The Last Survivor

A BACKWARD GLANCE by Edith Wharton. 385 pages. Scribner. $6.95.

The most famous story about her is probably the one concerning her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald. That was in France in 1925, when Edith Wharton was 63 and Fitzgerald 28. She had written him a letter praising The Great Gatsby and invited him and Zelda to her country home for tea. Zelda refused to go; she was damned, she said, if she would travel 50 miles from Paris to let an old lady stare at her and make her feel provincial. According to Biographer Arthur Mizener, Fitzgerald, fortified with alcohol and determined not to be put down as a provincial, went alone. Their conversation, as he recalled later, went something like this:

"Mrs. Wharton, do you know what's the matter with you?"

"No, Mr. Fitzgerald, I've often wondered about that."

"You don't know anything about life. Why, when my wife and I first came to Paris we lived for two weeks in a bordello!" Edith Wharton was interested but puzzled. After a pause, she said:

"But Mr. Fitzgerald, you haven't explained what they did in the bordello." Fitzgerald fled the room.

Watershed of Manners. The story is not included in A Backward Glance-and not surprisingly. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton were separated by more than several stiff drinks and the span of a generation. They stood on opposite sides of what she came to think of as the Great Social Divide--World War I--and no effort could reach across that watershed of manners.

Actually, there had been two watersheds--the Civil War being the first. It was after the Civil War that industrial money--"brazen new money," as Edith Newbold Jones Wharton called it --began to change the face of New York. Wharton was the first American novelist to use the breakup of preindustrial American society as the stuff of fiction--Sinclair Lewis, in recognition of the fact, dedicated Babbitt to her--but she was in some ways the last to understand it. Her best pre-World War I novels (The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country) were groping toward an understanding, and her failure to achieve such an understanding was finally the measure of her failure to become a truly first-rate novelist.

The difficulty becomes fascinatingly clear in her restrained, carefully cultivated autobiography, first published in 1934 and now reissued. Her backward glance is to "an old tradition of European culture which the country has now totally rejected" and which she herself partially rejected. But she could not reject it entirely, and so she suffered the disadvantage of being a perpetual outsider, resentful of an older social order but fearful of what replaced it.

Daughter of an old Manhattan family, Edith Jones grew up believing that the universe was composed of a row of brownstones in New York, a street in Newport and the continent of Europe. A child in that society was taught "only two things: 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."

The social fabric fascinated her even as a little girl. At eleven, 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.' " (On which her mother commented: "Drawing-rooms are always tidy.") Soon she was dispatching poems to Scribner's Magazine with her calling card attached, and when she began to be published she learned her first hard truth about old New York society: it had no use for brainy women. "My literary success," she wrote, "puzzled and embarrassed my old friends far more than it impressed them. None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books, either to praise or blame--they simply ignored them." Her marriage, at 23, to Boston Banker Edward Wharton, did not improve matters: "I was a failure in Boston because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable."

Best Remembered. She was not a failure in Europe. Starting in the 1880s, she spent nearly all her time abroad, ostensibly for her husband's health (he was a neurasthenic). Her idol was Henry James, and of the famous people she met, he is the one she remembered best --the one with whom, as James put it, she was "more and more never apart." Intentionally or not, she makes him out to be a buffoon. He was so convinced of his own poverty, she recalls, that when guests visited him at his home outside London, "the dreary pudding or pie of which a quarter or half had been consumed at dinner reappeared on the table the next day with its ravages unrepaired." He had a "passion for motoring," and he indulged it "to the last drop of petrol of any visitor's car." He was a hypochondriac and a fussbudget and noticeably thin-skinned where criticism of his work was concerned. But he was also the "greatest talker" she had ever met.

If the portrait of James seems incomplete, it is because Edith Wharton was a lady, and there are things a lady never tells. She makes no mention, for instance, of how unhappy her marriage was (her husband, said a friend, was "more an equerry than an equal") or how it ended after 28 years in divorce when her husband was finally declared insane and Henry James counseled her to "continue making the movements of life." And although she mentions a Washington lawyer named Walter Berry as a valued friend and literary adviser, she never hints that she was in love with him during and after her marriage or that she had requested that she be buried by him in the cemetery at Versailles (as she finally was when she died in 1937 at 75).

The end of A Backward Glance describes instead the last years in France, when she was already a legend, hostess to most of France's literary lights (although she never sought out Proust, whose work she admired, because she suspected him of being a "climber"). Her enormous output (42 novels) yielded her easily $75,000 a year. Yet the feeling of nonbelonging, she confesses, never really left her. Looking back, she saw herself as the last survivor of a civilization "as remote as Atlantis or the lowest layer of Schliemann's Troy."

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