Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 10, 1997 | by James W. Tuttleton

Edith Wharton is best known for her ever-popular (nd splendidly filmed) novels of manners, including The Age of Innocence. But in her own time (she lived from 1862 to 1937), Wharton attained minor celebrity as a penetrating (and at times irascible) essayist and critic of the arts and literature.

Most of her nonfiction pieces were occasional and scattered, and she never made a serious effort to collect or recycle her essays -- with the exception of The Writing of Fiction, a handbook for aspiring writers, and sections of her autobiography, A Backward Glance.

Now, thanks to the industry of Frederick Wegener, a professor of English at Fordham University in New York, we have Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (Princeton, 312 pp), some 45 reviews and articles, prefaces and introductions, tributes and memoirs spanning the period from 1896 to 1934. Its an impressive collection. Some of these pieces have eluded all of Wharton's previous bibliobgraphers; others, originally French, have never been translated into English.

Wharton wrote about George Eliot, George Cabot Lodge, Marcel Proust, and her Scribner editor William Crary Brownell, among others. She reflected on subjects from the great American novel to "Permanent Values in Fiction." Students of social history and of literature both will value her retrospective "A Little Girl's New York" and the introductions to her novels.

That she produced such a body of criticism at all is testimony to Wharton's triumph over her anxieties. "The truth is," she told Brownell, "my irrepressible desire to write critical articles is equaled only by my cowardice and incapacity when I sit down to the task. Each time I swear, Never again!"

To write at all, to cultivate a literary career with its attendant publicity, was scandalous to her wealthy family and their conservative friends. Still, Wharton wrote so many books during the course of four decades -- more than 40 volumes of fiction, poetry, travelogues, gardening, autobiography, interior design, social history -- its a wonder she had time for criticism. Influenced by the argument of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, however, she strove to know the best of art and thought in her time, and she did not waver before the critical task of sharp comparison and aesthetic evaluation.

Wegener properly stresses the many remarks in these reviews and essays that suggest Wharton held an organic view of the novel: "It is only by viewing the novel as an organic whole, by considering its form and function as one, that the critic can properly estimate its details of style and construction." If such language is reminiscent of Henry James, it must be remembered that she learned much from the master, to whom her "Henry James in His Letters" is a graceful tribute.

Wharton also shared James, strong sense of the inadequacy of American society in nourishing the novelist of manners. Both had become expatriates intent on finding the cultural conditions that best would serve the artist. "Other things being equal," she remarked in 1927, "nothing can alter the fact that a `great argument' will give a better result than the perpetual chronicling of small beer. And the conditions of modern life in America, so far from being productive of great arguments, seem almost purposely contrived to eliminate them."

Such apercus made her appear Eurocentric and unpatriotic to some of her contemporaries, but her social America and her satirical novels -- The Custom of the Country, The Glimpses of the Moon and Twilight Sleep among them -- remain valuable criticisms of American popular culture in the early years of this century.

Some of Wharton's best literary criticism appeared in her fiction -- particularly in Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive. The two novels dissect the creative life and the literary racket -- having at hack writers, agents, editors publishers, reviewers and prize committees. She also blasts away at the artistic weaknesses of the naturalistic tranche de vie novel, Wolfean autobiographical effusion and incoherent Joycean stream-of-consciousness. Wharton insisted on the centrality of the novel of character focused on the conflict between the individual appetite and the social will. "Manners," says literary critic George Frenside, a fictional character in Hudson River Bracketed: "are your true material, after all."

Like most creative writers, then, Wharton formalizes her own fictional practice. But it is done here with such literary style and intellectual distinction that even Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce would have been charmed.

James W. Tuttleton is professor of English at New York University.