Urbane Sprawl

Today is the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth. I cannot recommend highly enough celebrating this milestone by dipping into one of her works.

The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome: All are worth visiting or revisiting. If you want a quicker introduction to the grande dame’s corpus, read this electrifying story, “Roman Fever.”

Or, just appreciate this fantastic observation Wharton made in her 1936 Introduction to Mirth (first published in 1905), in which she laments the superficiality of so much fiction and so much of life:

I remember once saying to Henry James, in reference to a novel of the type that used euphemistically to be called “unpleasant”: “You know, I was rather disappointed; that book wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected”; to which he replied, with his incomparable twinkle: “Ah, my dear, the abysses are all so shallow.”

Well, so they are; but at least they are always there, and the novelist who has the patience to dip down into them will find that below a certain depth, whatever his subject, there is almost always “stuff o’ the conscience” to work in.

Wharton was one such novelist with the “patience to dip down” into the abysses, and her works are so much the stronger for it.

But indeed some readers have found her novels too abysmal — too lacking in redemption for her characters and readers. Lionel Trilling indicted her for a “limitation of heart.” We need only look to his own words, though, to see why Wharton’s novels have such singular, enduring power.

About Ethan Frome, Trilling says what can be said of much of life: “It is terrible to contemplate, it is unforgettable, but the mind can do nothing with it, can only endure it.” Thankfully, even now, 150 years after her birth and 75 after her death, we can contemplate and endure life’s disappointments along with Wharton — and we can be ever-newly dazzled by the brilliance of her observations and insight.

Happy birthday to an unforgettable authoress.

David Brooks and Gail Collins are always worth reading, especially when they’re in dialogue. They had an especially illuminating chat yesterday about Mitt Romney’s Iowa results and what they mean for the future of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

One bit from Brooks particularly stood out, since it got at the two core roles primaries play in leading a party to the selection of a candidate: finding the person with the most desirable (1) policies and (2) personality.

David: [His eked out win] weakens Romney because it shows that no matter how much he spends per vote, he can’t break out of his educated suburban corporate Republican base. His motto should be, “We are the 25 percent!”

Gail: Fascinating how far the Republican base will go to avoid him. Rick Santorum. Wow.

David: The question is, Is Romney’s weakness good weakness or bad weakness? If it’s policy weakness, that’s good weakness. Then he’s just too moderate for the Republican Party and it is his very moderation that will help him in the general election.

If it’s bad weakness, it’s personality weakness. People just don’t warm to him. As Jonathan V. Last pointed out in The Weekly Standard a few weeks ago, the guy has run in 22 campaigns in his life. His record is 5-17. That’s not stellar.

Brooks is right on, I think, in talking about the “good weakness” of too-moderate policies, because it many ways a primary battle can be a winner’s curse. A refresher: a winner’s curse happens, for example, when people bid on an asset of indeterminate value (i.e. an untapped oil field). The asset’s real value is probably somewhere in the middle of the bid distribution, so the person who wins the auction has probably overpaid.

The candidate who wins the party base in a series of primaries is probably “overbidding” their policies to the extreme wing of their party. A very conservative candidate like Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum can capture Republicans for whom conservative bona fides are the most important criterion for their candidate of choice, but to win the base they necessarily cast themselves as too fringe to be electable.

But if winning the base with extreme policies were the only route to getting a nomination, a moderate would never win it. Moderates do win nominations: like John Kerry in 2004, John McCain in 2008, and (likely) Mitt Romney this year. Of course this is because electability is a value that rivals fidelity to the base’s policy positions.

It’s also because the other essential aspect of the winnowing process — related to electability, of course — is finding a candidate who wins on the axis of personality. Romney’s bad weakness would be the inability to stir passion, as Barack Obama did in 2008 and Kerry, McCain, and (likely) Romney were and are unable to do.

Bottom line: Romney is not overbidding on policy, so he has to rely on electability and personality to win the nomination. He has electability in the bag — his lack of a stirring personality, though, might be a curse of another kind.