Bilson June 07

A thoroughbred life

Gay Bilson

Edith Wharton
Hermoine Lee
Chatto & Windus, $79.95 hb, 853 pp, 9780701166656

I took to Edith Wharton in the late 1970s but don’t remember why. I have never forgotten the name of the heroine of the first of her books that I read: Undine Spragg, all soft promise dashed by that biting surname. This was The Custom of the Country (1913), and I read on: Ethan Frome (1912), Summer (1917) and The Children (1928), for instance. Someone offered me R.W.B. Lewis’s Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975), and a friend created space on his bookshelf by unloading The Collected Short Stories (edited and introduced by Lewis, who calls himself an ‘addict’). Much later, when the film of The Age of Innocence was released in 1993, I primly chose to read the novel rather than see a version of it. Then I left Edith Wharton, née Jones, born to wealth in 1862 in New York, on the shelf.

All of the above is to declare that I came to Hermoine Lee’s literary biography of Wharton as a general reader, neither as a Wharton afficionado, nor with academic interest in this writer who published forty-eight books in forty years. Lewis’s Life had surprised me: I admit to being hardly friendly towards biography. It was engaging and compelling enough to invite a lively interest in Wharton whose Old New York circumscribed much of her social attitudes (V.S. Pritchett called her ‘the accountant-historian of a rich society’). Old New York had a penchant for, and the money to sail to, France and Italy and Old European Culture. Often, Old New York established itself in Europe. Wharton did, and Lee insists that her biography is ‘the story of an American citizen in France’.

Wharton is glimpsed off-centre stage in Iris Origo’s Images and Shadows (1970). Like Wharton, Origo was born to wealth, though rather more so. She became an exceptional scholar and an altogether remarkable woman, an opinion that Lee shares. Iris’s mother, Sybil Cutting, who rented the Villa Medici in Florence, moved in some of the same circles as Wharton (Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, for instance). Sybil’s third marriage was to Percy Lubbock, once Wharton’s close friend, and introduced to Wharton by Henry James.

Lubbock published a memoir about Wharton (1947), but he is unreliable. He declared, for instance, that she scared off books, yet Lee’s penultimate chapter is an exam-ination of Wharton’s extensive library and obvious reading. This is just one instance of the differences between Lee’s biography and Lewis’s. Lee examines the fiction in greater depth (literature and life commenting on each other like twins) and her book is far more detailed, more dense. It is best, I think, to push comparison to one side and begin with Wharton, via Lee, all over again.

The persistent coupling of Henry James and Edith Wharton, most usually with Wharton’s fiction coming in as second best, is one of the interesting threads to follow. James, early in their acquaintance, wrote of Wharton’s ‘rich intelligence’. They would become close friends, ‘mutual confidantes and professional peers’, but if James was any sort of literary model for Wharton, who was twenty years younger, she ‘wrote against him’, not ‘under him’ according to Lee. Wharton’s travel book, A Motor-Flight Through France, published in 1908, long after James had written A Little Tour of France (1884), is, for Lee, ‘full of James and free of him’. Both carped about each other’s work but were mutually devoted.

A central story in Wharton’s life is her passionate three-year affair with Morton Fullerton, which took place when she was in her mid-forties. Wharton had married at slightly later than the right age for her social scene and times, and was terrified at the prospect of what came with marriage: sex. Her mother’s response to her anguished questions is laughable and worrying. Teddy Wharton, the butt of Henry James’s jokes (‘the cerebrally compromised Teddy’), did not, it seems, fulfil Edith Jones. She met Fullerton, a lit-tle younger than herself, while resident in Paris with Teddy, and the literary voyeur is tempted to divide her life into pre- and post-Fullerton periods, pre- and post-awakening.

Fullerton was a complex fellow, deeply attractive to women and devoted to none it seems. ‘In his love life he is something like a telephone, always engaged, and even then with several on hold.’ This is the wicked summation of Fullerton made by the incomparable critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick in an article on Wharton in the New York Review of Books in 1988. Wharton’s friendships, her enthusiasms for particular people and her generally sparse sex life interest biographers because of what they might explain to the reader about her novels and short stories, which are often seething with, well, with something inchoate. Lee writes of Wharton being ‘explicit and bold’ about sexual treachery in The Reef (1912), as opposed to the ‘indirect and teasing’ Henry James in The Golden Bowl (1904).

With the onset of the World War I, Wharton devoted herself to work (and words) for her ‘adopted country’, France, and we are just over halfway through Lee’s book. The war becomes a transition for the reader, tumbling us out of the Edwardian into the modern along with Wharton, who is too easily lost to her present public among the flounce and swirl of the 1870s costumes of Martin Scorcese’s film of The Age of Innocence.

In 1914 Wharton returned to France from England, and her ‘grande naturalisation’ was confirmed, and confirmed again by her war work, which was honoured by the governments of France, Belgium and the United States. By 1919 Wharton had rented a residence at Hyères, and ‘invest[ed] in that particular idea of French life - tradition, beauty, taste, exclusiveness - which had always inspired [her] writing on France ...’ She gardened with customary energy (and servants), writing to Berenson that she had always been more interested than others in ‘horti & agri & all the rest of it’. And all the while she was writing, writing, writing.

The consuming effect of such a marvellously detailed biography of Wharton’s life and her fiction is to reel from the sense of unceasing, even intimidating energy that this extraordinary woman displayed. Whether you want to put her in the same literary class as James or not is somehow beside the point. Lee never wears her opinions on her sleeve, never heaves her heart into her mouth. She has told us everything we might want to know about Wharton, more besides, and marshalled her research into a thoroughbred Life. A bril-liant synthesiser, Lee weaves the major novels and short stories into the story with great skill, so much so that the book becomes as much the story of the fictions as it is the story of a life. If Lee is revisionist by interpretation, by shifts of emphasis, she is courteously rigorous, having spent years as the welcomed guest of prestigious American libraries. Wharton, prodigiously energetic in her work and life, has posthumously met her match.

But even when we know so much about Wharton’s life (so very many letters were written and kept in those days!), and know that she wrote about the society she knew intimately, know of her formidable intelligence and energy, I don’t think we are any closer to understanding her creative gift, although Lee’s life throws light on the intransigence of her literary style. Another American, William Faulkner, who declared that he didn’t know how he could write the way he did, had published a great modernist novel, As I Lay Dying, in 1930. Wharton continued in her own soon-to-be superseded way into the 1930s. That she had read Proust, Eliot, Joyce and Faulkner (she found Sanctuary distasteful) is completely obscured by her fiction.
The best resolved literary biography will surely send you back to the subject’s fiction. ‘Roman Fever’, a short story praised by Lee, is finely tuned and layered with observations, a conventionally plotted story of its time (published in 1934, just three years before Wharton’s death at the age of seventy-five), clever, surprising, even moving. ‘Xingu’, a satire, and very cruel, might be read by any contemporary reading group with fluttering intellectual pretensions and produce shivers of recognition. Now for The House of Mirth (1915). Wharton’s generally acknowledged triumph. But there, I think, I will leave her again.

Gay Bilson is the author of Plenty: Digressions on Food (2004).