My Love Affair with the Short Story

In my humble migraine-riddled life, I've found few things more comforting than climbing into bed at night with a good book in my hands.



How I got to be 50 before that book was one written by Edith Wharton, I do not know. Perhaps because no one ever said to me, "Judy, you simply MUST read Edith Wharton." Possibly this is a direct result of hobnobbing with the under three crowd, which I so willing do.



Edith Wharton could WRITE. I can't say that the actual story is what I find so enjoyable, it is the way she captures her characters, and thereby captures me, her reader. She handles words in much the same way Seurat did dots. Remove just one, and a gaping hole would appear. Some would say the following paragraph needs the help of an editors red pen. But, I could not find one word that wasn't deftly placed.

I think this may be the most perfect paragraph ever written.

It comes from the short story, "The Pelican", which tells of the widowed Mrs. Amyot who gives lectures to support her son.




Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there was the same curious discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the staleness of her theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness with which she had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that the shots were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that, for her purpose, the bull's-eye was everywhere, so that there was no need to be flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated the flow of her eloquence that she seemed to be performing a trick analogous to that of the conjurer who pulls hundreds of yards of white paper out of his mouth. From a large assortment of stock adjectives she chose, with unerring deftness and rapidity, the one that taste and discrimination would most surely have rejected, fitting out her subject with a whole wardrobe of slop-shop epithets irrelevant in cut and size. To the invaluable knack of not disturbing the association of ideas in her audience, she added the gift of what may be called a confidential manner - so that her fluent generalizations about Goethe and his place in literature (the lecture was, of course, manufactured out of Lewes's book) had the flavor of personal experience, of views sympathetically exchanged with her audience on the best way of knitting children's socks, or of putting up preserves for the winter. It was, I am sure, to this personal accent - the moral equivalent of her dimple - that Mrs. Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It was her art of transposing secondhand ideas into firsthand emotions that so endeared her to her feminine listeners.

And she sighs, turns out the light and goes to sleep, dreaming of turning secondhand ideas into firsthand...

...zzzzz...