The Buccaneers - Edith Wharton

After finishing the Anne de Courcy's The Husband Hunters, I dove straight into Edith Wharton's last, and unfinished, novel, The Buccaneers.

I had seen the mini-series quite awhile ago and liked it and sort of remembered the basic outline of the plot, but it was great to read the novel. It was actually a very easy read and a fairly straight-forward plot--four young American girls find New York society impenetrable and so, along with their mothers and their father's cash, head to England to find mates.

The protagonist of the story is Nan St. George, the youngest of the lot, naive, dreamy, artistic, romantic, and talented. I loved the relationship between her and her English governess, Laura Testvalley, who shows the girls the ropes, introduces them, and wants to protect Nan from throwing her life away on a loveless marriage to a peer.

The focus of The Husband Hunters was on the ravenous quality of the American mothers who insisted that their daughters marry aristocrats, in some cases literally forcing them to do so. Wharton, however, chose to focus on the ambitions of the girls, painting the mothers as vague, indolent chaperones who were definitely out of their league and comfort zone.

Wharton completed 29 chapters of the novel before she died in 1937. These were published posthumously in 1938. In 1993, Wharton scholar Marion Mainwaring finished the novel, adding 13 chapters to mixed reviews. I only read the 29 chapters that Wharton wrote as well as her synopsis of the plot, which sketches out her intentions for Nan and Laura.

I felt that the 29 chapters I did read were extremely polished--it's hard to see them as first draft material, so perhaps Wharton polished as she wrote or they have been further edited. I don't know.

The Buccaneers is an interesting story and the ending that Wharton planned is bittersweeet--definitely less bleak for the protagonist than is usual for a Wharton novel but still not an unqualified happy ending.

This is my first book completed for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020 - category Classic by a Woman Author.

The also counts in my Classics Club, leaving only one book unread on my list, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.

The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York

I met up with my brother Mark just before Thanksgiving, and he lent me a book saying "I know you have lots of books you're reading or planning to read, but drop everything and read this one next."

I took his advice and absolutely loved The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York, by Anne de Courcy, finishing it last week.

The Husband Hunters is a non-fiction account of the American invasion, when American heiresses stormed Britain in search of penniless aristocratic husbands willing to trade "coronets for cash." The stories of these young women, mostly beautiful, mostly clothed in Paris fashions (House of Worth gowns), mostly energetic, flirty, confident, and above all well-endowed with very rich fathers and socially-ambitious mothers were fascinating.

Sadly, it seems that most of the marriages were not a success--meaning that while the girls were able to use their married titles to crack the glass ceilings of New York society, they weren't all that happy and many ended up divorced and disillusioned.

This book greatly enhanced my understanding of the world of Edith Wharton novels (well, not Ethan Frome, but most of the others), from the stultifying world of the New York society dominated by Mrs. Astor and its extension to the summer resorts first in Saratoga and later in Newport, to the old world oppression of English society.

Having faithfully watched all the seasons of Downtown Abbey, it was interesting to read about Lady Grantham's backstory--she was an American heiress whose father's money kept Downton Abbey afloat. But, the Downton Abbey experience made me aware of a critical element that the The Husband Hunters didn't address, that of the children of the American/British marriages. While the book faithfully chronicled the wooing and wedding and some of the aftermath, it didn't touch much on the children, apart from Winston Churchill, and how they fit into the different worlds of their parents.

I suppose that topic requires a whole book in and of itself. I remember Lady Mary once explaining to her mother that she wouldn't understand a certain nuance because she was American and not English--I thought that an odd thing to say to one's mother...hence my curiosity.

But that quibble notwithstanding, The Husband Hunters was excellent and a great way to seque into my current book, the last and unfinished novel The Buccaneers, by Edith Wharton.

The House of Mirth

I'm somewhat of a late-comer to Edith Wharton--sure, I read Ethan Frome in high school and watched The Buccaneers when it aired in 1995, but I only read The Age of Innocence a few years ago.  However, after finishing The House of Mirth this week, I can count myself as a Wharton fan.  I was so impressed with The House of Mirth--the writing is brilliant, the structure flawless, and the dialogue convincing.

As with any tragedy, I repeatedly wanted to step into the story and take Lily Bart in hand and shake some sense into her.  The copy of the novel that I read, a Modern Library Classic, contained a number of contemporary reviews of the work and I found myself disagreeing with most of them.  They talked about Lily's descent, her love of material things, her mistakes, but I saw the novel much differently.

In a way, I saw the story as her transcendence, her ascent above material goods and the superficiality of her society.  The House of Mirth chronicles a two-year period in the life of Lily Bart, circa 1890, society girl in New York City in which she goes from having the pick of America's most eligible bachelors to living in poverty, an insomniac, friendless and futureless.  Yet in the end, she is the "noblest Roman of them all."

If I look at the various scenarios in which she "makes mistakes," I can't say she should've done anything differently.  She was a babe in a shark tank but she never gave in to the desire to live a lie.

Having been an Austen fan for four decades, I thought it interesting to think about Lily's inability to actually seal the deal with the many men who pursued her and become someone's wife.  The story begins when she is 29, already well past her coming out, and although she was raised to marry well, she ends up sabotaging every relationship before it actually results in marriage.

I admired Lily immensely for her inability to treat marriage as a financial contract.  Without marriage, she cannot retain her identity in society, but to the end, she retains possession of her soul.

I am so looking forward to watching the movie version.

This is my American classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge.

1876: A Novel - by Gore Vidal

With 1876, by Gore Vidal, I complete the TBR Pile Challenge for 2013.  I am actually glad that both The Leopard and The Sweetness and the Bottom of the Pie turned out to be duds for me, because had they not, I might have put off reading this marvelous book even longer.  It's been on my TBR shelf for decades--it was first published in 1976--and I think I got my copy sometime in the 1980's.

It is the third book in Vidal's Narratives of Empire series, which is a heptalogy of historical novels that chronicles American history from 1775, with Burr, to 2000, with The Golden Age.  I read Lincoln, the book before 1876, and enjoyed it and have been meaning to read the rest of the series, but you know how that goes!

1876 is about the last days of the Grant administration and the much-contested election that brought Rutherford B. Hayes to the White House.  The protagonist is Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, fictional illegitimate son of Aaron Burr, who has just returned to the U.S. after spending decades in France.  Having lost his money in one of the many scandals that rocked the Gilded Age, he is working as a political journalist, primarily for the New York Herald.  Because his daughter Emma, who has accompanied him, is a widowed Princess, all of New York and Washington societies are open to them.

Vidal really was a superb writer.  In 1876, he explains the issues of the day, the political machinations, and the nuances of society beautifully and seamlessly in the context of his story.  I felt that I learned so much about the Gilded Age, which has been one of those black holes in my knowledge of American history, and I found myself constantly using my iPad to look up people, places, and events that Vidal brushed up against in the course of the novel.  

I particularly enjoyed Charlie's absolute disdain for Mark Twain.  I felt that Charlie was definitely speaking for Vidal, and I have to say that I agreed with him.  Of course, 1876 took place before Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--I wonder what Charlie would have thought about that book, which is, in my opinion, Twain's one redeeming work.

1876 is truly excellent historical novel and one that I wholeheartedly recommend, particularly for readers who enjoy Edith Wharton's novels.  The world of 1876 is the one in which Wharton was a young girl, and the New York of 1876 is the New York she grew up in.

Edward Harrison May portrait of Edith Wharton

"You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome."

So says Mrs. Hale, the source of the few facts of the story that the narrator concocts about Ethan Frome, and so say I.

I first read Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, during the last millennium and, along with millions of other high-school students, remember it for the depression into which it flung me as I faced page after page of unrelenting misery that Wharton inflicted upon her title character. I probably callously thought then what I callously thought on my latest reread of this American classic, "Ethan Frome couldn't even succeed at killing himself and his lover as she asked him to."

Callousness aside, I have spent the last six weeks scratching my head trying to figure out why I would sign up to review Ethan Frome for the Classics Circuit's Edith Wharton tour when I had no good memories of reading this book and whenever I mentioned to someone what I was reading they invariably moaned and rolled their eyes and questioned my sanity. But, it is an American classic and I couldn't really remember how the story worked and I've matured a lot since I was 16, so after having a jolly good time with Murder at Longbourn I dived into Ethan Frome last week, and I'm glad I did.

It is beautifully written--exquisite prose, finely crafted, and a true expression of an American tragedy. It is compelling too. I found myself thinking of Hamlet a lot whilst reading it, and I forced myself to slow down and not chug it but to savor it and think about and feel the unfolding inevitability of the catastrophe.

I've also been slowly reading Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, and in it he says that "some books are badly written...sometimes they're badly read, too." Ethan Frome is beautifully written but more often than not it's badly read, hence the almost universal loathing it inspires. I think it's a mistake to inhale it--though I think many people, especially students who must read it for a class, are tempted to because it's short (i.e., inhalable) and depressing (i.e., "let's just get it over with!")--because it does have a lot to like.

I found that I enjoyed reading this book when I limited the experience to just three or four chapters a night--and they are short chapters--and then turning to another book for balance. I read Shakespeare, especially the tragedies, this way too.

In thinking about what to write about for this post, I googled on "tragedy" and liked this opening sentence from the Wikipedia entry:

Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that paradoxically offers its audience pleasure...

I think our society tends to shy away from stories that don't have happy endings. I imagine Hollywood types discussing the "box-office poison" of tragedy--maybe that's why reality-show contests are so popular. In addition to being cheaper to produce than regular dramas, they do guarantee a happy ending for at least someone or some team. A tragedy is a guarantee that that there is no happy ending--the art lies in telling the story in a way that makes it pleasurable for the reader.

In the case of Ethan Frome, it is not the message but the medium that makes the story a classic. It is not that Wharton shows the dark underbelly of the American dream--although I thought it was interesting that Ethan thought of "going west" as a way of escaping the prison of his life in Starkfield--but that you can read this horrific tale of thwarted dreams and forbidden desire and appreciate and enjoy the beautifully wrought story arc, the layered, interwoven imagery of light and incarceration, and the metaphor of the seasons, from the dead mid-winter of discontent to the remembered heat of August to the false spring that ends the story.

I couldn't help wonder where Wharton's head was when she wrote this story--it was published in 1911, she divorced 1913. I found this on womenwriters.net: "Wharton was divorced from her husband in 1913, in part because she and her husband had grown into separate lives, and in part because her husband had numerous infidelities." Two years after she thwarted Ethan's escape from the shackles of his marriage, she affected her own escape.

A few years ago I listened to a series of lectures from The Teaching Company that were delivered by Elizabeth Vandiver, and I remember her saying that punishments in Greek mythology were particularly appropriate to the crime. I have to say that Wharton provided Ethan with a particularly appropriate punishment to his crime of lusting after his wife's cousin by having her become as querulous as his wife. Of course to be fair, Mattie did sustain a spinal injury which might excuse a certain amount of peevishness on her part over a twenty-year period.

In my opening paragraph, I mentioned that the narrator concocts the story of Ethan Frome from the few facts he gets from the inhabitants of Starkfield about Ethan. I read Atonement about six months ago and wrote a bit about the unreliability of narrators, Briony in particular, and how the story of Celia and Robbie is really more about Briony than Celia and Robbie. I got to thinking about Atonement again whilst thinking about Ethan Frome because it struck me that the story of Ethan Frome is more about the unnamed narrator who fills in the huge gaps between the facts with his own fantasy than it is about Ethan and Mattie and Zenobia.

In doing a bit of reading about Ethan Frome, I have discovered that Wharton wrote a companion piece to it, Summer. Since I read Ethan Frome in January, maybe I'll put Summer on my list for July.



In looking for an image of the version that I read, I found quite a few versions out there...most have similar covers--the one on the Signet Classic version I read is a Grandma Moses painting, but I thought this one was the most out of the norm! Kind of gives away the whole story on the cover.


There's also a fairly recent movie adaptation with Liam Neeson as Ethan. Not sure whether I'll watch it or not.