The End of the End of the Earth Read online

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  But sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the perplexities of fiction—and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art form—is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French president, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case, though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of “bad” people into sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to get away with murder) and I, as a reader, become helpless not to make that desire my own.

  In Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), as in The House of Mirth, an unfit member of old New York society fails to survive. But here the harshly Darwinian “nature” is the new, industrialized, nakedly capitalist America, and the victim is certainly not the protagonist, Undine Spragg. The novel reads like a perfect, deliberate inversion of The House of Mirth. It takes the same ingredients of sympathy and applies them to a heroine beside whom Lily Bart is an angel of grace and sensitivity and lovability. Undine Spragg is the spoiled, ignorant, shallow, amoral, and staggeringly selfish product of the economically booming American hinterland; she’s named for a hair curler mass-produced by her grandfather. Wharton was working on the novel in precisely the years when she was preparing to forsake the United States permanently, and its grotesquely negative cartoon of the country—the lecherously red face of the millionaire Van Degen, the fatuous pretensions of the celebrity portrait painter Popple, the culpably feeble traditions of old New York, the vacuous pleasure seeking of the arrivistes, the corrupt connivance of business and politics—reads like a selective marshaling of evidence to support her case. The country that can produce and celebrate a creature like Undine Spragg is not, Wharton seems to be arguing to herself, a country she can live in.

  But Undine’s story is one you absolutely have to read. The Custom of the Country is the earliest novel to portray an America I recognize as fully modern, the first fictional rendering of a culture to which the Kardashians, Twitter, and Fox News would come as no surprise. Lewis’s Babbitt and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby not only follow directly from it but seem, if anything, somewhat less modern. The nexus of money and media and celebrity, which dominates our world today, appears in the novel’s opening chapter in the form of the press clippings that Mrs. Heeney (Undine’s masseuse and early social adviser) carries with her everywhere, and the clippings become a leitmotif, a recurring measure of Undine’s progress. Ignorant though Undine is, she’s smart enough to know that she has exactly what reporters need, and she proves remarkably adept at manipulating the press. Along the way, she anticipates two other hallmarks of modern American society: the obliteration of all social distinctions by money, and the hedonic treadmill of materialism. In Undine’s world, everything can be bought, and none of it will ever be enough.

  The novel’s most strikingly modern element, however, is divorce. The Custom of the Country is by no means the earliest novel in which marriages are dissolved, but it’s the first novel in the Western canon to put serial divorce at its center, and in so doing it sounds the death knell of the “marriage plot” that had invigorated countless narratives in centuries past. The once-high stakes of choosing a spouse are dramatically lowered when every mistake can be—and is, by Undine—undone by divorce. The costs now are mostly financial. And Wharton, who could see the inevitability of her own divorce when she was working on the book, again does nothing by halves. The story is saturated with divorce; it’s what the book is relentlessly about. Whereas The House of Mirth, a story of irrevocable mistakes, ends with the guttering of the feeble flame of Lily’s life, The Custom of the Country, which is a story of mistakes without lasting consequences for their maker, ends with the cartoonishly pure spectacle of Undine’s marrying the soon-to-be-richest man in America and still not being satisfied. You don’t have to admire Undine Spragg to admire an author with the courage and the love of form to go for broke like this. Wharton embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov embraces pedophilia in Lolita.

  Undine is an extreme case of the unlikable person rendered perplexingly sympathetic by her desires. She’s almost comically indestructible, like Wile E. Coyote. The interest I take in her ascent—in her Coyote-like survival of the seeming wipe-out blows that her divorces deliver to her social standing—may be akin to the fascination of watching one spider in a jar prevail over other spiders, but I still can’t read the book without aligning myself with her struggle. This, in turn, has the odd effect of rendering secondary characters who might be sympathetic (her second and third husbands, her father) less so. I feel annoyed and frustrated with these men for thwarting a progress I’ve become engrossed in. Their scruples, though admirable in theory, contrast unfavorably with Undine’s desires. In this regard, Undine may remind you of Wharton herself, whose success and vitality finally crushed her husband, and whose two great romantic love objects (Berry and Fullerton) it’s hard not to think less of, when you read her biography, for not being equal to her love. Undine’s sole motivating appetite, which is to have a certain kind of flashy good time, may bear little resemblance to Wharton’s sophisticated hunger for art and foreign travel and serious talk, but Undine is nevertheless very much like her creator in being a personally isolated woman doing her best to use what she was given to make her way in the world.

  Here, indeed, is a portal to a deeper kind of sympathy for Wharton. Despite all her privileges, despite her strenuous socializing, she remained an isolate and a misfit, which is to say, a born writer. The middle-aged woman tossing her morning pages onto the floor was the same person who, beginning at the age of four, was prone to falling into trancelike states in which she would “make up” stories. She was raised to care about clothes and looks and maintaining proprieties in an elite social milieu, and she spent her twenties and thirties dutifully playing the role for which she’d been bred, but she never stopped being the girl who made up stories. And that girl, perverse, yearning, trapped, is inside all her best novels, straining against the conventions of her privileged world. As if aware of what an unlikable figure she herself cut, she placed unlikable women in the foreground of these novels and then deployed the storyteller’s most potent weapon, the contagiousness of fictional desire, to create sympathy for them.

  In her most generously realized novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), written well after her affair with Fullerton, and after the Great War had made the decades preceding it seem suddenly historical, Wharton told her own story more directly than she ever had before, by splitting herself into a male and a female character, dividing beard from lily. The novel’s protagonist, Newland Archer, embodies Wharton’s origins: he’s an isolated misfit who is nevertheless inextricably enmeshed in the social conventions of old New York and inescapably adapted, despite his yearning not to be, to the comforts and norms of a steady, conservative world. The object of Newland’s grand passion, Ellen Olenska, is the person Wharton became: the self-sufficient exile, the survivor of a disastrous and disillusioning marriage, the New York–born European free spirit. They attract each other intensely because they belong together the way two sides of a unitary personality belong together. And so, for once, the problem of sympathy for Wharton’s characters isn’t a problem at all. There’s no making of mis
takes here, and money is a minor issue. Ellen is simply pretty and in trouble, and Newland simply wants her but, being married, can’t have her.

  The beauty of The Age of Innocence is that it takes the long view. By setting the main action in the 1870s, Wharton is able, at the end, to bring Newland and Ellen into a radically altered world in which their earlier plight can be seen as the product of a particular time and place. The novel becomes the story not only of what they couldn’t have—of what they were denied by the velvet-gloved conspiring of their old New York families—but of what they have been able to have. Its great heartbreaking late line, which takes the measure of Newland’s unfulfilled desire, is delivered not by Newland or Ellen but by the woman whom Newland has stayed married to. Wharton, in the novel, certainly shines what she once called “the full light of my critical attention” on the social conventions that deformed her own youth, but she also celebrates them. She renders them so clearly and completely that they emerge, in historical hindsight, as what they really are: a social arrangement with advantages as well as disadvantages. In so doing, she denies the modern reader the easy comfort of condemning an antiquated arrangement. What you get instead, at the novel’s end, is sympathy.

  TEN RULES FOR THE NOVELIST

    1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

    2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

    3. Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.

    4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

    5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

    6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.

    7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.

    8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

    9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

  10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

  MISSING

  Maybe it was the sleep medication I’d taken not many hours earlier, or maybe the fifty minutes I’d stood in the security line at JFK, watching JetBlue personnel reward other travelers for their lateness by sending them to the head of the line, but something wasn’t right with my head. The time was a quarter after six, and I was standing at the counter of a food station and emptying the very full outer pocket of my knapsack, trying to find a quarter and add it to the six dollars I’d already given the barista for espresso and a muffin. It seemed extremely important to provide exact change—a quarter after six—although I was aware that it was weird of me to think it was important.

  Only after I’d located a quarter and loaded my things back into the knapsack did I remember to ask the barista for a receipt, and by then she was ringing up her next customer, a young Latino. I knew I should just forget about expensing my coffee and muffin, but the receipt now seemed extremely important, too. When I asked the barista for a handwritten one, the young Latino offered to give me his own receipt. I thanked him warmly and repaid his kindness by walking away with his rollerboard suitcase.

  Ten minutes later, after I’d checked my email and read some football scores, my eyes came to rest on the suitcase at my feet. I’d recently bought a new 21-inch Victorinox rollerboard, and the bag in front of me looked curiously large. It was also not a Victorinox.

  I hurried back to the food station and learned that nobody had left a bag there. Recalling that I hadn’t put my name and address on my new bag yet, and imagining the ramifications of my mistake—the young Latino had already boarded a plane with my bag! a bag with no personal identification inside or out!—I searched several gate areas and ended up in front of a service counter. There, conferring with a female JetBlue representative, was the young Latino. He was very happy to get his bag back. But he didn’t have mine.

  “Let’s see if we can find it, before we call security,” the representative said. “Maybe the gentleman took your bag somewhere without realizing it.”

  This struck me as unlikely. Someone else must have taken my bag, possibly deliberately; I wondered if I could manage my trip with nothing but my knapsack. As I followed the JetBlue woman back up the concourse, looking at bag after bag attached to its rightful owner, I felt like a birdwatcher who was seeing every imaginable kind of bird except the one kind he was desperate to find. But then we came to another food station, with inferior baked goods, and I remembered that I’d earlier stood at this station and dithered in a cloud of wrongheadedness, looking for a muffin that met my requirements. In front of the muffins, minding its own business, unreported to security in the twenty minutes it had been there, was my Victorinox.

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  My goal for the trip was straightforward: to see every endemic bird species on two islands, one Greater Antillean and one Lesser, in the seven days I had at my disposal. Species endemic to an island (i.e., found nowhere else on earth) are of special interest to birders who keep lists of the birds they’ve seen. Endemics that we miss on a particular island are species that we’re likely never to see, because there are so many other places to go birding before we return to that island, and because, in the Caribbean, many endemics are in trouble and will become only harder to find in the future. If I’d had two weeks, I could reasonably have expected to see every one of Jamaica’s twenty-eight and Saint Lucia’s four endemics. But to get the job done in a week I would need some good luck.

  Although I’m generally not superstitious, I felt as if I’d made a substantial withdrawal from the karma bank by relocating my suitcase at JFK, and I do adhere to the superstition that my luck as a birder is improved by giving generous tips to cabdrivers and hotel staff. So it was a further bad sign that, after I’d been conveyed from the Kingston airport up into the Blue Mountains, I was too slow on the draw to tip the driver.

  My host in the mountains, Suzie Burbury, collected me in an SUV and took me up a terrible road to her coffee farm and guesthouse. Until recently, eighty percent of Jamaica’s Blue Mountain coffee was exported to Japan, but Japanese demand had crashed since the Fukushima disaster. Jamaica’s coffee processors were buying half as much coffee from farmers or halving the price they paid. Suzie and her husband now depended on tourism for income, and more than a third of their guests were birders; the global birdwatching demand for Caribbean endemics is less elastic than the market for coffee.

  Suzie gave me quiche and red sorrel iced tea and then sent me out to look for birds. The first endemic I saw, an Orangequit loitering by the road below the farm, was a handsome, gray-blue, orange-throated bird, and I spent some minutes admiring it through my binoculars, but my happiness in seeing it was undeniably bound up in the numbers game that I was playing: one endemic down, twenty-seven to go. I later saw many more Orangequits, and they came to signify little more than “not a species I’m still looking for.” It is, of course, a pleasure in itself to walk in a place with abundant and diverse birdlife. It’s a way of connecting with a past in which nature was more whole, not fragmented, not degraded—birds being the most visible indicator of a healthy ecosystem. Birding has the added charm and virtue of taking you to parts of a country that most tourists never visit. It makes for a different kind of tourism, in which your First World voyeurism redeems and is redeemed by your obsessive attention to adding species to your life list.

  If you hire local bird guides, as I did, you also get to meet people who are hearteningly out of step with their countrymen’s indifference or animosity to nature. My guide on my first morning was Lyndon Johnson (“My middle name does not start with B,” he told me), a thirty-fiv
e-year-old employee of Jamaica’s forestry department. After setting out well before dawn, to allow for the badness of the roads, we drove up into high country where tracts of native forest survive amid coffee farms and other development. Within a few hours, Lyndon had found me twelve more endemics. Among them were the Sad Flycatcher, lovely in both name and plumage; the Jamaican Tody, a brilliantly green and gold and red jewel known locally as the Rasta Bird; and the little Arrow-headed Warbler, clad in a black-and-white gabardine vest. The countryside was full of close relatives of this warbler, a dozen different and more colorful North American migrants, whose presence rendered poignant and mysterious the Arrow-headed’s insistence on staying rooted to one island while its cousins fly thousands of miles and merely winter in the tropics.