Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Hermione Lee
Chatto, 854pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Thursday, 25th January 2007

Yet it is hard not to be sad about the eclipse of all Teddy’s bubbling gaiety and easy to think that his treatment by Edith and her friends might have hastened his decline. One visitor recalled the awkward, tight-lipped silence that would fall upon the company when Teddy smilingly joined them on the terrace at the Mount. R. W. B. Lewis in his 1975 biography, the first to spill the beans about Morton Fullerton and to reprint ‘The Terminus’ and ‘Beatrice Palmato’, speculates that ‘Teddy’s collapses were in part ways of drawing attention to himself in the midst of his wife’s widespread recognition and her achieved independence and well-being’.

Even in the version offered by Hermione Lee, who is much less interested in Teddy, a certain vitality goes out of the story after Edith divorces him and he is shuffled off to a succession of sanatoria. The reader, left with Edith Wharton on her own, is inclined to murmur with Henry James, ‘She uses up everything and everyone.’ We begin to weary of her amazing sales figures, her feisty quarrels with her publishers, the relentless decoration of her house. In the last 300 pages we begin to wish for a little winnowing, for example, of the pages Lee uses up describing houses that Edith might have bought or rented but did not and repeating the plot of a story she might have written but didn’t.

In her later years in France Mrs Wharton became a chilly, controlling chatelaine. Lee herself cannot resist comparing her to the stout and stately Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers films. She was as exhausting a guest as a host. Even her ‘male wives’, as her gossipy bachelor friends were dubbed by Beren- son’s companion Nicky Mariano, could only stand her in small doses. James reported of her last visit to Lamb House, Rye:

The Angel of Devastation has become a mere agitating memory, but nothing could have exceeded the commotion and exhaustion produced by her prolonged stay. Devoted as I am to her I feel even as one of those infants of literary allusion whom their mothers hush to terror by pronouncing the name of the great historical ravager of their country, Bonaparte, Attila or Tamerlane.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Life and Letters

Allan Massie

Breaking the rules

Brave new writing

Richard Bradford

Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how.