WHARTON’S THE REEF
NOVELS CONSIST OF words, evenly and democratically spaced; though some may acquire higher social rank by italicisation or capitalisation. In most novels, this democracy spreads wider: every word is as important as every other word. In better novels, certain words have higher specific gravity than other words. This is something the better novelist does not draw attention to, but lets the better reader discover.
There are many ways of preparing to read a novel. You might prefer to approach it in proper and delighted ignorance. You might like to know a few basics about the author (Wharton, 1862–1937), her social origins (New York, old money), literary company (Henry James), land of exile (France), financial, marital and sexual status (rich, distressing, largely unfulfilled), and so on. You might want information inclining you to read the novel in as autobiographical way as it is possible to do (in which case, you will have to go elsewhere). You might, less prejudicingly, prefer to have simple facts of literary chronology and positioning: thus The Reef was published in 1912, seven years after Wharton had made her name with The House of Mirth, and is definingly placed between her grimmest novel, Ethan Frome, and her greatest novel of Franco-American interrelationship, The Custom of the Country. You might like such information decorated with literary gossip which warmingly defines the author: in the year she published The Reef, Wharton, having previously campaigned unsuccessfully to get Henry James the Nobel Prize, performed an act of literary generosity rare in any times and hard to imagine taking place today. She asked her publishers Scribner’s to divert $8,000 from her royalties and offer them as an advance to James for ‘an important American novel’. James was delighted at the largest advance he ever received, and never guessed the prompter of his publishers’ urgent generosity (he never completed the book, The Ivory Tower, either).
Or you might prefer to approach a novel like The Reef on the lookout for a few key words. Here are some of them:
Natural. At the start of the novel George Darrow, an unmarried American diplomat of thirty-seven, ponders the contrasting appeals of Anna Leath, his early and now renewed love, and the passingly encountered Sophy Viner. Anna is widowed, rich and of good stock; Sophy is young, unattached, of unknown social origin but with bohemian connections. It appears to be a light-hearted contest (since Darrow knows his heart to be engaged in one direction only) between the charm of naturalness and the solider appeal of good manners. Sophy’s forwardness and vivacity make companionship easy and immediate, giving Darrow’s dealings with her a rare freshness; on the other hand, such naturalness has its drawbacks, notably a tendency to provoke embarrassment. Her initial and prime effect is to show up the world of Darrow and Anna in all its evasive formality; it makes him reflect on ‘the deadening process of forming a “lady” ’ in good society. Travelling to Paris on the train with Sophy, Darrow indicates the term which is the novel’s polar opposite to ‘naturalness’. Had he been in the same compartment and circumstances with Anna, he decides, she would not have been so restless and talkative; she would have behaved ‘better’ than Sophy, ‘but her adaptability, her appropriateness, would not have been nature but “tact” ’. Sophy strikes him as having the naturalness of ‘a dryad in a dew-drenched forest’; but – regrettably, or fortunately – we no longer live in forests, and ‘Darrow reflected that mankind would never have needed to invent tact if it had not first invented social complications’.
Sophy’s Parisian plan is to train for the stage, and her open, intelligent, frank, naive and unfettered approach to things – her naturalness – probably persuades the reader that this would be a fitting career. But Darrow is shrewder than the reader: in his experience the vivacity of an actress onstage is quite different from the vivacity of a person in life; the latter does not assist the former. To Darrow, Sophy seems ‘destined to work in life itself rather than any of its counterfeits’. Here he proves correct: he recognises that Sophy is unequal to either kind of counterfeiting – that of the actress, or that involved in ‘the deadening process of forming a “lady” ’.
At this stage of the novel, the viewpoint and the judgements are Darrow’s, the rivalry between ‘naturalness’ and ‘tact’ seen through his eyes. It is always clear, however, to which world Darrow – a diplomat by instinct as well as profession – belongs. Much later in the novel, Anna is trying to understand the earlier appeal of Sophy Viner to the man she loves, envying those who have ‘plunged’, trying to understand the ‘darkness’ of her own heart and to release her own sexuality. She is aware of Sophy’s advantage over her. In this condition she views Darrow’s handling of women with a disenchanted eye, and turns against him the word he had earlier used against (though also in praise of) her: ‘The idea that his tact was a kind of professional expertise filled her with repugnance, and insensibly she drew away from him.’
Veil. What is the consequence of ‘tact’, of the dread process of ‘forming a lady’? It is to place a veil between the self and the emotions. One of the most powerfully compacted and ironic lines of the novel comes when Anna, musing on the social rules of the world in which she grew up, recollects that ‘people with emotions were not visited’. At that time, and during her subsequent marriage to Leath, the veil between herself and life ‘had been like the stage gauze which gives an illusive air of reality to the painted scene behind it, yet proves it, after all, to be no more than a painted scene’. This is a cunning image: the veil is not just a barrier between herself and life, but something actively deceptive – behind it is not reality but a theatrical fake. To translate the metaphor: social training gives you the illusion that a stodgy dried-up snuffbox-collecting bore of a husband is a rightful object of romantic attachment. Anna’s story is about the rending of the veil between herself and life; the point about the veil being that, once rent, it cannot be unrent.
Life. Hardly a word one might expect to be unimportant in a novel. But here it is especially charged: the word – the thing – focuses the struggle between tact and naturalness. Darrow, we are told early on, has a ‘healthy enjoyment of life’; Anna is ‘still afraid of life’; whereas Sophy has the word ‘often on her lips’ – even if, in Darrow’s view, when she speaks about ‘life’ she seems ‘like a child playing with a tiger’s cub; and he said to himself that some day the child would grow up – and so would the tiger’.
Darrow has an attitude to life; Sophy is an attitude to life. It is within Anna that the novel’s great psychological drama takes place: a struggle to understand what is, or could be, life, whether it is a wonderful or a terrible thing, and what the price of such understanding might be. She has been brought up in Old New York and transplanted to old provincial France: during her marriage she discovered that ‘real life’, that glib phrase, was for her ‘neither dead nor alive’. Later, in her widowhood, she supports her stepson Owen’s desire to marry an ‘unsuitable girl’, aware that his rebellion is also hers – even if it is a kind of retrospective rebellion, a refutation of her earlier timorousness and tact. During this first, proxy engagement in the cause of life she can afford to be dashing and freethinking. The real struggle lies ahead: with what Sophy represents in terms of womanhood, modernity and sexuality; with the responses such women provoke in Darrow and other men; with her own emotional and sexual repression. The choice – all the harder since she is not Sophy’s age – seems to be between living a restricted existence with her head held high and eyes averted, and ‘looking at life’ with all its consequent agony. Even so, how can she be sure that the tormenting predicament into which she has been thrust is indeed ‘life’? Anna’s big question, asked at the end of Chapter 30, is whether ‘life’ is really ‘like that’ – i. e. ‘grotesque and mean and miserable’ – or whether her ‘adventure’ is a ‘hideous accident’.
Metaphors of sturdy usefulness accumulate around the word ‘life’ in The Reef. For Leath, life ‘was like a walk through a carefully classified museum’; for Anna, while married to him, ‘it was like groping about in a huge dark lumber-room whe
re the exploring ray of curiosity lit up now some shape of breathing beauty and now a mummy’s grin’. When Darrow appears to be rescuing her, she tells him, ‘I want our life to be like a house with all the windows lit; I’d like to string lanterns from the roof and chimneys!’ Later, when the rescue has proved more life-threatening than anticipated, she employs a broader architectural metaphor: ‘She looked back with melancholy derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of well-lit and well-policed suburb to dark places one need never know about.’ But the truth of the novel does not support this town-planning notion of existence. Rather, it is on the side of Darrow’s comparison of life to a tiger’s cub which grows up. Life’s instincts are destructive, not constructive. Or as Darrow pompously explains it to Anna:
When you’ve lived a little longer you’ll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we’re struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes – and then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious things we’d smashed to atoms without knowing it. Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
The metaphor here is less precise, no doubt deliberately so. We might imagine the destruction of an idol, icon or statue; except that ‘broken bits’ sounds more like pottery – at which point we might recall that Darrow had earlier compared his pursuit of the elusive Anna to the figures on a Grecian urn, vainly chasing one another throughout eternity. Now the urn is in shards. Of course, when people talk of ‘life’ they rarely do anything but generalise from their own experience; so we could take Darrow’s assertion that ‘Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits’ less as authorial conclusion than as special pleading by the man who dropped the pot.
House. If Anna wants her life with Darrow to be like a house with all the windows lit, we cannot help noticing that she has one of these already. And what a house Givré sounds, lovingly described by Wharton. At best it seems to give off a moral force, with ‘the high decorum of its calm lines and soberly massed surfaces’. But the house is more a mutable character in the novel than a monolithic point of reference; ‘decorum’ is very close to ‘tact’, and the same building may, in other moods, come to represent ‘the very symbol of narrowness and monotony’. A house implies a habitat; this novel is about being emotionally ‘unhoused’ – having your roof blown off.
Racinian. This word does not appear in The Reef, but has been associated with it from early on. Writing to thank the author for her novel in December 1912, Henry James offered this praise: ‘The beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility.’ The same adjective had been applied a little earlier by Charles du Bos, the French translator of The House of Mirth, who told Wharton after reading the proofs of The Reef that ‘No novel came closer to the quality of a tragedy of Racine.’ It is true that there are a small number of characters; that the action (after Book I) takes place in an enclosed area; that a complex and intensifying emotional predicament unfolds, binding in ever more tightly the four main characters, so that none can move, or lie, or tell the truth, without a dire chain of consequences – as Anna tells Darrow, ‘We’re all bound together in this coil.’ But we should allow for the tendency of French translators to Gallicise as they applaud; and also that of friendly novelists to approve those aspects of a work which seem most to resemble aspects of their own. The critical line on The Reef, started by James’s approval, is that it is Wharton’s most Jamesian – specifically late-Jamesian – novel. Though there are undeniable echoes of the Master, it’s worth remembering that Wharton consistently disliked late James, finding an airlessness in the very sense of enclosure here applauded.
And by Racinian, should we understand also ‘tragic’? Probably not: when the coil finally comes unbound, Sophy is returned to the social and financial position she was in before the novel began, Anna and Darrow get a tarnished version of what they had wanted, while Owen runs away (having at least been spared a perilous marriage). There has, it is true, been a tremendous smash, and the lives of these four will never be the same again: Anna’s unenviable final choice is between the long misery of giving Darrow up and the equally long misery of living with someone whose words you cannot trust. However, compared to, say, that other great and near-contemporary novel of coil-bondage, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), there is a very low body count.
It is probably the case that the tragic no longer exists in modern life, or therefore in the modern novel. We may take the starting point of the latter as Madame Bovary, a work whose influence on Wharton is apparent; also a novel which defines the diminished version of the tragic nowadays allowable – a ruthless chain of events made more ruthless by the rules and forms of society, and also by the expectations, misconceptions and self-destructiveness of the principal character. Ford’s novel does not begin ‘This is the most tragic story I have ever heard’ but ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’ One reason for this is that the gods have been replaced. When Darrow takes Sophy to see a French version of Oedipus, the characters make her feel ‘as if the gods were there all the while, just behind them, pulling the strings’. In the absence of these controlling gods, we have the vain illusion that it is we, with our famous free will, who pull the strings. The Reef is a novel which doubts this: as Darrow remarks to Sophy at the start of it all, ‘What rubbish we talk about intentions!’ And so we do: they are an attempt to impose purpose and rationality upon the flapping laundry of our emotional lives. Darrow invokes the world of Greek tragedy again at the end of the novel, during his key exchange with Anna (Chapter 32). He asks: ‘Is it anything to be proud of, to know so little of the strings that pull us?’ This is the measure of our aloneness, our lack of tragic stature: we are still puppets twitched by strings, but the puppeteer’s box up there is no longer occupied.
Luck. In tragedy, this used to be called destiny. In our reduced state, we find a lesser word for it. In The Reef, the term is attached to Sophy Viner (this is appropriate, for the world of ‘tact’ she is about to explode with her presence does not acknowledge luck much: to do so would be a denial of merit, birth, rank, money).
Darrow perceived that she classified people according to their greater or less ‘luck’ in life, but she appeared to harbour no resentment against the undefined power which dispensed the gift in such unequal measure. Things came one’s way or they didn’t …
Though Sophy is unschooled in the classics, when she watches Oedipus her role as luck detector enables her to touch the play’s pulse, to feel ‘the ineluctable fatality of the tale, the dread sway in it of the same mysterious “luck” which pulled the threads of her own small destiny’. Of course, by the time Sophy lightly introduces this concept, the ‘luck’ that is to settle her fate and that of others has already happened. At first it appears mainly the fault of the postal services (always handily at a novelist’s beck and call): if only Darrow hadn’t had Anna’s telegram flung into his compartment just as the boat-train was pulling out … If only Sophy had not left London so precipitately, before any letter from the Farlows detailing their changed plans could reach her … These are certainly factors: but when, hundreds of pages on, after the smash, Darrow is seeking to explain how his trivial, central liaison with Sophy began, he identifies a different hazardous aspect: ‘Perhaps but for the rain it might never have happened.’ He is referring specifically to the day in Paris when the rain makes them return to their hotel earlier than usual. But this in turn alerts the reader (though not Darrow) to earlier rain at Dover when he and Sophy encountered one another. He is scrambling around in a gale when ‘a descending umbrella caught him in the collar-bone’ – an impact, a first proleptic smash, which destroys Sophy’s umbrella, and leads her to shelter beneath his. All the fault of the rain? In the old Greek days, the gods sent thunderbolts to determine our fates; now meteorologists guide our luck.
In the final chapter, Anna broods on w
hether she can free herself from the inevitability of life with George Darrow; and she becomes ‘vaguely conscious that the inky escape from it must come from some external chance’. Anna, being posh, does not acknowledge luck except by a posher name; but she is correct in deducing that ‘luck’ somehow resides in Sophy Viner. If she can find Sophy and tell her she is renouncing Darrow, there will be no turning back on the decision and she will be free. Anna goes to Paris, but Sophy has already left for India, taking her luck – and Anna’s ‘external chance’ – with her.
Reef. The word occurs monolithically as the title and we wait for its appearance in the text. We wait in vain. Towards the end of Book II marine metaphors seem to put us on watch: Darrow is taking a ‘dark dive’ into his difficulties; he feels the ‘sweep of secret tides’; meanwhile, Sophy has been ‘adrift’, while Anna is ‘floating’ on a ‘tide of felicity’. These aquatic hints lead nowhere for the moment. Later, Darrow feels the light of Anna’s eyes moving before him ‘as the sunset moves before a ship at sea’; later, again, Anna has a ‘flood of pent-up anguish’ – and the metaphor seems to have drained away into a formulaic phrase. But just as we might have given up expectations, Wharton craftily produces the held-back image – though not the word itself. Darrow, in his climactic scene with Anna, tries to explain how the smash came about: ‘It seemed such a slight thing – all on the surface – and I’ve gone aground in it because it was on the surface.’ Again, we might find the image masculine special pleading (Sophy as a largely inert lump of coral whose only function is to tear the hull out of smart pleasure boats). We might wonder if the metaphor had wider application, and is intended to denote the reef of Anna’s sensual unresponsiveness, on which Darrow also goes aground. And we might wonder if Wharton, having left the image so late, might either have made more of it, or left it out altogether, letting the title do the work by itself. The Reef is unusual in Whartonian composition in that the proofs were delayed between America and France (the ‘luck’ of the postal services again), and she did not have time for her normal last-minute reassessment. What might she have altered?