The Age of Innocence

“Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken” – Philip Wylie, The Disappearance

In the last chapterWarning! I am about to spoil the ending of a book published in 1920! of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence Newland Archer, after the death of his wife, has traveled to Paris, where his true love Ellen Olenska, who he has not seen in over 30 years, resides. When Archer arrives he finds himself paralyzed, only able to look up at Ellen’s window on the fifth floor:

Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged balcony. He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall, and then ushered into the drawing-room. He pictured [his son] entering that room with his quick assured step and his delightful smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy "took after him."

Then he tried to see the persons already in the room--for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one--and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it. . . . He thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.

"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

On its own, this passage is powerful enough, a tragic ending for the reader who has been hoping against hope that true love would finally triumph and Newland and Ellen would be united. But a little more insight into Wharton's possible source for this scene truly makes this passage tragic. Wharton named Archer after two characters in novels by her good friend Henry James: Christopher Newman (The American) and Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a LadyDiscussed in depth here.). In fact, a character in The Age of Innocence says to Archer, “You’re like the pictures on the wall of a deserted house: ‘The Portrait of a Gentleman.’”.

Wharton goes even further than referencing James’ work. In his wonderful examination of The Portrait of a Lady and its relation to Henry James’ lifePortrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece., Michael Gorra describes this heartbreaking story:

“[James] had once stood at dusk on a city street, watching “for the lighting of a lamp in a window on the third storey. And the lamp blazed out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face.” James had stayed there for hours, wet from the rain and repeatedly jostled by the hurrying crowd, ‘and never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face.”

The similarities between this story and Newland Archer’s vigil seem so clear that one assumes James told this story to Wharton as well. We do not know for sure who James was looking for in the window. Perhaps it was Paul Zhukovsky, a Russian who James had developed “a most tender affection for”As described in Gorra's book. as Colm Toibin in his fictionalized version of James’ life, The Master, speculates. Whoever it was, it is almost a certainty that it was someone James loved, a love that due to the social norms of the day was doomed to be unrequited. In this wondrous passage Wharton has not only captures the emotion James must have felt standing there, paralyzed in the rain, but has passed it along to us, her readers. For three hundred pages we have yearned for Newland and Ellen to finally be together. And we, like Newland, like James, are left wanting.

Notes

As I’ve previously mentioned I am very particular about the appearance of my books. After I’ve read them I still want them looking brand new when I put them up on the shelf. So, instead of writing notes in the book like a lot of people do I prefer to write notes separately. Here’s a look at the different types of notes I take.

Standard
Whenever I read a passage that really makes me think for whatever reason I write it down. Also, if I’m reading a novel and a family tree starts to grow and all of a sudden there are tons of cousins to keep track of I start a family tree. Here’s an example from Henry James The Portrait of a Lady:

Of course this method does has its drawbacks. As you can see there’s a big gap between pg. 65 and 325. I’m fairly certain there was something worth writing down in there. Unfortunately, what tends to happen is I end up bringing the book places but forgetting the note book. I have every intention of going back and writing stuff down later but hey, life happens.

Vocabulary Words
This doesn’t happen much, but this particular book of critical essays on the work of David Mitchell proved to be a doozy My handwriting sucks but yes that is the phrase "deleuzian rhizome" you see.:

Oh, and speaking of David Mitchell...

Keeping track of the connections in David Mitchell's books Very much deserving of its own category.
One of these days I’m going to make a map-based graphic representation of this. One of these days.

My Protagonist Has a Husband and She Hates That Dick

"...I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose" said Isabel. – Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady 1881

"This is life. What a fucked up thing we do. What a nightmare come true. Or a playground if we choose. And I choose." – The Offspring, I Choose, 1997I believe I can say with 99.9% certainty that I am the first person in the entirety of human existence to compare a line from a Henry James novel to a lyric in a song by The Offspring.

In case you were wondering, James is the one on the right.

Epiphanies often come when you least expect them. For example, when I was 22 and in my first year of graduate school I was complaining about not knowing how to iron clothes to a fellow classmate. A professor overheard our conversation and said, "Kyle, it’s not that you don’t know how to iron, it’s that you choose not to learn". I was so dumbstruck by this remark I immediately changed my name to Lyle and stopped persecuting Christians.Sorry, classical reference. Had to be done. But more importantly I realized how right this professor was. How hard is it to learn how to iron clothes? How pathetic was it to sit there and bitch about something that was totally in my power to change?

Fast forward a few more years and I’m listening to this Offspring song for the 1200th time but I finally really listen to the lyrics. Life can be a nightmare or a playground, but it is your choice! I can choose to sleep in late and eat a huge breakfast or I can get my ass up and run 10 miles. Yes I can make excuses as to why I can’t run the 10 miles. I am le tired. I have two kids who kept me up all night. It’s cold. It’s rainy. But still it is my choice. And I choose.

Which made it great when I encountered the above conversation in James’ The Portrait of a Lady. This novel contains the story of Isabel Archer, whose life changes dramatically when she is whisked away from her childhood home by an Aunt she had never met. When describing the room Isabel sits in when encountering her Aunt for the first time James describes how Isabel had always looked at the door:

"But she had no wish to look out [this door], for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side, a place which became, to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror.

That strange, unseen place on the other side is the adult world which is waiting for Isabel and as she discovers, it is very much a place of delight and terror. But the important fact, the most important fact is that it is entirely within her own power Yes Yes cousin Ralph’s help in obtaining her a large fortune definitely helped in this but still. to choose between the two, and the rest of the novel consists of Isabel learning this. So, in the end when she makes the decision to return to her evil bastard husband instead of turning towards the safety of Caspar Goodwood’s arms, don’t pity Isabel. I don’t know what happens to her after she got on that train to Rome. But I do know that it was her choice to make and she chose. And I choose to believe she has more delights than terrors, and more playgrounds than nightmares, ahead of her.