IF THE MYTH THAT creative genius is the exclusive preserve of the young, the beautiful and the radical — begun by the Romantics and seized upon by today’s publishers — needs refuting, it can be done by the life of the American novelist Edith Wharton.
Hermione Lee’s biography could take as a subtitle “Portait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman”, for it was not until then that Wharton — rich, privileged and plain — began her most vital creative and emotional flowering.
Lee’s last chapter describes, with a late, welcome touch of irony, a visit that she made to Wharton’s final home, the Pavillon Colombe at Saint-Brice, northwest of Paris, and to her burial place at the Cimetière des Gonards, at Versailles.
Wharton’s home has been preserved in some style by its present owners, the Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein, although the Princess has replaced Wharton’s treasured white dahlias with white peacocks. The author’s grave, however, is sadly neglected, covered with weeds, bottles and dead flowers — a melancholy state for a woman who spent each All Souls Day remembering her dead.
Lee finds in this mixture of grandeur and neglect a reflection of the fall and rise of Wharton’s posthumous reputation. Its long decline began in her lifetime, when her work became considered too old-fashioned and too racy for a public wanting the bright, the modern, the wholesome and the emotionally uncomplicated, until a tentative recovery in the mid-1960s with the release of new papers and appointment of a biographer.
Growing interest in women writers spurred an appetite for new editions of her books and the publication of more biographical material helped to rescue her reputation from being overshadowed by her friend Henry James.
The final buffing of her new lustre came in the 1990s, with the release of films of her novels, such as Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. Belatedly, Wharton became a star. Perhaps her shade was pleased by this posthumous vindication, but Lee also finds in the mixed fates of the last home and burial place of a writer to whom places mattered so passionately, resonances not just of her writing but of her personal life. In them she finds concentrated the essence of social grandeur and personal loneliness that was a catalyst to Wharton’s creativity.
Wharton was born on January 24, 1862, into a period of change as astonishing as the Renaissance. Entering a world of corsets and carriages, she died 75 years later, on August 11, 1937, having survived a world war in which she served with distinction in her adopted country of France, and on the brink of another that would sweep away the last remnants of the culture in which she had grown up.
Wharton’s background was fortunate for a writer — one of social privilege and a certain emotional deprivation. She was the late, probably unexpected third child of oldish parents, with two brothers.
Her socially ambitious mother seems to have been mystified by her plain, talented daughter; her more sympathetic father led the family on a series of grand tours that ensured that Edith, or “Pussy”, Jones grew up as much a European as an American, despite the family’s fashionable New York address and solid position in patrician New York society.
Wharton’s fiction echoes with the reticences, unspoken longings and closed emotional doors of her upbringing. As a child, she preferred making up stories to more conventional amusements, although her career as a writer did not really begin until she was 37.
As a young woman, her first attachment faltered. Soon after, a more serious closeness to the cultivated and eligible Walter Berry, was to end although he remained a friend for life. Edith eventually married a man from her brothers’ social circle, Teddy Wharton, who appears as adequate, but without redeeming personal qualities: a mixture of philistinism and feeble-mindedness.
Contained until her divorce, first by distant parenthood and then by an uncongenial, childless marriage, her creative and emotional life turned in on itself to dwell on loss, thwarted passion and unrequited longing.
Wharton’s sense of longing found expression in good housekeeping; in creating and writing about model homes for her ambitious peers. She took to travel writing and co-wrote a manual on interior decoration. Her burgeoning grand dame-ishness — which attracted the ridicule, as well as the fondness, of her friends — translated fluently into fiction, made her financially independent and secured her the intimacy of a gossipy Euro-American coterie — James, Jean Cocteau, Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark and others.
But none of her salon friends, or her devoted servants, liked her unequivocally. The shifting population of house guests exchanged bitchy letters about her controlling tendencies; the servants proved fallible and even the most faithful, her housekeeper, succumbed to a dementia in which she feared her mistress. Even her doted-upon dogs had a tendency to expire.
Through all this Wharton conducted herself with indefatigable self-control, appearing seriously disturbed only by a passionate love affair in her mid-forties, soon after The House of Mirth had made her a household name, with a second-rate seducer, Morton Fullerton, and by the final collapse of her marriage.
But the capacity of second-rate love affairs to translate into first-rate fiction is remarkable — and Wharton recovered, continuing to write until the end of her long life.
Lee takes an academic approach to her narrative. The result is extremely diligent, but springs to life mainly where literary criticism is undertaken. Lee is a confident and vivid critic, at her most alive when writing about writing.
When writing about people, she is more diffident, displaying an awareness of earlier biographers and a reticence about her own interpretations that make the earlier parts of her book — until the middle years when Wharton’s life so unexpectedly picks up momentum — slightly lacking in the empathy that brings her final chapter so vividly to life.
One might compare Lee’s painstaking style with the brilliantly intuitive approach of, say, Claire Tomalin. Other biographies of Wharton may be written in which her solitariness, her sensibility, her erotic drive and its sublimation into friendship, are more daringly integrated into a more boldly interpretative narrative.
But any such attempt will be deeply indebted to the sheer scholarliness of Lee’s epic and definitive biography.
