Life-Lover
The Letters of Edith Wharton.
by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis.
Scribners. 576 pp. $29.95.
When one reflects on the popularity of Edith Wharton’s work in her lifetime, the vast body of serious literary criticism her work generated and still generates, and her enduring and fully justified reputation as a major American novelist—moreover, our best woman novelist—the fact that her correspondence has been so long delayed in publication is something of a mystery.
When she died in 1937, Mrs. Wharton’s letters, according to the terms of her will, were closed to inspection for thirty years. During that period, Percy Lubbock published a rather acerbic biography, emphasizing the imperiousness of her personality. Lubbock’s book was strangely off-key, but, in the absence of her correspondence, no confirming impression of the woman and writer was otherwise available.
Once the correspondence was released for scholarly inspection, R.W.B. Lewis expertly mined it for his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Edith Wharton: A Life (1975). But it has taken another thirteen years for an edition of the letters to appear. Whatever the reason for the delay, the wait has been worth it. In this selection, ably edited and annotated by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, we have nearly 400 of the extant 4,000 letters Mrs. Wharton wrote to friends and correspondents. And what an honor roll it makes: Henry James, Bernard Berenson, André Gide, Paul Bourget, Charles Eliot Norton, John Jay Chapman, Kenneth Clark, Royall Tyler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, and others. At last the image of the woman and writer has begun to come into clearer focus. What do these letters disclose?
First, the older view that Edith Wharton was a starched grande dame, imprisoned by the social proprieties of Old New York, where she was born in 1862, must now be fully discarded. The letters reveal a woman of exceptional energy, great passion, and extraordinary intensity. If she was sometimes formal with strangers, to intimate friends she could be tender and affectionate, a treasury of wit and learning, sympathy and compassion. And they reciprocated with care and concern, especially after the turn of the century, when she was obliged to divorce Edward Wharton, the ineffectual husband whose embezzlement of her estate to finance his infidelities made living together impossible.
Second, the letters disclose how strangely intermixed was the ironic rationalism of her temper (she once called herself the “high priestess of reason”) with her capacity for ecstasy in love, once she experienced it at the late age of forty-six. One of the revelations of this new edition comes from the selection from her 300 or so letters to Morton Fullerton, with whom she had a passionate affair beginning in 1908. These previously unknown letters surfaced in 1980, long after Lewis’s biography had been published. But they confirm his astute inference there that the unstable and philandering Fullerton was the first and only grand love of her life. Although it was a short-lived affair, it aroused in Edith Wharton an ethereal rapture almost transcendental in its mysticism.
An instance of the rich mixture in her of reason and passion is suggested by a 1908 letter to Fullerton, after his inexplicable neglect made plain to her that his ardor had cooled. “The basest thing about the state of ‘caring,’” she wrote, “is the tendency to bargain and calculate, as if it were a game of skill played between antagonistics.” And she went on to remark: “There would have been the making of an accomplished flirt in me, because my lucidity shows me each move of the game—but that, in the same instant, a reaction of contempt makes me sweep all the counters off the board & cry out:—‘Take them all—I don’t want to win—I want to lose everything to you!’” But then again, pulling up short: “I pause, remembering you once told me that, on this topic, I serve up the stalest of platitudes with an air of triumphant discovery!”
By 1910 the affair was virtually finished. “I said once that my life was better before I knew you,” she wrote Fullerton. “That is not so, for it is good to have lived once in the round, for ever so short a time.” Indeed, that experience made much richer her treatment of ardent love in her later fiction, especially Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), Summer (1917), and the Pulitzer Prize winner, The Age of Innocence (1920).
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The Wharton letters also throw a clearer light on a third aspect of her life and work—her attitude toward America and her reasons for moving permanently to Paris in 1907. After spending a night in an expensive American “summer hotel” in 1904, she wrote Sara Norton that she despaired of the Republic: “Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! And mind you, it is a new & fashionable hotel. What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty”—and, she added comically, “eating bananas for breakfast.” Apropos of the extravagant plutocracy in New York, she wrote in 1905 to Morgan Dix, the rector of Trinity Church: “Social conditions as they are just now in our new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes, is a vast & absorbing field for the novelist, & I wish a great master could arise to deal with it.”
She herself was to be the great master of this subject in her best-selling novel, The House of Mirth (1905). A persistent critic of the coarseness and inelegance of American manners, she scoffed at the critic Van Wyck Brooks for assuming, in The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925), that “human relations in America are intrinsically as interesting as in the old centers of civilization and social life.” And she exclaimed to Barrett Wendell, “How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ‘American’ before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? It is really too easy a disguise for our shortcomings to dress them up as a form of patriotism!”
Yet although she was an expatriate, Mrs. Wharton’s quintessential Americanism expressed itself in the tenacity with which she clung to her right to define our social and intellectual shortcomings. To her, Henry James, whose friendship, she once wrote, “has been the pride & honor of my life,” seemed ready to give up on the country; she, however, was not. To John Hugh Smith she remarked in 1911: “America can’t be quite so summarily treated & so lightly dismissed as our great Henry thinks; but at the present stage of its strange unfolding it isn’t exactly a propitious ‘ambiance’ for the arts, & I can understand his feeling as he does. Balzac would not have!” In The Custom of the Country (1913), she produced a Franco-American novel of manners both Balzacian in scope and withering in its critique of American mamthe theory comes monism.
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One of the pleasures of The Letters of Edith Wharton is to see a fourth area of her work more clearly defined—the formation of her literary principles and her judgment of the work of other writers of fiction. As a novelist of manners, she early on committed herself to the method of reportorial realism. “There is, of course, no recipe for writing a good novel, & each ‘method’ is worth just what the writer can make out of it,” she told Judge Robert Grant, author of Unleavened Bread (1900); “but I am so great a believer in the objective attitude that I have specially enjoyed the successful use you have made of it; your consistent abstinence from comment, explanation & partisanship, & your confidence in the reader’s ability to draw his own conclusions.”
So great was this faith in the “objective attitude,” the method she associated with the great 19th-century masters like Trollope, Tolstoy, and Balzac, that she could not stand the mandarin psychological style employed by her friend Henry James. To her editor William Crary Brownell, she complained in 1904 that “the continued cry that I am an echo of Mr. James (whose books of the last ten years I can’t read, much as I delight in the man), & the assumption that the people I write about are not ‘real’ because they are not navvies and charwomen, makes me feel rather hopeless. I write about what I see, what I happen to be nearest to, which is surely better than doing cowboys de chic.” And of James’s The Sacred Fount she wrote to Sara Norton: “I could cry over the ruins of such a talent,” a judgment with which many readers have agreed.
Her opinion of other writers is delivered with a comparable sharpness of insight. Of André Gide she observed: “He is a mass of quivering ‘susceptibilities,’ & invents grievances when he can’t find them ready made. Luckily he is so charming that one ends by not minding.” She insisted to John Hugh Smith and Percy Lubbock that “We love [George Bernard] Shaw because he’s knocked over a few tottering conventions; but his satires won’t outlast the special weaknesses he satirizes, because they’re too specialized and don’t deal with the general human fate.” She dismissed Proust’s Sodom et Gomorrhe (1921), the fourth part of Remembrance of Things Past: “I think he has fourvoyé himself [gone astray] in a subject that can’t lead anywhere in art, & belongs only to pathology. What a pity he didn’t devote himself to the abnormalities of the normal, which offer a wide enough and unfilled enough field, heaven knows.”
Committed as she was to the representation of her characters’ conscious motivation, she insisted on the artful design of formal narrative structures. Modernist methods like Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique in Ulysses made her livid. In 1923 she told Bernard Berenson that Ulysses was “a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind) & unformed and unimportant drivel; & until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & thought can make a work of art without the cook’s intervening. The same applies to [T.S.] Eliot.” She added: “I know it’s not because I’m gettting old that I’m unresponsive. The trouble with all this new stuff is that’s à thèse: the theory comes first & dominates it.” Such observations, recorded in the letters, prepared the way for her formal exposition of the novelist’s art in The Writing of Fiction (1925).
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One of the most sharply worded expressions of her literary perspective was addressed to the socialist Upton Sinclair, who had sent her his propagandistic novel Oil in 1927: “It seems to me an excellent story until the moment, all too soon, when it becomes a political pamphlet. I make this criticism without regard to the views which you teach, and which are detestable to me. Had you written in favor of those in which I believe, my judgment would have been exactly the same.” She added that she had “never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views.”
This same letter, incidentally, gives us a glimpse into Mrs. Wharton’s own political views. While she could understand, she wrote Sinclair, how the excesses of the millionaire oil tycoons might be “enough to justify any thoughtful man in the desire to make some radical change in the organization of our society, I believe that a wider experience would have shown you that the evils you rightly satirize will be replaced by others more harmful to any sort of civilized living when your hero and his friends have had their way.” The historical insight displayed in this remark is witheringly acute.
Shortly before her death in Paris in 1937, Edith Wharton wrote to Mary Berenson that she wished she knew “what people mean when they say they find ‘emptiness’ in this wonderful adventure of living, which seems to me to pile up its glories like an horizon-wide sunset as the light declines. I’m afraid I’m an incorrigible life-lover & life-wonderer & adventurer.” So she was, as woman and writer, and so these letters wonderfully reveal.
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