6 - Edith Wharton and her Books: A Writer in her Library

Summary

Apart from her last historical novel, The Buccaneers, Wharton would be absorbed, from the publication of The Children onwards, with the telling of the writer's life, both in fiction – in the linked narratives, Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932) – and in her own autobiography, A Backward Glance. Crucial and central in that telling is the place and influence of the printed word, the literary influences that not only awakened and sustained Wharton herself as an artist but that she places at the heart of the life story of her fictional writer, Vance Weston. Whilst the moral and social concerns that animated the novels of American life discussed in the previous chapter do not disappear, they are more incidental to the structure of both the novels and the autobiography. All three books can be seen as continuing with the anti-modernist and reactionary drift of Wharton's work in the 1920s: the strongest impetus for the writing of the fiction, for instance, is the promotion of the argument she put forward to her publishers, Appleton, in an outline of Hudson River Bracketed: that the cultural conditions of American life are not conducive to the production of great art. As she said: ‘I want to try to draw the experiences of an unusually intelligent modern American youth, of average education and situation, on whom the great revelation of the Past, which everything in modern American training tends to exclude, or at least to minimize, rushes in through the million channels of art, of history, and of human beings of another civilisation’ (SHRB).

Wharton's ambition in A Backward Glance, as discussed in Chapter 1, is to commemorate not interrogate the social structures of old New York. Whilst she celebrates the access to culture that relative freedom to explore her father's library gave her as a child, she also pokes fun at the fear and loathing in which her family and social circle held the practitioners of any creative art. The autobiography is an embattled text, but the obstacles that she describes as having been thrown in the way of her own youthful artistic ambitions are as nothing compared to the difficulties with which she freights the intellectual and creative development of Vance Weston.