Old New York – Edith Wharton, 1924 ★★★★½

Casualties in Crinoline 

Short-story collections can be like concept albums where individual pieces flow together to create a thematic whole. At their best, these collections contain dialogues not only within the stories, but between them.

I have seen it happen with Hemingway’s in our time and James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room. In Old New York I got to see it again, in perhaps its most successful version yet. Here are four novellas that, terrific as they read in isolation, develop when read together a unity of setting and message that transports you to another place and time.

The place is familiar, if transformed: New York City, circa the mid- to late 1800s, when members of the cultural elite rode in fancy carriages and snubbed each other at parties. Edith Wharton, herself a product of that class, has enormous fun at her strata’s expense:

He belonged to the cautious generation of New York gentlemen who revered Hamilton and served Jefferson, who longed to lay out New York like Washington, and who laid it out instead like a gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people they secretly looked down upon.

Edith Wharton grew up among the Manhattan elite before relocating in Europe. While never losing her patrician manner, her fiction displays deep empathy for life's underdogs. Image from https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photo-edith-wharton-unimpressed-f-scott-fitzgerald/

That could be an excerpt from any of the stories; it is taken from the second and longest of them, “The Old Maid.” One of the joys of reading Old New York is how it captures mindsets, customs, and scenery of a bygone time, not without judgment but with a depth of feeling that immerses the reader.

The novellas are delineated by decades. The first, “False Dawn,” sets up the 1840s; “The Old Maid” represents the 1850s; “The Spark” is about the 1860s; and “New Year’s Day” occurs in the 1870s.

But in fact, it’s not as neat as that. “The Spark” involves the shadow of the American Civil War of the 1860s, but everything in it takes place decades later. In other stories, the decade isn’t even mentioned.

Manhattan is a nexus if not always the setting. In “False Dawn,” the first story, much of the action takes place in Long Island, where some of Gotham’s richest lived even then. The one constant between the stories is a focus on the wealthy, an aristocracy already in the process of being passed over by time while doing their best to ignore it. The result lends both comedy and pathos to the proceedings.

Manhattan in the 1840s, when Old New York begins. Sailing was the main form of mass transit then. Image from https://pixels.com/featured/vintage-pictorial-map-of-new-york-city-1840-cartographyassociates.html

Here’s a novella-by-novella breakdown:

“False Dawn” – A rather comedic tale, this set up for me an incorrect expectation that all the stories here would be played with a smile. Poor Lewis Raycie chafes and wilts under the domineering gaze of his autocratic plutocrat of a father. Papa Halston sends Lewis on a Grand Tour to Europe in order to buy some prize art to amaze his Long Island neighbors and Manhattan society alike.

“A young man, in my opinion, before setting up for himself, must see the world; form his taste; fortify his judgment,” Halston explains. “He must study the most famous monuments, examine the organization of foreign societies, and the habits and customs of older civilizations whose yoke it has been our glory to cast off.”

Suffice it to say Lewis’s expedition doesn’t go as planned, as he departs from his father’s favored painters and plunges his fortune into unfamiliar art pieces that, when assembled back home, leave his father first perplexed, then furious. They aren’t by the usual suspects, you see.

The sort of painting Halston Raycie expects his son to buy, a portrait by the celebrated Spaniard Lo Spagnoletto. New Yorkers knew how to pronounce the name, Wharton notes. Not so Giotto di Bondone. Image from https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-4684725

As a story, “False Dawn” is both clever and amusing for the way it sets up the reader as well as New York society in a grand misdirection ploy Wharton carries off with aplomb. Yet the glory is as much in the margins here, with an affecting romance between Lewis and the ungainly woman who wins his heart because she reminds him so of those paintings no one else in New York seems to like.

Here as with the other novellas, the ending is ambiguous in the way it refuses to provide a happy or sad ending, just one that feels utterly right to the characters and setting and makes for a fantastic start. Can Edith keep it up?

“The Old Maid” – The short answer is yes. This is the longest story in the collection, and probably the most successful from a cultural perspective, being made first into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play and then a movie co-starring Bette Davis. It has the strongest emotional undertow as it articulates the cruel juxtaposition of age and social expectations.

Two female cousins both qualify for the title after one is widowed and the other loses her one chance for a socially acceptable marriage (which the other woman helps to disrupt). What brings them together is the girl they more or less jointly adopt and find themselves quietly feuding over when she grows up to seek out her own marriage.

Bette Davis starred in The Old Maid, a 1939 Hollywood adaptation co-starring Miriam Hopkins as her cousin. Judging by reports, this film was notable for the behind-the-scenes feuding between the two actresses. Image from https://www.classicmoviefavorites.com/julie-reviews-bette-davis-in-the-old-maid-1939/

Since Wharton is a woman, I expect her fiction to be female-focused. “The Old Maid” certainly has that quality to it, a woman bemoaning the social constructs of a time and place that makes her a prisoner of her gender. “Why is it crazy to do what I think is right?” exclaims Charlotte Lovell, the one who never marries.

Wharton writes about this situation with heart and withering sarcasm:

And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to “make up for everything,” and didn’t – though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.

I read that Wharton was very much a fan of Henry James; I’m not but definitely saw his influence. I think for me, where Wharton is better is in the way she explains her characters with James’ delicate nuance without losing a feeling for them as people. The relationship between the two cousins carries real heartbreak (at times it’s a real soap opera) but what sticks with you is the empathy. It would be easier, and perhaps more satisfying, to develop one as the villain, but Wharton keeps the feelings of both always in frame. As a result, you care about both.

Running through Old New York is the theme of ephemerality. Wharton: "These old New Yorkers, who lived so well and spent their money so liberally, vanished like a pinch of dust when they disappeared from their pews and their dinner-tables." Bethesda Fountain in Central Park is seen above, in a still from a lovely YouTube video by Jordan Liles found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mjOdBpDxZU&t=0s.

“The Spark” – Every collection of short stories will have one that doesn’t quite come off, and here’s that one for me in Old New York. But “The Spark” also exemplifies why I think Old New York is much more than the sum of its parts.

Wharton cops early on to the fact that what you are getting here is not a story so much as a slice-of-life piece: “This is not a story-teller’s story; it is not even the kind of episode capable of being shaped into one,” she has her narrator explain.

If I was tempted to think of Wharton as a woman’s writer because of “The Old Maid,” reading “The Spark” snapped me out of it. The victim of an unfaithful wife, Hayley Delane lives a quietly affluent life amid the phonies who surround him, moved to anger only when one of his wife’s lovers mistreats a pony in a polo match.

A “shut-in fellow,” Hayley seems oddly able to brush off his social embarrassments, suffering without complaint the condescension of his wife and her glittery young friends. The secret of this fortitude is eventually revealed, with the help of a young narrator who finds himself holding the answer in an author’s portrait.

Part of Hayley's secret involves his experience as a young Union soldier at the First Battle of Bull Run, depicted here in an 1889 lithograph by Kurz and Allison. Wharton: "People, I had by this time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many years longer they continued to be alive; and I suspected that Delane had stopped at about nineteen." Image from https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Battle-of-Bull-Run-1861

While “The Spark” didn’t click as a story, it was satisfying to revisit Wharton’s New York, for both its well-drawn characters and as a backboard for pithy social comment, like “Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.”

“New Year’s Day” – Fascinatingly developed in the form of a framing device around a winter day’s festivity enjoyed by some of Manhattan’s oldest and wealthiest families, this quickly hones in on one woman who, in a freak moment, is spied outdoors by the partygoers with a man not her husband. Will she survive the scandal?

Make no mistake, she’s a survivor:

Lizzie Hazeldean had long since come to regard most women of her age as children in the art of life. Some savage instinct of self-defense, fostered by experience, had always made her more alert and perceiving than the charming creatures who passed from the nursery to marriage as if lifted from one rose-lined cradle into another.

Lizzie Hazeldean's glamourous figure overshadows her devoted husband, an effect John Singer Sargent also captures in this 1897 double portrait of a New York City couple, Isaac and Edith Stokes. What lies beneath that bucolic surface? Image from https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1897-sargent-mr-stokes/

The best story in terms of the way it builds both suspense and character, “New Year’s Day” wouldn’t contain nearly the charge it does without the other novellas in this collection as company. New York City’s days as a genteel gaslit battlefield of pince-nez and ballgowns may be over, but there remains a certain hovering meanness Wharton captures well.

Life with other people can be nasty even when they aren’t trying to be, as Lizzie finds with one Mrs. Mant, who initially took her in to her Manhattan home before turning on her, then began feeling sorry for her once Lizzie became the victim of scandal. “Mrs. Mant’s sympathy seemed more cruel than her cruelty,” she writes. “Every word that she used had a veiled taunt for its counterpart.”

New Yorkers can kick you around even when they’re trying to be nice to you, Wharton seems to be saying. If so, I think I get what she means.

Old New York was not an easy read – there is a lot of attention to home furnishings and the like which can be heavy going even when they help ground me in its specific time. But in taking her time, Wharton sinks her hooks in deep. I found myself still reading this long after I put it away.