The Age of Innocence and Whether You Can Ever Leave Home
The old society depends on compliance, on not standing out. Fame lies in the family name and its quiet upkeep through seasonal parties, boxes at the opera, decent marriages.
I’m writing from just outside D.C., in Virginia, after the east coast heatwave, and it appears that I have left California. But not without confusion. This morning I read Maureen Dowd’s piece on Sean Penn in The New York Times and it did what it was supposed to, I longed for a particular Southern California mirage: a Malibu where stars are neighbors who pass around independent film scripts. And surf. And live with their rescue dogs.
I imagine Joan Didion sitting down to Sunday brunch in Malibu with her one-time carpenter friend Harrison Ford occurring along the same time-space-zone as Penn walking the dirt path with his key to the Point Dume surfing beach.
I smell the chaparral, the desert dust, the lingering edge of smoke from last season’s wildfire. I hear the whipped air of cars flying past on PCH.
I’m susceptible to California imprints, maybe more so this summer when they’re calling out as an answer to displacement. They inhabit a physicality within my imagination, as if I’ve knit together another sensory landscape. A memory collage. What if we could go back here? And yet I understand they are not a place to return as much as an aspect of longing; they may feel more real with the emotional lines I’ve cast through them. They offer a peculiar nostalgia. Bare feet in warm sand, the pink light off an ocean wave just before sunset. The collages often go into my writing because they are a kind of fiction, gathered from lingering impressions, and when they arrive I’m curious if I could make them into something else entirely.
I feel impatient with the boxes in the hallway. But the dog beds are unpacked and the dogs sleep beneath the dining room window as if the sun here is the same as everywhere else.
And in the midst of changing states and coasts, I read The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer, the young man of New York City’s Gilded Age an unexpected companion, and Edith Wharton’s novel another kind of antidote: a love story, a marriage plot, a sharp critique of high society. Wharton the actual insider since Newland Archer cannot free himself from the thicket. He resists social conventions up to a point, and then he cannot not abide them. The double negative fitting his resistance and falling back into its sea.
The old society depends on compliance, on not standing out. Fame lies in the family name and its quiet upkeep through seasonal parties, boxes at the opera, decent marriages. The Age of Innocence opens at the opera, Archer surveying the landscape with a group of men training their eyeglasses into the crowd. While Archer perceives the “intellectual and artistic” limitations of his friends, he aligns with them from the start:
[G]rouped together they represented ‘New York’, and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine in all the issues called moral. He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome - and also rather bad form - to strike out for himself.
Madame Olenska appears in the box across the way, a mysterious cousin to his secretly betrothed May Welland, and stirs in Archer all kinds of emotional trouble. Olenska arrives in New York seeking safety from a dangerous European marriage, the Count inflicting physical harms that she may have escaped in dubious ways, Newland must get to the bottom of it, and meanwhile her family, May’s family, grapples with her European habits, her interest in artists, her relationships with people like the Beauforts who are tolerated for their money, but only within parameters.
But Archer’s New York does not feel safe for Olenska, or for him, more of a mausoleum of reticence as his feelings overtake him and he struggles against expectations. Wharton allows Olenska her outsider freedoms, to what extent is the ongoing question, and through her a clear-eyed view of society’s restrain on self-expression as she asks:
“Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again or on the stage, before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.”
I’m struck by her insights, running from religion to theater; the lack of authenticity she perceives with curiosity more than judgment. And the desperate sadness of living amidst a “dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.” Olenska will make accommodations to this audience but she won’t mold herself to its forms. Her unusual upbringing, her time in Europe, becomes her foothold outside, but only as much as she may convince her family to allow it.
I remembered the novel as a destruction of Olenska, an unaccounted-for woman whom society can’t tolerate, but on this read, I’m saddened by Archer’s losses. He underestimates his wife and then falls prey to her conditions despite his repeated dread and wariness of their effect on him:
[W]ith a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
Archer perceives himself as the one progressive in his society, and the hypocrite, but the outsider status he nurtures may be part of a victimhood that makes him into an actual victim. Or, as Wharton’s flash forward at the novel’s end suggests, society changes with time, not one person. And yet some characters will reinvent themselves while Archer fluctuates between impulse and deliberation. I like him most in his quest for freedom, and Olenska when she plays with his and our imaginations:
“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
“Why not - why not - why not?”
A novel does the conjuring for us, whether we are rooted in place or longing for one. I don’t know if I trust Archer’s perspective of his wife, yet I do of Olenska; maybe on another read I will see light cast differently, again. The Age of Innocence changes with me and offers that touchstone where I return. And not just for the love story, it’s the outfits, the parties, the gossip.
Why is it easier to reread a classic novel than most anything else?
All my best and till next time,
Kelly
Recommended:
Stacey D’Erasmo read from her new book at Bennington this month, her conversations with artists about how they sustain themselves, their art, over a lifetime. It’s such a good companion. And then my fascination with the process of poetry continues, I didn’t realize I’m reading about the beginning of process and the ongoingness of it at the same time with these two books. Craig Morgan Teicher writes about Sylvia Plath, W.S. Merwin, Louise Gluck and others.
• The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo.
• We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress by Craig Morgan Teicher.