732
PARTISAN REVIEW
dozen misprints or garbled transcriptions, not to mention a reference to
a non-existent letter of August 3, 1908, as well as a number of
inconsistencies; Wharton's
A Motor-Flight Through France
appears once
with its hyphen and three times without it, while the private diary that
she addressed to Fullerton is referred to variously as "The Life Apart" and
as
A Life
Apart.
One footnote identifies Chateaubriand as "author of
Le
Genie du christianisme"
-
hardly one of the works by which he would be
quickly recognizable to English-speaking readers - while another suggests
euphemistically that Colette "initially wrote in collaboration with
Willy,
the pseudonym of her first husband," who of course published as his
own name the novels that he essentially compelled his wife to write.
References to several friends and events, some of them quite cryptic,
are not explained - leaving unintelligible, for instance, Lubbock's rather
mysterious movements in 1913-14, or the brief and nasty swipe James
takes at "Vernon Lee" (identified only as "an English novelist whom
HJ
had known for thirty years"). Powers is not above the irrelevant insinua–
tion-why bother pointing out that Raymond Recouly, who
smoothed her path to the front in 1915, was "fourteen years EW's
junior?"-and he also might have reordered some of his editorial
priorities; he nowhere refers to Wharton's review of the Lubbock
edition ofJames's letters and twice identifies "The Younger Gener–
ation" without mentioning its remarks on her work, but he can fmd
room for as many as fifteen separate annotations of the nicknames of
Wharton's automobile.
The lacunae are fewer in the Lewises' volume, which manages to be
about as representative of its subject as one could reasonably hope or ex–
pect of a selection of less than one-tenth of the letters extant. A good
many of the myriad facets ofWharton's character are captured here with
considerable success, reflecting her wide and miscellaneous intellectual
in–
terests , her abiding concern with matters of form and aesthetic tech–
nique, as well as the inveterate sophistication and refinement re–
markable in a woman largely self-educated under circumstances, and
from within a particular social background, that would have perma–
nently stifled a less determined sensibility. Only one letter repro–
duced here precedes Wharton's publishing life, so that the Scribner's
volume documents only in retrospect the rather discouraging odds
against which Wharton must have struggled in finding her way into
expressiveness. The letters that she sent during the war, and the
moving and widely noted surprise of her long-lost correspondence
with the abominable Fullerton, convey a strong and sympathetic hu–
manity balancing other traits even less attractive than one might al–
ready have gathered from her essays and later fiction-her rather
alarming notions of race and ethnicity, for example, or the reflexive
contempt in which she held all forms of organized benevolence, or
the narrowing of her critical and artistic tastes, or the increasing
