At sixty, one either prepares to die or one faces life anew. In the latter event one knows, if one chances to be a writer, the heavenly and earthly certitudes ... and the escape from platitudes is final. Thus, for example, it is given to understand that a reputation will at least last for the remainder of a lifetime but that markets change. And, after all, as Mrs. Wharton once remarked, cleanliness and comfort are the two most expensive things on earth—comfort implying whatever degree of luxury is essential to a state of mind in which one can do work to purchase continued comfort. At sixty, though one may now and again bounce it high in the air, the real and right concern is to keep the ball a-rolling.... Let people think what they like and say what they like (and the follies of attack and fence are always equal), the unerring perception is directed toward the next thing that is to be written. One may exercise a choice from the very limited amount of material one has or can acquire; at sixty, it is too late to acquire much additional. Of course, a finely cultivated imagination in early years might come to the rescue with a second blooming; but suppose one’s imagination has always moved in the best society? No, it doesn’t do, it most decidedly doesn’t do to speculate any longer about anything; let others pretend what they like, there is a positive relief in the knowledge that one writes what one can when one has to—and be it good, bad, indifferent or astonishing the aim was an honest aim and the result achieved was, at least, intelligent.
iv
And what could place Mrs. Wharton in a clearer, finer light than just this situation of fact? What could be more in keeping with the two traditions that have bound her life?—the tradition of an older New York and the literary tradition of France, both strict and both congenial, both so severe as by their very classicism to give the greatest possible scope to personality. The New York of the Age of Innocence into which she was born, the literary Europe of the nineteenth century to which she so early attached herself—these were the ideal forcing-beds of a personality such as hers. You come upon her expressing in vigorous words her delighted enthusiasm for the first novel of William Gerhardi: “You not only make your people live, but move and grow—and that’s the very devil to achieve. Do, for all our sakes, keep it up!” There is no flabbiness about her. She is past the pitfall of fanaticism and safe beyond the quagmire of adulation. She does not need to practise the conventional literary dishonesties which close like traps upon novelists whose fame is on the make and who still have much to lose. She can say frankly: “There are moments—to me at least—in the greatest of Russian novels, and just as I feel the directing pressure of the novelist most strongly on my shoulder, when somehow I stumble, the path fades to a trail, the trail to a sand-heap, and hopelessly I perceive that the clue is gone, and that I no longer know which way the master is seeking to propel me, because his people are behaving as I never knew people to behave.” What heresy! Here we all are kneeling on the ground, touching foreheads and breathing the overpowering incense burnt before the shrine of Dostoievsky, and a voice is distinctly heard to remark that the literary deity is perhaps not as luminous as he should be! How many would dare such a remark, or, if they ventured it, would command from any of us the bravery of timid, relieved assents? Not many; scarcely a one.
She has not always been so free; who, indeed, is born to freedom? Saint Paul said he was, but a price had been paid formerly; it always is. Henry James, tormented to the end of his days by the fact that his books really didn’t sell, wasn’t able to pay the price. Thomas Hardy paid it at the cost of silence as a novelist after the reception accorded to Jude the Obscure. O. Henry, confronted with the heavy total, shivered and shuddered. Every man has his price, indeed, in quite another sense from what that saying was coined to convey; it is a price he must manage if he is to have the truth for himself or tell it about others.
Mrs. Wharton’s greatest good fortune has probably consisted, after all, in her realisation of this. Did she learn it in France, that country where truth lies at the bottom of a well ... and is not drawn up but used as a mirror? You can see the perception through nearly all of Mrs. Wharton’s work. In her long novel of eighteenth century Italy, The Valley of Decision, she is painting away with grand strokes on a magnificent canvas; she wants to find out if she really is suited to the execution of fictions like the Romola of that George Eliot she once read so attentively. Well, no; the result satisfies her that she isn’t. So then she goes on with those short stories in the writing of which she is so proficient, and, a few years later, produces The House of Mirth. The result is instructive; one might almost say it was destructive. Mrs. Wharton definitely learned that here was a kind of thing she could successfully do, in terms of money and popularity. But in other terms?
This was a question less easily answered. Two years after The House of Mirth came The Fruit of the Tree, with its highly interesting “problem” as to whether it can ever be right for a physician or nurse to accelerate and ease the death of a doomed patient. This has been called, by the Folletts, Mrs. Wharton’s “one lapse into artistic disintegration.” But Mrs. Wharton was not thinking of art, but of life. It had sharply come over her that the pursuit of art in one or another form of preciosity would land her where she didn’t wish to be landed. She might be, as was charged, the woman who of all women wrote most like a man; but she didn’t desire to write like some men. If she could have been Gustave Flaubert, perhaps ... but she saw no use in being George Moore or—Henry James? The whole contemporary French school left her unaffected; she read them, but experienced no wish to write like them; and in the midst of a freshly-running sea of Continental literature she became more than ever aware of her absolute and inescapable Americanism. In a way, it was a tragedy. To think that one could grow up in Europe, be, as it were, a part of Europe, definitely adopt Europe, and yet not to Europe belong! After steadily eyeing this situation for a while she reacted without either tears or temperament; and her reaction took the form of a short novel which is among the most perfect pieces of workmanship in English, the story of Ethan Frome. The “hard shapeliness” of that tale was the hard shapeliness of a full self-recognition, the so-called “sterility” was the result of an individual adjustment to the deepest personal need of her remarkable nature. What she would once have so wanted to give, she now knew she never could give to the world, and her awakened consciousness strove for the fit expression of this discovery in terms of an art of which she knew something. Ethan Frome, whatever else it may be (and it is many things, some strange and all beautiful) is the Magnificat of a woman in the hour of profoundest personal disappointment. Such works of fiction are especially rare, but, given the genuinely capable writer, given the one hour of a lifetime, the masterpiece is quite possible, yes, almost certain.
Ah! She had written it at last ... and she could afford to let it stand there to her credit while, with calmness and admirable fortitude she returned to the region of The House of Mirth and The Fruit of the Tree to add a study of divorce and parasitic marriage called The Custom of the Country. The resumption of the general warfare which has been the custom of Europe during odd generations for several centuries didn’t interfere with Summer (1917), wherein Mrs. Wharton tried to combine her established “material” with some of the qualities of Ethan Frome—an experiment only moderately a success. When she came later to write The Age of Innocence she was, to all appearances, in the happy position of desiring only to do a definite and modest thing, a first-rate story of very marketable quality, and then achieving something distinctly beyond that.
v
Mrs. Wharton’s new novel, A Son at the Front, is primarily a study of character and a portrayal of the relation between a father and his son. The father is Campton, a lame painter of some distinction living in Paris. His son, George, has just finished his education and the father is counting on a trip to Italy for the chance, at last, to get acquainted with the boy. Campton’s wife, Julia, after divorcing him, married a rich American named Brandt. The two also live in Paris and George has for some years been supported by the Brandts, spending part of his time with them. With this position when the novel opens, end of July, 1914, war intervenes, taking George from them because of his French birth. Campton and Brandt, drawn together by a common interest, pull what wires they can to secure a clerical appointment for George. The intensity of the war and initial reverses bring Campton to regret that George should have been willing to remain behind the lines. But word comes that the son is lying wounded in hospital; he has all the time been at the front but has concealed the fact in writing home. Brought back to Paris, an effort is made to keep him there, a shallow little married woman of George’s acquaintance lending what help she can; the huge compulsion of the war is too great, however, and on his return to the front George is again wounded, this time fatally. He lives to hear that America is at last in the conflict and to know that Campton and the rest have an undivided aim while the war lasts. When George dies, the others, feeling they have lost everything except the hope of victory, bend themselves to help toward that with such courage as they have left.
The record of wartime Paris, the shift of ideals and the gradual sacrifice of all lesser purposes, the resolution of smaller loyalties in a larger, the intimacy of personal emotions—these, of course, are the true substance of Mrs. Wharton’s story.