My Favorite Book of All Time

I've read thousands, so I don't offer this recommendation idly

Summer, by Edith Wharton

I’ve been reading a lot of 21st century popular fiction lately, mostly because I’m a 21st century author and I feel obligated to study trends and to discern what works (and doesn’t work) in other people’s stories. This led me to Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a bestseller that was optioned and made into an upcoming TV series.

As a book, it’s written to be consumed like candy, and one does. I binged right through it, a process made effortless by Reid’s interesting decision to tell the story using nothing but dialogue. One character speaks, then another, like conducting an interview. Without all that “cumbersome” exposition, your eyes whip right down the page.

When Reid’s next book came out, Malibu Rising, I was curious to see if she would continue that “interview” framework. She didn’t. Malibu Rising is written more like a traditional book, one that reveals flaws and limitations in her capacity—not as a storyteller (that she does superbly) but as a writer. Her prose is clunky. Uninspiring. I say this not out of spite, but observation.

If money is a reflection of success, Reid has a lot more of it than I do. Clearly, she’s on to something, and whatever I have to say about her writing—or about anything, for that matter—ought to be taken with an eye roll of exasperation and a huge grain of salt.

Also, full confession in terms of my literary preferences: I don’t belong to this century.

Don’t get me wrong. I love having free long distance, life-saving vaccines, streaming videos on Netflix, and access to Wikipedia. What I don’t love is how superficial and spare most of our literature has become. As wordy as the 19th century writers may have been, there’s something profoundly moving about their emotional restraint, observation of detail, and command of a language that has the richest vocabulary in the world: 171,476 words in English compared to its nearest competitor, Russian, which “only” has 150,000.

I could swim in those words. Sometimes I do, come to think of it, a not altogether pleasant experience for a writer.

To me, the greatest of the Edwardian writers—and my personal G.O.A.T.—is Edith Wharton. So, I’d like to talk about her for a moment, and perhaps acquaint you (if you aren’t already familiar) with why the artist and her work are so remarkable.

Edith Wharton, early middle age

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American blueblood, the youngest child of a New York society family. Like many women of her time and class, she was kept purposely ignorant in all matters pertaining to sex, so when at age twenty-three, she married Edward Robbins Wharton, a member of the Boston upper crust twelve years her senior, the marriage collapsed almost from the start. Edward “Teddy” Wharton was fratty and sportsmanlike, the opposite of sensitive, bookish Wharton. Even if conjugal relations weren’t part of the deal, it’s doubtful they were ever destined for closeness. Their common ground, apparently, was a mutual love for small dogs.

The marriage lasted for twenty-eight sexless years until it was discovered that Teddy was stealing money from her to maintain a mistress in Boston. How telling that in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, 1934, Wharton only mentions Teddy twice.

Whatever happened on their wedding night was traumatic enough for both of them to lapse into deep depression. It has recently come to light that Wharton may have been sexually abused during her childhood, and possibly by her own father. Her unpublished short story, “The Beatrice Palmato “ is a disturbingly explicit account of incest between father and daughter. Given Wharton’s natural reticence, it is doubtful she would have chosen such a subject were it not for an overwhelming need to cauterize old wounds.

Edith Wharton as a young woman

It is no surprise then that when Wharton did allow herself to succumb to passion at age forty-five, the man she fell in love with was bisexual, philandering journalist Morton Fullerton whose inability to return that love made him a wildly unsuitable choice. The affair was short-lived, but had a profound impact on Wharton, whose poem, “Terminus,” so named because she and Fullerton were forced to meet in seedy, Victorian, train terminal hotels, remains (in my opinion) one of the greatest poems in the English language.

Her loneliness and yearning weep soft tears in every line. After a lifetime of sexual aridity, she wrote in her diary, “I have drunk the wine of life at last. I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through never to grow quite cold again until the end…” 

Sadly, that end came too soon. Fullerton’s chronic neglect compelled Wharton to terminate the affair. Her handful of stolen moments were, quite possibly, the only sexual happiness she was ever to know. After her divorce from Teddy in 1913, she moved to Provence and spent the rest of her life supporting the French war effort. On April 18, 1916, the President of France appointed her Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the country's highest award, in recognition of her dedication and valor.

How would you describe the look in Wharton’s eyes?

Wharton didn’t publish her first novel until the age of forty, but quickly made up for lost time: fifteen novels, seven novellas, eighty-five short stories, poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and her memoir. She is best known for her 1921 Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Age of Innocence, but my favorite of her books (which, to my delight, was also Wharton’s own) is a little-known novella titled Summer, originally conceived as a companion piece to its more famous cousin, Ethan Frome.

I’ve read Summer well over twenty times, and each reading reduces me to tears. It is so much more than the old seduced-and-abandoned trope; instead, it reveals characters who must do the hardest thing of all: confront reality without flinching or evasion, even when it means giving up the last shreds of true happiness.

Don’t let the furs, jewels, and corsetry fool you. Wharton was—and is—a force majeure.

Wharton’s themes of confinement and attempts at freedom are centermost in Summer. I strongly urge you to read it, which is why I am providing a link here. Remember, you have to work a little harder when reading 19th century literature. There’s no “skimming,” and the verbal precision may feel a little fussy at first, but that’s not the fault of Wharton. Instead, it’s a scathing indictment of what a bunch of scattered, marginally literate short-handers we’ve become, myself included.

And now, Wharton’s finest poem, “Terminus.” Read it at least twice: once quickly, and once slowly. Let it seep into your pores. Remember where she was in life when she wrote it. Then you will know why Wharton is my favorite author of all time.

Do you have a favorite author? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Please leave your comments below.

Terminus

Wonderful were the long secret nights you gave me, my Lover,
Palm to palm breast to breast in the gloom. The faint red lamp,
Flushing with magical shadows the common-place room of the inn
With its dull impersonal furniture, kindled a mystic flame
In the heart of the swinging mirror, the glass that has seen
Faces innumerous & vague of the endless travelling automata,
Whirled down the ways of the world like dust-eddies swept through a street,
Faces indifferent or weary, frowns of impatience or pain,
Smiles (if such there were ever) like your smile ad mine when they met
Here, in this self-same glass, while you helped me to loosen my dress,
And the shadow-mouths melted to one, like sea-birds that meet in a wave–
Such smiles, yes, such smiles the mirror perhaps has reflected;
And the low wide bed, as rutted and worn as a high-road,
The bed with its soot-sodden chintz, the grime of its brasses,
That has borne the weight of fagged bodies, dust-stained, averted in sleep,
The hurried, the restless, the aimless–perchance it has also thrilled
With the pressure of bodies ecstatic, bodies like ours,
Seeking each other's souls in the depths of unfathomed caresses,
And through the long windings of passion emerging again to the stars . . .
Yes, all this through the room, the passive & featureless room,
Must have flowed with the rise & fall of the human unceasing current;
And lying there hushed in your arms, as the waves of rapture receded,
And far down the margin of being we heard the low beat of the soul,
I was glad as I thought of those others, the nameless, the many,
Who perhaps thus had lain and loved for an hour on the brink of the world,
Secret and fast in the heart of the whirlwind of travel,
The shaking and shrieking of trains, the night-long shudder of traffic,
Thus, like us they have lain & felt, breast to breast in the dark,
The fiery rain of possession descend on their limbs while outside
The black rain of midnight pelted the roof of the station;
And thus some woman like me, waking alone before dawn,
While her lover slept, as I woke & heard the calm stir of your breathing,
Some woman has heard as I heard the farewell shriek of the trains
Crying good-bye to the city & staggering out into darkness,
And shaken at heart has thought: "So must we forth in the darkness,
Sped down the fixed rail of habit by the hand of implacable fate–
So shall we issue to life, & the rain, & the dull dark dawning;
You to the wide flare of cities, with windy garlands and shouting,
Carrying to populous places the freight of holiday throngs;
I, by waste lands, & stretches of low-skied marsh
To a harbourless wind-bitten shore, where a dull town moulders & shrinks,
And its roofs fall in, & the sluggish feet of the hours
Are printed in grass in its streets; & between the featureless houses
Languid the town-folk glide to stare at the entering train,
The train from which no one descends; till one pale evening of winter,
When it halts on the edge of the town, see, the houses have turned into grave-stones,
The streets are the grassy paths between the low roofs of the dead;
And as the train glides in ghosts stand by the doors of the carriages;
And scarcely the difference is felt–yea, such is the life I return to . . ."
Thus may another have thought; thus, as I turned may have turned
To the sleeping lips at her side, to drink, as I drank there, oblivion . . . .