The Girl from Apex City

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) is one of the most sparkling and enjoyable novels I have ever read, and I’ve read it now several times. Each time it manages to surprise and delight me. I put it in a class with Pride and Prejudice, as a book that offers endlessly renewable pleasure. That’s high praise, but I mean every word of it.

If it had any flaw – which it hasn’t – it would be that of being too sparkling, a criticism that Austen herself acknowledged could be applied to her own work, wondering if readers might find her first novel ‘rather too light and bright and sparkling’. All of Edith Wharton’s books are enjoyable, but this one has an incomparably shining bravura. She must have been very pleased with it. It gives us a panorama of society at the height of the Belle Époque, in New York and Paris, with all the satisfactions of the classiest of costume dramas and the added reassurance that the novel isn’t a facsimile: it is, as her friend Henry James would have put it, the Real Thing.

It is the story of Undine Spragg from the fictional Apex City in the Midwest (what a name, what a provenance!) and her relentless search for advancement. At the beginning we find her friendless and lonely, living in what she soon learns to be less than stylish affluence in a luxury hotel in New York with her lonely, wealthy and indulgent parents, whom she has bullied mercilessly since childhood. (The personalities of these, at first sight unpromising parents are developed with great subtlety.

Undine is a beauty, a head-turner, and she has set her sights on a society marriage. As we discover, although so evidently desirable, she is not very interested in sex, but she is seriously interested in fun. She likes fine clothes, jewels, expensive restaurants, dinner parties and any settings that will display her charms to the world. She likes to be where the action is, and we watch her as she continues to revise her opinion of where that might be. Although not conventionally intelligent (she has no interest in books or art, although she likes the chic world of the artist’s studio) she is very smart, and very quick at picking up hints about the customs of the countries that she finds she wishes to conquer.

Wharton’s title indicates her lively interest in anthropology. It is taken from a 1647 Jacobean drama by Fletcher and Massinger, referring to the feudal droit de seigneur, but Wharton uses the phrase to invoke in part the inbred manners of old New York, of which she gives an explicitly anthropological analysis: ‘the Dagonet attitude, the Dagonet way of life, the very lines of furniture in the old Dagonet house’ are likened to

the Aborigines . . . these vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race. [Ralph] was fond of describing Washington Square as the ‘Reservation’, and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries.

But she also focuses her attention on the emergent world, and on the complex and changing customs of the moneyed marriage market. In particular, she analyses the distinctions between the social status of American and European divorcées, distinctions which play a crucial role in the plot.

We watch Undine as she triumphantly trips her way through this minefield, deftly avoiding many a danger. The sensational plot is full of surprises, some of them with slow fuses, and some of them sprung upon us as sudden detonations: I had managed to forget the most shocking of all, so it came upon me this time round as a horrifying revelation. Wharton’s handling of narrative is superb: her deft time breaks and swift cuts between chapter and chapter are a master class in pace and in the handling of expectation. She doesn’t waste time on unnecessary linkages: she jumps, along with her heroine, to the next adventure, the next incarnation, the next unexpected marriage.

Are we meant to admire the astonishing and shameless Undine? Clearly not: she is venal, apparently heartless, and a very bad mother. One of the most painful scenes in the book concerns her neglect of her only son Paul, whose birthday party she forgets under the heady influence of a glittering ‘tea’ held in honour of her newly painted portrait in the studio of Claud Walsingham Popple, a character inspired by John Singer Sargent (with maybe a touch of Whistler). Undine likes Popple, and she also likes his paintings: he is very good at pearls and fabrics, and all his sitters and their patrons ask of his portraits is that ‘the costume should be sufficiently “life-like” and the face not too much so’ – although in Undine’s case, as Popple assures her, there has been no need to idealize: ‘nature herself has outdone the artist’s dream’. Surrounded by admirers and sycophants, she neglects to return home for her son’s party, an event which precipitates the breakdown of her first society marriage and presages a life of uncertainty and sorrow and loneliness for Paul, who loses count of his fathers and grandparents as he is dragged, at her convenience, in her wake.

And yet, and yet. There is something primal in her energy, in her ambition, in her resolution. Wharton describes her as a ‘pioneer’, and the word has a powerful American resonance. One cannot wholly dislike her. The more we learn of her childhood in Apex, details of which are released slowly throughout the narrative, the more we come to feel a certain grudging admiration for her audacity, her contempt for conventional opinions, her willingness to carve her own fate.

The story of her developing relationship with her childhood beau from Apex, the self-made Elmer Moffatt, is full of nuance. He is the red-faced, overweight, ill-dressed, parentless boy from nowhere, who transforms himself into a Wall Street tycoon, a connoisseur of the arts and a great collector. He becomes a man who can look down on the works of Popple and his like. Undine, as a girl, had defied Apex by walking down Main Street on Moffatt’s arm, when that small town with its small-town morality had turned against him because he had disgraced himself the night before at a temperance rally. The way she stuck by him at that moment has profound consequences for her, and for the society she moves in.

In the grand finale, we see her in Paris bedecked with pigeonblood rubies that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, but, like Alexander, she is still intent on conquest. She is still feeling ‘that there were other things she might want if she knew about them’. Will she discover what they are? The novel was published in 1913, as the world was about to change forever, and so we cannot follow her illimitable desires beyond the great debacle.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Margaret Drabble 2023