Edith Wharton did not write happy
endings. Her stories feature the lost chance; her characters yearn for someone
to join them in that innermost room of the soul. Whether Wharton achieved that
in her own life, and with whom, is a story as mysterious and captivating as any
of her fiction. [from a sign inside The Mount, Edith
Wharton’s home from 1902 to 1911]
Ethan Frome
was required reading when I was in high school. Since then I have read about
Wharton’s characters’ yearnings in The House
of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.
I admire Edith Wharton’s writing but knew little about the author, so we took a
tour of The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts.
We
began by walking a winding road past a rather elegant white stable building and
through beautiful forests and myrtle-covered knolls. Modern-art sculptures
along this long path in to the classic-architecture house looked odd on formal
grounds. There’s modern, abstract art inside the house, too. Our guide said the
designer justifies this by thinking Edith Wharton, if she were alive today,
would have supported modern artists. In my opinion, she probably would have
supported the artists themselves, but she may not have wanted her house to be a
modern art museum, whatever “modern” meant in various eras. She had strong
personal preferences and in fact, coauthored a book on home design. In
designing her house, Wharton rejected the style of her time (Victorian) to
preserve the classical symmetry and balance she preferred. For example, she placed
some front shutters with no windows behind them, just so the house front would
look balanced; in the interior, what looks like a double door is functionally a
single door because she wanted it to match what was opposite in the room. As
much as I like some of the modern sculptures, they seem out of place there.
Wharton
was born into the Jones family, old New York society, although not among the
absolute richest. She did not have formal schooling, but her father had an
extensive library, and she loved to read. She had traveled with her family in
Europe, was fluent in English, French, German, and Italian. She adapted what
she liked in Europe when she created The Mount, “a cottage of the gilded age,”
her own home, in 1902. She could afford electricity and indoor plumbing, a
Ping-Pong table and a telescope. The Mount had beautiful plaster relief art on
the ceilings and walls. I lost count of the number of fireplaces, but many of
them had carved scenes on the back panels. When the fire was lit, it
illuminated the scene on the back panel.
Wharton
had a close circle of friends, and Henry James was among regular guests. She
wrote nine books at The Mount (1902–1911). Although she posed for publicity
photos writing at her desk, she actually wrote her stories on her bed between 9
and 11 a.m. She balanced an ink pot on one knee, held a beloved dog under one
arm, and wrote with the other hand. She tossed completed pages on the floor. At
11, an assistant came in and picked up all the tossed papers, put them in
order, and typed them up.
In
all, Wharton wrote 38 published books. In 1920 The Age of Innocence earned a Pulitzer Prize. She was also an
accomplished gardener. During World War I she visited the front lines and fed
and housed 600 Belgian refugees. In recognition of her humanitarian efforts,
France awarded her the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
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