The lady steamroller

“YES -- all my ‘blue distances’ will be shut out for ever when he goes,” Edith Wharton wrote a friend. Henry James lay dying, and with him an extraordinary friendship: profound mutual incompatibility along with profound mutual need, a short-lived, mainly unconscious mentorship on his part, a lightly waspish self-assertion on hers. And throughout, a moving devotion spiced with itchy complaints and private mockery.

Wharton was rich, hugely successful, a lavish spender, a builder and restorer of grand houses, an extravagant and lordly traveler. Everything about her, at least on the surface, was energetically declarative. (There was doubt and more than a share of suffering, but these were held close even as they were the engine of her prodigious literary output.) She wielded a keenly discriminating intelligence; subtlety tended to disappear into the need to control and impose -- in her work as well as her life.

Even those who loved and admired her could find her to be too much. “I dreamt last night that I was a child going to a school kept by Edith and terribly afraid of her,” confessed Royall Tyler, a diplomat and staunch member of Wharton’s inner circle in her later years. Others, resenting the too-muchness, couldn’t withhold a grudging respect (except for a French duchess who remarked languidly of Wharton’s often alarming hospitality that “with her, one is overly organized”).

Like the privileged young woman in T.S. Eliot’s “Cousin Nancy,” Wharton strode across the hills and broke them. She could almost have written that line herself, except that her poetry was poor. She knew what she had and what she could do (again, both in work and life) and what she lacked: namely, James’ blue distances -- his finenesses and subtleties, which spoke to her even when, as in his later work (“The Golden Bowl,” “The Wings of the Dove”), she rejected them.

At her most powerful -- “Ethan Frome,” “The House of Mirth” -- hers was the brilliant, unsparing, head-on beam, no backlighting or penumbra. She could declare but not suggest. What you get is what you see, not -- because little room is left for it -- what you yourself may imagine and provide. She was an important writer but not quite a great one, as James could sometimes be, in his finicky, mannered way.

Hermione Lee would not agree. In her new biography -- diligent and massively detailed, at times to a standstill -- she discusses Wharton’s admiration for Marcel Proust. Though they moved in some of the same circles, Lee writes, there was never a meeting of “the two great novelists.” That defines greatness down a little; so does Lee’s characterization of Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth” as a tragic figure on the order of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina.

The quality of tragedy, after all, depends not just upon the protagonist but upon everything else that isn’t tragic. Tragedy is the shadow cast by the protagonist on the surrounding world. Wharton’s worlds -- social and familial -- lack texture, mystery and richness; they exist mainly to punish or entrap the lead characters.

Lee writes both the work and the life. If there is a theme running through her discussion of Wharton’s 16 novels, 11 novellas and more than 80 short stories and story collections, it is the attempt to winkle out whatever strengths there may be in many that have been forgotten or dismissed. While not uncritical, she does sometimes make much of Wharton’s small virtues: not mountains out of molehills, exactly, but a seemingly interminable procession of molehills, each dutifully summarized and commented on.

Many of Lee’s points are well made; she is lucid and acute about the better-known works. On the other hand, she devotes 17 pages to establishing “The Custom of the Country,” a neglected novel that she and other critics admire, as one of Wharton’s strongest. Yet as she plods through plot and characters, she fails to convey either strength or allure. It is like being at a party where one knows nobody and doesn’t much want to.

As for the life, Lee goes into it with the best of biographical purposes -- to resurrect rather than inter -- and does so with a thoroughness no other Wharton biographer has yet achieved. It is not hagiography but advocacy. No warts are hidden; each is displayed in the spirit of Terence’s “Nothing human is alien to me.”

Wharton -- brought up in a Gilded Age New York that stifled her, with a mother who belittled her, a beloved father who died young and a blithe and stupid society husband who gradually went mad -- from childhood read and wrote in order to draw breath. Writing and travel were a way out; the more so when, about 1900, she began publishing stories regularly in the better magazines. In 1905, “The House of Mirth” brought her tremendous success, and from then until her death in 1937 she was a steady bestseller. It bolstered her confidence, both inner (she had no doubts about her talent) and outer (she made a great deal of money, even more than the comfortable amount she inherited).

Wharton used her writing to combat the narrowness and vulgarity of American society and her money to escape it. The innocence in “The Age of Innocence,” set in 1870s New York, is murderous: a refusal to admit any culture beyond its own constricted version, one that “seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience.” The protagonists of her other major novels are corrupted or trapped by society’s evils. The traditional comparison with Henry James, as Lee notes, is largely off base; Dreiser and Hardy are closer.

As for escape, Wharton moved away from the New York/Newport world to build the Mount in western Massachusetts and then, after a few years, settled permanently in France. There she became part of a wealthy and cultivated American expatriate set, along with the more traditional part of the literary world. She had no use for what was then the avant-garde and is now the revered generation of Modernists.

She had a passionate and destructive affair with the American journalist and bisexual Morton Fullerton and divorced her husband after years of trying to cope with his madness. With both these episodes, Lee is at her wrenching best. Wharton worked devotedly to rally American support and relief money for France in the Great War, and for the next 20 years she wrote, set up two country houses and traveled and entertained with autocratic lavishness.

Lee, in her resurrecting ardor, resurrects every last button and shoelace. There are pages upon pages describing Wharton’s houses, gardens, reading lists, itineraries. A half-page goes to one of her wine cellars. A biography should create the appetite that its details feed; Lee stuffs her reader like a Strasbourg goose. Sometimes, though, she goes into a sublime overdrive, never more than in a portrait of Wharton and James that has never been bettered.

Insecure, fragile, depressed over his lack of popular success, James was paradoxically sustained by the rich solicitousness of the Whartonian cyclone. Her insistent “silver-sounding toot” comfortably agitated him, not least because he could make fun of it -- she was too confident to mind -- and complain of the exhaustion she caused him. Billowing in enormous hats and scarves, she spun James -- hunched and dry -- all around France in what he baptized the “Vehicle of Passion” (her chauffeured car). Happily, he noted the daily dispatch of servants to prepare hotel rooms at the next stop; happily, he remarked on “the wild, almost incoherent restlessness of wealth.” Depression hovered. It was not always easy to muster the convolutions to be James, and in Wharton’s alarums and excursions there was comic, touching surcease. *