This was my task, if I were to tell the story of Ethan Frome and my scheme of construction- which met with the immediate and unqualified disapproval of the few friends to whom I tentatively outlined it- I still think justified in the given case.

It was the first subject I had ever approached with full confidence in its value, for my own purpose, and a relative faith in my power to render at least a part of what I saw in it.Įvery novelist, again, who 'intends upon' his art, has lit upon such subjects, and been fascinated by the difficulty of presenting them in the fullest relief, yet without an added ornament, or a trick of drapery or lighting. But I had no such fear of them in the case of Ethan Frome.

I knew well enough what song those sirens sang, and had often tied myself to my dull job until they were out of hearing- perhaps carrying a lost masterpiece in their rainbow veils. Every novelist has been visited by the insinuating wraiths of false 'good situations,' siren-subjects luring his cockle-shell to the rocks their voice is oftenest heard, and their mirage-sea beheld, as he traverses the waterless desert which awaits him half-way through whatever work is actually in hand. This incompatibility between subject and plan would perhaps have seemed to suggest that my 'situation' was after all one to be rejected. They were, in truth, these figures, my granite outcroppings but half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate. It must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had always presented itself to my protagonists any attempt to elaborate and complicate their sentiments would necessarily have falsified the whole. But I never thought this for a moment, for I had felt, at the same time, that the theme of my tale was not one on which many variations could be played.

This enforced lapse of time would seem to anyone persuaded- as I have always been- that every subject (in the novelist's sense of the term) implicitly contains its own form and dimensions, to mark Ethan Frome as the subject for a novel. The problem before me, as I saw in the first flash, was this: I had to deal with a subject of which the dramatic climax, or rather the anti-climax, occurs a generation later than the first acts of the tragedy.

Ethan frome author wharton