Elliot's Reading - May 2023
Edith Wharton's The Reef, stories by Nancy Hale, and George Eliot's Romola
Edith Wharton’s follow-up to the much better known House of Mirth was The Reef (1912) and it’s surprising how seldom this one is read or discussed in its day and now - perhaps partly due to the title whose meaning and euphony still puzzle me. I found this narrative much more intense, personal, and comprehensible than in her previous work, largely I think because it’s a much narrow field of action - essentially only 4 or 5 characters and two locales. But also: It’s highly dramatic and sort of a rom-com cliffhanger as we are left at numerous reading points wondering what can he/she possbly say to respond to that or wriggle out off that situation. The plot, in brief: a dapper and too-slick and self-involved 30ish man (Owen) on his way to from England to France to meet prenuptial to his wife to be, a widowed woman (Anna) of his age and class; en route he receives a cryptic message from Anna to delay his arrival by at least a week (I don’t even remember why she sent this telegram); his voyage delayed, Owen meets in the station a much younger (and lower “caste”) woman (Sophie) and has with her a brief but intense affair. On arrival finally at Anna’s, he is shocked to see that Anna has hired Sophie as the au pair for her young daughter - and complications ensue. One way to judge this novel in context is to recognize how it was both ahead of its time (scandalous, even!) in depicting an obvious adulterer and philanderer as a somewhat sympathetic character as well as a slam at the social/sexual attitudes that seemed to protect the infelicity of his (andWharton’s) social class. That said, it’s also revealing how indirect Whart had to be in presenting this scandalous plot; the seduction scene occurs behind locked doors, and throughout the long and torturous courtship of Owen and Anna they seem to never had sex - they abide in the same household/estate but with complete sanctimony; how different life (and literature) is today.
The Library of America edition of Where the Light Falls, Selected stories of Nancy Hale, brings to the reading public, small though that may be, the work of a long-forgotten short-story writer, Nancy Hale, presenting a selection of her stories from 1934 to 1966, with many of her early stories published in so-called “women’s magazines” and later stories almost exclusively in the New Yorker. Her work has been left aside for a # of reasons: bias against female authors and themes, lack of a single unifying style, and, most of all, not in particular innovative or even emulated: She never really cared for, it seems, the one-ended “new” short fiction of Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and, in a later iteration, in which the New Yorker reigned supreme, of Cheever and Updike. Her stories tend to end with a sense of finality, not of further possibility; they’re truly short stories and not scenes from a novel-to-be. She’s generally limited in scope as well - the New England well-to-do - so that was another strike. But all that said, her stories are universally accessible, insightful, and emotional: stories of social prejudice, of misfits and outcasts albeit from a world of social privilege, and a vivid portrayal of the intricacies of class and taste. Her middle stories, I would say, are her best; later in life she focused on Americans in Europe, and there she doesn’t hold up well against her predecessor (James) or her contemporary (the also nearly forgotten Mavis Gallant). I’d recommend for starters maybe To the North (about racial and social discrimination in a New England coastal town), That Woman (about social pressure and ostracism, Those Are Brothers (war refugees), and Who Lived and Died Believing (love and fate, a young nurse), and then just keep reading.
George Eliot’s (aka MaryAnn Evans’s) 4th novel, Romola (1863) is for me anyway largely unreadable, and I had to turn it aside after + 100 pp w/ + another 800 to go. Not going. Unlike her previous works, including such greats as Adam Bede and Silas Marner, this one gets off to a rugged and jumpy start, as we follow the pathways of a shipwrecked sole survivor washed ashore in or near Florence/Firenzi ca 1492 (auspicious date of when not much is made). This wayward protagonist has several odd encounters over a span of a few days that provide us w/ a good deal of Florentine gossip about which I cared not at all; at some point the young man, who’d set out from Greece and knows a good deal about the Renaissance thinkers and artists, is led to the lair of an unsuccessful philosopher, now blind and unable to work, and whose daughter, the eponymous Romola, is his main aide. Obviously, something will develop between the two - but damn so little has happened up to this point, and it’s so difficult to follow all the strands and systems of the various thinkers who appear here (would they have been more distinct and notable in Eliot’s day?) that I throw up my hands, as I suspect many readers would as well. Think of the powerful opening chapters of SM; think of the dramatic conclusion to Mill on the Floss. And you will wonder as did I what happened to her narrative skill? One aspect stands out for me, however, in trying to make sense of how Eliot would have come to write this novel: Romola is obviously a first run at a character like Dorothea in GE’s masterpiece, Middlemarch: An attractive young woman enslaved to a father/father figure as she tries to help the hapless old man complete his life’s work, for which she will get no credit. Eliot’s 2nd passing at this theme is much more profound, as the philosopher is not the woman’s father, about which she’d have no choice, but is her husband, which brings up all the failure not only of him but of her - a moral, financial, and sexual failure that ruins their marriage and nearly ruins D’s life.
