There are many reasons to preserve and restore the homes of famous people. Monticello explains Jefferson and Graceland, Elvis. Or so we like to think. Perhaps uniquely with Edith Wharton it is important because her novels and poetry fed on her various houses. When she was unhappy, habitation was a cell, a prison. The Mount, her Berkshire residence now undergoing a $5 million restoration, made her supremely happy. Here, lying in bed, she spent mornings writing “The House of Mirth” and used its considerable royalties to build herself a secret garden.
But also at the Mount her marriage to Teddy Wharton finally unraveled. There had been adultery on both sides, Edith’s with a caddish journalist who, nonetheless, broke through a sexual frigidity that had its origins in the Victorian custom of not preparing women for the wedding night. On her 60th birthday, celebrated as a novelist and a Pulitzer Prize hers for “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton wrote to a friend about buying the house of her dreams in the south of France. “I feel as if I were going to get married — to the right man at last.”
The Mount has had only four owners since Edith Wharton reluctantly sold it in 1911, never to live in America again. The house was treated kindly by the Foxhollow School for girls, which used it as a dormitory from 1942 to 1973. The headmistress, the late Aileen M. Farrell, “acted as if she were its curator,” says Stephanie Copeland, director of Edith Wharton Restoration, or EWR, the nonprofit group founded to bring the house back to the exacting standards of both Whartons, for the Mount was also Teddy’s pride and joy.
More or less resolved is the Mount’s relationship with its tenant, Shakespeare & Company. Their signature work, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged outdoors with the Mount and its gardens as backdrop, has been justly praised. The troupe also has a nice line in plays based on Wharton stories, which it acts in the drawing room. But Shakespeare & Company was always behind on the rent and the dozen actors living on the bedroom floors were less gentle to the building than the Foxhollow girls. Shakespeare’s annual rent was intended to keep the Mount mortgage free. This did not happen. A judge has now ruled that Shakespeare must pay up (it has) and must not violate the terms of the National Trust agreement with EWR, which puts preservation above adaptive reuse. While the company may still use the Mount in theatrical productions, actors and staff must not set foot above the main floor.
What is Edith Wharton Restoration hoping to honor by preserving? Wharton was the one American novelist who could write as a member of the upper crust and find its moral center. She was fascinated by the clash of European and American culture, as was her great friend (and guest at the Mount) Henry James.
Restoring the Mount is also a wonderful chance to do some restoration work on Teddy, specifically on the running of an estate as suitable occupation for a man of leisure. Edith did the work, had the money (made and inherited) and, as her social class decreed, hid her intellectual side. Teddy loved and admired her. “Look at that waist!” he said to a friend as they strolled behind Edith erect and trim in her corset. “No one would ever guess she had written a line of poetry in her life.” When Teddy wanted to build a piggery for the Mount farm, Edith sold a poem to pay for it.
With the royalty checks came fame and a new set of friends, the writers and intellectuals to whose company she aspired. Henry James had the best guest room at the Mount. It’s uncertain whether Teddy read let alone understood Edith’s books, says R.W.B. Lewis who got his Pulitzer for his 1975 Wharton biography. In their day, people did not flounce in and out of marriage, and a persistent theme in her stories and novels was marriage on the rocks, the marriage that bent but did not break. When Teddy would join Edith and her pals for tea, “smiles froze in place” and the egghead palaver had to stop.
The future Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862 into one of the “good old money” New York families she would depict in “The Age of Innocence” (1920). Very much younger than her two brothers, she was almost an only child. She was prettier as a child than as a woman, for her jaw grew more masculine than was the fashion. The family spent years at a stretch in Europe, and Edith had difficulty feeling American. Her childhood pastime was “making up,” that is, inventing stories
Edith wasn’t quite on the shelf when Teddy proposed but at age 23 she was approaching the sell-by date for young society women to secure their future by marriage. He was 35, the best-looking man in his Harvard class, an affable Bostonian who lived on an allowance from his family. He called her “Puss” or “John,” both Wharton family nicknames, the latter bestowed by her brothers. Edith called Teddy “Old Man” in the way, biographer Lewis says, that large men are called Tiny. The marriage took three weeks to consummate. If not marital rape, it may have seemed so to the bride. There would be no children.
Until years later, when he embezzled her trust fund of $50,000 and sported a girlfriend, Teddy and Edith were a companionable couple. Their social standards were the same and they meshed in other ways. They loved dogs and riding. She chose the food and he the wines. He knew he was “not on Puss’s plane” intellectually but men liked his clubman’s stories, and their friends his hospitality. While Edith was abed writing, Teddy ran the Mount and its farm.
The Whartons had begun married life in Newport where Edith tried her hand at interior design. Those lessons went first into “The Decoration of Houses” (1897), which she wrote with Bostonian Ogden Codman and received her first-ever royalty check of $39.60. For all its Eurocentric focus, it’s still worth reading. Few of us today aspire to the grand style of Wharton’s time, and many details will seem dated. Still valid is what she had to say on making architecture and decor appropriate to a room’s use. From appropriate design would follow appropriate behavior. Form, she believed, helps us sort life out; form clues the clueless. The Mount was her first attempt to design a house from the ground up. Construction began in 1901 and the Whartons received their first guests the next fall, James arriving in October. The Whartons intended to live there six months a year.
The house is tall and compact, rising to a cupola now under scaffolding as Phase 1 of the restoraton proceeds. Country seats were expected to have a view. Though the Mount looks down a hill, a vista had to be contrived. But knowing that what the eye glimpses the imagination will inflate, Edith and her niece, the landscape designer Beatrix Jones Farrand, made it seem that the swampy meadow below the house was the shore of sparking Laurel Lake beyond. The better to enjoy the vista, the reception rooms were on the upper main floor, a design Edith had learned to love in Europe. In layout, the main floor of the Mount consists of a row of connecting rooms, this enfilade sandwiched between a long terrace, made shady by awnings, and a long gallery that served as the main hall. This established a traffic pattern observing the social niceties: Guests flowed between rooms, doubtless in Edith’s wake, but the servants came and went from the gallery hall.
Traveling in Italy, she had become fascinated by the relationship of habitation to nature and would publish her thoughts in “Italian Villas and Their Gardens” in 1904. Most of the Berkshire estates, like the Newport “cottages,” were showplaces. The Mount is personal and human; it breathes because Edith made its spaces progress in gradual stages from open to closed, sun to shade, public to private, and back again.
The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate on Walker Street, Lenox, is open through Monday, Nov. 3. For information about hours and tours, telephone Edith Wharton Restoration at (413) 637-1899.
