“Each time you happen to me all over again.”

I finally watched Martin Scorsese's adaptation of "The Age of Innocence"

When it comes to film adaptations of books I love, my inclinations can be a little bit peculiar. On the one hand, some of my favorite films are adaptations that I consider compelling in terms of their readings of the original texts and that I admire as unique visual narratives. You already know how I feel about Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations. I am similarly transported by Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre; Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Thomas Vinterberg’s Far from the Madding Crowd. I also really ought to devote a newsletter to Clueless, the very best of Emma adaptations (and yes, various angry people on Goodreads, I am INDEED aware that Jane Austen is not Victorian and NEVER! SAID! SHE! WAS!).

And yet, I don’t necessarily feel compelled to see an adaptation of a favorite book simply because it exists. Sometimes I think this makes me a bad Victoriana fan, but the truth is simply that the book is often enough for me. I don’t need to see it physically rendered; my relationship with the story doesn’t depend on anything more than what I’ve taken from the page.

All that said, if an adaptation looks as if it’s doing something unexpected, or has a killer cast, I’m going to chomp at the bit until I get my grubby little eyes on it. I currently feel this way about Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, which by the way, somebody really ought to pay me to cover. I also want to see Autumn de Wilde’s new Emma, but haven’t been able to justify paying twenty dollars for the online rental.

---

As the title and top image of this newsletter suggest, I’m currently focused on one film in particular: Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence. It is almost Cornflake Victorians material par excellence. The film was released in 1993, and stars ‘90s icons Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, and Daniel Day Lewis. And while the book was published in the early twentieth century, it is set in the 1870s—albeit in New York City, not the United Kingdom. But we are transatlantic in our scope!

Regardless of my adaptation preferences, this certainly seems like the sort of film I would have watched as soon as I knew it existed. It’s sexy and stylish, and it features two actresses I positively adore. But my delay does, in a way, make sense: the novel is tethered to a searingly unhappy moment in my life, and if I’m honest, I’ve probably been avoiding it. I initially read Wharton’s novel during my second semester of doctoral work, in a seminar on narrative. My first marriage was in shambles because my then-husband and I were ill-suited and because I had fallen in love with someone else (Paul, the person to whom I am now married, but who at the time was a fellow classmate). I don’t want to spoil the novel for you if you haven’t read it, but I’ll share enough so that the coincidence is clear. The novel chronicles an illicit romance between a wealthy and respected married man, Newland Archer, and his wife’s cousin, the glamorous Countess Olenska, who has left her terrible European husband, wants to divorce him, and is treated like a social pariah because she is unwilling to silently endure. I should be so lucky to be as elegant and exquisitely melancholy as Ellen Olenska—there is, alas, little resemblance—but her predicament and unhappiness, while not identical, felt familiar to me. When I opened the book, I was perhaps two months out from a suicide attempt, and had been forbidden from seeing Paul—from so much as being in the same room as him—because I had committed indiscretions and had confessed them to my then-husband. I wanted a divorce but believed that I was Not Allowed, that certain social conventions were too rigid to so utterly thwart. After all, I hadn’t been married for nearly as long as the Countess Olenska; in fact, I hadn’t been married long at all. (When I left my first husband, in May 2011, we had been married for about nine months.)

I didn’t know, when I read The Age of Innocence, that I would leave. In fact, I was pretty sure that I would need to follow Ellen’s example in forbearance: to let go of the person I loved and adore him from afar, while wishing him happiness with somebody else. But at least I could cling to the novel, and so I did. I chose to write my end-of-term paper on it—on Wharton’s evocation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life and scopophilia, to be exact—and in fact turned that in on the day I decided to leave my now-ex and reunite with Paul (I would not, by the way, suggest trying to copyedit a 25-page paper while agonizing over whether or not to dismantle your entire life.) The parallel is poetic, in its way; then again, maybe it’s just cliché. Regardless, in The Age of Innocence so many choices seem foreclosed—because of one’s family, one’s reputation, one’s situation within a larger, pernicious social ecosystem. Previously I had acted according to expectations. Deciding to leave my marriage was perhaps the first decision I made entirely on my own.

To put it mildly, I’m glad that I made the choice I did and have never once questioned it. But that certainly does not mean it was easy, and the aftermath was turbulent and viciously anxious. And while I have written about my divorce, and told the story of my infidelity in my book in an effort to suss out our larger cultural understanding of so-called “fallen women,” dwelling on this period of time unsettles me, and sometimes even makes me depressed. I still have recurring nightmares in which I am forced away from Paul due to some Handmaid’s Tale-esque decree that deems my marriage illegal. I still feel guilty for hurting the people I did, including my ex-husband. I think about the people whose opinion of me changed, irrevocably. I want to be good and kind and loving and must live with the knowledge that to some I will always be the opposite of these things—that, on the contrary, I must seem to them both selfish and deceitful. To live the life I wanted, I had to become the villain of certain people’s stories. And in the process, I have struggled, often, not to similarly condemn myself. Now and then, I think I’ve let myself off the hook.

The Age of Innocence is obviously not the only novel I read when it felt as if my life was cracking apart, but you can understand why it would have felt almost supernaturally apt—and why I didn’t revisit it for years. It was only last week when the material felt safe, and so, one evening, I decided to watch the movie with Paul. We’ve been married for almost six years now, and been together for nine. Whatever nightmares dog me, I always wake up from them; they are merely fictions from my lizard brain.

Perhaps I needn’t have waited so long, but in any case, the return was marvelous. After nine years, Scorcese’s film delivered me one of my favorite romantic lines in literature, a line that, after I first read it, felt stitched to the outside of my heart, where it pulled and quivered every time I saw Paul from afar—down the hall, walking to his office, talking to a mutual friend:

“Each time you happen to me all over again,” says Newland to Ellen.

What a line. I love the fullness of it, the physiology—the suggestion that a person can be so precious to you that they are both event and entity. That verb, “to happen,” tells a story of the body and the mind, and although it might be exhilarating, the pleasure is not uncomplicated. Because, after all, a happening presupposes a prior absence. A person happens to you when they cannot be with you, remain with you.

I am fortunate that Paul no longer happens to me. He simply is.

---

Wharton’s novel turns 100 in June, and I hope that I will be able to write more about it specifically. As far as Scorsese’s film goes, well—the Hollywood White Boys Club annoys the hell out of me, but I must admit that it’s a triumph. Only profound cowardice precluded Michelle Pfeiffer from being nominated for an Academy Award, and while Daniel Day Lewis extremely does not do it for me, he and Pfeiffer glow in one another’s presence, their depiction of shared, forbidden desire an almost palpable, quivering thing. And Winona—the range demanded to embody May Welland AND Lydia Deetz! But of course we already know that she is one of the greats. The costumes, by the way, are so lush and dreamy that they can almost make one forget how miserable it must have felt for a woman to wear clothes in the 19th century. Elmer Bernstein’s score is a masterpiece, too.

The movie is streaming on the Criterion channel right now, so if you have a log in available to you, or can swing a free trial, I promise that it’s worth it. It is, dare I say, the sort of film the happens to you.