Looking for Edith
By Susan Minot
Edith Wharton is one of my literary heroes, and I have long traveled many places with her through her books. One summer day I decided to visit The Mount, her hilltop residence in Lenox, Massachusetts. She had been actively involved in creating both the house and the grounds. I came to see her stamp on the place, hoping to find a glimpse of Wharton the writer.
The first book Edith Wharton wrote—before The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome, before The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth—was The Decoration of Houses, co-written with architect Ogden Codman. It might have been titled The Declaration of Houses, so forcefully does it put forward classical principles of design. There are practical statements: “Doors should always swing into a room,” or “Pale tints should be avoided in the selection of carpets.” And more philosophical ones in which I hear Wharton’s ring: “Proportion is the good breeding of architecture,” and “The boudoir is the room in which small objects of art…show to the best advantage.” Wharton traveled widely to the great houses of Europe and in The Mount incorporated those elements of French, English, and Italian design she so admired. Raised in affluence and surrounded by what she felt was uniform materialism, Wharton brought a higher sensibility to architectural concerns, a kind of nobility. In her fiction one often encounters rooms and landscapes used as metaphors for her characters’ feelings and psyches.
It was a clear warm day when I arrived. The Mount, recently opened for the season, houses a theater group, Shakespeare & Company. When I pulled into the driveway, a young man told me to park by the stables. I walked down the driveway at the pace of a horse and buggy, taking the bends and dips, the house coming in and out of sight as I approached. Along the road were ferns, new and green; I knew Wharton had brought them from nearby Stockbridge. Inside the entryway, a couple of employees lingered by the cash register near the small bookshop. At one o’clock I was given a private tour (I was the only one there) by a young man in his twenties wearing a crisp shirt. We stood outside in the middle of the gravel courtyard surrounded by a high brick wall. Standing in the sun, my guide related some familiar facts of Wharton’s life: She was born in 1862 into the moneyed social world of New York, entered into a loveless marriage, and found literary success at age forty. Just before she and her husband divorced in 1913, Wharton sold the house and moved to Europe, a continent she felt was more sympathetic to her interests and where she lived until her death in 1937. A couple from New Orleans lived in the house for 23 years, and eventually it was sold to the Foxhollow School for Girls in 1942. Though the general structure of the building was never changed, fire escapes were put up, damaging the façade. Inside, original decorative objects such as vases and tapestries had long since disappeared. By the mid-seventies the house had been abandoned, its gutters rusted and pipes burst. In 1978 Shakespeare & Company rented it, and in 1980 the Edith Wharton Restoration project was created in a full-scale attempt to restore The Mount. So far, that effort has produced a new slate roof and a rebuilt cupola.
The façade, with the flat white elegance of European houses, was inspired by Belton House in England, a 1684 design thought to have been by Christopher Wren after an Italian villa. My guide pointed out that one of the arched shuttered windows was false, placed there for symmetry. I thought of the parallels between the false window and her writing—the balance of plots in her fiction and the illusion of art. Above the doorway, flanked by pillars, was a central arching window on the second floor where one could see through another window to trees and sky. But this, too, was a trick of the eye: A mirror inside reflected the window.
The front entrance had a low vaulted ceiling with cool terra-cotta floors and a niche where a scalloped fountain once held a statue of Pan playing his flute. The plaster panel inlays resembled water dripping down stones. “Like a grotto,” my guide explained. Here her guests would arrive—Henry James, Walter Berry, Beatrix Jones Farrand, her niece who’d helped with garden designs—sweeping up the stone staircase with the wrought-iron rail. Wharton had a great gift for friendship, and in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, she speaks more about others than about herself.
My guide assured me the color of the entry’s walls, a pistachio-blue trimmed with white molding, was the original, but I spotted a chipped area where the underlying hue was more subtle, faded with age perhaps. I pictured Wharton choosing this color; seeing her as a decorator added another dimension.
The upper gallery seemed least altered by the changes of 90 years, and I could easily visualize Wharton by the windows. She was not beautiful, but slight and graceful, and the reserve of her manners may have given her a brittle air, yet she had a good sense of humor and great sensitivity—a fact amply proven by the emotional complexity of her characters.
Privacy, Wharton believed, was “one of the first requisites of a civilized life,” and every room in the house, even the large drawing room, could be closed off. Privacy was particularly important to her. Without it, she could not write. The room she loved most was the library. We stood there surrounded by its built-in oak shelves. The carved panels were designed by her coauthor Codman, whom she could not afford to hire as an architect—Francis L.V. Hoppin took the job. One imagines Wharton an exacting and probably exasperating client. Henry James called The Mount “a monument to the almost too impeccable taste of its so accomplished mistress.” In the fireplace was an original cast-iron fireback portraying Hercules slaying the lion. Wharton, who had an opinion about everything, found scenes of violence most appropriate seen through flames.
A picture of Wharton I’ve often seen shows her sitting at a desk in the library, wearing a dress with lacy sleeves, bending forward from her narrow waist. But she did not write here. She wrote in bed, in the early morning, dropping sheets of paper to the floor as she finished them, to be gathered up by her secretary. She would finish by ten or eleven and then was free to take part in what she called “country cares and joys.” My guide pointed upward; above us was the bedroom. That was what I especially wanted to see.
Next door in the wide drawing room, I felt the first real intrusion of the present on the past. The theater company performed here now, and rows of folding chairs were set up. I glimpsed the ghosts of the fringed silk sofa, the circle of curving French armchairs, and the Aubusson rug.
I drifted out onto the terrace. The large green awning was gone, and in the sun I could see the terrace floor was chipped. Here Wharton had stood watching “the glowing summer weeks, and the woodland pageantry of our matchless New England autumn.” Amid the beautiful surroundings, she wrote her first novel, House of Mirth. An immediate best-seller, it allowed her to pay off The Mount’s loans. Looking out, I could see where the Lime Walk—rows of linden trees that made a pathway connecting the two main gardens—used to be. Now there was a lawn. Beyond, the grass was taller, blowing in the wind, and becoming wilder and wilder as it rolled off to Laurel Pond in the distance. The original view included Laurel Lake, even farther off, but woods had grown over the space.
Bringing culture and good company, Wharton’s visitors would go for motorcar rides and sit by the fire on winter afternoons. When I saw the dining room, I was reminded of her great appreciation for good conversation. She would seat her guests at a rather small table, with candles under little lamp shades. At her feet would be the striped pillows where her Pekingese slept—among them Miza, Mimi, and Toto—as beloved as children. They were buried on a shady hillock above the flower gardens.
A most important visitor was journalist Morton Fullerton, a friend of Henry James’s. Wharton was quite taken with him during a snowy ride in the country; later, in Paris, they began a love affair—the great one of her life. She was forty-seven years old and she was finally introduced to, as she put it, “what happy women feel.”
Visits were usually substantial, and guests brought a lot of luggage. A hydraulic elevator, a wire cage of sorts, ran parallel to the stairs in the servants’ quarters. My guide explained I was not allowed to look at the servants’ quarters. They were, I was told, now administrative offices.
Upstairs the tour came to a near halt. The doors were shut, and we stood looking down a dark hallway. My guide pointed to a door. It was where Henry James stayed. Could I see? No one was supposed to, my guide said; it was a dressing room for the theater company. A quick look? He seemed distressed. He put his ear reluctantly to the door and let me dart in. There were Sheetrock dividers and the kind of long tables used for bake sales. A few costumes and props were lying about. A narrow passageway led down steps to another door—my guide watched anxiously as I moved off. In this passageway Henry James had perhaps hung something on this hook. I felt that odd sense of being where a great person has been—what I’d been searching for. But I’d yet to find it with Wharton.
We were back in the hall. “Can I go down?” At the end of the hall, closed off, was her suite: bathroom, boudoir, and most particularly the bedroom where she wrote.
“No.” His tone was firm.
“Not just run down?”
He shook his head. Clearly this was more serious. I pestered him further and was told he’d have to check with his boss. When he returned he said to follow him—I would get to see the servants’ quarters!
The offices where we went to see his boss were little cubicles, rumpled and friendly. I was shown into a small room where a woman sat behind a desk talking on the phone. She indicated I should sit. I gazed at an enlarged picture of Wharton, appearing casual, her hair blurred-looking. She was a daunting figure, Edith Wharton. Besides being the greatest American woman writer at the beginning of the century, she was accomplished in language, travel, and knowledge of architecture. She managed to create this house, dress with elegance, and still see to the smallest detail, such as making sure her houseguests got the morning papers.
Eventually, the woman put down the phone. I explained my business and asked if there was some way I could see the bedroom. The woman shook her head.
“Really?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
“But—” I think I laughed.
She had very pale blue eyes, and they looked at me matter-of-factly. “Those rooms are used by the theater company.”
“I couldn’t look in?”
“They would be very upset.”
“I wouldn’t—make any noise…”
She sat immobile. I suggested the magazine piece might help the restoration project. She seemed to stir. I pressed on.
Finally she stood up, not happy. “I’ll see if anyone’s there. I can’t promise you—” I leapt after her.
Down the dim hall we went. She knocked on a door to the right. Silence. The door opened, and I was allowed into Edith Wharton’s bedroom. It was empty, except for a table or two, and full of light. Those were the corner windows through which Wharton looked out on her flower gardens and through which she had observed “the glory of their coloring actually vibrates in the sunlight.” I felt a thrill. I thought of the characters who had been born here “seemingly from nowhere.” She’d written of the process, “the character draws nearer, and seems to become aware of me, and feel the shy but desperate need to unfold his or her tale.” Sconces on the wall showed where her bed would have been, and my impression was so vivid I am not altogether sure now a bed wasn’t there.
After the tour I walked around the grounds. I’d felt a charge in her bedroom, but perhaps it had more to do with the triumph of getting inside. I knew her gardens were important to her. In them she became “lost in mazes of an inarticulate happiness.” News of phlox made her “mouth water,” and while living in Lenox she won many prizes in local flower shows. So involved had she become with her plants that she wrote a friend, “I am a better landscape gardener than novelist.” At one end of the lawn is where the principal flower garden had been, with a square fountain in the center surrounded by a tangle of white petunias. The eight gumdrop-shaped bushes long ago grew into trees, and now the garden is all leveled. I could see its outline.
I crossed the lawn below the split staircase through a stand of cedar trees, past the smell of orange blossoms, to the walled Italian garden. A gravel path and shallow stairs led down to the giardino segreto. Classically, this is a garden with no flowers and with more gravel than lawn, giving it “a charm independent of the seasons.” A pair of curled dolphins sat in the center of a dry fountain, and on one side stone pergola posts were bare of vines.
Walking back I passed under a lilac bush, really more of a tree with a twisting trunk and arching branches. I stood beneath its fat blossoms, which looked white from a distance but up close were a subtle shade of lilac. Suddenly it seemed as if this bush had been there in Wharton’s time. She may have walked under it. I held a flower and felt the stirring sensation. Edith Wharton was there.
For our most recent look at this fascinating estate, see “Edith Wharton’s The Mount,” on page 54 of the July/August issue of Victoria magazine.