"The wish to do some good work"
Wharton Wednesday: Lovely excerpts from Edith Wharton's letters
As we take a break between read-a-longs, and before I announce all the details of our upcoming close reading of The Age of Innocence, I want to keep Wharton Wednesday going — and what better way than sharing Wharton’s own words?
For this week’s Wharton Wednesday, I’ve collected a few excerpts from The Letters of Edith Wharton, a volume I have mixed feelings about because we know from her architectural style to her autobiography that Wharton was an immensely private person.
So it feels strange that we collect and publish the letters of famous authors, and that we pour over their private communications with others. There’s something a bit voyeuristic about it all.
Wharton writes to her publisher
And yet a letter like this one — from Wharton to Charles Scribner, who had published The House of Mirth one month prior to this letter — feels like a lovely little record of the publishing world in November 1905.
Scribner had written to Wharton to let her know they were ordering more copies of the novel, because it was flying off the shelves; she writes back in excitement, including a note about a recent press photo —
Dear Mr. Scribner,
It is a very beautiful thought to me that 80,000 people should want to read “The House of Mirth,” & if the number should ascend to 100,000 I fear my pleasure would exceed the bounds of decency.
Seriously, I am of course immensely interested & amused by all these ‘returns,’ & very grateful to you for sending them to me. —And by the way, I hope you got the photograph I sent you about ten days ago, with my eyes down, trying to look modest?! The photographer swore he would send it off punctually, but I have had my doubts, as he hasn’t sent me one yet….
I shall be in town for one day next week….I am going to see Miss Marbury about dramatizing the H. of M., as I am having so many bids for it.
Thanks again for your letters,
Sincerely Yrs,
Edith Wharton
The voice of the author
I wonder at the voice we come to flow with, so willingly, in Wharton’s novels and the voice we find here — Wharton’s own, not her narrator’s — and I wonder at the similarities (the twinges of sarcasm, the internal rhythms) and the differences (the colloquial “Seriously” and the interrobangs of the real woman).
But then there are other letters, in which Wharton’s voice and the voice of her fiction, conflate powerfully.
Consider, for example, these excerpts from letters she sent to W. Morton Fullerton — the man with whom she met and fell in love while she was still married to Teddy Wharton.
She writes to Morton in May of 1908, at the outset of their affair —
You knew I was sad at saying goodbye to you. You knew why sometimes I drew back from your least touch. I am so afraid — so afraid — of seeming to expect more than you can give, & of thus making my love for you less helpful to you, less what I wish it to be. And sometimes mon corps ne peut pas oublier ton corps.1 & then I am miserable.
I shouldn’t say this to you if you hadn’t shown me that you understood. I don’t want to have any plan of conduct with you — to behave in this way or that way — but just to be natural, to be completely myself. And the completest expression of that self is in the desire to help you, to give you the chance to develop what is in you, & to live the best life you can. Nothing else counts for me now, Dear, except the wish to do some good work, & to have you see in it the reflections of all the beauty you have shown me.
Ton amie—E.
She seems eager to be in love as her most authentic and true self: to not “have any plan of conduct” and to “be natural…completely myself.” when she is with him. This wish mirrors Lily Bart’s own at the end of The House of Mirth, when she longs to break apart the version of herself that exists for others from the version that exists only for Lawrence Selden.
A few months later, Wharton sounds like Lily Bart herself as she writes to Fullerton after a long silence from him:
Goodbye, goodbye.—Write or don’t write, as you feel the impulse—but hold me long & close in your thoughts. I shall take up so little room, & it’s only there that I’m happy!—
Wharton’s appeals to Fullerton recall Lily Bart’s desperate moments in Selden’s apartment, as she attempts to warm herself before the fire — and their dwindled prospect of love — that no longer holds warmth:
“There is some one I must say goodbye to. Oh, not YOU—we are sure to see each other again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room.”
Wharton echoes her defeated heroine here, desiring to stay in the heart and mind of a man with whom she feels herself coming to an end. Far from being her most authentic and full self, as both she and Lily desire to be at the outsets of their relationships, each of them shrinks to make herself smaller, thinking it a worthy trade-off to maintain proximity to a man who no longer writes to her or holds her closely.
Wharton’s letter to Fullerton curiously conflates the fictional world of Mirth with the fantastical (yet real and lived) love story she was experiencing with Fullerton; I wonder if Wharton was conscious of making the connection. And if she was, could she see how heartbreakingly inadequate Fullerton’s love was, as we could see how judgmental and circumstantial Lawrence Selden’s love was in The House of Mirth? Was Wharton conscious of repeating the exact phrase of her heroine, under such strikingly similar circumstances?
Or was Wharton’s own skill and interest in architecture and home decor a kind of passion that lent her a vernacular of space, that encouraged her to make ready, spatial metaphors for selfhood and belonging in order to be understood?
I couldn’t help but feel, as I read this set of letters again last week, that it seems evident that Edith Wharton had reached the same emotional space as that of her heroine, Lily Bart, who at the end of the novel,
“had passed beyond the phase of well-bred reciprocity, in which every demonstration must be scrupulously proportioned to the emotion it elicits, and generosity of feeling is the only ostentation condemned. But the sense of loneliness returned with redoubled force as she saw herself forever shut out from Selden’s inmost self. She had come to him with no definite purpose; the mere longing to see him had directed her; but the secret hope she had carried with her suddenly revealed itself in its death-pang.”
Translates from the French, roughly: “My body cannot forget your body.”
What an absolutely lovely treasure to find this article in my inbox- I'm so glad your writing exists. Thank you for sharing!
Oh, thank you for sharing this! what an amazing connection and tie between Wharton's real life and her fiction. just as it was heartbreaking in Mirth when Lily said it, so it is here as well!