What James could have learned from Wharton

(Re)reading after many years Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and as is so often the case for me I know I've read the novel but don't remember a thing about it (what does that say?), yet it is lodged somewhere in my imaginative experience and has in some ways shaped how I read, what I think about what I read, and what I think about our world - and in the act of re-reading these pieces and elements emerge, like the bygone image of a photograph coming into being on a film washed in developer. Suddenly I start to remember Princess Olenska and Archer Newland and the Mingotts and the Waymarshes, if I have those names right event, probably I don't - and the opening scene at the opera and the Mingott house way up in the wilderness of what Wharton amusingly calls "the Central Park" - and reading cut off last night as Archer visits Olenska - a very daring thing for a single, engaged man to be doing - in her place in the lane filled with goats and sheep and "writers and journalists" in the declasse west 20s. New York was different - and of course Wharton herself, in 1920, was writing about a New York long gone, 1870. Wharton's great friend Henry James could have learned a few things from her: though they right about a similar caste of characters, wealthy Americans with European pretension and an idiotic reverence for titles and nobility and suckers for an English accent, contemptuous of anyone who has to earn a living by "trade," Wharton is far more subtle and caustic, keeping a greater personal distance from her characters (which may be why, or may be because, she sets her noel 50 years in the past). She's also for more shrewd and incisive on the issues of love, engagement, and marriage: for James, marriage is a contractual agreement, like the Treaty of Versailles I guess, whereas for Wharton it's a complex and usually a terrible relationship - both writing from their experience, but James feels bloodless. Wharton also knew how to use dialogue move a story forward, whereas James, especially in his late works, uses dialogue to explore the most subtle nuances of thought - and loses us in the process. Over all, James is the greater writer - based on the scope of his work and the incredible number of magnificent novels and, for me, above all on his novellas and stories; Wharton wrote a lot of novels, but probably "only" 4 great ones (1 is plenty - but this just by point of comparison), but I think at her best she's every bit as great a writer as James, funnier and more accessible, too. When I was in college she was nowhere to be found on the reading lists: women novelists in the canon back then were Austen, Woolf, perhaps Eliot, and that was it. Terrible.