Anachronism

The Story* is about Pauline Manford, her gaily poised daughter Nona Manford, her tired-lawyer husband Dexter Manford, her easy-going son by a former husband Jim Wyant, and Jim's wife Lita.

Pauline Manford shifts the gears, steers the lives of all the others. A woman whose day is divided into minute portions, at the same time a member of the Motherhood League and the Birth Control Society, she makes activity an aim in itself.

Reduced to its lowest terms, the action of the book is provided by Nona's love affair with Stan Heuston and Lita's incipient love affair with Dexter Manford. The rest of the characters are so implicitly concerned in one another's actions, each is so much a pillar in the last year of the 19th Century, separate catastrophe would be impossible. Total catastrophe trembles above them like a paper cutter on a thread when Dexter Manford arranges things so that he can, without Jim, have Lita as a guest in his country home. A triviality twists the weapon as it falls. Nona's arm is grazed, but her parents, unhurt, set out to tour the world. Lita goes back to Jim.

The Significance. It is not unjust to imply that for Mrs. Wharton's characters the most dangerous weapon of destruction would be a paper cutter. They are fragile figures which resemble" those outlined in fashion magazines for the socially ambitious to cut out. The narrative, as usual in Mrs. Wharton's books, is pursued with neo-Jamesian traps and snares, rather than less subtle hounds and horn. Her methods have not kept pace with her times, her subject matter, her ambition as social observer. Narration by implication, which seemed wise and successful in The House of Mirth, has, after the pioneering of Virginia Woolf and others, a feeble gait, a corseted carriage.

By her title Mrs. Wharton means to suggest that her characters, in their social security, have scarcely realized the ruin they so narrowly escaped. Mrs. Wharton too, basking on the literary peak where she has longtime lived aloof, gives no sign of realizing that she is a distinguished anachronism.

The Author, aged 65, lives in distinguished privacy on the Riviera. She published her first book in the last year of the 19th Century. Descended from Manhattan patricians (Rhinelanders, Schermer-horns), she has always been seriously a gentlewoman. Art and animals are her least intellectual diversions. Henry James was her most important friend.

*TWILIGHT SLEEP--Edith Wharton--Appleton ($2.50).