Marlene Wagman-Geller

Jan 24, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

Chapter # Graves are Always Tidy

“One can give up many things for love, but one should not give up oneself.” -Edith Wharton

The Mount (opened 2002 )

Lennox, Massachusetts

 

         The writer who punctured the stereotype of the starving artist, Edith Wharton comes across as a cosseted, stiff-necked dowager, with stays firmly fastened. However, if passion had not beat under the primness, she could never have penned her passionate epics. To partake of her gilded world, grab your lorgnette and head to The Mount.

         Born Edith, (nicknamed Pussy), Newbold into New York society-the phrase, “keeping up with the Jones” originated with her fabulously wealthy great-aunts, Mary and Rebecca Jones. Edith arrived in 1862 to George Frederick Jones, and Lucretia, members of the “400-” a reference to number of guests that could be accommodated by Mrs. William Astor’s ballroom.

    Edith was extremely fond of her father, but relations with her mother were strained. As she did not attend school, the lonely child turned to books. She wrote of her paper salvation, “Whenever I try to recall my childhood, it is in my father’s library that it comes to life…”

    For the Jones, civilization ended north of Central Park, except for satellites in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Continent.  While in Paris, her parents found six-year-old Edith curled under the table with a book. They were shocked as she had never been taught to read. The book, taken from the drawing room shelf, was a play about a prostitute. Lucretia disapproved of novels and forbade Edith to read any until had a husband.

     Edith enjoyed made up stories, an activity her mother discouraged by withholding paper.  The resourceful budding author wrote on brown paper salvaged from parcels. At age eleven, Edith embarked on her first novel that began, “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.” The pain of her mother’s response echoed through the years, “Never shall I forget, the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment, ‘Drawing rooms are always tidy.’” At age fifteen, Edith sold her first poem at a church fair. Her circle viewed her writing with the distaste they reserved for manual labor; bluebloods did not need brains.

     At age seventeen, Edith made the rounds of parties in New York and Newport. Although the Holy Grail of the debutantes was husband-hunting, holy matrimony did not pan out. Walter Van Rensselaer Berry proposed in a canoe in Bar Harbor, but backed out due to “an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride.” Approaching “old maid status” at age twenty-three, Edith started seeing Boston banker Edward “Teddy” Robbins Wharton-who had been Harvard’s class of 1873 handsomest hunk. With the 1882 death of her father, even more under her mother’s thumb, she felt marriage would provide escape-including the freedom to read novels. Despite the childhood novel about the prostitute, Edith was naïve, and on the eve of her wedding she asked Lucretia about marital dynamics. Her mother responded, “You’ve seen enough picture and statues in your life. Haven’t you noticed that men are …made differently from women? You can’t be as stupid as you pretend.” In Trinity Chapel, Edith married the twelve-year older Teddy who shared her passion for travel, decorating, and dogs. The Whartons did not consummate their marriage for three weeks, after which their sexual relations ceased.

        The couple moved to Newport where Edith also felt like an outsider, “I was a failure in Boston because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.” What countered her alienation was her collaboration with Ogden Codman on The Decoration of Houses-a repudiation of the Gilded Age more-is-more-décor.

     In 1901, Edith purchased The Mound, situated on 113-acres in Lenox, in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. In a letter to Morton Fullerman she wrote, “I am amazed at the success of my efforts. Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own, far surpasses The House of Mirth…”

     In Xanadu, Edith wrote The House of Mirth, (1905) whose title was a biblical allusion, “The hearts of fools is in the house of mirth, and Ethan Frome (1911) that a critic compared to those of Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, while her career soared the Mount was far from a house of mirth. Teddy, whom Henry James had pronounced “cerebrally compromised,” withdrew $50,000 from her trust fund to support his Boston mistress. He also spiraled into a morass of drink, depression, and mental instability. Edith had also side-stepped her marriage vows when she fell for charming rotter Morton Fullerton, a journalist who had as many affairs as characters had in a Wharton novel. His romantic past included homosexuality, a divorce, and a quasi-incestuous relationship with his adopted sister. Smitten with the man who had unleashed her emotional virginity in her mid-forties, Edith paid off his inconvenient mistress. She rendezvoused with Morton in France where he worked as a Paris correspondent for The Times of London. They plotted their Parisienne assignations via post messages such as, “At the Louvre at one o’clock in the shadow of Diana-” an allusion to the marble sculpture of the Goddess of the Hunt. In letters she poured out her passion, “You can’t come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame.” By 1910, Morton’s ardor had waned; Edith’s love affair with France remained. After twenty-eight years of marriage, Edith filed for divorce from the increasingly unstable Teddy-though her upper class milieus felt scandal far worse than disease. More painful, having only spent a decade in what she had considered her fabulous forever home, she sold the Mount.

       Edith met with the names of legend: Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldous Huxley. Sinclair Lewis dedicated Babbitt to her. In 1925, the sixty-three-year-old Edith met the twenty-eight-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald. She had sent him a letter praising The Great Gatsby and invited him and his wife Zelda to her chateau for tea. Zelda said she would be damned if she would travel fifty miles from Paris to let an old lady make her feel provincial. Fitzgerald, fortified with alcohol, met the Grand Dame.

“Mrs. Wharton, do you know what's the matter with you?”

“No, Mr. Fitzgerald, I've often wondered about that."

“You don't know anything about life. Why, when my wife and I first came to Paris we lived for two weeks in a bordello.”

“But Mr. Fitzgerald, you haven't explained what they did in the bordello." Fitzgerald fled.

         When World War I erupted, Edith, living in Paris, devoted herself to charitable causes such as providing for 600 Belgium war refugees. At the Front, she reported firsthand on the carnage. France awarded her the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and Belgium made her a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. She paid a visit to the United States to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, the first woman to be so honored. She did not visit The Mount; it would have proved too painful.  In 1920, she published The Age of Innocence-that skewered the upper echelon of New York-that garnered the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Nobel Prize committee had nominated Edith three times.

     Henry James observed, “No one fully knows our Edith who hasn’t seen in her the act of creating a habitation for herself.” He described the stately pleasure dome as a “delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” James dubbed her “The Lady of Lenox.”

     In the Mount the rooms are windows into the soul of its chatelaine, something she wrote of in “The Fullness of Life, “I have always thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms.” The courtyard resembles an Italian grotto and is the antechamber of the thirty-five-room stucco, green-shuttered estate. A broad veranda runs the length of the house; a Palladian double staircase leads to the magnificent gardens. The drawing room displays a marble fireplace. Fans of Wharton novels can visit her third-floor bedroom where, dressed in an elegant bed-jacket, lying on a pink bedspread strewn with papers-and her dogs of the moment-she wrote The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome. The library on the first floor contains 2, 600 volumes. One bears a dedication to Edith from Morton Fullerton; others were gifts from Teddy Roosevelt and Henry James. On a flyleaf of a book on haikus she wrote her own, “My little old dog/A heartbeat/At my feet.” In A Backward Glance she wrote, “It was only at the Mount that I was really happy.”

Edith’s final resting place was in the Cimetière des Gonards at the Protestant cemetery in Versailles that holds a cross and the Latin inscription “Ave Crux Spes Unicaz’- “The Cross Is Our Hope.” Overrun with weeds, bird droppings, and an ancient pot of flowers, one can hear Lucretia Jones’ disapproving remark, “Graves are always tidy.”

A View from Her Window:

On a hill overlooking the formal Red Garden were the miniature markers that commemorated four of her devoted dogs: Toto, Jules, Miza, and Mimi.

Nearby Attractions: The Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, the Berkshires

Viewing the collection of Norman Rockwell paintings is to walk down memory lane of rural America, an era encapsulated in idealized images.

         Born Edith, (nicknamed Pussy), Newbold into New York society-the phrase, “keeping up with the Jones” originated with her fabulously wealthy great-aunts, Mary and Rebecca Jones. Edith arrived in 1862 to George Frederick Jones, and Lucretia, members of the “400-” a reference to number of guests that could be accommodated by Mrs. William Astor’s ballroom.

    Edith was extremely fond of her father, but relations with her mother were strained. As she did not attend school, the lonely child turned to books. She wrote of her paper salvation, “Whenever I try to recall my childhood, it is in my father’s library that it comes to life…”

    For the Jones, civilization ended north of Central Park, except for satellites in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Continent.  While in Paris, her parents found six-year-old Edith curled under the table with a book. They were shocked as she had never been taught to read. The book, taken from the drawing room shelf, was a play about a prostitute. Lucretia disapproved of novels and forbade Edith to read any until had a husband.

     Edith enjoyed made up stories, an activity her mother discouraged by withholding paper.  The resourceful budding author wrote on brown paper salvaged from parcels. At age eleven, Edith embarked on her first novel that began, “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.” The pain of her mother’s response echoed through the years, “Never shall I forget, the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment, ‘Drawing rooms are always tidy.’” At age fifteen, Edith sold her first poem at a church fair. Her circle viewed her writing with the distaste they reserved for manual labor; bluebloods did not need brains.

     At age seventeen, Edith made the rounds of parties in New York and Newport. Although the Holy Grail of the debutantes was husband-hunting, holy matrimony did not pan out. Walter Van Rensselaer Berry proposed in a canoe in Bar Harbor, but backed out due to “an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride.” Approaching “old maid status” at age twenty-three, Edith started seeing Boston banker Edward “Teddy” Robbins Wharton-who had been Harvard’s class of 1873 handsomest hunk. With the 1882 death of her father, even more under her mother’s thumb, she felt marriage would provide escape-including the freedom to read novels. Despite the childhood novel about the prostitute, Edith was naïve, and on the eve of her wedding she asked Lucretia about marital dynamics. Her mother responded, “You’ve seen enough picture and statues in your life. Haven’t you noticed that men are …made differently from women? You can’t be as stupid as you pretend.” In Trinity Chapel, Edith married the twelve-year older Teddy who shared her passion for travel, decorating, and dogs. The Whartons did not consummate their marriage for three weeks, after which their sexual relations ceased.

        The couple moved to Newport where Edith also felt like an outsider, “I was a failure in Boston because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.” What countered her alienation was her collaboration with Ogden Codman on The Decoration of Houses-a repudiation of the Gilded Age more-is-more-décor.

     In 1901, Edith purchased The Mound, situated on 113-acres in Lenox, in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. In a letter to Morton Fullerman she wrote, “I am amazed at the success of my efforts. Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own, far surpasses The House of Mirth…”

     In Xanadu, Edith wrote The House of Mirth, (1905) whose title was a biblical allusion, “The hearts of fools is in the house of mirth, and Ethan Frome (1911) that a critic compared to those of Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, while her career soared the Mount was far from a house of mirth. Teddy, whom Henry James had pronounced “cerebrally compromised,” withdrew $50,000 from her trust fund to support his Boston mistress. He also spiraled into a morass of drink, depression, and mental instability. Edith had also side-stepped her marriage vows when she fell for charming rotter Morton Fullerton, a journalist who had as many affairs as characters had in a Wharton novel. His romantic past included homosexuality, a divorce, and a quasi-incestuous relationship with his adopted sister. Smitten with the man who had unleashed her emotional virginity in her mid-forties, Edith paid off his inconvenient mistress. She rendezvoused with Morton in France where he worked as a Paris correspondent for The Times of London. They plotted their Parisienne assignations via post messages such as, “At the Louvre at one o’clock in the shadow of Diana-” an allusion to the marble sculpture of the Goddess of the Hunt. In letters she poured out her passion, “You can’t come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame.” By 1910, Morton’s ardor had waned; Edith’s love affair with France remained. After twenty-eight years of marriage, Edith filed for divorce from the increasingly unstable Teddy-though her upper class milieus felt scandal far worse than disease. More painful, having only spent a decade in what she had considered her fabulous forever home, she sold the Mount.

       Edith met with the names of legend: Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldous Huxley. Sinclair Lewis dedicated Babbitt to her. In 1925, the sixty-three-year-old Edith met the twenty-eight-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald. She had sent him a letter praising The Great Gatsby and invited him and his wife Zelda to her chateau for tea. Zelda said she would be damned if she would travel fifty miles from Paris to let an old lady make her feel provincial. Fitzgerald, fortified with alcohol, met the Grand Dame.

“Mrs. Wharton, do you know what's the matter with you?”

“No, Mr. Fitzgerald, I've often wondered about that."

“You don't know anything about life. Why, when my wife and I first came to Paris we lived for two weeks in a bordello.”

“But Mr. Fitzgerald, you haven't explained what they did in the bordello." Fitzgerald fled.

         When World War I erupted, Edith, living in Paris, devoted herself to charitable causes such as providing for 600 Belgium war refugees. At the Front, she reported firsthand on the carnage. France awarded her the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and Belgium made her a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. She paid a visit to the United States to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, the first woman to be so honored. She did not visit The Mount; it would have proved too painful.  In 1920, she published The Age of Innocence-that skewered the upper echelon of New York-that garnered the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Nobel Prize committee had nominated Edith three times.

     Henry James observed, “No one fully knows our Edith who hasn’t seen in her the act of creating a habitation for herself.” He described the stately pleasure dome as a “delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” James dubbed her “The Lady of Lenox.”

     In the Mount the rooms are windows into the soul of its chatelaine, something she wrote of in “The Fullness of Life, “I have always thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms.” The courtyard resembles an Italian grotto and is the antechamber of the thirty-five-room stucco, green-shuttered estate. A broad veranda runs the length of the house; a Palladian double staircase leads to the magnificent gardens. The drawing room displays a marble fireplace. Fans of Wharton novels can visit her third-floor bedroom where, dressed in an elegant bed-jacket, lying on a pink bedspread strewn with papers-and her dogs of the moment-she wrote The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome. The library on the first floor contains 2, 600 volumes. One bears a dedication to Edith from Morton Fullerton; others were gifts from Teddy Roosevelt and Henry James. On a flyleaf of a book on haikus she wrote her own, “My little old dog/A heartbeat/At my feet.” In A Backward Glance she wrote, “It was only at the Mount that I was really happy.”

Edith’s final resting place was in the Cimetière des Gonards at the Protestant cemetery in Versailles that holds a cross and the Latin inscription “Ave Crux Spes Unicaz’- “The Cross Is Our Hope.” Overrun with weeds, bird droppings, and an ancient pot of flowers, one can hear Lucretia Jones’ disapproving remark, “Graves are always tidy.”

A View from Her Window:

On a hill overlooking the formal Red Garden were the miniature markers that commemorated four of her devoted dogs: Toto, Jules, Miza, and Mimi.

Nearby Attractions: The Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, the Berkshires

Viewing the collection of Norman Rockwell paintings is to walk down memory lane of rural America, an era encapsulated in idealized images.

Prev Next