enthusiasm is contagious

Some years ago I read A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton in anticipation of visiting her home, The Mount,  in Lenox, Massachusetts. Her home, in a wild state of repair and disrepair, was beautiful. It was fun to play with the servant’s bell and to imagine her pal Henry James, bored and hot at The Mount in the summertime, “between the electric fan clutched in his hand and the pile of sucked oranges at his elbow, he cowered there, a mountain of misery.”

She lived an interesting, if occasionally sad life, surrounded by great wealth, much supplemented by her writing success. Her first book was about the decoration of houses, and I was able to get a copy of it out of the Bridgeport Public Library. Later novels provide a window into the staid lives of America’s very wealthy. Her position within society, and her willingness to observe and report on it, make her many novels an interesting window into the America of that time.

Wharton liked to write in bed with her dogs at her side.

Yesterday was the anniversary of her death in France at the age of 75. She was a bookish girl who loved to read, “Whenever I try to recall my childhood, it is in my father’s library that it comes to life. I am squatting again on the thick Turkey rug, pulling open one after another the glass doors of the low bookcases and dragging out book after book in a secret ecstacy of communion. I say “secret” for I cannot remember ever speaking to anyone in these enraptured sessions.”

In 1885, at the age of 23, she married Teddy Wharton, a sportsman from Boston who shared little in common with her save an interest in travelling. She wrote, “I don’t know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.” She & Teddy built the Mount, which she called her “first real home” and they travelled extensively. She bought a motorcar two years later—a Pope-Hartford—and she liked to drive around the Berkshires in it. While as a child she had been bookish, precocious, and inclined to write, she had difficulty writing as an adult. She did not publish her first book of fiction until she was 36.

Teddy suffered from manic-depression, and the couple gradually grew apart. In 1908, he told her he had embezzled $50,000 from her trust fund to buy an apartment in Boston he was sharing with his mistress. In 1911, Wharton left the United States, but she did not seek a divorce until 1913. At the time, divorces were rare and expensive, as well as socially unacceptable. Wharton’s courage—which turns up in the subjects of her fiction—was tested in her decision to seek the divorce.

Some other quotes from her I adore:

Wharton on friends: “I enjoy the commerce with great minds as a painter enchanted by the glories of an Alpine Meadow rather than as a botanist cataloging its specimens.”

On Henry James, “To James’ intimates, however, these elaborate hesitancies, far from being an obstacle, were like a cobweb flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malice, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one’s feet.”

James was “at home in Boston, where the sense of the past has always been so much stronger than in New York.”

“My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.”