Edith Wharton
Hermione Lee Chatto & Windus, 853pp, £25
ISBN 0701166657
Years before Edith Wharton published her first novel in her mid-thirties, she wrote a book with her interior-decorator friend Ogden Codman. Called The Decoration of Houses, it made a case for what Hermione Lee calls "the morality of taste", against the hideous and bogus historical hotchpotch, the fringed sofas, Louis Quinze dining suites and acres of gilt that characterised the homes of wealthy Americans in the 19th century.
Homes were always important to Wharton and her fictions contain detailed descriptions of houses, their furniture and atmosphere. Bolstered by vast wealth, first inherited and then earned by writing, she was a prodigious home-maker, designing and decorating each house down to the last detail. But she was also concerned with the larger question of cultural belonging. At the end of this marvellous, densely detailed and sympathetic biography, Lee visits Wharton's grave in the cemetery in Versailles and finds it neglected and litter-strewn, which leads her to wonder if this is the fate of "the exile in a strange land". Despite a lifetime's affiliation with France, the honour, influence and friendships that she won there, and her creation of two beautiful houses, Wharton never quite shook off the distance of the wealthy foreign visitor.
This is one of the many contradictions and tensions that Wharton explored in her novels, and which she herself embodied. In what Lee calls "the perpetual battle between tradition and change" that is the theme of all her fiction, Wharton was both a despiser and an ironic observer of the stifling conventions that repressed the American upper classes, and a rigid upholder of form, given to chilly put-downs of her nouveaux-riches neighbours in Massachusetts. In England, she turned down a chance to meet fellow novelist May Sinclair in favour of dinner with the Duchess of Sutherland; yet, in Paris, she refused to meet Proust because she considered him a snob. With publishers she was bossy, writing sharp letters about advances and sales; yet she recoiled from the vulgar business of self-promotion.
Wharton's hauteur was probably largely due to shyness: her correspondence (alas, much of it destroyed) shows her as a warm, amusing, loyal friend. In a chapter on her friendship with Henry James (this book rescues Wharton's novels from their undeserved reputation as pale imitations of James's), we learn that she felt at ease in the waspish company of his circle of clever young men. They teased her, though, finding her whirlwind energies tiring; in a letter James wrote while Wharton was staying with him at Lamb House in Rye, he marked next to the date "Reign of Terror". There was something lonely about Wharton, sealed in her luxurious motor cars and her magnificent houses. Her one great love affair, when her marriage to the genial philistine sportsman Teddy Wharton had foundered on incompatibility and his mental illness, was unsatisfactory. Morton Fullerton was evasive, bisexual and caddish, but he had an astonishing allure for women; Wharton, in her mid-forties but an innocent when it came to sex, was susceptible.
The most important thing about Wharton, however, was her commitment to her work. She could not stop writing, and produced some of her most famous novels in the last decade of her life. This is an intensely writerly biography in the sense that it gives space to Lee's astute readings of Wharton's novels but is also concerned with the workings of the writer's life: how life bleeds into art; the creation of the daily order and regularity of the writing life. A great deal of Wharton's interest in homes and houses was a need to find the space for writing, the right place.
Wharton's reading was a vital component: from her childhood with her indolent, wealthy New Yorker parents, she set herself to read wide ly and deeply, marking, annotating and rereading books on science, philosophy and literature in three languages. She left details of her working methods, too, notebooks in which plots are delineated and characters worked out and drafts of pages corrected and recorrected. Wharton's last two homes in France, one just outside Paris and a château in the south near Marseilles, were the loveliest and most splendid of all - monuments to a working life, an exacting aesthetic and the search, in all sorts of ways, for home.
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