For the edition of The House of Mirth that I’m preparing for the Complete Works of Edith Wharton (OUP), I’ve been collating the Scribner’s Magazine version of with the first American edition, and that means that I’m going line by line, punctuation mark by punctuation mark, through the text. Although this isn’t close reading, the process gives you time to savor every word and react emotionally rather than in a literary critical sort of way.

Here’s one takeaway: most of the men in this book could, to paraphrase Mark Twain writing about Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, be taken out to the back yard and drowned without any of the women being the worse for it.

[Spoilers ahead if you haven’t read The House of Mirth and content warning for assault.]

Let’s see: there’s Gus Trenor, who essentially tries to rape her; George Dorset, whose self-absorption makes a black hole look navigable; and Selden, the putative hero of the book. What are his sins?

1. He is, as generations of scholars have realized, “seldom” there; like Winterbourne in James’s Daisy Miller, he likes to watch the spectacle of a pretty woman rather than take her seriously as a human being.
2. He mocks Lily’s initial hunt for a husband, undermining her quest for Percy Gryce (not that Gryce was her soul mate) while giving her no alternative in terms of emotional support or affection.
3. He is stirred by the vision of Lily at the tableau vivant, yet he’s willing to believe the worst of her as she escapes from Gus Trenor. In this, he’s not using any logic: why would Lily be Gus’s mistress when it would destroy her chances for a $$$ marriage? She’s not stupid, and yet he lets his conventional ideas and misperceptions read her escape as utterly damning.
4. All right, he shows up one time–one time–with an actual plan to help her out, first telling her to leave Bertha Dorset’s yacht and then escorting her to Jack Stepney’s to stay the night. Then–nothing. She’s on her own.
5. He tries to get her away from Mrs. Hatch, who employs her, without offering her anything in the way of actual monetary support. Sensing a theme here? He has a lot of ideas about how she can live a “republic of the spirit” life without any of the money that supports it. Thanks a lot, Lawrence.
6. Finally, when she visits him for the last time, he has no idea what she’s sacrificed for him. He’s focused on her fragility and physical translucence. He takes hold of her thin hand, tells her “you can never go out of my life,” which she correctly interprets as “see ya,” without any obligation on his part.
7. The next day he bounds up the steps to her rooming house like an eager puppy, now that he has “the word which made all clear,” but it’s too late. Question: since he had never bothered to visit her before, in all those months of trial, how does he even know where she lived? Gerty must have told him, and if she did, how damning is it that he knew what dire straits she was in and never bothered to send a note or a word?

Here is the big question:

Why didn’t Selden drop a dime on Bertha Dorset at one of the many opportunities he had when she was persecuting Lily?

Oh, sure, “gentleman’s code” and all that, but he had as much means of blackmail as Lily did–more, even. His reputation wouldn’t suffer.

As Bertha’s former lover, he could have called her and told her to lay off Lily. Or dropped a knowing reference in one of those withering triple-meaning and ironic statements that Wharton’s characters are so fond of using. Or even shot her a knowing glance when she’s ordering Lily off the yacht.

What does our boy Selden do?

Nothing.

On an intellectual level, I know that this is part of Wharton’s point, the tragic consequences of a rigid social order, and all that.

Sure, everyone justly hates Selden on one reading. But part of the brilliance of this book is that there are a thousand tiny points, like the “points of interrogation” about Lily’s character that Rosedale mentions, that allow you to hate Selden fully, madly, deeply.

It’s no secret that literary critics are shaped by their era, no matter how much the New Critics tried to pretend that they existed in a realm of Universal Truths about Aesthetic Judgment, so I’m not here to pile on to Vernon Louis Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1930).

Parrington was a giant in his day, and he synthesized and explained what he saw as, well, the main currents, etc.

Parrington died before completing the last volume of Main Currents, which exists as a sequence of lecture notes and previously published essays.  It’s a kind of critical voice–definitively categorizing, full of sweeping pronouncements, and obsessively worried about ethical actions and judgments–that would never get you past the covers of PMLA today. Who but Parrington could sum up Norris’s unfinished Vandover and the Brute  by calling it “a huge and terrible torso”? (332). And he does talk about now-forgotten naturalist authors like Ernest Poole (The Harbor, 1915) and progressivist Winston Churchill (the novelist, not the politician).

Yet the book is unaware of its own (whiteness) blinders: I saw no references to popular African American writers of the era that he covers so conclusively, such as Frances E.W. Harper, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, or Paul Laurence Dunbar. And how can you treat “main currents in American thought” without the insights of W. E. B. DuBois or at least a mention of The Souls of Black Folk?

As I alluded to in a tweet this morning (the one that made me want to write this post) Parrington’s judgments give a window into thoughts of the era but increasingly diverge from our own.

• “Theodore Dreiser: Chief of American Naturalists.” Okay, there’s a case for that, which for Parrington relies on “sympathy and mercy” and Dreiser’s “vast and terrifying imagination.” (Just try getting away with language like that today at some of our more theory-oriented journals. Can you imagine what Reviewer #2 would have to say? I can, and it’s not pretty.)
• “Sinclair Lewis: Our Own Diogenes.” Well, sure, if you really like Sinclair Lewis, and I do.
• A short paragraph on “F. Scott Fitzgerald”: “A bad boy who loves to smash things to show how naughty he is. . . . Precocious, ignorant–a short candle already burnt out” (386). Obviously written before The Great Gatsby, let alone Tender is the Night. 
• “The Incomparable Mr. Cabell.” I can hear you saying “who?” Like Joseph Hergesheimer, whom Raymond Chandler paired with Cabell as the “fancy boy” writers in contrast to his plainer style, James Branch Cabell was a well-considered writer whose historical fantasy novels set in Poictesme (link so that you can look up the pronunciation) were considered high art and whose novel Jurgen led to an obscenity case.  When I was writing the “Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s” chapter for American Literary Scholarship in 2000-2008, I read all the yearly criticism on him, and it’s fair to say that he’s much less popular than he was.  Parrington praises him for the “open door of woman-worship” that allows Cabell to “enter his world of deeper realities” (341)

Now here is the head-scratcher for modern readers: lumped under the heading “Certain Other Writers” with Willa Cather, comprising the front and back of two pages (381-384) for both of them, is “Edith Wharton–The Genteel Tradition and the New Plutocracy.”

In other words, Parrington devotes a chapter each to Dreiser, Lewis, Cabell, and Ole Rolvaag , but the front and back of a page each for Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, which for the time was probably about right.

Calling Wharton a “temperamental aristocrat” who was “isolated in America by her native aristocratic tastes” (I see what you did there, V.L.), Parrington approves of House of Mirth (Selden and Trenor are “the aristocrat and the plutocrat” [381]), Ethan Frome (“a dramatization of the ‘narrow house’ theme” [381]), The Custom of the Country (“a study of the social climber” [381]), The Age of Innocence (“an admirable work” [382]), and Old New York (“A return to her best manner” [382]). The rest of her work is “not important.”

Summing up, Parrington says “Mrs. Wharton [is] a finished artist who grasps her material firmly; an intellectual attitude, delighting in irony” (382).

But she is “[n]ot a thinker like Cabell, whose irony springs from an imagination that contemplates man in his relation to cosmic forces, but an observer whose irony springs from noting the clash between men and social convention. The last of our literary aristocrats of the genteel tradition” (382).

For those keeping score at home, let me sum this up:

Cabell: a thinker, interested in “cosmic forces,” in touch with “deeper realities” through his contemplation of an abstract conception of “woman.”

Wharton: not a thinker but an observer, an “aristocrat” (x3), and–most damning of all–a relic of the genteel tradition.

I said on Twitter that Wharton must have been laughing in four languages at a judgment like this. Wouldn’t her extensive reading in social and biological evolutionary thought qualify her has a “cosmic” thinker? In fact, wouldn’t her status as an actual woman give her a little insight into what makes Cabell so special?

This little exercise in how literary reputations are made is just one of many instances, of course, but if Edith Wharton–pictured in 1923 when she received an honorary degree from Yale University, the first woman to be so honored–is laughing, this may be why.

After reading so many letters to as well as from Edith Wharton last month at the Beinecke Library, I had a few thoughts, not all of them reverential, on writing letters to Edith Wharton.

First of all, her letters are a joy to read because her command of the language is–can I say perfect? Even if you can’t make out a word at first, you know that the sentence is grammatical and that the defect lies in your ability to read her handwriting, not in the letter itself. This is immensely helpful in deciphering the letter and also an inspiration to the rest of us, who’ll then resolve to write more gracefully.

But suppose that you’re one of her contemporaries, and you want to write a letter to her. What then?

With apologies to Wharton scholars for the hasty generalizations below, here are a few tips:

1. If you’re a close friend or family member, you’ll know the right tone to take, and the exchange will be friendly, funny, and great to read.
2. If you’re an editor with whom she has a good professional relationship, such as Edward Burlingame or Rutger Jewett, you can expect friendly and witty letters as well as the immemorial authorial complaints about sales and advertising and the number of periods to use in an ellipsis.  Let’s just say that Mrs. Wharton and common sense do not agree with current recommendations from the Modern Language Association.

3. 

   Figure 2. Lily Bart might have been marginally safer with Orangeine than chloral hydrate, although it, too, could be deadly.

   If you’re a random fan, she might keep your letter, as she did the one from the president of the Orangeine Company, who was delighted to see her mention the product in The House of Mirth and in effect offered her an endorsement deal, if I remember correctly. Needless to say, she didn’t comply.

4. If you’re trying to get her to address your book club, autograph a copy of a book, give her an award (except the Pulitzer Prize), give you a few pithy words explaining her literary philosophy, or any of the other requests that famous authors must get by the thousands, the answer is no.  You might get a frosty but polite letter back from her secretary, roughly as follows: “Mrs. Wharton never speaks in public,” “Mrs. Wharton has made it a rule to reserve autographs for her close friends,” or  “Mrs. Wharton appreciates the honor but is unable to attend,” etc.
5. If you’re a member of a literary rights agency such as Curtis Brown, most of the time you will have to address your correspondence directly to “Mrs. Wharton,” but all the letters you receive will be from her secretary and will begin “Mrs. Wharton begs me to remind you” or another such phrase. In other words, you have to talk directly to her, but she responds through a secretary–which, if you think about it, makes sense given the constraints on her time. 
6. If an underling or someone unfamiliar with Wharton slips and addresses her as “Miss Wharton”–you will certainly hear about it, and not in a good way.

The peak “letter to Wharton” experience may be this one, which is at the Lilly Library. It’s  a form letter written to EW from GLOBE: THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE, dated Aug. 6, 1936. It begins “Dear Miss Wharton: Will you write for us?” and asks her to write a short, “intimate” piece for the magazine.  It concludes, “We hope you will go to bat for us. … the deadline was yesterday.”

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when Mrs. Wharton read this one.