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Monday 1 December 2008

Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Edith’s volcanic bossiness was magnificently fruitful during the first world war. She visited the Western Front again and again and sent back poignant reports to prick American consciences. She founded hospitals for soldiers with TB, convalescent homes for women and children, workshops for Belgian refugees. She was a combination of Florence Nightingale and Martha Gellhorn, intolerable, unstoppable and indispensable.

But in peacetime her autocratic carry-on did not make her easy to love. She had been lonely all her life but kept up a proud Jonesian front. Only with her dogs and now with her friends’ children did she unbend and show how much her childless, unhappy marriage had cost her. She was out of tune with the Jazz Age and out of touch with her fellow countrymen. When asked how she could possibly write about Americans so far from America, it was only half a joke when she replied, ‘I stay four weeks every year at the Hôtel Crillon in Paris, and I always listen to every- thing my American fellow-passengers say when I go up and down in the lift.’ Note, not elevator.

But I think it was on her fiction rather than her friends that her bossiness had its worst effect. Her novels and stories become too cut-and-dried, satires against a brittle age which share its brittleness. They never lose their bright gloss, are never less than readable, their twists always manage a satisfactory snap. But compared to, say, Chekhov or Alice Munro or Raymond Carver, her people do not really have a life of their own. At her best she is better than Saki, at her worst she is as mechanical as Roald Dahl. ‘My last page is always latent in my first,’ she boasted once. Too much so, unfortunately. She is at her best when at her most restrained, which is, oddly enough, when she is writing about people not of her own class whom she cannot so easily put in their place. Henry James admired the ‘kept-downness’ of stories like ‘Bunner Sisters’ and Ethan Frome, set among poor farmers in the Massachusetts backwoods.

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