Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, Sizing Up a Young Masculine Admirer)


“He said that I knew more of German literature than he does (and he sets up to be rather well-read) that my ‘knowledge of the language was wonderful’ and that he had never quoted anything (and he is very quote-y) which I had not recognized—there! ‘Lay that flattering unction to your soul, good Tonni.’ Think of my being a credit to you after all! Well, you taught me German to such good purpose that the Secretaire de la Majeste Imp. & Royale etc. sent me two splendid bouquets within a week before he left, and I am engaged to dance the Cotillion with him at the ‘Patriarch’ ball.”—Edith Newbold Jones, the future Edith Wharton, to governess Anna Bahlmann, in an 1879 letter, quoted in Rebecca Mead, “Literary Lives: The Age of Innocence—Early Letters From Edith Wharton,” The New Yorker, June 29, 2009 (registration required to see full text online)

You never know when new materials will turn up adding to or even altering our understanding of an author. Such a case is analyzed in Rebecca Mead’s article, which discusses a cache of 130 letters from Edith Wharton to her family’s governess.

The correspondence, lasting from 1874, when Bahlmann entered the family’s service, to 1915, a year before her death, languished first in an attic, then in a safe-deposit box. Tomorrow the letters will be auctioned at Christie’s.

The quote above particularly fascinates me. In it, the 17-year-old relates a flirtatious encounter with a young swain she identifies only as “the Doppelader,” or “double eagle.”

What we are witnessing here is a voice in formation. Hardly the wallflower she claimed to be in her 1934 memoir, A Backward Glance, she can’t help but bask here in masculine attention. She reveals herself not only as a participant in events, but also as an observer, and a sophisticated, cheekily satiric one at that—one infinitely attuned to pretension and ego (her own as well as others).

The only thing missing: the sense of enclosure and tragedy that came with middle age, a desperately unhappy marriage, and a fugitive but ultimately doomed love affair—the kind of experience necessary to produce classics such as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence.

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