Something for Everyone

Publishers already have a large and eager bustle of fiction in orbit, and since the average quality is event- fully high, the most useful basis for an early autumn report seems to be its variety. There is something for everyone, even readers. In order of seniority, therefore, the following quintet is endorsed with continuing thanks for the printed word, and equinoctial blessings on all:

The Best Short Stories of Edith Wharton (Scribners, $4.50) is a just job of reclamation. Mrs. Wharton wrote as the inside observer of a closed, massively garnished milieu of millionaire Americans who lived on Fifth Avenue and whose highest earthly ideal was a titled European. Her details of their manners, morals, and muffled losses are always real, and her common-sense adaptation of Henry James’ middle period prose still reads fluently. According to his gospel, too, she made a tidy job of her storytelling, and in fact, it is this reliably professional finish which has always struck me as the most curious aspect of her work. Since, after all, she did not write for a living, I would have expected a little more self-indulgence of her. But on the contrary, she erred in the opposite direction, writing too often like a contracted hack whose only concern was to satisfy the editor of a ladies’ magazine. Neither her prose nor her substance ever makes the demands a really first-rate writer’s must, and at her best, she remains second-rate. But the truly second-rate is uncommon enough to be preserved. I don’t know everything her present editor, Wayne Andrews, has left out, but what he has put in is all viable. This goes for Mrs. Wharton’s ten stories as well as his own preface, crisp and canny enough to make his forthcoming biography a prospect of plum-value.

RP

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Robert Phelps

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Publishers already have a large and eager bustle of fiction in orbit, and since the average quality is event- fully high, the most useful basis for an early autumn report seems to be its variety. There is something for everyone, even readers. In order of seniority, therefore, the following quintet is endorsed with continuing thanks for the printed word, and equinoctial blessings on all:

The Best Short Stories of Edith Wharton (Scribners, $4.50) is a just job of reclamation. Mrs. Wharton wrote as the inside observer of a closed, massively garnished milieu of millionaire Americans who lived on Fifth Avenue and whose highest earthly ideal was a titled European. Her details of their manners, morals, and muffled losses are always real, and her common-sense adaptation of Henry James’ middle period prose still reads fluently. According to his gospel, too, she made a tidy job of her storytelling, and in fact, it is this reliably professional finish which has always struck me as the most curious aspect of her work. Since, after all, she did not write for a living, I would have expected a little more self-indulgence of her. But on the contrary, she erred in the opposite direction, writing too often like a contracted hack whose only concern was to satisfy the editor of a ladies’ magazine. Neither her prose nor her substance ever makes the demands a really first-rate writer’s must, and at her best, she remains second-rate. But the truly second-rate is uncommon enough to be preserved. I don’t know everything her present editor, Wayne Andrews, has left out, but what he has put in is all viable. This goes for Mrs. Wharton’s ten stories as well as his own preface, crisp and canny enough to make his forthcoming biography a prospect of plum-value.