Category: American Literature

Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin

Truth and self-deception are topics that are never far from literature’s pages. The omission in speech of the facts of the heart, or else the failure to acknowledge them even within one’s own soul, is often the chute down which tragedy falls our lives. Yet in a way, I find books about authenticity harder and harder to believe the closer their settings get to our own time. In life, by which I mean within that vague lumpy western collective population I have to refer to here, it has become boringly easy to tell the truth. Marriages, that great source of anguished self-deception, are no longer arranged, nor are the consequences of divorce as total and obliterating as they were in the days of Anna Karenina or Effi Briest. At an art book fair in Düsseldorf at the weekend, I was surrounded by people who seemed to be being their authentic selves – making bizarre but personal images, wearing silly clothes, having the kind of hairstyles my girlfriend considers hot and my mother considers ghastly.

I wondered, perhaps, whether many of us really now really know inauthenticity well enough to articulate it. If I were to speak of my own case, born into reasonably great financial and social privilege but failing either to commit to being a writer to the full extent of my powers and energies or to commit to making a lot of money and influence as a lawyer or what-have-you by instead choosing a muddly middle ground in a relaxing, reasonably well paying corporate career where I have an excellent work-life balance and time each day to write a few pages – if I talked about this, about being dishonest to both my calling and my familial obligations, well then I would rightly make myself the subject of ridicule and only with great luck would I make a half-decent novel.

The overwhelming advantage and interest to me of writers whose identity conflicted with the society of their time is that they felt questions of authenticity with the full force they ought perhaps to have for us all. There’s Walt Whitman, at times my favourite poet – this man of joy thinly papering over his despair at having to transfer much of his love for men into love for man; then there is E.M. Forster, that supreme writer of the “muddle” of our hearts; and to that list I today add James Baldwin, long ago recommended to me, a gay Black American writer who spoke forcefully for rights and acceptance for himself and for others. I have begun my acquaintance with him through Giovanni’s Room, a novel of self-deception and tragedy in a Paris of the 1950s that is free enough for its main character to find love, but not free enough for him to be willing to admit it.

We start at the end, with the American David standing alone in the house in southern France that he and his girlfriend (fiancée) had rented together. He tells us that she is already on a ship back to the United States. As for Giovanni, this other person with a claim upon David’s heart, this is his last morning alive. The guillotine awaits him. While Giovanni’s Room holds some information back, such as the nature of Giovanni’s crime, the broad contours of its plot – that a man loves a man and yet cannot commit to him, destroying their relationship – are no mystery, even to a reader that has ducked past the book’s back cover. Such an approach, and the way that the narrative is told by David as he looks back upon the wreck of his life, lends the text a fatalistic, determined atmosphere.

This is assuredly deliberate. Looking at Giovanni’s Room as a whole, a certain link becomes apparent between its images and ideas – or rather, a particular opposition. One of movement versus standing still. I have to avoid the temptation to write “stasis”, because Baldwin’s lack of movement is more nuanced than that word would imply. The same thing keeps me from writing “flight”, though this is how David – an American who has left his homeland – describes his own life. Instead, using this simple binary, Baldwin’s other images and ideas, whether the sea, or acting, or time itself, are reflected and refracted, over and over.

But first I should mention the plot. How Hella, David’s girlfriend, had gone away to Spain to think about whether to marry him, while he stayed on in Paris. How Jacques, a wealthy businessman, and David had gone drinking to a bar owned by the Frenchman Guillaume, and how there the bartender was a handsome Italian, Giovanni. How with the same inevitability of the text, Giovanni and David begin a passionate affair that cannot last. (They acknowledge this inevitability too, in word if not in fact). How in the end, Hella returns, and sees Giovanni, and eventually discovers the nature of his relationship with David.

Within this cast we already have one of the markers of a lack of movement – reflections. At several points in the story David is confronted with his reflection as he cleans the house in preparation for his departure in the morning, and from that reflection he quite literally flees. Movement makes the water ripple, the image unrecognisable. Guillaume and Jacques, older gay men, are a kind of grotesque mirror of Giovanni and David. They chase after young men, but their lives are empty of love. Guillaume, the last member of an ancient family, has through his failure to sire an heir become a kind of image of David’s own anxieties over his need to create a family. Jacques can hardly admit his sexuality, even as he tries to flirt with David. The comparison between these young and older men becomes starker once David has broken off with Giovanni, for the latter ends up falling in with Jacques, and thereby begins to adopt “a fairy’s mannerisms”, the same as him. Still another reflection is between Hella and Giovanni – both offering certain images of the future. One respectable, the other true. David sees himself, and the reader sees other reflections, but what we notice each time is his refusal to face those reflections. Self-deception only works if you don’t stand still long enough for the self to notice.

Self-deception births flight – “by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.” Two images best characterise David’s vision of the alternative, of staying still – a cave and a room. After David’s first sexual experience with a man, he runs from the house in horror: “That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood.” “Seemed” – while this word is necessary for a simile, it also contains uncertainty – David doesn’t know how things will be. In the same way, even “opening” hints at something positive: potentiality rather than any negative. Even leaving aside the “manhood” topic for now, the striking thing about this image is not just its power as an image – because it comes in the text suddenly and bearing horror – but also that this image undermines itself. David does not just tell the readers how he thinks he feels, he also, crucially and accidentally, reveals his doubts about those very feelings.

Then there is the room. Giovanni lives outside of the Paris centre, alone, in a small room. Like the cave, the room’s symbolic meanings are multiple. As the doors close for Giovanni and David’s first night together, it is clearly a place of lust and freedom – its very darkness becomes a source of intimacy and desire. It takes one out of the world, distorting time – David feels the need to remind the reader throughout the story that “I did not really stay there very long”. His text, naturally, tells another tale – Hella, the woman he attempts to persuade himself he loves, is barely on the page until the end. Is time to be measured by the days we are truly alive, or just those where all our organs are functioning? David might think it is the latter, but his narration tells us the former.

When David decides to view the room negatively, it becomes so – dirty, overcrowded with rubbish, with peeling wallpaper, and so on. He tries to make himself view it as a site of constraint, rather than of freedom. Unfortunately for him, Giovanni’s later attempts to renovate the place and make it more homely by adding a bookcase mean that even this critical view fails to convince the reader. David calls it “some weird idea”, but at this point the bookcase becomes a reminder Giovanni’s commitment to the relationship that is contrasted harshly with David’s own lack of investment, his constant backward movement.

Few people, however, come out of Giovanni’s Room well or even looking well. Within its pages, it’s a profoundly pessimistic book. The wreck of David’s life at its end is monumental. What hurts, as a reader, is the extent of his self-knowledge. He knows perfectly well how he deludes himself, but that cannot change the past or offer much hope for the future. The affirmations we get, “With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes”, are always tempered by the commitment failures that follow.

David surrenders each time only to retreat later. His assertions of a desire for normality are brilliantly false, paper-thin. “I wanted children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed.” Really what David wants is a state of innocence that he knows is impossible – a state of things, rather than the concreteness of the children or wife. “Watching”, “unquestioned” – he wants to be able to view his life without shame. But whoever wanted children or a wife rightly or truly only because of the image they would confer? There is also the implicit egotism of that longing – “my” is repeated three times in a single sentence. (Perhaps this also reflects a fear of Giovanni’s equality to him, a desire for control he cannot have with the man). In short, David’s failure to commit is as painful as Giovanni’s own tragedy. That second man, at least, cannot be faulted for his emotions or his earnestness.

Among the characters it is Hella, David’s fiancée, who has the most interesting trajectory, because it contrasts with all the others so clearly. She ends the novel, we learn at its beginning, on a ship back towards her own country. Like David, like all of the other characters, she is acting throughout, putting on a performance for the people around her. In her case, she has pretended to the bohemianism and libertarianism of Paris. Yet upon returning from Spain, she discovers that in reality “I’m not really the emancipated girl I try to be at all. I guess I just want a man to come home to me every night. I want to be able to sleep with a man without being afraid he’s going to knock me up. Hell, I want to be knocked up.” The characters that Giovanni’s Room destroys – David, Giovanni, Guillaume and Jacques – are all given desires that the world they live in will not tolerate seeing in the open. Only the woman, whose true wish (perhaps) is obliterating conventionality, is given the chance not only to know herself, but to be able to choose that life. None of the others, faced with an oppressive society and personal weakness, get anywhere close to this.

In all this and in the cyclicity of the story – with a narrator looking back upon a failed life and an ending returning us to the winter season that marked its beginning – Giovanni’s Room is profoundly pessimistic in temperament. There is no happy ending, of the sort that (admittedly) hurt Forster’s Maurice in my eyes. Instead, the forces to conform are triumphant. Yet by bringing us to face this desolation, the book instead serves that noble goal – that of illuminating all the more brightly the horror of the inauthentically lived life, and the terrible pressures to conform placed upon anyone whose desires or identity lie beyond the “normal” world. Giovanni’s Room is a wonderfully moral book, a profoundly serious one, and that is quite enough.

Elif Batuman – The Idiot

I bought Elif Batuman’s The Idiot because I wanted to read a contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, which I suppose makes me the idiot on this particular occasion, since the connection to Dostoevsky is tenuous. Instead, it’s a novel about a naïve student on her first year at Harvard who falls in love and spends the summer in Hungary. It’s a novel with ideas, if not quite a novel of ideas. Selin, the protagonist, studies things like linguistics and the philosophy of language, and reads books like The Magic Mountain, and has an opinion on Dostoevsky. However, on the level of language this is more akin to Sally Rooney than Mann or the Russian. It’s all light and easy sentences, dialogue smooth as someone letting a slinky slide between two outstretched arms, and disorganised observations of things in rooms. It’s real in the way reality TV is real – it is existence absent of any redeeming light.

One of the criticisms I might make of it is that so much of its four hundred, easy-to-read pages, feels meaningless. The things caught in our narrator’s gaze often have neither narrative nor thematic relevance; their purpose is to make reality feel real, but often they don’t even seem to do that. The interactions between characters are regularly similarly lightweight. Yet the novel as a whole might make for itself the defence that it is actually serious about meaning, that such scenes are essential to its construction, that I am the one misunderstanding it. For indeed, being a work about language, love, and communication, it tries to treat seriously the shifting presence and absence of meaning in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps. The fact that I sit here writing this suggests maybe it’s a case worth making.

The Idiot begins in 1995 with Turkish-American Selin arriving at Harvard to begin her undergraduate studies. She meets her roommates and her classmates. She majors in linguistics and studies things in the philosophy and psychology of language. She volunteers a little of her time to teach maths and English as a second language, largely without success. She goes to the odd party but barely drinks and certainly does nothing sexual. There are many characters who drift in and out, largely undifferentiated, but there are two that are important – Ivan, an older Hungarian man Selin meets during Russian class, and Svetlana, a Serbian girl from the same class. Ivan provides a kind of love interest for Selin, while Svetlana is a kind of worldly motherly figure for her. In the summer break Selin goes to Paris with Svetlana, and from there on to Hungary, where she is to teach English to some Hungarian village children.

It makes sense to start with language, since these are the ideas that underpin the novel as a whole. With her linguistics studies, Selin tries to make sense of language itself by considering how language could be explained to Martians, or by them to us. “Supposing we went to Mars and the Martians said “gavagai” every time a rabbit ran by”, it would not be possible to know whether this referred to running, or rabbits, or something else entirely. Selin finds this depressing, as this early introduction to communication seems to suggest we cannot communicate, that meaning is trapped inside of us, never to get out. Naturally, this is an introductory class, so the fact that Selin can’t get anywhere towards solving this problem is one of those examples where a text seems to provide a problem that contains the seeds of its own later dissolution. (She should keep studying as it’s obvious she does not have the full picture yet).

The novel also challenges this “communication doesn’t work” idea through a short story for Russian learners whose chapters are scattered throughout its pages. This tells of a girl called Nina who goes to Siberia after the man she loves disappears, but one of its quirks is that the text is simplified to focus on the grammatical structures the learners are currently focusing on, such as a particular grammatical case. While the story contains plenty of miscommunications, the fact that a coherent narrative can be produced even with such obvious linguistic limitations rather suggests that it is people who are failing to communicate, rather than language itself. In other words, meaning’s general transferability is not precluded by language. Rather, it is people who are the problem. I found this a little unsatisfying – The Idiot introduces a problem only to deny it is one.

This sense that people are the problem is one we might have picked up on from the novel’s title, of course. Selin is naïve – in this she has something in common with Prince Myshkin. Since she is naïve and innocent she struggles with the articulation of her own emotions towards Ivan, turning from speech to lengthy emails that might work if they were not themselves, inevitably, an exercise in avoiding communication – they talk indirectly, and so do not reach the destination:

“Dear Selin, would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon?  Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?”

The above is one of Ivan’s, though Selin’s are no better. At times they also use Russian, a language neither of them knows well, which naturally enough does not help either. These are two people failing language. This is a point stressed when Selin is in rural Hungary teaching English, and trying and failing to fight a local fellow-teacher who insists one pronouncing all the silent vowels in English. “One”, becoming “oh-neh”, for example. Selin herself does not really seem to realise that teaching requires effort on her part, so while she is critical of her co-teacher she gets nowhere with her own students – “Papel iss blonk”, one of them says, for “the paper is white”. Failure, but human failure, everywhere.

These failures mean that Ivan and Selin do not connect in the way they should, or could, and create joint meanings together. They leave things unsaid, or said in a distorted manner. In this they are like teenagers, however, rather than people seriously struggling with a higher-order problem about the possibility of meaning transference. We might say that Batuman wants to make a point about culture here, and its relationship to this connection-building among people. Hungary and America (or Turkey) are different! Look, Ivan hasn’t read Walden. Again, the text raises this potential problem only to refute itself. The Hungarians and Turks can bond, we are told, over the shared indignities of the collapse of empire – “Trianon! Touché!” one of the Hungarians says. Even the legendarily strange Hungarian language is demystified by Batuman stressing the similarities and loanwords common to it and Turkish.

It is perhaps wrong to disparage a book called The Idiot for having an idiot at its centre or suggesting that the ideas she encounters are really less important than her own failures. (Would this not mean that writing a novel called “A bad book” would always be good, unless it were excellent?) Yet it’s wrong to dismiss how corrosive the idea of human failure can be when it becomes central. A lot of Russian novels – and Batuman loves Russian novels enough to have written a whole book on them – centre on the gap between the idea and the reality of human practices. Raskolnikov’s theory of murder, and the reality of a bloodied axe, for example. But there’s an important distinction to be made between this and what The Idiot does. Raskolnikov or Bazarov discover that human failings cause issues for their philosophies. Selin has no philosophy to be challenged, so ideas cannot be central to the work, no matter what other reviewers on the cover might say.

Perhaps we can rephrase this in terms of the ideas and their potential for realisation. Communication is possible. Sometimes it’s hard, but that’s allowed. The theories on it are developed and probably, to a certain extent, the result of real thought and experimentation. Utopias, as far as we can make out, are not possible. The ideas fail because they imagine an incorrect view of human nature. Communication eludes Selin not because the theories are wrong, but because she is naïve, childish, and doesn’t really put any effort in. One approach becomes universal because it’s about all of our failings, while the other is about an individual’s failings which she will probably sort out once she has grown up a little.  

I have gone quite far from what I actually thought is the most interesting thing in this book – its use of section breaks. While Ivan and Selin’s not-relationship is the central story of the book, the bulk of it is taken up with Selin’s day-to-day experiences of being a new student in a big university. When I was about sixteen and thought I could teach myself writing through an entirely formulaic approach, I read in various places that my sections could never be shorter than 1’500 words and should always include some kind of conflict. This number has stuck with me even as it has never helped me much with my own writing. With The Idiot, Batuman doesn’t follow this rule either. Many of its sections are impressionistic and under a page in length. They accumulate, creating a sense of Selin’s experience of Harvard. They are snatches of conversations, or things spotted from a window. They are not, really, meaningful – even within a mesh of novelistic themes and meanings. But they are the brocade out of which the novel as a whole is built.

What is mildly interesting here is the way that Batuman builds meaning into this use of length and brevity. On the one hand, this is most obvious in the way that once the not-romance gets going, the sections with Ivan are considerably longer than the sections without him. It’s a quite direct way of putting the disorganised meaninglessness of the earlier sections into perspective by showing the paucity of their development quite literally on the page. On the other, and more thematically curious, is the way that this relates to Selin’s friendship with Svetlana. There is a moment when Svetlana reveals that she used to be bulimic and the narrative cannot contend with this fact, so the section just ends. It’s not presented as something deeply revealing from Svetlana within context, but Selin’s lack of reaction is another indication about the meaning-problem of the novel. Selin is yet again too immature, too naïve, to appreciate what her friend has told her. It’s not relevant to her own story.

If there’s something close to an epiphany to cap The Idiot, it’s the discovery by Selin that she is not the centre of the world, only of her world. This little bulimia mention is one example, as are the countless new people that she meets in Hungary: “I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.”

I can be charitable and say that the novel begins with a meaningless mass of impressions, grows more formally clear at its centre with Ivan, then ends up with a return to those same disconnected impressions. Only this time, Selin has a new consciousness of what they mean through her slightly-increased maturity. She has a sense that even if they are disconnected and non-narrativised to herself, they may be formed and clear in others’ worlds. Indeed, perhaps that’s one hidden message of all the teaching in the novel – that a teacher, like Selin herself, can have an impact on her students far greater than she herself would ever know.

Anyway, it was a reasonably funny, easy-to-read, work of contemporary fiction. Now I can go back to the dead.

Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence

So much of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence is perfectly done that to write about it in a blog post becomes very difficult – it truly provides an embarrassment of novelistic riches. Such books are a blessing to a reader but a beast for the blogger. There is too much for me to say, even after a single (re)reading. Each word is a thread that can be followed, rather than merely plucked. Everything from flowers, to place (New York City), time (1870s), society, location, and language, works meaningfully to make this a supremely rewarding work for the analytical reader. And Wharton does all this with a prose that is clear and a story whose mysteries linger long after we finish it.

If I try to summarise it overmuch, the story might collapse into a mixture of predictability and familiarity. It is a question of the obligations owed to love in a restrictive society. Newland Archer, a marriageable young man of elevated social standing, gets engaged to May Welland, a pretty young lady from a good family who is ready for her husband to tell her what to do and who to be. Before the wedding, however, Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin and an old friend of Newland, returns to New York from the Old World without her husband. Older, wiser, ignorant of the finer rules of New York society, Newland finds himself falling quickly in love with Olenska. But New York is a powerful force within the novel, and Newland is “at heart a dilettante”. We wonder whether he has the strength to choose, or whether that choice will be made entirely for him.

With so many themes and ideas to select from, the one that strikes me as the best way into the novel is that of perspective. “Age” is in the title of The Age of Innocence, and while this might refer to either Newland or May at their stage of life, it also refers to their time as a whole. Furthermore, it can only refer to their time when we have the wisdom to look back from a time when that innocence is no longer present. It implies a multiple perspective. This multiplicity concerns the whole novel, which we can read differently, depending on how closely we wish to stick to Newland’s perspective. If we decide to step back, as I think the novel would like us to, then it moves beyond being a simple work of frustrated love and weak men and allows for a far more nuanced view.

Viewing

The narrator follows Newland throughout The Age of Innocence, with only occasional moments when they step back to give a kind of “society view” through reference to things like “the daily press” on the novel’s first page, or to the welter of names we as readers have to get used to. Indeed, one reason The Age of Innocence feels like a society novel is because there are so many people milling about that I began to suspect that Wharton’s intention was that I struggled to keep track of them all. Indeed, I soon began treating them abstractly in my head as “important” or “unimportant”, just as those same characters would judge those around them. Newland, our hero, is just another member of this mass when the book begins, and it is only as it progresses that he begins to find himself being able to view it from his own perspective.

This sense of massed perspective is established in the first scene, where we are present at an opera performance. To one on the stage there is only a mass of eyes staring down, undifferentiated, and Newland is up there among them. The opera is not so important, because it is Newland’s gaze we are interested in, emphasised by the repeated looking words like “contemplated,” “scanned”, and so on. Indeed, because he spends much time staring at May across the hall, we might notice and smile at the thought that her presence in her box is every bit a work of performance as is that of the person on the stage, something that becomes clearer and clearer as we learn about the New York of the 1870s over the course of the book. Newland does not actually do anything here, really, except look. This preference for observation over action proves one of the most distinctive elements of his character.

This early scene also introduces us to one side of the dynamic between May and Ellen, a comparison that exists in Newland’s perspective and develops as he observes both women. There’s a striking paragraph here which sets out his view on May and explains quite clearly why Ellen may prove alluring:

“He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the “younger set,” in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it.”

This is funny, albeit in a terrible way. Look at the verbs – “wish”, “meant”, “develop”, “enabling” – each and every one of them looks to the future and presumes May has nothing to value now except her beautiful emptiness, her state as a blank canvas. Indeed, “Mrs Newland Archer” annihilates the name of his wife and thereby makes it clear how substitutable Newland must view this person as being. This is Newland’s view of May, and really, it does not change much as the novel progresses. He comes to contrast it mentally with Ellen, who has a history through her failed marriage. Unlike with May, whom Newland believes he must form, (hence requiring effort, something mildly distasteful to the dilettante, however pleasurable the reward), the temptation of Countess Olenska comes from the opportunity to discover a fully-formed personality. Since she thinks for herself, she is unknowable in the way that Newland believes May never could be.

Flowers

The constant presence of flowers within the novel both expands this comparison while also deepening it. Newland sends May lilies-of-the-valley every day, an action whose regularity (though it is not done by standing order) seems to predict the very predictability and conventionality of their married life. After reconnecting with Ellen, Newland finds himself in a flower shop, where his eyes land upon some yellow roses. “Too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty” – rather than send them to his betrothed, Newland sends them to Ellen. Ellen receives flowers from many admirers, and her display of them – scattered here and there in her house, rather than kept orderly – is taken by society as yet another mark against her personality, a reminder of the disorderliness of the woman who has failed her husband by separating from him. The orderliness of May’s flowers contrasts with the personality of Ellen’s to evidence the seeming accuracy of Newland’s judgements of the two women.

Yet the flowers are not just a prop of this sort. Nor even does their importance cease at the obvious symbolic readings we can find in them – wastefulness, fragile youth, and so on. It is with flowers that we see, perhaps most obviously, some of the limitations of Newland’s perspective. Newland purchases the yellow roses he sends to Ellen “almost without knowing what he did.” Indeed, that Newland continues sending flowers to her at further points of the story is only brought to our attention after the fact some hundred pages later. It is as if the prose is conspiring to hide from Newland and the reader the fact that is increasingly obvious to anyone but him – the extent to which he loves Ellen. Newland might be discovering a life beyond society’s rules, but the yellow roses provide a potent symbol of the fact that in both cases he is carried by forces beyond his control – society in the first case, his subconscious in the second.

New York

New York dominates the novel – it is mentioned on near-enough every page. It is a totality, or at least seems to be. Yet this, too, is only a perspective that the novel seeks to shake. When May’s family go for a holiday to Florida, her father insists on trying to remake a little section of New York in their lodgings there. This is patently ridiculous – it makes New York look silly, shows how silly it is when removed from the environment that protects it. At the same time, it shows how important that environment was – how protective, to its inhabitants. When Ellen and Archer meet privately, it almost requires them to be somewhere else – a carriage or country estate, for example. In terms of the novel’s perspectives, one thing we might take from this is that New York’s restrictiveness actually works successfully to control everyone, so long as they are there. To me, the climax of the novel is when Newland tries to say goodbye to Ellen before she heads back to Europe, only to find that New York, in the figure of May, has already arranged for her to travel in a friend’s carriage. 

Limitations

We see through Newland’s eyes. We see the frustration of his life in New York, once he wants what it cannot give him. But just as we saw with the flowers, he is limited. Even the most powerful image of the book reveals that limitation: “He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?” Striking, but even when he thinks outside the system of his city, Newland is still taking the image from another, not quite thinking for himself.

We think May is like this, because Newland repeatedly considers her so – a mere “type”, absent of agency. But the novel’s penultimate chapter, where May sends off her rival without ever openly acknowledging it, is startling because it is here where, after noticing the importance of perspective as we read, Wharton makes it clear that we’ve only seen a fragment of the whole. May, her eyes “wet with victory” in the undeclared battle, has indeed acted independently to surprise Newland with the personality he hadn’t supposed she had. Even though that personality’s distinguishing characteristic is to ally itself with the existing powers of New York, it is still much more a something than the nothing he assumed. Hence his failure to achieve the conclusion with Ellen that he had hoped for.

The Final Chapter

In its final chapter, The Age of Innocence leaves us with a kind of mystery to ponder. I first read the novel over ten years ago now, and all I remembered in the years since was that the ending had left me feeling that there was something strange going on. That may well have been my total inexperience of romance, which meant I had no way of understanding Newland’s actions. Taking place nearly thirty years after the main events of the novel, this epilogue shows the consequences of Newland’s choice – if choice it quite was – of May over Ellen. He has achieved the worldly success that sticking in his place in society promised him, including professional recognition and beautiful children. He has also, in a way, come to terms with his life. “It did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty.”

After May’s passing Newland’s son takes him to Paris. It is here that Ellen now lives. She sends a note to the Archers’ hotel when she learns of their arrival, inviting them both to her, but on the street the father hesitates, in the end only his son goes upstairs to her rooms. “It’s more real to me here than if I went up”, is how he puts it to himself. And then he goes back to his hotel.

Young Angus could not understand him. Older Angus, perhaps, can take a slightly more appreciative view. But still, it’s another moment where the novel seems to be doing something with perspective that’s not at all clear. We’ve gone through the whole of The Age of Innocence watching Newland and Ellen restraining themselves, making sacrifices for the good of a society that neither quite likes nor believes in. That society has done nothing to commend itself to us. Now, both of them are free to be together, free of that society, but even now, Newland still chooses to remain with a memory, rather than a reality.

It is perhaps some comment on human desires. The way that we want until the moment we have. Perhaps Newland, whose first recorded thoughts about May in the book use the distinctive word “possessorship”, has decided that having something real is no longer worth the trouble. Better to enjoy the dream, undiminished. The next generation are much freer than he and Ellen had been – his son is an architect, a profession that would not have been acceptable in Newland’s youth for a man of his background. By choosing not to see Ellen, I suppose we can say that Newland is choosing to protect the idea of his life, even with its bad parts, as having been the right choice. Perhaps this sense of justification is fragile enough that meeting the countess might throw him off course. 

Perhaps the restrictions of the past – the absence of the telephone or relatively rapid transatlantic crossings – meant a heightened receptivity to what ultimately was perceived. The glance felt across the room back then was more keenly felt than the softest press of lip on lip is today. I don’t know; the novel does not know either. Newland’s justification seems rooted in fear. The novel’s portrayal of his world is too negative to redeem at the last moment. May may surprise Newland, and indeed us readers, when she steps up to ensure she gets her marriage and the life she wants, but her perspective is not enough to save the society. I came out of the book marvelling at its technical proficiency, which truly is worth studying; yet after writing this blog post, I’m marvelling also at this mystery, which still remains so to me, of what exactly it seems to want to say.

I suppose I’ll keep pondering these questions until the next time I return to it.