Volumes have been written on Edith Wharton, the US novelist and short story writer, but few books explore her non-literary interests. Critic and scholar Hermione Lee, a professor of English at the University of Oxford, aims to rectify that with a new biography. It offers the usual portrait of a strong-willed woman obsessed with America’s complicated social transitions but also a rare exploration of the author’s talent and passion for architecture and decorating.
Reared in wealth in New York City, Wharton settled for a time in Newport, Rhode Island. But it was through a move in the late 19th century to Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires of New England, that she came into her own as a home designer, embarking on the construction of The Mount, her famous house in 113 acres. In her first book ‘The Decoration of Houses’ Wharton writes that she was determined to demonstrate the virtues of good architectural expression: order, scale and harmony. The result is a main building with a striking white stucco exterior, strongly set off by black shutters, that takes inspiration from the 17th-century Belton House in Lincolnshire in the east of England, as well as classical Italian and French architecture. Wharton lived there from 1902 to 1911, during which time her first novel, ‘The Valley of Decision’; one of her most famous, ‘The House of Mirth’; and her non-fiction book ‘Italian Villas and Their Gardens’ were published.
The following is an extract from Lee’s biography, ‘Edith Wharton’.
Edith Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses, a manual on American house decoration co-authored with a young Boston architect and designer, Ogden Codman, and published in a lavish format in 1897, when Wharton was 35, took a socially responsible and forward-looking approach to house design. Both authors believed passionately that “interior decoration should be considered a branch of architecture”. They disliked the fussy, stuffy style of their parents’ generation – as satirised in Wharton’s historical novel, The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s:
“Mrs Newland Archer’s drawing-room was generally thought a great success. A gilt bamboo jardinière, in which the primulas and cinerarias were punctually renewed, blocked the access to the bay window (where the old-fashioned would have preferred a bronze reduction of the Venus of Milo); the sofas and arm-chairs of pale brocade were cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver toys, porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames; and tall rose-shaded lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms.”
The authors of The Decoration of Houses loathed clutter: too many knick-knacks; pictures hung over flowered wall-paper; “superfluous draperies” covering doorways, frightful fire-screens and elaborate hooped and ruffled muslin curtains. “Lingerie effects do not combine well with architecture.” But they also disapproved of the eclectic tastes of newly rich, gilded age millionaires who prided themselves on having a “colonial” verandah, a Louis XV bedroom, Queen Anne furniture, a chinoiserie dining-room and a renaissance ballroom. No: “uniformity of style” did not have to be “servile”, “formal” or “pretentious”. What was essential was simplicity and comfort. Why should there be “a vague feeling that no drawing-room is worthy of the name unless it is uninhabitable”? This made for as sad a room in a grand house as the shut-up “best parlour” of a New England farmhouse, like the one in Wharton’s great, grim novella Ethan Frome. The terms that run through the book are appropriateness, harmony, organic proportions, simplicity, commonsense. The approach was rational: “A building ... must have a reason for being as it is and must be as it is for that reason.” One of Wharton’s suggested titles was “Rooms & Their Reasons, or Logic in House Decoration”.
The Decoration of Houses described privacy as “one of the first requisites of civilized life”. The authors hated the new fashion for halls with open staircases, sheets of plate-glass between rooms or rooms without doors. Here, Wharton anticipates the design of The Mount. Bedrooms should be designed as suites, preferably with a separate door into the bathroom for the servants to use without disturbing the inhabitants of the bedroom. As for the entrance to the house, “it should be borne in mind ... that, while the main purpose of a door is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude”. The vestibule should be cut off from the inner hall or staircase by a glass door.
At The Mount, guests were only allowed by invitation through the glass door, up the stairs and into the inner regions of the house – the splendid gallery, the spacious and elegant living rooms with their high windows. The dramatic surprise of The Mount’s long terrace and its views of distant hills could not be guessed at from the entrance courtyard. Throughout, the structure emphasised “distinctly articulated spaces”. On the second floor, where the long hall had doors opening off to the Whartons’ separate (but adjoining) bedrooms and to the three guest rooms, Edith had a self-contained suite, a bedroom, bathroom and boudoir, which could be closed off from the rest of the house and where she could write in peace.
Privacy, of course, is something you have to be able to afford. Class assumptions run unquestioned through The Decoration of Houses. These are houses for those rich enough to model their style on Versailles or Audley End, to have ballrooms, suites of bedrooms, private libraries, tapestries and statues, 18th-century furniture, marble floors and carved ceilings (some imported wholesale from Europe), large teams of live-in servants and architects and decorators commissioned to do the work. But the idea was that good taste and good practice among the rich would have a trickle-down effect into less grandiose houses. “The book is not written for millionaires alone,” Wharton said. The authors often apply their principles to small houses being built on a budget: “What must be done cheaply should be done simply.” If this reads condescendingly, it was meant helpfully.
It is hard to take The Decoration of Houses quite seriously now, though at the time it had an influential effect on American house design. It has such high-handed prejudices, for instance against the vulgar effects of “the general use of gas and electricity in the living rooms of modern houses”. It is so sure of being right: “One need only look at the ceilings in the average modern house to see what a thing of horror plaster may become in the hands of an untrained ‘designer’.” It is so snooty: “No one should venture to buy works of art who cannot at least draw such obvious distinctions as those between old and new Saxe, between an old Italian and a modern French bronze.” But the book is not just about decor; it is about how best to live your life: “If art is really a factor in civilisation, it seems obvious that the feeling for beauty needs as careful cultivation as the other civic virtues ... No greater service can be rendered to children than in teaching them to know the best and to want it.”
The Mount, completed in 1901, where Wharton and her husband Teddy lived (in between trips to Europe) until the tragic breakdown of their marriage in 1911, was a majestic and elegant house based on the principles outlined in The Decoration of Houses. Henry James rather wickedly described it as “a delicate French château mirrored in a Massachusetts pond”.
But for Wharton it was a place, at first, of pleasure and inspiration. “It was only at The Mount that I was really happy,” she wrote years later, looking back on her American life. She wrote one of her finest novels, The House of Mirth, while she was living there and she would often return to the New England setting in works like Ethan Frome, Summer, The Lady’s Maid’s Bell and All Souls. This was a place that would haunt her for ever and a landscape that she would re-write over and over. It was here that she turned herself into a great writer, with the same determination and pragmatic ambition that she had brought to the building of the house. Her closest friend Walter Berry wrote to her at the end of 1904: “I suppose The House of Mirth is being shingled and having its interior decoration attended to. May none of its chimneys smoke!”
Extracted from ‘Edith Wharton’ by Hermione Lee (Chatto & Windus, 2007; Vintage, 2008), which is available through the FT Bookshop at £8.79 (RRP £10.99), not including p&p, tel: 0870 429 5884
The Mount, which has been renovated by the Edith Wharton Restoration Society and now houses Wharton’s remarkable library, is open to visitors but, threatened with foreclosure, needs to raise up to $3m by 31 October 2008. For details, contact www.edithwharton.org
