Happy summer, salon friends. Here in Paris it is finally sunny and warm after seemingly endless rain and clouds.
On Friday night, seven singers and two pianists conjured a magical evening of song in a cozy concert hall nestled in the hill of Montmartre. I’m proud of founding the Paris recital series Un Voyage lyrique, even more proud that it has now had four editions. Thank you to everyone who came out and celebrated La Fête de la musique with us!
Amidst all our rehearsals, I saved my Tuesday evening to attend Joanna Biggs’s reading at the American Library. Her book A Life of One’s Own examines nine women writers’ lives, desires, and challenges, and listening to her speak about it all was an inspiration. I’ll certainly be revisiting her work in a future salon; in the meantime, I highly recommend reading!
After four recitals in three weeks with a huge writing deadline in the middle, on Saturday I took a whole day off for myself. What could be better than spending a day with one of your favorite authors? This week I’ll be discussing Edith Wharton’s short story “The Letters” (1910).
Why am I such a Wharton fan? The Paris connection is part of it, but more importantly, I connect with her worldview. Even though we come from radically different backgrounds and time periods, in Edith Wharton I find a vision of human nature that makes me feel less alone.
Chez Wharton, ambiguity and irony are regular characters, class and privilege provide unjust trials and tragedies (on both ends of the spectrum), love is passionate and real, yet its survival hangs on a thread under the pressure of society. All this in some of the most elegant language ever written in English—from a woman’s pen, in an American voice.
“The Letters” takes place in Île de France. Lizzie West is a twenty-five year old American of little financial means, drawn to Paris for its artistic life. She lives in a boarding house and earns her living by tutoring the young Juliet Deering in Saint-Cloud.
Juliet, like her mother, is more interested in gossip than learning. Exasperated with her pupil, Lizzie eventually confronts Juliet’s father Mr. Deering, an American artist, telling him that his daughter is not making progress and that if she were to continue the lessons she would feel she was stealing his money.
The encounter results in a kiss, and though “one does not…arrive at the age of twenty-five without being now and then kissed,” this kiss is different.
A sleeping germ of life thrilled and unfolded, and started out to seek the sun.
This beautiful botanical metaphor recurs in the story, paralleling Lizzie’s romantic education without ever being heavy-handed.
When Mr. Deering’s wife suddenly dies, he must travel back to America to settle the family’s finances. Before his departure, he and Lizzie meet in Paris, where they make a pact: Lizzie would write to him, on the condition that he write to her when he wanted word.
In this passage, Wharton dazzles again, writing of Lizzie:
Just because she was so poor, and had always, materially, so to count her change and calculate her margin, she would at least know the joy of emotional prodigality, and give her heart as recklessly as the rich their millions.
So much of Wharton’s work examines wealth, but she does not confine her exploration to that of the material sort. She asks quintessentially American questions: what does it mean to be wealthy? Are there still limits, impasses, or impossibilities in a country and a people that boast being the most free in the world?
The transatlantic experience is also at the heart of Wharton’s prose, and fittingly, in “The Letters” the Atlantic separates Lizzie from Mr. Deering. Their correspondence survives for a time, until Deering stops responding. In a classic Wharton ellipsis, three years pass without word from Deering or from the story. But while Lizzie seems to have lost her “emotional prodigality,” she finds wealth again, in the form of an unexpected inheritance.
I won’t spoil the story, but Lizzie and Mr. Deering do meet again. Lizzie will ultimately learn about love, wealth, and womanhood.
I’ll conclude with one of Wharton’s incredible sentences near the ending:
For she saw now, in this last wide flash of pity and initiation, that, as a comely marble may be made out of worthless scraps of mortar, glass, and pebbles, so out of mean mixed substances may be fashioned a love that will bear the stress of life.
I hope this week’s salon will inspire you to read Wharton. My personal favorite of her novels is The House of Mirth (1905). Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) is currently on Netflix here in France, and it’s a beautiful, faithful adaptation.
Have a great week all, et à la prochaine !
Rachel
I have yet to read one of her writings (I did see adaptations though), but you're review really makes me want to read her!
You know I LOVE EW too. Gros bisous : )