January 3, 2019: Short Story Discussion Group Reading
Happy New Year!
This week features Edith Wharton, who writes some of the saddest, most heart-wrenching and searingly honest stories in the English language.
One of her more upbeat characters made this comment: There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time. (The Last Asset, 1904).
This week’s story, “A Journey,” takes place on a train.
I am a traveler, and when a traveler gets to a certain age like me, it gets harder to dodge the thought that this might be the time you won’t make it back alive and someone else will have to delete all those crappy pictures.
What could be worse than coming back in the baggage compartment?
Edith Wharton has a scenario for you to consider.
The author: Edith Wharton (1862-1937):
Born into upper-class New York society, Wharton received all the advantages that money could buy, including European travel, access to her father’s library, private tutors, and presentation to society as a debutante. She tried marriage, but the union was not a happy one. She found more satisfaction in designing her home, The Mount, as a perfect expression of her cultivated tastes. From her refuge there she wrote with stinging honesty about the privileged world she knew so intimately. She was in France when World War I started, and she remained there for the duration of the war, organizing charitable work and reporting from the front. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature (The Age of Innocence, 1921).
More on the Author:
Edith Wharton: A Biography. The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home.
Biography. The Edith Wharton Society.
The Story: was published in 1889 in her collection of short stories, The Greater Inclination, Wharton’s first book. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, she describes her feelings after it was published.
I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country, and I gloried in my new citizenship. The publishing of The Greater Inclination broke the chains which had held me so long in a kind or torpor. For nearly twelve years I had tried to adjust myself to the life I had led since my marriage. . . .
One of Wharton’s biographers, Hermione Lee, writes that it is “not surprising” that several of Wharton’s stories of this period portray “marital misery . . . . The journey itself becomes a metaphor for an unhappy marriage.” A Journey. Story of the Week. Library of America.
