EDITH WHARTON ' S NEW YO R KS
419
It
took more than ignorance to produce the clumsy satire of this
passage. It took resentment, resentment at the formlessness of a
world that had repudiated the very formalities which she had once
satirized.
In 1937, the year in which she died, Mrs. Wharton was work–
ing on a novel that shows a brief, renewed interest in the New York
of her childhood from which she drew
The Age of Innocence.
This
is the posthumously published fragment,
The Buccaneers,
the unfin–
ished story of three American girls in the 'seventies who make bril–
liant English marriages and become the envy of a New York which
had scorned them. The book has more life than its immediate pre–
decessors, but on its very opening page we find its author still laying
on satire at the expense of America with the now customary trowel.
She refers to certain tall white columns on the portico of the Grand
Union Hotel in Saratoga which "so often reminded cultured travelers
of the Parthenon at Athens (Greece)."
Guy Thwarte in this unfinished tale is the thread that links it
with so many of its predecessors. Although English, he is still the
Wharton hero, tall and good-looking, a Gibson man, and, to the
amazement of his family, though he has a "decent reputation about
women" and is a "brilliant point-to-point rider," he "messes about"
with poetry and painting. Like French classic heroes the Wharton
men keep their action off stage. Guy consents to dip into commerce,
but only in foreign climes. He disappears to Brazil for four years
and returns a millionaire, but the "dark, rich stormy years of his
exile" lie "like a raging channel between
himself
and his old life."
The notes at the end of the book show that he was fated to elope
with the Duchess of Tintagel; it was to be the triumph of "love, deep
and abiding love." One cannot feel ,after this any keen regret that
the story was never finished . Lily Bart's love for Lawrence Selden is
the one hollow note of
The House of Mirth.
Undine Spragg in
The Custom of the Country
is, of course, incapable of love. Love in
The Age of Inno cence
is stifled by the characters themselves. Mrs.
Wharton at her best was an analyst of the paralysis that attends failure
in the market place and of the coarseness that attends success. Hers
was not a world where romance was apt to flourish.
