Edith Wharton

I just finished Summer by Edith Wharton and continue to want to read all of her works.  In this novel, she has a few lines of dialogue from people who aren't cultured; and it rang true to me.  I think the banter back and forth that I have come to identify with her writing is a reflection of upper-class speaking and there are situations such as up on The Mountain where people live without beds and drink and don't speak much.  But of course that might be my aristocratic bent since I've never been anyone but a rich white American guy.

Thinking about dialogue reminds me of YouTube's Jon Humanity pointing out the obvious but fundamental fact that we're all acting because we've watched so much acting.  My cousin was talking about how people talk the other day and how that's different from how people speak in movies.  And I was telling my uncle recently about a cache of wartime audio from prisoners of war from the Edwardian age.  Speech changes quickly now that we're listening to so much of it from outside our own neighborhoods.

Maybe that's why I like Wharton.  There are- especially in other books- so many great lines of dialogue said by snappy people with nice vocabularies, but the knowledge of those characters stays on the surface from what they say- but reveals the icebergs underwater in her non-dialogue passages.

And that's what we're doing; we humans.  We use speech to construct our selves but there are truer ones devoid of words; underneath.