4

The life apart

Edith Wharton

Remember it’s not me, though I thought it was when I was writing it …¹

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton emerged from the First World War almost as a new woman, still charged with plans for reinvention at the age of fifty-six. She was tired—even when young, she had suffered for years from exhaustion—but immediately set about reorganizing her life. In some ways, the war reinforced her commitment to France. She had been swept up in the patriotic fervor and the courage she witnessed during her charity work in Paris, and during her dispatches from the front-lines collected in her book of reportage, Fighting France (1915). Before her divorce in 1913, she had swung between France and America rhythmically—one of many nicknames her friend Henry James gave her was “the pendulum-woman”² because of this trait—most often between her apartment in the Rue de Varenne in Paris, and her American residence, The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts. But after the armistice, she gave up America. The two new houses she moved into in 1919 and 1920—the beautifully enclosed Pavillon Colombe outside Paris in the forest of St-Brice, and the Château Sainte-Claire, in Hyères near Toulon, on a rocky promontory with views “south, east & west, ‘miles & miles’ ”³ out over the Mediterranean towards the Ile de Porquerolles—were to provide the frame for the last seventeen years of her life. She tended to go south to Hyères in December, often staying until June, before motoring back to Paris. Swinging between these two stately residences, surrounded by parks, gardens, pools, and the sea, she entered a late phase of work that was astonishingly sustained, prolific, and profitable.

She was now her own person entirely, free from the marriage endured for twenty-eight years. And she ordered her existence more than ever before. This new life was peaceful, secure, and sheltered; to some extent it was also a retreat from life, after the tumults of the war years. People came to stay with her, as they always had done. She gardened, spent long hours reading, and occasionally still traveled. Yet she kept her most private hours for work.

Each morning, she wrote from very early in bed, by hand, in black ink on blue paper, until lunch, when she would appear to any guests. The pages would be gathered up and typed with the assistance of her secretary Jeanne Duprat, and then revised again, until Wharton was satisfied. In this fashion, the chapters of book after book accumulated throughout the 1920s—novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel—beginning with The Age of Innocence (1920), started as soon as Wharton moved into the Pavillon Colombe. The subject of the novel, feeding on her memories of the Old New York world of her youth, offered a way around the difficulties of making sense of what she felt to be the incomprehensible rupture of tradition caused by the war. The book gave her a refuge in the distant past, meticulously recalled in fantastic detail. It was not reminiscence so much as reimagining, tapping deep wells of memory to recreate its setting. The novel also led indirectly to an ongoing project of the 1920s and early 1930s, as Wharton began to think seriously about writing her memoirs.

The great success of The Age of Innocence prompted a request from McCall’s Magazine in early 1923. This was for Wharton to write six articles on her recollections of New York Society. In a letter to her editor Rutger Jewett, Wharton replied that she did not want to write the articles, but that the proposal reminded her of a plan “vaguely floating through my mind for some time: namely, the writing of my own early memories, from 1865 to 1885 or 1890.”⁴ Her initial intention, she informed Jewett, had been to “jot down these remembrances, and put them away.”⁵ They were to have been a purely private enterprise, not for public consumption; and she only considered the project “to avoid having it inaccurately done by some one else after my death”⁶ should her books attract future biographers. But now, “as they would be concerned only with the picture of my family life as a child and young girl,” she saw “no particular reason in keeping them back.”⁷ Even so, the “remembrances” would only be a sideline, done “in the intervals of my novel writing.”⁸

Autobiography, she hints, was not a priority; and her memoirs were indeed done only in asides from other work. It would be ten years before her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), was finished and published, during which time Wharton wrote many other books. But was the long gestation due to indifference, or to an excess of care? Wharton was an avid reader of lives and letters, with a lifelong penchant for certain biographies. She loved Wladimir Karénine’s multivolume life of George Sand, which she sent in instalments to Henry James, and later, enthused over the biographical experiments of Lytton Strachey.⁹ In one of her only explicit declarations on the art of biography, however, she declared: “Biography makes strange bedfellows.”¹⁰ The pairing of biographer and subject—especially seen from the subject’s point of view—is in some ways akin to a marriage. But the dead subject has no choice in who writes his or her biography. Wharton was haunted by this, and well knew the value of her memoirs as source material for biographers. This went hand in hand with a slight timidity, if not modesty, about the project.

It was hard for her to even gauge the most appropriate stance to take towards herself. In two fragmentary self-portraits unpublished at her death, Wharton tested her reflection on the page. Both these short texts were put away privately, as she initially envisaged her “remembrances” would be. The Quaderno dello studente was begun in Salso, Italy, in 1924, and was kept up for the next decade. On the inside cover of this Italian notebook, Wharton wrote, “If ever I have a biographer, it is in these notes that he will find the gist of me.”¹¹ In these pages, in a series of intermittent notes, she collected the “floating scraps of experience that have lurked for years in the corners of my mind. And gradually […] I may even be able to jot down a sketch of myself—my own growth and history.”¹² The observations in this semi-private place are spurred on at first by motives that have little to do with self-analysis or self-interest. They are merely a pre-emptive strike against future biographers. “When I get glimpses, in books and reviews, of the things people are going to assert about me after I am dead, I feel I must have the courage and perseverance, some day, to forestall them.”¹³

Biographers have found the Quaderno to be far from revelatory. R. W. B. Lewis describes it as “disappointingly sparse”;¹⁴ Hermione Lee says its entries “amounted only to a few stray thoughts and reflections […] a few melancholy notes […] on her feelings about animals, solitude, the death of friends, being reviewed, beauty, loss, and happiness.”¹⁵ While the Quaderno shows little more than Wharton’s desire to get her life-story into pre-emptive shape before any biographers, “Life & I,” also unpublished until after Wharton’s death, gives a fuller portrait. In fact, although it only runs up to the early 1880s, this short three-chapter sketch of Edith as a little girl is far more revealing than her much longer Backward Glance, for which it probably served as an unfinished early draft.¹⁶ If it was indeed written before the formal memoir, it can be seen as a dress rehearsal, giving the inner history that the memoir covers up.

Extraordinarily direct and honest, “Life & I” has the close scrutiny of a psychoanalytic case study. Relating Wharton’s earliest memories to when she was roughly nineteen, it is a story of gradual psychic strengthening: of how a timid little girl overcame irrationalities. It tells us things found nowhere else in her writing, and does so clearly, unequivocally, sometimes almost as though she was writing purely for herself. There is very little about externals, as the psychic drama of Wharton purging herself of mental aberrations takes the foreground. The text obeys the urge towards secret-sharing of all autobiography. Sometimes, it is even about this, as if Wharton realized, in this uncontrolled attempt at self-portraiture, that one of the deep subjects of autobiography is the very idea of telling the truth. The page becomes a substitute for the psychoanalyst’s couch or the Roman Catholic confessional. But how much should be told? In “Life & I,” Wharton recalls the “chronic moral malady”¹⁷ which paralyzed her as a child. She always somehow felt a duty to tell the absolute truth, on pain of punishment by God. And yet she also saw how much this could cause mischief. “Nothing I have suffered since,” she writes, “has equalled the darkness of horror that weighed on my childhood in respect to this vexed problem of truth-telling, & the impossibility of reconciling ‘God’s’ standard of truthfulness with the conventional obligation to be ‘polite’ & not hurt any one’s feelings.”¹⁸

Ugliness provides Wharton with her first quandary on this score, prompting reflections that she knew it would be “ ‘naughty’ to say, or even to think.”¹⁹ If, as she writes, the desire “to look pretty”²⁰ was one of her deepest-seated instincts, this was accompanied by “feeling for ugly people an abhorrence, a kind of cold cruel hate, that I have never been able to overcome.”²¹ And not just people: “I remember hating certain rooms.”²² She fell ill at nine with typhoid while the family were in the Black Forest. She recalls this as the ending of this phase of moral torment over truth-telling, ushering in a new era of more terrifying psychic disturbance.

I had been naturally a fearless child; now I lived in a state of chronic fear. Fear of what? I cannot say […] It was like some dark undefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking, & threatening; I was conscious of it wherever I went by day, & at night it made sleep impossible […] But, whatever it was, it was most formidable & pressing when I was returning from my daily walk […] During the last few yards, & while I waited on the door-step for the door to be opened, I could feel it behind me, upon me; & if there was any delay in the opening of the door I was seized by a choking agony of terror […] This species of hallucination lasted seven or eight years.²³

Wharton was to become a connoisseur of homes and interiors: her first published book of prose, a study on The Decoration of Houses (1897), shows the same obsessive love of order and neat enclosure as her Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904). In “Life & I,” what seems strange is that she feels this omnipresent dread most intensely at the door of the house: that it is precisely at the threshold between outer and inner worlds that this abstract fear bears down. The door opens into a place of safety and enclosure; it is a shield and barrier as much as a gateway. Wharton stands at the doorstep, terrified. Only behind the door does she know she will be safe. Passing through the threshold, perhaps hearing the key turn in the lock once inside, offers a moment of respite after climactic terror. But only a moment.

In “Life & I,” Wharton presents her childhood fear as a mere phase. The self-portrait traces a neat and orderly progression through these various states of unrest; and her fear is replaced by a third, supposedly final neurosis: an obsession with the sufferings and the cruelties done to animals. “This lasted for years, & was the last stage of imaginative misery that I passed through before reaching a completely normal & balanced state of mind.”²⁴ Yet all her life, the fear at the door lingered and metamorphosed. She always saw herself as someone pursued by unabating “Furies.” At the same time, she was also scared of freedom, repeatedly seeking sanctuary and secrecy—while aware that such safety was illusory and momentary. Like the concern over truth-telling, the image of respite on the threshold of the door also offers an image of the anxious autobiographer, zealously guarding her privacy: putting up screens and bolting doors, while suspecting they will eventually be prised open. In writing her own life, Wharton became increasingly adept at marking such boundaries, yet did so with an odd awareness of how ultimately permeable they would prove. She became a devotee of the sealed packet, and the supposedly private manuscript left in the archive, as “Life & I” was. (It was first published in 1990.)

One reason that Wharton ultimately settled on a semi-private resting-place for “Life & I” was its candid treatment of sexuality, as well as its account of fears and desires. Opening with a kiss on Fifth Avenue in New York, before she was four years old, “Life & I” tells of her early loves, her childish crush on one of the Rutherfurd boys in Newport, her later flirtations and courtships. It also gives the simple, brave statement, “I did not fall in love till I was twenty-one.”²⁵ Wharton writes that her mother’s repeated refusals to enlighten her about the realities of sex (“It was ‘not nice’ to enquire into such matters”)²⁶ “did more than anything else to falsify & misdirect my whole life.”²⁷ She knew nothing about “the processes of generation till I had been married for several weeks.”²⁸ Yet the short self-portrait—as so much of her writing does, under very tightly controlled formal parameters—pulses with the passion of what she calls “Life.”

And all the while Life, real Life, was ringing in my ears, humming in my blood, flushing my cheeks & waving in my hair—sending me messages & signals from every beautiful face & musical voice, & running over me in vague tremors when I rode my poney, or swam through the short bright ripples of the bay, or raced & danced & tumbled with “the boys”. And I didn’t know—& if, by any chance, I came across the shadow of a reality, & asked my mother “What does it mean?” I was always told […] “It’s not nice to ask about such things.”²⁹

Wharton cut off the narrative of “Life & I” around 1881, at a moment in her life-story when she was in Europe with her parents, months before the unmentioned death of her father in Cannes in 1882. Why did she stop writing this version of her life? And why did she stop at exactly this point? If her sense of the dangers of truth-telling, and her fear at the door, were unconscious expressions of a deeper unease about self-revelation, then it is hardly surprising that she was unable to continue the candid vein of “Life & I”—although it is tempting to imagine what the account, if it had been continued up until the time of the writing, would have revealed. It may merely be that “Life & I” fulfilled her initial idea, outlined to Jewett, of writing her life only in its early phases, although it didn’t even reach up to 1885 or 1890, as she had first planned in that letter. But something about the candor of the narrative made her uneasy. Perhaps she felt that she had not grasped her subject as firmly as she grasped her characters in novels. When she portrayed herself in A Backward Glance, she showed a much more public face, and wrote about the adventures of the same little girl with a novelist’s sense of distance. The portrait is more poised, reserved, and veiled. Wharton may have bitterly resented her mother’s inhibitions, and the damaging effect they had on her own love life, but in the full autobiography she is very much her mother’s daughter, retaining a self-consciously old-fashioned sense of propriety, and what it was “nice” to discuss—courteously, silently, cordoning off entire zones of experience.

*

On October 12, 1927, Wharton’s lifelong friend Walter Berry died. Hearing of Berry’s first stroke, Wharton had rushed to the Hôtel Crillon in Paris from the Pavillon Colombe to be close to him. She was a witness to his last days, and the death affected her profoundly. She would eventually ask to be buried next to Berry: he was her dearest friend, and sometimes, potentially, the greatest unrequited love throughout her life. She had married Teddy Wharton in 1885, two years after meeting Berry. Early biographers, and many friends, thought she had a later affair with Berry, although it appears they were mistaken. In the aftermath of Berry’s death in 1927, Wharton burned all the letters she had written him—the only person she did this for—and assembled a packet labeled “For My Biographer.” (This packet, writes R. W. B. Lewis, was mostly about “her husband’s various illnesses and her divorce from him.”)³⁰ Then Teddy died in February 1928. That year, no doubt influenced by these two deaths, Wharton signed a contract to write her memoirs.

She was still busy writing fiction. Her novel The Children was serialized throughout 1928, appearing as a book that autumn. Then she set to a novel delayed for many years: Hudson River Bracketed (1929), based on an unfinished manuscript begun in 1914 called “Literature,” stalled during the war. It was the story of the growth of a writer, Vance Weston. This itself was a form of autobiography, using elements from her writing life: Weston, with his name so close to Wharton, was an alter-ego, even though his sex, his background, and his much younger age distanced him from her. Wharton labored over his life during 1928 and 1929, continuing with a sequel, The Gods Arrive, which occupied her until 1932, when it was published in September. She probably wrote parts of A Backward Glance alongside these two novels. But she only really turned to it exclusively once The Gods Arrive was done. In the early 1930s, the autobiography loomed closer, as did other biographical endeavors by or about Wharton’s friends, which intensified her anxieties about how other people would write her life, when she died.

In a letter to the art historian Bernard Berenson in February 1931, Wharton wrote, vis-à-vis a proposed life of Walter Berry by a young Leon Edel, “as you know I am trying to get together material for some reminiscences, & I am perfectly willing, in order to block Mr. Edel, to say that I may write a life of Walter myself.”³¹ (Of course she planned to do no such thing.)³² By June 1932, Wharton was giving Mary Berenson—who sent her the manuscript of a Life of Bernard Berenson she was working on, which was never finished or published—advice on how to spice up the narrative. She asked Mary for comments in turn. “And now, please send me ‘by return’ some advice as to how to write my own ‘Life’, for I’m hopelessly stuck, & feel how much easier it wd have been if I’d lived in Florence with picturesque people instead of stodging in New York!”³³ Stuck or not, she worked rapidly throughout 1932. By March the next year she wrote Gaillard Lapsley from Hyères that “My ‘Apologia’ is on its last lap,”³⁴ asking about Henry James’s last words, so that she would get them right in her self-portrait. She posted the last chapters of what was then called Retrospect to Jewett on March 15, 1933, and struck on the title A Backward Glance on July 20.³⁵ It soon began to be serialized in the Ladies’ Home Journal, appearing in full in 1934 as a lavishly illustrated book.

The autobiography opens with a disclaimer, after briefly reflecting on sorrow and old age, and thoughts that came to Wharton “in the course of sorting and setting down these memories.”³⁶ Carefully, Wharton raises the theme of truth-telling, mentioning reviews of “a recently published autobiography” praised “on the score that here at last was an autobiographer who was not afraid to tell the truth! And what gave the book this air of truthfulness? Simply the fact that the memorialist ‘spared no one’, set down in detail every defect and absurdity in others, and every resentment in the writer.”³⁷ This is not the kind of autobiography she has written, Wharton warns us. Her self-portrait, she implies firmly at the outset, will only deal with pleasant memories.

A Backward Glance stretches back across Wharton’s whole life. It gives the histories of the prior generations of her family, and the romance of her parents, sketching the New York world she remembered before she was four, when the family set off for six years in Europe, traveling through Italy and Spain, with long sojourns in Paris and Florence, before returning to America when she was ten. As in “Life & I,” Wharton writes of dancing lessons in Paris with Mlle Michelet; reading in her father’s library; “making up” stories by holding books in front of her and pretending to read them, while inventing entirely new tales. She tells of life as a débutante in New York society, her fearsome “coming-out” party, and her summers spent in Newport by the sea. Where “Life & I” ended in 1881, A Backward Glance continues towards the twentieth century, with the regular travels in Europe which began soon after her marriage; her yachting trip of 1888 in the Mediterranean on the “Vanadis”; setting up a house in Newport, and then in Lenox. Step by step, Wharton recalls the stages of her writing career, and her literary friendships; trips to Italy, France, and England; her time at The Mount and among the Parisian literary world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; her friendship with Henry James and the circle at Queen’s Acre in Windsor; her war-time charity work in Paris. Then she briefly touches on the life she rebuilt afterwards.

For all this fullness of scope, the autobiography is notoriously discreet. “Glance” is an apt word for what Wharton does whenever faced with telling things she doesn’t want to—she slides around them. Of course, there is omission and evasion. But the most cunningly deployed and persistent technique is deflection. To delight and distract herself, and the reader, Wharton piles up extraneous surface impressions. She wraps layers of drapery around herself, carefully smothering the inner story.

The story proper begins with a kiss on Fifth Avenue, like “Life & I.” “The little girl who eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in particular”³⁸ is walking with her father. But in this telling, Wharton writes about “the little girl” in the third person, initially, with ostentatious control. She lingers over externals, lavishly detailing all the layers of her dress: the white satin bonnet, “patterned with a pink and green plaid in raised velvet,” with “a bavolet in the neck to keep out the cold, and thick ruffles of silky blonde lace under the brim in front.”³⁹ It is a symbolic adjustment, this fixation on clothes, done with a sleight-of-hand typifying the autobiography’s glancing method. Wharton lovingly recreates the outer surfaces of her youth. She excavates, like an “assiduous relic-hunter,”⁴⁰ the society which formed her. As she performs this archaeological retrieval with one hand, she simultaneously scoops out and places elsewhere all the material about her inner psychic disturbances, her fears, desires, and loves.

The same events from “Life & I” prompt very different responses. While Mlle Michelet’s ugly mother cues the dilemma over truth in the fragmentary text, here she is dressed up—“in a cap turreted with loops of purple ribbon”⁴¹—and her ugliness glossed over. In place of the throbbing sensations of “Life,” and the prim prohibitions about sex by Edith’s mother, the full self-portrait gives an anecdote about the disgrace of Edith’s cousin George Alfred. “ ‘But, Mamma, what did he do?’ ” Edith asks. “ ‘Some woman’—my mother muttered”⁴²—and her ominous omission and lack of specificity reveal the same weight of scorn, but glancingly and indirectly. Edith’s love for the Rutherfurd boy goes unmentioned; the narrative instead reflects on the costume of the Newport “archery club meetings,” and the hidden faces of their young and beautiful participants, their “heavy veils flung back only at the moment of aiming”: “veils as thick as curtains.”⁴³ The haunting fear of the Newport years is absent; instead Wharton depicts the parade of fashionable ladies on their “Ocean Drive,” painting in their elaborate attire with an intricate excess of brushstrokes: their “brocaded or satin-striped” dresses, “powerfully whale-boned”; their “flower-trimmed” bonnets “tied with a large tulle bow under the chin.”⁴⁴

Beneath all the deflection and drapery, however, is still the same fearful soul depicted in “Life & I.” She is simply harder to find. At first the center of the portrait remains one of a lost and lonely girl, whose isolation—as to what really interested her—was extreme. And what really interested her was literature, always depicted with an aura of secrecy. Wharton maintained this secrecy her entire life, as though protecting something priceless. The autobiography traces this secrecy back to her childhood encounters with literature. “There was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude, or at least no one whom I had yet encountered,”⁴⁵ Wharton says of her literary yearnings. The early account of discovering books and “making up” in A Backward Glance is very similar to “Life & I.” Originally, the pages were part of the manuscript of her 1914 novel “Literature,” but were then moved by Wharton from fiction to fact: from her novel about a writer’s growth into her autobiographies.⁴⁶

“Making up,” in all its senses of creativity, compensation, and cosmetics, was what Wharton did all her life, through literature. She made up stories which made up for the deficiencies of reality. Through such making up, she built up a personality. The full self-portrait is another tale of strengthening, as Edith progressed from “the same insignificant I that I had always known”⁴⁷ into the person she wanted to be. Initially, reading books was the key, and was fruitful, if solitary. Early travels in Europe were also important. Later, encounters and friendships with other writers became pivotal. And Edith’s life-story, begun as a tale of loneliness, soon becomes a much more social portrait. Like many autobiographies, its later structure becomes “people I have known.”

*

Self-portraiture, while often being seen as solipsistic, frequently becomes a story about how other people, often met by chance, have influenced oneself. Character is relative; it depends on situation. “What is one’s personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one?”⁴⁸ Wharton asks, pointing to the ways in which personality and selfhood depend on and are nourished by friendship and influence. She only talks of friendship here, where choice intervenes as much as chance; rather than of families, where the sense of fate and lack of choice is so much stronger. And tellingly, she doesn’t mention love, where other people’s impact can prove indissoluble from oneself.

The relativity of personality—the ways in which we adapt our personalities in reaction to other people—also has an aesthetic dimension in the life and work of any writer. Mutual influence and friendship in “real” life between writers or artists has a corresponding effect, if only in reaction, on their work. It is often as important as the mutual influence exerted by writers purely on the page. Biography and autobiography consistently expose these circumstantial elements. This is frequently seen as one of the irremediable trivialities of life-writing: the way that dwelling on circumstantialities leads to the banal, or worse, to plain gossip. Yet many artists’ work is nourished by such links.

In her autobiography, Wharton was incredibly selective about who to portray. She knew that such portrayals also related to her self. Certain characters were rubbed out from the portrait; others were raised on plinths. This was not always due to the influence they exerted on her life, or work, or both. Sometimes the most intimate figures were shielded, with the same protective privacy Wharton displayed in all her writing life. But she did most often celebrate those who helped her to connect the two sides of her outer daily existence and her secret writing self. In the early stages of her life, such figures were random and sparse: Walter Berry; Egerton Winthrop; the French writer Paul Bourget and his wife Minnie; Wharton’s early editors Edward Burlingame and William Brownell. She eventually met more influential figures; but it took years.

Wharton reserves the most extended, loving portrait in the autobiography for Henry James, whom she first met in Paris at the house of the watercolorist Edward Boit (a good friend of Sargent’s) and then later in Venice “in 1889 or 1890.”⁴⁹ The great man failed to notice her on both of these occasions, even though, as Wharton says, she dressed up to look her prettiest: first in “my newest Doucet dress,” then with “a beautiful new hat!”⁵⁰ But they finally became such good friends, after meeting again in 1903, that their literary fates became intertwined. Their meetings often occurred in very different places. During his American tour of 1904–5, for example, James had stayed with Wharton; and he visited her in Paris in 1907.

Part of their friendship, strangely, in later years, was an almost obsessive urge on Wharton’s part to make James sit for his portrait. During another of James’s visits to Paris, in 1908, Wharton persuaded James to sit for Jacques-Emile Blanche (which resulted in what she later thought the only extant portrait of James “as he really was”);⁵¹ in 1912 she commissioned Sargent’s charcoal drawing of James, and in 1913, the Sargent portrait for James’s seventieth birthday. In a corresponding memorial act, Wharton took full control of the opportunity to portray James in words. And almost possessively, she portrayed sides of him that no one else had seen. As she wrote after James’s death, to Lapsley, referring to the inner circle of James’s friends at Queen’s Acre—“we had a Henry that no one else knew; and it was the Henry we had!”⁵²

Wharton’s James is, above all, seen as an equal. Financially operating in realms of which James was in awe, Wharton even sometimes almost seems sorry for James. She portrays him, gently, as a spendthrift, seeming genuinely shocked at the meager fare served and re-served at Lamb House, noting how he was always prepared to “take advantage, to the last drop of petrol”⁵³ of her car—without ever getting a motor himself. She draws out his sense of fun and playfulness, differing from many portraits, which imply that James was only unintentionally funny. She sees his malice and his humor as being interlinked, his “elaborate hesitancies” as being full of comic timing: “one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one’s feet.”⁵⁴ She delights in “the quality of fun—often of sheer abstract ‘fooling’—that was the delicious surprise of his talk”;⁵⁵ his dementedly endless humorous allusions, “as four-dimensional as that of the Looking Glass, or the Land where the Jumblies live”; his “heaped-up pyramidal jokes, huge cairns of hoarded nonsense.”⁵⁶

Nowhere, perhaps, was this spirit of nonsense more alive in their relationship than in all the names he gave her. “One could make an amusing list,” writes Millicent Bell, “of the epithets he created for ‘the most remuante of women’—the Princess Lointaine, the whirling princess, the great and glorious pendulum, the gyrator, the devil-dancer, the golden eagle, the Fire Bird, the Shining One, the angel of desolation or of devastation, the historic ravager […] each more hilarious than the last.”⁵⁷ Wharton’s enormous energy and wealth terrified and amused James; if at first he could not take her entirely seriously, he soon, semi-secretly, saw her as a threat, for all their camaraderie. The sales of her books were phenomenal, while his New York Edition flopped. He could not but respect her artistry, even if his criticisms were fierce. The slight tone of mockery in his letters to her changed over time to one of heartfelt sympathy; it switched decisively during the war, when he had nothing but admiration for the way she threw herself into action. She wrote him long descriptive letters from the front-lines, which he devoured.

Wharton’s respect for James throughout her autobiography is self-evident; yet she celebrates him slightly more as a man than as a writer. She presents the convivial James, giving glimpses of him amid the literary milieu at Queen’s Acre, or motoring together—James accompanied her on her Motor-Flight Through France (1908) though not mentioned by name—or visiting the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She depicts him on his trips back to America in 1904 and 1911. She describes him reading poetry aloud, noting that he read very few contemporary novels except Wells’s—because, as James told her, “ ‘everything he writes is so alive and kicking’ ”⁵⁸—“and a few of Conrad’s.”⁵⁹ Wharton’s mimicry of James’s circumlocutions forms several hilarious set-pieces, most often when James consistently gets them lost motoring, by insisting on offering directions to Cook, the chauffeur. Metaphorically, Wharton subtly implies, much more softly than Wells did in Boon, that James’s late style was a wrong turning artistically. “This—this, my dear Cook, yes … this certainly is the right corner. But no; stay! A moment longer, please—in this light it’s so difficult […] It may be … yes! I think it is the next turn … ‘a little farther lend thy guiding hand’ … that is, drive on; but slowly, please, my dear Cook; very slowly.”⁶⁰ Yet Wharton, beyond all her playful imitations, is also keen to capture the inspirational quality of James’s talk and conversations. She portrays him as a miraculous autobiographer, whose winding syntax and parentheses brought people back to life. She recalls one summer evening in 1911, during James’s visit to The Mount, as they were sitting out late on the terrace, when in his improvised verbal memories she glimpsed the stirrings of his autobiographies A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother.

One of us suddenly said to him (in response to some chance allusion to his Albany relations): “And now tell us about the Emmets—tell us all about them.” […] for a moment he stood there brooding in the darkness, murmuring over to himself, “Ah, my dear, the Emmets—ah, the Emmets!” Then he began, forgetting us, forgetting the place, forgetting everything but the vision of his lost youth that the question had evoked, the long train of ghosts flung with his enchanter’s wand across the wide stage of the summer night. Ghostlike indeed at first, wavering and indistinct, they glimmered at us through a series of disconnected ejaculations, epithets, allusions, parenthetical rectifications and restatements, till not only our brains but the clear night itself seemed filled with a palpable fog; and then, suddenly, by some miracle of shifted lights and accumulated strokes, there they stood before us as they lived, drawn with a million filament-like lines, yet sharp as an Ingres, dense as a Rembrandt; or, to call upon his own art for an analogy, minute and massive as the people of Balzac.⁶¹

Wharton shows how James’s spoken verbal Impressionism worked almost magically through blurs, auras, half-glimpsed essences, suddenly, mysteriously, cohering: as, at unpredictable moments, the sinuous verbal haze shifts to reveal a needle-sharp focus. She emphasizes how close James’s art as an autobiographer was to his normal talk and conversation, giving a glimpse of exactly how its portraits of others were achieved through dictation, as James paced up and down, remembering, adding stroke after stroke to an image or idea. In a later passage in her self-portrait, Wharton recalls James doing the same at Queen’s Acre, as he plunged “into reminiscences of the Paris or London of his youth, or into some slowly elaborated literary disquisition, perhaps on the art of fiction or the theater, on Balzac, on Tolstoy, or, better still, on one of his own contemporaries. I remember, especially, one afternoon when the question: ‘And Meredith—?’ suddenly freed a ‘full-length’ of that master which, I imagine, still hangs in the mental picture-galleries of all who heard him.”⁶²

In such instances, Wharton again crosses the lines between autobiography and normal talk, showing how close they can be. Yet her own autobiography remains considered, careful, intensely written: anything but freely discursive. She hints at James’s sensitivities, and his inability to take criticism, for all the quietly devastating critiques and advice he gave others on their work. But she keeps her knowledge of his depression out of the portrait. She had seen this at first hand, and had been terrified by her glimpse of its abysses. But there is nothing of this in A Backward Glance. It is only in her private letters. She visited James early one afternoon in March 1910, as James’s Pocket Diaries also record, and wrote to Morton Fullerton about the encounter.

I was told to come after luncheon; & when I entered, there lay a prone motionless James, with a stony stricken face, who just turned his tragic eyes toward me—the eyes of a man who has looked on the Medusa! […] I sat down beside the sofa, & for a terrible hour looked into the black depths over which he is hanging […] I could hardly believe it was the same James who cried out to me his fear, his despair, his craving for the “cessation of consciousness”, & all his unspeakable loneliness & need of comfort, & inability to be comforted! “Not to wake—not to wake—” that was his refrain; “& then one does wake, & one looks again into the blackness of life, & everything ministers to it—all one reads & sees & hears” […] Don’t think I am exaggerating: it was all this & more—with cries, with tears, & a sudden effondrement at the end, when, after pleading with me to stay—“Don’t go, my child, don’t go—think of my awful loneliness!”—he wanted me no more, & could hardly wait for me to be out of the door!⁶³

That spring of 1910, Wharton had serious problems of her own. Teddy Wharton’s mental illness had by then become uncontrollable. There was talk of putting him in a sanatorium. His ups made him behave manically (he boasted of having had affairs in Boston with chorus girls in a flat he had bought); his downs left him sobbing and needy. All this is only glimpsed in the autobiography, as is the rest of their tragically inappropriate union. It is a glaring omission: there isn’t even a photograph of Teddy in the book. But it is not a complete omission. Teddy makes a few appearances, but only namelessly as “my husband,” and only rarely. The effect of such glances and rubbings-out is similar to Wharton’s mother’s exclamation “Some woman!”—making us aware of something that is not being said.

Omission in autobiography needs to be total for it to work fully; otherwise it draws attention to itself. Yet Wharton tries not to stimulate any curiosity with her few dry mentions of Teddy. The marriage is announced obliquely, then ignored. “At the end of my second winter in New York I was married; and thenceforth my thirst for travel was to be gratified,”⁶⁴ Wharton writes. “An intriguing non sequitur!”⁶⁵ exclaims one biographer, Grace Kellogg. (Although this sentence resonates oddly—unconsciously?—with Wharton’s observation in “Life & I” that for many years, “I still thought that persons who had ‘committed adultery’ had to pay higher rates in travelling […] because I had seen somewhere, in a train or ferry-boat, the notice: ‘Adults 50 cents, children 25 cents’.”)⁶⁶ Wharton erased Teddy from her life as she wrote it. She talks around his “neurasthenia” only in one neutrally worded, extremely guarded paragraph, towards the end. The hole in the narrative highlights the defensive hand of the writer, shielding the facts.

There are other gaps and absences in the group portrait which A Backward Glance becomes. The depictions of Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the French Riviera in the 20s and 30s, reveal the extent to which Wharton kept herself to herself: socializing mainly with the privileged sets of the Queen’s Acre circle in England, and Rosa de Fitz-James’s salon in France. Wharton never met Proust, although she read the instalments of A la recherche du temps perdu as they appeared. She frequented the same Faubourg milieu as Proust, and was in Paris, on and off, the whole time he was writing the novel. Her autobiography is, in its social scenes of Paris, almost like a chapter of the Recherche, depicting a similar world, but from the angle of an American; and Wharton possibly found encouragement to depict a writing life—as she also did from 1914 onwards in her books about Vance Weston—from reading Proust. Walter Berry dined regularly with Proust. But there was no meeting between Marcel and Wharton, apart from the literary and intimate encounter of her reading him, and possibly, him reading her—the Motor-Flight, especially, has many Impressionist passages like the later descriptions of motoring in the Recherche.

Wharton also never met Gertrude Stein or any of the habitués of the rue de Fleurus, later so sharply rendered by Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Indeed, Wharton avoided the Parisian bohemian world outside the confines of the elite Faubourg; and her Riviera life was similarly sheltered. Her social life was entirely different from that of the ateliers of modernist Paris, and of the Nice and Monte Carlo of the young expatriates. The dilettante-type to which Wharton was attracted, and with whom she made the best of her long-standing friendships, perhaps reveals her old shyness and reserve, as well as the ingrained habit of living at an elevated social and financial level: a prerequisite for many of her friendships. James was the only great writer she came to know well; this is no doubt why she gave him pride of place in her autobiography.

Wharton also knew, all too well, how meetings between novelists are often as deflating as they are inspiring. In A Backward Glance, on meeting Thomas Hardy in England on one of her visits, she noted how she found him “remote and uncommunicative […] completely enclosed in his own creative dream.”⁶⁷ On meeting the “shining galaxy” of talent at weekend parties near St Albans, Wharton writes, in an image which captures the effect of banal talk with a writer whose books one has read, “meeting them in such circumstances was like seeing their garments hung up in a row, with nobody inside.”⁶⁸ Yet “good talk” in real life passed into her mind with “a gradual nutritive force sometimes felt only long afterward.”⁶⁹ This slow percolation of talk—sometimes distilling the gist of what was said more than the exact words—was, Wharton felt, one of the characteristics of her memory. On meeting Henri Bergson at a dinner, she quizzed him on a theme closely related to this, asking about the “the odd holes”⁷⁰ in her memory, and why she often forgot great poetry while remembering pointless things and trivia. Bergson’s cryptic answer was: “Mais c’est précisément parce que vous êtes éblouie (It’s just because you are dazzled).”⁷¹

Near the end of the autobiography, Wharton again recalled Bergson’s words, as she stood on July 14, 1919 on a balcony high above the Champs Elysées, watching the procession of the Victory Parade down in the streets below. The occasion was too overwhelming—and still too near—for her to fully depict or grasp. The glare of certain memories makes it hard to look straight at them; and the present also has a Bergsonian “dazzle” or glow.

Many autobiographers feel the change in the texture of their material as their story approaches the time of the writing. Wharton’s reaction to this in A Backward Glance was to remember and record less and less of her recent past. Even in telling of her war experiences, Wharton is startlingly brief, recounting how she set up workshops for seamstresses in Paris, and also founded hospitals for tubercular children, although she does also mention some trips that she made to the front. In her treatment of the post-war period, Wharton even seemed to feel she had little worth remembering, as her fire in later years was fed only “with the dry wood of more old memories.”⁷²

She might have felt—as she writes of the war, which she had covered in Fighting France—that she had already depicted the same material elsewhere. She might have felt—as she says about her cruise on the “Osprey” in 1926—that she might yet still write about the same material in a future book. But as A Backward Glance closes, there is an increasing sense of compartmentalization, and of areas to which we are not allowed access.

*

Wharton always maintained meticulous levels of self-control and self-arrangement. She kept certain pieces of herself out of view, so that many people who met her never saw her private self, only a prickly, even intimidating, public façade. And she did a similar thing in her writing. The compartmentalization in her work is so thorough that her books are unusually easy to categorize, and to place in different drawers or genres. Her travel books, for instance, do not feel like autobiography, although they recount segments of her life, because they keep so rigorously to the account of her travels. Her criticism is similarly focused, and has little self-revelation. (She took James’s New York Edition prefaces to task for blending reminiscence and criticism, declaring that the technical maxims should be extracted and compiled in another book.) Her fiction—sometimes extremely close to her life—never seems autobiographical, because its elements are so carefully transposed.

To write fiction, she insisted, took so much more than self-confession. You had to simultaneously stand inside and outside your life.⁷³ When people saw real people in novels, they were missing the point. “It would be insincere,” writes Wharton of her characters, “to deny that there are bits of Aunt Eliza in this one, of Mrs. X in that,” since “no ‘character’ can be made out of nothing.”⁷⁴ But the fictional process uses such characteristics only as elements. “Experience, observation, the looks and ways and words of ‘real people’, all melted and fused in the white heat of the creative fires—such is the mingled stuff which the novelist pours into the firm mould of his narrative.”⁷⁵ The liquid image recalls James’s fear of writing in the first person: its “fluidity”⁷⁶ and the danger of a “leak.”⁷⁷ Wharton also mostly used the third person in her fiction: part of her obsessive making sure she always had her “firm mould.”

If the writing of fiction was a hot, dangerous process at root, another image of self and character which Wharton used was cool and controlled. This was from her story “The Fullness of Life,” of “a woman’s nature” as a “great house full of rooms”:

there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.⁷⁸

Unusually, this self-image is not quite an image of surface versus depth. It is more intricately three-dimensional, dependent on the presence of others. Different people have the keys to certain rooms, only used when they discover them. (There was an accompanying fear, for Wharton, of becoming lost and alone in the vast house of one’s own soul.)

The same image of the self as a house can also be seen in terms of literary compartmentalization, and the way that we file different kinds of texts in different genres. In life-writing, the layout of the rooms is dictated not only by their literary form (diaries, letters, and notebooks especially) but also by the role of each piece of writing and its level of privacy. Of course, Wharton was very neat and careful when arranging the biographical drawers to be opened and inspected after her death; and they all form different pieces of her archival autobiography. If we were to continue the house metaphor, A Backward Glance would be the drawing room; “Life & I” a small, locked sitting-room; the Quaderno a closed book within that room. Closer to the bedroom would be Wharton’s poetry, recording the adventures of her frail, unpublic soul. But the room most precious to the secret of her whole life—as she liked to arrange it—also kept carefully locked, was the Love Diary she wrote for Morton Fullerton in 1907 and 1908. It was only one of two diaries which she kept at this pivotal period of her life. Whereas one diary, as Hermione Lee writes, was “a record of social engagements and the weather,”⁷⁹ the Love Diary, tucked away separately, recorded the affair Wharton had with Fullerton over this period, mainly in Paris.

Suggesting that she saw it as a literary work in its own right, Wharton gave the Love Diary a title: “The Life Apart. (L’âme close.)” The French phrase more literally means The Closed or Shut-in Soul. It is written directly to an unspecified “you,” which is perhaps why early biographers mistook this “you” for Walter Berry, rather than Fullerton: a bisexual, amorous journalist who was for many years the Paris correspondent of the London Times. The diary covers seven months in their affair, and like all diaries, hinges on suggestive gaps and absences. Wharton began it at The Mount, on October 29, 1907, resolving to go further than she had before in “one or two spasmodic attempts to keep a diary. For I had no one but myself to talk to, & it is absurd to write down what one says to one’s self; but now I shall have the illusion that I am talking to you, & that […] something of what I say will somehow reach you.”⁸⁰ She eventually gave the diary to Fullerton, who read it and returned it. Its early pages have been torn out. Almost, in places, a graph-like tracing of emotions hitherto unexperienced by Wharton, who was forty-four when she met Fullerton in 1907, it records her descent into the love affair.

Where her other autobiographies omit the affair in its entirety, and even at their most loose, display various degrees of personal control, the emotions charted in the Love Diary are recounted with intensity. Wharton partitioned off this segment of her experience between these covers. She seems to have regarded it as the central event in what A Backward Glance calls her “uneventful”⁸¹ life. The biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes that Wharton “knew that the Love Diary was bad literature, and she allowed it to be so.”⁸² Yet the fast curve of the short narrative, the terrain it charts, is exhilarating. The story is a tragedy, enacted in swift strokes, written close to the present; the pacing is theatrical, with vertigo-inducing peaks and troughs. Wharton makes full use of the gaps of the journal, forming a narrative through inferences and silences.

The Love Diary pulses with the discovery of what Wharton called “Life,” much more so than in “Life & I.” It makes clear how much Wharton enshrined it as the thing most worth knowing, the most precious vial of all experience. And what she means by Life is often love, or sex. On May 3, 1908, Wharton dreams of going “off with you for twenty-four hours to a little inn in the country, in the depths of a green wood,” deciding “I will go with him once before we separate […] It would hurt no one—it would give me my first, last, draught of life.”⁸³ The illicit couple had a “perfect day” a week or so later at Senlis. “Alone in the train returning to Paris, we watched the full moon rise.”⁸⁴ By May 21: “I have drunk of the wine of life at last […] Oh, Life, Life, how I give thanks to you for this!”⁸⁵ The following day in the diary is entitled “The Last Day,” as Wharton packs for America, and, like Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905), lays out in her room “the dresses, cloaks, hats, tea-gowns, I have worn these last six months”⁸⁶—an actress surveying her past roles. At The Mount in 1908, Wharton felt stifled, thinking of “you who have given me the only moments of real life I have ever known,”⁸⁷ in his absence. The diary closes as Wharton recalls what she wrote about Senlis—“One such hour ought to irradiate a whole life” ⁸⁸—realizing it isn’t enough: “the human heart is insatiable.”⁸⁹

The affair went beyond the short period of the diary, into 1909, reaching another moment of union when Wharton and Fullerton stayed in London in June, in Suite 92 of the Charing Cross Hotel. Wharton assiduously recorded and preserved this event in another deliberately only half-locked archival room: the Whitmanesque poem called “Terminus,” first published in 1975 by R. W. B. Lewis in his biography. In the poem, Wharton thinks of all the previous encounters in Suite 92, and is at one with them.

Secret and fast in the heart of the whirlwind of travel,

The shaking and shrieking of trains, the night-long shudder of traffic;

Thus, like us they have lain and felt, breast to breast in the dark,

The fiery rain of possession descend on their limbs while outside

The black rain of midnight pelted the roof of the station.⁹⁰

Wharton was heading off the next day with Henry James via Queen’s Acre to Lamb House in Rye (“a harbourless wind-bitten shore, where a dull town moulders and shrinks, / And its roofs fall in”).⁹¹ Fullerton was off to America and “the wide flare of cities.”⁹² But if the lovers’ meeting of “Terminus” was as close to life as Wharton ever got, it is surely significant that, as Lewis tells us, when Fullerton left her in the morning, he saw Wharton “propped up in bed with a writing board across her knees, scribbling the first words.”⁹³

The whole affair, as well as being the most intense amorous adventure of Wharton’s life, was intrinsically literary from the beginning. Wharton even had the affair in the first place (and justified it to herself) partly as an experiment in life and love which would feed her creativity. She wrote to Fullerton on August 26, 1908, “You told me once I should write better for this experience of loving. I felt it to be so.”⁹⁴ And Wharton did indeed use her experience from the affair each time she wrote of sexual passion in the future. While the affair was taking place, there was a literary dimension in the exchange of love letters, which delighted Wharton. She describes savoring Fullerton’s letters to her, enjoying the experience of reading about their affair as much as the “real” thing.

But it was more than a literary game. The pulverization of the self which Wharton records in the Love Diary was disorienting, even frightening. She lost all sense of who she was. Love was the ultimate, undeniable proof of how the self changes under the influence of others. “Nothing else lives in me now but you—I have no conscious existence outside the thought of you, the feeling of you. I, who dominated life, stood aside from it so, how I am humbled, absorbed, without a shred of will or identity left!”⁹⁵ Oddly, the language Wharton uses recalls the language she uses writing of fiction: “I am a little humbled, a little ashamed, to find how poor a thing I am, how the personality I had moulded into such strong firm lines has crumbled to a pinch of ashes in this flame!”⁹⁶ The letters tell the same story, more forcefully. On May 20, 1908, Wharton wrote, “I am mad about you […] in the whole universe I see but one thing, am conscious of but one thing, you, and our love for each other.”⁹⁷ This shattering of the self reached its apotheosis as Wharton, at The Mount in June 1908, hears of a car crash, and “felt the wish that I had been in it, & smashed with it, & nothing left of all this disquiet.”⁹⁸

Wharton gave herself to Fullerton on the page much more easily than she gave herself to him in life. The circumstances of the affair were prohibitive. But beyond that, she was too timid, too careful, too cautious a soul to live with such risk and dissolution of her own idea of herself. Even while it was happening, she lived it most fully in the Love Diary. Fullerton, meanwhile, was no lover to trust; all this time he was engaged in several other trysts and complications. Wharton withdrew before the possibility of a fatal smash, having tasted what it would feel like. She rebuilt herself, just as in her later autobiographies, she covered herself with a “carapace.”⁹⁹ And even while she was doing this, she was frightened that by locking the door to herself, she would lose herself.

She knew this would happen long before it did. She almost luxuriated in its happening. In the Love Diary, Wharton scattered lush and antiquated images of her own decaying soul throughout the text, as her “poor ‘âme close’ barred its shutters & bolted its doors again, & the dust gathered & the cobwebs thickened in the empty rooms, where for a moment I had heard an echo.”¹⁰⁰ And in the poem “Ame close” within the pages of the Diary, Wharton again used the metaphor of her self as a house: but here it was a crumbling ruin, in terminal disrepair.

Thick ivy loops the rusted door-latch tie […]

And flowers turned weed down the bare paths decay […]

Yet one stray passer, at the shut of day,

Sees a light tremble in a casement high […]

Yet enter not, lest, as it flits ahead,

You see the hand that carries it is dead.¹⁰¹

This brief taste of life was jaundiced before it began. Wharton protected herself; but the self-protection was self-destructive. Her fear of ruining what was most dear to her held her back from having it. This was the tragedy the Life Apart told. Wharton’s reaction to the affair, as she charted it in her letters to Fullerton and in the diary, was a later variation of her early fear at the door. Obeying the dictates of society, and her sense of self-preservation, she went back into the “black box”¹⁰² of her marriage and suffocated. She almost got used to it. To Sara Norton, in November 1908, she wrote, “the change & movement carry me along, help to form an outer surface. But the mortal desolation is there, will always be there.”¹⁰³

If the present has a glow or “dazzle,” diaries and letters often come closest to capturing it, of all the forms of life-writing. The Love Diary, in its sustained second-person address, was also like a letter, with all the inimitable specificity of tone—almost as nuanced as talk—which comes from texts written directly to a certain person. If Wharton had written of the Fullerton affair in her autobiographies—and perhaps she would have done if she had continued “Life & I”—it would have presented itself to her quite differently: certainly with less precision in charting the flickering passage of emotions. She would have caught the penumbra of the affair, not exactly how it felt. Events gain shape over time, compacting into patterns.

The Love Diary revels in flux and confusion: its passages of waiting bring the present tense so near that it crawls forward inch by inch. Yet compared to the letters of the same period—which plot the course of the affair even more immediately—it is also clear how much of a deliberately fashioned and consciously literary artefact the diary remains, with its interwoven poems, deletions, hesitations, and rehearsals of emotion. It occupies a unique space in Wharton’s life-writings as a whole, partly because of the precision with which it has been kept “Apart.” It is the piece of the jigsaw that brings the other self-portraits into focus, yet it also contradicts them. Wharton could never have written as desperately as this, as recklessly as this, in her later years. She would not publish like this. But she never forgot what happened over this period with Fullerton. She got back in touch with him in later years, yet the two former lovers, exchanging letters, merely resumed a tentative, courteous friendship.

*

In the first months of 1937, the last year of her life, Wharton began another autobiography, with an article, “A Little Girl’s New York,” first conceived as the opening part of a sequel to A Backward Glance called Further Memories.¹⁰⁴ By March 17, 1937 Wharton had already abandoned this idea of “a second volume of Reminiscences,” feeling that she had “not enough material left.”¹⁰⁵ “A Little Girl’s New York” was as far as she got. Some autobiographers become more and more frank and self-exposing the more they write their lives. Wharton’s reaction, as evidenced by the article, and the decision to abandon the sequel, was the opposite. She built up the carapace further, and wrapped herself up in even more external details. This defensive building-up is the overall movement of her formal autobiographies, from “Life & I” to A Backward Glance to “A Little Girl’s New York.” Wharton is really nowhere to be found in this last article, which focuses, much more even than A Backward Glance, exclusively on the outer layers of the New York world of her youth: its houses, its clothes, its customs, its dances, its trips to church, the theater, the opera. The motive for “beginning my old story over again,” Wharton writes, was one purely of archival preservation, fixing all these relics as though in aspic, to save them from the darkening world of the late 1930s.

Everything that used to form the fabric of our daily life has been torn in shreds, trampled on, destroyed; and hundreds of little incidents, habits, traditions which, when I began to record my past, seemed too insignificant to set down, have acquired the historical importance of fragments of dress and furniture dug up in a Babylonian tomb. It is these fragments that I should like to assemble and make into a little memorial like the boxes formed of exotic shells which sailors used to fabricate between voyages.¹⁰⁶

Just as Wharton formed a “carapace” for herself in A Backward Glance, “A Little Girl’s New York” goes further, being explicitly made of “shells.” This “little memorial” was the final resting-place of her “shut-in soul.” It was full of bric-à-brac, with Wharton hidden amid the antique lumber, behind the heavy veils of the brownstone houses of the 1870s and 80s, whose “tall windows were hung with three layers of curtains: sash-curtains through which no eye from the street could possibly penetrate.”¹⁰⁷

Wharton, now seventy-five, knew there was not much time left. After a mild stroke on April 11, 1935, losing some sight in her left eye, she had written the following year to her friend from the war-years, Elisina Tyler, with “instructions after my death” and funeral arrangements, telling her that “personal papers are […] to be found in a small locked portfolio, marked E. W.”¹⁰⁸ Perhaps this ill-health, not a lack of material, prevented her further reminiscences. But she enjoyed her last days of life, safely away from the vicissitudes of her middle years. Old age, she had written to Minnie Jones in 1932, was better than people said it was, with its own “quiet radiance […] in that light I discover many enchanting details which the midday dazzle obscured.”¹⁰⁹

As an old woman, the steely Wharton of the carapace, whose outer shell could sometimes seem so intimidating to people she didn’t know, and who mistook her painful shyness and solitariness for toughness, shrank from view and mellowed, even while the encrustations of her life as she wrote it increased. And away from life, finally, she savored it all the more, feeding on her memories and her imaginations without fear. On October 11, 1936, Wharton wrote to Mary Berenson, “I wish I knew what people mean when they say they find ‘emptiness’ in this wonderful adventure of living, which seems to me to pile up its glories like an horizon-wide sunset as the light declines.”¹¹⁰ “An incorrigible life-lover and life-wonderer,”¹¹¹ she was lying next to Walter Berry within a year.

H. G. Wells photographing Ethel Merman in New York on January 14, 1936.

Source: Keystone-France/Getty Images.