THE BUCCANEERS—Edith Wharton— Appleton-Century ($2.50).
Death last year ended Edith Wharton's work on a novel which might have been her masterpiece. She had written 29 chapters of a book apparently planned to run to about 35 chapters. The story had reached its climax; the characters were at a moment in their careers when they were compelled to make irrevocable decisions. While Mrs. Wharton left notes suggesting how she intended to end the novel, she gave no hint of how she intended to solve its moral and esthetic problems. Last week her literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley,* offered The Buccaneers as a novel complete as far as it went, but with its conclusion a puzzle which readers might work out themselves. Because it contains two first-rate characterizations, some sharp social satire and a tantalizing dilemma at the end, The Buccaneers makes far better reading than most novels, finished or unfinished.
The Buccaneers begins in Saratoga in the 1870s, where Mrs. St. George and her husband are watching over their two handsome daughters. Because Colonel St. George, a shady Wall Street speculator, needs the financial assistance of a still shadier Mr. Clossons, Mrs. St. George agrees to entertain Mrs. Clossons. This brings their girls into friendship with the Clossons' wild daughter, and gets ambitious Mrs. St. George in wrong with the Manhattan dowagers.
Until this point in The Buccaneers, 16-year-old Nan St. George has been its heroine. Thereafter she shares the limelight with her governess, a cool, prim, middle-aged Englishwoman named Laura Testvalley. Laura decides that, since the girls have no chance in Manhattan, they may succeed in London. Their London triumph is so complete it almost destroys them. Nan becomes the Duchess of Tintagel, discovers that she does not love her husband, falls in love with a young widower, calls her former governess for help. But in the heady sequence of brilliant marriages, Miss Testvalley has also recovered her youth, is making a brilliant marriage herself. At this point The Buccaneers breaks off. Mrs. Wharton's notes suggest that the governess was to sacrifice her own future to help Nan escape. That ending, however, would create almost as many difficulties as it would solve.
The best parts of The Buccaneers are its glimpses of raucous and pretentious Gilded Age society in New York, where social maneuvers interweave with Wall Street plots and humble wives of new millionaires squat uneasily on upholstered fortunes. Although Editor Gaillard Lapsley compares scenes in The Buccaneers to passages in Proust, the comparison only calls attention to Mrs. Wharton's limitations: brilliant chapters like those laid in Saratoga fade out quickly, to be followed by weary passages scarcely superior to the average fiction in women's magazines.
* U. S.-born Cambridge don.