If ever there was a vivid illustration of the abiding truth that gobs of money may not be enough to buy even the tiniest smidge of happiness, it is to be found in two contemporary examinations of life as it was lived by the very rich a century ago in what was called the “Gilded Age.”
One is the just-released Jennifer Jason Leigh, Albert Finney film “Washington Square,” adapted from the enduring 1881 Henry James novel of the same title.
The other, more subtle expression of upper class pain is the new exhibition at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery: “Edith’s Wharton’s World.”
Rather a pathetic fellow in his way, a sponge who never attained the great wealth that so fixated him, James was, however, as gifted a writer and brilliant an amateur psychologist as he was an insufferable snob.
He well understood the incredible unhappiness endured by a social class seemingly able to afford every pleasure — especially when it came to love. “Washington Square” has Miss Leigh literally writhing on the ground in a pouring rain that metaphorically defines the misery consuming her at being thwarted in her effort to marry the man she loves — just because he only seems to be after her money.
The Portrait Gallery show, a lavish collection of some 100 paintings, miniatures, photographs, manuscripts, letters and assorted other memorabilia, recreates the monde of the fabled Edith Jones Wharton, author of such stuffy tragedies as “The Age of Innocence” and the ironically titled “The House of Mirth.”
Co-curator of the exhibition, which runs through Jan. 4, is one of my favorite art historians and Wharton scholars, Eleanor Dwight, author herself of “The Gilded Age: Edith Wharton and Her Contemporaries” and “Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life.”
A Boston-bred descendent of Chicago’s McCormick clan of farm implement fortune fame, Dwight is egalitarian enough to teach at New York’s New School for Social Research, and lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, rather than the Upper East, which in my day simply was not done.
As her works betray, Wharton was a most unhappy person. Dwight detects this even in a painting of the author as a smiling 19-year-old. Trapped in the confining garb and pose of her time and social station, the shy, uneasy Wharton looked like “another person trying to get out,” Dwight said.
And, as Dwight also observed, “She was 47 when she discovered sex.” Hitherto, her life was in large part suffocating misery. She was pushed into a loveless, unhappy marriage with a gentleman of her own class, Edward Wharton, who, as a gentleman, did not work. Exposed to the cosmopolitan excitements of Europe when a tiny traveling tot, she was not allowed them in stuffy America.
For all her yearning to breathe free, Dwight said, Wharton was unwilling to cut herself loose from a class and lifestyle that defined her as superior.
Which was, of course, a crock. Nothing in American history has been more absurd than the struggle of people who — rising from the common clay by amassing fortunes through such grubby trade as the manufacture of manure forks, sale of raw meat and providing the government with shoddy Civil War goods — tried to transform themselves into a British-style hereditary aristocracy — or worse, buy their way into Britain’s.
The resultant pathos is evident in a number of paintings in the exhibition: the famous glamoroso Boldini portrait of the beauteous Consuelo Vanderbilt, descendant of one-time garbage scow skipper turned rich guy Commodore Vanderbilt, unhappily married for a title to the stone broke Duke of Marlborough; Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, the Mrs. Astor of “Four Hundred” fame, painted shortly before her mind succumbed to senility; Mary Leiter, daughter of a former Marshall Field dry goods partner, who became Lady Curzon through an arranged marriage that ultimately killed her with fevers acquired in “Inja”; Mrs. Olivia Cutting, who looks so painfully sure of her origins you’d think she was sitting on something exceedingly sharp; and poor F. Scott Fitzgerald, who adored Wharton but was, as Dwight put it, “an outsider, wishing he could be in.”
Happily, there are a few fun folk in “Wharton’s World.” One is Bertha Palmer, the queen of Chicago society who, after the death of her husband, Potter Palmer, moved to England and became the very, very, very, very close friend of King Edward VII, a monarch whose love of fun was exceeded only by the later King Farouk. Bertha also had a Paris salon and was the first person to stage Oscar Wilde’s salacious play “Salome.”
Edith Jones Wharton finally found a little of that kind of fun — and with a mere newspaperman! — taking as her lover an American foreign correspondent named Morton Fullerton. He went to Harvard, don’t you know, and came highly recommended by Henry James, but had been engaged to an actress, engaged to his cousin, and had a long string lovers of both sexes!
How much happier for Edith, all the way around, had she picked, say, a newspaperman who came highly recommended by Chicago’s Billy Goat tavern.
