Books for Our Times:
“The Custom of the Country” by Edith Wharton
Getting and spending is “the custom of the country” under review in this 1913 novel by perhaps the acutest observer ever of American capitalism: Edith Wharton (1862–1937).
Born into a wealthy New York family, at a time when a woman’s sole ambition was to make a brilliant marriage, Edith Wharton broke with her times and her social stratum to write 40 works in 40 years that vividly portray the forces, if not the characters, that make American capitalism so dominant in the world, in her day and continuing in ours.
The great American experiment of democracy-and-capitalism, historically unique, is intended to enable the demos, the people, to pursue their individual ambition in a state of freedom, security, and democratic equality. Success or failure depends on an individual’s ability to peddle their goods, so to speak, in the market, this being a market economy and not a barter or feudal one. But what if the market, in doing its thing — buying and selling — and doing it with little oversight or regulation, becomes so dominant that the people, the other component of this historic experiment, become mere cogs in the machine? For this experiment to work, Main Street must be in some equilibrium with Wall Street.
With the wealthy ever more dominant, and income inequality ever more pronounced, and the wealthy’s political minions (Republicans) in control of the U.S. House, the chamber holding the purse strings, it is instructive to read Wharton’s novel about how the wealthy view the world. It is not a pretty or humane picture: As alluded above, the story is more about forces, not character. Undine Spragg, the central character (never could you call her a hero nor even a protagonist) is, pure and simple, appetite.
Appetite, unregulated, is a destructive thing — in human beings and in cultures.
In Undine, appetite is presented with a beautiful exterior. A small-town beauty who moves with her parents to New York, where her father is only moderately successful on Wall Street and thus not the provider Undine needs, Undine’s struggles will always relate to spending too much money (to clothe her beautiful exterior) and thus always putting the men in her life (there are three husbands) in a bind. This reader’s only attachment to this character-less character is watching her manipulate any situation or crisis — and prevail. All she wants from life, she claims, is “amusement and respectability” and, yes, things: “To have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence.” Her through-line is: learning how to use her beauty. Quick to defend herself — “I’m not an immoral woman” — she epitomizes Oscar Wilde’s definition of the cynic as one “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Other people count for nothing with Undine. “[F]or all her light irresponsibility, it was always she who made the practical suggestion, hit the nail of expediency on the head. No sentimental scruples made the blow waver or deflected her resolute aim.” Least of her concerns is her son. When she learns she is pregnant, she bewails the waste of her new Paris wardrobe. Young Paul is, for Undine, a drag in her conquest of New York society: “the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen.” His low priority is vividly dramatized when Undine totally forgets his fourth-birthday party; why? Because she is sitting for her portrait with a major painter and basking in the praise of his coterie. Yet Paul ultimately proves of value: He becomes a bargaining chip in her divorce settlement. Paul will always love his mother, but he also comes to see: “She said things that weren’t true.”
Nor does Ralph, the artist of her husbands and Paul’s father, count for much with her, either. Undine marries him for his old-line Washington Square family, but soon grows disenchanted with him, starting with their honeymoon, when he reveals that his artistic ambitions far outweigh those of making money. Soon, because of Undine’s unending expenditures, he is forced to forsake his artistic dreams (he’d planned to write an epic poem titled “The Banished God”) and joins a real-estate firm on Wall Street. Though neither very good at it nor happy, he puts in long, long hours. Soon he realizes:
“Was this to be the end? Was he to wear his life out in useless drudgery? The plain prose of it, of course, was that the economic situation remained unchanged by the sentimental catastrophe and that he must go on working for his wife and child. But at any rate, as it was mainly for Paul that he would henceforth work, it should be on his own terms and according to his inherited notions of ‘straightness.’”
Harking to those inherited ethics, Wharton writes of Ralph: “[H]e still wanted to implant in Paul some of the reserves and discriminations which divided that tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession.” In his artistic and ethical aspirations, Ralph is this novel’s tragic figure — and perhaps symbolic of the efficacy of Art and Ethics in today’s turbo-charged capitalism. (I should note that Undine does not read books.)
So why read such a tragic story? Because Edith Wharton is a writer so intelligent on the subject of “making money,” and the perils thereof, that she bears close attention. She wrote from close-in experience She was born and married to Wall Street, she lived through the transition from old New York to the new, more hard-charging city; in a word, she knew. Here she is on “the custom of the country,” speaking of America (as opposed to Europe), in probably this novel’s most famous passage:
“Where does the real life of most American men lie? In some woman’s drawing-room or in their offices? The answer’s obvious, isn’t it? The emotional centre of gravity’s not the same in the two hemispheres. In the effete societies it’s love, in our new one it’s business. In American the real crime passionel is a ‘big steal’ — there’s more excitement in wrecking railways than homes.”
“Big steals” necessitate a code, “the Wall Street code”: “[Q]uick decisions were essential to effective action, and brooding over ethical shades of difference might work more ill than good in a world committed to swift adjustments.” Which is to say, ethics default to expediency. Ralph the ethicist still seeks to abide by “the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently,” a view his father-in-law listens to “with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest questions”: “[T]hey say shipwrecked fellows’ll make a meal of a friend as quick as they would of a total stranger.” In this milieu, wives are adornments, who make do with “the leavings tossed them by the preoccupied male — the money and the motors and the clothes — and pretend to themselves and each other that that’s what really constitute life!” Divorce, shorn of the old stigma of scandal, becomes the instrument of changing out wives.
Society surrounding this ethics-free business arena is insubstantial in the extreme: It was a “chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies.” It’s this society that Ralph hoped to show had “banished God.” Wharton is brilliant at describing this sparkling but weightless society, while also casting it as the way humans anywhere behave. Here the setting is Paris, where a “fetish” of family relations outweighs business, but behavior is the same. Her observer is an old-line New Yorker, summing up “human nature’s passion for the factitious, its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation”:
“The dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe [hotel] represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisures: a phantom ‘society, with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence.”
Wharton’s pièce de résistance on this society: “Nothing that ever happens here is real.” “Promiscuous” is a word she evokes often in this context.
What kind of individual fares best in this heaving, compassless arena? Elmer Moffatt, a “world-beater” in today’s parlance, has the power of personality — and that’s what it takes in this hall of mirrors: power of personality — to bend any and all his way, be it a crisis or rival. Moffat is someone who, even if beaten, doesn’t look it, a capacity perceived about him that enables him to scramble to his feet for another go at a deal. As such, Moffatt is this novel’s most dynamic character: In having wants, epic ones, he must act epically to achieve them; and he is never “off” (“Business never goes to sleep”).
When Ralph, former artist and eternal ethicist, went to work on Wall Street, coming into contact for the first time with “the drama of business,” he found
“a certain interest in watching the fierce interplay of its forces. In the down-town world he had heard things of Moffatt that seemed to single him out from the common herd of money-makers: anecdotes of his coolness, his lazy good-temper, the humorous detachment he preserved in the heat of conflicting interests.”
Later, in doing a deal with Moffatt, Ralph is left with
“a dazzled sense of Moffatt’s strength and keenness, but with a vague doubt as to the ‘straightness’ of the proposed transaction. Ralph had never seen his way clearly in that dim underworld of affairs where men of the Moffatt….type moved like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of the surface. He knew that ‘business’ has created its own special morality; and his musings on man’s relation to his self-imposed laws had shown him how little human conduct is generally troubled about its own sanctions.”
Of course, world-beaters like Moffatt need “somebody up in Washington” to grease the wheels of the aforementioned sanctions, an offhand reference indicating the utilitarian function of politics to Wall Street. To Undine, politics was “a kind of back-kitchen to business — the place where the refuse was thrown and the doubtful messes were brewed.”
If you wonder how it could be that states, Republican-controlled, could act so meanly as to block the expansion to their state of Medicaid, the federally-funded healthcare program for the poor, this novel shows why. For the wealthy, people outside their “tribe” (a term Wharton uses often) do not compute, they simply do not exist, not in any felt way. Nor do “We the People”: Unless I missed it, words like “democracy” or “common good” or “commonweal” never manifest, not as concepts to be prized and defended.
I consider Edith Wharton a national treasure: After reading her, I always come away comprehending more deeply — life, human behavior, relationships, and here, Wall Street. And Edith, bless her, is unafraid to make the moral point, the ultimate point. This is not my favorite Wharton novel; “The House of Mirth” is, which shares the same milieu and same appetitive woman as central character, though Lily Bart fails where Undine Spragg succeeds (ethics again). But Edith Wharton would agree with the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu: “Know your enemy.”
Read “The Custom of the Country” and know.
A note to Carla’s readers from Carla’s husband Larry: this is a piece from “the vault.” Preparing to devote a few months to writing a play,“Prodigal,” Carla wrote four essays to be published one by one in Medium while she concentrated on the long-planned play. Sadly, her cancer intervened. More about her life here.
