My (self-imposed) task for this August was to re-read something from my 1996 list of “books read”. It was a list that had 22 entries, most of them novels: among the candidates for re-reading I pondered Jonathan Coe (his What a Carve-Up!), Vikram Seth, Ellen Gilchrist and Georges Perec (the last read, appropriately, while on holiday in France). But in the end I chose something short, though not necessarily an easy read: Edith Wharton’s 1907 novella Madame de Treymes. The copy I read, and re-read, was a “Penguin 60s” edition – one of 60 small volumes, costing 60p each, collectively issued in a box set in 1995 to celebrate Penguin’s 60th anniversary. (Incidentally, serving – and surviving – as a bookmark in my copy was a British Rail/London Underground one-day travelcard dated 4 June 1996. It cost £3.50 for zones 1 to 6. What does it cost these days?)
Edith Wharton (née Jones – did she have any Welsh blood?) is often described as a female and less convoluted version of Henry James, and Madame de Treymes certainly is reminiscent of James in places. Most of all in its setting and plot, which concerns the clash of attitudes and values between two cultures – aristocratic Parisians on the one hand and wealthy Americans on the other. The plot boils down to a fairly simple problem: John Durham wants to marry Fanny Frisbee, a friend of his youth who has become Madame de Malrive, the wife of a French aristocrat from whom she is now separated after producing a son. Durham, who is American, is visiting Paris apparently with the aim of helping Fanny get a divorce. We never meet her husband, who has apparently misbehaved in some shadowy way; instead the only representative of the Malrive “clan” who appears is Madame de Treymes, Fanny’s sister-in-law, with whom Durham seems to spend most of the story in frustratingly elusive dialogue in an attempt to break down the “mysterious solidarity” of Fanny’s in-laws. Divorce becomes possible, but in the end (spoiler alert) the terms under which it is offered make it unacceptable to Fanny, and the novella ends with Durham heading off to break the news to Fanny – after which he’ll presumably to return to America.
In 1996 this was by no means the first Wharton I’d read: Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth had already appeared in my “books read” lists, and since then I’ve read The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country and The Fruit of the Tree, plus some of her short stories – so she’s a writer I like reading. (Incidentally I recommend Terence Davies’s film adaptation of The House of Mirth, in my opinion one of the best screen adaptations of any novel.) But I wouldn’t say that this novella, first published quite early in her literary career, in 1907, is up there with EW’s best.
One of the observations I’d like to make about Madame de Treymes is that the dialogue – and there’s plenty of it – is not only elaborately artificial in the Henry James manner but marked with a lot of what we might call “stage directions” to give extra nuance to what’s said. For instance:
She raised a half-smiling glance of protest. “Oh, they’re not wantonly wicked …” (p16)
“Well, she knows us,” said Durham, catching, in Madame de Malrive’s rapid glance, a startled assent to his point. (p25)
“Yes, I do,” he said with equal directness, and they smiled together at the sharp retort of question and answer. (p37)
“Whatever I choose?” She made a slight gesture of deprecation. (p65)
In an odd way I was reminded of this when reading the Guardian “long read” (28 August this year) about Marcos Rodriguez, the Spaniard who was “raised by wolves” and as a result “emerge[d] into adulthood without any of the socialisation that the rest of us unconsciously absorb”. As the author of the article, Matthew Bremner, wrote: “In his [Marcos’s] company, you can’t help realising that our daily interactions are eased by a stream of invisible signals – a kind of silent language that you don’t even notice until it’s absent”. I suppose it is these “invisible signals” that a writer such as Wharton tries to articulate by annotating her characters’ verbal interactions in the way that she does.
Along with this attention to the nuances of conversation there’s a lot of variation in EW’s dialogue markers – the word “said” does crop up, of course, but other verbs proliferate – for instance in just four lines of dialogue on p74, you’ll find “groaned Durham”, “she persisted” and “he broke in”. That’s very Jamesian, isn’t it? Or did other writers of the period do it as much?
The only other point I’d like to make about Madame de Treymes is that everything is seen from the man’s point of view: Durham is “on stage” the whole way through and his are the only thoughts we are given access to (this exclusively male view happens in The Age of Innocence too, where in Penelope Lively’s words “of the two central characters, Newland and Ellen Olenska, … only Newland is allowed a voice. Ellen is seen always at one remove”). No one, as far as I know, has denied Wharton’s right – and her narrative ability – to take the male point of view; so surely, in principle, there’s no reason, ceteris paribus, to deny that male writers can use the female voice …
In August I also read: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje; The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick; some of the poems in Michael Symmons Roberts’s Mancunia … and I finally finished Clair Wills’s Lovers and Strangers (begun, see above, in June). Masterly – but, as I said on Twitter, with a glaring omission: barely any mention was made of postwar UK immigrants’ involvement in sport.
Old geezer re-reading 