The Unknown Edith Wharton

...She had come a very long way from "good old New York," where it had been thought improper for a woman to write at all...

...Once established, she displayed an energy that was staggering...

...By 1920, although much of her satiric bite-as well as her pervasive theme of the doom that inevitably overtakes the pure in heart-was still evident in The Age of Innocence, she depicted the old New York aristocracy with a conciliatory respect-in a favorite word, it had "standards...

...In time she made the obligatory "good" marriage with Teddy Wharton, an amiable and incurably boyish sportsman from Boston...

...The union was a sexual disaster that eventually destroyed Teddy...

...What is ultimately so striking and more than a little sad about the fascinating woman Lewis has so ably reconstructed is that her patrician fastidiousness prevented her from confronting a world-particularly the American world-that had changed drastically in her lifetime...

...Her work, before she divorced her deranged husband in 1913, was suffused with images of prisons offering no escape: In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart's bracelet is seen as a manacle that binds her to her fate...

...The liaison, predictably, was short-lived-Fullerton was congenitally inconstant, and Edith too shrewdly realistic to clutch at chimeras of freedom...

...But for years she was too inchoate and insecure for rebellion, and moved obediently within the sheltered confines decreed by her social station: the hypertrophically cluttered Victorian brownstone, the summer "cottage" in Newport, the ritualized social rounds, the haphazard 19th-century female education geared to domestic proprieties rather than intellectual growth...

...The result was a prettier picture, and a much less interesting novel...

...In her later years, she churned out a vast and very lucrative amount of women's-magazine pap for exactly that uncultured public she despised, and wrote the wretched stuff primarily to maintain a baronial, carefully sheltered existence that in her youth she would have condemned as imprisoning...

...It has taken almost 30 years (three beyond Wilson's lifetime), but R. W. B. Lewis, a professor of American literature and a first-rank critic, has not merely fulfilled that hope, he has exceeded it in his superb Edith Wharton: A Biography (Harper & Row, 592 pp., $15.00...

...With her private papers deposited in the Yale library after her death in 1937 and closed to scholars up to 1968, the persistent image of Edith Wharton has largely been that of Lubbock's slyly malicious memoir -the rich and imperious grande dame whose personal life, as Lewis sums up the legend, "was a narrow one, who was cool and even abrasive in her outward relationships, and puritanically repressed within...

...Lewis is rather more charitable to her later fiction than it deserves, yet this is an understandable flaw in his book...

...It has commonly been assumed that, if ever lover there was, it had to be her most intimate male friend, Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, an urbane and evasive bachelor who for decades exerted over her life the varied powers of father figure, intellectual counselor and boon companion...

...As indeed it had to be to cope with her professional commitments (a book a year), her restless addiction to travel (she crossed the Atlantic some 60 times, dividing her life between the Berkshires and Paris till she abandoned America for France altogether), her voluminous correspondence, and a social calendar that would have quickly ruined a less resilient constitution...

...If, in her early work, notably The House of Mirth, she pointedly dramatized her ironic outrage at the tyranny of convention over brave and imaginative spirits, when she grew older her attitude toward the America she had scarcely glimpsed in many years shifted...

...She even seemed to take her art more casually than she should, between her duties as a busy hostess...

...Though Lewis' disclosures of Fullerton and "Beatrice Palmato" demonstrate an unsuspected audacity of experience and imagination, the fact remains that Edith Wharton's commitment was not to sensual abandon but to the moral imperatives of order, the inviolable commandments of the civilized society she had chosen for the context of her identity as both writer and femme du monde...

...During this undernourished literary period, her inspiration came not from a restive intelligence straining against the tethers of society, but from a nostalgia that restricted her vision...

...After the War, the American scene appeared, from her luxurious French fastness, an unrelieved desert of "vain-glory, crassness and total ignorance...

...Wharton's bitterly recurrent metaphor for a desolate marriage that provided neither sex nor the intellectual excitement she savored in her enduring friendships with Henry James, Henry Adams, Bernard Berenson, and a continually renewed circle of scholars, writers and artists whose cosmopolitan enthusiasm she found literally indispensable...

...Characteristically, she confided her inmost dread of the affair to a secret journal: "I, who dominated life . . . am . . without a shred of will or identity left...

...From both sides of her family she inherited the thin blue blood, enriched with old money, of such hallowed New York clans as the Schermerhorns and Rhinelanders...

...Much of this we have known, but Lewis has stumbled upon a hitherto well-bidden secret of Edith Wharton's supposedly unimpeachable private life-her one grande passion, at the late-blooming age of 45, with Morton Fullerton, an American journalist who worked in Paris for the London Times...

...One can think of few more classic examples of Freudian sublimation...

...Wharton coincided with the dark beginnings of her husband's manic depression-when, for once, her guard was down-and he initiated her into the adulterous pleasures she had merely imagined in her novels...

...Lewis persuasively argues that Berry, for all his worldliness and roving eye, had an aversion to sex...

...Despite all this, she showed herself in The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and, to a lesser extent, The Age of Innocence, to be a brilliant satirist of the constricted American haut monde, observing sardonically, unsentimentally, even cruelly, its tragically defeated women and impotent dilettante men...

...This was Mrs...

...How drastic and rapid the transformation had been in a career that extended from Longfellow, who praised her youthful poems, to Moravia, whom she met in the '30s...

...It also threatened Edith's sanity until, with growing assurance and recognition as a writer, she succeeded in converting private failure into the objective shape of public art...

...Lewis' exhaustive pursuit of the truth here and abroad reveals, however, that Lubbock's portrait bears scarcely the faintest resemblance to the reality of this complicated, intelligent and gifted woman, for a number of years before World War I "the most accomplished practicing American novelist...

...Nothing would seem to be less nourishing to serious ambition than the stifling patrician world of old-i.e., pre-Gilded Age-New York into which Edith Newbold Jones was born in 1862...

...Writers & Writing THE UNKNOWN EDITH WHARTON BY PEARL K. BELL In 1947, Edmund Wilson ended a deservedly harsh review of Portrait of Edith Wharton, by her quondam British friend Percy Lubbock, with the hope that there would eventually be "a biography that will tell the whole of her story and show her in her full dimensions...

...With The Custom of the Country, a savage satire of 1913, she directed her contempt not, as in her youth, at the New York gentry, but at the ruthless nouveaux riches who had vulgarly conquered an older America, and were now insufferably marrying their lumpy daughters into the European aristocracy she cherished...

...Sensitive, romantic, a gluttonous reader who began "making up" stories in early childhood, she had vague yearnings for a less hidebound life...

...The hard-won, self-made personality-writer, hostess, respected confidante of the great-was now being placed in jeopardy, and for Edith Wharton it was not something to be recklessly cast away...

...Lewis believes that "it was, finally, her writings that constituted the life she had most truly and deeply lived," and his view is borne out sensationally by the pornographic fragment, "Beatrice Palmato,'' that she wrote toward the end of her life and significantly neglected to destroy: It is as explicit as anything in Henry Miller, and also violates the deepest taboo by adding incest to injury...

...Fullerton, on the other hand, was an artfully dedicated philanderer whose encounter with Mrs...

...A biographer who is not generous and defensive about his subject is not worth reading...

...Yet not before Edith Wharton was well along in her 30s, and had suffered through a severe breakdown, was she able to commit herself to a sustained career in literature...