Twilight Sleep
by . New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1927, 12mo. xiii+373 pp. $2.50.
IN any consideration of the work of Mrs. Wharton, from The House of Mirth to Twilight Sleep, one is safely and pleasantly convinced of gradations, not grades, of excellence. Thomas Hardy between his greatest novels wrote stories so weak and ineffective from every point of view that, when judged in the kindest light, they seem incredible as products of his genius; Arnold Bennett has never fulfilled the promise of The Old Wives’ Tale, nor has Hergesheimer realized his high destiny so clearly discerned in Java Head and Three Black Pennys; but Mrs. Wharton has never really descended from that plane of excellence which since its beginning has characterized her work. In each story have been evidenced that conscious care in plan and execution which knows no short cut to perfection and dignity of sentence structure, a recognition of the power of things withheld, dialogue which rarely if ever oversteps its mark, tense situations memorable most of all for their terrible simplicity. With such a consistently high record of achievement as hers in mind one is almost tempted to say that Mrs. Wharton could not write a poor novel. Whatever the story, the method must inevitably be distinguished.
Twilight Sleep is assuredly not a poor novel. Here as always the reader can rest in the perfect security of a careful and irreproachable style, can be sure that his sense of fitness will not be outraged, that his mounting eagerness and suspense will be neither too quickly satisfied nor sated. And yet with all its literary fineness one misses in this new novel that one surpassing distinction of other and greater books, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The Old Maid, that best of the Old New York sketches — namely, a compelling naturalness in character and in situation. There is nothing in Twilight Sleep, not even in those final scenes between Nona and her parents, clearly the best in the story, that is at all comparable to Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver at the breaking of the pickle dish, to Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska at lunch on the verandah at Point Arley, to Delia and Charlotte Lovell when the former discovers that Charlotte is the mother of a child by Clement Spender, whom Delia has always loved — scenes rarely if ever surpassed in American fiction. This newest story has no such high lights — not for want of occasion, but for want of actors. And right here, one must believe, lies the reason for its comparative inferiority to the novels just cited. From Pauline Mumford, who inconsistently embraces one ‘cause’ and one ‘creed’ after another with such unbelievable stupidity that she is neither humorous nor tragic, to the pampered and silly Lita, whom all the others think they want to save from self-inflicted tragedy, the characters, when viewed in the bright light of Mrs. Wharton’s other creations, are puppets, pulled at times by too inadequate strings.
The reason for this is, however, perhaps not impossible to find. Twilight Sleep is very evidently a satire on the affectation and hypocrisy of the life lived by the modern millionaire class of New York. A satire is almost bound to sacrifice its means to its message; and this, in the opinion of one reviewer at least, is precisely what Mrs. Wharton’s satire has done. Incredible Pauline, silly Lita, charming Nona, and sanctimonious Aggie Hueston, not to mention the four men who play opposite them, are types, even tragic warnings; but rarely, except in the case of Nona and of her father, are they anything else. Twilight Sleep is, in fact, in spite of its ‘timeliness’ and almost overwhelming modernism, reminiscent of those novels of the late eighteenth century, which marked the concern of Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Day, and others in new theories of education and religion rather than in the emotions of real people.
MARY ELLEN CHASE