Karl Orend
Edith Wharton in France
Edith Wharton was in love with France and the French way of life. It provided the antidote to the shallowness and materialism of the wealthy, elite New York Society into which she was born in 1862, and later satirised in The House of Mirth. Edith said of her close friends "we never think or feel as Americans do". Two of her great-grandparents were French and her family's gaze was always set on Europe. Edith lived with her family in Paris at 61 Avenue Josephine between 1868-1870. She first spoke French at 4 years old, and later became fluent in German and Italian. While in Paris, and still unable to read, she discovered how to unleash her imagination, pacing the floor and "making up"; she composed stories out loud whilst holding a copy of Irving's Tales of the Aihambra from Galignani's Press. Upon her return to New York, having learned to read, she read extensively in French. Her mother, a cold, insensitive beauty, indifferent to literature, forbade her modern books, and she read so many classical texts that her spoken French became "pure Louis Quatorze". Edith grew up lonely and bookish, shy, and insecure about her looks. Books were her refuge. Her other great joy was the yearly arrival of "our trunk from Paris" with its resplendent dresses. Through these years she wrote poems, stories and then her first novel at 16. She revisited Paris at 18 when her father often took her to the Come die Francaise, her love of which resurfaced in The Reef.
Her first literary friend was Walter Berry, a Franco-phile cousin whom she met in 1883. She secretly loved him throughout his life, and he would later help her with editing her books. Seeking an escape from family life, she married her older brothers' friend Teddy Wharton in 1885. Henry James would call the marriage "utterly inconceivable". Teddy suffered from manic depression and, an inferiority complex due to Edith's greater wealth and education. They were very unhappy. France was never far from her mind, and John Winthrop, a family friend, educated her in all the modern French writers, historians and critics. She constantly tried to balance the demands of la vie mondaine with the life of the spirit, something she eventually came to feel was only possible in France. Her friendship with Paul Bouget, a French novelist, in the 1890s would help her understand the intricacies of French society.
Edith's life as an expatriate in Paris began in the winter of 1906. She felt the difference at once, "in Paris no one could live without literature, and the fact that I was a professional writer, instead of frightening my fashionable friends, interested them!" She began to try to write in French. She sought friends who shared her tastes and as she came to know more of French society, realised she had at last found a milieu which shared her sensibilities. Her profound, dormant love for France had awoken.
For Edith, the French woman was more grown up than her American counterpart, who believed only in short cuts to knowledge, materialism, and tragedies with happy endings. The French had understood that men and women complete each other mentally and physically, and they grew up mature, in contact with the material realities of living. To her, the French were a race of artists. They were educated to have the Seeing Eye.
For someone who loved artistic expression more than anything, Edith felt at home in a society where the idea that art and knowledge could be subordinated to material concerns was incomprehensible. However, she wasn't blind to the less readily appealing aspects of French life, such as their clinging to rules and precedents which had become meaningless, their selfishness. This, she explained, was due to the fact that they had nearly 2000 years of history and culture to conserve, which led them to recoil from the new, be conservative and lack spontaneity, to "shun the outer darkness of risk". Women played a much more central role in French life. They were often their husband's business partners and ruled their families with a fierce conservatism. Marriage was more a business contract between two families and, in order to preserve their fortunes intact, couldn't be allowed to be at the whim of transitory emotions such as passion and love. Hence marriage was founded for the family, not the husband and wife. They left love out of marriage because there was no room for it. They were neither instinctively generous, nor trustful. This explained the normality of love affairs in French life, the independent strong role of women. The French were realistic, but at the same time passionately romantic. Amour was not simply love, but rather all the "complex of sensations and emotions which a man and woman may inspire in each other."
Throughout the pre-war years, Edith mixed with a circle of important literary and political figures and members of the Faubourg Society she had written about in Madame de Treymes.
Edith always made sure her work was translated into French and her standing in Paris as a writer was assured.
During the Great War, Edith did much for the war effort, working for charity and opening her own charity for shunned tuberculosis patients in 1917. She also continued writing. Unable to write fiction, she also turned her literary gifts to the war effort. Her descriptions of Paris and France under war conditions, which appeared in Fighting France (1915), did a lot to bring America into the war. Combining the acute sensitivity of a travelogue with the moral authority her social work had given her, she was the first American writer to provide and account of the events at the front line. She made four trips to the front in early 1915. Nothing prepared her for what she saw. She felt at times a "sense of being at the very gates of hell."
By the end of 1918 Edith had decided that she must leave Paris. The world she had known was gone, and the Great War had destroyed the Faubourg Society. Paris had become associated in her mind with illness, worries, loneliness and the continual demands of the sufferings she had tried so hard to relieve.
Edith had been sketching an idea for a novel about old New York. Written in seven months, this was The Age of Innocence (1920), her best loved book. It sold 115,000 copies in the first year in America and even film rights were sold. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in1921 and compared to Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad and de Maupassant. But she was only able to bear short trips back to Paris. In 1920 the French Academy awarded her the Prix Montyon, the gold Medal for Virtue, for her war writings. Paris by this time had become "simply awful" and was filling up with Americans, eager to exploit the buying power of the dollar. The days of the Lost Generation were approaching.
Edith Wharton died in August 1937, following a heart attack. As was her wish, she was buried in the cemetery at Versailles. There were flowers from her beloved garden and a guard of honour formed by old soldiers and the war wounded. The inscription on her grave reminds us of her late adopted Catholic faith- a Latin inscription meaning 'Hail the Cross: Our Only Salvation'. This is a coded reference to a now forgotten play by Strindberg, which opens in Montparnasse cemetery, the lines spoken by a woman who loves much more than she is loved.
For the people of France Edith Wharton lives on. In St Brice a street bears her name, she is widely studied in schools and universities, and remains one of the most loved 20th century writers. Loved not only for her books, but also for her generous heart and her defence of the French way of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment