Edith Wharton: The Sense of Harmony
(bright, airy
instrumental music)
– [Voiceover] I have
always seen the world
as a series of pictures, more
or less harmoniously composed.
And the wish to make
the picture prettier,
was, as nearly as
I can define it,
the form my feminine
instinct of pleasing took.
– [Voiceover] Edith
Wharton was a cosmopolitan,
in an age when cosmopolitanism
was still a privilege
of the elite.
She crossed the
Atlantic 66 times.
Henry James called her
“The Pendulum Woman”.
Nonetheless, Edith
Wharton was obsessed
with the home and
its decoration.
A recurrent theme in her work.
She took great pride
in the the building
and garden design of
her own home, The Mount,
in Lenox, Massachusetts.
And the furnishing,
redecoration,
and creation of gardens at
her other homes in France.
Edith Wharton was born
in New York in 1862,
but as a child she spent
six years in Europe.
– [Voiceover] The depreciation
of American currency
at the close of the Civil War,
had so reduced my
father’s income,
that, in common with many of
his friends and relations,
he had gone to
Europe to economize,
But I did not learn
till much later
to how prosaic a cause I owed
my early years in Europe.
Happy misfortune, which gave
me for the rest of my life
that background of beauty
and old established order.
I did not know how
deeply I had felt
the nobility and harmony of
the great European cities,
till our steamer was
docked at New York.
– [Voiceover] The memory of
the European sense of form
leaves its imprint on
Edith Wharton’s first book,
The Decoration of Houses.
Written in collaboration with
architect and interior
decorator, Ogden Codman,
and published by
Scribner’s Sons.
The illustrated description,
which juxtaposes places
as varied as the bathroom of
the Pitti Palace in Florence,
the furnishings of the Salon
de Malachite at Versaille,
the ceiling of the Palais
de Justice at Rennes,
And Edith Wharton’s own,
practical intelligence,
inaugurates a distinctly
American style.
The Mount, the house with
Edith Wharton built in 1901,
follows the principles laid out
in The Decoration of Houses.
– [Voiceover] Where
there is a fine prospect,
windows made of a single plate
of glass are often preferred.
But it must be remembered that
the subdivisions of a sash,
while obstructing the view,
serve to establish
a relation between
the inside of the house,
and the landscape,
making the latter what
it logically ought to be,
a part of the wall decoration.
– [Voiceover] Edith Wharton’s
first published novel,
The Valley of Decision,
was set in Italy,
and was issued almost
at the same time
as The Wings of the
Dove, by Henry James.
– [Voiceover] Lamb House
Rye, August 17th, 1902.
Dear Mrs. Wharton.
My lately having read
The Valley of Decision,
read it with such
high appreciation,
and received so
deep an impression.
But after all, let it
suffer the wrong of being
crudely hinted is
my desire earnestly,
tenderly, intelligently,
to admonish you.
While you are
young, free, expert,
by which I mean you are in
full command of the situation.
Admonish you, I say, in favor
of the American subject,
there it is ’round
you, don’t pass it by.
The immediate, the real,
the hours, the yores.
The novelist that it waits for.
What I would say in
a word is, profit,
be warned by my awful example
of exile in ignorance.
All the same, do New York.
The firsthand
account is precious.
Henry James.
– [Voiceover] 16 years
earlier, Edith Wharton
had met Henry James
for the first time.
It was in Paris, with
some Boston friends of
Teddy Wharton, Edith’s husband,
also a Bostonian
like Henry James.
– [Voiceover] I could
hardly believe that
such a privilege
could befall me.
And I could think of only
one way of deserving it;
To put on my newest
Doucet dress,
and try to look my prettiest.
I was not more than 25, and
those were the principles
by which I had been brought up.
– [Voiceover] But the
master noticed neither
the Doucet dress, nor two
years later in Venice,
Edith Wharton’s new hat.
– [Voiceover] Henry James
noticed neither the hat,
nor its wearer.
And the second of our meetings
fell as flat as the first.
As for the date of the meeting
which finally drew us together,
we could neither
of us ever recall
when or where that happened.
It was as if we had
always been friends.
– [Voiceover] In 1904, the
Whartons visit Henry James
at Lamb House Rye, in England.
They take an automobile trip
in the Panhard-Levassor,
that Edith Wharton was one of
the first to have purchased.
The following summer, Henry
James visits The Mount,
and they continue
their car trips.
This time, through
the Berkshires.
Henry James, who
called Edith Wharton
the “Angel of Devastation”,
nicknamed her automobile
“The Chariot of Fire”.
With The House of Mirth,
Edith Wharton followed
the advice of Henry James,
and did New York.
Her memory, which she herself
characterized as photographic,
enabled her to accurately
depict the upper-class milieu,
with which she was so familiar.
And helped to secure
the immense success
of her first best seller.
The author was 43.
– [Voiceover] Dear Mr. Scribner,
it is a very beautiful
thought to me
that 80,000 people should want
to read The House of Mirth.
And if the number should
ascend to 100,000,
I fear my pleasure would
exceed the bounds of decency.
– [Voiceover] On the same
day, Edith Wharton writes
to Boston biographer
and historian,
William Roscoe Thayer.
– [Voiceover] The Mount,
Lenox Massachusetts,
November 11, 1905.
Dear Professor Thayer,
I am particularly,
and quite inordinately pleased
with what you say of my
having, to your mind,
been able to maintain
my reader’s interest
in a group of persons so
intrinsically uninteresting,
except as a social
manifestation.
I knew that my great
difficulty lay there,
and if you think I
have surmounted it,
I shall go about
with a high head.
But, I must protest,
and emphatically,
against the suggestion
that I have “stripped”
New York society.
New York society is
still amply clad,
and a little corner of
its garment that I lifted,
was meant to show only that
little, atrophied organ,
the group of idle
and dull people,
that exists in any big
and wealthy social body.
If it seems more
conspicuous in New York
than in an old civilization,
it is because the whole
social organization with us
is so much smaller
and less elaborate.
And if it is more
harmful in its influence,
it is because fewer
responsibilities attach to money
with us than in other societies.
Forgive this long discourse.
But you see, I had to come to
the defense of my own town.
Which, I assure you,
has many mansions
outside of the little
House of Mirth.
Sincerely yours, Edith Wharton.
– The particular society
that she described, in 1905,
when there was date
of the House of Mirth,
was the usually
second generation,
or even third generation
of wealthy post
Civil War tycoons.
Who, what Edith Wharton called
“The Lords of Pittsburgh”.
Who had come from
Pittsburgh and built
great European chateaus
up and down Fifth Avenue,
and were enjoying a great,
extraordinary expanse
of new wealth.
Not unlike what we have
in some places today.
And that society,
which was a mixture
of the old, brownstone
knickerbocker families,
who had been in New York
for 100 years or more,
and these new rather brash,
much wealthier types,
was a particular society
that she was really
almost the first to
describe, I think.
She knew it well, and
described it magnificently.
Lily Bart is almost the
history, in The House of Mirth,
of a beautiful woman, a
staggeringly beautiful woman,
it’s her beauty
that does her in.
And it is constantly
described, all during the book,
in wonderful,
wonderful chapters,
that give the sense of this
remarkable woman as she
falls from one rung of the
social ladder to the other,
unable to pick herself up.
Horrifying people,
what they do to her,
because of her beauty.
It’s almost as if they were
a savage bunch of hounds,
trying to tear a beautiful
beautiful deer that’s escaping.
And I think that it’s
notorious that Edith Wharton,
who was rather a
plain woman herself,
wanted very much to
have been beautiful.
There are those who
say, one woman told me,
she said, “You know,
she would rather,
“she would have given all
her novels to be beautiful.”
A terrible thought!
– [Voiceover] In 1908,
The House of Mirth
is translated into French
and published in Paris,
with a preface by Paul Bourget.
The same year, the Whartons
rent the Vanderbilts’ apartment
at 58 Rue de Varenne, in Paris.
When Edith Wharton moves
permanently to France,
a few years later, she
remains on the Rue de Varenne,
this time at number 53.
Edith Wharton had spoken French
since she was four years old.
But her French, acquired
and maintained by reading
Courtney and
Labourier, was so pure,
that the writer Paul
Bourget considered it
impeccable Louis Quatorze.
The first pages
of Edith Wharton’s
most famous book, Ethan Frome,
set in a snowbound village
of Western Massachusetts,
where insanity, incest, and
slow mental and moral starvation
were hidden away behind the
paintless wooden housefronts
of the long village streets,
were written as a lesson to
improve her French expressions.
The French lesson was lost.
But that summer at The Mount,
catching a distant
glimpse of bare mountain,
Edith Wharton
remembered Ethan Frome,
which she wrote the
following winter in Paris.
– [Voiceover] It’s snowing in
Normandy like in Ethan Frome.
Never had I seen
such a heavy fall.
Andrí Gide wrote
to Edith Wharton.
– Ethan Frome I think
shows the powerful presence
of Hawthorne in her imagination.
It is that haunted,
New England atmosphere,
that Hawthorne gave
time and again.
Ethan Frome as a name
seems to echo a little
one of the most famous names
in Hawthorne’s short stories,
Ethan Brand, which, they’re
both New England names,
but he was in her imagination.
And one of the
paradoxical signs,
is the fact that she never
spoke very warmly about him,
I think because she had to
fend him off a little bit.
– Of course, many people think
Ethan Frome is her finest book.
And it stands absolutely
out of the others,
in that subject material
is totally different,
it’s a tour de force
about people with whom
she had nothing personal to do,
but whom she viewed in
Lenox Massachusetts,
and she was very thorough
in whom she read about.
And it’s a perfectly
extraordinary story,
an amazing, amazing job.
To me, it doesn’t have
the deep conviction
of the books where
she’s writing about
people and families that
she knew so intimately,
and were a part of herself.
– [Voiceover] Written in 1912,
The Custom of the Country
takes place between
New York and Paris.
During a terrible New York
heat wave, Ralph Marvell,
husband of The Custom of
the Country’s heroine,
Undine Spragg, and member
of a stodgy New York family,
takes the subway home from
his work in Wall Street
to Waverly Place.
– [Voiceover] “He stood at
the corner of Wall Street,
“looking up and down his
hot summer perspective.
“He noticed the swirls of dust
“and the cracks of the pavement,
“the rubbish in the gutters,
the ceaseless stream
“of perspiring faces that
poured by under tilted hats.
“He found himself next,
slipping northward between
“the glazed walls of the subway,
“another languid crowd
in the seats about him,
“and the nasal yelp of the
stations ringing through the car
“like some repeated ritual wail.
“The blindness within
him seemed to have
“intensified his
physical perceptions.
“His sensitiveness to
the heat, the noise,
“the smells of the
disheveled, midsummer city.
“But combined with the acuter
perception of these offenses,
“was a complete
indifference to them.
“As though he were
some vivisected animal,
“deprived of the power
of discrimination.
(subway cars screeching)
“Now he had turned
into Waverly Place,
“and was walking westward
toward Washington Square.
“At the corner, he pulled
himself up, saying half aloud,
“‘The office, I ought
to be at the office.’
“He listened again, and this
time he distinctly heard
“the old servant’s
steps on the stairs.
“He passed his left hand
over the side of his head,
“and down the curve of
the skull behind the ear.
“He said to himself, ‘My wife.
“‘This will make it
all right for her.’
“And a last flash of irony
twitched through him.
“Then he felt again,
more deliberately,
“for the spot he wanted,
“and put the muzzle of
his revolver against it.”
– [Voiceover] Undine
Spragg has just returned
to Paris from the country,
and doesn’t learn of her
husband’s suicide immediately.
(bright, airy
instrumental music)
– [Voiceover] Edith Wharton
isn’t always included
as an American
writer who deals with
the international theme, but
she treats it again and again.
She’s fascinated by it.
– [Voiceover] “As she looked
out at the thronged street,
“on which the summer light
lay like a blush of pleasure,
“she felt herself naturally
akin to all the bright
“and careless
freedom of the scene.
“She had been away from
Paris for two days,
“and the spectacle before
her seemed more rich
“and suggestive after her
brief absence from it.
“Her senses luxuriated in
all its material details.
“The brilliant shops.
“The novelty and daring
of the women’s dresses.
“The piled up colors of
the ambulant flower carts.
“The appetizing expanse of
the fruiterer’s windows.
“All the surface
sparkle and variety
“of the inexhaustible
streets of Paris.”
– In The Custom of the Country,
where Undine Spragg, who’s
a wonderful creation,
she’s all brains and
red hair and energy.
She has a number of husbands,
and one of them is
an Old New Yorker,
another one is this
French aristocrat,
so she’s able to
contrast the values
of Undine, the Midwesterner,
with the values of Old New York,
and then the French values.
The international theme
was a very personal theme
for Edith Wharton
because she herself
was searching for
another place to live.
And of course ultimately
she chooses France.
– [Voiceover] In France,
Edith Wharton frequents
literary salons,
introduced by Paul Bourget,
who was then at the
height of his popularity.
She had met him in
Newport in 1893.
She is regularly
invited to the salon of
Rosa de Fiche Gamme, where she
once again sees Henry James.
The portraitist
Jacques-Emile Blanche
was one of the first friends
Edith Wharton made in Paris.
At his house in Auteuil, or
his manor house in Offranville
on the Normandy coast,
there was a constant
coming and going of people
like D’Aguilef, and Andrí Gide.
– [Voiceover] I used
to go there often,
and the first time I went,
I met a young man of 19,
who at that time vibrated with
all the youth in the world.
This was Jean Cocteau.
One beautiful afternoon,
toward the end of June 1914,
I stopped at the gate of Jacques
Blanche’s house at Auteuil,
an exceptionally gay season
was drawing to its close.
The air was full of new
literary and artistic emotions.
And that dust of ideas with
which the atmosphere of Paris
is always laden, sparkled
like motes in the sun.
I joined at party at
one of the tables,
and as we sat there, a
cloud shadow swept over us,
abruptly darkening bright
flowers and bright dresses.
“Haven’t you heard?
“The Archduke Ferdinand
assassinated at Sarajevo!
“Where is Sarajevo?”
– [Voiceover] At the
onset of World War I,
the massive departure
of men for the front
leaves many women and children
without means of subsistence.
Edith Wharton chooses
to stay in Europe,
and a friend, the president
of the French Red Cross,
asks her to organize
a sewing room
for the women workers
of her neighborhood.
Edith Wharton succeeds
in raising 12,000 francs
from her wealthy
expatriate friends.
Someone lends her a
large, empty apartment
on the Boulevard Saint Germain.
The sewing room which
soon has 90 seamstresses,
procures orders for
elegant lingerie,
especially from America.
At a time when
women were excluded
from diplomatic and
political activity,
Edith Wharton’s
personal contacts
already had allowed
her to play the part
of unofficial U.S. Ambassador.
In 1910, when former
President Theodore Roosevelt,
an old family friend, comes
to Paris on an official visit,
he asks her to organize a
reception for him at her home.
Early in 1915, the
French Red Cross
comes to Edith Wharton
again for help.
this time, to report on the
needs of some military hospitals
near the front.
Foreign correspondents
were still excluded
from the war zone,
but Jules Cambon,
the Secretary of Foreign
Affairs, whom she had met
in Washington when he
was French Ambassador,
talked it over with the Chief
of Staff of General Joffre.
– [Voiceover] Monsieur Cambon
succeeded in convincing him
that even if in my
ignorance I should stumble
on some important
military secret,
there would be little
risk of its betrayal
in articles which
couldn’t possibly be
ready for publication
until several months later.
I was given leave to visit
the rear of the
whole fighting line,
all the way from
Dunkerque to Belfort.
And did so, in the course
of six expeditions.
– [Voiceover] Edith Wharton’s
friend, Walter Berry,
accompanies her on all
of her expeditions.
She evokes the first in
a letter to Henry James.
– [Voiceover] Grand
Hotel Du Coq Hardi,
Verdun, February 28, 1915.
Dearest Cher Maitre,
we got here about four
and presented ourselves
at the Citadel,
where the officer
who took our papers
had read The House of Mirth,
and turned out to be
Henri de Jouvenel,
Collette’s husband.
He said, “You are the first
woman to arrive at Verdun”.
The cannon booms continuously
about 10 miles away.
(distant cannons booming)
Grand Hotel Nancy, May 14, 1915.
Dearest Cher Maitre,
I don’t dare write you except
when I am scaling heights
or exploring trenches.
And as I am yearning
for news of you,
I’ve asked and obtained,
a permit for the front
in Lorraine and the Vosges.
(distant bombing)
Yesterday we went to see
the incredibly destroyed
Gerberviller, where we spent
a very interesting hour
with Monsieur Liegeay,
who acted as mayor.
And who took us over
the lamentable ruins
of what must have been his
once charming old house.
– [Voiceover] On June
28th, 1915, Edith Wharton
writes to her publisher,
Charles Scribner.
– [Voiceover] Dear Mr.
Scribner, I have been given such
unexpected opportunities for
seeing things at the front,
that you might perhaps care
to collect the articles.
We were in Cassel last
week when it was bombarded,
and I was allowed Ypres, which
no one is allowed to go to,
as the road between
Poperinghe and Ypres
was continually under fire.
Some months ago I told you
that you could count on
the completion of my novel
by the spring of 1916.
But I thought then that the
war would be over by August.
– Summer, although it was
written during the war,
about 1917 perhaps,
had nothing whatever to
do with the war in Europe.
She was in the middle
of it in her Paris home.
Well, this story takes place
in western Massachusetts,
and on a, halfway up a mountain,
terrible mountain where the
young woman’s mother dies.
I think the,
the connection was,
Edith’s own experience
through the refugees from
Belgium and elsewhere
of people who were
shattered and sick,
and frightened and
penniless and hungry.
And some of that
condition is repeated in,
Charity it’s a little bit,
she hasn’t got any money,
but more her mother,
who’s in terrible shape.
I think that sense that Edith
Wharton’s experience of it
and compassion about
it, I think show up.
– You get a sense that
she’s being healed
from her experience
during the war,
where she worked terribly
hard, she exhausted herself,
and also she was so
aware of the destruction
of the landscape in
the North of France,
by the fighting,
and the ruining of the
different French villages.
And she saw the
French village really,
as an example of a
kind of a civilization
that she admired so much.
– [Voiceover] Paris,
August 22, 1915.
These poor children
we are caring for
have been rescued from
almost certain death.
Death from disease, from hunger,
or from enemies’ shells.
Many of their companions died
before the work of rescue began.
Some are still lying
in hospitals, maimed
by shot and shell.
Some were found in the
trenches with the soldiers.
– [Voiceover] To assemble
The Book of the Homeless,
Edith Wharton takes it
upon herself to gather
poems, articles,
drawings, and portraits,
by benevolent artistic
and literary celebrities
as diverse as Igor
Stravinsky, Andrí Gide,
Thomas Hardy, Henry James,
Max Beerbohm, and Jean Cocteau.
Rodin gives a watercolor.
And Renoir donates the
portrait of his son,
injured at war.
The only real vacation
that Edith Wharton takes
during the war consists
of a trip to Morocco,
at the invitation
of General Lyautey.
– [Voiceover] Yesterday
afternoon, Madame Lyautey
took me to the exhibition,
to see the reception
of the sultan.
It was very picturesque to see
him dashing away afterward,
preceded by his garde noire.
– [Voiceover] The travel
essays inspired by this trip
were collected in a
volume called In Morocco.
The chapter most
praised by the critics
was about two harems which
Edith Wharton visited,
accompanying General
Lyautey’s wife.
Places inaccessible to
male Western travelers.
The war had taken too much
of a toll on Edith Wharton
not to have had an
influence on her writing.
– [Voiceover] A study
of the world at the rear
during a long war seemed
to me worth doing.
But before I could
settle down to this tale,
before I could begin
to deal objectively
with the stored up
emotions of those years,
I had to get away from
the present altogether.
And though I began
planning and brooding
over A Son at the Front in 1917,
it was not finished
until four years later.
Meanwhile, I found
a momentary escape
in going back to my
childish memories
of a long-vanished America,
and wrote The Age of Innocence.
I showed it chapter by
chapter to Walter Berry,
and when he had finished
reading it, he said,
“Yes, it’s good.
“But of course, you and
I are the only people
“who will ever read it.
“We are the last people
left who can remember
“New York and Newport
as they were then.
“And nobody else
will be interested.”
– [Voiceover] The Age of
Innocence was a bestseller.
It is set in the elegant
Old New York into which
Edith Newbold Jones, later
Edith Wharton, was born.
– I think her best book
is The Age of Innocence.
Where she describes the
New York of her childhood,
not the New York that
she left to go to Paris,
which was the New York
of The House of Mirth,
but in a nostalgic mood
after her continued,
her very hard war work,
and exhausted after
the First World War,
she was then, rather began
to wonder if the victory
for which she’d worked, and
which millions had died,
had not been obtained
at too high a price.
Because she found the
world of the 1920s
very noisy and vulgar,
and a bad thing.
And so the stuffy,
conservative New York
of the post Civil War,
from which she had fled,
she began to see in
a different light.
She saw it as having
standards and disciplines,
and taste, that
no longer existed.
And out of that
mood of nostalgia,
she then wrote this remarkable,
The Age of Innocence.
– [Voiceover] Edith
Wharton’s parents,
George Frederick
and Lucretia Jones,
were the descendants of
English and Dutch colonists
who made their fortunes
in ship-building,
banking, and real estate.
Her great-grandfather,
Ebenezer Stevens,
played a key role in
the American Revolution.
– [Voiceover] I was
told, “There’s your
great-grandfather.”
The tall thin young man
in the sober uniform,
mounted at the head of
an artillery regiment
didn’t impress me very much.
– [Voiceover] The Age of
Innocence begins in 1872,
the year of the Jones’
return to New York,
to their house on 25th Street.
Edith is 10 years old,
and has just completed
a 30,000 word novella,
entitled “Fast and Loose”.
It was a comic send-up
of English romances.
– [Voiceover] It began like
this: “Oh, how do you do
“Mrs. Brown? Said Mrs. Tomkins.
“If only I had known
you were going to call,
“I should have tidied
up the drawing room.”
Timorously, I submitted
this to my mother,
who returned it with
the icy comment,
“Drawing rooms are always tidy.”
– [Voiceover] But a few
year later at Newport,
Lucretia Jones makes up for it
by publishing at her
own expense, without
the author’s name,
a series of 29
poems, some original,
others translated from
German, by the young Edith.
When Edith Wharton
turns 16, her parents,
worried about seeing their
daughter always busy reading,
decide to have her come
out one year early.
– The Age of Innocence,
I think myself that
the phrase is meant to be
both descriptive and ironic.
From the point of view of 1920,
looking back to the
1870s, when Edith herself
was 10, 12 years old,
that age has a certain
innocence to it.
A certain lack of sophistication
in social affairs.
A certain belief that
everything will be all right.
Innocent about the possibilities
of human wickedness, perhaps.
On the other hand, it’s
also ironic because
it was an age, as
the novel shows,
of sometimes
pretended innocence.
The young women
of the social set
were not as
innocent-minded at least,
as they pretended to be.
They pretended not
to know anything,
but May Welland, the young
heroine, the other heroine,
is very canny in
her manipulation.
New York society in
the 1870s is presented
as a kind of tribe, and
old tribe of earlier times
with its own rites and rituals.
And that’s true of that scene.
A dinner party given
by Newland Archer
and his wife May Welland,
theoretically it’s
a farewell dinner,
for cousin Ellen Olenska,
who’s going back to Paris,
she decided not to live in
New York, going back to Paris.
In fact, she’s being thrown
out by the New York society,
they were rejecting her
because they assumed
she had been Newland
Archer’s mistress.
And that is not
allowed, at least,
what isn’t allowed is
if it gets to be known.
So it’s they’re kicking her out.
But none of this is
said in the scene.
It’s a scene of, they’re sitting
around a big dinner table
eating canvasback ducks
and drinking wine,
and everybody seems to
be affable and smiling.
But behind those
smiles are these little
cynical side looks
and these little,
little gestures that
indicate to the reader,
but also to Newland Archer,
who knows what’s happening,
that what they’re doing
is a form of murder.
And the narrative voice said,
it was a kind of tribal ritual
of killing without
the effusion of blood.
– [Voiceover] As
critical as her vision
of American society may seem,
Edith Wharton’s move to
France must not be viewed
as an expatriation.
She never became
a French citizen.
But as part of the
literary tradition
of American cosmopolitanism,
initiated by Nathaniel
Hawthorne with The Marble Faun,
and continued throughout
the 20th century.
For Edith Wharton,
cosmopolitanism was
a family tradition as well.
Her father had died
in Cannes in 1882,
when Edith was 20.
As a child, she traveled
through Spain, England,
and stayed for longer
periods in Italy,
especially in Rome.
As two elderly
American women recall,
in one of Edith Wharton’s
most famous stories,
Roman Fever.
– [Voiceover] “Oh,
we’re all right up here,
“down below in the forum
it does get deathly cold,
“all of the sudden,
but not here.
“Ah, of course you know, because
you had to be so careful.
“Mrs. Slade turned
back to the parapet.
“She thought, ‘I must make one
more effort not to hate her.’
“Aloud she said, ‘Whenever I
look at the forum from up here
“‘I remember that story,
about a great-aunt of yours.
“‘Wasn’t she a dreadfully
wicked great-aunt?'”
– [Voiceover] During her
first visit to Europe,
while staying at Wildbad,
a spa in the Black Forest,
the nine-year-old Edith Wharton
comes down with typhoid fever.
– [Voiceover] When
I came to myself,
it was to enter a world
haunted by formless horrors.
I had been naturally
a fearless child.
Now I lived in a
state of chronic fear.
But how long the traces
of my illness lasted
may be judged from
the fact that,
till I was 28, I could
not sleep in a room
with a book containing
a ghost story,
and that I had frequently had
to burn books of this kind
because it frightened me to know
that they were downstairs
in the library.
– [Voiceover] The love of
travel was one of the few things
which Edith Wharton
had in common
with her husband, Teddy.
When they first married, they
moved to Pencraig cottage,
a small house on Edith’s
mother’s property at Newport.
A few years later, the
Whartons buy Land’s End,
which Edith redesigns with
the help of Ogden Codman,
the co-author of The
Decoration of Houses.
At Land’s End, Edith
Wharton suffers from
severe melancholia.
It is also at Land’s
End that she begins
her career as a writer.
She writes several short
stories, among them,
The Fullness of Life,
which she said was written
at the top of her voice
as one long shriek.
– [Voiceover] I have
sometimes thought that
a woman’s nature is like a
great house full of rooms.
There is the hall, through
which everyone passes
in going in and going out.
The drawing room, where
one receives formal visits.
The sitting room, where
the members of the family
come and go as they list.
But beyond that, far
beyond, are other rooms,
the handles of whose doors
are perhaps never turned.
No one knows the way to them,
no one knows whither they lead,
and in the innermost
room, the holy of holies,
the soul sits alone, and waits,
for a footstep that never comes.
– [Voiceover] Every
spring and winter,
Edith and Teddy Wharton
travel extensively in Europe,
mostly in Italy.
In 1903, in order to
write Italian villas
and their gardens,
Edith scours the Italian
countryside in a carriage,
while often the athletic
Teddy rides ahead on a bicycle
to make hotel arrangements.
In four months, they
visit more than 70 villas.
– And I see these
years, 1894 to 1904-5 as
her so called “Italian Period”.
And it seems to me that
it really was Italy
that got her started writing.
She could do travel essays,
which were socially acceptable,
she was having a lot
of conflicts about
becoming a writer, of
seeing herself as a writer.
She calls the place where
she creates her books,
this imaginative space,
“the secret garden”.
So it’s interesting that she
sees her inner creative life
also as a garden, a kind
of perhaps, garden room,
an enclosed garden, a refuge.
– [Voiceover] When Edith
Wharton designed, created,
and planted the extensive
gardens at The Mount,
they were inspired by
gardens studied and visited
for her book, Italian
Villas and Their Gardens.
– [Voiceover] The
garden must be studied
in relation to the house,
and both in relation
to the landscape.
Gamberaia combines, in an
astonishingly small space,
yet without the least
sense of overcrowding,
almost every typical excellence
of the Old Italian garden.
– [Voiceover] Italian
Villas and Their Gardens
is still a reference book for
landscape architects today.
– [Voiceover] The
most important, if
not the most pleasing
of Tuscan pleasure gardens,
lies within the city walls.
This is the Boboli Garden,
laid out on the steep hillside
behind the Pitti Palace.
The plan of the Boboli
Garden is not only
magnificent in itself, but
interesting as one of the
rare examples in Tuscany,
of a Renaissance garden
still undisturbed in
its main outlines.
– [Voiceover] In 1901,
Edith and Teddy Wharton
had purchased the large
property in the Berkshires
where they built The Mount.
– [Voiceover] Yes, he
promised not to sell The Mount
to anyone at any price, till
after I had reached Paris.
I urged on him the advisability
of keeping the place
and looking after it himself.
I was to put aside $8,000
a year for the purpose,
and he was to keep his whole
income for his own amusement.
What more did he want?
Yet when I landed, I found
his cable saying he had sold.
– [Voiceover] Edith Jones and
Teddy Edward Robins Wharton
had been married
on April 29, 1885,
at Trinity Chapel in New York.
– Edward Robbins Wharton
was a member of a
fairly distinguished
Boston family,
well-to-do, not millionaires.
He was a gentleman of leisure,
he didn’t have any
profession or career at all.
And when they married,
we’d say that years later,
Henry James, writing
to a friend said,
when things are going
bad with the marriage,
and she was so bored with him,
Henry James said to a friend,
“Edith must lie awake
at night thinking
“that she did years ago
an inconceivable thing.”
– [Voiceover] Hotel
Excelsior, Rome, May 3 1913.
Cher Amie, you did absolutely
right in telling the reporters
that you knew nothing
of my divorce.
I have told all my friends of
it, and that is sufficient.
I obtained it on the
ground of adultery,
in Boston, London, and France,
with documents è l’appui.
– [Voiceover] In the spring
of 1907, Edith Wharton had met
the American journalist
William Morton Fullerton.
He was a correspondent to
the London Times in Paris.
A friend of Oscar Wilde, and
a disciple of Henry James.
Morton Fullerton was James’
source of inspiration
for the character
of Merton Densher
in The Wings of the Dove.
Edith Wharton was 45.
– [Voiceover] 58 Rue
de Varenne, March 1908,
Wednesday evening.
Do you want me to lunch
with you tomorrow cuor mio?
I can slip off beautifully if
you have time and are free.
I should like it to be somewhere
at the end of the earth,
rive gauche, where
there is bad food,
and no chance of
meeting acquaintances.
If you tell me where, I’ll come.
Or better, meet you at
the Louvre at one o’clock,
in the shadow of
Jean Gougon’s Diana.
Paris, April 1910, I have
had a difficult year.
But the pain within my pain,
the last turn of the screw,
has been the impossibility of
knowing what you wanted of me.
My life was better
before I knew you.
That is, for me, the sad
conclusion of this sad year.
And it is a bitter thing
to say to the one being
one has ever loved d’amour.
– [Voiceover] Edith Wharton’s
affair with Morton Fullerton,
the only one of her life,
lasted less than three years.
Some time before,
Henry James had written
to Morton Fullerton.
– [Voiceover] You are
dazzling, my dear Fullerton,
you are beautiful, you
are more than tactful.
You are tenderly,
magically, tactile.
But you are not kind.
There it is, you are not kind.
– [Voiceover] Before the
1980s, when Morton Fullerton’s
correspondence was discovered
at a Paris antique dealers,
scholars believed that
the private love diary in
the form of a long letter
addressed by Edith Wharton
to Morton Fullerton,
was actually addressed to
the international lawyer,
Walter Berry.
– A lot of people thought
that Edith would marry
Walter Berry after she divorced
her husband Teddy Wharton.
Walter van Rensalier
Berry, full name,
he was a friend and
advisor, and to some extent,
a literary mentor
of Edith Wharton,
from roughly 1900, a
little bit before that,
but 1900 to his death
in the late 1920s.
– He was not popular with
many of her friends or family,
who regarded him as
an arid dilettante.
But Henry James liked him,
and Marcel Proust liked him,
and Edith Wharton adored him.
And I think to achieve the
admiration and friendship of
those three writers, means the
man must have had something.
– [Voiceover] Walter
Berry and Edith Wharton
first met in 1883 at
Bar Harbour, Maine.
It wasn’t until 1923 that
Walter Berry writes to Edith:
– [Voiceover] Dearest,
the real dream of mine
was in the canoe, and
in the night afterwards.
For I lay awake
wondering and wondering,
and then, when morning came,
wondering how I
could have wondered.
I, a penniless lawyer,
not even that yet,
with just about enough
cash for the canoe
and for my hotel bill.
And then, later in the
little cottage at Newport,
I wondered why I hadn’t.
For it would have all been good,
and then the slices
of years slid by.
Well, my dear, I have never
wondered about anyone else.
And there wouldn’t be much of
me if you were cut out of it.
Walter.
– [Voiceover] October 12, 1927.
Walter had another stroke 10
days ago and died this morning.
All my life goes with him.
– I suppose if I suddenly
heard her voice now,
I might say “That’s Edith”.
But I don’t know that I can
really describe it much.
She’d got a…
Not a very strong
American intonation,
but you’d know she
was an American.
And you’d say an American from
a good family in New York.
– [Voiceover] At Hyeres
in the South of France,
where she had often gone
to visit the Bourgets,
Edith Wharton began in
1919 to spend winters
at the Chateau Saint-Claire.
Built in the ruins
of a fortress.
She started to create
the terraced gardens
even before she moved in.
(insects chirping)
– She had a great
sense of irony.
She liked being amused.
And she loved being told
some sadly grotesque story.
One distinguished
American millionaire
who went down in the Titanic.
And his widow,
staying in London,
was horrified to
read in the papers
that he and his wife
had been drowned.
Because she’d never known that
he’d always traveled
across with a floozy.
And then telling his wife
that they’d better not
travel together in case
there were accidents.
That gave him the excuse
to have his floozy.
Well Edith thought
that a lovely story,
and she said she must write
a short story about that.
But that was right at
the end of her life,
she never did get to it.
But that was the sort
of thing she enjoyed.
She could be very amusing,
she didn’t much mind what
she said about her friends.
It was a little alarming,
you never knew quite
what she mightn’t
say behind you,
behind your back.
And then she was
very much amused
by her neighbors in Hyeres,
Marie Laure de Noailles.
Whom she regarded with
a certain affection,
certain disapproval, and
a great deal of amusement.
And so we used to go
over from one side of
the castle rock to the
other to see the Noailles.
Quite often, that
I always enjoyed.
And she used to tease them.
She was a very good teaser.
And one of the
most amusing meals
I ever had staying there,
was when Aldous Huxley
came to see her.
And he teased her, and
she teased him back!
She loved motor drag, loved
those automobile excursions.
One didn’t have
many dull moments.
– I have a memory of her
being rather a fussy person.
She didn’t settle for very long.
She kept calling for
this, and asking for that,
and ringing a bell for this.
In the best humor, she
wasn’t doing it unpleasantly,
but she was rather
hard to imagine
settled down, for long.
Although I suppose she must have
settled when she was working,
because we were always
told she couldn’t be
disturbed till lunch time.
I remember Edith Wharton
was always trying
to organize a picnic, she
loved picnics she said,
but I don’t think we ever
actually went on a picnic.
All those sort of
informal things
seemed to be what she liked.
As soon as the
situation became formal,
even I must honestly say,
at Mr. Berenson’s
big lunch parties,
she became very…
Very frightening, really.
She would shut her face and
look quite disapproving.
I don’t think she liked
that sort of society.
Of course, nor did
we as children.
So we were just as alarmed.
– [Voiceover] Starting in 1908
until the end of her life,
Edith Wharton made an annual
visit to the Villa I Tatti.
Art historian Bernard
Berenson’s home
outside of Florence.
She had her own
furnished suite there,
nicknamed, “The Ritz”.
– Bernard Berenson
was a great friend
of Edith Wharton’s
starting in about 1908.
They had a great deal in common,
they were able to
experience the world
in a way that was quite similar,
because they did have this
intense visualizing gift
where they almost so
fixate on a beautiful view,
or a painting, and lose
themselves completely
in a kind of
transcendent moment,
or transcendent experience.
– [Voiceover] Edith Wharton
took up residence in France
starting in 1910.
As World War I came to an end,
she had grown tired of Paris.
In 1918, she purchased
Le Pavillion Colombe
at St. Brice-sous-Forît
north of Paris,
with a pond designed long before
by the painter Hubert Robert.
(water trickling)
She only returned to
the U.S. once, in 1923,
to receive an honorary
degree from Yale University.
The first time it
was given to a woman.
– Edith Wharton’s worst
book I would think was
well, one of the ones
that she wrote in the
1920s or 30s, Hudson
River Bracketed.
She made the great mistake,
Henry James had warned her,
“You should remain tethered
in your native past,
“even if it ties you to
a backyard in New York.”
He saw that The House of Mirth
and The Custom of the Country,
The Fruit of the Tree,
The Age of Innocence,
were her great books.
And that by living
constantly abroad,
she’d lost touch with
her subject material.
And indeed she had.
And in Hudson River Bracketed,
she was writing about
the middle west,
where she’d never been.
American middle-class,
middle western things,
which she knew nothing about.
And the books are
in part grotesque.
And yet, she had always,
she could not write a dull book.
She was a natural storyteller.
– I think that every work
of fiction she ever wrote
is now in print.
Almost all the short stories,
certainly all the novels
and novellas, there’s
something about…
Her vision of life
in American society,
that has an extraordinary
appeal that continues today,
and perhaps, in a very odd way,
you might say the appeal is
even greater for this reason.
The House of Mirth
was a realistic novel.
It described the way things
happened in that society.
The kind of moral
choices people faced.
But I think readers today
are stirred by the
clarity of moral alternatives
that are proposed in that novel,
that is against most of
what they’re experiencing
in their own lives, or
reading in current fiction,
where the moral issues
may be very intense,
but they’re awfully confused.
– [Voiceover] Besides the
1924 and 1934 versions
of The Age of Innocence,
two of her novels,
The Children, and The
Glimpses of the Moon,
were immediately
made into films.
The movie version of
the novella The Old Maid
starting Bette Davis,
wasn’t released until 1939,
after Wharton’s death.
The theme of illegitimate
birth which had already
threatened the publication
of The Old Maid,
succeeded in overcoming
the ferocious
Hollywood censorship
of the 1930s.
Edith Wharton’s work
is frequently full
of scandalous situations,
although usually only suggested.
In 1920, when Edith
Wharton is 58,
she begins to write a
novella, Beatrice Palmato,
whose subject is incest
between a father and daughter.
The novella’s title
echoes the name of the
15th century heroine,
Beatrice Cenci,
who murdered her father
after he had raped her.
Three years before her
death, Edith Wharton
resumes work on Beatrice
Palmato, for which she only
writes the explicitly
erotic consummation scene.
On this subject, she
writes to Bernard Berenson.
– [Voiceover] As for
Moravia, I remain unconverted
and incorrigible,
because Faulkner and
Celine did it first,
and did it nastier.
I’ve got an incest
donnee up my sleeve
that would make them all
look like nursery rhymes.
But business is too bad to
sell such berquinades nowadays.
– [Voiceover]
Throughout her life,
Edith Wharton wrote
ghost stories.
One of the strangest of
them all was Careful,
in which the ghosts
are the dogs.
All Souls, a ghost story, is
Edith Wharton’s last work.
An old woman with a
sprained ankle discovers
as she wakes up
on All Soul’s Day,
that her servants have
mysteriously disappeared.
– [Voiceover] “The
broad oak stairs were
“beautifully polished,
and so slippery
“that she had to
cling to the rail
“and let herself
down tread by tread.
“And as she descended, the
silence descended with her.
“Heavier, denser, more absolute.
“She seemed to feel its
steps just behind her,
“softly keeping time with hers.
“It had a quality she
had never been aware of
“in any other silence.
“As though it were not
merely an absence of sound,
“a thin barrier between
the ear and surging murmur
“of life just beyond,
“but an impenetrable substance,
“made out of the
worldwide cessation
“of all life, and all movement.”
– [Voiceover] Edith Wharton
dies on August 11th, 1937.
She is buried at the Gonards
Cemetery at Versailles.
She receives the full
honors of a war hero.
