Edith Wharton at her writing desk in New York City in the 1930s
January is
my birthday month that I share with my mother and grandfather. I am a native
New Yorker who understands the ‘attitude’ of a New Yorker. Some would say, ‘brash,
harsh or unfriendly’. This is not the case at all. You see New Yorkers are city
folk who are always in a hurry trying to get to work, out with friends, dates,
and back home again. We live in a thriving and overpopulated city where there
is beauty and peacefulness it just depends on where you look! So, I strongly
identify with female writers who happen to be New Yorkers with attitude or
directness in writing. For instance, Dorothy Parker (who was born in my
neighborhood) and Edith Wharton of course!
I have read
two biographies on Edith Wharton where there are some similarities: she was an
only child born to elderly parents who went to church on Sunday and when her
family townhouse became too overcrowded with guests, she would escape to her
upstairs bedroom where she was ‘compelled’ to write stories that were inside
her and just had to come out; luckily for her readers! A fellow aquarian who
was very close to her father and grandfather.
So, this is dedicated to my grandfather who gave me my love for history,
who took me to all the best museums in New York City including some favorite
haunts such as: an eight year old me holding my grandpa’s hand as we stand in
the library room at The Morgan Library (maybe he knew something I didn’t), The
Birthplace Museum of Theodore Roosevelt (a ten year old me asking a guard if
the house was haunted and smiling at the discovery of the teddy bear being
named after Teddy Roosevelt) and Fraunces Tavern Museum (a shared admiration
for George Washington). Happy Birthday
Pop I hope you are looking down and smiling as you read this…
So this will
not be a biographical overview of a female author born in the nineteenth
century who was the first woman to receive The Pulitzer Prize. This article
will be the highlights and memories of a little girl named Edith Jones who grew
up in Manhattan who happened to write one of my most favored stories about a
central character named Lily Bart whom I can identify with in ‘The House of Mirth’.
For a little
girl named Edith Jones, one family member who stood out was her grandfather,
Frederick William Rhinelander, because he loved to read. When he died in 1836
at the age of forty, however, his fortune was well depleted and Edith’s mother,
Lucretia, and her brothers and sisters grew up in a kind of genteel poverty at
the family place near Hell Gate on the East River. When Lucretia married George
Frederic Jones, her fortunes improved:
He graduated from Columbia University yet never felt the need to work.
His daughter, Edith, later suggested that her mother’s extravagance and her father’s
fixed income led to difficult periods.
Edith Jones grew up in a Manhattan neighborhood
near Washington Square at Eighth Street, Gramercy Park in the East Twenties,
and Madison Square Park at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue (the building
still survives and is now a Starbucks…seriously!). When Edith was born in 1862 in the house at
14 West twenty-third street, her brother Freddy was sixteen and Harry was
eleven. During her childhood, they were often away at school; she was raised as
an only child of elderly parents, with a large, socially prominent collection
of cousins, aunts and uncles.
childhood home of Edith Wharton, 14 W. 23rd Street, NYC
Their house
was a four and a half story brownstone in the Italianate style. It had a low
stoop of four steps that led up to double doors crowned by a massive pediment.
Beyond the vestibule, which was probably “painted in Pompeian red, and frescoed
with a frieze of stenciled lotus leaves”, were her father’s library, the
conservatory, and the billiard room.
Upstairs on
the second floor were the dining room and the drawing room, “a full blown
specimen of Second Empire decoration, the creation of the fashionable French upholsterer,
Marcotte.” The floor length arched
windows were “hung with three layers of curtain: sash curtains through which no
eye from the street could possibly penetrate and next to these draperies of
lace or embroidered tulle, richly beruffled and looped back under the velvet or
damask hangings which were drawn in the evening.” In the drawing room were huge
pieces of Dutch marquetry furniture and a table of “Louis Philippe buhl with
ornate brass hands at the angles.” The table held a Mary Magdelene “minutely
reproduced on copper,” and in the dining room a Domenichino “darkened the
walls.”
Edith’s room was on the upper floor: there she
could amuse herself by scribbling her stories and poems on the brown wrapping
paper she had saved. She also stared out her window at the goings on at the
Fifth Avenue Hotel (no longer there) across the street.
During the
years Edith lived in New York with her parents, from 1872 to 1880, this
enormous hotel was the center of the city’s social, business, and political
life. Visiting dignitaries stayed there:
the Prince of Wales in 1860 and later Prince Napoleon. Years later, Wharton’s short novel, ‘New Year’s
Day’ opens with a couple being discovered in their affair as they escape the
Fifth Avenue Hotel when a fire starts there. They are observed by “proper” New
Yorkers, who, gathered for a family New Year’s party, watch the fire from the
windows of a house on Twenty Third Street.
Edith’s
memories of her mother Lucretia are of constant competition and power
struggles. Unable to share the child’s “secret life of the imagination,”
Lucretia was the insensitive enemy of the reading and solitude that nourished
it. Mother and daughter struggled over trying to make Edith “like other
children”. Lucretia would invite them
over to play, only to have Edith disappear because she wanted to be alone to “make
up” stories:
“I used to struggle on
as long as I could against my perilous obsession, and then, when the ‘pull’
became too strong, I would politely ask my unsuspecting companions to excuse
me.”
Leaving her
mother to cope with the “nice little girls,” Edith would rush to shut herself
up in her mother’s bedroom, where she:
“poured out the
accumulated floods of my pent-up eloquence. Oh, the exquisite relief of those
moments of escape…the rapture of finding myself again in my own rich world of
dreams!”
One could
imagine the scoldings she received for such bad manners.
Edith and
her father, George Frederick Jones, were very close. He lived through his eyes
as his daughter later would. From an early age he took her to visit art
galleries, walk in the gardens, and tour palaces and classical ruins. In his
diary he notes during an 1848 trip that Pompeii was the most interesting place
in Europe. He visited the Colosseum in the moonlight (as have I) and he
traveled with the words of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold in his mind. He loved the
things his daughter would later care for.
Edith’s last
trip she made with her father was an important memory because he died in Cannes
in the early spring of 1882 after being stricken by paralysis. Years later, she
wrote,
“I am still haunted by
the look in his dear blue eyes, which had followed me so tenderly for nineteen
years, and now tried to convey the goodbye messages he could not speak.”
His not
being able to say goodbye prompted her to write:
“I doubt if life holds
a subtler anguish.”
With her father’s death, Edith lost
the companion who had taught her to read, who had taken her to church, the
theater, and had been with her in all the important places. She remembered all
her life,
“the tall splendid father who was
always so kind, and whose strong arms lifted one so high, and held one so
safely.”
me and my pop
SOURCE
Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, An Illustrated Biography by Eleanor Dwight, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 1994
Please feel free to leave any questions or comments,
