Outstanding! A great surprise ending...wow the last line is a real zinger. Read it once, find out the surprise... then read it again! ( )

Though I taught Flannery O’Connor stories as the best ever written, Wharton’s title story here competes, with the greatest ending ever. (Must avoid spoiler.) Roman fever was the warning of grandparents— probably malaria back then. The next generation warned kids not to go out for romantic entanglements. For Mrs Ansley in this story, prone to illness, she was warned not to go out after 4 PM, especially not to go out at night to the Coliseum where, though locked, lovers found admittance with bribes. Before her marriage, Mrs. A had been invited to that architectural ruin by the boyfriend, later to be the successful Wall Street lawyer, of the other woman here, who became Slade’s wife: but Mrs. Slade in fact had written the invite, assumed she had fooled the smaller woman, who was more beautiful in youth.
Here EW elucidates the secret envy of old friends. Each feels, “she was rather sorry for her”(9). Wharton writes gems, like,
“Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver”(10).

“It was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in mid-heaven”(13)
and, “The clear heaven overhead was emptied of its gold. Dusk spread over it..”(18)

All Wharton’s stories display her European upbringing, even touring a French border town during WWI (See my review of her travel book). The cover on my 1993 edition features a Parisian painting, (woman with “Cigarette” by Lebasque, Musée d’Orsay). Every story features society women in various competitive encounters, and of course Wharton’s house in the Berkshires, The Mount, gives expression to her status, including literary (she rode, conversed with Henry James in his early motorcar). Wharton and James are truly international, while Hemingway, writing in Italy and Paris, comes to us as quintessentially American.

More hilarious than the great first story, the second, Xingu, exposes society women who restrict their Lunch Club to six. They assign books to read—avoiding the amusing (thus, the great). The latest admitee to the group, Mrs Roby, doesn’t read the work assigned, by the famous author who’s visiting. Yet she manages to confound that author, and indeed the whole group of six. Mrs. Leveret carries a pocket “Appropriate Allusions,” and can quote several until the group meets, when she can only recall one, from the Book of Job, which she has failed to find occasion for, though Melville did, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?”(30) Adding to the satire, EW here compares social conversation to war, “Miss Van Vluyck resolved to carry the war into the enemy’s camp”(35).

“The Last Asset,” later in the collection, focuses on an older man who’s lived in Paris forever, despite shabby clothes, and typically American, knows no French, asks for the bill, “Gassong! L’addition, silver play” Garçon, l’addition, si vous plais (155). He is small and bald, eats at a low-cost place (rather like where we ate near Chariot d’Or decades ago, croque messieurs and a vin deux franc). Keeping obscure, he reads one local paper for examples of human folly, rather as I read the Venice’s Il Gazzetino, now online, but years ago newsprint, when living on the Lido, researching my books on Giordano Bruno. Garnett, his compadre at the low-cost place, knows a Mrs. Newell from NYC, who overspends and depends on her aristocratic acquaintances to put her up in the UK and France. Suddenly she needs her daughter’s dislocated father, since her daughter Hermy, Hermione, has landed a great French catch, an aristocrat no less. But the French require both parents at the marriage. Will the small, penniless father show up?

The next story, “After Holbein,” shall end my review. Mrs. Jaspar, scion of society decades ago, features here with nurse and maid Lavinia. She uses the names of her early servants for her current ones, though they have changed. She insists on bringing out her expensive jewels from her safe—to which only the Butler knows the combination—in order to entertain dozens at her grand table, dozens who no longer arrive. Nor are the invitations she composed sent. The table is no longer set with gold plate, though the famous chandelier still hangs.
Mrs. Jaspar criticizes her current servants,
“‘Lavinia! My fan, my gloves, my handkerchief…how often do I have to tell you?
I used to have the perfect maid—-‘
Lavinia’s eyes brimmed, ‘That was me, madam.’”
Of this scene, the nurse Cress told her friends, “To watch the two of them is better than any circus”(214).

But the story begins with the most prominent of her guests, Anson Warley, small and witty years ago, so much invited that he gave up her grand parties “declining the boredom” as he told friends, hoping she would not hear. At any rate, Mr Warley accepts an invitation, finally, and is received for a dinner of mashed potato and spinach with wine, though not the vintages declared, and the food served on mere kitchen plates. I should note, though not specific to this story, that Wharton’s favorite adjective may be “petrified.” ( )

I love Wharton's fascination with society, how it's all an illusion, a facade upheld by a certain group of people, which could immediately shatter the moment someone points out that the emperor isn't really wearing any clothes at all.

From the lovely twist in Roman Fever, to what I imagine bookclubs are really like in Xingu, to my reread of the heartwarming upending of a man's expectation of a woman's past in The Other Two, to the agonising tension-filled resignation-to-societal-expectations in Souls Belated, to a life unlived in The Angel at the Grave, to the surprisingly uplifting The Last Asset which also includes my favourite Wharton prototype of the woman who gets everything she wants through careful manipulation, to the delusional and bittersweet bygone days of After Holbein, to the frustratingly bewildering and gutwrenching Autres Temps, all these stories made me exclaim and guffaw and yelp and groan.

It's good to be reminded what a joyous experience reading can be: that not all books - regardless of how excellent they might otherwise be - are meant for everyone, but when you get to one that IS for you, oh what bliss! ( )

I believe for some time I had unfairly maligned Roman Fever because I had confused it with Daisy Miller and now I am sorry I didn't get to this short story collection earlier because it was marvelous. We read Xingu for book club, which was brilliant but all the stories were great.

A very nice collection of eight short stories from Edith Wharton, with three true gems: ‘Roman Fever’, ‘Xingu’, and ‘After Holbein’. As in much of Wharton’s oeuvre, you’ll find themes of the mores of Old New York society, the stigma of divorce, and characters feeling trapped by the situation they’re in. The build-up and ending to ‘Roman Fever’ is fantastic, and a reminder of just how good she was at finishing a story. Intellectual pretension is satirized in ‘Xingu’, and the sad effect of aging on the mind is haunting and touching in ‘After Holbein’. The stories were not originally published together, and looking up the when they were was interesting:

Roman Fever (1934)
Xingu (1911)
The Other Two (1904)
Souls Belated (1899)
The Angel at the Grave (1901)
The Last Asset (1904)
After Holbein (1928)
Autres Temps… (1916)

It was also interesting to place them relative to Wharton’s timeline and what I consider her masterpieces: ‘The House of Mirth’ (1905), ‘The Reef’ (1912), her divorce at age 51 after 28 years of marriage (1913), Pulitzer Prize winning ‘The Age of Innocence’ (1920), and her death at age 75 (1937). ‘Souls Belated’ was among her earliest writing, and ‘Roman Fever’ among her last, so it’s a collection that spans her career.

Quotes:
On aging, from ‘After Holbein’:
“Yes; his mind, at that moment, had been quite piercingly clear and perceptive; his eye had passed with a renovating glitter over every detail of the daily scene. He stood still for a minute under the leafless trees of the Mall, and looking about him with the sudden insight of age, understood that he had reached the time of life when Alps and cathedrals become as transient as flowers.”

On identity, from ‘The Other Two’:
“Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many directions. Alice Haskett – Alice Varick – Alice Waythorn – she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides.”

On the past, from ‘Autres Temps…’:
“When she was alone, it was always the past that occupied her. She couldn’t get away from it, and she didn’t any longer care to. During her long years of exile she had made her terms with it, had learned to accept the fact that it would always be there, huge, obstructing, encumbering, bigger and more dominant that anything the future could ever conjure up. And, at any rate, she was sure of it, she understood it, knew how to reckon with it; she had learned to screen and manage and protect it as one does an afflicted member of one’s family.”

On relationships, from ‘Souls Belated’:
“They had reached that memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man seems obtuse and the woman irrational.” ( )