The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Her own life had its novelistic elements. In 1885 she mar- ried, with no great enthusiasm, Teddy Wharton, a well-to-do but vapid Bostonian who was conspicuously her intellectual inferior. For a few years she lived a life of idle affluence, build­ing her dream house, The Mount, in Lowell, Massachusetts, and frequenting the haunts of the wealthy in Saratoga, Newport, and New York. At the same time she began, tenta- tively, the literary career she had dreamed about as a young girl; her collection of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899) won some favorable notice. She began to achieve real celebrity as a writer with a steady output of novйis in the early 1900S; by that time her marriage was showing serious strains (Teddy began embezzling money from her trust fund and spending it on more compliant young women) and she was liv­ing mostly in Europe, with or without her husband. In 1906-09 she had an affair with Morton Fullerton, the great love of her life, who unfortunately turned out to be a cad. She and Teddy were divorced in 1913, and her relations with men thereafter were confined to warm but asexual friendships with men prominent in the arts—most notably Henry James [96], but also Walter Berry and Bernard Berenson. (The dark tone of her best-known short novel, Ethan Frome, published in 1911, very likely reflects her disenchantment with the institu- tion of marriage.) Edith Wharton settled permanently in Europe, living on her ever-increasing royalties and acting as a literary hostess and generous friend to young writers at her sumptuous Paris apartment and her garden home in the south of France.

The strength of character that saw her through her difficult youth and her impossible marriage made Edith Wharton a dis- ciplined and hard-working writer who achieved both popular and criticai success. Of her many excellent novйis (and I find it hard to choose), I recommend especially The Custom of the Country (1913), whose heroine, the ambitious Undine Spragg, finds none of her conquests satisfactory; The Age of Innocence (1920), the story of an irresolute young man in the New York of the i88os, caught between his feelings for his fiancйe and his rekindled passion for an earlier lover; and her first best- seller, The House of Mirth (1905), whose heroine Lily Bart, in my view, is Wharton^ finest character. Like Becky Sharpe [76], Lily finds little she will not do to win a place in society; but whereas Thackeray tried to suppress his own and the readers potential affection for his spunky adventuress (by making her a bad mother), Wharton clearly has every sympa- thy for Lily, but nevertheless finds no way to avert the doom that a rigid and censorious society reserves for her.

In these novйis, and in ali of her work, Edith Wharton viewed the world with a sympathetic but unsparing eye.

J.S.M.

103

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

1865-1939

Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiography

Exclusive of Shakespeare [39] and Chaucer [32], the Plan sug- gests for extended reading a small number of English and American poets. Among these, posterity will assign Yeats his proper rank. That he will not be at the bottom of the list we may be sure.

Yeats offers difficulties. He was a complex man who offers inadequate satisfaction when read in anthological snatches. Also, he is more than a poet. Among his tremendous output are poems, plays, memoirs, essays, literary studies, folk and fairy tales, mysti- cal philosophies, letters, speeches, translations from Sophocles [6]. Like Goethe's [62], his long life comprised a series of evolu- tions. There is a vast space between the aged poet of the Last Poems and Plays (1940) and the young Celtic dreamer of The Wanderings of Oisin (1889). To bridge this space the reader must absorb a great deal of Yeats and also know something about the Ireland whose soul he tried to find and form.

That is why I suggest his Autobiography, a one-volume omnibus. It contains reminiscences of his life through 1902, together with extracts from a diary kept in 1909, some notes about the death in 1909 of the fine Irish dramatist Synge, and an account of his reception in Sweden, which he visited in 1923 to receive the Nobel Prize.