MICHAEL GORRA
Hermione Lee
EDITH WHARTON
853pp. Chatto and Windus. £25.
978 0 701 16665 6
The opening chapters of The House of Mirth (1905) are as crisp as anything in Jane Austen. Edith Wharton places us in Grand Central Station on a summer afternoon, our “eyes . . . refreshed” in that most liminal of American spaces “by the sight of Miss Lily Bart”. No longer a girl but not yet a spinster, the “radiant” Lily carries with her a sense of buoyant possibility, even after “eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing”. But then this apparently expansive world turns grim. Wharton’s Naturalism defines a society in which, she wrote, “the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations”, and she judges that frivolous world by concentrating on “what its frivolity destroys”. For its loveliest flower can neither break from nor fully accept that society’s standards, and the walls of the plot in which Lily is imprisoned seem all the more cruel in comparison to her starting point.
What, however, would it mean for her to succeed in the new American century? Or, as Hermione Lee asks in what is, on balance, the fullest biography of Wharton to date, “If Lily were a novel, would she be a bestseller?”. Wharton would prove far more adept than her heroine at negotiating the tension between “integrity” and the marketplace, but she would always worry about the relation between literature and trade, about the corruption that popularity might bring. She had the luxury of worrying, and not only because of her inherited wealth; 100,000 copies of The House of Mirth were sold in the first three months after publication. She spent much of the proceeds on her gardens at The Mount, the country place she had built in Lenox, Massachusetts. She enjoyed success, though she discounted her publisher’s suggestion that the royalties on her second novel were a “sign of awakening taste in our fellow-countrymen”, and claimed that The Mount itself was the greater achievement.
Lenox was a more relaxed summer colony than the Newport in which Edith Jones of New York had spent the early years of her marriage to Teddy Wharton; it is a town in the Berkshire hills surrounded by villas, each with its fifty or hundred acres of park. Some of them remain privately held, and others are now hotels, but Wharton’s has been restored for visitors. There is a grottoed entry hall, and then a climb to what can only be called the piano nobile. The principal rooms offer a warm-coloured comfort, and yet, however lovely, the place as a whole rings false. Henry James called it “a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond”, and Lee records the remark made by the lawyer Joseph Choate as he surveyed the gardens: “Ah, Mrs Wharton, when I look about me I don’t know if I’m in England or in Italy”. The Mount isn’t exactly an American house, and Choate’s own Naumkeag a few miles away makes a good contrast, with its Arts and Crafts woodwork in place of Wharton’s stucco mouldings.
“It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country”, Ellen Olenska says in The Age of Innocence (1920). Trust the tale, not the teller – in her books. Wharton often knew better than in the accoutrements of her life. However, even in her fiction Wharton’s Europe doesn’t always bear the same historical freight that it did for her friend Henry James. She was twenty years younger, and the European sequence in The House of Mirth is simply that, a location to which her characters might seasonally move. She quickly came to resent the comparisons to James her reviewers made. Nevertheless she lived in a world to which he had given definition, and she too had always had to fight against what he termed “a superstitious valuation of Europe”. Sometimes she lost that fight: late in her life she protested about a Dutch edition of Ethan Frome that claimed it was “translated from the American”. She continued to set the bulk of her work in the United States, but after the sale of The Mount in 1912, and her divorce the following year, she identified herself increasingly with Europe. She spent the First World War in Paris and returned to New York only once in the years before her death in 1937. This biography, as Lee suggests in her prologue, is above all “the story of an American citizen in France”.
The standard Life of Wharton up to now has been R. W. B. Lewis’s Pulitzer Prizewinning volume of 1975. Lewis was the first to have full access to a sealed archive, and that enabled him both to break the story of Wharton’s affair with the caddish journalist Morton Fullerton and to publish “Beatrice Palmato”, the fragment of pornography that the critic Cynthia Griffin Wolff had discovered among her papers. Those discoveries gave extra point to the mingling of desire and restraint in Wharton’s fiction, to Summer (1917) and The Reef (1912) as well as to Newland Archer’s longing, in The Age of Innocence, for that undiscoverable place where he and Ellen can “be simply two human beings who love each other”. Lewis’s version has been challenged in its details, and his book does sometimes plod; its account of Wharton’s Paris too often resembles a guest list. But it still provides our finest portrait of the brownstone milieu of her early life, and of her career’s first hesitating steps.
Hermione Lee’s version doesn’t replace Lewis’s so much as complement it. She begins by differentiating between “the many fictions and memoirs in which Wharton ‘made up’ versions of herself as a child”: the hard-edged autobiographical fragment called “Life and I”, which remained unpublished until 1990, and the soft focus of her 1934 memoir, A Backward Glance. Wharton’s story is “solid with structures, objects, habits, money, food and clothes”, but it is also one of a solitary girl with a “fragile secret self”. She was born in 1862 into a cautious over-upholstered world, in which her rentier parents lived as though “there was no national crisis going on”. Her father was intelligent, and indolent. Her mother had a chilly obsession with decorum, and her refusal to calm her daughter’s pre-wedding jitters, Wharton believed, “did more than anything else to falsify and misdirect my whole life”. For Lee, as for the novelist herself, there are many variations on this tale, and no one of them is definitive. Lee does more than her predecessors with Wharton’s making of houses and gardens, sometimes down to the choice of plants and the ordering of bulbs. She presents a slightly disenchanted version of Wharton’s relief work during the First World War: not discounting the achievement, which included the founding of TB sanatoria, but acknowledging that the story is “also one of special treatment, connections in high places, and servants to run errands”. Lee gives us our fullest account of her subject’s late illnesses and death. And she is, as one expects, superb in using the fiction as a way to read the life, defining their relation in a way that is at once seamless but never simplified.
She does not, however, give us enough on the dozen-odd years after Wharton’s apparently sexless 1885 marriage, when Lewis describes her as suffering a series of breakdowns. In her justly famous Life of Virginia Woolf, Lee analysed the history of that writer’s mental health with skill and tact, sifting the surviving evidence for what it can and cannot allow one to say. She attempts something similar here. She allows that “one of the obscurities of [Wharton’s] marriage . . . centres on her health”, and notes that the future novelist did suffer in those years from “asthma, hay fever . . . . exhaustion, persistent nausea, and anaemia”. But few documents from a crucial period in the mid-1890s survive, and while “it is tempting to associate breathing difficulties with a sense of personal suffocation”, Lee returns a verdict of “not proven”. Any “retrospective narrative of depression giving way to achievement”, even the writer’s own in A Backward Glance, is to Lee “too simple”, for Wharton was “leading a complicated active, energetic life, all through the period in which she was also unwell, unhappy, and depressed”. Lee concentrates on the activity not the illness, and above all on the mixture of reading and European travel that made Wharton into a formidable connoisseur. It is a useful corrective, and one has to look twice to see how radically Lee has foreshortened her account of those marital “obscurities”. In the end, however, I wanted a fuller account of the evidence, a detailed reading of its lacunae.
When Wharton the writer emerges in Lee’s account, it is in terms of the books that developed from that activity, works like The Decoration of Houses (1897), which she wrote in collaboration with the architect Ogden Codman, or the austere Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904). This emphasis underplays the stories Wharton was publishing throughout the 1890s – Lee puts the publication of her first collection, The Greater Inclination (1899), into a parenthesis – but it has benefits as well as costs. As with the Life of Woolf, Lee’s organization isn’t chronological so much as thematic. Her chapters move crabwise over the concerns of her subject’s life, and here that structure allows her to give us long essayistic accounts of Wharton’s experience in Lenox or Italy, or to chart the political complexion of her Parisian circles. In the hands of a more conventional biographer such things might seem a form of digression. But Lee is more concerned with analysis than narrative, and her portraiture at its best seems Proustian. Time passes, but we glide forward without seeming to.
Nevertheless, this is not the best method for certain periods in Wharton’s life. Her middle years involve a complicated set of relations and chronology. The history of Teddy Wharton’s own “nervous collapse” is better documented than that of his wife. He had a family history of mental instability – his father committed suicide – and spent many years after the divorce sitting in his room, “with a shawl over his knees”. His illness took hold in the early years of the century, and he seems to have been disturbed by the gap between Wharton’s growing success and his own absence of an occupation. From 1906 on, Wharton spent ever more time in Paris, and increasingly without her husband. She met Fullerton in 1907, and their physical affair seems to have begun the following year; for much of its duration, Wharton was having to help pay off his former mistress, while also worrying about his nominal engagement to his first cousin. Teddy doesn’t appear to have known about any of this, but he confessed to an infidelity of his own in 1909, and also to having embezzled $50,000 of his wife’s inheritance.
The Fullerton affair was over by the time Wharton decided on divorce, and she does not appear to have ever taken another lover. Still, these difficulties overlapped, along with much else: the deepening of her friendship with Henry James, her move into the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; even the desperate triangle of Ethan Frome (1911), which she began as an exercise in French and continued without knowing what would happen in the locked room of her own marriage. Lee’s biography separates all this. She gives a chapter to James, another to Fullerton, and a third to the process that ended in divorce. Each strand of Wharton’s life is disentangled for us, and Lee does present the most coherent account available of Teddy’s disintegration. We follow it without distraction – which means that we don’t follow it in the way Wharton herself experienced it. These years were a jumble, and the essayistic structure which worked so well for Woolf seems here to erase that confusion in the name of a strangely distorting clarity.
Wharton sued for divorce in France, rather than in America, as a way to minimize gossip; though Lee shows that it followed her anyway. She had already sold both The Mount and her Park Avenue home, and yet it would be a mistake to see her decision to live abroad as a principled choice. Henry James had made such a choice at a particular moment in his life. Wharton did not. Rather she simply got in the habit – perhaps a stratagem in her marriage – of spending more and more of each year in Europe, until it had hardened into all she’d got. Certainly she had what the critic Elizabeth Ammons calls an “argument with America”: the sense that “America finds the creative woman dangerous because she is female”. But much of that argument was formulated retrospectively, and it is easy to imagine that it could once have been different.
Lee provides a sense of that contingency in her treatment of Wharton’s first great story, “The Bunner Sisters”. This “subdued . . . masterpiece of thwarted lives” dates from 1892, but Scribner’s Magazine rejected it, while accepting many slighter pieces, and it wasn’t published until 1916. In consequence, Wharton’s tale of poor Manhattan shopkeepers seems to belong to the same period as Ethan Frome or Summer, to stand as a part of her mid-career attempt to extend her range. Seeing it in its proper place not only suggests that Wharton was not the late-starter she appears, but also that her first creative impulses were directed away from her own social world. Lee writes that “Wharton’s strong sense of compassionate realism – more Dreiser than James – has tended to be undervalued”, and one wonders what the early publication of “The Bunner Sisters” might have done to the shape of her career. Would it have been enough to let her slip the chains of Newport? It seems a missed opportunity, and one that must have cost her; it suggests that Ethan Frome, almost twenty years on, was a return to something she had lost.
Wharton wrote that she intended that story as an accurate portrait of “the derelict mountain villages of New England . . . grim places . . . [in which] mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden house-fronts”. Her picture of such snow-covered ills has been criticized, but she had her own intimate knowledge of unhappiness and she knew how to work up a subject. What it isn’t, of course, is a description of her own Berkshire setting. The novel takes Ethan’s climactic attempt at a Liebestod from an actual Lenox sledding accident; but neither its Starkfield nor Summer’s North Dormer is in any way a picture of that gracious resort.
No account of Wharton can neglect her love affair with the automobile, and she found her places on her drives through the surrounding hills, in towns like Plainfield or the curiously named Peru; towns that remain in some measure agricultural, and in which dereliction still keeps pace with prosperity. Her destination on those drives was often Ashfield, the summer residence of the Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, to whom Henry James had written his great 1872 letter about the “complex fate [of] being an American”. And the question of Wharton’s debt to James is one on which, even today, much criticism turns. They shared a milieu and she certainly learned some tricks from him. But her books teem with people and things in a way that his do not, and her sense of novelistic form owes him little beyond the desire to make every word contribute to a total impression. The size of her debt has been overstated. Not even the James of The Princess Casamassima could have written “The Bunner Sisters”, no more than he could have done the violence of Ethan Frome, or the strange “After Holbein” (1928), in which senility turns her characters into something like their own ghosts. Still, one wonders if the desire to separate Wharton from James might lie behind Lee’s belief that her greatest novel is The Custom of the Country (1913). For this caustic, gleaming tale is surely the least Jamesian of her longer books, and the conclusion to which Wharton brings the amoral and irresistible Undine Spragg seems as comically dispiriting as anything in Evelyn Waugh.
My own choice would be The Age of Innocence, a book that opens “on a January evening of the early seventies”. Wharton’s characters in that expansive yet inexorable novel are trapped by the rules of their own moment. And they know it – they know that their New York both dreads and is drawn to change, and some of them may even welcome the supersession of their own values. At the end of the book, Newland Archer will look back from the start of the twentieth century and recognize the degree to which his now “old-fashioned” life has been circumscribed by history itself; accepting the choices he has made, while knowing that in a different age he would have made other ones. Wharton uses her sense of the past to provide a powerful reading of the limitations of nineteenth-century Anglo-American fiction, a precise account of all the subjects it tried to avoid. If the novel recalls James’s Portrait of a Lady, it does so deliberately, and in a way that reminds us of T. S. Eliot’s definition of a classic: a work in which we hear the “ancestral traits” in a voice that is nevertheless unique. And Wharton does something similar in her last important story, the 1934 “Roman Fever”: an act of farewell that evokes the world of “Daisy Miller” in order to mark the changes.
“Roman Fever” is one of the greatest American short stories, and yet by the 1930s the historical process it defines had made Wharton into its victim, and she had slipped from critical though not from popular favour. Lee makes few claims for Wharton’s late novels, and such one-time bestsellers as Twilight Sleep (1927) or The Children (1928) have not recovered their audience. It is no exaggeration to say that the most important work of her last years was that of cultivating her own garden. One part of that garden lay in her memory, and led to the engaging nouvelles of Old New York (1924) and to the discreet craft of A Backward Glance. Wharton did not serve the journalistic apprenticeship that gave both James and Woolf an ingratiating playfulness, and her non-fiction is often stiff. Yet her memoir has the charm of majesty, and some of its anecdotes are as well-turned as those of Saint-Simon.
Her other gardens were just that, carefully tended pieces of ground: a villa in what is now a bedraggled Paris banlieue, and a converted abbey in Hyères, overlooking the Mediterranean. Lee’s biography reaches its height in its account of Wharton’s life after the First World War. The thematic structure that simplified the struggles of her middle years works perfectly in capturing the even rhythm of her later life, and I cannot imagine that anybody will ever provide a better account of this period. Wharton’s personal turmoil was over, and what remained was work and friends and houses. She slipped with the seasons from one residence to another, staying at the Crillon while her servants carried out the move; and surely it says something about her that, once hired, those servants tended to stay. Lee provides a wonderful chapter on Wharton’s post-war ambivalence towards modernity, and another on her reading. She liked Joseph Conrad, and admired The Great Gatsby, though a meeting with Scott Fitzgerald was a failure. A reading of Sanctuary “made her want to write an article called “Wuthering Depths”, and she was immune to the Modernism of Woolf and Joyce. But she was almost alone among important American writers in her love of Goethe. Her gardens in Provence were almost entirely destroyed in the winter of 1929, and in Lee’s judgement Wharton never entirely recovered. There were strokes and heart attacks, and in her last years she would stay up on All Souls’ Night and tell over the list of her dead.
Hermione Lee writes with a poise that allows her to record Edith Wharton’s many acts of personal generosity while also detailing her limitations, the “unappealing” racism and anti-Semitism of her class among them. It is not her biographer’s fault that some readers, myself among them, will finish this book liking Wharton the woman rather less than before. I have no such doubts about Wharton the writer who, along with Willa Cather, produced the most enduring body of American fiction in the period between James and Faulkner.
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Michael Gorra chairs the English Department at Smith College. His books include The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany
