The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, December 26, 2025

Byblos: I love Edith Wharton. I love her stories, her clarity, the occasional ice current in her very warm veins. I prefer her to Henry James. But don’t know about this story, “The Angel at the Grave,” from 1901, the beginning of her late period. It’s got words like “suddenly” and “breathlessly” and “tragically” and “hang fire,” and felt, in its opening pages, like warmed-over late James, who became unreadable. There’s nothing quite unreadable here, at least not after a third pass over certain paragraphs. But it was  a bit of labor to get to a disappointing payoff. Paulina Anson is the granddaughter of the late Oreste Anson, a famous writer in his day, revered less and less after his death, judging from the diminishing number of tourists wanting to visit his house. Miss Anson is his granddaughter, the only one who could read his books. She becomes the house’s caretaker (“She had been born, as it were, into a museum, and cradled in a glass case with a label”) and she writes his biography for decades. “After that the House possessed her.” By the time she delivers it to his old publisher, that train has left the station: “Literature’s like a big railway station now, you know: there’s a train starting every minute. People are not going to hang round the waiting-room,” the publisher tells her. She’s crushed. She realizes she’s wasted her life keeping Anson alive as “the silence which had gathered round her task had been the hush of death.” A devastating passage:

She sat in the library, among the carefully tended books and portraits; and it seemed to her that she had been walled alive into a tomb hung with the effigies of dead ideas. She felt a desperate longing to escape into the outer air, where people toiled and loved, and living sympathies went hand in hand. It was the sense of wasted labor that oppressed her; of two lives consumed in that ruthless process that uses generations of effort to built [sic] a single cell. There was a dreary parallel between her grandfather’s fruitless toil and her own unprofitable sacrifice. Each in turn had kept vigil by a corpse.

Then the bell rang. Epiphany time. A young admirer of dead Anson shows up, asking about a particular, and particularly obscure, pamphlet Anson had written about the amphioxius. Paulina unearths its only copy. It might as well be a dead sea scroll to the young man, the seed of what he sees as a renaissance for the great dead man. He praises Paulina for enabling the resurrection, and asks if he can come back in the morning to “work this thing out,” whatever that vague thing may be. She is flushed, she agrees. After he leaves, “When she turned back into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips.” Sure. But it’s as if Anson’s making a sarcophagus of Paulina’s life is justified. As if she’s trading her grandfather’s prison for a younger man’s.

A Malinke griot, a West African historian, musician and storyteller, one day asked a blacksmith to build him a guitar. The instrument being completed, the musician made a test and found that it sounded very bad. Then the blacksmith said to him: “This guitar is a piece of wood. How do you expect him to sing, as long as he has no heart? It’s up to you to give it to him. You must take this wood on your back and carry it into battle so that it resonates when the saber blows fall. He must absorb blood; he must absorb your blood and your breath. Your sorrows must become his and your glory must become his glory.” As long as an instrument is not consecrated, it is an empty temple. To bring the god in, the Menominee “heat” the drums with songs. The Papuans put the god’s mask next to the flute to make it easier for him to find his way home. In a new drum they introduce a stone and stir it with a stick until the sound “gimo” is heard. Then the god entered into his instrument. 

–From the History of Music, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade vol. 1, ed. Roland-Manuel, Gemini translation (1960).

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