By Edith Wharton (1862-1937), this was originally published in 1900. Although preceded by translations, poems, and short stories, this is the author's first published novella (her first novel apppeared in 1902).

Apart from a short story entitled A Journey, which formed part of an anthology I somewhat incongruously took to Burkina Faso in 1997, this is the first Wharton I've actually read. Previous experience consists only of Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and Terence Davies's The House of Mirth (which latter my diary tells me I'd also previously listened to, no doubt on a pre-diary commute, but I have no recollection of that).

The reason for this choice is that it deals with a problematique similar to that of The Aspern Papers, by Henry James. To what extent does the public have a right to know about the private lives of public figures (dead or alive)? And, in the case of the dead ones, to what extent do those left behind have the right to profit from relationships that may lie many years in the past?

It's not really surprising to come to Wharton via James. Wharton was a big fan of the older writer, and must have been highly gratified to receive, also in 1900, a letter of encouragement from him after the publication of a short story entitled The Line of Least Resistance. They became friends. (And there's a hilarious account here of a road trip Wharton and her husband took with James.)

A touchstone (and I confess I had to look this up) is a test or criterion for determining quality or genuineness. In our case, the person most obviously being tested is Stephen Glennard. He is in possession of a large number of letters from deceased author Margaret Aubyn, who once (unrequitedly) carried a torch for him.


Letters from round the world: Armenia

Glennard is not a likeable man. Through the brief sketch we're given of Margaret Aubyn, we come to feel we would have liked her much better (and to wonder quite what she saw in Glennard...). She marries unwisely, and ends up returning to her father's house. Eventually, her husband dies. When Glennard first meets her, she has just published her first novel. He doesn't quite love her, and as time goes by, she also starts to make him feel inferior. With hindsight, he regrets that it didn't work: "To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations." But at the time, he is just not sufficiently interested: "It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves her, he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never removed."

Eventually she goes to live abroad: "He was tired of her already -- he was always tired of her -- yet he was not sure that he wanted her to go." Then comes a very interesting, almost prophetic exchange:

"'I may never see you again,' he said, as though confidently appealing to her compassion.
"Her look enveloped him. 'And I shall see you always -- always!'
"'Why go then --?' escaped him.
"'To be nearer you,' she answered; and the words dismissed him like a closing door."

As is the way with these things, several factors -- drip, drip, drip -- conspire to make Glennard consider selling Aubyn's letters: First, he sees an advertisement by a would-be biographer, asking for such material. Glennard is generally pushed for cash, but more specifically, he does not have enough to marry the woman he loves, Alexa Trent. She, too, is from straitened circumstances, and when a rich aunt invites her to accompany her to Europe, she feels she will have to accept -- unless some better prospect comes her way. So this adds urgency to Glennard's temptation. And then along comes opportunity in the shape of Barton Flamel, a "friend" -- someone whose company Glennard regards as "one of those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield", but who happens to be a collector of books and manuscripts, and therefore familiar with the world of publishing. Glennard puts to him a hypothetical case (letters from Aubyn entrusted to him by a dead friend), and Flamel is absolutely convinced there is nothing wrong with offering the letters for publication. Indeed, he believes it would be wrong not to: "Anything of Margaret Aubyn's is more or less public property by this time. She's too great for any one of us."


The Isle of Man

The next time we meet Glennard, he is married to Alexa, living in a picture-perfect little house, with "a baby who never cried". It is obvious that he has done the deed.

During the whole editorial process, he managed to not think about the implications of his actions. But then the press releases start. And so does the guilt and vexation: "Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous bargain." He's angry with Alexa, with Flamel -- and with Margaret: "His punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always be there now."

Meanwhile, everyone is talking about the "Aubyn Letters". Glennard is somehow shocked to see the books in print: "The little broken phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open... It was a horrible sight... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He had not known it would be like this... [He had been] heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead."

And the reminders won't stop. A royalty cheque arrives. Then there's a reading for charity of these "unloved letters" (in aid of the Home for Friendless Women...). There are magazine articles. Glennard, increasingly losing all sense of proportion with regard to the deal he has made, is now embroiled in a strange triangle with Flamel and his wife. He is tormented by the question of who knows what, and the extent to which that person has shared that knowledge with the other.

Eventually, he asks Alexa to sort out his bills, thinking that the sight of the royalty cheque will reveal to her what he can't bring himself to avow out loud. Which it does. But because she doesn't say anything, he starts to think she is complicit with his use of the letters -- and looks down on her for it.

Everything about Glennard is made meaner by this business...

And ironically, he is more and more drawn to the memory of Margaret: "Her presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows... The rapture of recovery [of a sense of this presence] was embittered to Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him with her blood." He visits her grave, where he "lost himself in morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been. There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them."


Singapore

This is all great psychological stuff. But I was less impressed by the ending. Alexa welcomes her husband's repentance (and his eventual appreciation for her support); feeling acute guilt herself over what has taken place, she resolves that they make amends by trying to return the money (not really realizing how much is involved).

Glennard says something along the lines of not deserving her, and she replies:

"'Don’t you see that you’ve never before been what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into the man she loved? That’s worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman -- that’s the gift she would have wished to give!'
"'Ah,' he cried, 'but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give her?'
"'The happiness of giving,' she said."

I really wasn't sure about that... It seemed a little -- what? -- contrived, perhaps, or overly convenient, or too soft in allowing some mitigation of the irony and the tragedy that Wharton has been piling on.

But there's an interesting gloss here: "In The Touchstone... we see the [persona of the] writer as anything but an ordinary human being... For a writer, the happiness of giving is to become your written word. This goes to the heart of something terrifying about being a writer: your work eclipses and outlives you... The writer seems to be laying her heart open, vulnerable, but she’s actually in a position of power... She has the power to manipulate posterity to take her side, and to turn her sad little one-sided love into something great and immortal... The seemingly pathetic, martyred Margaret Aubyn ultimately emerges as the triumphant one."

This commentary agrees: "[Glennard's guilt] isn’t really the point. His betrayal of Margaret Aubyn is. She’s behind every action of the novella, and her haunting of Glennard is what drives his guilt. She may be dead, but she is, through her words and her captured essence, far more lasting than the living."

Maybe... What the novella unquestionably does with absolute success, however, is shine a light on that whole question of authorial availability. In that sense, it still seems extraordinarily relevant.

"Literature travels faster than steam nowadays," muses one character. Indeed, we think, and will travel faster yet...

And what we really have the right to know about is the key issue of the story. After starting to read the published letters, one of the women in the circle around Glennard and his wife says: "It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots -- her whole self laid bare... I don't mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a keyhole." This is an opinion Alexa shares when she reads the letters. But of course, we're pretty sure that people didn't stop reading when they felt they ought to...

The key dilemma is set out in this exchange:

"'How can any letters belong to the public that weren't written to the public?'
"'A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn's belongs to the world... It's the penalty of greatness -- one becomes a monument historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is always open to the public.' ...
"'But she never meant them for posterity!'
"'A woman shouldn't write such letters if she doesn't mean them to be published.'

Ah yes, we're familiar with this mindset. It's ALWAYS the woman's fault...


Java

Jessica Bulman-Pozen has some very interesting background on all this. This novella, she says, "presciently anticipates questions of privacy, publicity, and personality that would underlie Wharton's mature fiction, her interpersonal relationships, and her very conception of herself". There was intense interest in authors' personalities in the late 19th century, it seems, and writers were broadly seen as "objects of legitimate mass consumption". This is what is reflected in the novella: It is precisely the private tenor of the writings that makes them so popular.

These are concerns that authors like Sally Rooney are still exploring more than a century later. And they pick up a debate that was launched in 1890 with the publication by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis of a legal article entitled The Right to Privacy, which was intended as a response to journalistic sensationalism. "The press," say the authors, "is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and decency... To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers."

All well and good, but Warren and Brandeis were also writing within a societal convention that favoured male privacy: "In their view, a husband could keep his domestic activities to himself, but would his wife enjoy the right to keep her dining habits a secret? It is doubtful, for, in casting property ownership as the implicit basis for a right to privacy, Warren and Brandeis suggested that a man had the right to determine not only the bounds of his own privacy but also those of his family members... This had notable repercussions for nineteenth-century women. Because male privacy contained within it female experience, women were the objects rather than the subjects of privacy... Their homes were their husbands' castles."

This article, the social background that prompted it, and the various responses to it would almost certainly have been familiar to Wharton. According to Bulman-Pozen, "Evidence of Wharton's concern with privacy, and the law more generally, abounds in her novels... As a female writer who sought both to establish her reputation and to protect her private life, Wharton shed the model of domestic lady writer and self-consciously positioned herself in the public sphere. She was accordingly sensitive to her competing needs for publicity and privacy and to the complications of each. Although feminist criticisms of privacy rights would not emerge until after her death in 1937, Wharton's works offer a nuanced critique of Warren and Brandeis's proposal."

With regard to The Touchstone, Bulman-Pozen suggests, Wharton's proposition is this: "Property rights serve not to protect Mrs. Aubyn's private personality, but to transform the author herself into a commodity. The organic relationship the lawyers posit between writer and text does not guard literary expression from unwanted publication, but instead turns the writer into a text vulnerable to public consumption... Wharton repeatedly emphasizes the loss of self-ownership that successful authorship can effect. By writing popular novels, Mrs. Aubyn has become a personage and ceased to be a person, and the public claims ownership of her... She effectively has lost both the right to her personality and the right to privacy."


Sri Lanka

Bulman-Pozen also made me aware of one of Wharton's short stories, called Copy. It takes the form of a highly satirical "dialogue", and records a meeting between Mrs Dale and Mr Ventnor, "the greatest novelist and the greatest poet of the age", as Hilda (Mrs Dale's personal assistant) gushingly describes them. Mrs Dale maintains she has lost her reality: "I died years ago. What you see before you is a figment of the reporter's brain -- a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion." Ventnor agrees: "Ah, well, yes -- as you say, we're public property."

Mrs Dale has no illusions about the trade-off she has made: "Don't talk to me about living in the hearts of my readers! We both know what kind of a domicile that is. Why, before long I shall become a classic! Bound in sets and kept on the top book-shelf... I foresee the day when I shall be as lonely as an Etruscan museum!"

It turns out they have kept each other's letters (and both want to recover the correspondence held by the other with a view to providing material for their respective memoirs). But as they peruse the letters, Mrs Dale is moved by "how fresh they seem, and how they take me back to the time when we lived instead of writing about life". Ventor agrees. Just as a modern-day influencer might, he longs for "the time when we didn't prepare our impromptu effects beforehand and copyright our remarks about the weather". They agree to burn the letters, feeling that by doing this, they are destroying the key to a garden that they can now keep private.

"Considered together," says Bulman-Pozen, "The Touchstone and Copy anticipate Wharton's lifelong engagement with questions of personality, privacy, and publicity and offer two competing views: Mrs. Aubyn's private personality that is threatened by publicity and Mrs. Dale's public persona that is, in fact, her inmost self. Throughout her own career..., Wharton negotiated a path between the extremes of Mrs. Aubyn and Mrs. Dale by employing the very threat of public exposure to forge a distinct private personality."

Fascinating. Must definitely read more.


Sumatra