Pursuit of Love

Has she dislodged her predecessor? Yes, triumphantly. Wharton’s own story, as related by Lee, is as compulsively readable and as coherent in all its parts as Wharton’s best novels: The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The Custom of the Country. Writers’ biographies do not always shed much light on their work, but Wharton’s does, for her finest fiction reflects the patterns of her own life and those of the upper-class American world she came from–a society for which she felt a volatile mixture of rage, contempt, pity, and affection. Far from being the grande dame of popular legend, the aristocratic chronicler of the Gilded Age, a second-rate Henry James (as depicted by Percy Lubbock in his spiteful “authorized” biography), Wharton was a very complicated character, a powerful and articulate rebel against her caste and its values. Though she adhered throughout her life to certain increasingly dated social standards, her work tells a different tale, and the life itself, as Lee notes, “often feels like a cover-story, with tremendously articulate activity on the surface, and secrets and silences below.”

Wharton meant those secrets to remain secrets. She tried hard to control her image to posterity, destroying large quantities of personal letters: Privacy was important to her, as Lee points out, and she made its violation one of her literary subjects. There is no remaining correspondence between Wharton and her parents and brothers; there are only a few letters from Walter Berry, her closest friend (indeed she thought she had destroyed them all), and only three from her husband of 28 years, Teddy Wharton. Henry James destroyed most of her letters to him, and she destroyed all the letters from her lover, Morton Fullerton (though Fullerton kept hers, which eventually made their way to the Beinecke Library at Yale–a fact that would have horrified her).

Though Wharton’s literary stock fell during the years after her death in 1937, the last couple of decades have seen it rise to its proper level and she is now recognized as having been a first-rank novelist, perhaps a great one. But what astounds people is not simply the quality of her fiction, or the fact that it was written by a woman from that particular background (surprising enough in itself), but that she produced this vast quantity of very high-level work–more than 40 books, including novels, volumes of short stories, and writings about houses and gardens–while leading a strenuous social life, running several large households, traveling compulsively, entertaining lavishly, creating world-class gardens, and reading and studying widely–and all this without a wife!

She had servants, yes, but the very running and organizing of a sizable staff is a job in itself; her key, indispensable team at each of her establishments consisted, at the very least, of housekeeper, butler, staff-manager, chauffeur, secretary, and two maids. “The two essential underpinnings of her life” were “money and servants,” Lee states. The freedom from life’s worldly demands that so many artists have deemed necessary meant nothing to her; she was incurably worldly, voracious for life’s material offerings as well as its intellectual ones. As Henry James exclaimed to their mutual friend Howard Sturgis, Wharton was “a lady who consumes worlds as you & I (don’t even) consume apples. . . . She uses up everything and everyone.” James was intermittently horrified by the Whartons’ wealth and mad consumption: “Such incoherence, such a nightmare of perpetually renewable choice and decision, such a luxury of bloated alternatives, do they seem to burden life withal!”

Yet Lee makes a case for Wharton’s worldliness and perpetual activity as an aspect of her particular art. She posits, for example, that “it might not be too fanciful to think that gardening and novel-writing have something in common. The mixture of disciplined structure and imaginative freedom, the reworking of traditions into a new idea, the ruthless elimination of dull, incongruous or surplus materials, and the creation of a dramatic narrative, all come to mind.” There is clearly some truth to this, so that even readers totally uninterested in gardening–like myself–will not be irritated by the many pages Lee devotes to the subject. Interior decoration (in which field Wharton was a pioneer, coauthoring a classic 1897 work called The Decoration of Houses) is even more pertinent to Wharton’s fiction. In Lee’s formulation, “The links between her Italian writings [on villas and gardens], her interest in the decoration of houses, and the harsh, witty analysis of her society she was starting to make in her stories and novels, were part of a complex cultural argument about America at the turn of the century. One of the key topics in this argument was the morality of taste, something that interested her very much.”

This is absolutely true. Wharton always took particular pains to describe the décor with which her characters surrounded themselves, and nearly every one of them can be assessed, if not absolutely judged, by the way they furnish their homes. “Whenever Wharton writes about the decoration of houses, she is writing about behavior and beliefs,” Lee says, and nowhere is this more evident than in Wharton’s descriptions of the world she was formed by, the materially lavish, emotionally repressive society of old New York. Wharton described her own childhood home as a “full-blown specimen of Second Empire decoration” punctuated by medieval motifs that were inspired, she guessed, by a vague idea that there was “some obscure (perhaps Faustian) relation between the Middle Ages and culture.” In her story “The Old Maid,” she gave a cutting description of the sort of bibelot-packed interiors favored by her mother’s generation:

The excess of the ensemble is stifling, and its little bows to some dimly grasped ideal of “culture” are pathetic. Culture here is a commodity, an ornament, rather than a living world of thought and art. How could it be anything else in a society “wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant,” as Wharton deemed hers to be? She remembered her parents as being respectful of literature, at least in theory, but standing “in nervous dread of those who produced it. . . . In the eyes of our provincial society authorship was still regarded as something between a black art and a form of manual labor.” The degree to which this was true is proved by an astounding statement by Wharton, which Lee for some reason does not include in her biography, to the effect that no one in Wharton’s family ever discussed her books with her or even mentioned her writing career. This career was incomprehensible, threatening, transgressive: best to say nothing about it.

So Wharton was a great materialist both personally and as an artist: Her characters are viewed through the lenses of their possessions and of their relation with the material world in general. It is surprising, then, to discover that in her commonplace book (to which Lee devotes a fascinating section) it was the Stoic writers, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, who made the most frequent appearances. Anyone less obviously Stoic than Wharton, who “consumed worlds,” would be difficult to think of. And yet there is real significance here. Wharton described life as “not a matter of abstract principles, but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate,” and all of her fictions illustrate this theory. No one’s life is an unqualified success, but a life is only genuinely tragic when its protagonist fails to come to philosophical terms with these compromises. Here her sympathetic but fatally passive “heroes,” Newland Archer of The Age of Innocence and Lawrence Selden of The House of Mirth, come to mind. Both these men, Lee persuasively suggests, were based at least in part on Wharton’s kind, disappointed father.

The vein of stoicism that runs through Wharton’s densely materialist fiction is what carries most of her work out of the limiting specificities of its time and place and makes it still entirely pertinent a century later. Lee lists the qualities that, in her opinion, made Wharton a great writer: “her mixture of harshly detached, meticulously perceptive, disabused realism, with a language of poignant feeling and deep passion, and her setting of the most confined of private lives in a thick, complex network of social forces.” This is a very good description, stressing the characteristically dark vision that made Wharton so very much more than the mere drawing room novelist her disparagers have portrayed.

It is this very darkness that kept Wharton’s consummately filmic fictions from reaching the screen until quite recently; if it is true, as William Dean Howells told her, that what Americans want is a tragedy with a happy ending, Wharton wasn’t about to give them one. A planned film of her 1913 novel The Custom of the Country was scrapped as late as 1961 because its voracious heroine, Undine Spragg, was thought to be “too evil.” Is it possible that the producers had already forgotten the success of the terrible and irresistible Scarlett O’Hara, so reminiscent of Undine? And the great John Schlesinger film Darling, which appeared only a few years later, presented almost the same character and story as The Custom of the Country, but brought up to date and anglicized. It was not until the 1990s, amazingly enough, that Wharton’s novels became the hot screen properties they should always have been. Maybe the fact is that we Americans have only just begun to grow up enough to do without that happy ending.

There was certainly no happy ending in Wharton’s own life, at least not of the conventional romantic type. Her marriage was a disaster from the very beginning; not only were she and Teddy sexually incompatible (she put some of the blame on her mother, who had refused to tell her the facts of life before her wedding), but they had nothing in common except for their shared background and their affection for dogs. Teddy Wharton was a man of limited intelligence and no artistic or intellectual interests; he also, as it turned out, inherited his father’s bipolar illness and, in the first decade of the 20th century, began a rapid and irreversible slide into mental illness. It seemed that Teddy was too crazy to deal with, but not quite crazy enough to lock up; Edith was trapped. “Think of having had the chance of . . . a life of my own, in which I could write & think; & now this!” In the opinion of Henry James–and for once this was not a bitchy comment but a painful truth–their union was a “gilded bondage” or “gorgeous vortex.” Wharton abhorred divorce and lampooned American divorcées in her fiction, but she knew there could be no alternative in her own case, and the marriage was dissolved in 1913.

By that time Wharton’s one great love affair, her three-year relationship with Morton Fullerton, had also broken up. The two of them had met in 1907, when Wharton was already 45 years old. Until that time Wharton appears to have had no sexual partner except for Teddy, though consensus has it that she had always loved her friend Walter Berry. Most people have assumed that Berry was gay, but for some reason Lee never mentions that theory, not even to knock it down; instead, she describes him as a lady-killer who preferred the freedom of bachelorhood to being trapped in marriage. Wharton fell passionately in love with Fullerton and the affair lasted on and off for three years, but as he had demonstrated over many years to countless lovers and admirers of both sexes, he was deeply evasive, perhaps incapable of loving. Wharton railed against his emotional cruelty–“The one thing I can’t bear is the thought that I represent to you the woman who has to be lied to“–and complained of “being left to feel [after sex] like a ‘course’ served and cleared away,” but to no avail; eventually she realized he had nothing more to give, and moved on.

One thing Fullerton did give her was the experience of a fully felt and lived love, and she used it to good effect in her fiction of that period. “It takes a strong power of detachment to turn one’s most painful humiliations into comedy,” Lee remarks. Wharton rose to the challenge magnificently. Her life with Teddy also went into her books. As Lee points out, there are very few happy marriages in Wharton’s fiction, and her unhappy ones provide the most vivid and visceral moments in all her work. Newland Archer’s love for Ellen Olenska is delicately imagined, for instance, but his marriage to the “invincibly innocent” May is a masterpiece.

“I wonder,” Wharton reflected, “among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie–and which, consequently, is more ‘made to hand’ of the psychologist and the dramatist?” (And the novelist, of course.)

Lee recognizes the idiotic husband in the story “The Choice” as Wharton’s closest fictional version of Teddy. His wife is given this horrifying monologue:

And yet, when there is a boating accident and they are all in danger of death, it is the husband she cries out for and her lover who is killed. No happy ending, indeed.

After the end of her marriage, Wharton departed definitively for Europe, trying to reinvent herself as a Frenchwoman (while remaining American “jusqu’aux moelles,” according to one of her French obituarists), passionately identifying herself with her adopted country, and laboring on its behalf throughout the First World War. She began to look on crude America with an ever more jaundiced eye, and her work suffered as a result; in her later novels she was more mocking of her home turf and seemed to understand it less. As with so many expatriate writers, separation from the sources of her art did not improve the work. She was old-fashioned, and openly disliked–this is Lee’s list–lesbianism, feminism, bad manners, obscenity, socialism and “Bolshevism,” exhibitionism, and experimental art. All these things flourished in postwar America, along with jazz and divorce. But in merely parodying the American scene, as she did in late novels like Twilight Sleep (1927), she forgot her own dictum–a true one–that what doesn’t date in a work of art is “whatever of unchanging human nature the novelist has contrived to bring to life beneath the passing fripperies of clothes and customs.”

Lee is at her best when she detects the echoes of Wharton’s life in the lives of her characters, weaving their stories into hers. She does readers a real favor by reminding them of Wharton’s many superb short stories, which are seldom read any more. I did not agree with all of Lee’s literary judgments, and felt that she missed the occasional point in her discussions of the various fictional works; but her enthusiasm is contagious, her knowledge prodigious, her personal insights very sharp. One feels, as is so seldom the case, that had subject and biographer ever had the chance to meet (in fact, Wharton died a decade before Lee’s birth), the two would have become tremendous friends.

Brooke Allen is the author, most recently, of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.