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Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Hermione Lee
Chatto, 854pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Thursday, 25th January 2007

She fretted about money, as the rich do. But she never had much cause to. When her father George Frederic Jones died in 1882, he left her $600,000 in real estate. Six years later, her cousin Joshua topped this up with a legacy of $120,000. The Joneses were big in real estate and in the Chemical Bank of New York which they owned. Edith’s great-aunts shocked the family by building two huge blocks at 57th Street, which was then way uptown, almost in the country (above 40th Street, the lots were not built on but already marked out by boulders of the living rock). This, Hermione Lee tells us in her great boulder of a biography, was the origin of the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Certainly the phrase started in America and before 1914, but surely it meant then as it does now, an orthodox, even banal strategy for upward mobility, like replacing a Mondeo with a Mercedes, not audacious behaviour like building a couple of skyscrapers in the middle of nowhere.

The Joneses were at the heart of the Old New York which Mrs Wharton satirised with such relentless bite, yapping at its heels like one of those pooches of hers that she idolised, preferring them to most human beings (in Lee’s index, there are 18 references to dogs, three to children). The Joneses were as extravagant with their cash as they were parsimonious with their emotions, uptight everywhere except in their wallets. None of them pursued any trade, except family quarrels which they pursued to the grave. They quarrelled with New York too, Edith’s parents traipsing round Europe with their family for years on end, and in adult life Edith and her brothers all settled in Paris, though for much of the time not on speaking terms with each other. Lee does not think this quite as odd as I do.

Edith claimed that, from the moment she was brought back to New York after six years in Europe, she felt like an exile in America. ‘One’s friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don’t think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glasshouse, the most déplacé and useless class on earth!’ Compared with Italy and France, ‘the landscape and the life lack juice’. Edith, in short, like Nancy Mitford contracted an incurable variety of French ’flu. Apart from her friends — Mr James and the gratin of New England, the Winthrops, the Lodges and the Chanlers — America was ‘a whole nation developing without the sense of beauty and eating bananas for breakfast’. Each morning as I scatter the shards of banana over my cereal (another American innovation Edith detested), I offer up a tiny prayer of expiation.

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