Down and Out in Denver

It’s cold and snowy here in Denver so I spent most of yesterday rereading one of my all-time favorite novels, The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton. Wharton is a genius, so far as I’m concerned, brilliant at documenting New York society at the turn of the century. Though she’s best known for Ethan Frome (a non-New York novel), The House of Mirth, and The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country is probably my favorite, if only because it’s just so nasty and funny.

It is the story of Undine Spragg, which must be one of the most hideous names in all of literature. Her parents named her for a hair-waver her father manufactured that came out the week she was born. As her mother, Leota B. Spragg, explains, “‘It’s from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping.” Undine and her nouveau riche parents move from Midwestern Apex City (yes, really) to the Big Apple in order to give her the chance of making it in society. Undine is, at least, beautiful, but she’s often seriously dumb and remarkably vain, which make the novel all the more fun. Early on in the novel she goes to a museum to “look at the pictures” because she had discovered at a dinner party the night before that this was something that fashionable people did. Wharton writes:

Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jeweled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand.

Undine is the social climber par excellence, giving Thackeray’s Becky Sharp a run for her money. And Wharton is fantastic at describing the ways that Undine learns the ways of New York society, makes mistakes and then learns from them, ditching friends (and husbands) along the way when they are no longer useful to her. By the end of the novel she has married four times, is a very wealthy woman, and yet always what she wants is just slightly beyond her grasp. She has designs on an ambassadorship for her fourth husband (also her first), Elmer Moffatt, but he informs her that it won’t be possible because ambassadors cannot be married to divorcées (which she is), and thus he will never be made an ambassador. As Wharton explains in the final paragraph of the novel, “She had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part that she was really made for.”

Denver may have been cold and snowy but as long as I’ve got Undine to keep me company, you won’t hear me complain!