Books: Popping the Stays

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Manic Energy. Despite her unprecedented popularity, she grew increasingly dissatisfied with America and Americans, elevating snobbishness, her most unpleasant characteristic, to the height of religious pride. "Such dreariness, such whining callow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!" she wrote after spending a night at a Massachusetts hotel. "What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast." More and more time was spent in Europe, and finally Edith and the ever compliant Teddy took an apartment in Paris, returning to America for shorter and shorter visits.

Most of her friends were Americans. In 1903 Edith had begun her famous friendship with another expatriate, Henry James. He was alternately fascinated and appalled by her wealth and her seemingly inexhaustible and sometimes manic energy, which led him to call her "the Angel of Devastation."

Other friendships were more intimate. Well into her 40s, Edith met Morton Fullerton, an American journalist in Paris, who finally unlocked her sexual passion. Fullerton, who seems to have been irresistible to both sexes, later hinted that he taught a very willing partner his many tricks. Edith was never again shy about sex. In her old age she even tried her hand at writing pornography in a never published story of father-daughter incest entitled Beatrice Palmato.

Edith dissolved her marriage to Teddy after he took $50,000 from her trust fund to support a mistress in Boston. After World War I, during which she led a major effort to house and feed French and Belgian refugees, she divided her time between an estate north of Paris and a villa on the Riviera. Much of her later work was little better than contemporary soap opera, written by formula to keep her expensive life-style going. But the best of it, like The Age of Innocence, returned to the once despised world of her childhood, which she dissected with loving care. Such is the in exorable irony of nostalgia.

The Wharton papers, which were deposited at Yale after her death in 1937, were opened only in 1968. Biographer Lewis, a Yale professor, has had a treasure chest of hitherto secret material, and he has made good use of it. Edith Wharton's own story, too long delayed, is as compelling as anything she ever wrote.

Gerald Clarke