Photo of the Day: Garden at Edith Wharton’s Estate, Lenox, MA

On other occasions, I have blogged about Edith Wharton and the Berkshire summer residence in which she lived at the start of the 20^th century, The Mount. But a word—and this photo, which I took on an August 2017 visit—about the gardens at her estate might be appropriate.

Much like her home, Wharton conceived of her gardens as being harmonious and perfectly proportioned. She was a woman with very decided ideas of what she wanted, and she designed herself the formal gardens on the south and east of her home, based on her study of European landscape design. She was assisted in this effort by her niece, Beatrix Jones Farrand, who, by the time of her death in 1959 had established herself at the forefront of American landscape architecture.

Photo of the Day: Italian Garden, The Mount, Lenox MA

Over the last three decades, I have visited the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts on several occasions. On each vacation, I stop at The Mount, the turn-of-the-century country home of novelist Edith Wharton. Each time, I find something new to appreciate. 

Sometimes it’s because of the different perspectives of the various guides to the home. Sometimes, as part of the ongoing restoration of the place, it’s because some new facet of this pioneering female fiction writer has been discovered.
 

But it’s hard to get away from the beauty of the whole place, created under the watchful, demanding eye of Ms. Wharton. The architecture of the building itself if a marvel of symmetry and sleight-of-hand.

But outside, in the back, the gardens convey their own magic. Indeed, Wharton herself saw them as a series of outdoor rooms, designed to harmonize with the house itself.

The novelist’s niece, Beatrix Jones Farrand, a self-styled "landscape gardener," signed up to make the property harmonize with her aunt’s vision of what a natural backdrop should be. In this, she admirably succeeded.

Flashback, December 1897: Wharton’s ‘Decoration of Houses’ Sets Architectural Standard

One hundred and twenty years ago this month, Edith Wharton published her first full-length book. Unlike nearly all her other works, it was nonfiction. Even more unusually, the strong-willed woman collaborated on the project. And, within a few short years, she was able to put her own ideas into practice in her own home in Western Massachusetts. 

Already, Wharton had written a couple of short-story collections when she decided she was ready to leap to a more extended work. She had a subject she felt strongly about—the hideously garish architecture she saw among her own moneyed class—and someone who shared her scorn: Ogden Codman, Jr., the Boston architect who had worked on the Newport “cottage” “Land’s End” for her and her husband Teddy.

The Decoration of Houses, the product of their thinking, did more than earn their publisher, Scribner's, good sales, or even launch Wharton firmly on the path toward her iconic status as first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for her 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence). For thousands of the well-heeled over the years not in the habit of reading much of anything, let alone her deeply ambivalent fiction about them, it set a simpler, more tasteful direction in home design. 

Nearly 40 years later, Wharton recalled the dominant trend in homes of the wealthy in her memoir, A Backward Glance:

“The architects of that day looked down on house-decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field to the upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gewgaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing-tables.”

Wharton had helped Codman land one of his biggest commissions, the Breakers, the Newport mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Perhaps she felt that the young architect’s restraint would mitigate the worst of the family’s excesses, since she wrote him in the spring of 1897: “I wish the Vanderbilts didn’t retard culture so very thoroughly. They are entrenched in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them.”

The first step toward overthrowing this mindset was a counter-revolution, in a phrase that their readers would understand perfectly: Good interior decoration, they proclaimed, was a matter of “good breeding.” But paradoxically, in a bow toward social mobility, they posited that these principles could be learned, a matter of “calculating”—particularly by attending to the example of fine European style they had examined in their separate travels.

All of this sounded a bit too esoteric to the president of the company to which the pair originally submitted their manuscript, Macmillan’s George Platt Brett, who, in a testy meeting, told them he was canceling the firm’s provisional agreement to release it. The annoyed Wharton told Codman that he was responsible for the rejection, informing him that, from then on, he should leave the marketing of the manuscript in her hands. 

Thankfully for the mental well-being of the architect, at the crucial revision stage of the manuscript, Codman was sidelined by sunstroke. Wharton turned for help to a lawyer who was her friend and soulmate, Walter Berry. Heeding his keen critical eye , she made appropriate alternations and turned in a manuscript suitable enough for Scribner's consultant, critic William Crary Brownell, to suggest acceptance, which the house did.

Through summer and fall, Wharton kept up a steady drumbeat of letters—29 in all—in which she peppered Scribner’s with suggestions for the book’s cover, as well as the title’s wording, printing and placement, not to mention the binding, paper, illustrations, introduction and conclusion, according to Eleanor Dwight’s 1994 biography, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. 

Given that background, as well as Wharton’s peevishness with Codman when the relationship with Macmillan went awry, one might instinctively side with Marc Aronson, author of a 1994 New York Times Book Review article called “Wharton and the House of Scribner: The Novelist as Pain in the Neck."

In other ways, though, Wharton’s behavior was understandable. In an era when women were still at a decided disadvantage in business, such demanding attention to detail might have been the only way she could ensure that the book would find its audience and she would gain a lasting outlet for her energy and questing intelligence.

Her marriage didn’t help matters. While not yet plagued by the mental illness that would doom their relationship in the next decade, it was increasingly clear that Teddy was incompatible with her in terms of age and intellect. He was, as affluent men of the time often were, a “man of leisure” whose major occupation was managing the couple’s real estate—and he was not even particularly good at that. He was the last person that Edith could lean on for editorial or commercial advice in dealing with Scribner’s. It all fell to her.

The publishing house gave the work the kind of attention that suggested they didn’t expect many buyers beyond the authors’ circle of family and friends: a handsome, clean typeface and layout reflecting its call for artistic simplicity and taste, but also a limited print run. To nearly everyone’s surprise, the book sold out its first edition and continued to yield royalties to Wharton until her death.

The wider impact was even greater. The book, Dwight observed, “initiated a new style of decoration, drawing on classical models that combined simplicity, harmony and beauty, which was carried on by others, such as Elsie de Wolfe, in rebellion against Victorian clutter.”

The novelist’s relationship with her collaborator and publisher continued strong for a few years until persistent strains attenuated her ties with them. For Codman, the sticking point became Wharton’s planned cottage in The Berkshires, The Mount. The architect, already chafing about her incessant demands and confident enough now in his practice to feel he didn’t need her patronage anymore, used a dispute about money to effect a mutual decision that he withdraw. The break was amicable enough that he remained on good terms with her for the rest of her life.

It took a half dozen years longer for Wharton to move away from Scribner's. The publisher’s enthusiasm for her work waxed and waned with the sales of her books. In 1912, disappointed by the budget for The Custom of the Country, she turned to Appleton for The Reef. Though Scribner’s published a few of her subsequent books, Appleton became from then on her primary conduit to readers.

The Decoration of Houses has naturally taken a back seat to Wharton’s fiction, but it represented an important milestone in her life. Its unanticipated commercial success made Scribner’s more open to her later ideas for novels and short-story collections, and it gave her increasing self-confidence. 

Moreover, the need to articulate her principles made her more conscious of the house that she would create in The Berkshires. The Mount embodied many of the principles of The Decoration of Houses, from its downstairs marble gallery (“the design, like those of the walls, should be clear and decided in outline”) to her library (its general decoration should “form a background or setting to the books, rather than to distract attention from them”).

Photo of the Day: Lydia Musco’s ‘Stack C,’ at The Mount, Lenox, MA

Lydia Musco is the creator of this abstract sculptural form. It is part of the outdoor sculptural exhibition “Nexus,” running from June 1 to October 31 on the grounds of The Mount, novelist Edith Wharton’s marvelous summer residence in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.

This Day in Literary History (Edith Wharton, Chronicler of Troubled Marriages, Enters Her Own)

April 29, 1885—The fiction of Edith Wharton dwelt so obsessively on emotional constriction, the conflict between social convention and freedom, thwarted sexuality, and depression because it reflected her own marriage, which began with an exchange of vows at noon in Trinity Church chapel in New York.

At this distance, the union of Edith Newbold Jones with Teddy Wharton seems so…convenient. The groom was a Harvard friend of one of her brothers; the ceremony took place across the street from the Jones home at Twenty-Fifth Street (Trinity later became the Serbian Orthodox Church of St. Sava); and the couple would settle down on a small cottage across from the Jones estate in upper-crust Newport, Rhode Island. Moreover, Edith and Teddy were members of the upper crust.

But all kinds of omens appeared even from the beginning:

* There was a real question from the first if Edith truly loved Teddy. The bachelor, 11 years her senior, was certainly kind and charming. But two summers before—the same period when she met Teddy—Edith had encountered Walter Berry, a lawyer with a literary bent, a man she believed gave her “a fleeting hint of what the communion of kindred intelligences might be.” It sounds reminiscent of what Lily Bart’s would-be suitor, Lawrence Selden, desires in Edith's bestselling 1905 novel, The House of Mirth: “a republic of the spirit.” Unfortunately, Edith and Walter’s relationship, like Lily’s and Lawrence’s, became nothing more than a friendship. Berry preferred women who surpassed Edith in beauty but badly lagged her in intellect.

* The wedding invitations, written by Edith’s mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, never mentioned her daughter’s name—a telling lapse by a haughty matriarch, otherwise concerned about the smallest social nicety, who scoffed when her skittish daughter asked what could be expected on her wedding night—and never provided an answer.

* Nothing did happen on Edith and Teddy’s wedding night. It took weeks for the marriage to be consummated, and then, after a few years, husband and wife stopped having relations altogether.

* Before long, Edith realized that, aside from canines and motoring through the countryside, she and her husband had little else in common—especially when it came to matters of the intellect, where Teddy was utterly at sea among her bright friends.

* Despite having numerous cousins, Edith had no bridesmaids—likely indicating a distance from family members that would prove a handicap when she needed a support network in the years ahead.

* At the age of 35, Teddy still relied on his trust income of $2,000 a year. This was not uncommon at the time for a man of leisure such as himself, but the lack of a profession, along with any real instinct for managing money, would prove problematic.

*Teddy’s father was institutionalized at McLean Hospital, where he would commit suicide in 1891.

Though emotionally empty, the first years of the Wharton’s marriage were amiable enough, as Teddy was physically vigorous and frequently displayed what his wife called in her memoir A Backward Glance “sweetness of temper and boyish enjoyment of life.” After 1903, however, when they moved to a summer house in Western Massachusetts, relations between the two became profoundly troubled. The instability that plagued his father began to manifest itself in Teddy.

Several times, I have visited The Mount, the couple’s gleaming white Georgian mansion in the Berkshire Mountains, now a museum (and one that, like Lily Bart, has, in recent years, found itself in financial dire straits). One especially interesting feature of this home built to Edith's specifications is how she managed the issue of solitude for herself and her guests.

The front door, opening at ground level, contains locks, hinges and handles, a reminder that she believed a door should not only admit but also exclude. To secure privacy, Wharton placed doors not in the center but near the end of the long suite of rooms so that occupants could not be easily observed. Access to her own suite (separate from Teddy’s) was controlled with special care, with the stairway to the upper level set off from the public spaces of the first floor.

The arrangement not only enabled Wharton to linger in bed in the morning, free of care as she read or caught up on correspondence. It also provided an additional advantage she may not have initially sensed.

Unwary guests or nosy servants would be less likely to witness the quarrels and long silences that increasingly typified her relationship with Teddy, whose manic depression and neurasthenia grew in tandem with his wife’s literary success and self-confidence. A writer whose work was filled with secrets, Edith crafted a house that, consciously or not, protected her own.

In 1907, following an idyllic motoring excursion, Wharton believed that she had discovered a “kindred spirit” in guest Morton Fullerton, an American journalist. By the following spring, she had embarked on a passionate affair with him.

An urban sophisticate and aristocrat, Wharton projected her private drama of marital desolation, the yearning for freedom and fulfillment, and frustrated desire onto the impoverished farmer Ethan Frome, in the novel of the same name. Zeena, Ethan’s shrewish wife afflicted by hypochondria, represents a fictional stand-in for the now-quarrelsome, unstable Teddy. Ethan’s would-be lover, Mattie, completes the love triangle. (Ethan and Mattie even share the first initials of the author and Fullerton.)

One passage from Ethan Frome seems especially redolent of Edith’s feelings about her husband: “Ethan’s heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely, sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts.”

The novella’s initially tepid sales did not ease Wharton’s burden in maintaining The Mount. That financial millstone and the strains in her marriage were compounded when she discovered that Teddy had embezzled at least $50,000 of her trust fund to squander on his mistress. The idyllic environment she had created, built with money and an instinct for artifice, was now imploding for the same reasons.

Reluctantly, at the same time she decided to leave Teddy, Edith allowed him to sell the house in 1911. Unwilling ever to view the Mount again as a stranger, Wharton never returned to the Berkshires. She lived the rest of her life in France, dying 26 years later, cherishing memories of gardening, friends and “freedom from trivial obligations” in this rustic retreat.

After the couple’s divorce, Teddy stayed with a sister until her death, then was cared for by a trained nurse. After he died at age 78, Edith wrote a friend, the Cambridge don Gaillard Lapsley, that her ex-husband had achieved “a happy release, for the real Teddy went years ago, & these survivals of the body are ghastly beyond expression.”