The Age of Innocence and a Perfect Day

Sometimes a reading experience can be just as memorable as the book itself. Last month I had the pleasure of reading The Age of Innocence with Audrey, another long-time Edith Wharton fan. It was a reread for her, but somehow I never got around to reading the book many refer to as Wharton's masterpiece.

Goodreads sums it up nicely in just one sentence:
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence  is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.”

The main character, Newland Archer, is caught between desire and duty. Archer is engaged to May Welland, a quintessential product of the society in which she has been raised, but he begins to develop feelings for May's free-spirited cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has recently returned to New York to escape an unhappy marriage.

Wharton's style is immediately recognizable and the story drew me in right away, but her portrayal of 'society' also fascinated me. Societal constraints appeared suffocating, arbitrary, and at times laughable. For example, it was considered vulgar to appear in the latest fashion. New dresses were ordered from Paris only to hang in closets for two years. After that amount of time had lapsed, they were deemed appropriate.

I don't want to say anything more about the plot, but the last chapter just bowled me over. Can there be a better ending in all of literature? Set 26 years later, it transformed a really good novel into a great one. The Custom of the Country  has long been my favorite Wharton novel but, after reading that last chapter,  The Age of Innocence  moved into my top slot. However, I still think Undine Spragg is Wharton's most memorable character.

The Age of Innocence  was a read/listen combination for me. Although a beautiful hardcover has been on my shelf for years, I downloaded a free kindle edition and a 99 cent audible special narrated by Laural Merlington (who captured the tone of the novel perfectly). Whispersync is so convenient!

My rating:

The only thing better than a shared read with a blogging friend is to meet in person and talk about it. If that meeting happens to take place at the author's home, then all the better. Audrey and I had the opportunity to meet a couple of Sundays ago at The Mount, Wharton's home in Lenox, MA.

We had lunch on the terrace and talked about The Age of Innocence, books, blogging, life, baking, and much more. After lunch we toured the house, gardens, and, of course, the gift shop.

Audrey and JoAnn at The Mount

Although it was a grey, drizzly, frizzy-hair kind of day, it didn't dampen our enjoyment in the least. We're already talking about planning another bookish activity, possibly next spring or summer. In the meantime, I need to read that biography by Hermione Lee I bought five years ago on my last visit to The Mount.

Tuesday Intro: The Innocents by Francesca Segal

Adam had, for the occasion, bought a new suit. He had wavered between dandyish black, chalk-striped and double-breasted, and a more traditional two-button jacket in deep  navy wool. After some consideration he had chosen the navy. It seemed a more appropriate suit for a man who was newly engaged.

The Innocents
by Francesca Segal

OK, so I'm a little Edith Wharton obsessed this week. After finishing The Age of Innocence  and watching the movie over the weekend, I can't seem to let the story go. The Innocents, inspired by Wharton's masterpiece, is set in a "small, tight-knit Jewish suburb of London".  Audrey and Jane both enjoyed it and it sounded wonderful to me, too, but I  wanted wait until after I'd read  The Age of Innocence. Yesterday, I found it at the library.

What do you think of the opening? Would you keep reading?

I also added my name to the hold list for The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields, a new novel about Wharton's life. Thanks for telling me about this one, Rita!

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

A Late September Sunday Salon

Time // 8:00 Sunday morning

Place //  my favorite chair

Drinking //  black coffee and trying to wake up

Reading //  I finished two books this week, The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. The Ivy Tree  was a good introduction to Stewart's work, but I loved The Age of Innocence  and can't stop thinking about it. Will share my thoughts soon.

Yesterday I started Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo for book club. We have been considering this for the past year, but the time is finally right. The author is giving a reading at Colgate University next month, so we'll all attend and then go out for dinner!

Listening //  I seem to be on a roll with nonfiction audiobooks. This week I finished (and thoroughly enjoyed) JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke.

On impulse, I purchased Wheat Belly by William Davis when it was offered as an Audible Daily Deal last week. This book is quite compelling. Twin B has some GI issues and I'm considering a wheat-free trial for both of us.

Watching// Thanks to a twitter tip from Brona, I borrowed the 1993 movie adaptation of The Age of Innocence from the library. Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer,  and Winona Ryder, it was a feast for the eyes and very true to the novel.

Making //  It was mussel week in the kitchen. I enjoy them in restaurants, but have never attempted to prepare them myself.... it may deserve a Weekend Cooking post.

Today I'm in charge of dessert for our family dinner and will try the Apple Pie Cake recipe Diane posted on Friday. It looks delicious and she promises it's very easy, too.

Blogging //  I've been experimenting with shorter, more journal-like book reviews and plan to continue this format at least until I've made it though my review backlog.

Enjoying// Extra-long walks... bright, sunny mornings, cool temperatures, changing leaves, and a good audiobook. It doesn't get much better than that!

Anticipating //  Trish is hosting an October Pin It and Do It Challenge and you all know how much I love Pinterest. Sure, there will be recipes, but there are plenty of book, movie, travel, and home decor pins I'd like to try. Who knows... I may branch out into fitness, too, and finally figure out what to do with this kettlebell!

Happy Sunday, friends!

Tuesday Intro: The Age of Innocence

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. 

Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the forties", of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendor with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton

I've considered myself an Edith Wharton fan for years, but have somehow put off reading her masterpiece until now. The Age of Innocence, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, has swept me away into the glamorous world of Old New York. I'm happy to be reading with Audrey and hope we can coordinate a visit to The Mount sometime this fall.

What do you think of the opening paragraphs? Would you keep reading?

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

Vogue, Me?

That's right. I've always loved clothes, but fashion is something else entirely. Still, the September issue of Vogue found its way into my home. What prompted this extraordinary purchase?

Edith Wharton.

I simply could not resist the gorgeous photo shoot from The Mount or the article by Colm Tóibín. If you'd rather not lug home the nearly five pound magazine, just flip to page 810 the next time you pass a newsstand. Better yet, read the article and view the slideshow here.

A word of advice. If you decide to purchase the magazine, be sure to grab a tissue before reading Ann Patchett's eulogy to her beloved dog, Rose. You'll thank me later.

"A Venetian Night's Entertainment" by Edith Wharton

*image credit

Short Story Monday, meet Venice in February. I'd been searching for stories set in Venice to share this month, when Audrey pointed me toward Edith Wharton. The story was exactly what I'd hoped for and Wharton, as always, was a pleasure to read.

"A Venetian Night's Entertainment" is a story Judge Anthony Bracknell liked to tell his grandsons. Ever since childhood, the mere mention of Venice had been like "a magician's magic wand" to the judge. His fascination stemmed from a print depicting a "busy merry populous scene" in St. Mark's Square.

"For here, by their garb, were people of every nation on earth, Chinamen, Turks, Spaniards, and many more, mixed with a parti-coloured throng of gentry, lacqueys, chapmen, hucksters, and tall personages in parsons' gowns who stalked through the crowd with an air of mastery, a string of parasites at their heels. And all these people seemed to be diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with the hucksters, watching the antics of trained dogs and monkeys, distributing doles to maimed beggars or having their pockets picked by slippery-looking fellows in black -- the whole with such an air of ease and good-humour that one felt the cut-purses to be as much a part of the show as the tumbling acrobats and animals."

As young Tony grew up, that image faded, but Venice still figured prominently in his dreams. All he learned in subsequent years seemed to "confirm its claim to stand midway between reality and illusion" - Venice still meant magic.

"It was the kind of place, Tony felt, in which things elsewhere impossible might naturally happen..."

Tony finally had an opportunity to visit Venice 1760, as part of his grand tour aboard the family's merchant ship. The story perfectly conveys the carnival-like atmosphere as, almost immediately upon arrival, Tony becomes an unwilling participant in a strange series of events involving a chance encounter with a beautiful young woman, an arranged marriage, misdelivered correspondence, and a chase. Tony is never exactly sure what is happening and, as a result, neither is the reader. This story was great fun! You can read "A Venetian Night's Entertainment" here.

Can you suggest other short stories set in Venice?

Short Story Monday is hosted by John Mutford. Venice in February is hosted by Bellezza and Ally.

A Literary Friendship: Henry and Edith

From today's Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1900 that Henry James wrote his first letter to the budding novelist Edith Wharton, beginning a long friendship. Wharton was an admirer of James's work, and she sent him one of the first short stories she ever wrote. He wrote back to say that he liked the story but that she shouldn't write about Europe if she didn't live there. He said, "Be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduces [you] to a back-yard in New York." His advice inspired her to write about the New York society she'd grown up in, and the result was The House of Mirth (1905), which became her first big success.


They remained friends for the rest of James's life, but while Wharton became more successful, James's novels sold less and less well. When he learned that she'd used the proceeds from a recent book to buy herself a new car, he joked that he hoped his next book would provide enough money for him to buy a new wheelbarrow. But he always appreciated her friendship, and once wrote to her, "Your letters come into my damp desert here even as the odour of promiscuous spices ...might be wafted to some compromised oasis from a caravan of the Arabian nights."

Virago Reading Week: Edith Wharton's Birthday

Today marks the beginning of Virago Reading Week hosted by Rachel and Carolyn.  It is also Edith Wharton's birthday. Do you suppose this is purely coincidence?  I think not, and give full credit to our gracious hostesses.  This article from today's Writer's Almanac seemed the perfect way to start the week.


It's the birthday of the writer who said, "Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope." That's Edith Wharton, (books by this author) born in New York City (1862). She wrote about frustrated love in novels like The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.

She came from a rich and snobbish New York family who lived off the inheritance of their real estate and banking tycoon ancestors, and she spent several years of her early childhood traveling around Europe. When she was 10, her parents re-settled in New York, around 23rd and Park Avenue. She was a teenage bookworm, reading insatiably from her family's expansive library and feeling alienated and adrift in the New York high-society circles her family moved in. At 23, she married a family friend, a classy, good-looking sportsman named Edward "Teddy" Robbins Wharton, who wasn't particularly fond of books. He had a tendency for manic spells, extravagant spending sprees, and infidelity. It was a long and miserable marriage.

She met Henry James in Europe and became good friends with him. He encouraged her to write about the New York City she knew so well and disliked. He said, "Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours." And it was Henry James who introduced her to his friend Morton Fullerton, a dashing, promiscuous, intellectual American expat journalist who reported for the London Times from Paris. Edith Wharton fell hard for the man, filled her diary with passages about how their romance and conversation made her feel complete, wrote him pleading letters, and about a year into their affair, when she was in her late 40s, moved full-time to Paris, where he resided. The affair ended in 1911, the year she published Ethan Frome. She once wrote to him:

"Do you know what I was thinking last night, when you asked me, &; I couldn't tell you? — Only that the way you've spent your emotional life while I've ... hoarded mine, is what puts the great gulf between us, & sets us not only on opposite shores, but at hopelessly distant points of our respective shores. Do you see what I mean?

"And I'm so afraid that the treasures I long to unpack for you, that have come to me in magic ships from enchanted islands, are only, to you, the old familiar red calico & beads of the clever trader, who has had dealing with every latitude, & knows just what to carry in the hold to please the simple native — I'm so afraid of this, that often & often I stuff my shining treasures back into their box, lest I should see you smiling at them!

"Well! And what if you do? It's your loss, after all! And if you can't come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame, & if, wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, & if, when you hold me, & I don't speak, it's because all the words in me seem to have become throbbing pulses, & all my thoughts are a great golden blur — why should I be afraid of your smiling at me, when I can turn the beads & calico back into such beauty —?"

He left her in 1911, and she stayed married to Teddy for a couple more years, though the two lived apart from each other during the last part of their 28-year marriage. She loved living in Paris, and there she mingled with people like André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Theodore Roosevelt, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she once told: "To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers." But she wasn't prim or overly proper, and she famously enjoyed one of Fitzgerald's scandalous stories, about an American couple in a Paris brothel, which he drunkenly related the first time he met her.

Modernist writers were among her contemporaries, but she didn't use modernist techniques like stream-of-consciousness in her own writing, and she wasn't a fan of it in others'. She once said about James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), "Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening."

She died in Paris at the age of 75. At the time of her death, she was working on a novel called The Buccaneers, about five rich American girls who set out to marry landed British men, so that they can have English feudal titles in their names, like "Duchess." In her last days, she lay in bed and worked on the novel, and each page that she completed she dropped onto the floor so that it could be collected later, when she was through.

Many of her novels have been made into movies. The House of Mirth, The Glimpses of the Moon, and The Age of Innocence were all adapted into silent films around the 1920s. John Madden directed a version of Ethan Frome in 1993, the same year Martin Scorsese directed a film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. In 2000, Gillian Anderson stared in The House of Mirth, directed by Terence Davies.

In her short story "The Fullness of Life" she famously wrote:
"You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple. But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."
"And your husband," asked the Spirit, after a pause, "never got beyond the family sitting-room?"
"Never," she returned, impatiently; "and the worst of it was that he was quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel parlor, I felt like crying out to him: 'Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find the handle of the door?'"

And Edith Wharton said, "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it."

Short Story Monday: "Afterward" by Edith Wharton

Hello, Short Story Monday.... meet the TBR Dare.
Nearly fifty bloggers have accepted C.B. James' dare to read only from our shelves until April 1.  Since my shelves hold plenty of short stories, Short Story Monday posts will focus on collections and anthologies I've purchased over the last couple of years, as well as back issues of The New Yorker piled on my coffee table, for the entire first quarter of 2011.

Last Monday I started F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales From the Jazz Age, but this week I was in the mood for a ghost story and turned to "Afterward" from The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton.   It begins:

"Oh, there is one, of course, but you'll never know it." 

These portentous words are spoken to Mary and Ned Boyne,  a newly wealthy American couple escaping "the soul-deadening ugliness" of the midwest for an English country home, when Ned, believing a ghost to be an absolute necessity for such a property, quite bluntly asks:

"I don't want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody else's ghost.  I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?"

Ned is somewhat disappointed at the prospect of a ghost that nobody knows is a ghost and, upon pressing further, learns legend says the ghost is only recognized "afterward".  Ned then asks how it can be called a ghost if it is not immediately perceived as one, while Mary puzzles the question with their friend Alida,

"But if it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn't its signalment been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito?... Suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's self 'That was it'?"

Alida can only offer the words, "One just has to wait."

"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than that, Mary?"

The fun, and creepiness, comes with the unfolding story and discovery of the ghost... afterward. "Afterward" was less ambiguous and, ultimately, more satisfying than "The Lady's Maid's Bell" (reviewed here), also included in this eleven story collection. "Afterward" may also be read online.

Short Story Monday is hosted by John Mutford at The Book Mine Set.

Teaser Tuesday: Summer by Edith Wharton

"Never had her ignorance of life and literature so weighed on her as in reliving the short scene of her discomfiture. "It's no use trying to be anything in this place," she muttered to her pillow; and she shrivelled at the vision of vague metropolises, shining super-Netteltons, where girls in better clothes than Belle Balch's talked fluently of architecture to young men with hands like Lucius Harney's. Then she remembered his sudden pause when he had come close to the desk and had his first look at her."

Summer

by Edith Wharton

page 78

Summer is a wonderful book that has been referred to as 'Hot Ethan'. Today I will begin a reread of Ethan Frome and see if I agree.

The Lady's Maid's Bell by Edith Wharton

I'm a day late with Short Story Monday again this week, but I suppose a Tuesday post is better than none at all, especially if it's a story by Edith Wharton! I found The Lady's Maid's Bell on line and decided to print it out and take it along on my travels last weekend. What I expected to be a story about New York's Gilded Age (like The Custom of the Country or The House of Mirth) turned out, instead, to be a ghost story.

Alice Hartley, a lady's maid recently recovered from a bout of typhoid, has trouble finding a new position until an old friend sends her to Mrs. Brympton. The new employer, herself youngish and somewhat of an invalid, lives year round in the country and is in need of a maid/companion following the death of her long-time maid Emma Saxon. Hartley is told that it will be a dull, gloomy job, but she will be fine as long as she stays clear of Mr. Brympton, who is rarely at home anyway.

Upon arriving at the house, we get the first hint that all may not be well. Hartley is shown to her room upstairs and notices another woman, also dressed as a maid, standing in the hallway. However, the housemaid leading the way doesn't seem to see her at all and is instead concerned that a door, meant to be locked, has been left open. We also learn that since the death of the beloved maid Emma, the Brymptons have had trouble keeping a lady's maid for more than a few days.

One night, the bells rings in Hartley's room (odd since Mrs. Brympton has said she does not use the bell). Unusual footsteps are heard in the hall and Hartley rushes to her mistress's side. Mrs. Brympton calls out for Emma and then claims to have been dreaming. She tells Hartley that the bell was not rung and instructs her to return to her room. Before she leaves, Mr. Brympton asks, "How many of you are there, in God's name?"

Soon afterwards, a photograph of Emma Saxon is found. She is the same woman Hartley saw in the hall, but nobody in the household seems willing to talk about her.

I won't say much more about the plot, except that some of the events seem to make little sense. Nonetheless, this was a very compelling Gothic style story. I have my idea of what happened and would love to hear yours if you decide to read this story.

During my reading, I was reminded of Henry James' The Turn of The Screw (1898). Of course, Wharton and James were great friends. The Lady's Maid's Bell was published in 1902, the same year Edith Wharton moved into her 'first real home', The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. James spent a great deal of time there, even having his own guest suite, and it's fun to imagine the two of them strolling through the gardens discussing ghost stories!

To see other Short Story Monday posts visit The Book Mine Set.