Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  (The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II, ed. Percy Lubbock [1920])

  Apex City is the origin of Undine Spragg, her parents, and of her both first and final spouse, Elmer Moffatt, pride both of Kansas and of Wall Street. I suggest that Henry James here is the most useful critic that The Reef has attracted. He acutely notes of Anna, “I’m not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation.” That is the center of Anna’s vacillating consciousness, at once drawing her to George Darrow and spinning her away from him. James also helps us to appreciate Wharton’s movement from her initial depiction of Darrow in his affair with Sophy Viner to: “we see him almost only as she sees him—which gives our attention a different sort of work to do; yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method.” In a sense, we lose Darrow’s verity to Anna’s internalization of him, yet James is again accurate in judging this “a triumph of your method.”

  That the method, despite antecedents in George Eliot and in James himself, indeed is newly born in Wharton prompts a subtle and persuasive instance of that return of the precursors as if they were descendants that I once termed apophrades, the Athenian unlucky day of the dead, in which they returned to inhabit their former houses:

  There used to be little notes in you that were like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot—the echo of much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding through. But now you are like a lost and recovered “ancient” whom she might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in her texture some weaker reflection were to show.

  In this charming compliment, Wharton has mothered (if that is the right word) George Eliot and Henry James. Aesthetic judgment, however, must admit that the moral splendor of George Eliot and the vibrant indirectness of Henry James far surpass anything in Wharton. If you mass all of Wharton’s fictions together, you get a larger impression than any single work provides. I may be moved by my own belatedness in coming upon The Reef, though it lingers in my speculations more even than The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence. I cannot fully grasp Anna’s interminable hesitations, rejections, joyous reacceptances of George Darrow’s love and desire to marry her. Something more has to be involved than her conventional shock at the brief affair between Darrow and Sophy Viner, and her subsequent flarings of sexual jealousy. Both Sophy and Darrow have told her the full truth, that for Sophy it was indeed love, and for Darrow a mixed act of kindness and self-indulgence.

  I cannot pretend to puzzle Anna out. She is somehow both true gold and a labyrinth. Is she as close to a self-portrait as Wharton would permit herself in a narrative fiction? The shadow of Walter Berry, whose love for Wharton declined sexual expression, falls over Darrow as it does over Newland Archer and Lawrence Selden.

  It would be grotesque to find a feminist in Edith Wharton. And yet few other novelists so dramatize the double standard that patriarchy so long maintained against the sexual fulfillment of women. It does not occur to Darrow to think how he would react if Anna had gone through an affair after the death of her husband. Doubtless he would flee. Anna, though tempted, does not take flight. After much agony, she seems to accept marrying George Darrow, but Wharton gives us no certainty. In the weird final scene of The Reef, Anna goes in search of Sophy, who has departed for India, and finds instead the blowsy sister of Sophy, Laura, who has a steady succession of husbands and lovers. In some shock, Anna departs, presumably to go back to Darrow and her impending marriage.

  It is unclear, after this depressing episode, what we are to assume will happen. Most likely, the emotionally exhausted Anna will be content with Darrow and live a better life. Yet there are too many shadows. Wharton declines to tell us what lies beyond; perhaps she does not know. This is the last exchange between them that Wharton gives us:

  “Anna—Anna!”

  “Yes; I want to know now: to know everything. Perhaps that will make me forget. I ought to have made you tell me before. Wherever we go, I imagine you’ve been there with her…I see you together. I want to know how it began, where you went, why you left her…I can’t go on in this darkness any longer!”

  She did not know what had prompted her passionate outburst, but already she felt lighter, freer, as if at last the evil spell were broken. “I want to know everything,” she repeated. “It’s the only way to make me forget.”

  After she had ceased speaking Darrow remained where he was, his arms folded, his eyes lowered, immovable. She waited, her gaze on his face.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

  “No.”

  The blood rushed to her temples. “You won’t? Why not?”

  “If I did, do you suppose you’d forget that?”

  “Oh—” she moaned, and turned away from him.

  “You see it’s impossible,” he went on. “I’ve done a thing I loathe, and to atone for it you ask me to do another. What sort of satisfaction would that give you? It would put something irremediable between us.”

  She leaned her elbow against the mantel-shelf and hid her face in her hands. She had the sense that she was vainly throwing away her last hope of happiness, yet she could do nothing, think of nothing, to save it. The conjecture flashed through her: “Should I be at peace if I gave him up?” and she remembered the desolation of the days after she had sent him away, and understood that that hope was vain. The tears welled through her lids and ran slowly down between her fingers.

  “Good-bye,” she heard him say, and his footsteps turned to the door.

  She tried to raise her head, but the weight of her despair bowed it down. She said to herself: “This is the end…he won’t try to appeal to me again…” and she remained in a sort of tranced rigidity, perceiving without feeling the fateful lapse of the seconds. Then the cords that bound her seemed to snap, and she lifted her head and saw him going.

  “Why, he’s mine—he’s mine! He’s no one else’s!” His face was turned to her and the look in his eyes swept away all her terrors. She no longer understood what had prompted her senseless outcry; and the mortal sweetness of loving him became again the one real fact in the world.

  This is so powerfully wrought that it ought to be definitive. And yet the consciousness of Anna is a vortex. Terrors of the mind will return. Henry James was accurate: there is something of Racine’s Phèdre in Anna. Lily Bart’s fate was too pathetic to be tragic. Anna cannot shed a tragic aura. That may have been the threshold Wharton crossed into a touch of greatness.

  CHAPTER 33

  The Rainbow (1915)

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four. He was amazingly prolific: a dozen novels, another dozen volumes of shorter fiction, many volumes of increasingly strong poetry that moved from the influence of Thomas Hardy to that of Walt Whitman. But that only begins to catalogue Lawrence’s fecundity. He was an incisive literary critic, an intensely vivid travel writer, a polemicist who argued against Freud while getting Freud quite wrong, a dramatist, an incessant letter writer, and a painter. After reading him for more than seventy years, I value him most for two great novels: The Rainbow and Women in Love, which he had intended to be one long saga to be called The Sisters. Of equal importance are his shorter fictions, many of them novellas, and his poetry. Now, in 2018, Lawrence is no longer esteemed as a prophet or a spiritual guide. When I was young, many women and men of my generation were Lawrentians, but that vogue expired when fiercer feminisms arrived.

  Lawrence invoked a living God:

  then I must know that still

  I am in the hands of the unknown God,

  he is breaking me down to his own oblivion

  to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

  Heightened prose takes on the intensity of sublime poetry in Herman Melville, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and others, but achieves an apex in Lawrence’s novel The
Rainbow (1915). In its first chapter, the rhythms of the King James Bible inform Lawrence’s vision of the Brangwens:

  It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened its furrow to them, that the wind blew to dry the wet wheat, and set the young ears of corn wheeling freshly round about; it was enough that they helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats from under the barn, or broke the back of a rabbit with a sharp knock of the hand. So much warmth and generating and pain and death did they know in their blood, earth and sky and beast and green plants, so much exchange and interchange they had with these, that they lived full and surcharged, their senses full fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the blood, staring into the sun, dazed with looking towards the source of generation, unable to turn round.

  These cadences return in the final paragraph of The Rainbow, where Ursula has a vision:

  And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.

  This kind of High Romanticism stems from Lawrence’s Nonconformist heritage. After The Rainbow, his novels dwindle, unlike his poems and shorter fictions of all lengths. Even Women in Love (1920) falls away from the remorseless drive of The Rainbow. Ursula Brangwen bears the same name in both books yet scarcely is the same woman. The first Ursula is even more passionate and more determined to live a life altogether her own and to seek and find fulfillment in every sense. After an intense lesbian relationship, she undergoes a turbulent relationship with Anton Skrebensky, a remote cousin from Poland who has become an English soldier.

  After dining together, Ursula leads her lover down to the sea:

  She stood on the edge of the water, at the edge of the solid, flashing body of the sea, and the wave rushed over her feet.

  “I want to go,” she cried, in a strong, dominant voice. “I want to go.”

  He saw the moonlight on her face, so she was like metal, he heard her ringing, metallic voice, like the voice of a harpy to him.

  In ancient mythology a harpy is a predatory bird with the head of a woman, scarcely an accurate description of the passionate Ursula, but a revelation of Skrebensky’s sense of his own inadequacy:

  She prowled, ranging on the edge of the water like a possessed creature, and he followed her. He saw the froth of the wave followed by the hard, bright water swirl over her feet and her ankles, she swung out her arms, to balance, he expected every moment to see her walk into the sea, dressed as she was, and be carried swimming out.

  But she turned, she walked to him.

  “I want to go,” she cried again, in the high, hard voice, like the scream of gulls.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  The reader recalls that this next-to-the-last chapter of The Rainbow is called “The Bitterness of Ecstasy.” Strangely, this Ursula is very close to the younger sister, Gudrun, of Women in Love, and very different from that later Ursula. Each longs to break all bounds and fails to find in sexual intercourse her image for longing:

  And she seized hold of his arm, held him fast, as if captive, and walked him a little way by the edge of the dazzling, dazing water.

  Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of him, hard, as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction, she fastened her arms round him and tightened him in her grip, whilst her mouth sought his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till his body was powerless in her grip, his heart melted in fear from the fierce, beaked, harpy’s kiss. The water washed again over their feet, but she took no notice. She seemed unaware, she seemed to be pressing in her beaked mouth till she had the heart of him. Then, at last, she drew away and looked at him—looked at him. He knew what she wanted. He took her by the hand and led her across the foreshore, back to the sandhills. She went silently. He felt as if the ordeal of proof was upon him, for life or death. He led her to a dark hollow.

  “No, here,” she said, going out to the slope full under the moonshine. She lay motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon. He came direct to her, without preliminaries. She held him pinned down at the chest, awful. The fight, the struggle for consummation was terrible. It lasted till it was agony to his soul, till he succumbed, till he gave way as if dead, lay with his face buried, partly in her hair, partly in the sand, motionless, as if he would be motionless now for ever, hidden away in the dark, buried, only buried, he only wanted to be buried in the goodly darkness, only that, and no more.

  He seemed to swoon. It was a long time before he came to himself. He was aware of an unusual motion of her breast. He looked up. Her face lay like an image in the moonlight, the eyes wide open, rigid. But out of the eyes, slowly, there rolled a tear, that glittered in the moonlight as it ran down her cheek.

  He felt as if as the knife were being pushed into his already dead body. With head strained back, he watched, drawn tense, for some minutes, watched the unaltering, rigid face like metal in the moonlight, the fixed, unseeing eye, in which slowly the water gathered, shook with glittering moonlight, then surcharged, brimmed over and ran trickling, a tear with its burden of moonlight, into the darkness, to fall in the sand.

  He drew gradually away as if afraid, drew away—she did not move. He glanced at her—she lay the same. Could he break away? He turned, saw the open foreshore, clear in front of him, and he plunged away, on and on, ever farther from the horrible figure that lay stretched in the moonlight on the sands with the tears gathering and travelling on the motionless, eternal face.

  He felt, if ever he must see her again, his bones must be broken, his body crushed, obliterated for ever. And as yet, he had the love of his own living body. He wandered on a long, long way, till his brain drew dark and he was unconscious with weariness. Then he curled in the deepest darkness he could find, under the sea-grass, and lay there without consciousness.

  She broke from her tense cramp of agony gradually, though each movement was a goad of heavy pain. Gradually, she lifted her dead body from the sands, and rose at last. There was now no moon for her, no sea. All had passed away. She trailed her dead body to the house, to her room, where she lay down inert.

  When I was much younger, I could read this intently without suffering it. In my High Eighties (as my late friend Ursula Le Guin taught me to call it), I find it exquisitely painful but aesthetically superb. Lawrence prophesied against what he called “sex in the head.” William Blake might have called this “Reasoning from the loins in the unreal forms of Beulah’s night.” A lifelong admirer of Lawrence, I go with Blake. And yet The Rainbow permanently illuminates what Shakespeare and Milton and Tolstoy understood too well: women are sexually superior to men. Adam was God’s initial molding out of the red clay. Eve, quarried out of the human, was better made.