The Reef is not I think one of Edith Wharton’s more popular
novels. It is the one everyone calls Jamesian. I think part of the problem,
popularity-wise, is that it sets out by putting us in the consciousness of a
man, George Darrow, who is incorrigibly snobby. There’s the snobbiness of having
a standard of taste that reveals broad experience and reading, and the
snobbiness that comes with having a social position and assuming that one has
broad experience and reading. Darrow’s is the latter snobbiness. He’s no Swann.
At the beginning of the book he meets a young American in Paris, a Daisy Miller
cast-away without Miller’s family money given the name Sophy Viner – an almost
insurmountable moniker as far as readerly sympathy goes. However, Viner is
sympathetic, young, and unbearably patronized by Darrow, who escorts her around
Paris due to circumstances I don’t really want to get into.
No, what is important here is that Darrow, who is hunting
for bigger social game, in effect makes Viner his girlfriend, or, as they would
say at the time, his mistress. Here, Wharton does a wonderfully subtle thing,
something that James must have loved. Her problem is how to make us know that
after Darrow spent some time escorting Viner around Paris, they became sexual.
How to do this without becoming vulgar. This isn’t just a matter of censorship
because American publishers would freak if one described the beast with two
backs too narrowly – it was more a matter of tone. There has to be a certain
tone to this affair if the book is going to work.
Thus, the wonderfully subtle thing. Darrow’s hotel room in
Paris is right next to Viner’s. On his last morning of this visit to Paris,
Wharton gives us, first, a post-coital shower, blotting out the Parisian
landscape, then a look around Darrow’s room, which he perceives, for the first
time, is in need of some cleaning, and then this great melodic invocation of a
knowledge that, by indirection, seeks direction out:
“A different noise aroused him. It was the opening and
closing of the door leading from the corridor into the adjoining room. He sat
motionless, without opening his eyes; but now another sight forced itself under
his lowered lids. It was the precise photographic picture of that other room.
Everything in it rose before him and pressed itself upon his vision with the
same acuity of distinctness as the objects surrounding him. A step sounded on
the floor, and he knew which way the step was directed, what pieces of
furniture it had to skirt, where it would probably pause, and what was likely
to arrest it. He heard another sound, and recognized it as that of a wet
umbrella placed in the black marble jamb of the chimney-piece, against the
hearth. He caught the creak of a hinge, and instantly differentiated it as that
of the wardrobe against the opposite wall. Then he heard the mouse-like squeal
of a reluctant drawer, and knew it was the upper one in the chest of drawers
beside the bed: the clatter which followed was caused by the mahogany
toilet-glass jumping on its loosened pivots...”
Those squeaks and creaks and jingles = Joyce, in Ullyses,
will have Bloom imagine the jingling of his bed, the bed Molly lies on with
Blazes Boylan. Consciousness is more repressed, or at least, represses itself,
in Wharton’s world. What I love is the realisitic
ellipse. All of those things, and their sensual properties, mark what isn’t
being said. And that gap accrues a force – the umbrella and the wardrobe, here,
are moral witnesses. For a snob such as Darrow, incredibly harsh witnesses – since
in this story, the fall is not so much Sophy’s, but that of the male snob.
I love how Wharton accomplishes this.
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