Prisoner of Life

Edith Wharton, A Biography By R. W. B. Lewis Harper, 592 pp., ilus., $15 Toward the end of her days, novelist Edith Wharton wrote of Henry James that “The Master’s” meandering style of expression meant something very special. to those who really knew him. The “elaborate hesitancies, far from being an obstacle, were like a cobweb bridge flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one’s feet.” The redoubtable Mrs. Wharton took a similar attitude toward the twists and turns of life. In a long and, in many respects, sorrow-filled existence, she never lost her zest for the ironies, the jokes, the malices, and the occasional explosions of mirth, passion, or inspiration. A prisoner of life, she was trapped by (or was she really clinging to?) the fascinating web of human relationships and experiences that made bearable her basic view of the world as a series of snares and muted tragedies.

But she was more than a spectator; she wrote. Because she was a patrician (one of the old New York Joneses), Mrs. Wharton devoted most of her pages to characters with similar backgrounds, Ethan Frome and a few short stories aside. This had an unfortunate short-term side effect. The new wave of post-World War I writers, glorying in proletarian sweat, gore, and ruttishness, considered her writing an anachronism long before her death in 1937. Like Mrs. Wharton, her characters might occasionally sin, but they were invariably polite arid well-scrubbed, and never overdone—in short, hopelessly civilized. Yet, as Janet Flanner noted in one of her Paris letters of the 1930s, “Mrs. Wharton had the tender and reserved sentiments of the truly literate.” She was also one of the few genuinely cultivated women (or men) of letters in this century to achieve immense success on the American popular market without pandering to the plebs or vulgarizing her style. This achievement by itself makes her that delightful rarity, a truly liberated lady; and, in Professor Lewis, she has at last found a masterly, gentlemanly biographer. It is not often that one comes across such an ideal literary marriage and I urge any reader who enjoys a good biography to buy the Lewis tome and savor it slowly. It is a long book but not a bloated one; each page is filled with fresh insights into Edith Wharton and the several eras she lived through and helped illumine —from gilded Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian to the Grim Thirties.

AB

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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Edith Wharton, A Biography By R. W. B. Lewis Harper, 592 pp., ilus., $15 Toward the end of her days, novelist Edith Wharton wrote of Henry James that “The Master’s” meandering style of expression meant something very special. to those who really knew him. The “elaborate hesitancies, far from being an obstacle, were like a cobweb bridge flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one’s feet.” The redoubtable Mrs. Wharton took a similar attitude toward the twists and turns of life. In a long and, in many respects, sorrow-filled existence, she never lost her zest for the ironies, the jokes, the malices, and the occasional explosions of mirth, passion, or inspiration. A prisoner of life, she was trapped by (or was she really clinging to?) the fascinating web of human relationships and experiences that made bearable her basic view of the world as a series of snares and muted tragedies.

But she was more than a spectator; she wrote. Because she was a patrician (one of the old New York Joneses), Mrs. Wharton devoted most of her pages to characters with similar backgrounds, Ethan Frome and a few short stories aside. This had an unfortunate short-term side effect. The new wave of post-World War I writers, glorying in proletarian sweat, gore, and ruttishness, considered her writing an anachronism long before her death in 1937. Like Mrs. Wharton, her characters might occasionally sin, but they were invariably polite arid well-scrubbed, and never overdone—in short, hopelessly civilized. Yet, as Janet Flanner noted in one of her Paris letters of the 1930s, “Mrs. Wharton had the tender and reserved sentiments of the truly literate.” She was also one of the few genuinely cultivated women (or men) of letters in this century to achieve immense success on the American popular market without pandering to the plebs or vulgarizing her style. This achievement by itself makes her that delightful rarity, a truly liberated lady; and, in Professor Lewis, she has at last found a masterly, gentlemanly biographer. It is not often that one comes across such an ideal literary marriage and I urge any reader who enjoys a good biography to buy the Lewis tome and savor it slowly. It is a long book but not a bloated one; each page is filled with fresh insights into Edith Wharton and the several eras she lived through and helped illumine —from gilded Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian to the Grim Thirties.