Brimmings: up from the well

There are some books written long ago that we still read for good reasons. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is one of them.

Though Wharton wrote it in 1905, it remains resonant in our own time with its extant hierarchal social structures where one percent own half our nation’s wealth, twenty percent live in poverty, and the middle class faces inexorable decline.

And yet it seems an anomaly that Wharton, so deeply endowed with wealth, should prove one of its harshest critics. Free from economic anxiety, she never knew the duress of marginal income and its daily weight in meeting the monthly rent or mortgage, paying rising utility bills, putting food on the table, having just enough to last until the next paycheck; worse, the cyclic loss of employment amid the vicissitudes of a market economy. She crossed the Atlantic some 60 times, moving permanently to France in 1913. Her parents, who had accumulated substantial wealth from real estate investment, provided their two children with every privilege wealth can confer. A debutante, she never lacked for suitors and married rich. Enjoying replete cultural exposure, she spoke French, German, and Italian fluently, became expert in architectural design, and was a knowledgeable gardener.  Yet the fact remains, she’s among America’s most insightful literary critics of what we now call the Gilded Age with its plutocracy of concentrated wealth.

Unlike the novel’s protagonist, the snobbish Lily Bart, Wharton is unsparing in bursting the bubble of the wealthy, the often shallowness of their wanton materialism, the competitive rigors of keeping up appearances, its social intrigues, smug superiority and indifference to the working class.

Wharton’s conscience finds its mindset in foil Gerty Farish’s inveterate altruism who, as Lily observes, “likes being good.”

And though she evolves, it comes too late. Adulating the wealthy, “she liked their elegance, their lightness. They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way. Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.”

Like all tragic figures, Lily’s downfall is self-wrought, knowing the encumbrance of her social aspirations, yet subscribing to its comforts. As Selden, the man she loves, astutely observes, “She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

Selden’s observation, which reverberates throughout the narrative, links her with the naturalist school of writers that includes Crane, Zola, and Dreiser. Cosmic indifference infuses our universe and those unable to adapt it destroys, moral exigencies not withstanding. The House of Mirth has no easy fix. It is tragedy writ large.

As for Selden, he may love Lily, but unable to accomodate her quest for opulence and distinction, he cannot reciprocate. Sadly, he comes to believe the gossip he has heard, stifling his giving her the saving love she requires most by story end: “Selden had given her of his best, but he was as incapable as herself of an uncritical return to former states of feeling.”

Lily’s catalyst to insight is working-class Nettie Struther, whom she runs into toward novel end. In a singular act of previous charity, Lily provided money for Netty to access medical treatment, saving her life. Married and a recent mother, she offers that she had not only been ill, but unhappy. Like Gertie, Nettie has found contentment nonetheless, not in material goods, but in the bonds of affection: “It was the first time she had ever come across the results of her spasmodic benevolence, and the surprised sense of human fellowship took the mortal chill from her heart.”

In the novel’s most salient passage, Lily perceives that

all the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance; her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen. The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the fragments of her life and build herself a shelter with them seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence….If only life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the loving and foregoing in the world…The little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon her.

Though written in 1905, the novel’s women reflect changing mores and the earliest intrusion of feminism, married women venturing into adultery and divorce and smoking becoming commonplace. Bertha Dorset, Lily’s primary antagonist, has no misgivings about her serial adultery: “The code of Lily’s world decreed that a woman’s husband should be the only judge of her conduct; she was technically above suspicion while she had the shelter of his approval, or even of his indifference.” Its author, trapped in a 28-year unfulfilling marriage, would venture into a long affair, then divorce, rare for its time.

Contemporary readers may find Wharton’s lugubrious sentences tedious to navigate and, yet, read closely, redolent with observational detail probing human behavior in its myriad particulars not unlike England’s literary master, George Eliot, in Middlemarch.

I’ve long held up Wharton as among America’s foremost women novelists, supreme not only in her acuity observing social behavior, but its motivation. Wharton’s novel emerges as America’s rendition of close friend Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, both Isabel Archer and Lily Bart, not only victims of betrayal and lost freedom, but of themselves. The House of Mirth ultimately epitomizes the conflict between society’s impositions and the quest to live our authentic selves.

–rj

 

I hadn’t heard of Patti Smith before reading Devotion, her slim volume of 112 pages that expands upon her lecture presentation at Yale (2016), initiating the Windham-Campbell series, “Why I Write.”

Rock aficionados remember Smith for her punk-rock as a singer with her own band and award-winning albums.  Politically, her “People Have the Power” became the theme song for Ralph Nader in his 2000 campaign for the presidency. In 2007, she was admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone ranks her among the top 100 rock artists of all time.

She isn’t the norm among rock artists. A gifted painter, poet, and memoirist, she has achieved eminence both at home and abroad for her literary achievement, winning America’s most prestigious prize, The National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids (2010), sharing company with the likes of Faulkner, Bellow, Didion, Ellison, Auden and Roth. Earlier (2005), France awarded her one of its most prestigious cultural honors, “Commander of the Order of the Arts and Letters.”

Smith is an ardent francophile, with a special love for symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. Devotion largely takes place in France, with Simone Weil and Albert Camus receiving special attention.

I stumbled upon the book when I was alerted to Good Reads during our national lockdown and Devotion got mentioned. Years ago, I had read J. M. Cameron’s early biography of the French mystic, Weil, whose posthumous writings became influential. Not least, I’ve always been enamored with Albert Camus. Their presence in the memoir drew me in.

Devotion is divided into three sections, the first and last forming a frame for a fictional narrative of sixteen year old Eugenia, and her fateful liaison with much older Alexander and his exploitation.

In the first portion, we breathe Paris everywhere, its hotels, streets, restaurants, and artist luminaries. Voltaire, Nabokov, Genet, Joyce, Weil, Camus, Modiano—they hover over the City of Light, silent emissaries of the imagination, catalysts of its powers, instigators of imitation. It’s the France I love.

Smith provides readers here with antecedents, or fragments of what we experience, often unwittingly, if not hazardly, of encounters that surreptitiously have a way of becoming part of us, influencing who we are and become.

Devotion doesn’t define the imaginative process. It demonstrates it, and thus the fictional tale at its center, an amalgram of subtle encounters in life’s passage, a mosaic the end result. As she tells us, “Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.”

Many readers dislike the narrative of Eugenia with its theme of alienation from what gives solace and fulfillment, ending tragically, as its center placement implies: the raison d’etre of Devotion, the essence of imagination’s weaving, or of what Smith fondly calls “alchemy” in the fusing of inchoate elements into an assemblage of unified nuance.

Eugenia, is an Estonian survivor, escaping the deportation of thousands of Estonians to Siberia by a paranoid Stalin during World War II, and owes her genesis to a Martti Helde documentary trailer called Risttuules, translated as In the Crosswind.

Similarly, Eugenia’s studied pursuit of ice skating had its source in Smith’s admiration for a sixteen year old Olympic Russian skater she saw on TV. Smith had no previous experience with the sport.

Weil is important as well in her separation at an early age from her mother through war and Jewish ancestry. Eugenia likewise experiences maternal loss, ultimately learning that her paternal grandmother was Jewish. Like Weil, Eugenia is shy, sensitive and highly intelligent, incorporating Smith’s decision to fuse the physical and intellectual in her protagonist. Writers not only imbibe, they invent.

Eugenia yearns to know her family’s history, having been raised by her mother’s sister, Irna, to keep her safe from the Soviets. She tries to recoup the past “in a futile effort to uncover a father’s eyes, a mother’s face.“

Smith’s pastiche of myriad contributory sources underscores writing as an act of retrieving the past, of making time palpable, of discovering who we are, often unknowable, or as Irina comments in her letter near the story’s end, “There are no signs that tell us who we are. Not a star, not a cross, not a number on the wrist. We are ourselves.”

Artists must be free to hone their craft. Alexander nicknames Eugenia “Philadelphia,“ central in America’s quest for freedom. When he ties her hands late in the story, he symbolically shackles that freedom and pays its consequences:

“Yes, Philadelphia, a hotbed of freedom,“ she said, pulling the trigger.

(Smith grew up in Philadelphia. I did, too.)

Eugenia has been on an archetypal journey, crossing a continent, traversing an ocean, to sojourn on a new continent, now to return to an old. She subsequently enters Alexander’s apartment, reads his notes on presumably Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus:

The text posed a philosophic examination of the question of suicide—Is life worth living? He (Alexander) had written in the margin that perhaps there existed a deeper question—“Am I worthy of living? Five words that shook her entire being.”

Thematically, Eugenia is an orphaned child, vulnerable in her need for affection, abandoned by her last relative at sixteen. She finds compensation in daily ice skating on a secret winter pond hidden in the woods and becomes very good at it. Stalked by outsider Alexander, she is lured away from her devotion to what sustains: “Her defining sense of self was completely entwined with the laces of her skates.”

Having lost her freedom and with it, her innocence, she enters into knowledge, and seeks freedom’s retrieval. Guilt, however, intrudes with its heavy weight and she cannot pay its cost. Earlier, she had asked her tempter of a better life, “What is the price of this privilege?” Social and cultural constructs have done their mischief: “… she vowed to never skate again. It was her penance, to deny herself the one thing she could not live without.”

Devotion manifests not only Imagination’s dynamism, but its necessity for artists to complete themselves.  In sum, Smith has delivered an embedded parable of the consequences of its loss. As she tells us near Devotion’s end, defining the writer’s mission, “What is the task? To compose a work that communicates on several levels, as in a parable, devoid of the stain of cleverness.”

In resuming the frame, we again return to non-fiction in real time, a gathering of additional antecedents informing the embedded narrative—this time, not Paris, but the South of France.

There is Smith’s successful search for poet Paul Valéry’s grave, similar to her search for Weil’s when back in England, having garnered her material. She stops at an older tombstone with the word DEVOULEMENT carved diagonally across its border and asks her friend, what it means. “Devotion,” he replies, and a title is born, resonating the discipline that engenders successful artistry.

I’m curious about this. Despite the anecdote’s implied explanation of the title’s source, we should remember Rimbaud had written a poem, “Dévotion.” Rimbaud is Alexander’s favorite poet, as in real life, Smith’s. It turns out, dévoulement isn’t the word the French employ for devotion as Rimbaud’s poem title indicates. It means “devolution,” i. e., regression to a lower level or abnegation, its synonym in French. Smith doesn’t speak French and reads its literature only in translation.

In a telephone interview, Smith says she first came upon Rimbaud in a bookstall in a Philadelphia bus station. Sixteen at the time, the same age when Eugenia meets Alexander, she saw Rimbaud’s photo on the cover of a 99 cent paperback edition of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and found him “beautiful.” No money on her, she slipped it into her pocket. Dévotion is one of its poems (Tristram Fane Sanders, telegraph.co.uk, 9 November 2019).

It’s this third section I find Smith at her very best, so many sentences I’m underscoring, observant, moving, waxing poetic. She tells of receiving an invitation from Camus’ daughter, Catherine, to visit the family residence in Lourmarin near my favorite French city, Aix-en-Province.

She is given his bedroom, still housing his books, and access to his uncompleted manuscript, Le Premier Homme. She senses his presence, that affinity of one writer with another: “One could feel a sense of a focused mission and the racing heart propelling the last words of the final paragraph, the last he was to write.” True artistry, impelling its imitation, she senses the urgency, accompanied by confidence, to create her own.

There follows Smith’s compelling close, compe in its succinctness, unceasing in its resonance:

“Why do I write? My finger, as a stylus, traces the question in the blank air. A familiar riddle posed since youth, withdrawing from play, comrades and the valley of love, girded with words, a beat outside. Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.”

–rj