Days of elegance
Anita Brookner
NEW YORK MOSAIC: THREE NOVELS by Isabel Bolton Virago, £12.99, pp. 482 Isabel Bolton, who was really Mary Brit- ton Miller, died in 1979 at the age of 92. She was wealthy, unmarried and a New Yorker; indeed it appears from a first read- ing of her novel Do I Wake or Sleep?, reprinted here for the first time since it was published in her 63rd year, that she was Mrs Dalloway in New York, strolling in a hazy but febrile manner through a series of sophisticated pleasures — lunch, the dress- maker, cocktails — in a fashion that beguiled both Diana Trilling and Edmund Wilson. She was thus not quite unknown and must have enjoyed a certain reputa- tion, since she was praised by both eminent critics in the 1940s.
Today she is not even a name one recalls from other reading, and the eulogies of Trilling and Wilson seem overheated. Her writing strikes one as exactly half way between professional and amateur, and, given the period in which these novels are set, roughly those meagre years following the war, they seem escapist, moneyed, almost frivolous. Like Edith Wharton she is Old New York, but whereas Wharton seems firmly grounded and in full posses- sion of herself, Bolton remains something of a solitary, dignified, but with an unreli- able character, apt to be led into situations of which she does not approve, and indeed deplores, but from which she is powerless to extricate herself.
There is no proof that she was lonely, but she seemed, on the evidence of her first novel, Do I Wake or Sleep?, to have enjoyed the lonely person's faculty of observation — which implies standing apart — together with its opposite, an ability to succumb to the flux of life. Her rapturous descriptions of New York in that novel will certainly lift the heart of any reader, although they are breathless and hardly in the Edith Wharton Mould. She was compared with both Henry James and Virginia Woolf, although we should not do so today. Nevertheless, she has something of Virginia Woolf's combi- nation of inwardness and stylistic indepen- dence: she is both headlong and prudent. She is evidently a lady, and thus has some connection with Henry James, but with his characters rather than with his genius. He was, she says, a very great gentleman. One can imagine her reading him with full approval.
In republishing these three novels, the editors at Virago have been hampered by a complete absence of biographical material. A short introduction by Doris Grumbach fails to elicit either personal or social detail, which increases the impression that `Isabel Bolton' was the persona behind which a woman of means but of little confi- dence chose to present her stories. She was something of an outsider, though willingly involved in the rituals of New York life. The protagonist of her first novel, Millicent Munroe, gives an excellent impression of a society woman, while at the same time remaining glumly aware of the pretence. Her New York is full of pretence, but it is also the thrilling physical New York which dominates the lives of its inhabitants. In those distant days, in that place of abun- dance which knew so little of Europe's aus- terity, a woman's most acute problem was her choice of hat. This is the note struck in Do I Wake or Sleep?, which evidently had an appeal for both men and women of a certain class. Today the appeal is somewhat lessened, but it is still faintly discernible.
In the second novel, The Christmas Tree, a story of maternal stoicism, the style sharpens, matures and becomes more Wharton than Woolf, as may perhaps be judged from the following passage: For those were the days when people really believed in their wealth and special privilege — the days of the big new houses and the ample ways of life, of the many servants and the negligible wages, the days of elegance, of arrogance, of ignorance, and what rashly planned security.
We are still in New York, but now there are memories of villas on the Riviera and apartments in Paris, although the bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Concern is now with the past rather than the present; nostalgia, still emi- nently potent, gives way to discernment, and a glamorous childhood finally surren- ders to adult analysis. Becalmed by all the appurtenances of material good fortune, Mrs Danforth realises, in the most ladylike manner, that life has not delivered what it promised. This very attractive theme is car- ried through with something like genuine worldliness. It is the perceived superiority of the past over the present that situates the writer in her time.
It may even have been the best of times for a woman of a mild but discriminating temperament, with a favourable past on which to reflect. Yet with age her sympa- thies seem to expand rather than to con- tract, so that in Many Mansions, the third novel in this collection, the thoughts of an old woman are more than enough to keep her occupied. Miss Sylvester is 84, the age the author might well have been at the time of writing: again, no indications are given, or indeed offered. Miss Sylvester rereads the novel she once wrote about her life and relives its major events: the break with her grandiloquent family after the birth of an illegitimate child, her flight from Brookline to New York, her social work in the poorer districts, her uneasy friendship with a surly young man met in a restaurant, her small fortune ready to be passed on to an almost unknown recipient. Less successful as a fiction — too much contrivance at the end —Many Mansions is still striking, but on a descending scale. Yet it is the work of a novelist in whom respectability and sincerity almost make up for a certain absence of narrative drive. Respectability and sincerity: laudable attributes for a writer.
A writer she certainly is, or perhaps was. The jacket gives the titles of two other nov- els, one of which, The Whirligig of Time, no doubt deserves to be republished. Perhaps Virago will extend its researches and bring this out in due course. And this had better be soon: Isabel Bolton's fragile gift will not last long in today's brutal marketplace. New York Mosaic is a welcome revival, a tribute to the modest endeavours of a woman and a writer too fastidious to reveal her secrets in any other way.
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