Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters Read online

  EVERYMAN,

  I WILL GO WITH THEE,

  AND BE THY GUIDE,

  IN THY MOST NEED

  TO GO BY THY SIDE

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  First included in Everyman’s Library, 2008

  Introduction Copyright © 2008 by Hermione Lee

  Bibliography and Chronology Copyright © 2008

  by Everyman’s Library

  Typography by Peter B. Willberg

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Published in the United Kingdom by Everyman’s Library, Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT, and distributed by Random House (UK) Ltd.

  US website: www.randomhouse.com/everymans

  ISBN: 978-0-307-26825-9(US)

  978-1-85159-312-8 (UK)

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-5293-8

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  ——

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Select Bibliography

  Chronology

  ETHAN FROME

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  SUMMER

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  BUNNER SISTERS

  Part I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Part II

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Titles in Everyman’s Library

  INTRODUCTION

  ——

  ‘Bunner Sisters’ is the name of a shop, and it is the only thing written by Edith Wharton to have such a title. It is not what you expect if you associate her mainly with class, wealth, and snobbery. But the underside of society interests her, too, more than she has been given credit for. Because she made her name as an analyst of rich, leisured Americans in Old New York, Wharton’s strong strand of compassionate realism has tended to be undervalued. She is no Dreiser or Zola, but her writing life overlaps with theirs, and she is well aware of the economic and social inequities which underly the world she specializes in. She gives more thought than many of her fictional characters do to the lives of people who have to get up and go to work and struggle to make a living. In an early story called ‘A Cup of Cold Water’, a grim tale of urban struggle and despair, the central character looks out in the morning at the city going about its business: ‘That obscure renewal of humble duties was more moving than the spectacle of an army with banners.’ And he quotes one of Wharton’s favourite lines from Hamlet, ‘For every man hath business and desire.’ It is like Dorothea’s knowledge, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, that she must rouse herself, after a night of personal anguish, to an involvement in ‘the involuntary, palpitating’ life of humanity. Wharton admired, and emulated, George Eliot’s seriousness and responsibility. She said in a letter of 1905 that she did not want The House of Mirth to be a superficial study of trivial people. On the contrary, she wanted to bring out the ‘tragic implication’ of a society with no ‘inherited obligations’, by concentrating on ‘what its frivolity destroys’.

  The unemployed, the hard-up, the pauperized and the shabby-genteel, servants and workers, press in at the corners of her fictions. She makes you wonder what it would be like to see events from their point of view – as in ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’ or ‘After Holbein’, where the servants have their say. How would Undine Spragg’s story read, in The Custom of the Country, from the point of view of Mrs Heeny, the masseuse and manicurist who collects society clippings, part subservient social parasite, part malevolent gossip? What would Lily Bart’s story be like as told by Mrs Haffen, the charwoman she is so curt with, and who comes back to blackmail her, whose desperation and resentment burn off the page on which she appears? Lily Bart, slipping down the cold social surface she has tried to grip on to, reduced in the end to an incompetent milliner’s assistant and a supplicant to the working-girl Nettie Struther, shows us the underside of the social fabric, the place the despised Mrs Haffen comes from. Only very rarely does Wharton shift the vantage point altogether to that underside (other examples are ‘Mrs Manstey’s View’, ‘Friends’, ‘A Cup of Cold Water’ and ‘Bewitched’). But when she does, she gives the lie to critics who accuse her of not understanding the ‘real’ America.

  Bunner Sisters is the earliest, and by far the least well-known of her three superb novellas of poverty and deprivation, and it deserves to be as famous as Ethan Frome or Summer. Wharton’s editors at Scribner’s, Edward Burlingame and Charles Scribner, were nervous of its unflinching grimness. Wharton tried to get Burlingame to run it in Scribner’s Magazine in 1892 and again in 1893. It was early in her publishing career, when her confidence in her own work was not yet high – but she knew it was good. ‘Though I am not a good judge of what I write,’ she told him, ‘it seems to me, after several careful readings, up to the average of my writings.’ But Bunner Sisters would not be published until 1916 (the year that she was writing Summer), and Scribner did not want to publish it on its own because (he told her in July 1916) it was ‘just a little small for the best results in separate form’. So this realist masterpiece of thwarted lives was included in her war-time volume of stories, Xingu, and never had the impact it would have had if published separately.

  Bunner Sisters is a poignant and cruel story of two sisters who, at the start of the novella, are making ends meet with a bit of sewing and a shabby-genteel basement shop that sells hat-trimmings, artificial flowers and other knick-knacks, in a run-down side-street in New York. They are a fretful pair, the older one, Ann Eliza, self-martyring and anxious, the younger, Evelina, spoilt and dissatisfied. Into these dismal lives comes a seedy German clock-mender, Mr Ramy, who makes up to them both. When Ann Eliza, who has always indulged her younger sister, begins to fall for Mr Ramy, the narrator tells us: ‘She had at last recognized her right to set up some lost opportunities of her own.’ But Bunner Sisters only allows a brief vision of hopes and possibilities before it settles, implacably, for renunciation, loneliness, and disappointment. Evelina, obtusely and permanently unaware of her sister’s feelings, marries Mr Ramy and is taken away to a fate which turns out, on her eventual return, to be as bad as any of Ann Eliza’s worst imaginings. A sympathetic upper-class lady, who has troubles of her own, makes occasional visits to the Bunner sisters’ shop, but we never find out her story, or even her name, and like everyone else in the story, she cannot be of any help to the sisters. Ann Eliza comes to feel that there is no God, ‘only a black abyss above the roof of Bunner Sisters’. Wharton tells the story with a pain
staking, Balzacian exactness and a scrupulous interest in these compressed lives. She shines a light which is at once harsh and compassionate on every detail – the district, the neighbours (who provide some subdued humour), the sisters’ home-life, a Sunday outing to Central Park, or a ferry-crossing to Hoboken to visit Mr Ramy’s friend the German washerwoman Mrs Hochmüller (a soft, tender piece of urban pastoral, unlike anything else in Wharton). But there is nothing soft or tender in the dialogue between the sisters. Any hint that the older sister’s love for the younger might sentimentalize the story is bleakly made away with:

  ‘Don’t you talk like that, Evelina! I guess you’re on’y tired out – and disheartened.’

  ‘Yes, I’m disheartened,’ Evelina murmured.

  A few months earlier Ann Eliza would have met the confession with a word of pious admonition; now she accepted it in silence.

  ‘Maybe you’ll brighten up when your cough gets better,’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes – or my cough’ll get better when I brighten up,’ Evelina retorted with a touch of her old tartness.

  ‘Does your cough keep on hurting you jest as much?’

  ‘I don’t see’s there’s much difference.’

  At the end, Ann Eliza, horribly alone, sets out on a spring morning into the great city, which ‘seemed to throb with the stir of innumerable beginnings’. But not for her.

  *

  In all three of these stories, a window of hope and love is opened onto a narrow, thwarted life, only to be closed shut again. The most startling example of this is Ethan Frome (1911) which became the best-known of all Wharton’s works, frequently reprinted and adapted for stage and screen. This famously American, provincial novella began life around 1907 – amazingly enough, as a formal exercise in improving her French, written in the grand Paris setting of the Faubourg St-Germain. She told her friend Bernard Berenson that it amused her to do ‘Starkfield, Massachusetts’ and ‘Shadd’s Fall’ in the rue de Varenne. A few years later, at the darkest point of her own marital crisis, she returned to this French exercise and turned it into a great work of art.

  For readers more familiar with The House of Mirth or The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome comes as a shock, and this is not just because of the dramatic switch from her usual territory to the remote hills and poor farmers’ lives of nineteenth-century New England. What is just as startling is its quietness, what Henry James admiringly called its ‘kept-downness’. Ethan Frome is a story of silence and speechlessness. Voices and feelings are all ‘snowed under’.(The first French translation, which she oversaw, was titled Sous la neige.) The characters live inside ‘dumb melancholy’ and ‘secretive silence’, broken by sudden outbursts of long-repressed emotion. The gravestones by the farm gate seem more articulate than the living (‘We never got away – how should you?’ they say). Their deep quiet, in the end, may be preferable to any words.

  Ethan was a frustrated figure long before the crash which dooms him to a slow lifetime of silent misery. The first sighting of him, a ruined giant, is of someone who seems to be dragged back persistently by ‘the jerk of a chain’. As one neighbour puts it: ‘You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome.’ This grim figure of endurance once had potential and aspirations. A sensitive young man with intellectual curiosity, he had interests in physics, astronomy, and geology. Though ‘grave and inarticulate’, he had an appetite for ‘friendly human intercourse’. He looks after other people; he is kind and honourable and has a sense of duty. (His box-room ‘study’, with its home-made bookshelves, its engraving of Abraham Lincoln, and its calendar with ‘Thoughts from the Poets’, suggests his qualities.) But his father’s accident and breakdown, his mother’s illness and his confinement on the farm have doomed him: he cannot escape ‘the long misery of his baffled past’. ‘The silence had deepened about him year by year.’

  Ethan’s disabled father is an almost invisible figure in the story, but his mother’s life, just touched in, is desolating. A woman who once kept her home ‘spruce’ and shining has had to watch her husband go ‘soft in the brain’, their farm and saw-mill run down, and the road by the farm-house go quiet after the railway took the traffic away: ‘And mother never could get it through her head what had happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died.’ In illness and solitude she became more and more silent:

  Sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when in desperation her son asked her why she didn’t ‘say something’, she would lift a finger and answer: ‘Because I’m listening’; and on stormy nights, when the loud wind was about the house, she would complain, if he spoke to her: ‘They’re talking so loud out there that I can’t hear you.’

  That loud silence is echoed in the wretched marriage Ethan makes to the older cousin, Zenobia, who comes to look after his mother and who, after her death, seems a preferable alternative to utter loneliness. (‘He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter.’) Over seven years, Zeena Frome turns from an efficient manager into a joyless hypochondriac, and she too falls silent; because, as she spoke ‘only to complain’, Ethan has developed a habit of never listening or replying. Under her ‘taciturnity’, ‘suspicions and resentments’ fester.

  Into this hostile household, summed up by the word ‘exanimate’, Mattie Silver, Zeena’s orphaned twenty-year old cousin (everything in these villages is a family matter) arrives to help keep house. Mattie is ardent, sensual, innocent, and fragile (it is one of the novella’s triumphs that she is touching and plausible, too) and Ethan falls deeply and silently in love with her. In the one year she spends with the Fromes, the tender, inarticulate relationship that grows up between them is marked by the rhythms of rural life, as in a novel by Hardy or Gaskell: the village dance, church picnics, walks home in the starry night. Ethan fantasizes a life with Mattie, and he finds himself longing for his lawful spouse to die. But such visions of release are instantly replaced by that of ‘his wife lying in their bedroom asleep, her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed.’ The climax comes on the night that Zeena leaves them in the house, and they spend the quiet evening as if they were husband and wife, yet without touching each other. This sweet ‘illusion of long-established intimacy’ is disrupted when Zeena’s special red-glass pickle-dish, which Mattie has got down from its secret place to ‘make the supper-table pretty’ is broken by the cat, Zeena’s baleful familiar. So deep and sure is the tone of the book that this little, homely accident seems as great a tragedy to us as to the characters. Zeena returns, discovers the breakage, and bitterly laments her loss:

  ‘You waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I’ve got … You’re a bad girl, Mattie Silver … I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn’t get at ’em – and now you’ve took from me the one I cared for most of all –’

  It is one of the places in the novel where the pressure of feeling bursts through the silence. And though all our sympathies go to Ethan and Mattie, Zeena’s own suffering – sick, lonely, unloved, betrayed – rushes onto the page.

  Zeena’s ‘inexorable’ will and the force of circumstances mean that there is no way out for the unconsummated lovers: Mattie must go and Ethan must stay. Their passion finally breaks through their shyness in intense, pared-down, simple utterances, words ‘like fragments torn from’ the heart:

  ‘Ethan, where’ll I go if I leave you? I don’t know how to get along alone. You said so yourself just now. Nobody but you was ever good to me. And there’ll be that strange girl in the house … and she’ll sleep in my bed, where I used to lay nights and listen to hear you come up the stairs …’

  Urged by Mattie (Ethan’s role throughout is to be at the service of his women), they take what they hope will be a fatal sled-ride, a scene written with the utmost intensity. And because what is meant to be their farewell scene together is told with such concentrated lyricism, the coda to the novella, where we find
out what has become of these three, nearly thirty years later, is one of the most quietly horrifying moments in all fiction, cruelly powerful and done with brilliant, ruthless economy. One of the village witnesses to Ethan’s life-long incarceration concludes, grimly: ‘The way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ’cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.’

  In itself this story, with its grim final twist, is powerful enough. But (unlike in Bunner Sisters or Summer) we come at it through a frame narrator, who sets up the flashback into Ethan’s story, signalled by several lines of dots. He acts as the conduit between the reticence of Starkfield and the eloquent piece of literature we are reading. Wharton’s models for Ethan Frome were Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and – for their use of competing narrative versions – Browning’s The Ring and the Book and Balzac’s story ‘La Grande Bretèche’. Ethan and Mattie owe something, too, to Hardy’s Jude and Tess; Nietzsche, one of Wharton’s most admired philosophers, lies behind Ethan’s lost ‘will to power’. Another acknowledged debt, as in all these novellas, was to Hawthorne. Ethan’s name comes from Hawthorne’s guilt-ridden, isolated hero Ethan Brand, and Zenobia’s from the doomed feminist heroine of his satire on a New England utopia, The Blithedale Romance. That novel is told from the viewpoint of a cynical, semi-detached observer, Coverdale. Wharton’s nameless narrator, like Coverdale or like Brontë’s Mr Lockwood, seems to belong to another world. He is a man of progress, bringing electricity and communication with the outside world to Starkfield. But after a winter there, he begins to understand the isolation and deprivations of the natives a little better.

  The narrator allows Wharton to be both outside of, and inward with, her subject. Like a biographer, he collects the evidence, listens to the different versions, and makes up his own story of the past. Like his author, he is as interested in the conditions of New England life as in the personal story. Wharton would say more than once, for instance in her introduction to a 1922 edition of Ethan Frome, that she wanted to present a truer picture of the ‘snow-bound villages of Western Massachusetts’, with their grim facts of ‘insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation’, than she had ever found in the ‘rose-coloured’ versions of earlier New England writers (she meant, rather unfairly, Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett). She was always extremely irritated by critics who accused her of remoteness from or condescension towards this material. During her years at the Mount in Lenox, she was vividly aware of the bleakness of the surrounding landscape. The grimness of lives in remote New England farms and desolate little hill villages, particularly in winter, and the hard times of the industrial workers in the region, stirred Wharton’s imagination as much as the life of the wealthy ‘cottagers’ in their opulent houses in Lenox or Stockbridge. There were violent contrasts in this environment between that wealth and the deprivation of the rural poor, between the romance of the landscape and the development of local industries. Lenox Dale, not far from the Mount, was an industrial centre. The Lenox Iron Works were founded in 1848. Clocks, carriages, china, and muskets were made in Pittsfield. Dalton, the industrial town on the banks of the Housatonic, had the thriving Crane Paper Mills, and there was a paper-making factory at Lee, near Lenox. Further north, in Adams and North Adams, there were shoe factories and cotton and wool mills. Technological advances like railway lines and tunnels and the influx of trolley cars and motors were changing the landscape. Wharton had written about these aspects of life in the Berkshires in The Fruit of the Tree (1907), which set ‘the great glare of leisure’ of the wealthy houses against the needs of the mill-workers. In Ethan Frome – and a few years later in Summer – she took the wealthy houses right out of the picture.