This, my second foray into the writing of Edith Wharton, was published in 1922. That's more than two decades -- and what decades too -- after The Touchstone, and a year after she'd won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence.

Reason for reading? Venice!

Wharton's story also takes us to Lake Como, and to bits of Paris, but it's definitely Venice that stands out. Our newlyweds, the young Lansings (socialite Susy and would-be writer Nick), are staying in a palazzo borrowed from a friend (I so wish I had friends with palazzi...). And of course, it's atmospheric: "Vastness and splendour... the great shadowy staircase... a dimly-lit table under a ceiling weighed down with Olympians..."

A bit further on, we hear more about the city and its charms: "Late in the afternoon he laid down his pen and wandered out of doors. He loved the increasing heat of the Venetian summer, the bruised peach-tints of worn house-fronts, the enamelling of sunlight on dark green canals, the smell of half-decayed fruits and flowers thickening the languid air. What visions he could build, if he dared, of being tucked away with Susy in the attic of some tumble-down palace, above a jade-green waterway, with a terrace overhanging a scrap of neglected garden -- and cheques from the publishers dropping in at convenient intervals! Why should they not settle in Venice if he pulled it off!"


Dhaka, 2014. Another candidate for the "Venice of the East"

Verdict? I liked it, although the good folks at Washington State University, while conceding "the novel's popular success and some critical acclaim", argue that "most scholars today do not consider Glimpses among her most impressive accomplishments".

For sure, it's a product of its time. The source above quotes Wharton's biography: "Death and mourning darkened the houses of all my friends, and I mourned with them, and mingled my private grief with the general sorrow." It's easy to see how this book, with its superficial and frivolous crowd of perpetual travellers -- a richer, frothier, giddier version of our digital nomads -- might offer a "flight from the last grim years". Some say it influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, another window onto the excesses of the Roaring Twenties.

Yet, surprisingly perhaps, I warmed to the main characters. You wouldn't think that Susy and Nick, accustomed to a life of ease and elegance, but without the wherewithal to fund it for themselves, would merit much sympathy. Susy has lived the life of a hanger-on, a poor person who depends on the generosity of richer friends, and thus acquires a variety of debts and obligations. It's not that bad a life -- at one point she manages "to get taken to Canada for a fortnight's ski-ing, and then to Florida for six weeks in a house-boat" -- but Nick clearly recognizes the frailty of the thread on which "the popularity of the penniless hangs", and how vulnerable such people are to the moods and whims of others. Nick, meanwhile, is a writer, but not a successful one. He has never made more than a pittance, and left to his own devices, "the best he could look forward to was a middle-age of poorly-paid hack-work, mitigated by brief and frugal holidays".

The reader's more austere side will harrumph that these two should buckle down, and find a job... But you can't help admiring their blithe spirits, and willingness to roll the dice. Drawn to each other, they decide to marry, but "with the definite understanding that whenever either of them got the chance to do better he or she should be immediately released". This is Susy's idea. She thinks marriage will give them more social opportunities -- not to mention wedding presents and better offers of accommodation.

They're very happy together, but Nick grows increasingly squeamish about the way Susy "manages", seeing in her little stratagems more than a little deceit. So, on leaving Lake Como, they have a bit of a tiff over whether it's acceptable to pack in their baggage some of the cigars that belong to absent host Charlie Strefford (Nick is adamant that it isn't). And when they arrive in Venice, Susy inadvertently finds herself embroiled in another subterfuge, this time set up by absent hostess Ellie Vanderlyn with the aim of covering up the fact that she is cheating on her husband.

When Nick (via Ellie's thank-you present) finds out about this trickery, he goes all holier-than-thou -- "Would you mind telling me... exactly for what services we've both been so handsomely paid?" -- and storms off. Susy feels hard done by: "When they had entered into their queer compact, Nick had known as well as she on what compromises and concessions the life they were to live together must be based." But Nick is disillusioned: "We both know that my sort of writing will never pay. And what's the alternative except more of the same kind of baseness? And getting more and more blunted to it?"



Both of them start to think that their pact might be over.

And both have very tempting alternatives. The Hicks family (rich, but "both ridiculous and unsuccessful... always taking up the wrong people, giving the wrong kind of party, and spending millions on things that nobody who mattered cared about") want Nick to join them on their boat (and their intelligent daughter, Coral, clearly has a thing for him); Strefford, meanwhile, adores Susy, and on the death of his father, has come into an earldom and the family fortune. Indubitably, the hypothetical better prospect that would release them has materialized for them both. Our newlyweds start divorce proceedings.

The problem is that they still actually love each other... And over the course of the narrative, both go through a sort of learning curve (in looking after some friends' children, Susy discovers that it is possible to live a life that doesn't revolve around "money, luxury, fashion, pleasure"; and Nick, increasingly uncomfortable with his position among the Hickses, realizes he can make a little money through travel writing).

At the end we see them back together -- but in a muted, boding kind of way that I think is one of the book's strengths.

The closing section is very tense. Nick and Susy are both in Paris (Nick has arrived to sort out the divorce). They meet. But neither is honest about the situation, and they part again. You think they're going to go their separate ways, and you're sad about that. But they both make one more effort. They meet. They decide they want to stay together, to try again.

But there's still the issue of money. For Susy it's "the perpetual serpent in her Eden, to be bribed, fed, sent to sleep with such scraps as she could beg, borrow or steal for it". She secretly pawns the bracelet Ellie gave her (the payment for those dubious services rendered, Nick's equivalent of which he has already returned...), but then Nick tells her about some money he has earned from his articles, and she's delighted because now she can get the bracelet out of hock, and return it... Although they feel they inexorably belong to each other, "the first rapture had been succeeded by soberer feelings".

Yes, they're back together, and they want it to work. But you don't know whether they have really learned enough -- whether enough in their lives has changed -- to enable them to stay the course.

At one point Strefford warns Susy that what lasts in the world is the power of habits: "They outstand the Pyramids. Comforts, luxuries, the atmosphere of ease... above all, the power to get away from dulness and monotony, from constraints and uglinesses. You chose that power, instinctively, before you were even grown up; and so did Nick." Dependence is a hard habit to break.



It's interesting, in this light, to compare the opening and closing sentences:

This is how we begin: "It rose for them -- their honey-moon -- over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own." So there we are, all bright and bold, and staring down life's obstacles.

And this is how we close: "They leaned on the sill in the darkness, and through the clouds, from which a few drops were already falling, the moon, labouring upward, swam into a space of sky, cast her troubled glory on them, and was again hidden." Much more sombre and boding.

The title of the book comes from Hamlet (and the phrase also crops up, with rather different connotations, in James Joyce's Ulysses, published the same year as Wharton's novel). The context is the question Hamlet puts to his father's ghost:

What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again, in complete steel,
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.

Lack of money, you can't help but feel, will continue to haunt our two beautiful young things, and make night hideous, despite their best intentions.

Ah yes, I do like a nice, ambiguous, looming ending...



I also enjoyed Wharton's depiction of the cosmopolitanism of the era, damnably decadent though it is:

"These cosmopolitan people, who, in countries not their own, lived in houses as big as hotels, or in hotels where the guests were as international as the waiters, had inter-married, inter-loved and inter-divorced each other over the whole face of Europe, and according to every code that attempts to regulate human ties." Susy and Nick, too, are "as mentally detached, as universally at home, as touts at an International Exhibition". Their presence in Venice, along with Strefford's, "had already drawn thither several wandering members of their set. It was characteristic of these indifferent but agglutinative people that they could never remain long parted from each other without a dim sense of uneasiness."

And there are some admirable turns of phrase:

-- Seeing the wealthy Violet Melrose attaching herself to a promising artist, Susy reflects that the so-called patron "belonged to the class of moral parasites; for in that strange world the parts were sometimes reversed, and the wealthy preyed upon the pauper. Wherever there was a reputation to batten on, there poor Violet appeared, a harmless vampire in pearls who sought only to feed on the notoriety which all her millions could not create for her... The insignificant Ellie Vanderlyn, with her brief trivial passions, her artless mixture of amorous and social interests, was a woman with a purpose, a creature who fulfilled herself; but Violet was only a drifting interrogation." Could anything be more cutting...?

-- When she loses patience with Ellie, and says she's "abominable", continually seeking out fling after fling, even though she has all the money she can possibly want, Ellie replies: "But you simply don't know what you're talking about. As if anybody ever had all the money they wanted."

-- But Wharton does pathos too. In the depths of her confusion over Nick, Susy is prey to dark thoughts: "Her memories would be there waiting for her, every one of them, waiting quietly, patiently, obstinately, like poor people in a doctor's office, the people who are always last to be attended to, but whom nothing will discourage or drive away..."

Lots to enjoy, then -- aside from Venice.