Here is the story of Edith Wharton’s childhood. Pussy Jones, as she was called, was born in the 1860s in a New York brownstone, the color of “cold chocolate sauce,” just off Fifth Avenue and Madison Square Park. From her family, it is thought, we get the expression “Keeping up with the Joneses,” and certainly there was money and connections and gossip. Even in a society “wholly barricaded against the unpleasant,” Pussy Jones’s mother, Lucretia, was particularly harsh, forbidding her daughter from any discussion of money, sex, (even on her wedding night: “Mamma—I want to know what will happen to me”) and, worst of all, banning her from reading novels.
Article continues after advertisement
So little Pussy Jones, the only girl, the baby, a proto-Anne Shirley with her red hair and big feet, was left alone, talking to animals. The “changeling child,” she never felt like she belonged. There were even rumors that her father was not her beloved Mr. Jones but her brothers’ English tutor. A lot of her time was spent in Mr. Jones’ library, where she would pace back and forth, holding a book upside down and making up fictions in her head, a process she later described in peculiarly erotic tones.
As her biographer Hermione Lee writes in her Edith Wharton, “There is evidently something masturbatory and orgasmic about these ‘enraptured sessions’” with the “anxious spying parents” hovering outside the library door. Perhaps, because her mother had tried to keep her from both sex and literature, the two became entangled in her mind. (Years later, Wharton would describe the process of writing the end of a novel as being like a “night with a lover.”)
Wharton has also done something very strange: she has given herself the kind of childhood that would make her a literary heroine.
Despite this oppression, Pussy Jones learnt to read. “How” Wharton later wrote in her memoir, “no one ever knew.” Aged eleven, she wrote her first story. It began: “Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?” Said Mrs Tompkins. “If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room.” Lucretia replied sharply, “Drawing-rooms are always tidy.” As Wharton scholar Laura Rattray (Edith Wharton In Context, Edith Wharton and Genre) points out, Wharton would give her heroine Ellen Olenska a messy home in The Age of Innocence, the novel that would make her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. And so, as one friend commented, Pussy Jones became, like Teddy Roosevelt, a “self-made man.” At least, that is the story she told.
*
The adult Wharton could be, contemporaries complained, difficult to get to know. She was cold, just like her mother, wrapped up in fur, always covered by tiny fluffy dogs (in fact she had once campaigned for drinking bowls to be placed in the streets of New York). A conservative who disliked socialists, Jews and lesbians, she refused to align herself with the Suffragettes, writing “they’d much better stay at home and mind the baby.” Yet her literature was dazzlingly bold and feminist, witty and empathetic. Her New York novels depict how corset-tight the rules were that a woman had to follow in the so called “Knickerbocker society,” lest she be, as Lee puts it, “torn to shreds.” Martin Scorsese would even call his adaptation of The Age of Innocence, a story that takes place mostly in drawing rooms and opera boxes, one of his most violent movies. And the women who do succeed tend to be ignorant of how cheap their prize really is. The Age of Innocence’s May Welland is drawn like a dog who has never been electrocuted by the invisible fence because she has never tried to run away from her own front yard.
For many years before her career took off, Wharton was a debutant, socialite, wife, dressed in French couture and attending events such as the (aptly named) “Patriarchs Ball.” Like many of her characters, Wharton was at once attracted to and repulsed by this “hieroglyphic world.” She would eventually move permanently to Europe and describe America as “a whole nation developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.” But she continued to visit the Old New York of her youth in her fiction, as both tourist and guide.
It is natural, therefore, to assume that Wharton used her own experiences of this claustrophobic society as material for her work. She even gave Undine Spragg from The Customs of the Country her own nickname, “Pussy.” After all, Wharton was writing in an age where, as Lee says, “authors were becoming good copy” and it did not escape the press’ attention that Wharton, who so often wrote about unhappy marriages, was herself divorced. Promotional material for The Age of Innocence ran with the headline: “Does Your Husband Love You? Honestly now, does he?” As its divorcée Ellen Olenska exclaims: “Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be oneself?” She feels that she is always on stage, “before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.”
But Wharton did keep a secret. When she was forty-five, she fell madly in love and it certainly wasn’t with her blokeish husband, Teddy. Although her beau had promised her that he had destroyed her love letters to him, in reality he had kept them, and so they inevitably came to light: romantic, painful, embarrassing. Morton Fullerton was a slippery fish: a handsome Byronic journalist, secretly engaged to his cousin, always double dealing and possibly a Nazi collaborator. Wharton documented their on-again, off-again affair in her secret diary and there is something a little performative here. “You shall give me the signal” she once told Fullerton, “and one day call me ‘mon ami’ instead of ‘mon amie’” then she would know the affair to be over. It is the sort of line that might have cropped up in The Age of Innocence. “We can’t behave like people in novels though” May Welland argues, “can we?”
Meanwhile, Teddy was gambling with her money, keeping a mistress in Boston, and telling delusional stories about chorus girls. Lee argues that the husband in Wharton’s story “The Choice” is our closest model to Teddy: sporty, boastful, incompetent, drunk and dull. “Day by day, hour by hour” the wife in the story confesses, “I wish him dead.” (Rattray: “I think the husband has been really maligned,” Lee: “I feel a bit sorry for him really.”) Teddy likely suffered with bipolar disorder, which would explain his more erratic behavior. But as his condition got worse, he began to drag Wharton down with him.
One of Teddy’s favorite axioms was “Fish, cut bait—or get out of the boat,” yet, the process of their separation was a lengthy one. Aware of the stigma that divorcées faced, Wharton was very much concerned, Rattray says, to make her version of events “the version.” Wharton got divorced in France, somewhat protected by their privacy laws, and listed the cause as infidelity (his not hers). She wrote Teddy out of her memoirs and took to copying down letters concerning him in which she was presented as the caring, worn-down nurse. These, she kept in an envelope labelled, intriguingly, “For my biographer.”
In the late 20th century, as well as Wharton’s secret diary and her love letters, an outline for an erotic novel, “Beatrice Palamato,” was discovered. The “Unpublishable Fragment” details a joyful, Anaïs Nin-esque sexual encounter between father and daughter. There had always been something dark about Wharton’s work, the tragic interwoven with the comic, the nettle and the dock leaf.
Kennedy Fraser, in her collection Ornaments and Silence, describes the heroine of The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, as “strangely spellbound, lonely, and unprotected, like a girl in an incestuous house.” Then there is Ellen Olenska, who has been all but chained to the radiator by her brutish husband. But after “Beatrice Palamato,” critics began to reconsider Wharton’s childhood; its gothic scenes, the dark library and the changeling girl. There was little Pussy Jones, aways ill, always alone, trying to talk to some animal who can’t talk back to her.
*
And then, in 2009, the personal papers of Anna Bahlmann were sold, and subsequently published under the title, My Dear Governess. Bahlmann was mentioned just once by name in Wharton’s memoirs, though she appears in the background of the single most famous image of the author: the older lady, writing every morning in bed on blue stationary, letting the written pages drop to the floor, and having the nameless secretary—Bahlmann—pick them up and type them out. Bahlmann was not counted as a friend by Wharton, in the way that Henry James was a friend, though the two women were very close. She was part of what Wharton referred to as her “gang,” including her housekeeper, butler, and (insultingly) her dogs. The letters from an adult Wharton to Bahlmann tell us little that we do not already know. But her letters to her governess began when she was twelve, and there she explodes onto the page, a chatty, precocious, cheerful little girl.
While Wharton was not, in any sense of the phrase, a “self-made man” she was self-constructed, and largely unique for a woman of her time.
For a long time, the line that Wharton had educated herself was upheld. Bahlmann is characterized as the well-meaning but ineffectual governess, if she is mentioned at all. In reality, these letters show that Bahlmann was teaching her pupil Norse, Greek, Roman and Arthurian myths; English, American, German, French and Italian literature as well as multiple languages. Even before the letters were found, Lee had caught on to one of Wharton’s inconsistencies: her memoirs almost completely exclude her female friends. Wharton has often been considered a man’s woman, always surrounded by a group of queer male artists and writers (her “male wives” as one contemporary sneered). And yet, both her adult life and her childhood were informed by her close female companions, including some, like Bahlmann, who were lifelong.
Where is the gothic childhood? As Rattray describes: “She’s lively, she’s bookish, she’s adventurous, she’s playing tennis and she’s talking about George Elliot.” This last part is particularly damning. It would appear that the image of novelist Edith Wharton forbidden from reading novels is a lie. All the family, the neighbors, even the local booksellers, knew about Pussy Jones’s love of literature, and encouraged her story-telling. For Christmas, just before she turned thirteen, she was gifted a nine-volume set of Maria Edgeworth’s Tales and Novels. Rattray: “What a hatchet job she did on her mother.”
It is expected that a writer would cannibalize her life for her literature, and we can look at Wharton’s own experience as a debutante, and later a divorcée, to connect her life to her fiction. But Wharton has also done something very strange: she has given herself the kind of childhood that would make her a literary heroine, ironically the kind of literary heroine that she herself would write about. The girl who nevertheless persisted is much easier to root for than the happy child having her essays on Goethe edited by her clever German governess.
And it is sympathy, as Jonathan Franzen writes in his introduction to Three Novels of New York, that is the modern reader’s biggest hurdle when it comes to Edith Wharton: “No major American writer has lead a more privileged life.” And yet while Wharton was not, in any sense of the phrase, a “self-made man” she was self-constructed, and largely unique for a woman of her time. As Lee says, “She wanted to think of herself as singular and she was singular.” After all, Wharton was a born writer, and the story she told, that she was solitary, uneducated, misunderstood, is simply, as Irene Goldman-Price, editor of the Bahlmann letters, concludes, “the better story.”
