If The Cosmos Wears A Beard

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

Another book I read a while ago but am just now getting around to writing up . . .

In her introduction Wharton offhandedly claims for herself a Celtic sensibility, which brought me up a little short; but after all, her maiden name was Jones.

Wharton was a disciple of Henry James, but unlike James it appears she didn't bring her A-game to the ghost story genre (with one major exception). Many of these stories start off very Jamesian, but a few paragraphs in the prose rapidly simplifies, making the stories more readable but also less substantial. I consulted the dates on the copyright page, and the later stories are noticeably more pedestrian, which is a common critical complaint about her work in general.

So, a few quick comments on some of the stories. "The Eyes" is about a wasted life - a (much) slighter version of "The Jolly Corner". "Kerfol" is about the sinister history of a Breton country house and is reminiscent of M.R., not Henry, James. "All Souls'" begins very promisingly, with a sick old rich woman awakening and wandering around her mysteriously deserted mansion hunting for her vanished servants, but the ultimate explanation is a letdown. "Bewitched" is in Ethan Frome territory but is otherwise undistinguished. "The Triumph of the Night" is about a bystander who unknowingly witnesses the exploitation of a sick youth by his uncle, a ruthless robber baron, but the narrator misses his chance to intervene. "Miss Mary Pask" is a total fakeout and a rather clumsy attempt at humor. And so on. You get the picture.

The one major exception? "Afterward", the only story that has substance and actual genuine feeling backing it up. I read it as an expression of the frustrations of being an upper class wife at the turn of the twentieth century, and these women's incredible vulnerability: they are so dependent on their husbands but are totally ignorant of their spouses' actual business affairs. (And also, not so incidentally, of their husbands' probity, or lack thereof.) Oddly enough, "Afterward" is the one Wharton that's in just about every ghost story anthology. It almost makes you think anthologists might actually know what they're doing, shifting the wheat from the chaff . . .

You know (and this is not the first time I've made this observation), Thomas Ligotti is indisputably the most important American horror writer since Lovecraft, but despite that, I'm really, really glad I'm not him.