In a letter to her close friend Sara Norton, Edith Wharton writes about her house in Massachusetts and her sense that her real home is elsewhere.
The Mount
Lenox, Mass.
June 5 [1903]
Dear Sally
Your letter glowing with the reflection of the National Gallery came yesterday, & made me feel more acutely than ever the contrast between the old and the new, between the stored beauty & tradition & amenity over there, & the crassness here. My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, & I am not enough in sympathy with our “gros public” to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One’s friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don’t think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most déplacé & useless class on earth! All of which outburst is due to my first sight of American streets, my first hearing of American voices, & the wild, dishevelled backwoods look of everything when one first comes home! You see in my heart of hearts, a heart never unbosomed, I feel in America as you say you do in England—out of sympathy with everything. And in England I like it all—institutions, traditions, mannerisms, everything but the women’s clothes, & the having to go to church every Sunday.
We arrived safely & comfortably, after a long slow crossing on the best steamer I ever was on, & came at once to Lenox. It is very pleasant to be taking one’s ease in one’s own house, but out of doors the scene is depressing. There has been an appalling drought of nine weeks or more, & never has this fresh showery country looked so unlike itself. The dust is indescribable, the grass parched & brown, flowers & vegetables stunted, & still no promise of rain! You may fancy how our poor place looks, still in the rough, with all its bald patches emphasized. In addition, our good gardener has failed us, we know not why, whether from drink or some other demoralization, but after spending a great deal of money on the place all winter there are no results, & we have been obliged to get a new man. This has been a great blow, as we can’t afford to do much more this year—I try to console myself by writing about Italian gardens instead of looking at my own. …
The dear dogs were so glad to see us. Miza looks younger than ever, but old Jules is very rheumatic.
Thanks again for your letter, dear Sally—
Affly Yrs E.W.
I am so delighted that you think the Maison du Péché as remarkable as I do. It is so full of beauty & feeling, so profoundly moving, so unlike the average French novel in every way.
FURTHER READING
Watch a video with images of The Mount, the estate whose house and grounds Edith Wharton designed herself, here.
Here is Jonathan Franzen’s controversial New Yorker essay on the occasion of Wharton’s 150th birthday, and here is Victoria Patterson’s response.
For more about Wharton’s European travels and sense of alienation in America, read Gianfranca Balestra’s discussion in the RSA Journal, here.