Monday, Jun. 22, 1925
Recompense*
Mrs. Wharton's Hothouse Produce Becomes Virile
The Story. If you marry into Fifth Avenue society at 21, bear a daughter when you are still fond of dancing, choke on the resultant respectability, accept a dapper clubman's advances' and slide out of New York Harbor with him on his yacht, leave him in Europe, later have an idyll with a boy-artist, who in turn leaves you, then it is a natural thing to settle quietly on the French Riviera. There your past blends with the background. You anoint your conscience with self-pity. You maneuver and wait in righteous patience for the boy-artist--or something equivalent--to seek you out. After years of waiting, you become very, very lonely.
Kate Clephane waited, was sought out at last by her daughter. Mother-in-law Clephane had followed her son to a respectable grave and there was no other family music to face. Kate found New York quite graduated from its age of innocence, found her lovely daughter Anne all that was satisfying to a mother-love grown ravenous through lean years.
Yet Anne had reserve--her father's --and self-sufficiency, the genius of the new generation. Secret panic trembled beneath Kate's joy lest her new life, her girl, should be denied her.
Conducted by Fate, Kate's artist, Chris Fenno, no longer a boy, suddenly appeared as Anne's fiance and mother-panic had an unpleasant struggle with mother-revulsion. To tell the girl about a certain week in Normandy would have been to lose her. The family minister contributed some sound observations on "sterile pain" and panic, thus reinforced, carried the day. Not heroic, perhaps, but who shall say unnatural?
The Significance. Her severest critics have never suggested that Mrs. Wharton is not the most finished U. S. novelist of the country. But they have regarded the fruits of her work as hothouse produce--glossy plums of culture, fat melons of class, clipped hedges of morality. The flavor of irony in this latest offering indicates that even hothouse produce can be kept fairly virile.
The Author. Mrs. Edith Wharton (nee Jones of New York), a vigorous lady of 63, seldom leaves the cosmopolitan stream of charming and distinguished people constantly passing through her villa at Hyeres on the Mediterranean and her house in Paris. Since 1899, she has been known as the most apt pupil Novelist Henry James ever had--a pupil with a score of polished books to her credit, including one American masterpiece, Ethan Frame.
* THE MOTHER'S .RECOMPENSE--Edith Wharton--Appleton ($2.00).