Arts and Letters

There was an interval of twenty years between the death of Julia Ward Howe, the only woman until then a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the election of Edith Wharton on November 13, 1930. The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, and her finest short stories had already been published. Much of the best American fiction of the last fifty years has been contributed by women. Yet despite honied words, this world is still managed by men, and the policy of the Academy, like that of many other learned bodies, has been to throw the burden on the other sex where membership is concerned. The choice of Mrs. Wharton sprang from enthusiastic recognition of her genius as a novelist and as a consummate artist in the use of pure English. Long before her death our world of letters was aware, subconsciously at all events, of the truth of the estimate which Professor Arthur Hobson Quinn put into words in his American Fiction, published in 1936: “With Edith Wharton the supreme artist in modern American fiction emerges, belonging to no movement or group, following her own standards and, while assimilating more richly than any other American novelist except Crawford the culture of France and Italy, remaining essentially American in her choice of material and in her artistic point of view." This eulogy in my opinion should not make an exception of Crawford; indeed if any exception is to be considered should it not rather be Howells or James?

I have heard from a reliable source that Mrs. Wharton's literary executor is not likely to sanction any formal biography for the reason that she has herself set down in A Backward Glance with delightful precision yet delicate restraint all that she wished posterity to know of her life and literary processes. Extraordinarily sensitive to the atmosphere of Europe, especially of Italy, from the early age of four, and ever an ardent traveler, she lived during her youth and the first ten years of her marriage mainly in her native land. It was from her select family and their circle, to which she accredited an aimless life, except for elegance and a deep-rooted devotion to absolute correctness in every-day speech, that she acquired her familiarity with the New York society of the seventies which she satirized so artistically and keenly. Her winters were passed in New York City, her summers at Newport, which bored her.

Italian wanderings in the spring and a visit to London were a foil to this conventional mode of life. But shortly prior to the publication of The Valley of Decision in 1902 the Newport house was sold and one built near Lenox. This was named in memory of her great-grandfather Stevens's place The Mount. Here she lived and gardened and wrote contentedly during summer and autumn for ten years, and here it was, as she has gayly recorded, that she received the terse and vigorous letter of an amateur critic: "Dear Madam, have you ever known a respectable woman? If you have, in the name of decency write about her."

It was from the proximity of The Mount to the remoter parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire that her famous Ethan Frome and the later novel Summer, to which Mrs. Wharton was ever partial, were written. Her residence in that neighborhood refutes the early frequent query "What does she know of her subject?" "For years," so she declares, "I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my own time, and a thousand-fold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose-colored spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett. In those days the snow-bound villages of western Massachusetts were still grim places, morally and physically: insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden house-fronts of the long village street or in the isolated farm houses on the neighboring hills; and Emily Brontë would have found as savage tragedies in our remoter villages as on her Yorkshire moors."

My long friendship with Edith Wharton dates from very shortly after her marriage in 1885. We had previously exchanged a letter or two, but the first time I met her was at Groton where she was visiting with her husband, Edward R. Wharton of Boston, at the house of a mutual friend. Teddy Wharton was thirteen years her senior, a friend of my boyhood and a college classmate. I was struck by his bride's refinement, but was kept a little aloof at first by her reserve,—for even as late as this she suffered in the presence of strangers from what she has termed "the long cold agony of shyness." Because Charles Scribner was my own publisher, I had the opportunity to observe her modest, yet wonderfully swift development under the discernment of Edward L. Burlingame, editor of the magazine, and his colleague, William C. Brownell, adviser of the publishing house. They accepted her first short stories, recognizing in them the touch of a new artist in letters. There was an interval of only two years between her venture The Decoration of Houses written with Ogden Codman and the appearance of The Greater Inclination (1899); the book of short stories which caused the London bookseller to say to Mrs. Wharton incognito as he handed it to her, "This is what everyone in London is talking about now." Three years later appeared her first novel The Valley of Decision of which she has written so revealingly. "I have often been asked whether the writing of The Valley of Decision was not preceded by months of hard work. I had never studied hard in my life and it was far too late to learn how when I began to write The Valley of Decision; but whenever I make this reply it is received with polite incredulity. The truth is that I have always found it hard to explain that gradual absorption into my pores of a myriad details—details of landscape, architecture, old furniture and eighteenth century portraits, the gossip of contemporary diarists and travellers, all vivified by repeated spring wanderings guided by Goethe and the Chevalier de Brasses, by Goldoni and Gozzi, Arthur Young, Dr. Burney and Ippolito Nievo, out of which the tale grew…. My years of intimacy with the Italian eighteenth century gradually and imperceptibly fashioned the tale and compelled me to write it; and whatever its faults—and they are many—it is saturated with the atmosphere I had so long lived in."

Three years later (1905) appeared The House of Mirth, that compelling yet touching satire on New York society within the memory of many who read it, and Mrs. Wharton's reputation as a fearless and veracious artist was made. To my mind The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome are her best books and in the order named. It is the fashion to speak glibly of Ethan Frome as her masterpiece and the book stands high on the list of books to be read by college students. But compact and thrilling as it is, I was told by the author and we have her words in print that far from thinking Ethan Frome her best novel, she was bored and exasperated when told that it was.

Because of our kindred tastes I was one of the group who from time to time visited at The Mount, delighting in its abundant hospitality and the sparkling talk we heard there. The group was small and of different ages. It was a trait of the hostess to like devotedly the people she fancied and disregard the outer world. In the best sense of the word she was fonder of the society of men than of women. Even then and oftener in the years to come I heard Mrs. Wharton spoken of as cold and unpatriotic. But invariably it was by women who did not approve of her analytic mind. In A Backward Glance she has alluded to her especial friends, but any memorial which did not refer to the debt which she felt she owed to Walter Berry would be inadequate. With a fervor from which there is not time to quote she tells how he taught her to write and safeguarded her literary style from her first volume of short stories to Twilight Sleep, the novel published in 1927 just before his death.

My last visit to The Mount seemed the happiest at the moment, for each of my hosts gave the impression of being in love with what they had builded, and Edith Wharton spoke gleefully of hoping to pay for a new terrace with the profits of her next book. Within three weeks I heard they had decided to uproot themselves and live abroad. The decision seemed a mystery at the time. Teddy Wharton was an attractive man, debonair, spruce, and amiable. They had many fastidious tastes in common, but he was not intellectual, and his wife had in this sense outgrown him. We have Edith Wharton's printed word for it that his growing ill health was the underlying cause of their emigration. On the other hand the lure of Europe and wider literary associations were fully understandable as one of her motives, and at the moment it seemed as if Teddy would find the boulevards of Paris thoroughly congenial. But he never fitted in and they bored him. On the other hand her eager intelligence derived fresh vigor and atmosphere from the old world and from the contacts her growing reputation brought her. After some wanderings they settled in Paris on the rue de Varenne, and here they remained, except for travels and a few summers spent at The Mount until after the great war. It was in Paris that Edith Wharton sought to assimilate all that was beautiful in the realms of artistic or literary knowledge and simultaneously to produce unfalteringly the brilliant series of novels and stories that have won her lasting fame. During the years of the war she initiated and conducted the bountiful splendid charities in aid of the wounded and tuberculous into which she threw herself with completely unselfish ardor. War weary and eager to escape from Paris, she fell in love in 1918 with a house in its ruined suburbs already named the Pavillon Colombe. "At last," as she says in her autobiography, "I was to have a garden again—and a big old kitchen garden as well, planted with ancient pear and apple trees, espaliered and in cordon, and a pool full of fat gold fish and silence and rest under the big trees. It was Saint Martin's summer after the long storm."

Here, and shortly after in her winter villa Ste. Claire Le Château at Hyères in the south of France, Edith Wharton settled down to the rounding out of her literary career. A Son at the Front was conceived in 1917 but not completed for four years. Meanwhile she wrote The Age of Innocence, of which Walter Berry, to whom she showed it chapter by chapter, said, "Yes; it's good. But of course you and I are the only people who will ever read it. We are the last people who can remember New York and Newport as they were then, and nobody else will be interested." But she writes, "It had its fate and that was to be one of my rare best-sellers." Often as she travelled, and paid visits, her literary industry was remarkable. Even so far as in the day at The Mount she wrote in bed with a pencil every morning until luncheon time. With this nothing was allowed to interfere. The rest of the day was free for what she would, motoring, gardening, and the joys of conversation or reading.

One may not follow her work further in detail. What is most significant in it from the beginning to the end was the exacting seriousness with which she visualized her art and the transcendent skill with which every situation and sentence was illuminated. My own friendship with her, which might have languished because of her residence abroad, was strengthened by our correspondence. In looking over my sheaf of letters I am impressed again by the warmth, frankness, and delightful gaiety which permeated whatever she wrote to those of whose sympathy she was sure. Once when two of her manuscripts had appeared in the same year, I referred to them as "your twin books" and drew from her a plausible explanation followed by the airy not unfamiliar couplet:

The rabbit has a pleasant face,
Its private life is its disgrace.

I do not pretend to have been within the fortunate circle of Mrs. Wharton's greatest friends, who beginning with Henry James formed a special group, and with whom she was so closely and avowedly allied, especially in her later years. For all of this group she had an intense affection. As far back as 1909 she wrote me: "It is curious that when I was younger and busy with my own slow development, I could subsist on myself indefinitely, with only a vague unformulated need of companionship de l'esprit; whereas now I find myself greatly stimulated by it, and consequently more and more dependent on having it for at least a few months of each year. Hence my great enjoyment of London and Paris."

It is to be said of this truly remarkable woman that she had two aims from the first, but especially after she transplanted herself. These aims were parallel and independent, but in the last analysis one was subsidiary to the other. Most of her compatriots knew next to nothing of Edith Wharton except for her literary creations. They saw her through the haze of distance writing in an ivory tower at the Pavillon Colombe or Ste. Claire Le Château. They did not realize that in the interval since they had first heard her name she had become one of the most cultivated women of her time. Ever athirst for the beauty in knowledge she had steeped herself in architectural and scenic lore, in familiarity with the masterpieces of foreign art and literature. She had delved with the aid of travel into all that was inspiring or recondite in the thought and scenery of a scholarly past.

All this for its own sake, and yet as a stimulus and aid to the literary portrayal on which her talent was bent. Although her surroundings were foreign and she had facility in the use of French,—as witness her Madame de Treymes (1907) and Voyages au Front (1916)—her countrymen and countrywomen and usually the American scene itself were her dearest concern. Her situations kept pace with the customs and idiosyncrasies of Americans of her own class which lent themselves to satire or to pathos when weighed in the balance of the eternal fitness of things. Edith Wharton stood in the van of her generation in its readiness to make fun of the smugness and conventions of a not remote past and to idealize the freedom and naturalness of a rapidly changing world. Yet no one had a keener pen for the foibles of the over-rich or self-indulgent intoxicated by freedom, or for the vulgarities of those who gloried in being self-made. Her women were apt to be more sharply drawn than her men, for the reason perhaps, as has been said, that her quasi heroes were generally men of comparative leisure with a small fixed income, or else artists. Except for the sketch of Abner E. Spragg in The Custom of the Country she never sought to draw the successful American business man of large affairs.

There was, too, a deeper vein,—one may fitly style it a reservoir,—in Edith Wharton's work, which calls for mention to do her full justice. To say that she belonged to no group or movement is true in a narrow sense, but faulty from the point of view of her own attitude. Groups or eccentric expression counted for nothing in her own conception of literature. For her, there was only one great current of the art of fiction which had its own universal laws from which there could be no deviation. There were the immortal story tellers,—among whom Tolstoi was perhaps her dearest idol,—and it was to be worthy of their company, if only to touch the hem of their method, that her genius directed her.

I have spoken of her learning. Here again one must recognize that she accumulated it not solely from her love of knowledge, but for the purposes of her art. Even if one were to assume that this was unconscious, there would be no denying the atmosphere of culture which enriched all her scene and supplied the mot juste to her characterization. Where was there anyone in the field of serious fiction of whom this was so significantly true?

A modern of the moderns in her sympathies, Edith Wharton is sure to rank very high not only for the perfection of her style, but for her fastidious reticence. Looking across the Atlantic from her ivory tower and fully cognizant of disintegrating standards, she veiled her situations so artistically that one could read between the lines what life really is without the aid of aggravating details. This is another way of saying that, though fearless to the core, she told her readers all that it was necessary to know without violating the canons of artistic truth, obedience to which she felt to be a requisite of great literature, the hue and cry of democracy to the contrary, notwithstanding.