American Lives and Letters/Edith Wharton's Abuser
Lynn, Kenneth S.
Edith Wharton's Abuser by Kenneth S. Lynn artin Scorsese's version of M Edith Wharton's portrait of post–Civil War New York society in The Age of Innocence opens with a scene at the opera in...
...A largely covered-up Watergate, alas...
...As an 11-year-old, Lewis relates, Edith decided to write a novel...
...As Mainwaring recently remarked in an interview in the New York Observer, "Lewis's biography of Wharton is a sort of Watergate in American literary scholarship...
...Who indeed...
...But her TLS letter convinced me that "abnormal" better describes it...
...For the forthcoming trial in New Haven of Black Panther chief Bobby Seale, the outbreaks of protest over that trial by much of the Yale student body, and the doubts raised by President Kingman Brewster of Yale that the trial would be "fair" had created an inflammatory situation on campus that made it impossible for the university to guarantee Buckley's personal safety...
...Out of a desire, said Buckley, to give a completely accurate account of how it was that he had failed to become a guest of Calhoun College, he would appreciate it if Lewis would "confirm my story (or re-educate me) on the subject...
...A few weeks later, Buckley wrote him a second letter...
...L ewis is "a careless writer," Richard Howard observed in his Yale Review review of Edith Wharton...
...One example of her feelings is the notebook she kept of her daughter's poetic writings, which led her when Edith was 16 to make a selection of her verses and have them privately printed at Newport...
...Like a good many of the fictions of her maturity, it established an upper-class milieu on the very first page: "Oh, how do you do, Mrs...
...She had an affair with Fullerton...
...if he had examined Edgar Allan Poe's hatred of the cult of progress, detestation of the democratic mob, and scorn for the idea that because Negroes are "like ourselves the sons of Adam, [they] must therefore have like passions and wants and feelings...
...Richard Howard lamented—or pretended to lament—"missed opportunities," but limited space is obviously what Lewis wanted...
...at the Republican National Convention in 1968, when Mr...
...I believe it is owing to their kindness and forbearance that my terror gradually wore off, & that I became what I am now—a woman hardly conscious of physical fear...
...Inasmuch as most of these ladies are pursuing teaching careers, considerations of advancement up the appointment ladder and of job shifts to classier institutions also have to be factored in to any comprehensive explanation of their reverent silence about the faults of his book...
...Par for the course, one might say...
...He lavishly praised my research, but distorted or neglected much of the material I gave him...
...We [the family] spoke naturally, instinctively good English, but my parents always wanted it to be better, that is, easier, more flexible and idiomatic...
...As for Lewis's rhetorical attempt to make us believe that inside that home was a monster mother and her victimized daughter, A Backward Glance reduces it to a joke...
...M arion Mainwaring's letter in the Times Literary Supplement of December 16-22, 1988, got down to business right away: Working from 1969 to 1972...
...but they never scolded or ridiculed me for them, or tried to "harden" me by making me sleep in the dark, or doing any of the things which are supposed to give courage to timid children...
...Does Mainwaring advocate, I wonder, similar bowdlerization of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn...
...Her allusion was to a reporter in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, but Lewis's recognition of it didn't suffice to keep him from blurrily incorporating James's character into his narrative thoughts about his own book...
...If instead of never once mentioning Washington Irving, Lewis had had the honesty to attempt an explanation of the enormous popularity in pre-1860 America of the anti-modern, old age–loving author of Rip Van Winkle...
...Despite the power and authority of Pitlick's critique, the Lewis-confected Wharton myth has not been laughed out of court...
...We all [italics added] had a lively sense of humor," Wharton affirms, "and now that my [two] brothers were at home again the house rang with laughter...
...Only from an issue-raising assessment in the Yale Review by the poet, playwright, essayist, and translator Richard Howard and from two detailed letters to the (London) Times Literary Supplement from Lewis's erstwhile research assistants, Marion Mainwaring and Mary Pitlick—whom he had glowingly referred to in Edith Wharton as "something closer to collaborators" than assistants, in tribute to Mainwaring's "extraordinarily productive work in France" and Pitlick's "range of participation in the work" and "extremely rewarding consultations"—have we been able to gain a sense of how profoundly corrupt this book is...
...At the outset of his comments on Lewis's psychologizing, Howard quoted the resounding sentences with which the biography ushers young Edith into adolescence in the mid-1870s: Her conscious mind seems never to have grasped the cause of what she would describe as a "choking agony of terror...
...Victimization, however, laid the groundwork for rebellion and rebirth...
...But there was no center-stage drama or tripartite interplay in The American Adam, I discovered, for Lewis had dropped the party of Memory down an Orwellian memory hole...
...By way of a postscript to that last anecdote, I might add that some months ago the editors of the New York Times Book Review published a review by Kermode of a collection of Lewis's essays...
...3 That Lewisloves her back goes without saying...
...Mainwaring could not even ascertain her first name...
...Naturally enough, one of the heaviest investments in the myth has been made by feminist critics, first and foremost among them the author of A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, Cynthia Griffin Wolff...
...The searing irony in all this is that the feminists have overlooked the possibility of a strain of misogyny in Lewis...
...At this point in her narrative comes the tribute to her parents: I owe them the deepest gratitude for their treatment of me during this difficult phase...
...I still wince under my mother's ironic smile when I said that some visitor had stayed "quite a while," and her dry: "Where did you pick that up...
...They also share his intellectual laziness...
...A crucial event in Lewis's book, Pitlick announced, never took place...
...The clashing outlooks of a radiantly forward-looking party of Hope, to which Emerson and Thoreau belonged, and a more pessimistic party of Memory occupied center stage in the American mind, although the visions offered by an imaginatively powerful third party, the party of Irony, with which Hawthorne and Melville were associated, also played a vital role...
...In 1991, Buckley wanted something from him, and Lewis wouldn't even give him the time of day...
...Lewis did not favor him with the courtesy of a reply...
...Her ruling simply had the effect of turning Edith back—as Edith gratefully acknowledged—to the Elizabethans and other great authors of the past...
...0 3 Politics is not the only bond between the feminist critics and Lewis...
...The precipitants of this "total collapse," in Lewis's view, were her marital unhappiness, her absorption into "a guilt-ridden corner of her being" of her society's as well as her mother's "distrust" of anyone who took writing seriously, and her loss of self-confidence in her apprentice stories...
...They made as light of my fears as they could without hurting my feelings...
...Out of the "lively interplay of all three [parties]," Lewis asserted, there emerged the myth figure of the "authentic American," emancipated from history, democratically undefiled by inheritance and fundamentally innocent: the American Adam...
...But "I never did hear again from Professor R. W. B. Lewis...
...Both Kempton and Aaron, I then remembered, had been thanked with "special gratitude" in the acknowledgments of The American Adam for their "generous assistance...
...Taking the trouble to check his use of sources has been, and undoubtedly will continue to be, out of the question for them...
...The invitation, however, was never issued...
...said Mrs...
...if he had acknowledged that the antebellum humorists of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were Whigs who regarded the backwoods antecedents of the Snopeses whom they made fun of in their stories as fearfully satanic and not at all Adamic, then claims about the American mind's ravishment by personal images of unfallen innocence would have had to be drastically curtailed...
...Getting dates and proper names wrong was the spécialité de la maison...
...Miller was a giant figure in American Studies, with a mind of breathtaking subtlety...
...Stacks of novels," Wharton writes in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, were "annually devoured" by her mother, her aunts, and her grandmother...
...But the error that really flabbergasted me cropped up in the discussion of Thoreau...
...As he records on the last page of the seemingly endless acknowledgments in Edith Wharton: The latter sections of my book owe a great deal to intensive conversations with Cynthia Griffin Wolf...
...Tomkins...
...We all [italics added] knew by heart Alice in Wonderland, The Hunting of the Snark, and whole pages of Lear's Nonsense Book, and our sensitiveness to the quality of the English we spoke doubled our enjoyment of the incredible verbal gymnastics of those immortal works...
...Buckley's further recollection of that phone M y own awareness of the sort of scholar—and the sort of man—Lewis is took shape almost forty years ago...
...Miller's prophecy proved accurate...
...On a rising emotional note, Wharton concluded that "this feeling for good English was more than reverence and nearer: it was love...
...But the day before Buckley was scheduled to arrive, April 24, 1970, Lewis phoned to recommend against his showing up...
...Pitlick pointed out that Lewis's face-value interpretation of this excuse-making letter from a delinquent author to a publisher is given the lie by other letters that Wharton wrote in this time of supposed paralyzing melancholy...
...Howard asked with a trace of mockery, and with a trace more he added, "One scarcely needs the acknowledgment to Erik Erikson for this kind of cliff-hanging analysis...
...what my parents abhorred was not the picturesque use of new terms, if they were vivid and expressive, but the habitual slovenliness of those who picked up on the slang of the year without having any idea that they were not speaking in the purest tradition...
...I have never quite understood," she continues, how two people so little preoccupied with letters as my father and mother had such sensitive ears for pure English...
...Why offend a Pulitzer Prize–winner with strategically located academic friends...
...Wherefore, in one of the appendices in Edith Wharton, one finds a solemn statement that the "hard research" of the biographer's Paris associate has "disclosed the fact that the woman who had been blackmailing Fullerton was probably a certain Henrietta Mirecourt"—and in the text of the book the full name appears without the "probably...
...Eight years later the memory of my review was still bothering the English critic Frank Kermode...
...Between 1820 and 1860, Lewis argued, a clash of ideas occurred in the young American republic concerning the nature of Crevecoeur's "new man," the American...
...Can it be that the editors did not know of Kermode's intense admiration for Lewis until they received the after-dinner toast he sent them, complete with sidebar salutes to The American Adam and Edith Wharton...
...And early and late she produced brave, wonderful books...
...In fine, she triumphed...
...She resumed writing...
...If so it would be a change of enormous cultural consequence...
...Lewis depicted the Walden Pond cabin-dweller "tearing a woodchuck apart with his fingers and eating it raw"—whereas the Transcendentalist point about this most abstemious writer and woodland call was that Lewis was "deeply distressed by the activity of the students...
...Presented with three chances to get Wolff's name right, Lewis misspelled it twice...
...After reading it, her mother handed it back with the observation that "drawing rooms are always tidy...
...Even so, the letters she wrote to people not at Scribners "disclose an ebullient woman going back and forth to Europe, revelling in French and Italian architecture and decorative arts...
...A mangled allusion to Franz Liszt's mistress, the Comtesse d' Agoult, as the "Comtesse Dacou" and misspellings of the names of Braque and Derain were not reassuring, the urbane reviewer went on to say, and he confessed distress about a reference to the Harvard scholar Charles Eliot Norton's production of "what became a standard prose translation of Dante's Divina Commedia," when in fact Norton translated the Vita Nuova into prose and advised Longfellow on the latter's verse translation of the Commedia...
...Lewis could very well have been confident that most of his readers would never learn of this testimonial, for it is contained in an unpublished autobiographical fragment called "Life and I." When Wharton was nine, two child playmates of hers gave her a story of robbers and ghosts to read, as she lay inbed convalescing from a life-threatening attack of typhoid fever...
...Actually, Wharton's condemnation does an injustice to the culture of Old New York...
...L ewis's other researcher, Mary Pitlick, whose familiarity with Wharton's vast correspondence is unrivaled in Wharton scholarship, as is her knowledge of the contextual circumstances of the first four decades of the novelist's life, set off the second demolition bomb in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement two weeks after Mainwaring's exploded...
...the work of other commentators on the novelist (for a recent instance, see John Updike's New Yorker essay of October 4), has several explanations, ranging from the difficulties of checking up on a book with no footnotes and an erratic index to the mountebank trickiness of Lewis's arguments to the effusive compliments to other critics and scholars of American literature that for forty years and more have been a signature of his professional personality...
...On every side, today's critics and scholars are working out of the following assumptions: Borne down by her society, her mother, and her husband, Wharton collapsed...
...Since I last wrote you over a year ago," she said, "I have been very ill, and I am not yet allowed to do any real work...
...Edith was crushed...
...Speaking in Eriksonian lingo, Lewis had asserted in a chapter called "Breakdown" that in the summer of 1894, at the age of 32, Wharton suffered a "severe identity crisis...
...Thanks to Mainwaring's mimetic gifts as a stylist and her scholarly knowledge of what might be termed the "furniture" of society life in Victorian England, as well as to the guidance provided by a synopsis of the plot of the novel that Wharton left behind her, the transition from Wharton's story-telling to hers is smooth...
...Buckley's acute response appeared three months later in National Review: We are, I think, entitled to wonder whether Professor Lewis's extraordinary endorsement of the Vidal position presages a cultural revisionism...
...Ending on a note of what Lewis called "frail gallantry"—for he wanted us to believe that the better part of a year of suffering still lay ahead of her—she said she hoped to "get well and have the volume ready next year...
...His views have always made perfect sense to them, and their views in turn have been eagerly endorsed by him...
...and ransacking shops for antiquites...
...Yet one of the many oddities about Edith Wharton is that in a text of 532 pages in which the novelist is 40 by page 105, Erikson's self-proclaimed disciple vouchsafed himself too little space for adequate exhibitions of developmental psychodramas...
...I provided the documentation for large sections of Lewis's book...
...Our horror-mongering biographer makes a big deal out of this...
...You're going to receive a certain amount of flak about this," my senior Harvard colleague Perry Miller remarked after reading my review...
...The vapid conversational style of most of the social insiders in The Age of Innocence serves to augment an indictment of an entire society...
...She shucked off her husband...
...Take, for instance, Lewis's strong implication in the foregoing quote that the agony of terror from which Wharton suffered in her childhood was rooted in the traumatic scoldings, humiliations, and other abuses visited upon her by a Gothic ogress of a mother...
...What is truly disgusting about this implication is that it flies in the face of Wharton's touching expression of gratitude to her mother and father for helping her through her agony...
...The moment I salute most warmly," said Lewis, "is his memory (and ours) of a televised 'live chat' with William F. Buckley Jr...
...The example they set me was never forgotten...
...The Solzhenitsyns and Koestlers would freeze into history as the moral blind men, deferring to the strategic foresight and moral pre-eminence of such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, and other fellow-travelers and accommodationists...
...You write the nicest letters," Buckley was moved to exclaim at one point...
...Lewis's Bancroft Prize–winning, Pulitzer Prize–winning best seller, Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975...
...I am bound to say, though, that I deplore Mainwaring's decision to eliminate Wharton's "[references] to race in terms offensive to modem readers...
...In the guise of analyzing a cultural myth, the left-liberal Lewis had constructed one...
...It was Cynthia Wolf who...
...There are 76 'typographical' errors, mostly in the spelling of French words, though also in the failure to recognize such solecisms as `predelictions' (which occurs three times...
...Not only does he outrageously transform the novelist's mother into a monster, but his indignation about Wharton's suffering, whether in girlhood or womanhood, appears to me at least to mask a satisfaction in it...
...Edith brought the page to her mother...
...Even more striking than his sycophancy were his errors...
...A Backward Glance also makes excitingly clear...
...What makes you so sure...
...In 1991, Buckley wrote Lewis to say that he had been asked to contribute to an oral history, of Yale in the period 1950-1977—i.e., during the presidencies of A. Whitney Griswold and Kingman Brewster...
...From Dick...
...Edith Wharton's Abuser by Kenneth S. Lynn artin Scorsese's version of M Edith Wharton's portrait of post–Civil War New York society in The Age of Innocence opens with a scene at the opera in which the novelist's disdain for the society's lack of critical discernment is made abundantly clear...
...That Edith Wharton has so many steadfast admirers, that its formulations have been incorporated wholesale into Kenneth S. Lynn, who has taught English at Harvard and history at Johns Hopkins, is currently at work on a lifeand-times book about Charlie Chaplin...
...Lewis's most striking characteristics," I noted right off, was "his gratitude—The American Adam is replete with enthusiastic expressions of [his] indebtedness to the work of others...
...One result is that other writers have been propagating his errors...
...While my family and I were staying with friends in the south of France, Kermode appeared on the scene and under most inappropriate circumstances began berating me for my treatment of that splendid piece of work, The American Adam...
...In a letter two weeks later, addressed to "Dear Bill" and signed "Dick," Lewis assured him that the letter that Buckley had written to the Yale Daily News about Lewis's disinvitation had certainly "contained nothing that would offend anybody not so offense-prone as to be maniacal," and he spoke of "inviting you [to Calhoun] next fall as early as you can make it...
...But while she achieved spectacular results with her work on the liaison, the Mirecourt investigation kept running into dead ends...
...York Times last summer of the "beautifully informed" essays of that "treasure of state," Gore Vidal...
...During this "terrible and long-drawn out period" extending "for more than two years," her "malaise" was marked by "paralyzing melancholy, extreme exhaustion, constant fits of nausea and no capacity whatever to make choices or decisions...
...Yet it was often his habit to speak bluntly...
...By which she means Wharton's repeated use of the word "nigger...
...Yet the mother's criticism, however untactful, certainly did not reflect a lack of interest or pride in Edith's literary bent...
...Like Lewis's other stunts, the complete omission of this material is a symbol of his immersion not in the fascinating facts of Wharton's life but in the fantasies of his ideologically driven mind, wherein victimization equates with virtue and a wealthy, socially privileged mother (maiden name, Rhinelander) is bound to be a moral monster...
...During 1894-96, Pitlick continued, Wharton did have occasional illnesses: respiratory problems, influenza, and a bout of "pentonitis" that could have been a miscarriage...
...Professor Daniel Aaron of Smith College put aside his labors on a book about American writers on the left—wherein criticisms of writers on the left were being studiously avoided—and penned a letter of protest to the magazine in which my review appeared, and Murray Kempton also wrote...
...At first," I wrote, "they seem like slips of the tongue, but as the errors multiply, charitable explanations vanish...
...With my intense Celtic sense of the supernatural," Wharton writes, the story led her into "a world haunted by formless horrors...
...But the key to the biographer's success is the approval he has enjoyed throughout his career from left-tilted opinion makers in literary journalism and academia...
...As a newly-fledged assistant professor of English at Harvard, I undertook to review his first book, The American Adam (1955...
...If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing room...
...Furthermore, the author of the ruling was herself a devotee of the forbidden fruit...
...Wolff, as was mentioned earlier, is well launched on a psychologically oriented study of Edith Wharton's fiction, and I am bound to confess that my treatment of the later novels derives in good part from her perceptions...
...creatures is that he never ate one alive (or cooked, for that matter...
...In a letter to Lewis, she speculated that Mirecourt might have been a journalist, "a kind of French Henrietta Stackpole...
...Vidal, as he says, 'came close to revealing what I really am: a dedicated anti-anti-communist.' " "Say it again," Lewis fervently added...
...Who its members had been was left shrouded in mystery...
...Off and on, her "hallucinations lasted seven or eight years...
...One of Mr...
...And then there is the charming story Wharton tells in "Life and I"—but was most definitely not intellectual, why should we accept the idea that she was anti-intellectual...
...Would she foist Native-American Joe upon us, and African-American Jim...
...I euphemize.] When assiduous flatterers are attacked, they generally get their friends to do their fighting for them...
...Lewis's] carelessness is extraordinary," Mainwaring exclaimed...
...how indebted Wharton felt to both her parents for imparting to her their "reverence for the English language as spoken according to the best usage...
...But in Wharton's evocation in A Backward Glance of the vivid talk and the laughter in which "every one of us" participated in her girlhood home, she created a far livelier impression of Old New York...
...I cannot remember a time when we did not, every one of us [italics added], revel in the humorous and expressive side of American slang...
...Brown...
...Having myself read some of these superbly vivacious letters, I can testify that Pitlick's characterization of the woman they disclose is exactly correct...
...Mainwaring devoted the rest of the letter to damning examples of the "nature, number, scale, and cascade-effect" of those errors, of which my favorite—ranking right up there with the Thoreau-woodchuck gaffe—concerns a woman named Mirecourt, who allegedly blackmailed a scapegrace American journalist, Morton Fullerton, with whom Edith Wharton had a love affair in France in the years before World War I. In 1969, nothing was really known about the Fullerton-Wharton liaison or about Mirecourt...
...If I mention it here it is only because it applies so well to the scandalous failure of modern-day Wharton scholarship to face up to the truth about its most honored document—R.W.B...
...In the words of the Duke of Wellington, if you can believe that, you can believe anything...
...Yet who was waiting, ominously, inside the house—ready perhaps to scold, humiliate, frighten, and increase the anxiety in the child's eyes—but her own mother...
...Dick Lewis," he replied, "is an assiduous flatterer...
...For the psychodramas he features have been manufactured out of swift manipulations of scanty facts, omissions of lengthier contradictory facts, pumped-up rhetoric, and bluff...
...The question, of course, is why, and the answer is more obvious to me today than it was in 1955...
...And naturally enough, her book is damp with gratitude to Lewis for a gift "that I share with the rest of the educated world—that is, the bounty of his biography of Edith Wharton...
...he only savored the concept of wildness contained in the idea of doing so...
...I asked...
...In 1969-70, Lewis had wanted something from Buckley, and he couldn't have been more cordial...
...A recent example of the latter concordance was Lewis's review in the New 1Mainwaring has been in the news of late because of her addition of an ending and smaller interpolated passages to, a reissue of Wharton's unfinished novel, The Buccaneers (Viking, $22), a chronicle of the romantic adventures of a group of wealthy American girls in aristocratic English society in the 1870s...
...As proof of the collapse, Lewis cited a letter from Wharton to her editor at Scribners, to whom she had earlier promised a volume of stories, in December 1895...
...Gallantly, she fought back...
...2 2 Buckley also took this occasion to publish his correspondence with Lewis in 1969-70, centering around Lewis's entreaties to Buckley to come to Yale as a guest of Calhoun College, where Lewis was master...
...At Lewis's request," Mainwaring related, "I undertook the detective work that was called for in Paris where I was living...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
