The portrait of a governess
Miranda Seymour
THE BUCCANEERS by Edith Wharton, completed by Marion Mainwaring Fourth Estate, 114.99, pp. 469 he last, still uncompleted draft of The Buccaneers, the novel on which Edith Wharton had been working for four years, was published in 1938, the year after her death. This was the year of Q. D. Leavis's famous Scrutiny piece on Henry James's heiress', in which Mrs Wharton was taken to task, chiefly, for not being George Eliot. Diminished by the use of such damningly ambivalent words as 'inflexible' and 'socially-experienced' (about as low as you could sink in the Leavis book), Mrs Whar- ton was finally found guilty on the grounds that she not only lacked 'poetry in her books', but because she showed 'none of that natural piety, that richness of feeling and sense of a moral order, of experience as a process of growth' which brought Leavis to her knees at the shrine of George Eliot. It was a stirring piece, but its attitude suggests that it could just as well have been written in 1862, the year Edith Wharton was born.
Mrs Leavis has survived changing literary fashions less well than her despised subject and her criticism was both bigoted and unjust, It is as though she had recollected the five-year-old Edith's declaration that she wanted to grow up to be the best- dressed women in New York, and judged her for eternity on that. Nobody else who has read Mrs Wharton's greatest books, The House of Mirth, Summer, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country and, perhaps, The Mother's Recom- pense, could accuse her of lacking the sense of a moral order or of experience as an education. Life gave her some very hard knocks, an unloving mother, a deeply unhappy marriage, and, above all, divorce at a time when it had appalling social con- sequences for women.
It was necessity, rather than whim, which caused Edith Wharton to spend the last 25 Years of her life in Europe. To be a divor- cee was to excommunicate yourself from upper-class American society and in 1913 she obtained a divorce from her pathetic husband, Teddy. The plight of the unhappy wife and the independent woman became crucial to her work; her most responsive
characters were used to question the inhu- manity of social etiquette. The author's sympathy was invariably with the outsider, the breacher of convention. 'Divorce is intended to punish her, not to make her life pleasanter,' Miss Testvalley explains to a puzzled pupil in The Buccaneers; 'the fact is that a divorced woman is a social out- cast.' Mrs Leavis was too glib in her dis- missal of a writer whose best work embodied her expressed belief that 'life is the saddest thing next to death.'
The Buccaneers will never be placed among Edith Wharton's most successful novels, but it might, in parts, be among the most enjoyable. Without wanting to sound unkind, I think the less said about Marion Mainwaring's completion the better. She has followed the novelist's ideas faithfully in the last 60 or so pages. All that is wrong lies in the tone and nuances, which might easily have been corrected by a vigilant editor. (The editor might also have checked the spelling of 'connaisseuf, 'besique' and `succomb' as carefully as Edith Wharton would assuredly have done.) But what matters is to have the book finished and available and to see that it is a good deal better than Edmund Wil- son's 1938 judgment ('banal and perhaps a shade trashy') suggests.
The story is a late variation on the inter- national theme. Set in the 1870s, the period inhabited by Edith Wharton's most assured fictions, it describes the onslaught on British society of a bevy of ravishing par- venus from the American midwest. Shut- tling between the two social groups in the role of governess and chaperone is Laura Testvalley, whose name had been men- tioned in Mrs Wharton's 1934 autobiogra- phy when she said that Miss Testvalley was still in search of a vehicle.
The governess, it is worth noticing, is herself an outsider, intelligent, observant and independent. We are told that she comes from a revolutionary family and that her cousin is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but this matters less than that she stands out- side the society into which her work takes her. Singled out by early admirers as the best thing in the book, she stands some- where between Jane Eyre and the second, anonymous, Mrs de Winter. More-spirited than Rebecca's successor, she is less imagi- native and, it must be acknowledged, a good deal less richly presented than Jane. But — to return to Mrs Leavis' criticism — her real importance is as moral touchstone and guide. When we see how abominably she is treated by the great English families, the Brightlingseas and the Tintagels and and how they have difficulty in even 'I didn't sleep a wink. There was a pea under the ***************** mattress!' remembering who she is. We know that Miss St George, a pretty shopkeeper's daughter from Saratoga, is going to be much too good for the well-meaning but unbearably pompous young Duke of Tin tagel.
And so it turns out to be. The fascinating thing about The Buccaneers for any real fan is to see just how far Edith Wharton has come since she wrote about the rise of Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Coun- try. Undine emerged from just the same background as the Saratoga beauties, but she was created in 1913 when Mrs Wharton was still willing to be generous about the society for which she had been bred and to which Miss Spragg was determined to belong. The world had changed dramatical- ly by the time she began writing The Bucca- neers. The society which had closed its doors to her was almost dead and she was on the side of Miss Testvalley and the revo- lutionaries. The families of old New York are shown to be viciously narrow-minded; there is no mercy in the malicious descrip- tions of people like Miss Testvalley's first American employer:
Mrs Russell Parmore was certainly very dis- tinguished, and so were her pallid daughter and her rubbed-out husband; and how could they know that to Miss Testvalley they repre- sented at best a milieu of retired colonels at Cheltenham, or the household of a minor canon in a cathedral town?
The English, when they are not being disagreeable and, above all, mean, are pre- sented as stupid — one lady is convinced that Brazil is in North America and that all Americans, including her unseen daughter- in-law, are black. But the satire is hugely entertaining. The novel only slips off course when Mrs Wharton lapses into sen- timent. In The Buccaneers, as in much of her late fiction, the softer passages are not far removed from the moist silliness of pulp romance. The best that can be said of her gushing descriptions of the ancient English house of Honourslove and all that it stands for is that they would enhance one of Dame Barbara's Cartland's works One aspect of The Buccaneers was certainly not intended to provide the enter- tainment it now offers. Readers should examine for its remarkable prescience Mrs Wharton's description of the greatest catch of them all, the 'incorrigibly conscientious' and stubborn Duke of Tintagel (near enough to Prince Charles's Duchy of Corn- wall, after all) as he plans the education of his pretty young bride and, in astonishingly Caroiean vein, eulogises 'her childish inno- cence, her indifference to money and hon- ours and — er — that kind of thing.' The great thing is that I shall be able to form her,' he says to his mother. For the duke as for his modern parallel, that proves to be a rash hope.
Miranda Seymour's Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
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