Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on Discovering Happiness Amid Winter)

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning American fiction writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), Ethan Frome (1909)

The image accompanying this post shows Ruth Gordon and Raymond Massey as the desperate lovers grabbing for a moment of happiness in a desolate Berkshire village (appropriately named Starkfield) in the 1936 Broadway adaptation of Ethan Frome.

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on the Hypocrisy of the Very Rich)

“He stood in the doorway, studying the petty maneuvers of the women and the resigned amenities of their partners. Was it possible that these were his friends?... Who were they, that they should sit in judgment on him?

“The bald man with the globular stomach, who stood at Mrs. Gildermere's elbow surveying the dancers, was old Boylston, who had made his pile in wrecking railroads; the smooth chap with glazed eyes, at whom a pretty girl smiled up so confidingly, was Collerton, the political lawyer, who had been mixed up to his own advantage in an ugly lobbying transaction; near him stood Brice Lyndham, whose recent failure had ruined his friends and associates, but had not visibly affected the welfare of his large and expensive family. The slim fellow dancing with Miss Gildermere was Alec Vance, who lived on a salary of five thousand a year, but whose wife was such a good manager that they kept a brougham and victoria and always put in their season at Newport and their spring trip to Europe. The little ferret-faced youth in the corner was Regie Colby, who wrote the Entre-Nous paragraphs in the Social Searchlight: the women were charming to him and he got all the financial tips he wanted from their husbands and fathers.”—American novelist and short-story writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), “A Cup of Cold Water,” first published in The Greater Inclination (1899), republished in The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton, Vol 1. 1891-1910, edited by Maureen Howard (2001)

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on ‘The Only Way Not to Think About Money’)

“The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning American fiction writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), The House of Mirth (1905)

The image accompanying this post comes from the very fine 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s classic novel, showing heroine Lily Bart (played by Gillian Anderson) with the confidante she shares this line with about money, the middle-class lawyer Lawrence Selden (played by Eric Stoltz).

This Day in Film History (Scorsese’s ‘Age of Innocence’ Harks Back to Golden Age of Period Drama)

Sept. 17, 1993— The Age of Innocence, an adaptation of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Edith Wharton, opened to general release in New York, on its way to disappointment both at the box office and at the Academy Awards.

But in the three decades since, this piercing examination of conscience and conformity versus the promise of freedom and self-fulfillment has become celebrated as an example of bravura cinema, as well as representing a high point in the careers of its three principal actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder.

The 30^th anniversary of this plush period drama coincides with the release this fall of Killers of the Flower Moon, the latest entry in the half-century career of Innocence director Martin Scorsese, as well as Season 2 of The Gilded Age, the HBO series that occurs in the “Old New York” milieu that Wharton chronicled with such irony and insight.

All of this provides an opportunity to examine how The Age of Innocence relates to and departs from Scorsese’s larger work; why its initial reception fell short of expectations; and why it nevertheless repays repeated viewings.

Underappreciated at the time

Coming off the acclaimed Goodfellas, Scorsese had now turned to the costume drama genre that had long interested him. Friend Jay Cocks had been urging Scorsese to see this as next project for nearly a decade, but it was only after the controversy over the alleged “blasphemy” of The Last Temptation of Christ had died down that the director decided to collaborate with Cocks on the script.

But the choice puzzled and mystified fans that were awaiting another in his line of urban dramas often laced with violence and profanity, dating back to Mean Streets and Taxi Driver in the Seventies. (They would have to wait another two years to get what they wanted: Casino.)

The reception might have been different if, as planned, the movie had debuted in the fall of 1992, when its principal competition at the Academy Awards would have been Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

But it was held back by over a year to allow Scorsese more time to edit, so that what would have been prestige Oscar bait would now enter awards season facing Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List.

In an interview for a Criterion Collection DVD from2018, Scorsese said that Vincent Canby’s negative review in The New York Times “killed” The Age of Innocence. That is probably overstating matters.

Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy was closer to the mark in predicting, “For sophisticated viewers with a taste for literary adaptations and visits to the past, there is a great deal here to savor…But it is difficult to picture general audiences warming up to these representatives of the old ruling class.”

Even the opening scene brings audiences face to face with this situation: a sequence from Gounod’s opera Faust that segues into a sweeping reaction shot of the audience.

It sets up that the upper-crust spectators are less interested in the onstage spectacle than the drama in the seats: the presence of Countess Ellen Olenska, a scandal-shadowed member of the socially prominent Mingott family. It also foreshadows the doomed relationship that will eventually develop between Ellen and lawyer Newland Archer.

Yet casual viewers, unfamiliar with the Faust source material, are unlikely to grasp the symbolism. Moreover, as the scene lingers for a couple of minutes without subtitles, it tests viewer attention and patience from the start.

Moreover, Wharton’s characters speak in code—approaching sensitive subjects but using silences and facial expressions fill in the gaps left by words they dare not utter.

The similarities between Gilded Age aristocrats and Mafia gangsters

Viewers taking in this atmosphere of physical opulence and verbal repression, then, are likely to be astonished by Scorsese’s claim that this was “the most violent film I ever made.” What could he possibly mean by this?

The best answer might come in one of the film’s best-remembered set pieces: a dinner at which Archer, moving toward breaking away from his affectionate but passionless marriage to the judgmental, unimaginative conformist May, finds his path blocked by the entire mass of aristocratic New York.

Like Goodfellas’ Tommy DeVito finding too late that his initiation as a Mafia “made man” will not in fact transpire, Archer discovers a cadre that will punish him for defying its code, with the camera sweeping past the guests and their sumptuous even as narrator Joanne Woodward intones Wharton’s words:

Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.

The images, in combination with the foregoing description, eliminate the need to include onscreen this Wharton passage that may have capped the resemblance between the genteel aristocrats and the crude gangsters of Goodfellas:

It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.

A cinematic feast

This dinner scene is an example of how Scorsese sought visual and aural counterparts to Wharton’s verbal splendor. The aural component was supplied by Woodward’s voiceover narration and a memorable, Brahms-influenced soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein, while the visuals came through Gabriella Pescucci’s Oscar-winning costume design and Dante Ferretti’s production design.

In focusing on the themes of money and marriage in Victorian Age, Scorsese had one obvious antecedent: William Wyler’s The Heiress. In a February 1994 interview with Ian Christie of Sight and Sound Magazine, Scorsese acknowledged that the 1949 adaptation of the Broadway play of the same name and its source material, Henry James’ Washington Square, “made a strong impression on me as a child.”

Yet, though he admitted that it still “holds up well,” he criticized it for being “theatrical,” with a “three-act” structure—and “no narration, no montages, no flashbacks or flashes forward and no visual interpolations such as letters”—all devices he employed in The Age of Innocence.

These were not the only methods that helped make this one of Scorsese’s most controlled movies: Vibrant colors, dissolves, transitions, and similar visual motifs echo and reinforce each other, or subtly reinforce characterizations:

*Fireplace scenes building slowly in intensity parallel the growing emotional intimacy of Archer and Ellen;

*Archer bangs a pen violently at one point to force the ink out—encapsulating his frustration with bottled-up social norms;

*Demure young May is dressed early on in virginal white, while her more unconventional, passionate older cousin Ellen is dressed in red;

*And one scene that Scorsese made sure to carry over from the book depicted May as skilled at archery—a sly representation of how she will hit her target, Archer himself.

Unlike The Gilded Age, which in its first season leaned heavily on New York stage actors, Scorsese relied heavily on British actors.

Scorsese and Cocks have explained that such casting made sense, as New York aristocrats of the Victorian Era still retained strong verbal influences from their English ancestors. I think the choice also might derive from a belief that British actors came with appreciation for texts and a verbal dexterity springing from their intensive stage training.

Even so, to be fair, it’s hard to argue with what Lewis, Richard E. Grant, Alec McCowen, Michael Gough, Geraldine Chaplin, Stuart Wilson, Siân Phillips, and Miriam Margolyes did with their dialogue.

I think that The Age of Innocence is one of Scorsese’s overlooked masterpieces. Far more than most movies, it yields new insights each time viewed to go with scenes that will never fade from the memory.

Only the third time around, for instance, did I notice that a portrait of a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Woodward hangs on the wall in one scene. And only on this latest viewing did I pick up on how the camera, having focused for several minutes on the dogs climbing over Miriam Margolyes as Mrs. Mingott, mocks her further by moving towards other objects in the room: paintings, drawings, and sculptures featuring even more dogs.

At the same time, fans like me recall how Archer’s unbuttoning of Ellen’s glove in a horsedrawn carriage leads to a passionate encounter, or how the nimbus of light in which he beholds Ellen from a distance as he waits for a sailboat to pass a lighthouse at sunset.

Enhancing appreciation of Wharton

I am also grateful that Scorsese’s adaptation has fostered renewed appreciation of Wharton, one of my favorite writers, after an extended period of popular neglect.

In the 1920s and 1930s she had enjoyed significant attention, not only in sales but also in royalties from theatrical and cinematic adaptations. The Age of Innocence itself became a 1928 Broadway vehicle for Katherine Cornell, as well as a 1924 silent film (now lost) and a 1934 talkie starring John Boles as Archer, Julia Haydon as May and the incomparable Irene Dunne as Ellen.

Given the reverence accorded Scorsese and his greater faithfulness to the source material (approximately an hour longer than the Dunne version), this adaptation was not only more high-profile than these earlier efforts, but more successful than Hollywood’s other attempts to explore Wharton in the 1990s.

The Children (1990), with Kim Novak and Ben Kingsley, took on one of the novelist’s bestselling but less critically acclaimed works of the 1920s, and Ethan Frome (1993) featured Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette in Wharton’s tale of thwarted romance in the Berkshires. The decade closed with Gillian Anderson movingly depicting doomed Gilded Age beauty Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (2000).

In November, Apple TV+ will begin a series based on Wharton’s The Buccaneers, a novel completed several decades after her death in 1937 by Marion Mainwaring. Although Sofia Coppola’s attempt to develop another Wharton novel, The Custom of the Country, has temporarily hit a roadblock, there is always the hope that this biting satire will also find its audience.

Nevertheless, it would be difficult for any of these past, present, or future adaptations to match the art, depth of feeling, and appreciation for the source material shown by Scorsese’s Age of Innocence.

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on Starved Imaginations in Her New York Childhood)

“I have often sighed, in looking back at my childhood, to think how pitiful a provision was made for the life of the imagination behind those uniform brownstone façades, and then have concluded that since, for reasons which escape us, the creative mind thrives best on a reduced diet, I probably had the fare best suited to me. But this is not to say that the average well-to-do New Yorker of my childhood was not starved for a sight of the high gods. Beauty, passion, and danger were automatically excluded from his life (for the men were almost as starved as the women); and the average human being deprived of air from the heights is likely to produce other lives equally starved—which was what happened in old New York, where the tepid sameness of the moral atmosphere resulted in a prolonged immaturity of mind."—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937), “A Little Girl’s New York,” Harper’s Magazine, March 1938

Photo of the Day: View From Terrace, Edith Wharton’s ‘The Mount,’ Lenox MA

Nothing about Edith Wharton ever feels old and tired for me—not her luminous fiction, not the details of her life, and not her the home in which she lived toward the start of the 20^th century, The Mount in Lenox, MA.

While here in this beautiful estate, Wharton wrote the first books that secured her reputation, The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome.

But tonight on TCM, as I watched Martin Scorsese’s 1993 meticulously filmed adaptation of her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, it was easier to imagine the restless aristocrats played by Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder taking tea inside this beautiful home, gathering in its cozy library to puzzle out their romantic destinies—or, in the photo I took here while on vacation in this Berkshire landmark in late August 2017, strolling about in the garden just off the back terrace, perhaps in a crowd brought together for a wedding or archery contest, but isolated by their powerlessness to reach their elusive country of personal freedom.

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on New Year’s Day in the 1870s)

“Even then fashion moved quickly in New York, and my infantile memory barely reached back to the time when Grandmamma, in lace lappets and creaking ‘moire,’ used to receive on New Year’s day, supported by her handsome married daughters. As for old Sillerton Jackson, who, once a social custom had dropped into disuse, always affected never to observe it, he stoutly maintained that the New Year’s ceremonial had never been taken seriously except among families of Dutch descent, and that that was why Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had clung to it, in a reluctant half-apologetic way, long after her friends had closed their doors on the first of January, and the date had been chosen for those out-of-town parties which are so often used as a pretext for absence when the unfashionable are celebrating their rites.” – American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937), “New Year’s Day,” in Old New York (1924) 

As we turn the page on another year and even an entire era in American life, it’s useful to look back and see how others from earlier times marked turning points. Few such writers were more acute in their observation than Edith Wharton, one of my favorite authors. (And right here is a plug for The Mount, her Berkshire mansion, which, like her most famous heroine, Lily Bart of The House of Mirth, found itself in considerable financial distress this past year—and which could use all the visitors and financial support it can get.) 

As I was researching this post, I was thrilled to find that there’s a delightful blog about the author—and that its December 27, 2008 post highlights a New York Times article about her birthplace at West 23rd St., a five-story structure that was converted to commercial use some time ago and is now a Starbucks.

When she wrote The House of Mirth in 1905, Wharton was scathing in depicting the constrictive upper-crust society from which she sprang. With the distance provided by a cataclysmic world war and a move across the Atlantic to France, however, her attitude had evolved into something more complex. Sure, she could still decry, in The Age of Innocence (1920), “the old New York way of taking life 'without effusion of blood’,” but, like protagonist Newland Archer, she felt out of place in the rough-and-tumble world that replaced it. 

Wharton’s original proposed title for this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—the first ever won by a woman, incidentally—was Old New York, but her publisher rejected it. But once she had the bit between her teeth, she was not ready to let go so easily. So she used it for her 1924 quartet of novellas spanning from the 1840s to 1870s. 

“New Year’s Day,” the last novella in the group, has not won the critical acclaim of two others, “False Dawn” and “The Old Maid” (the latter was made into an unjustly neglected 1939 Bette Davis-Miriam Hopkins film). Still, the Wharton style—elegant, yet clear as a country brook—is here, along with a lightly amused attitude toward social dinosaurs such as Sillerton Jackson. 

In reflecting on Old New York, the closest counterpart to it that I could come up with was, believe it or not, John O’Hara’s Sermons and Soda-Water (1960), another novella collection set in what seemed to the author like an increasingly distant past. 

True, there’s the kind of difference you’d expect between a woman to the manor born, coming from a world in which Catholics and Jews were pointedly excluded, and a lapsed Irish-Catholic who desperately aspired to the society of the wealthy but felt excluded by his ethnicity from ever really belonging to it. 

But both Wharton and O’Hara wrote their books in the later part of midlife, when they could see the end coming not just for themselves but for their world, and their worldviews had evolved into something that veered between nostalgia and conservatism. That left them all the more resolved to record not just the details of that world—say, how little kids chased after fire engines, for Wharton, or the Gershwin tunes one might hear at a country club, for O’Hara—but the social mores of this American aristocracy. "I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it," O’Hara wrote a few years later in the foreword to a collection of short stories, The Horse Knows the Way.

Both authors were also obsessed with affairs of the heart and with how marriages endure—or fracture. The best novella in Sermons and Soda-Water, “Imagine Kissing Pete,” is about a bad marriage that, against all odds, survives and even, to an extent, thrives. “New Year’s Day” concerns an adulterous liaison that the narrator, as a boy, discovers in a hotel across the street from his 23rd Street brownstone; about the adult disapproval that clues him into the fact that a major transgression, a defiance of the social order, has taken place; and about how the beautiful woman at the center of the scandal lives out the rest of her life. 

The Fifth Avenue hotel where the affair occurs is scorned by New York aristocrats, chiefly because of the unrefined, overdressed partygoers who congregate there for the holiday. Little do they know that it’s this hoi polloi, not themselves, who represent the wave of the future in Gotham.

Flashback, October 1920: Lewis’ ‘Main Street’ Satirizes Small-Town Life

When Harcourt, Brace & Company published the sixth novel by Sinclair Lewis in late October 1920, it hoped for sales of 25,000. But the novel’s reception by critics and readers exceeded even the publisher’s fondest expectations. Buoyed by widespread attention arising from outrage over its attack on small-town life, Main Street sold 180,000 copies within the first six months of 1921 and narrowly missed being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The novel lifted Lewis—a janitor at Upton Sinclair’s utopian socialist community, Helicon Hall, in Englewood, NJ, 14 years before, and for the past five years author of five novels that, he said, were “dead before the ink was dry”—into the front ranks of American literature. It began a decade that represented his creative zenith, securing for him the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first time that an American had received this honor.

The qualities on display in Main Street—especially, a realistic depiction of everyday life backed by extensive research, and an uncanny “ear” for dialogue—became the hallmarks of Lewis’ style. But much of the attention accorded the novel derived from his willingness to attack a sacred cow—a tendency that made him a favorite of intellectuals and skeptics such as H.L. Mencken but also the bane of more tradition-bound figures such as Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler.

Since the founding of the republic, small-town/rural life had been regarded as an antidote to the multiple evils perceived in cities. In contrast, Lewis—who had loathed his childhood in Sauk Centre, Minn.—depicted fictional Gopher Prairie as a generator of vapidity and conformity. It is entirely too set complacent, provincial, even bigoted to be moved when Carol Kennicott, the idealistic young wife of the town doctor, decides to raise its cultural awareness. Gopher Prairie residents, he noted acidly, were:

“staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word ‘dude’ is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always peddlers or pants-makers.”

The three-judge panel to select the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was so taken with Lewis’ devastating satire that they recommended him for the award. Butler’s reversal of that decision and present the award instead to The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton was greeted with howls of protest (as was the panel’s decision two years later to overlook Lewis again in favor of Willa Cather’s One of Ours).

Contemporary critics are more likely than those of a century ago to praise Wharton’s anatomization of New York’s 1870s aristocracy: Feminist scholarship has opened many eyes to the precarious position of women years ago, and Wharton’s graceful prose style has worn better than Lewis’ blunter presentation.

In the end, much of this reappraisal is ironic: though the social circles examined by Lewis and Wharton could scarcely be more different, they both feature protagonists who, restlessly eyeing their dutiful but dull romantic partners, are easily maneuvered into compromise and defeat by their community. (Wharton herself felt that, in praising her book’s “wholesome” character, Butler had fundamentally her artistic purpose.)

Since the 2016 Presidential campaign, interest has peaked in a dystopian 1935 novel of Lewis’: It Can’t Happen Here.  Already, the novelist’s alcoholism was undermining his creative power. But, for one brief moment, the specter of European-style Fascism being imposed on the U.S. roused Lewis to something like a return to the creative form he enjoyed with Main Street.

Photo of the Day: Garden at Edith Wharton’s Estate, Lenox, MA

On other occasions, I have blogged about Edith Wharton and the Berkshire summer residence in which she lived at the start of the 20^th century, The Mount. But a word—and this photo, which I took on an August 2017 visit—about the gardens at her estate might be appropriate.

Much like her home, Wharton conceived of her gardens as being harmonious and perfectly proportioned. She was a woman with very decided ideas of what she wanted, and she designed herself the formal gardens on the south and east of her home, based on her study of European landscape design. She was assisted in this effort by her niece, Beatrix Jones Farrand, who, by the time of her death in 1959 had established herself at the forefront of American landscape architecture.

Photo of the Day: Italian Garden, The Mount, Lenox MA

Over the last three decades, I have visited the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts on several occasions. On each vacation, I stop at The Mount, the turn-of-the-century country home of novelist Edith Wharton. Each time, I find something new to appreciate. 

Sometimes it’s because of the different perspectives of the various guides to the home. Sometimes, as part of the ongoing restoration of the place, it’s because some new facet of this pioneering female fiction writer has been discovered.
 

But it’s hard to get away from the beauty of the whole place, created under the watchful, demanding eye of Ms. Wharton. The architecture of the building itself if a marvel of symmetry and sleight-of-hand.

But outside, in the back, the gardens convey their own magic. Indeed, Wharton herself saw them as a series of outdoor rooms, designed to harmonize with the house itself.

The novelist’s niece, Beatrix Jones Farrand, a self-styled "landscape gardener," signed up to make the property harmonize with her aunt’s vision of what a natural backdrop should be. In this, she admirably succeeded.

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on “The Value of Books’)

“What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader's mind just as it left the writer's -- without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought -- it has been read to no purpose…. The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity—their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought. Where, from one cause or the other, this reciprocal adaptability is lacking, there can be no real intercourse between book and reader. In this sense it may be said hat there is no abstract standard of values in literature: the greatest books ever written are worth to each reader only what he can get out of them. The best books are those from which the best readers have been able to extract the greatest amount of thought of the highest quality; but it is generally from these books that the poor reader gets least.”—American novelist and short-story writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), “The Vice of Reading,” in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, edited by Frederick Wegener (1996)

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on a Special Kind of Friend)

“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.” —American fiction writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), A Backward Glance (1934)