Wonderful book1

For Wharton fans, this book is a must, but in no way can you call it a memoir. Don't go into it thinking that that is what you are getting. It's a book of recollections, yes. But the bulk of those recollections are not about Wharton at all but the circle of people she knew. Not surprisingly, given when it was written and who she was, she goes out of her way not to reveal anything terribly startling about herself, or really at all. The most illuminating discussions actually are about Henry James, a figure who appears in many different chapters. Wharton's devotion to him is clear and abiding. There is also a very interesting chapter in which she describes her writing process and philosophy. It's called "The Secret Garden." Other than that, it's largely about other and mostly little known people. There is remarkably little about her husband or marriage. And not enough about her service World War 1, service which was very real and all-encompassing in those years. And of course don't expect anything about any affair she might have had. That information did not emerge until after her death. It's safe to say that this book is not nearly as engaging as her novels. And also not as true.

More about her friends than herself, but a generous appreciation, well written

Edith Wharton’s memoir is a gem. It is an interesting first hand account of life in New York City towards the end of the nineteenth century through the first part of the twentieth century. It contains the thoughts and the memories of a life rich in reading and writing, in travel and in dear friends.

The memoir is not a chronological autobiography; it is a collection of thoughts and memories of various topics, events and people. Ms Wharton is gracious and affectionate throughout. She is modest without being coy about her capabilities. She has an excellent sense of humour plus the wonderful capacity of being able to laugh at herself.

For someone who professed to be uninterested in celebrities, she certainly attended many dinners and luncheons hosted by celebrated hostesses and attended by the rich and famous. However, it is invariably on the quality of their conversation that she focuses rather than on the fashion of the day or any wealth on display.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

by Edward Harrison May

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Language, reading and writing
One of the first topics she tackles is Language. Her mother’s family had traditionally had excellent well-educated tutors, and from a very early age Edith was taught the importance of speaking well.
“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.”
“Bringing-up in those days was based on what was called 'good breeding.' One was polite, considerate of others, careful of the accepted formulas, because such were the principles of the well-bred. And probably the regard of my parents for the niceties of speech was a part of their breeding. They treated their language with the same rather ceremonious courtesy as their friends.”
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Little Edith had access to her father’s library, but permission was required prior to reading any novel.
“I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.”
“We all knew by heart 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'The Hunting of the Snark,' and whole pages of Lear's 'Nonsense Book,' and our sensitiveness to the quality of the English we spoke doubled our enjoyment of the incredible verbal gymnastics of those immortal works.”
“I was forbidden to read Whyte Melville, Rhoda Broughton, 'The Duchess,' and all the lesser novelists of the day; but before me stretched the wide expanse of the classics, English, French and German, and into that sea of wonders I plunged at will.”
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Certainly she has much to say about writing.
“I never cared much in my little childhood for fairy tales, or any appeals to my fancy through the fabulous or legendary. My imagination lay there, coiled and sleeping, a mute hibernating creature, and at the least touch of common things--flowers, animals, words, especially the sound of words, apart from their meaning--it already stirred in its sleep, and then sank back into its own rich dream, which needed so little feeding from the outside that it instinctively rejected whatever another imagination had already adorned and completed.”
“I cannot remember the time when I did not want to 'make up' stories. But it was in Paris that I found the necessary formula.”

She talks about writing her books, both fiction and non-fiction, but she doesn’t discuss them in depth as that is not the object of her exercise.

Of her fictional characters she says:
“From the first I know exactly what is going to happen to every one of them; their fate is settled beyond rescue, and I have but to watch and record.”


Travels, homes and gardens
“Perhaps, after all, it is not a bad thing to begin one's travels at four.” Ms Wharton travelled a great deal, and also lived abroad from time to time. One of her early writing successes (1904) was ‘Italian Villas and their Gardens'. (Due to an interest in things Italian, I purchased a paperback edition of this book long before I knew who Edith Wharton was.) She had a great interest in home decoration and gardens, and one of her first books was ‘The Decoration of Houses’ (1897). Here is a picture of her home 'The Mount' in Massachusetts:

The Mount, Massachusetts


Friends
She mentions many people whom she met, but I won’t go into any details here.
“What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.”

What stands out is her friendship with author Henry James, and it is clear this this friendship is of great importance to her. She reveals much about the great man and relates some very humorous incidents, but it is always admiring and affectionate rather than gossipy.
“Perhaps it was our common sense of fun that first brought about our understanding. The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights. I have had good friends between whom and myself that bond was lacking, but they were never really intimate friends; and in that sense Henry James was perhaps the most intimate friend I ever had, though in many ways we were so different.”
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“To James's intimates, however, these 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. This moment of suspense, in which there was time to watch the forces of malice and merriment assembling over the mobile landscape of his face, was perhaps the rarest of all in the unique experience of a talk with Henry James.”
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“As I write I yearn back to those lost hours, all the while aware that those who read of them must take their gaiety, their jokes and laughter, on faith, yet unable to detach my memory from them, and loath not to give others a glimpse of that jolliest of comrades, the laughing, chaffing, jubilant yet malicious James, who was so different from the grave personage known to less intimate eyes.”


War
Edith’s memoir describes what life was like immediately before WWI. It seemed inconceivable that there could be war or that it could last for long.
“It seemed as if those years contained some generative fire which called forth masterpieces; for close on Isadora, and on Diaghilew's dancers, came Proust's first volume.”

Edith was in Paris when war was declared, and she made a substantial contribution to the aid effort.

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n  “Meanwhile I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country, and I gloried in my new citizenship.”n

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Edith Wharton, I am becoming fond of you…

Straight up, Edith Wharton is one of my favourite authors. So when I come across her autobiography in the bargain bin, it was a no-brainer to pick it up right away and shuffle it into my ever-growing to-read pile. And even though she's one of my favourite writers, I know very little about her life. I suppose for most authors, we know their work on a superficial basis. We know their stories better than the milestones of their lives - who they're married to, their friends, and why they prefer rosemary instead of basil. Maybe these details don't matter, but their work matters more.

Many writers lead ordinary lives which cannot be said to be "exciting" as we know it. Not many writers live the life of adventure that Jack London, Kerouac or Orwell had. But we know that no life is ordinary, and these pockets where the ordinary falls away are always worth writing about. The anecdotes from the writer's childhood, the relationships that they craft and the ones which implode, the details in the places they visit are worth reading.

Wharton argued that her life was not interesting until World War I happened. And I can see why - her family comes from a decent background. It is said that the term "keeping up with the Joneses" referred first to her family. She became a polyglot as she lived in various parts of Europe as the US currency goes further in Europe. This upbringing also influenced her latter life to become a nomad who was never settled as an American. All things considered, her life was pretty good. She travels a third of the year with her husband to escape from the dreariness of America.

Through Wharton's eyes we see a glimpse of the bohemian art scene of the day. The highlight is the relationship she formed with Henry James. A name more famous for the name itself than his body of work (especially his latter writings). I wasn't aware that Wharton was very close to James, but in all honesty I couldn't care much about Henry James and his wanky writing. In A Backward Glance, Henry James is a stately man, albeit eccentric. He has a bit of an ego which may treat other writer's work with contempt, including Wharton's herself. He's a large lad whose passion for going for car rides rely on other people's petrol. His obsession with the form of a novel keeps him in a prison of his own making. Yeah, I couldn't care less about Henry James, who take up many pages of this book.

It's a shame that Wharton's most interesting part of her life, which happens during World War I, only takes up a chapter. Wharton practically became a war hero during that time, providing work for unemployed women to aide France's war effort. She made a few trips to the front to gather information of what the soldiers need, putting herself under great risk. But her writing during this time had already been covered in a series of articles which culminated in Fighting France and The Book of the Homeless. The brevity of the chapter does not do this period of her life justice. Some of her best work, such as Summer and Age of Innocence came after the war.

However, much of the book reads as a travelogue for the places that she had visited. In some ways, Wharton was right that her life was not too interesting until the war happened. But it is still a snapshot of what life of the gentry was back then. Lucky bastards. She did not reveal much of her personal life in the autobiography, and some significant relations were deliberately omitted from the book. It is a good read nonetheless - Wharton never disappoints. But I prefer her fiction.

A revealing look into the life of Edith Wharton. This book explains a lot (to me) about her fiction, its development and inspiration. It includes brief glimpses into Henry James's character and includes cameos of Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Hardy.

n  " . . . it will be seen that I was wakened to conscious life by the two tremendous forces of love and vanity."n

Be it the series of Gilded Age fashion that was covered on the Dressed podcast, my recent dabbling in The Gilded Age TV show, or the Sargent exhibition I attended at the MFA back in November, the Gilded Age has really been on my mind lately, and thus, naturally, Edith Wharton as well. I stumbled upon a used copy of this, her memoir, at the height of this interest and was eager to learn a little more about one of my all-time favorite authors.

I was naturally most looking forward to Edith's account of her childhood and early adulthood, growing up in one of the richest families in America in one of its most glamorous periods. And the Newport and New York scenes certainly did not disappoint — Edith's memories unfold in a blur of parties, faces, and especially clothes, for which she has a vivid recollection. I ate up every last detail.

But around the time of her marriage, the book shifted a bit and became much more focused on the people and places she interacted with in her adulthood. A lot of this was utterly fascinating — I had no idea how well-connected she was with so many of the famous figures of her day. And who, of course, can grow tired of her descriptions of traipsing around Europe?

However, it felt to me like any sense of Edith herself was very much in the background of all of this. I do understand that she was writing from a place of highlighting the important people and events in her life, rather than focusing on herself, but I just wish I could have seen more of her emerge in these pages. I felt like I got to know Henry James better than I did Edith.

The author of the introduction at the beginning of this edition points out that Edith hardly even alludes to her unhappy marriage and especially to her divorce, or even her husband at all, really, all of which must have made up a significant aspect of her adult experience, but which she only ever briefly mentions in passing. While I can understand all her unhappy reasons for avoiding this, it was still an obvious gap that created a slight sense of distrust for me as a reader.

Overall, though, this truly is a fascinating, extremely well-written look not only into the world of one of America's best writers, but into life in the early twentieth century from one of the most cosmopolitan women of the time. From start to finish, despite some dips and turns, I absolutely adored this as a reading experience. I wish all of my favorite authors had a memoir as detailed as this!

It was interesting to read about the privileged life of a New Yorker at the turn of the 20th century. I got bored with some of the chapters about writers I have never heard of, but I loved the Henry James stories; he really came to life. The book did a good job of creating the vision of what Wharton's life was like. I wouldn't mind reading a biography now to get the personal details that Wharton omitted.

This autobiography contains lots of interesting anecdotes and makes me want to start having dinner parties at which I throw together all sorts of people- she values all her friends so much, and one of the cool things about her life is the way she is constantly mixing with all different kinds of people, although her companions are very clearly delimited by class, and that insulated world with all that wealth and name-dropping made the book a little hard to get through in parts, even though I don't feel that way about her novels. She spends lots of time writing about Henry James, which is interesting, although I don't know if I'd particularly want to meet the guy myself- she really tries to emphasize how funny and charming and loyal he is but it still comes out that he's kind of a jerk, too. She barely talks about her husband and I had to read the part where he dies twice because I almost missed it, but I think I was supposed to assume he was there with her most of the time even when she didn't mention him. The couple does go on lots of adventures together, especially when they are young- I like the part where they decide to spend all their money to go hang out in Italy even though they're not sure how they'll manage financially when they get back- it partly inspired my summer vacation plans (although I don't know if my problems will all be solved by the same means as hers were- there's not that kind of money in my family!) Overall, I wish the writing had been a bit more personal, and that I got more insight into Wharton's writing process, and less rhapsodic detail about all her amazing friends.

Worst autobiography I’ve ever read except for the chapters on WW1

Did not learn a single thing about her except she was probably in love with Henry James

EW's coy "autobiography," written in the mid30s, contains a lot of bunkum. As much as I appreciate her novels, her debutante preening is often vexing. She constantly refers to her husband and never mentions that they were divorced in 1913. When she observes that after "The House of Mirth" was published (1905) "my husband and I decided to exchange our little house in NY for a flat in Paris," we know that the hovel accommodated 3-4 servants and could be divided into 6 apartments.

Edie needs a villa in Paris to replace "the emptiness of life in a hotel." Meanwhile, off to the French and Italian Rivieras. Salons and parties with "my dear friend the Marquis de Segur," or Comte Alexandre de Laborde - aah, the pre-war society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The name of Morton Fullerton, the American journalist who allegedly gave her a Lady Chatterley thrill, is omitted from this memoir. (It should really be called Impressions). The company Edie kept was mostly men, brilliant aesthetes like Henry James, Walter Berry, Howard Sturgis -- professional "bachelors." However, her portrait of James is genuinely warm and admirable. Advised that a boat for England sails from Boston in two days, Henry whinges that Lud! he couldnt possibly pack and get from the Mount (a few hours away) to Boston in a mere two days! He'd need at least four days. Say no more.... Wharton gives a sympathique study of the very rich/very gay Sturgis (she's blinkered) who was deeply wounded that James didnt like his fascinating novel, "Belchamber."

She also includes a Fun Fact : in France, at a dinner party, the "host and hostess sit opposite one another in the middle of the table." Or did pre-war. I'm told Hearst did the same at San Simeon. Guests descend, r and l, in dwindling importance.

"Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death," she concludes in the last lines. (Edie, pls take off your corset). She won prizes, was acclaimed for her best-sellers, made dozens of luxe transatlantic crossings First Class, had stately homes here and there, chartered yachts, and, frankly, never sat still - until she died in 1937.

Post-war1 America offended her. She couldnt bear to see any breakup of the social and class structure that enhanced her Gilded Age. Dont misunderstand my irreverence. Edie was a lady. Her stories capture a prehistoric period. It seems she and Fullerton could never get-it-on because her servants were always about. Elsewhere we read they finally pulled the shades in London at the Charing Cross Hotel. I hope it went beyond frottage.

In Wharton's autobiography she reveals herself to be a woman of letters, stories, books and relationships. She makes no pretext about saying that the great love of her life is her writing and traveling. While her romantic and married life remains in the shadows, only to be revealed later by scholars and sensationalists, her literary life takes center stage of this work. Her resources and connections shape her experience, but also hamper her passion, as women of New York society are not meant to write. The memories of her childhood, travel, and friendships are her most treasured 'resources' and she encourages her readers to build their own trove of memories. The entire work is tinged with melancholy as her life draws nearer its end and she watches the lives of her friends pass away one by one.