Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on the Evil Rich)

“In spite of the balmy temperature and complicated conveniences of Faxon's bedroom, the injunction [I.e., ‘Make yourself at home‘] was not easy to obey. It was wonderful luck to have found a night's shelter under the opulent roof of Overdale, and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full. But the place, for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and unwelcoming. He couldn't have said why, and could only suppose that Mr. Lavington's intense personality— intensely negative, but intense all the same— must, in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling. Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry, more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold, and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the prospect of perpetually treading other people's stairs.”—Edith Wharton, “The Triumph of Night” (1916)

Mention “winter” and “Edith Wharton” in the same sentence and the immediate association is with her classic novel, Ethan Frome. This year being the centennial of that marvelous tale of fate and thwarted love in the Berkshires, don’t be surprised if I post something about it before 2011 draws to a close.

But for me, Wharton has become linked with winter not just through this tragedy, but through her ghost stories. Brought together in the compact but choice collection The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, they might not have been as long, various, or tantalizingly ambiguous as those of friend and mentor Henry James, but to me, they surpass “The Master” in their evocation of atmosphere and, for want of a better phrase, the chill factor--and none more so than “The Triumph of Night” (even the title haunts me).

From its beginning, this tale is about imbalance and psychological disorientation. George Faxon has been hired as a secretary for a wealthy New Hampshire woman, but she’s forgotten about his arrival. His surmise has been acquired “through long experience,” suggesting vulnerability at the hands of the rich. His plight is worsened by exposure to weather so brutal that it almost becomes a character in its own right. (“Dark, searching and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts.”)

He’s seemingly rescued from this situation by Frank Reiner, who brings him to the home of his uncle, captain of industry John Lavington. But, as seen in the passage above, Lavington’s mansion is unsettling. Faxon simply can’t get a handle on it (he “couldn‘t have said why”)--especially the presence of a figure that mysteriously materializes and disappears in Lavington’s study with nobody else even noticing him.

By the time the night is through, Faxon realizes that this other visitor, focusing “eyes of deadly menace” on the guileless Reiner, is Lavington’s doppelganger, or double.

Like a New England Hamlet, Faxon bemoans his fate as the only person who, witnessing an apparition, is given the responsibility to prevent evil (“he, the one weaponless and defenceless spectator, the one whom none of the others would believe or understand if he attempted to reveal what he knew--he alone had been singled out as the victim of this dreadful initiation”). His panicked flight leads to tragedy, a breakdown and the lasting recognition that “he might have broken the spell of iniquity” had he acted immediately.

“The Triumph of Night” belongs to a group of stories written around 1910 that emphasize male characters; this and two others, “Afterward” and “The Eyes,” are ghost stories. A decade later, she would write of this milieu in which she grew up with increasing nostalgia, but at this point she left no doubt that much of the wealth of the Northeast aristocracy was acquired through fraud. “The Triumph of Night,” then, becomes not just a tale of the supernatural but also a moral consideration, an examination of the desperate and evil lengths to which the rich will go to prevent their own ruin.

Tales of the supernatural need not be simply gory fright fests; they can also memorably evoke the sorrows and evils created by our most compelling everyday concerns. That includes the world of work and finance.

It amazes me that, three years after the Wall Street collapse, no film of the supernatural has considered these events. (Even the skullduggery of 1980s Wall Street, far milder in effect than the one with such explosive consequences in 2008, eventually inspired the Oscar-winning script for Ghost.) As for supernatural fiction, it feels more genre-dominated than ever, less likely to be taken up by masters of mainstream literary fiction such as Wharton, who, with subtlety and concision, knew how to suggest evil all the more terrifying for being initially immaterial.