EDITH WHARTON'S NEW YORKS
0417
Older and shriller, she denounced the vulgarity that she was now
beginning to find in everything, judging America, the country in her
eyes most responsible, by the standards of Riviera expatriates whom
she did not even know.
The vulgarity on which she had declared war ended by over–
whelming her novels. Taste, the chosen guide of her later years,
went back on her. In the final dissolution, as with the Barts and
Rosedales, conflict is again lost
in
merger. The very titles of the later
books betray the drop of her standards; they are flat and ugly:
Human Nature, The Mother's R ecompense, Twilight Sleep, The
Glimpses oj the Moon.
The caricature of American life becomes
grotesque. The towns are given names like Delos, Aeschylus, Lohen–
grin or H alleluja, and the characters speak an anglicized dialect
full of such terms as "Hang it!", "Chuck it! " , "He's a jolly chap"
and "A fellow needs...." The town slogan of Euphoria in
Hudson
River Bracketed
is "Me for the front row." And the Amer–
ican face! How it haunts her! It is "as unexpressive as a football";
it might have been made by "a manufacturer of sporting goods." Its
sameness encompasses her "with its innocent uniformity." How many
of such faces would it take "to make up a single individuality"? And,
ironically enough, as her indignation mounts her style loses its old
precision and begins to take on the slickness of a popular magazine
story. Compare, for example, these two descriptions of a lady on the
threshold of a European hotel. The first is from
M adame de Tre),mes,
written in 1907, one of her Jamesian passages, but highly polished:
The mere fact of her having forgotten to draw on her gloves as
they were descending in the hotel lift from his mother's drawing room
was, in this connection, charged with significance to Durham. She
was the kind of woman who always presents herself to the mind's eye
as completely equipped, as made of exquisitely cared for and finely
related details; and that the heat of her parting with his family should
have left her unconscious that she was emerging gloveless into Paris
seemed, on the whole, to speak hopefully for Durham's future opinion of
the city. Even now, he could detect a certain confusion, a desire to
draw breath and catch up with her life, in the way she dawdled over
the last buttons in the dimness of the porte-cochere, while her footman,
outside, hung on her retarded signal.
