Winter Seascape and Wharton

 I've been down in Worthing these past few days (yes, again – and again on family business). A seaside resort in winter is not a terribly attractive prospect, especially if the winter has been as relentlessly rainy and bleak as this one. The sea off Worthing was behaving much as described in this Betjeman poem, 'Winter Seascape', though without cliffs or sea caves, or indeed shrieking shags –

The sea runs back against itself
With scarcely time for breaking wave
To cannonade a slatey shelf
And thunder under in a cave.

Before the next can fully burst
The headwind, blowing harder still,
Smooths it to what it was at first –
A slowly rolling water-hill.

Against the breeze the breakers haste,
Against the tide their ridges run
And all the sea's a dappled waste
Criss-crossing underneath the sun.

Far down the beach the ripples drag
Blown backward, rearing from the shore,
And wailing gull and shrieking shag
Alone can pierce the ocean roar.

Unheard, a mongrel hound gives tongue,
Unheard are shouts of little boys;
What chance has any inland lung
Against this multi-water noise?

Here where the cliffs alone prevail
I stand exultant, neutral, free,
And from the cushion of the gale
Behold a huge consoling sea.

All this wildness out at sea made a violent contrast with the sedate symmetry of the promenade and its terraces of bow-fronted houses and glass-walled apartment blocks, all standing firm against the howling wind. I did not, in the circumstances, spend much time on the beach.

To read on the long rail journey to the South coast I had Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. This is a book – and a writer – I've been meaning to read for many years, but had never got round to, so the last time I spotted The Age of Innocence on a charity bookshop shelf I bought it and resolved, this time, to finally read it. The edition I bought has one of the most off-putting introductions I have ever read, by an academic from the University of Kent, who, in dry academic prose, rehearses all the most negative critiques ever launched against Wharton, mostly by male critics, and finds little or nothing to say in her defence. He gives no idea of the sheer pleasure that was in store for me when I abandoned this deadening Introduction and plunged into the novel itself. I am, in a word, loving it. The satire of high society life in 1870s New York is indeed quite gentle, but so is Jane Austen's satire – saeva indignatio is not obligatory. There are many descriptions of the furnishings of interiors, but they are obviously important to the evocation of the opulent milieu. The story that unfolds is expertly told by an omniscient narrator, in an elegant, lightly ironic tone, with touches of humour; it could be called, as it is on the book jacket, 'a sometimes dark and disturbing comedy of manners', exploring a particularly difficult love triangle. I was reminded inevitably of Henry James, but also of Willa Cather (in particular Alexander's Bridge). In 1921 The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize, making Edith Wharton the first woman to win it. And two years later Willa Cather won it, with One of Ours. I shall be reading more of Wharton...