He was to her a heroine, she to him a
hero
Anita Brookner
HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON: LETTERS, 1900-1915 edited by Lyall H. Powers
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, f25, pp. 412
In 1909, overcome by a black depress- ion, Henry James burnt most of his person- al papers, including the many letters he had received from his friend Edith Whar- ton, who was 20 years his junior. In 1915, again depressed, and already in the throes of his last illness (although it was a stroke that brought the 'distinguished thing'), he burnt more. Therefore the letters which remain, with three exceptions, are from James to Wharton. Each greatly admired the other, with certain reservations; these dissolve in the case of James, whose character took on an angelic sweetness as his life declined. The 170 extant letters of this one-sided correspondence are pub- lished in this edition by Lyall Powers, and should be supplemented by the fine volume entitled The Letters of Edith Whar- ton, edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, and published by Simon and Schuster in 1988.
'His friendship has been the pride and honour of my life', wrote Edith Wharton, on hearing of James's death in 1916, while he, in 1914, addressed her as 'dearest Edith', and observed, 'you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together'. Both were noble creatures, and their friendship, although in many ways incongruous, subsisting as it did on heavily compromised arrangements to meet, was a truly exalted affair. Edith Wharton appears to have made the first move, sending James a story of hers as early as 1899, but it was not until 1902, when she
sent him The Valley of Decision, and he responded with The Wings of the Dove, that their correspondence really got going.
Wharton, in fact, found James's novel fairly deadly. She really only admired the more straightforward early work, while James, less anxiously effusive than he was to become, sent her an ambiguous piece of advice. She should pursue, he says,
the American subject. Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for. Profit, be warned, by my awful example of exile and ignorance . . . DO NEW YORK!
James's exile and ignorance at this point enabled him to produce his three most awe-inspiring novels — The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl — in the space of a mere three years. He saw Edith Wharton, at this stage of their lives, as an interesting and promising novice, but one who might be watched. With her bright clear style, and her agree- able touch of hardness, or 'hardness', as he would put it, he would be perturbed if she were to apply her talents to the fortunes of Americans in Europe, as he was doing with such agonising finesse. In fact she followed his advice, and in 1905 produced The House of Mirth, in many ways her most accomplished work. James knew what to make of this, and indeed discovered his main objection to Wharton's fiction: she lacked art, that is to say the art of composition. She was not, in other words, capable of the fugue-like invention which characterises his own major works. He finds her, perhaps, a little superficial, and thus largely fails to appreciate her subtle- ties, which are agreeably terse. He thinks the character of Selden, in The House of Mirth, 'too absent', whereas the whole point of Selden is that he signally fails to come up to scratch in the matter of Lily Bart. But The House of Mirth sealed for them both a recognition of mutual or parallel worldly experience. From this date James's letters signify his acceptance of a soulmate, one who would watch over him to the end, while he, becalmed in sadness and sickness, watched in helpless admira- tion as she whirled about Europe, kept great state at 58, later 53, rue de Grenelle, and generally provided the reclusive James with a glimpse of the greater world he was too timorous to enjoy.
Edith Wharton was a commanding woman, who constructed for herself an admirable and emancipated life from moneyed but narrow beginnings. She took her literary gifts for granted, and recog- nised in them a certain virility which did not displease her. In this she was perci- pient: her novels are more virile than those of James. What unites them both, and this is really almost fortuitous, is their great interest in women. James's major charac- ters are all women, as are those of Edith Wharton; both saw the heroine as the character who would carry the main im- petus of the novel and reflect its major development. In Edith Wharton's case this was not surprising. Men revealed them- selves to her gaze as ultimately disappoint- ing. Hence, perhaps, the craven male characters, all either venal or ineffective, who people her novels. When she allows a man heroic status he is noticeable princi- pally for the mildness of his manners. The exception is the dreadful Elmer in The Custom of the Country, but Elmer is a vulgarian, a hick, and a conman, and therefore destined for millionaire status. Edith Wharton's very old money was supplemented by enormous literary earn- ings, a fact on which Henry James medi- tated with some bitterness. She was an extremely rich woman, while he remained a relatively poor man, referring to himself on one occasion as 'a mere aged British pauper in a workhouse'.
The heroes of Henry James, on the other hand, are Henry James himself, with his sense of scruple mercifully contained, as it was not in real life. His letters to Edith Wharton show an almost grotesque confu- sion of tentativeness and delicacy, and appear to be written in a language some- where midway between English and French. Both fell into the society habit of using French phrases as a form of short- hand, but James actually employs euphem- isms and inversions which are hardly Eng- lish. In some cases this led to misinter- pretation. Edith Wharton mistook his elaborate humility for indigence, and attempted to get up subscriptions for a gift of money. Dining at Lamb House, she noted with distaste that a pie previously served at one meal was brought on again for another. (He in his turn occasionally dreaded her fulsome descents). Her gifts were only acceptable when they were anonymous, for example the concocted commission and advance from Charles Scribner for a novel which was never completed. What was acceptable was Edith Wharton's car. Like many sedentary char- acters James loved to go out in other people's cars, and each outing is fondly memorialised. With what awe and longing does he refer to Edith's 'motor-flights', her `world-swings', her 'globe-life', while send- ing her accounts of his 'sickishness', his `stomachic collapse', his 'food-loathings'. She in her turn was vigilant for him, and his last letters show him responding gratefully to her anxious solicitude.
After his death Wharton wrote to James's secretary, Miss Bosanquet, 'We who knew him well know how great he would have been if he had never written a line'. The lofty innocence of Henry James bears this out. Edith Wharton, who was to James, 'my ideal of the dashing Woman', complemented him with her greater sophistication. Each loved and admired the other, and for a singular reason: he was to her a hero, while she was to him a heroine. Their common ground was a recognition of the higher gentility, the quality they both shared. As James wrote, 'We are so abjectly wedded — and have to be — to the idea of the gentleman-when-it- comes-to-the-test, to say nothing of that of the lady similarly incommoded'. Thus the secret of their friendship was a shared moral outlook; it survived separation, and was unaffected by either time or distance. As a record of love and fidelity, these letters are therefore invaluable.
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