Art and Ardor Read online

  With her friends it was more difficult to invent claims; friendship has a way of resisting purchase, and she had to resort to ruses. When she wanted to release Morton Fullerton from the entangling blackmail of his former French mistress, she arranged with Henry James to make it seem as if the money were coming impersonally from a publisher. Fullerton having been, however briefly, her lover, it was hardly possible to hand over one hundred pounds and call it a “pension”; the object was not so much to keep Fullerton’s friendship free as to establish the illusion of such freedom. It was enough for the controlling end of the money tether to know the tether was there; and anyhow the tether had a witness and an accomplice. “Please consider,” James wrote, entering into the plot, “that I will play my mechanical part in your magnificent combination with absolute piety, fidelity, and punctuality.”

  But when it was James himself who came to be on the receiving end of the golden tether, he thundered against the tug of opulence, and the friendship was for a while impaired. The occasion was a proposal for his seventieth birthday: Edith Wharton, enlisting about forty moneyed Americans, thought to raise “not less than $5000,” the idea being “that he should choose a fine piece of old furniture, or something of the kind”—but to James it all smelled blatantly of charity, meddling, pity, and cash. Once he got wind of the plan he called it a “reckless and indiscreet undertaking,” and announced in a cable that he was beginning “instant prohibitive action. Please express to individuals approached my horror. Money absolutely returned.”

  It was returned, but within a few months James was hooked anyhow on that same line—hooked like Morton Fullerton, without being aware of it. This time the accomplice was Charles Scribner, who forwarded to James a phoney “advance” of eight thousand dollars intended to see him through the writing of The Ivory Tower—but the money was taken out of Wharton’s own advance, from another publisher, of fifteen thousand dollars. The reluctant agent of the scheme, far from celebrating “your magnificent combination,” saw it rather as “our fell purpose.” “I feel rather mean and caddish and must continue so to the end of my days,” Charles Scribner grumbled. “Please never give me away.” In part this sullenness may have been guilt over not having himself volunteered, as James’s publisher, to keep a master artist free from money anxiety, but beyond that there was a distaste for manipulation and ruse.

  This moral confusion about proprieties—whom it is proper to tip, and whom not—expressed itself in other strange substitutions. It was not only that she wanted to pay her lover and her friend for services rendered, sexual or literary—clearly she had little overt recognition of the quid pro quo uses of philanthropy. It was not only that she loved her maid Gross more than her mother, and Arthur White her “man” more than her brother—it is understood that voluntary entanglements are not really entanglements at all. But there were more conspicuous replacements. Lacking babies, she habitually fondled small dogs: there is an absurd photograph of Edith Wharton as a young woman of twenty-eight, by then five years into her marriage, with an angry-looking Pekingese on each mutton-leg shoulder; the animals, pressed against her cheeks, nearly obscure her face; the face is cautious and contemplative, as of one not wanting to jar precious things. A similar photograph shows her husband gazing straight out at us with rather empty pale eyes over a nicely trimmed mustache and a perfect bow tie—on his lap, with no special repugnance, he is holding three small dogs, two of them of that same truculent breed, and though the caption reads “Teddy Wharton with his dogs,” somehow we know better whose dogs they are. His body is detached; his expression, very correct and patient, barely hides—though Lewis argues otherwise—how he is being put upon by such a pose.

  Until late in life, she never knew a child. Effie, the little girl in The Reef, is a child observed from afar—she runs, she enters, she departs, she is sent, she is summoned, at one moment she is presented as very young, at another she is old enough to be having lessons in Latin. She is a figment of a child. But the little dogs, up to the end of Edith Whar-ton’s life, were always understood, always thought to have souls, always in her arms and in her bed; they were, Lewis says, “among the main joys of her being.” Drawing up a list of her “ruling passions” at forty-four, she put “Dogs” second after “Justice and Order.” At sixty-two she wrote in her journal of “the usness” in the eyes of animals, “with the underlying not-usness which belies it,” and meditated on their “eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.”

  The fellow feeling she had for the not-usness of her Pekingese she did not have for her husband, who was, from her point of view, also “not-us.” He too was inarticulate and mired in the slavery of a lesser intellect. He was a good enough man, interested (like his wife) in being perfectly clothed, vigorous and humorous and kind and compliant (so compliant that he once actually tried to make his way through James’s The Golden Bowl)—undistinguished in any jot, the absolute product of his class. He had no work to do, and sought none. One of Edith Wharton’s friends—a phrase instantly revealing, since her friends were practically never his; the large-hearted Henry James was nearly the only one to cross this divide—observed that Teddy Wharton’s “idleness was busy and innocent.” His ostensible employment was the management of his wife’s trust funds, but he filled his days with sports and hunting, and his glass with fine wine. Wine was the one thing he had a connoisseur’s familiarity with; and, of all the elegant good things of the world, wine was the one thing his wife disliked. When he was fifty-three he began to go mad, chiefly, it would seem, because he had married the wrong wife, with no inkling that she would turn out to be the wrong wife. Edith Newbold Jones at twenty-three was exactly what Edward Wharton, a dozen years older, had a right to expect for himself: she had heritage (her ancestor, Ebenezer Stevens, was an enterprising artillery officer in the Revolutionary War), she had inheritance (the Joneses owned the Chemical Bank of New York and much of the West Side). In brief, family and money. The dominant quality—what he had married her for, with that same idle innocence that took note only of the pleasantly obvious—was what Edith Wharton was afterward to call “tribe.” The Whartons and the Joneses were of the same tribe—old Protestant money—and he could hardly predict that his wife would soon replace him in the nuptial bed with a writing board. At first he was perplexed but proud: Louis Auchincloss quotes a description of Teddy Wharton from Consuelo Vanderbilt’s memoirs as “more of an equerry than an equal, walking behind [his wife] and carrying whatever paraphernalia she happened to discard,” and once (Lewis tells us), walking as usual behind her, Teddy exclaimed to one of her friends, “Look at that waist! No one would ever guess that she had written a line of poetry in her life.” She, meanwhile, was driven to writing in her journal, “Oh, Gods of derision! And you’ve given me over twenty years of it!” This outcry occurred immediately after she had shown her husband, during a wearying train journey, “a particularly interesting passage” in a scientific volume called Heredity and Variation. His response was not animated. “I heard the key turn in my prison-lock,” she recorded, in the clear metaphorical style of her fiction.

  A case can be made that it was she who turned the key on him. His encroaching madness altered him—he began to act oddly, out of character; or, rather, more in character than he had ever before dared. The equerry of the paraphernalia undertook to behave as if he were master of the paraphernalia—in short, he embezzled a part of the funds it had been his duty to preserve and augment. And, having been replaced in bed by a writing board, he suddenly confessed to his wife (or perhaps feverishly bragged) that he had recently gone to live with a prostitute in a Boston apartment, filling its remaining rooms with chorus girls; the embezzled funds paid for the apartment. The story was in the main confirmed. His madness had the crucial sanity of needs that are met.

  His wife, who—granted that philanthropy is not embezzlement—was herself capable of money ruse, and who had herself once rapturously fallen from merely spiritual friendship, locked him up
for it. Against his protestations, and those of his sister and brother, he was sent to a sanitorium. Teddy had stolen, Teddy had fallen; he was an adulterer. She had never stolen (though there is a robust if mistaken critical tradition that insists she stole her whole literary outlook from Henry James); but she had fallen, she was an adulteress. Teddy’s sexual disgrace was public; hers went undivulged until her biographer came upon it more than three decades after her death. But these sardonic parallels and opposites illumine little beyond the usual ironies of the pot and the kettle. What had all at once happened in Edith Wharton’s life was that something had happened. Necessity intervened, her husband was irrefutably a manic-depressive. He had hours of excitement and accusation; more often he was in a state of self-castigation. He begged her for help, he begged to be taken back and to be given a second chance. “. . . when you came back last year,” she told him, “I was ready to overlook everything you had done, and to receive you as if nothing had happened.” This referred to the Boston apartment; she herself had been in a London hotel with Fullerton at nearly the same time. In the matter of her money she was more unyielding. Replying to his plea to be allowed to resume the management of her trusts and property, she took the tone of a mistress with a servant who has been let go, and who is now discovered still unaccountably loitering in the house. “In order that no further questions of this kind should come up, the only thing left for me to do is to suggest that you should resign your Trusteeship. . . . Your health unfortunately makes it impossible for you to take any active part in the management of my affairs.” Gradually, over months, she evolved a policy: she did everything for him that seemed sensible, as long as it was cold-hearted. He was removed, still uncured, from the sanitorium, and subjected to a regime of doctors, trips, traveling companions, scoldings. In the end, when he was most sick and most desperate, she discarded him, handing him over to the doctors the way one hands over impeding paraphernalia to an equerry. She discarded him well before she divorced him; divorce, at that period and in her caste, took deliberation. She discarded him because he impeded, he distracted, he was a nuisance, he drained her, he wore her out. As a woman she was contemptuous of him, as a writer she fought off his interruptions. The doctors were more polite than Henry James, who characterized Teddy Wharton as able to “hold or follow no counter-proposal, no plan of opposition, of his own, for as much as a minute or two; he is immediately off—irrelevant and childish . . . one’s pity for her is at the best scarce bearable.”

  She too pitied herself, and justly, though she forgot to pity him. He had lost all trust in himself, whatever he said he timidly or ingratiatingly or furiously took back. He was flailing vainly after the last flashes of an autonomy his wife had long ago stripped from him. And during all that angry space, when she was bitterly engaged in fending off the partisan ragings of his family, and coldly supervising his medical and traveling routines, she, in the stern autonomy of her morning bed, was writing Ethan Frome, finishing The Reef, bringing off short stories. She could do all this because she did not look into her husband’s eyes and read there, as she had read in the eyes of her little dogs, the helpless pathos of “Why?” It was true that she did not and could not love him, but her virtue was always according to principle, not passion. Presumably she also did not love the French soldiers who were sick with tuberculosis contracted in the trenches of the First World War; nevertheless for them she organized a cure program, which she termed “the most vital thing that can be done in France now.” Whatever the most vital thing for Teddy might have been—perhaps there was nothing—she relinquished it at last. The question of the tubercular soldiers was, like all the claims on her spirit that she herself initiated, volitional and opportune. She had sought out these tragedies, they were not implicated in the conditions of her own life, that peculiar bed she had made for herself—“such a great big uncompromising 4-poster,” James called it. For the relief of tubercular soldiers and other good works, she earned a French medal, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. An arena of dazzling public exertion. But in the lesser frame of private mess she did nothing to spare her husband the humiliation of his madness. It is one thing to go mad, it is another to be humiliated for it. The one time in her life drift stopped dead in its trackless spume, and a genuine claim made as if to seize her—necessity, redder in tooth and claw than any sacrifice one grandly chooses for oneself—she turned away. For her, such a claim was the Gorgon’s head, to gaze on which was death.

  Writer’s death. This is something most writers not only fear but sweat to evade, though most do not practice excision with as clean a knife-edge as cut away “irrelevant and childish” Teddy from Edith Wharton’s life. “Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say—`Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state,” Emerson advised, “come not into their confusion.” And Mann’s Tonio Kroger declaims that “one must die to life to be utterly a creator.” This ruthless romantic idea—it cannot be lived up to by weaklings who succumb to conscience, let alone to love—is probably at bottom less romantic than pragmatic. But it is an idea very nearly the opposite of Wilson’s and Kazin’s more affecting view of Edith Wharton: that joylessness was her muse, that her troubles energized her for fiction—the stimulus of “some exceptional emotional strain,” according to Wilson, “so many personal maladjustments,” according to Kazin, which made the novelist possible. If anything made the novelist possible, it was the sloughing off of the sources of emotional strain and personal maladjustment. As for the parallel new-feminist opinion that a woman writes best when she risks “unbearable wisdoms,” it does not apply: what wisdom Edith Wharton found unbearable she chose not to bear.

  The rest was chatter. Having turned away from the Gorgon’s head, she spent the remainder of her life—indeed, nearly the whole of it—in the mainly insipid, sometimes inspired, adventure of elevated conversation. She had her friends. There were few women—whether because she did not encounter her equals among women, or because she avoided them, her biographer yields no hint. The majority were men (one should perhaps say “gentlemen”)—Lapsley, Lubbock, Berenson, Fullerton, Simmons, James, Bourget, D’Humières, Berry, Sturgis, Hugh-Smith, Maynard, Gregory, Grant, Scott . . . the list is longer still. Lewis fleshes out all these names brilliantly, particularly Berry and Fullerton; the great comic miraculous James needs no fleshing out. James was in a way afraid of her. She swooped down on him to pluck him away for conversation or sightseeing, and he matched the “commotion and exhaustion” of her arrivals against the vengeance of Bonaparte, Attila, and Tamerlane. “Her powers of devastation are ineffable,” he reported, and got into the habit of calling her the Angel of Devastation. She interrupted his work with the abruptness of a natural force (she might occur at any time) and at her convenience (she had particular hours for her work, he had all hours for his). He read her novels and dispatched wondrous celebrating smokescreens of letters (“I applaud, I mean I value, I egg you on”) to hide the insufficiency of his admiration. As for her “life,” it was a spectacle that had from the beginning upset him: her “desolating, ravaging, burning and destroying energy.” And again: “such a nightmare of perpetually renewable choice and decision, such a luxury of bloated alternatives.” “What an incoherent life!” he summed it up. Lewis disagrees, and reproaches James for partial views and a probable fear of strong women; but it may be, on all the lavish evidence Lewis provides, that the last word will after all lie with drift, exactly as James perceived it in her rushing aimlessness aimed at him.

  Before Lewis’s landmark discovery of the Wharton-Fullerton liaison, Walter Van Rensselaer Berry—Wharton’s distant cousin, an international lawyer and an aristocrat—was commonly regarded as the tender center and great attachment of her life. Lewis does not refute this connection, though he convincingly drains it of sexual particularity, and gives us the portrait of a conventionally self-contained dry-hearted lifelong bachelor, a man caught, if not in recognizable drift, then in another sort of i
nconclusiveness. But Walter Berry was Edith Wharton’s first literary intellectual—a lightning bolt of revelation that, having struck early, never lost its electrical sting. Clearly, she fed on intellectuals—but in a withdrawn and secretive way: she rarely read her work aloud, though she rejoiced to hear James read his. She brooded over history and philosophy, understood everything, but was incapable in fiction or elsewhere of expressing anything but the most commonplace psychology. This was, of course, her strength: she knew how human beings behave, she could describe and predict and surprise. Beyond that, she had a fertile capacity for thinking up stories. Plots and permutations of plots teemed. She was scornful of writers who agonized after subject matter. Subjects, she said, swarmed about her “like mosquitoes,” until she felt stifled by their multiplicity and variety.