Lonesome Road

A BACKWARD GLANCE--Edith Wharton --Appleton-Century ($3). Few writers of any sex or class have been so handicapped as Edith Newbold Jones Wharton. Born a woman, a lady, and rich, she somehow managed to make herself into an almost first-rate author. Few better exhibitions of eating cake and still having it have ever been put on. Now an old lady (72), Author Wharton takes a backward glance over her traveled road, reports in carefully cultivated prose what she has seen along the way. Being a lady, she has forgotten some things and people. Her road, once friendly with many companions, is fast dwindling to its horizon. She knows it; but she is proud to have been one of "the heirs of an old tradition of European culture which the country has now totally rejected." Daughter of an old Manhattan family whose colonial ancestry went back on both sides for nearly 300 years, Edith Newbold Jones was brought up to think that the real world consisted of a few houses in Manhattan, a street in Newport, the continent of Europe. "I used to say that I had been taught only two things in my childhood : the modern languages and good manners. Now that I have lived to see both these branches of culture dispensed with, I perceive that there are worse systems of education." At 11 she started her first novel, beginning: " 'Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?' said Mrs. Tompkins. If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room.' " Her mother's comment: "Drawing-rooms are always tidy." When she was 15 some of her verses, recommended by aged Poet Longfellow, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Otherwise, though she was a voracious reader and secret soliloquizer of stories, she conformed to the easy strictness of her station, making her debut in Manhattan and at 23 marrying Edward Wharton, Boston banker. Her first book, a collaboration with Architect Ogden Codman on The Decoration of Houses (1897), was daringly modern, surprised everybody by being a success. Soon she was well launched on her literary path. Few of her social acquaintance gave her any encouragement. "My literary success puzzled and embarrassed my old friends far more than it impressed them, and in my own family it created a kind of constraint which increased with the years. None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books, either to praise or blame--they simply ignored them." But in Europe, and in the world of letters, she was quickly appreciated. The late great Henry James, her idol, became her friend. Jamesians will enjoy the many anecdotes she tells (too lengthy for quotation) of the Master's circuitous crotchets. She met "everybody," seems to have liked them all except George Moore, whose malicious conversation she describes as "a torrent of venom. It was the tone of The Dunclad without its wit." Though France is Edith Wharton's second home (she has lived there since 1907), most of her 42 books have been concerned with the U. S. scene. She does not admit which literary child is her favorite, but says she is "bored and even exasperated'' when told that Ethan Frome (her most-famed book) is her best novel. A Backward Glance might well be her own choice, for into it she has distilled the fading essence of her vanished world: good manners, polite intelligence, brave impotence. Summing up as a human being, not as a lady or an author, Edith Wharton says: "Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death. . . . But I am born happy every morning."

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