Popping the Stays

By Gerald Clarke

EDITH WHARTON: A BIOGRAPHY

by R.W.B. LEWIS

592 pages. Harper & Row. $15.

Edith Wharton has always been seen through a lorgnette darkly. The highest born of all major American writers, she usually emerges from the memoirs looking like a bejeweled dowager in a Peter Arno cartoon--stiff-necked, straight-backed and with all her stays grimly fastened. There is some truth to the image, but only part of the truth, and no such caricature of a woman could ever have written such brilliant novels as The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frame. The lady was indeed a snob, but, as R.W.B. Lewis' fascinating biography demonstrates, she also had a keen, if delayed taste for the erotic and a fine, hitherto undisclosed talent for dabbling in very unladylike pornography.

Born in 1862 to a prominent New York family, Edith grew up in a world of high, narrow town houses and high, narrow minds. As a woman, she was supposed to know enough to be a good hostess and no more; to be educated was tantamount to being pushy, a sin just below adultery in the eyes of old New York. Judged by those almost Oriental rules, Edith Jones was a misfit, and she was more at home in the library than in the drawing room.

Marriage Bed. She spent perhaps too much time in the library, and even by Victorian standards she was unusually repressed and naive. On the eve of her marriage to Edward Wharton, Edith, then 23, went to her mother to ask about what goes on in the marriage bed. Her mother looked at her with icy disapproval. "You've seen enough pictures and statues in your life," she replied. "Haven't you noticed that men are . . . made differently from women? You can't be as stupid as you pretend." On that subject she was, however, and the marriage was not consummated for three weeks, after which the sexual life of husband and wife virtually ceased. What Teddy Wharton--a handsome, almost excessively amiable man ten years her senior--thought of such a bloodless arrangement is not recorded, but for years he seemed warily devoted to his unusual literary wife.

With a growing private income, Edith concentrated all of her energies redoing her homes on Park Avenue and in Newport. She eventually built The Mount, a mansion constructed to her own perfectionist taste in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. There was nevertheless plenty of time to write. Edith, who had begun an unfinished novel as a child, sent poems and then short stories to the literary magazines. Her first novel, The Valley of Decision, was published in 1902, just after her 40th birthday.

Modeled partly after Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, the novel was set in 18th century Italy. But Mrs. Wharton soon turned to her true subject, the world of the American rich and the clash between new and old money. On her native ground she has never been matched, and no other American has ever portrayed so well the sometimes savage drama of life behind the damask draperies of Fifth Avenue and the wrought-iron gates of Newport. By the time of The House of Mirth in 1905, she was recognized as a major novelist and, as an aging Henry James grew silent, she took his place as the preeminent American writer, a position she held for nearly 25 years, until the eve of the Depression.

Manic Energy. Despite her unprecedented popularity, she grew increasingly dissatisfied with America and Americans, elevating snobbishness, her most unpleasant characteristic, to the height of religious pride. "Such dreariness, such whining callow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!" she wrote after spending a night at a Massachusetts hotel. "What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast." More and more time was spent in Europe, and finally Edith and the ever compliant Teddy took an apartment in Paris, returning to America for shorter and shorter visits.

Most of her friends were Americans. In 1903 Edith had begun her famous friendship with another expatriate, Henry James. He was alternately fascinated and appalled by her wealth and her seemingly inexhaustible and sometimes manic energy, which led him to call her "the Angel of Devastation."

Other friendships were more intimate. Well into her 40s, Edith met Morton Fullerton, an American journalist in Paris, who finally unlocked her sexual passion. Fullerton, who seems to have been irresistible to both sexes, later hinted that he taught a very willing partner his many tricks. Edith was never again shy about sex. In her old age she even tried her hand at writing pornography in a never published story of father-daughter incest entitled Beatrice Palmato.

Edith dissolved her marriage to Teddy after he took $50,000 from her trust fund to support a mistress in Boston. After World War I, during which she led a major effort to house and feed French and Belgian refugees, she divided her time between an estate north of Paris and a villa on the Riviera. Much of her later work was little better than contemporary soap opera, written by formula to keep her expensive life-style going. But the best of it, like The Age of Innocence, returned to the once despised world of her childhood, which she dissected with loving care. Such is the in exorable irony of nostalgia.

The Wharton papers, which were deposited at Yale after her death in 1937, were opened only in 1968. Biographer Lewis, a Yale professor, has had a treasure chest of hitherto secret material, and he has made good use of it. Edith Wharton's own story, too long delayed, is as compelling as anything she ever wrote.

Gerald Clarke

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