E, an Old Friend

I’m not a poet, but this is for my friend E, a poet who died recently.

And looking over this an hour or so later, it is a pretty terrible poem, but what the hell?

“For E”

Two women writing
on opposite sides of the country.

We were on the news once.
No idea what channel
Occupying a building
with radicals who wanted free day care on demand.
We were their teenage babysitters.
We were there.
We saw the footage.
We talked on the phone for an hour afterwards.
“Can you believe it?”
“KCRG?”

It went on our college applications.

Not that we cared about college applications.
Later you dropped out
After only two years.

You went west and were a business manager for a small paper.
I went east and was a Latin teacher.
You wrote in your unique voice about the arts.
I wrote in my unique voice about the arts.

It was the way we dealt with
depression

So odd that we pursued parallel careers.

Never reached our potential, though.

Later I searched for your poetry
But didn’t find it.
Maybe there’s a database at the university library.

Didn’t you date somebody in The Band?
Or was it a Rolling Stone?
Or was it just the guy at the blues concert in Chicago
When I dated the other guy at the blues concert in Chicago?

The word I liked best in your obituary was “joyous.”

You died
survived by your mother and a cat.
I picture you surrounded by friends.

And I wish the obituary I found
Was just a fake obituary.

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For the Elegant R

There are good things about the internet.

When I moved to a beautiful small city where I knew no one, I thought:  I’ll just keep my computer on 24 hours a day and hang out with friends.

That was the good thing.

There are bad things about the internet.

The bad thing:  You get information you don’t want about friends.

Such as they’re dead.

Can you imagine googling three friends and discovering they are dead?

That happened to me today.  One was only 48.

The elegant R was older, almost old, but it was still a shock.

The Elegant R

My dear friend R and I met over a death. It was a sort of  Big Chill scene, only less intimate.  R invited all of us over to her house.  We tried to be friendly, but only R and I became friends.   And we were mutually fascinated, I by her ditzy veneer (she was a brainy Holly Golitely) and she by my slightly more bohemian life.

Basically we were  housewives with part-time jobs.  We drank coffee together, often coasted downtown in her big car (her dogs often went with us), and stopped at consignment shops.

I googled her today and discovered she died a few years ago.

She cannot be dead.

I decided this while I walked for two hours.

Then I came home and looked at old pictures of her.

I used to be a big crier, but now not so much.  I sobbed. Walking is good, because you can’t sob.   I had no idea that R was old enough to die.

I’ve thought fondly of her perching on a stool at her kitchen counter, reading Alice Hoffman (her favorite author), clandestinely smoking, preparing fabulous meals that she would never eat (she lived on pita chips and beer).

And I’ve remembered how she’d park right on the sidewalk if there were no parking places.

And how she took me to a thrift shop and we bought a whole new wardrobe for $1 (it was a bag for $1 day) when I got a new job.

And the excellent Christmas dinner she invited me to.

And all the dogs we rescued, because in those days I jogged and was always followed by homeless dogs.

And we weren’t totally happy, and were honest about it, though we had fun.  She talked about death sometimes.

Luv ya, R!

I wish you were here.

So, this one is going out to you, babe, cuz you’ve been there:  R.E.M.’s “Walk Unafraid.”

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Winter, LOA Finds, & Angela Huth’s South of the Lights

I’ve enjoyed the global warming this winter, but finally there’s snow outside.

It gets the winter sports aficionados out of the house.

I imagine women all over the state thanking God that there’s a temporary TV- basketball-free zone in the living room while their men are cross-country skiing for a few hours.

Their equipment has been out on the porch since November.  The x-country skis, the wax, the iron, the snowshoes, the boots, and other Wintry Things.  All of it crashes if you approach the bookcase on that side of the porch.    Just prop the skis against the bookcase.  Nobody notices.  Nothing breaks.

The weather report is checked many times a day, both on TV and online.  There’s snow in Omaha.  There’s snow in Minneapolis.   But there’s no snow here.

When will they be able to cross-country ski?

Finally there’s snow.

“Why don’t you come along?  You’ll enjoy it.”

Who, me?  I was the girl who pretended to have her period for an entire year of gym.  I was so unathletic the gym teacher didn’t even question it.

Years ago I cross-country skied a couple of times and crashed into trees, fell down where it was flat, and was cold because I wasn’t exerting myself much.  I mean you can’t exert yourself when you’re recumbent.

Then special skis were bought for me–it was decided that mine were too long–and I had to try again.

I couldn’t ski, and couldn’t stop, either. I tried crossing my skis together, or whatever you’re supposed to do to stop, and just fell down.

“Oh, you’re doing so much better.”

Finally I had to say no.  And since they were sure I would like it if I just kept skiing…  I had to say no again.

And I hope and pray that my skis were given away to Good Will, because I heard something today from an optimist about how maybe I’d like to x-c ski again.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA TREASURES. We were at a library branch looking for a copy of a movie that was checked out at all the other branches.

Three volumes of Library of America books were on sale at the ongoing library sale  for $1 each.

We came home with one volume of Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of Edith Wharton, and another of Richard Wright.

The book plates inside say:  “This book is one of the sixty-volume set of The Library of America presented as a gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundations and Friends of the ___ Public Library.”

It’s too bad that they broke up the set.  But we’re very happy to have the LOA books.

ANGELA HUTH’S NOVELS.  I have become hooked on Angela Huth’s novels.

They’re hard to classify, but fall somewhere in the women’s novel territory between Margaret Drabble and Maeve Binchy.  According to Webbiography, Huth “describes her self as an ‘old-fashioned’ writer who details the lives of ordinary people in ‘small corners of England.'”

Yes, these are traditional novels about love and loss, but they have a bite.

Take South of the Lights, set in a Midland village, the story of six unhappy people whose lives and loves have fallen askew. Evans, the postmaster, dreams of living on a housing estate with his voluptuous fiancée, Brenda.  Brenda, a former urban dweller who works on a chicken farm, wants to raise free-range chickens with Evans but has trouble committing, because he’s just not exciting.  And she thrives in the homey apartment of her roommate, Lark, a tiny, imaginative woman who secretly sings, washes Brenda’s hair but never washes her own (she seems afraid of men), loves the color red, and provides a nicer home environment for Brenda than Brenda will probably provide for Evans.

Then there are Evans’ parents, Henry and Rosie.  Henry is retired and has developed a fantasy about a woman he calls “The Leopard,” a blonde in a leopard coat who appears in the village bar one day.  He goes to the bar day after day waiting to see her, and his drinking ruins his life.  Rosie can’t imagine what’s wrong:  she thinks it’s her rough hands which he can’t stand.  And she fantasizes about seducing Henry again.

Augusta Browne is an upscale version of Lark, a home-loving, artistic woman who can’t face selling the beautiful old house where she and her husband loved one another.  She has to sell it, because they can’t afford it, but stays on till the New Year.   And like Lark, she provides a temporary “home” for Evans and Brenda; when Evans asks if they can use one of her rooms, she lets them have an attic.

The threads of the fast-paced narrative don’t go where you think they will.  And it’s because they don’t that you keep reading.

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Is Edith Wharton Pretty?

Is Edith Wharton pretty?

It’s weird that The New Yorker waited two weeks after Edith Wharton’s 150th birthday (Jan. 24) to publish an essay about her.  Other publications managed it in time.

Imagine my surprise when I got the Feb. 13 & 20th issue  of The New Yorker and found an essay on Wharton by Jonathan Franzen.

Why so late?  And why Franzen?

Did an editor say, “Whoops!  We missed her birthday.  Let’s call up Jonathan Franzen.”  Or did Franzen call up and say, “You missed it.  Can I write something?”

Franzen appreciates Wharton’s work.  But his thesis on her life–and he goes on and on and on–seems distinctly odd.  He says that she wasn’t pretty, and that it mattered.

I could take it at first.

Franzen, who says she was rich and sexually frustrated, writes gamely, “Edith Newbold Jones did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage:  she wasn’t pretty.”

Later he adds:

“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 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 her three finest novels is a female character of exceptional beauty, chosen deliberately to complicate the problem of sympathy.”

Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy?

Edith Wharton, undoubtedly great but, according to Franzen, not pretty.

Now that’s offensive.  It trivializes her work.

Wharton was attractive.  Wasn’t she?

Not Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.

But I’ve always concentrated on her work.

Did The New Yorker publish this essay deliberately to shock?

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Elizabeth Jolley’s Foxybaby

I love Elizabeth Jolley’s Foxybaby and have read it twice in two days.

I enjoy a comedy, and even more appreciate an ambiguous, elliptical satire that poses philosophical questions about work.  Think Lucky Jim, only less lucky. Can a character be ridiculous, yet serious?  The heroine, Miss Porch, a spinster writer, imagines alternate lives for each person she meets.  Are any of them real?

This exuberant, quirky novel made me laugh, but I also wondered at the shaky line between comedy and drama Jolley frequently crosses in her lively narrative.

Persea has reissued some of the award-winning Australian writer Jolley’s novels, including The Vera Wright trilogy and The Sugar Mother.

Elizabeth Jolley

In Foxybaby, the middle-aged heroine, Alma Porch, a writer, takes a job teaching drama at a “Better Body through the Arts Course”–an arts program with dieting– at an obscure college in an abandoned Australian town.  As a low-paid teacher at a girls’ school, Miss Porch must scramble to supplement her salary.  Although she has published one novel, she is very much aware of the fact that the publisher is not screaming for a second, that teaching jobs are insecure, and that she must spend most of her time in places she doesn’t like.  She agonizingly contrasts the bleak school where she spends most of her time with her modest cottage.

Where is home?

The novel begins with a series of letters to Miss Peycroft, the Principal of the college, in which she misspells Miss Peycroft’s name and also gets her job title and the name of the school wrong, showing us all too well her ambivalence toward teaching.

And upon Miss Porch’s arrival in East Cheatham, bizarre events unfold.  Miles, the school factotum and bus driver, organizes a car crash involving Miss Porch’s car, two other faculty and student cars, and the bus: he is in on the profits of the tow-truck  business (the two truck happens to be there).  At the isolated college, when their cars are in the shop, he sells them wares at inflated prices.

Miss Peycroft is a lesbian with an obsequious girlfriend, Miss Paisley, and insists on changing the title of Miss Porch’s film “treatment” of her new novel, which will be acted out in the drama class.  (Miss Peycroft also invites Miss Porch to an orgy; Miss Porch declines).  Miss Peycroft dominates Miss Porch’s course, showing up every day, ordering the students to mime the action, and sabotaging Miss Porch’s rock soundtrack with her cello and Miss Paisley’s sticks.

Fortunately, some of the fat students are charming.  Mrs. Viggars, a wealthy widow and lesbian who has contributed so much money to the program that she is given the lead role in the drama, invites her to illicit midnight feasts (again organized by Miles and costly).  Miss Harrow, a charming real actress who has come to the school to lose weight with her gigolo and his boyfriend, invites Miss Porch to an orgy, but later apologizes for what transpires.  And Mrs. Castle, the annoying grandmother whose son-in-law sent her to the program, ends up as Miss Porch’s unwanted roommate, and nearly drives everyone crazy with her homesickness.

Yes, it IS the writers’ conference I attended years ago.

Miss Porch’s “film treatment” of her novel, which the students act out,  is truly baffling.  Is it a melodrama, or serious?  At first I assumed that it was a burlesque of bad writing.  But the story of Steadman, a wealthy scholar, and his addict daughter, whom he somehow gets out of prison, and her sick baby, is painful, has elements of incest, and somehow reflects the inbred atmosphere of the school and the loneliness of the students’ lives.

I had to laugh at Miss Porch’s theory of narrative, which is antithetical to Jolley’s practice.

“Miss Porch began an explanation about reading being a creative process and that it was not necessary for the writer to write absolutely every detail belonging to the characters–for example their living arrangements and their meals need not be an essential part of the story or the novel.”

Ironically, Foxybaby centers on living arrangements and meals.  Home and comfort are what these lonely women want.

The ending is dream-like, and I will say no more.

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The Aeneid, Day 8: Aeneas and Women in Flames

Aeneas has a lot of trouble with women.

He loves them and leaves them (Creusa and Dido).  Sometimes they rise up against him (the Trojan women in Sicily and the Latin women in Italy).

Aeneas leaves Dido.

In Book IV he spends a winter of love with Dido in Carthage, and helps her build her city.  The flame of love (flamma) consumes her, and she considers him her husband.  After Mercury warns him that he must go to Italy, Aeneas intends to sneak off without telling her, and she confronts him.  Abandoned, Dido  kills herself, then snubs him in the underworld (Book VI).

She isn’t the only woman to go up in flames.  The Trojan women, inflamed by Iris, burn the ships in Sicily because after seven years of roving they rebel against Aeneas and want to settle, and who can blame them (Book V)?  Then in Italy, the Latin women, led by Amata, incensed by the fury Allecto,  go  into hiding in the leafy woods to keep Lavinia  from marrying Aeneas (Book VII).

They want her to marry Turnus, an Italian prince.

Aeneas has a habit of losing women.  He loses his wife Creusa in the flames of Troy (Book II). He loses Lavinia to Amata (temporarily) and never meets Lavinia in The Aeneid.

Creusa, however, loves him.  Her larger-than-life shade appears to predict the future and tell him to marry Lavinia in Italy.  Yes, that’s all right with her.

illic res laetae regnumque et regia coniunx/parta tibi; lacrimas dilectae pelle Creusae

“There happiness and a kingdom and a royal wife will be won by you; drive away the tears for beloved Creusa.”

Would you, newly dead, manifest yourself as a ghost and tell your husband to go marry a younger woman in Italy?  Why doesn’t he meet Creusa in the underworld?

Aeneas hates his job.  He is not Troy’s best; the best were killed.  But he is what they’ve got, and he is a hero–half god, half man.  In Book VII, after meeting his father in the underworld in Book VI, he begins to take responsibility.  This crying, dependent figure stoically pursues his fate.  This man who very much lives in the world of men, manipulated by gods, prepares for war.

And it is heartbreaking.

Happiness with a woman is not for him.

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Book Club: A Web Series for Bibliophiles

You can watch the complete first season of the new web series, Book Club, at Hulu.

This satiric comedy is not about the chic book club you want to join, but rather the one you probably belong to.  No, it’s not a bunch of old friends, but rather a bunch of people who saw an ad in the paper.

Here is the description of the show from the website:

After being rejected from their towns elite book club, a pill-popping young woman and a deeply closeted gay man start their own book club made up of local misfits and both fall in love with the town’s librarian. With every other meeting focused on a different book, Book Club explores both literary lessons applicable to daily life as well as the humor found in simple, monthly interactions of people dying to relate.”

It’s very funny.

I serendipitously learned about the show at IMBD while looking up information on Callum Blue.  Actually it turned out I had mixed up Callum Blue with another actor, but as he plays the librarian in this series, it’s good that I made a mistake.

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Self-Expression on the Internet

I love the internet.

I can be in Missouri or Alaska and still have the internet.  I blog.  I gossip in online groups. I watch YouTube videos about crocheting.   I read The New York Times and Dovegreyreader.

But I am not a “social networker.” If there is one thing I know, it’s that people get fired and divorced because of what they write on social networking sites.  And even if you don’t say something unforgivable about your boss or your partner, suddenly ex-husbands galore and people you barely remember from college are contacting you.

If we’re not Dovegreyreader, and we’re not, and that’s why we love her so much, we can get into trouble even without social networking.  We Americans express ourselves online all the time.  According to a consumer survey by Bowker in 2008, Americans spend 15 hours a week online, 2.9 more hours than they spend watching TV.

So is that good or bad?  Are people more active online, or just more foolish?

Don’t write anything online that you wouldn’t like everybody in the world to know, right?

Several years ago when email was new to me, I made that mistake.  I was a freelancer and used to saying what I thought.

Only someone without a real job would be so idiotic as to complain about her boss in an email, right? But how was I supposed to know it would end up in his mailbox?  I had a lot of work and diligently wrote the equivalent of a fluffy nonfiction book every time I wrote an article.  I was obviously exploited, yet also smoulderingly hated by the staff writers because I was on their turf, even though they only had to write one article every two weeks and I had to write four or five a week.

So I was blacklisted, even though I apologized.

It was one of those horrible experiences that you don’t wish on anyone.  It definitely was not the kind Virgil spoke about:

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

“Perhaps one day it will be a joy even to remember these things.”

It is still painful to think about.

The good thing about blogging is that we can say what we like.  Some people misinterpret our writing, but that happens everywhere.  And we are not addressing huge audiences.  It’s self-expression.

What is that expression?  “Those who can’t do, teach.”  And most of us blog.

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Joyce Cary’s Second Trilogy: Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, & Not Honour More

Portrait of Joyce Cary by Alfred Eisenstaedt

It snowed, we shoveled, we saw The Descendants (excellent), we baked Laurie Colwin’s chicken with apples and garlic (Home Cooking), and we saw the Superbowl halftime show.

I slept late, then got up and dragged tea and a plate of fruit into bed and finished Joyce Cary’s Second Trilogy.

I’m supposed to reread Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for a book group,  but I’m reading Cary instead (not to mention Virgil–and I’m expecting my readership to go WAY down for that).

Joyce Cary’s the Second Trilogy is not particularly well-known.  You probably know his First Trilogy,  Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse’s Mouth.   The latter is Cary’s most famous novel, the story of Gulley Jimson, a painter who spends much of his time trying to finance his work without a job, paints on walls when he can’t afford canvas (and he seldom even has a good place to sleep),  and is obsessed with Blake.

The writing is so beautiful that I can’t get enough of it.  Here is the opening:

I was walking by the Thames.  Half past morning on an autumn day.  Sun in a mist.  Like an orange in a fried fish shop.  All bright below.  Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud.  Like a viper swimming in skim milk.  the old serpent, symbol of nature and love.

I’ve read the book many times and love the movie with Alec Guinness, who wrote the screenplay.

I discovered the Second Trilogy accidentally. It is in print by Faber Finds and New Directions.  And it is so well-crafted, so humorous, and so absorbing that I don’t understand why it isn’t more widely distributed.  It centers on the career of a mercurial politician, Chester Nimmo, a brilliant autodidact who starts out as Union man, obsessed with class, but later changes his mind with the winds of public opinion so that he is always at the center.  His story is told from different points of view, from that of his wife Nina, from his own POV, and the third from Nina’s cousin, Jim, who is her second husband.

Prisoner of Grace, narrated by his wife, Nina, is a minor classic.  She is writing a book in middle age to save Nimmo’s reputation, though she is divorced from him and living with her second husband, Jim.  Her daughter Sally and her husband are writing an expose of Nimmo’s corruption, attacking his marriage to Nina, too.  Although she was always trying to leave the marraige, she couldn’t resist his slick speeches and persuasion.  At 18, her aunt basically arranged the marriage to help him into power with Nina’s money.  But Nina soon gets sucked in–Nimmo, a former fundamentalist preacher, is a hypocrite, always manipulating everybody for political means, but charming–and he convinces Nina that he needs her input and her presence on politial campaigns.  There’s a lot of double-dealing, and “shredding” of documents.

But Nina, twice pregnant by her cousin Jim,  stays at  Nimmo’s side, and defends him when he is accused of corruption in the Macaroni Case.

The whole point of the Macaroni Case was that three Ministers did not tell about their Macaroni Shares until there was so much talk about corruption that they had to explain.  And people thought they had waited so long because they had something to hide.”

It’s very contemporary, though set in the early 20th century, and Chester of course unloads his shares, hoping no one will find out he has owned them, but it comes out.  Nina feels it is public spite against him that almost ruins his career.

Except the Lord is Nimmo’s story of his childhood and youth in the West County.  It’s absolutely fascinating:  it’s like the story of a different person.  Nimmo is more articulate and detached than Nina, and this remarkable novel details his growing up in a poor household, the son of a stableman and fundamentalist preacher, and their struggles to live–his sister Gerorgina, one of my favorite characters in literature, works for a grocer and basically has to sell herself for food after their mother dies, without complaining about it, and she gets back at the grocer in the end.  She gets out of the situation, and supports her family as a housekeeper, finds her father a better job, and generally keeps them from starving.

Not Honour More is Jim’s story.  Jim, Nina’s cousin, has loved her since childhood and, in 1926, during the General Strike, is married to her.  He is, however, living in a very uncomfortable situation.  Nimmo has moved in with them, pretending to be sick to leave, and is using Nina as a secretary.  Jim is a gentleman, who worked in Africa for many years, and his politics are the opposite of Nimmo’s and Nina’s. He is working as a “special” during the General Strike, trying to control the radicals.

I very much enjoyed them.  They’re quick reads, SO GOOD, and I definitely want to read more Cary now.

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