“The Lamp of Psyche”
“Delia Corbett was too happy; her happiness frightened her.”
The story begins with Mrs. Delia Corbett making a series of reflections on her happiness. She’s newly married now in her mid-thirties, having been previously married and widowed (more or less both unhappily). She also reflects that her first husband’s wanderlust (and lust) made her not want to be with him anymore and if she benefited from his death so be it. Her new marriage is just two months old and has been a bit of a whirlwind. It’s only a short period, but has involved a lot of travel, and like with a lot of late (and second marriages) there hasn’t been the long courtship and meeting of each other’s families. Mr Corbett has had talk of a sister he doesn’t see much anymore and Delia has a beloved aunt who will meet her new husband soon, but hasn’t yet.
That’s our setting. The meeting takes places, and the aunt and husband seem to get along well and even swimmingly, until the aunt asks the man why he didn’t fight in the war (the US Civil War), and he tries to evade the question. She persists, remarking that every man, unless unable to fight went, well unable to fight or a coward. He tells her that if her simple way of looking at it are the only options, she can draw her own conclusions. After the event Delia goes to talk with him and apologizes for her aunt’s behavior. She also remarks to herself how slightly diminished he is her own eyes, not for failing to fight in the war, but for failing to adequate defend himself.
“The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems”
“Once upon a time a number of children lived together in the Valley of Childish Things, playing all manner of delightful games, and studying the same lesson-books.”
This is a series of short little fables, some feeling modern and some not, packaged together as a short story. This is a fairly common enough form, both the form of fables, but also taking the fable form and writing short little modern versions. I can think of examples from a few different writers. The fables range from a page or more to just a few lines. A short one goes like this:
“III There was once a little girl who was so very intellgient that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, “My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.”
The stories functions like little ironies (I guess I am most thinking of Gustave Flaubert as a corollary, if not source here for the form), and each one tends to have a pithy little ending. Each one is either slightly sad, slightly funny, or some of both, and all of them reveal a little sliver of reversal.
“The Debt”
“You remember—it’s not so long ago—the talk there was about Dredge’s “Arrival of the Fittest”? The talk has subsided, but the book of course remains: stands up, in fact, as the tallest thing of its kind since—well, I’d almost said since “The Origin of Species.”
I’m not wrong, at any rate, in calling it the most important contribution yet made to the development of the Darwinian theory, or rather to the solution of the awkward problem about which that theory has had to make such a circuit. Dredge’s hypothesis will be contested, may one day be disproved; but at least it has swept out of the way all previous conjectures, including of course Lanfear’s magnificent attempt; and for our generation of scientific investigators it will serve as the first safe bridge across a murderous black whirlpool.
This is a story in which Edith Wharton feels firmly to be straddling the line between the 19th and 20th century. It’s a story about many things, but one thing that comes about is that a young man is offered a position to work as a research scientist and this accrues a debt that needs paying back. Debts are literary gold of course, whether real or imagined, and this is no different. What makes this feel like both a modern and old story at once is that the frame of the story feels very much like a Dostoyevsky or maybe a Chekhov story, in that old European way (I guess fair to say Russian way), but the story itself and the details feels like an early foray into 20th century academic life. Debts are there in stories to be paid or not paid, but the fact of the debt can never be ignored.
The Eyes
“We had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s—the narrative of a strange personal visitation.”
This is the first real story of Edith Wharton’s where I get the sense of some real homosexual undertones, which is nice really. There’s a male homosocial bond that it is deeply affectionate, and among other things involves long looks into each others eyes. It’s kind of hard not to read things into this one, so therefore I will.
The story itself is not hugely remarkable otherwise. Eyes are a pretty ripe symbol, and in the story the eyes that the two make at each other are also mirrored by a set of eyes that the one characters sees in the dark. They seem sinister, but instead of springing at them and attacking them, he’s paralyzed and even allured by them. Wink.
The Journey
“As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and looked through the opening in the hangings at her husband’s curtains across the aisle . . .”
This one is great and terrifying in its own way and feels more like a Joyce Carol Oates story or maybe a Flannery O’Connor, and I guess some very very very specific Faulkner going on. We meet a woman who is married and in love and happy for the first time in her life, and what do you know, her husband immediately takes ill. She is worried he is going to die, and of course he does. She needs to get him home, but cannot stomach declaring him dead and dealing with the sadness and concern and paperwork of what is required to load a body on a train, so she wheels him aboard, closes the cabin’s curtains and pretends he’s sleeping a lot. There’s some awkward scenes as she puts off the porter and some busybodies, and worse, puts off her own feelings about the death knowing that once she believes it herself, there’s no going back. It’s a painful story (and not funny) but also it’s grim and morbid and somewhat uncharacteristically macabre for Wharton. Wharton likes a ghost more than a body. So this might a kind of OG Weekend at Bernies, but not a fun one.
The Moving Finger
“The news of Mrs. Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as though all sorts of renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of that one wheel. Not that Mrs. Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum to the social machine: her unique distinction was that of filling to perfection her special place in the world.”
Something that Edith Wharton really loves to write about it is a happy second marriage. And that’s what we get here. This is the story of Grancy and his new wife, but told through the eyes of his longtime friends who has seen him suffer in unhappiness, and then seem dreadfully happy in a new life. The sadness of his loss is too much for the story, so the story takes on a powerful sense of empathy, rather than grief. That’s still grief and mourning, but it’s aslant from what we tend to get from stories. It’s also interesting that this is the title of the first Marple novel by Agatha Christie.
The Daunt Diana
“WHAT’S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard the sequel?”
Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of the collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good listener, at any rate. I don’t think much of Ringham’s snuff-boxes, but his anecdotes are usually worth while. He’s a psychologist astray among bibelots, and the best bits he brings back from his raids on Christie’s and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human nature he picks up on those historic battle-fields. If his flair in enamel had been half as good we should have heard of the Finney collection by this time.”
This is a story about a man who has everything, well money at least. He buys himself a huge art collection, but then either grows bored of disillusioned by it and sells it. He immediately regrets this decision and must go searching for each piece of the collection bit by bit, with one painting remaining elusive. The “Diana” portrait becomes an object of obsession, even though it’s the one piece he said he wasn’t really moved by otherwise. The major theme of this work emerges pretty clearly. By purchasing the collection wholesale, he’s not earned the satisfaction of the choosing and curating a collection over time and putting the work in to get it together. He’s purchased that satisfaction, and well, that ends up being unsatisfying. I am reminded of several more recent examples of people who have gotten rich very quickly, but don’t really have anything that drives them outside of the thing that got them rich, and this turns them into a kind of dilettante like our character here. The sadness of trying to buy clout is not one that engenders much sympathy except through the other characters in the same basic social circle, and for the likes of us might feel nicely smug.
It’s also hard not to read the title of this one to the tune of Dirty Diana.
“Quicksand”
“As Mrs. Quentin’s victoria, driving homeward, turned from the Park into Fifth Avenue, she divined her son’s tall figure walking ahead of her in the twilight. His long stride covered the ground more rapidly than usual, and she had a premonition that, if he were going home at that hour, it was because he wanted to see her.”
This story primarily involves a woman meeting with and discussing marriage with her would-be/soon to be daughter in law. There’s money involved and that seems like it will be the direction of the conversation, but instead, the story takes down a nostalgic path as the mother sees herself in the daughter-in-law and rather than be delighted by the possibility of bringing someone like this into her life, she’s horrified by the possibility of the life and vitality being sucked out of the vibrant woman’s youth like she saw her own. And even though it’s her son, and maybe because it’s her son, rather than a welcome, we get a warning.
I like this one and it has some oomph behind it especially a pithy enough closure, which often makes a story land.
