The aristocratic Mrs. Edith Wharton was born Jones in a fashionable quarter of New York, arriving appropriately during the quarrel between masters about servants, known as the Civil War. The parents of the novelist were without talent, being mere people of the world. From them into her veins ran Rhinelanders, Stevens, early Howes, and Schermerhorns intact. Her corpuscles were Holland burghers, Colonial colonels, and provincial gentry who with the passage of time had become Avenue patricians—patrons of Protestant church and Catholic grand opera as the two highest forms of public worship, a strict clan making intercellular marriages, attending winter balls, dominating certain smart spots on the eastern seaboard, and unaware of any signs of life further west. In blood they were old, Dutch and British, the only form of being American that they knew. As a child among them, little Miss Jones started living in what Mrs. Wharton later entitled their Age of Innocence—a hard hierarchy of male money, of female modesty and morals.
Moving in high society at this time meant moving but little indeed. Space, outside of Newport for the summer, had not yet been discovered, though stately trips abroad were occasionally taken by bridal couples or dowagers headed for Worth. Fortunately for the impatient authoress, she was repeatedly sent as a child to the Continent, where governesses taught her French, German, and Italian. Something very close to English she had already learned in her correct American home. Thus the future Mrs. Wharton of the book reviews was launched. Thus at an early age she often returned from Europe to her native land, her critical eyes already seeing her New York as America indeed. And thus by her elders she was, in turn, already seen as “that handsome, disagreeable little Pussy Jones, always scribbling.” Her first manuscript to reach the outer world was a poem sold at a church fair when she was fifteen.
In the succeeding fifty years she has, according to her harshest critics, moved with unerring failure between two careers—that of a great woman of the world and a great woman novelist. Repeatedly redomiciling herself with elegance in various garden cities of the world, she has always suffered the disadvantage of being an outsider—even in the city of her birth, after she became a popular novelist. For if Boston, the city of her marriage, never forgave her for having been born in New York, her New York never forgave her for having been born in New York and writing about it. As a talented pioneer of professionalism among the domestic women of her class, absolution might have come with the dignity of her fame, had not Mrs. Wharton discovered her sinful skill at sketching from life. Though Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” was the supposed model for her “House of Mirth,” many of her contemporaries felt they had unconsciously sat across the space of years for too many of her portraits. And in “The Age of Innocence,” certain of the leading innocents connected with the novel’s adulteries and banking intrigues were decried, in Four Hundred society, as being this pillar, that pretender, or that déclassé—anyhow all drawn as large as life. The only positive identification which the book afforded, and which, while it gave society at large no more comfort, afforded it even less doubt, was that of Mrs. Wharton herself as the sad, charming, chaste hero, Newland Archer.
For like many novelists, Mrs. Wharton herself is her works. The presence therein of her friends or other characters is only a promenade for principle. They are mere illustrations of her historical report on a manner of living and thinking, often enough (for she is a moralist) bad. Therefore she and her characters in her wake seem too ably to have followed the unfortunate advice of Henry James, once tendered her in a letter of consolation for her domestic infelicities: “Continue making the movements of life.” All her heroes and heroines, meeting and sometimes mating under her eye, keep up this pantomime, as perhaps she has, without pleasure. Her books are filled with smart people whose capacity, according to her, for tragedy, wit, houseparties, and divorce, land them nowadays on the front page where vitality belongs. Their activities in her day were regarded not as necessary symptoms of transitional psychology or even news, but as mere decay. She spent her life formally proving that the wages of social sin were social death and lived to see the grandchildren of her characters comfortably and popularly relaxing into open scandals.
Though the first to utilize the breakup of the American mold, Mrs. Wharton is still the last to understand it; she saw the plot but never the point. Born for ethics, she ignored the senses. Thus even her most famous character, Lily Bart, though a drug fiend, did not have her heart in her work. For no irresistible Baudelairean visions did she swallow her nightly quota, but as one taking an aspirin tablet, to bring on sleep or ward off a cold. Mrs. Wharton described a trained-nurse murderess, but she was one who killed the wife for professional ethics, not as a passionate means to obtain the husband illegally loved. She even took up the labor problem, but as a banker takes out his typist to dine—a mere excursion out of one’s class. It was this emotional emptiness that gave her a success which was half polite incredulity when “The House of Mirth” was translated for the emotional French as “Chez les Heureux de ce Monde.” But “Ethan Frome,” after its American triumph re-titled as “Sous la Neige,” was justly hailed abroad as a chef d’œuvre of sufficient quality to merit a cheap edition and rank with the agrarian tragedies of Balzac and Zola. In this New England tale, small as a chance and tragic rural snapshot which the rich summer visitor leisurely enlarges for her album on returning to town, the worldly Mrs. Wharton gave something like immortality to the sadness of snow which it is likely her nature understood too well. At the age of thirty she was remarked as already cold and handsome. She was then spending her years at fashionable Lenox where the earth, under the many winters, retains a feeling of ice that no spring can thaw. And the rest is under glass . . .
Though she has spent another thirty years writing about human relations, it was in her friendship with Henry James that she really attained her literary height. Their platonic amity lacked none of their style, and contained all the warmth of which she never wrote. As if preparing herself for her own future expatriation, she first fell under his distant tutelage, then under the personal spell of her country’s greatest prose exile. He selected her at the expense of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, as his choicest female pupil. When distant in Rye he addressed her in letters as “Dearest Edith,” and, when present, introduced her to his London on the precise parabola of his pompous arm. To the literary, correct, meticulous Mrs. Wharton, the affection and approval of the literary, correct, meticulous Mr. James were the real bay leaves which she humbly wore (one imagines him helping adjust them) in her beautiful blond coiffure. Their friendship, which was the greatest and worthiest devotion of her life, covered long years and included, with other friends, Continental motor travels together, briefer always than the interminable charming letters which prepared for, discussed, delayed, and finally concluded them. There was even a houseparty of Whartons, Jameses, and other select souls at the grandiose Villa Medici outside Florence. And when after even that ripe man could ripen no more and so disappeared, there was still, for her, her famous round library in the Rue de Varenne, with its mounting tier of his works and, amidst them, the marble bust of their friend and author, the master American, James.
It was in this aristocratic Parisian quarter that Mrs. Wharton, more than a dozen years ago, began her permanent expatriation. Twice only has she returned to America, once to witness a marriage, and once for a ten days’ retreat at the Hotel St. Regis, where she prepared to receive her honorary degree from Yale. Her withdrawal from America was her most American act. She had exhausted New York, and Boston, so it says, always refused to accept her. She had early made with one of its scions what in those inept days was regarded as a brilliant, or happy, marriage (of the type which subsequently has to be legally dissolved). Mr. Edward Wharton was the handsomest man of the class of ’73, Harvard, a group which was graduated in virile side-whiskers; but his wife had been born a Rhinelander almost in her own right, wrote books, and had lived in Paris. Boston considered her fast.
So from the Rue de Varenne she finally started her frigid conquest of the faubourg, in company only with her mother, who had been Lucretia Rhinelander, and an iron hostess in her day, but was now disgusted with the way Newport was going. Mrs. Wharton was perhaps too formal even for the faubourg. As one duchesse complained, “On est trop organizé chez elle. One can’t so much as forget one’s umbrella at Madame Wharton’s with impunity.”
Later, still pursuing her policy of Continental expansion, she purchased a charming Cistercian monastery near Hyrès, on the Mediterranean, where she summers. Finally, for permanent residence, she acquired an eighteenth-century villa, the Pavillon Colombe, at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, about eighty motor kilometres from Paris. It was here that she collected her half-dozen adopted war orphans, left from the six hundred she housed during the war when she gave her property to the government and devoted herself to France and little Belgian refugees with a patriotism of which only an expatriated American who dislikes children is capable. For her splendid war work she was decorated by the King of the Belgians and was made an officer of the Légion d’Honneur by France.
She is now a handsome New Yorker of sixty years and immense dignity who has retired into a French country house and solitude. Her pavilion is not without suitability for one who has lived in contemplating the passions of others; the edifice is of the French type lovingly called une folie, erected by an amorous banker to house his mistresses, two sisters whose dovelike tenderness gave the property its name. The structure itself has been exquisitely and correctly restored; Mrs. Wharton knows her periods and architecture has long been one of her hobbies. In décors, she has been equally exacting; she spent twenty years searching for some eighteenth-century Chinese Chippendale wall paper of which she originally possessed a fragment.
In all details of life she demonstrates an accuracy of which she alone is capable. Her days are scheduled. The mornings are devoted to writing. The afternoons are devoted to walking in company with small dogs and to gardening, at which she is a tender expert. In all her properties, her flowers have been notable. Her White Garden at Lenox was famous. Moneyed in her own right, she is able to spend her royalties on her blossoms. She travels. She has seen France, Italy, and Spain from a limousine, and the Parthenon from a yacht. She is smartly but decently dressed by Worth who, when she once demanded of him a suitable, chic, black teagown, offered without hesitation a model called Resignation. She is civil rather than cordial as a formal hostess. She no longer smokes, but in the old fashion urges upon the gentlemen their after-dinner cigars. The viands at her table are perfectly served and chosen, though the wines, for which she cares little and which are selected by her butler, are less choice—according to the cigar-smoking gentlemen. Her old French housekeeper, who was Mrs. Wharton’s nurse, dominates below stairs and even influences her mistress on the floor above. All of the domestics, legend states, rigorously address each other as “Monsieur” and “Madame.”
Her friends are few but of long standing. It is in her character to support the old amities with loyalty. Many of her New York familiars are either dead or gone to Southampton. Her closest connection with her own land is represented by her sister-in-law and lifelong particular friend, Mrs. Cadwalader Jones. Since living in France, her affections have included the Princesse de Poix, the Paul Bourgets, certain of the noble Noailles, and—since the war—the Comte and Comtesse de Beaumont; also certain odd pedants in archeology and horticulture of whom her appreciation is touching and logical. She is herself an omnivorous reader. Among the younger minds she has enrolled Geoffrey Scott, Berenson the Florentine art critic, Percy Lubbock, and others. She also speaks appreciatively of Scott Fitzgerald.
On the whole she finds herself living in a generation in which conversation is lost. She is a dignified little woman set down in the middle of her past. She says that to the greener growths of her day, she must seem like a taffeta sofa under a gas-lit chandelier. Certainly she is old-fashioned in that she reserves her magnanimity for special occasions. In belief she is still nothing of an iconoclast but has become liberal through reflection. Hers is the grand manner which triumphs over a situation where another woman’s might save it. With years of living abroad, her anecdotes tend to deplore her tourist compatriots who mistake the Baptistery at Parma for the railway station.
In her long career Mrs. Wharton has published half a hundred short stories, translated Sudermann, written books on Italian gardens and art, a work on Morocco, a trio on France including one of the best on its war, a volume of verse, and more than a dozen novels. She won the Pulitzer Prize with “The Age of Innocence” and was the only woman to receive the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In writing of the sins of society, Mrs. Wharton gave the great public what it wanted and ever since the appearance, in 1905, of “The House of Mirth,” each of her novels has remained a best-seller for the period of its commercial life, a remarkable financial triumph. Her earnings must be estimated at approximately seventy-five thousand dollars yearly, of which much, now as in times past, would be for serial rights to magazines with whose feminine readers she is always a heavy favorite. Added to this now would be the play-rights to her old gold nugget, “The Age of Innocence” (1920), this winter’s production on Broadway, and already bought for the screen. Her current success, “The Children,” has also been sold for a cinema, was the Book of the Month Club’s selection for September past, and reached two hundred thousand copies within a month of publication. In thirty years of writing, Mrs. Wharton’s enormous output, with one exception, has been published by two houses, Scribner and Appleton, she not being one to make changes hastily. Her publishers have always found her an enemy of publicity and her standard press photograph shows her in pearls and décolletage, dressed for her public as for a ball.
Mrs. Wharton’s real excellencies are never marketed. Even those who love her most come by accident upon her golden qualities. She is regarded as cold. Yet a chord of Bach once recalled to her a moment passed half a century ago with a woman who was ever after to be her fondest companion. And to the same woman she recently wrote, after clipping her garden’s roses in the summer dawn, that the ripe sweetness of the flowers personified and brought their amity endearingly to mind. Mrs. Wharton has the tender and reserved sentiments of the truly literate. From many she has earned the title of Dearest Edith and for herself she has perfectly written what she hopes will finally be her epitaph—“She was a friend of Henry James.” ♦
