Adventures with Edith: Gus Trenor, primitive man

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Adventures with Edith, Book I, Chapter 13. This is the scene in which Gus Trenor has trapped Lily in his otherwise-empty house, and it is even more scary in the MS version, though that may be an artifact of the slow reading necessary for this part. Wharton rewrote this twice (manuscript with changes and typescript/manuscript with changes), with lots of crossouts, pasted-together strips, and alternate text on the backs.

I hadn’t fully appreciated before how much stagecraft Wharton puts into this scene: the drunken & angry Gus moves a chair in front of Lily and plops himself down in it, blocking her exit. He creeps up on her “with a hand that grew formidable.” And instead of making Lily “hear him out” as in the book, he’s now got what he wanted (Lily alone) and means “to make the most of it.”

In her anger, Lily had earlier made a satiric jab at Gus’s intelligence, and this calls forth the “primitive man from his lair.” She’s talked her way out of these situations before with wit, but now Lily’s terrified, frozen in place, afraid of the “mustering of vulture tongues” (just “tongues” in the book) if she calls for help.

As I was working on this part today, this scene reminded me of what Margaret Atwood said: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

Biography Corner: Tracy Daugherty’s Larry McMurtry: A Life and McMurtry’s Books: A Memoir

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Tracy Daugherty’s Larry McMurtry: A Life (2023) is a terrific and evocative biography. As Dwight Garner says in The New York Times (source of the image), it’s “episodic” and “entertaining.” If, like me, you’ve only read a handful of McMurtry’s fiction and nonfiction (the Lonesome Dove books, The Last Picture Show, Texasville, Duane’s Depressed and some essay collections), Daugherty fills you in on what you’ve missed and also the books that he (and McMurtry himself) say you aren’t necessarily missing if you don’t read them.

This isn’t a “On June 20, 1963 he did such and so” kind of biography. Rather, through interviews, recollections by McMurtry, and knowledge of the spaces he inhabited, it gives you satisfyingly rounded impressions of–for lack of a better word–McMurtry’s general activities, headspace, and landscapes at various periods of his life: his career as a teacher, as a writer, and as a bookseller and book collector, the last of which seems to have been his real passion. It’s all interesting, from McMurtry’s early days in Texas through his friendships, fame, and bookstores. “Interesting” is sometimes a coolly neutral word, but it’s meant as praise here, for if you’ve ever read a biography that goes into exhaustive detail on the subject’s FBI files or chronicles a minute-by-minute and equally exhausting tale of the subject’s travels, you know that “interesting” isn’t guaranteed in a biography.

Daugherty discusses and seems largely to agree with McMurtry’s reputation as a novelist with a special talent for drawing women, a reputation he shares with John Updike. I’m puzzled by both of these, because McMurtry, like Updike, has two basic types of women in all the novels by him I’ve read:

  1. Somewhat spirited but downtrodden by circumstances, like Lorena in Lonesome Dove or Ruth Popper in The Last Picture Show (though not in Texasville, where she’s become a jogger, if memory serves, and learns to speak her mind).
  2. “Scary” women, like Lois Farrow in The Last Picture Show, Karla in Texasville, and Aurora in Terms of Endearment. These women are demanding, capricious, sometimes funny, and sometimes mean as snakes–and yet the men in the novels adore them for it and seem to enjoy their antics. They bring the drama, and the men eat it up, but why? Is it because the men around them are so taciturn and the culture so unforgiving that being mean as snakes is the only way the scary women can get their way and make themselves heard? Maybe it’s a cultural dance like the one that Rosemary Daniell describes in Fatal Flowers, where Southern men seem to adore and indulge the crazy in Southern women (I’m going from Daniell’s book, not my own perceptions) because they know the women have so little power otherwise. In Peter Bogdanovich’s superb movie version of The Last Picture Show, Lois tells Jacy that she’s not scary enough to bully Duane into being a success as she has scared Jacy’s father into being a success, so maybe “scary” is for McMurtry’s women the only route out of being downtrodden.

Reading Daugherty led me to ordering and reading McMurtry’s Books: A Memoir (2008); I’d read Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen some years ago. Books: A Memoir is McMurtry’s life as a reader and bookseller, told in 109 short vignettes. The New York Times review by James Campbell faulted this approach, saying that it’s more like notes to a memoir than a memoir.

But McMurtry was ahead of his time in this: think about Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds or Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, both of which use the same form. Also, in our attention-challenged age, it’s a lot easier to read vignettes than long chapters. Because some phrases were repeated, I wondered whether these vignettes emerged from McMurtry’s famous morning writing routine as exercises to warm up as well as exercises in memory.

The writing routine: Daugherty tells us that McMurtry wrote on a Hermes 3000 typewriter, which McMurtry famously thanked in a 2006 Golden Globes acceptance speech for the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain (cowritten with Diana Ossana). McMurtry: “I wrote five pages a day for many years; then, as my fluency increased, I upped the pace to ten pages a day” (Books: A Memoir, 225). Daugherty adds this detail: after cataract surgery McMurtry continued his routine:

“McMurtry always felt that if he could capture the rhythm of a strong narrative voice, he could write as fast as he could type: the work was in his fingers and mind more than in his eyes. . . . He began at seven-thirty each morning. An hour and a half later, he’d be done.”

Adventures with Edith: Gus Trenor

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Adventures with Edith: The reverse-engineering and transcription of variants in the galley proofs for Book 2, Chapters 9-14 is done, and let’s just say that some pages were easier to work on than others.

I’m back to Book 1, Chapter 8 (there is no MS for Chapter 7), and here are two treats from it. First of all, you EW people know that Edith Wharton’s grammar and spelling are perfect–in English, anyway, and probably in French, Italian, and German as well. As I told my students working on transcribing the unpublished EW: if you think she’s made a mistake, look again. It’s not her; it’s you. But in all these tens of thousands of words, I have found one misspelling: buoyancy, which she spells “bouyancy.” Raise your hands if you would probably misspell this, too–anyone? anyone?

Second: Gus Trenor. Wharton leaves in all the descriptions of his heavy, sweaty, red-faced diving into his food & general grossness, but she deleted this gem in the final book. Lily’s standing there looking at the wedding-present jewels and thinking “why should Evie Van Osburgh marry Gryce & get all the good stuff?” when Gus lumbers up “as impervious to her annoyance as a pachyderm to the shrinking of a trodden grass-blade.” The book leaves off at “annoyance,” so we never got the image of Gus as an elephant stomping all over that trodden grass-blade Lily. Whether that’s because the image is comical, or too on-the-nose, or at odds with the imagery of Gus as a carnivore only God and Mrs. Wharton now know.

Today in Adventures with Edith

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Today in Adventures with Edith: I thought I would work on the galley proofs of the Scribner’s Magazine version for a while to take a break from the second pass collation of the MS. Unless I wanted to retype all five chapters (spoiler alert: I didn’t), this involves reverse-engineering a transcription of the galley proofs from the Scribner’s Magazine version by going line by line until they’ve been reconstructed & then inserting EW’s corrections. So far, so good.

All was well until I scrolled ahead and realized that there are TWO sets of corrected galley proofs. Wharton made one set of changes, turned it in, and then made a whole other set that doesn’t have any of the first changes listed. My favorite remark today was this one, left by a patient compositor: “To author: Many of the corrections made on this set of proofs conflict with those on previous set–returned herewith.”

House of Mirth Book 1, Chapter 6: tear at your heart & tear out your hair

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What is simultaneously one of the most beautiful chapters in any novel and also a hot mess? Chapter 6 of The House of Mirth, that’s what. It’s the chapter where Lily and Selden walk in the woods at Bellomont, and Edith Wharton was obviously determined to get it just right. But did she have to number pages things like 89A, which comes after 99 but before 98, which appears 8 pages later after 102? And how about all those random passages on the verso pages, sometimes just a word or two, that also need to be put into place? It’s a good thing I like jigsaw puzzles.

This is my second pass through the manuscript working on collating & recording variants, and it’s still taking me hours. Is it worth it? You bet. 

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Editing House of Mirth: Lily’s last hours

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Working on collating (spoiler!) Lily’s last hours today was so powerful. I’ve read HM many times, but reading it this way is entirely different. Every bodily sensation of her sinking into the drug-induced sleep is described at what seems an agonizing length, yet EW keeps making changes: is the sense of “warmth & pleasure” or–as she finally decides, “drowsy peace”?

But Wharton’s handwriting is her “fast” handwriting, when she’s clearly on a roll & making few changes. The last paragraph has almost no changes, especially to the last lines: “the recovered warmth flowed through her, she yielded to it, sank into it, & slept.”

Lawrence Selden, still a cad after all these years

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I’ve been working (all day, every day) on the OUP edition of The House of Mirth for The Collected Works of Edith Wharton and have been writing short posts about it to Facebook & now here. Here’s the first one (below), but I’ve already expressed, um, some feelings about Lawrence Selden here:

Lawrence Selden: A Cad among Men

Collating variants for The House of Mirth means going word by word, comma by comma, so I’m basically living this book inside my head. This struck me today: Lily Bart goes to two houses in the last few chapters.

Selden: “let me get you some tea & stand across the room, judging your cold, thin ‘curves.'”

Nettie Struther: “Are you cold, Miss Bart? Want some tea with milk? We love you here in my warm kitchen.”

I wanted to stab Selden in Chapter 12, and now I want to stab him more in Chapter 13.

Dear Edith Wharton: “Friday” is not a helpful date.

/ Donna Campbell / 3 Comments

In working with Edith Wharton’s letters in preparation for a trip to the Beinecke, I came across one of her letters to John Hugh-Smith in which she says the following:

“Thanks a lot for The Emperor Jones. O’Neill seems to be our only real play-wright. I wish I cd. have seen it acted.”

So, a significant judgment, isn’t it? And when did she write it?

Friday the 8th.

What month or year? She doesn’t say. The letter is from the 1920s, though, according to its place in the archive; EW’s excellent biographer Hermione Lee places the quotation within a paragraph of other literary judgments of the mid-1920s (620).

Let’s look at when Friday fell on an 8th in the mid-1920s

1924: February, August

1925: May

1926: January, October

A helpful archivist at the Beinecke Library has added “probably 1924,” which is logical. In 1924, there were two Fridays that fell on the 8th, which narrows it down slightly.

In the first paragraph of the letter, however, EW says: “What Spanish experiences we shall have to compare!” which might refer to her trip to Spain with Walter Berry in September 1925 (Lee 620).

If the letter is from 1924 or 1925, she’d be planning far ahead to discuss this upcoming trip, but then, EW was a planner. She kept a diary of this trip, called “Last Trip with W.” and edited by Patricia Fra Lopez as Return to Compostela a few years ago.

What if the letter is from 1926 and she’s looking back on the Spain trip? This is unlikely because (and I’m cheating here) the next letter in the sequence is dated March 21, 1925.

So, yes: 1924 has to be it, as the archivist had noted, because the only Friday in 1925 was in May, which rules that out as a date if the letter is in sequence, as it obviously seems to be.

Is it February 8 or May 8? There’s no way to tell except by delving into further evidence from the letter: Where was John Hugh-Smith traveling, since she welcomes him back? She says she sent him a postcard from “Fair—” (paper is torn), but there’s no postcard close to the letter; the most likely candidate, sent from Rocamadour, has the year obscured and is possibly years earlier.

The exact date isn’t important for what I’m working on at this point, so I won’t pursue it.

But dear Mrs. Wharton, couldn’t you have thrown future generations a bone here and given us more than “Friday, 8th”–or, as you do sometimes, just “Wednesday”?

Artisanal Writing Sold Here

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Today’s NY Times asks, “Tinkering with ChatGPT, Workers Wonder: Will This Take My Job?”

The answer is, “Well, yes, probably, if you do certain kinds of writing for a living”:

“One team of researchers ran an analysis showing the industries and occupations that are most exposed to artificial intelligence, based on a model adjusted for generative language tools. Topping the list were college humanities professors, legal services providers, insurance agents and telemarketers. “

A few quick questions:

  1. The least creative and least interesting part of writing is editing someone else’s stuff and sometimes our own. Programs like Grantable (mentioned in the article) can already generate writing for review, but with the amount of boilerplate language needed, wouldn’t it be even more boring to work through something that you didn’t write?
  2. Although ChatGPT will cut down on grammatical errors, how satisfying will it be to read, review, and (unless you’re an ungrading professor) grade student projects? Right now, there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that you and the student are exchanging ideas and that there’s a mind behind both sides of the equation.
  3. Will it seem useful or pointless to suggest creative ideas for improvement knowing that, instead of thinking about them, the student may run them through another ChatGPT loop and “improve” the paper that way? And if it does improve the paper, who (or what) should receive the credit for the improvement?
  4. Writing assessment software has been around for years and has been (last I checked) found wanting if not positively unethical by writing teachers. With the vast improvements of ChatGPT, will it be used for assessment?
  5. If students are using ChatGPT to write essays and teachers use some variant of that to assess them, then what are we doing here except batting software-written writing back and forth as if playing a giant game of Pong?

There’s a real market for organic, locally sourced, artisanal, responsibly farmed, non-animal-tested, non-GMO, etc. etc. goods in the marketplace.

Will we also see signs saying “No ChatGPT was used in the production of this book; it is the result of human hand and brain labor” and “Artisanal Writing Sold Here”? I’m kidding but curious to see what happens.