Age of Desire fictionalizes Wharton’s life
I have never read a book of this kind – a fictionalized version of a very real period in a person’s life using actual letters written by and to her using the real names of herself and others.
The Age of Desire tells of Edith Wharton in the Paris years in the first two decades of the 19th century. The author has obviously researched the mores, the customs and fashions of the times. She is a fine writer and gets within the changing feelings of the mostly real people and includes their actual letters to each other, having seen the letters before they were sold at auction.
Edith loved Paris – though she was married to a man who did not, longing only for The Mount. She spoke faultless French and enjoyed its high society.
It was there she met the “dashing” young journalist Morton Fullerton, who becomes her lover as her barren, sexless marriage falls apart completely in her mid-40s. Their letters to each other are very personal but he seems to have understood her better than anyone, except Anna Bahlmann.
Anna was Edith’s original nurse, who eventually became her typist (she admits to weeping as she typed the end of Ethan Frome), copy editor and gentle editor “here and there.” She accepted as well all kinds of other chores (packing up the apartment on Park Avenue, for example), taking care of Teddy Wharton – who, despairing of his relationship with his wife – falls in love with her.
She and Edith are best friends until Anna shows her disapproval of Edith’s treatment of her husband (he is growing seriously ill) and her affair with Morton.
For a period they were not as close, and Anna takes a trip to her native Germany and around Europe where she meets a German industrialist who gives her the first kiss she has ever had – and asks her to marry him. Upon learning he has a mongoloid daughter she rejects him, discouraged by the thought he wants her – as everyone else does – as a caretaker.
One of the author’s gifts as a novelist is to establish subtelties and changes in relationships (Anna’s toward Edith, Thomas and Teddy, and Edith’s own relationships toward her husband, Anna, Morton and Henry James, who becomes a close friend) through action and reaction – not by describing such changes.
Smoothly she weaves in their letters to each other giving depth and reality to the relationships of the novel. Another of her gifts is to establish the customs and realities of the times – cars that break down, steamship travel, societal rules and servant-master rules and customs – through lively action and reaction.
Comes the first world war and Edith and Anna hang together, setting up hostels and workrooms with Edith’s money to help in wartime Paris. Anna becomes ill and she is finally is allowed to go back to her family in Kansas.
Though this form is new to me, this author has made it a very convincing one.
By coincidence, in the reading room of the Lenox Library is an old, long and unusual sled which is accompanied by a note saying it is similar to the one on which Ethan Frome and Mattie went down the snowy hill to their fate.
Book info:
The Age of Desire
By Jennie Fields
Viking, $27.95
Posted by Rae Eastman
on November 8, 2012. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry