Adventures with Edith, Book I, Chapter 13. This is the scene in which Gus Trenor has trapped Lily in his otherwise-empty house, and it is even more scary in the MS version, though that may be an artifact of the slow reading necessary for this part. Wharton rewrote this twice (manuscript with changes and typescript/manuscript with changes), with lots of crossouts, pasted-together strips, and alternate text on the backs.
I hadn’t fully appreciated before how much stagecraft Wharton puts into this scene: the drunken & angry Gus moves a chair in front of Lily and plops himself down in it, blocking her exit. He creeps up on her “with a hand that grew formidable.” And instead of making Lily “hear him out” as in the book, he’s now got what he wanted (Lily alone) and means “to make the most of it.”
In her anger, Lily had earlier made a satiric jab at Gus’s intelligence, and this calls forth the “primitive man from his lair.” She’s talked her way out of these situations before with wit, but now Lily’s terrified, frozen in place, afraid of the “mustering of vulture tongues” (just “tongues” in the book) if she calls for help.
As I was working on this part today, this scene reminded me of what Margaret Atwood said: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Adventures with Edith: The reverse-engineering and transcription of variants in the galley proofs for Book 2, Chapters 9-14 is done, and let’s just say that some pages were easier to work on than others.
I’m back to Book 1, Chapter 8 (there is no MS for Chapter 7), and here are two treats from it. First of all, you EW people know that Edith Wharton’s grammar and spelling are perfect–in English, anyway, and probably in French, Italian, and German as well. As I told my students working on transcribing the unpublished EW: if you think she’s made a mistake, look again. It’s not her; it’s you. But in all these tens of thousands of words, I have found one misspelling: buoyancy, which she spells “bouyancy.” Raise your hands if you would probably misspell this, too–anyone? anyone?
Second: Gus Trenor. Wharton leaves in all the descriptions of his heavy, sweaty, red-faced diving into his food & general grossness, but she deleted this gem in the final book. Lily’s standing there looking at the wedding-present jewels and thinking “why should Evie Van Osburgh marry Gryce & get all the good stuff?” when Gus lumbers up “as impervious to her annoyance as a pachyderm to the shrinking of a trodden grass-blade.” The book leaves off at “annoyance,” so we never got the image of Gus as an elephant stomping all over that trodden grass-blade Lily. Whether that’s because the image is comical, or too on-the-nose, or at odds with the imagery of Gus as a carnivore only God and Mrs. Wharton now know.
Today in Adventures with Edith: I thought I would work on the galley proofs of the Scribner’s Magazine version for a while to take a break from the second pass collation of the MS. Unless I wanted to retype all five chapters (spoiler alert: I didn’t), this involves reverse-engineering a transcription of the galley proofs from the Scribner’s Magazine version by going line by line until they’ve been reconstructed & then inserting EW’s corrections. So far, so good.
All was well until I scrolled ahead and realized that there are TWO sets of corrected galley proofs. Wharton made one set of changes, turned it in, and then made a whole other set that doesn’t have any of the first changes listed. My favorite remark today was this one, left by a patient compositor: “To author: Many of the corrections made on this set of proofs conflict with those on previous set–returned herewith.”
Thought I would do a test drive with the subscription-based ChatGPT4o and see if it could read Wharton’s handwriting. My favorite line: “They are her lovers not Satan worshipers.” Are you SURE about that, GPT4?
What is simultaneously one of the most beautiful chapters in any novel and also a hot mess? Chapter 6 of The House of Mirth, that’s what. It’s the chapter where Lily and Selden walk in the woods at Bellomont, and Edith Wharton was obviously determined to get it just right. But did she have to number pages things like 89A, which comes after 99 but before 98, which appears 8 pages later after 102? And how about all those random passages on the verso pages, sometimes just a word or two, that also need to be put into place? It’s a good thing I like jigsaw puzzles.
This is my second pass through the manuscript working on collating & recording variants, and it’s still taking me hours. Is it worth it? You bet.
Working on collating (spoiler!) Lily’s last hours today was so powerful. I’ve read HM many times, but reading it this way is entirely different. Every bodily sensation of her sinking into the drug-induced sleep is described at what seems an agonizing length, yet EW keeps making changes: is the sense of “warmth & pleasure” or–as she finally decides, “drowsy peace”?
But Wharton’s handwriting is her “fast” handwriting, when she’s clearly on a roll & making few changes. The last paragraph has almost no changes, especially to the last lines: “the recovered warmth flowed through her, she yielded to it, sank into it, & slept.”
I’ve been working (all day, every day) on the OUP edition of The House of Mirth for The Collected Works of Edith Wharton and have been writing short posts about it to Facebook & now here. Here’s the first one (below), but I’ve already expressed, um, some feelings about Lawrence Selden here:
Collating variants for The House of Mirth means going word by word, comma by comma, so I’m basically living this book inside my head. This struck me today: Lily Bart goes to two houses in the last few chapters.
Selden: “let me get you some tea & stand across the room, judging your cold, thin ‘curves.'”
Nettie Struther: “Are you cold, Miss Bart? Want some tea with milk? We love you here in my warm kitchen.”
I wanted to stab Selden in Chapter 12, and now I want to stab him more in Chapter 13.
Figure 1. Left to right, upper row: Garrison’s bibliography, 1936 OUP 2nd edition of HM, book census; bottom row, L to R: 1st/2d Macmillan printing, 1st/2d–or is it 1st/1st?–of HM.
Back in 2016 or so, when I first started collecting printings for a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, I learned to rely on the bibliography bible for her printings and editions: Stephen Garrison’s Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), which is a magnificent resource. My colleagues and I at the Complete Works of Edith Wharton (CWEWh) project rely on it and refer to it all the time. You can see a copy of it in the upper left of the photo.
First, a little about the process (if you want to know what the mystery is, skip this list):
In preparing for the edition, I knew I needed to gather as many printings and lifetime editions, including serial versions, as possible, so I made a “census” based on Garrison. That’s the first page of the census in the upper right of the photo; the highlighted items are ones that I have, either in print or photographic or .pdf form.
I also traveled to Wharton’s archives and looked first hand at the manuscripts and letters (at the Beinecke Library), partial galley proofs and letters from EW to her publishers (Princeton), and first edition/first printing that Garrison described (Lilly Library, Indiana University) as well as more diaries and letters; I also photographed EW’s own copy of the book at The Mount. I took photographs, consulted with librarians, and so on.
I collected as many printings as possible, using Garrison’s taxonomy. The ones you see above are from a second collation of some of the British printings of TheHouse of Mirth; there are others on the computer screen that you can’t see.
A.12.1.a (Scribner’s, 1905): copy-text (photos and print)
A.12.2.a (Macmillan, 1905): 1st edition, 1st printing from the British Library (photos)
A.12.4 (Oxford U P, 1936): 2d British edition (print)
There’s much more to it than this, and I could go on about this for days, since it’s of passionate interest to me–but, since it’s of less interest to others, I’m guessing, I’ll cut to the chase and summarize the mystery.
The Mystery
Figure 2. Would you like to cross Mrs. Wharton in the matter of typography or book style? Didn’t think so.
Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography lists a true first/first as being on laid paper with no ads on pp. 535-538, giving as the source the copy at the Lilly Library. A first edition, second printing is on laid paper with ads on pp. 535-538. The changing ads are a whole story in themselves, but what’s important here is that they exist.
Here’s the mystery: since 2016, I’ve searched for what that bibliography defined as a first edition/first printing of The House of Mirth, querying research librarians, booksellers, other scholars, and so on. I have never found one, not ever. The one at the Lilly cited in EW:ADB (confirmed by a librarian) is not on laid paper.
I’m starting to think that the first edition/first printing is the one with the ads.
Why?
The Evidence
First point of evidence: The illustrations. As you might expect, Edith Wharton was as famously exacting about the appearance, typography, illustrations, and the rest of the apparatus of book creation as she was about getting the details right in her prose. She wrote letters to her publishers (at this point, Charles Scribner’s Sons) about preferring British to American spelling, about the appearance of the book, about how many ellipses should be included–everything.
Figure 3. Show of hands: who thinks that A.B. Wenzell more or less “recycled” his illustrations for Van Tassel Sutphen’s The Fortune-Hunter (above) (1904) for #EdithWharton‘s The House of Mirth (1905)?
Wharton hated the illustrations for The House of Mirth. Hated them.Tore them out, in fact.
She hated the illustrations so much that we assume she tore them out of the two copies we know she had her hands on and crossed out Wenzell’s name:
The copy that she gave to her friend and sister-in-law, Mary (Minnie) Cadwalader Jones on October 14, 1905 (at the Beinecke Library)
2. The copy in her personal library at The Mount.
2. Second point of evidence: Both of these copies have laid paper and the ads on pp. 535-538. This would mark them as first edition, second printings according to Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography, yet these are Wharton’s own signed copies.
Questions:
The first printing ran to thousands of copies. Hermione Lee reports that “it sold 30,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication” (159), and Wharton reported on 11 November 1905 “20,000 more of H of M printing” (qtd. in Lee 206). Assuming generously that the first printing was 10,000 copies (if the 20,000 copies on November 11 were the second printing), how likely is it that the entire first printing of 10,000 copies would have vanished without being preserved in a library somewhere in the laid paper/no ads version, if queries to libraries, etc., have failed to turn up even one?
Did you notice the date on the first example? October 14, 1905, was the date of the first American book publication of The House of Mirth. How likely is it that Wharton herself would have been given a second printing on the first day of publication when there were first edition/first printings available?
Would Charles Scribner’s Sons have sent Edith Wharton a second printing on the first day of publication to give to her dear friend and sister-in-law?
How likely is it that Wharton would have kept for herself a second printing of her first bestseller?
How likely is it that everyone at Scribner’s would not have been subjected to a scathing letter if they’d sent her a second instead of a first printing?
You can guess by now what my solution to the mystery would be; I’d love to hear your thoughts, though.
As is well known, Edith Wharton put her tireless energies to work for her adopted country of France during World War I (1914-1918), founding and running charities, organizing her wealthy friends to support her efforts, and writing essays from the front that were published in Scribner’s Magazine and later collected as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belport [misprint for Belfort] (1915). For this service, she was later awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.
Wharton’s biographers (R. W. B. Lewis, Shari Benstock, Hermione Lee) have written about Wharton’s war efforts; for more specific information see Alan Price’s The End of the Age of Innocence, Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War, and Alice Kelly’s recent edition of Fighting France.
The Book of the Homeless was organized and edited by Wharton to raise money for the American Hostels for Refugees. For Veterans’ Day, here are a few pictures from that volume. It’s a veritable Who’s Who of artists (Bakst, Blanch, Monet, Renoir, Rodin, Sargent, etc.), musicians and performers (Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt), and writers (Cocteau, John Galsworthy, Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy, W. D. Howells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Roosevelt, and of course Wharton herself).
For the edition of The House of Mirth that I’m preparing for the Complete Works of Edith Wharton (OUP), I’ve been collating the Scribner’s Magazine version of with the first American edition, and that means that I’m going line by line, punctuation mark by punctuation mark, through the text. Although this isn’t close reading, the process gives you time to savor every word and react emotionally rather than in a literary critical sort of way.
Here’s one takeaway: most of the men in this book could, to paraphrase Mark Twain writing about Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, be taken out to the back yard and drowned without any of the women being the worse for it.
[Spoilers ahead if you haven’t read The House of Mirth and content warning for assault.]
Let’s see: there’s Gus Trenor, who essentially tries to rape her; George Dorset, whose self-absorption makes a black hole look navigable; and Selden, the putative hero of the book. What are his sins?
He is, as generations of scholars have realized, “seldom” there; like Winterbourne in James’s Daisy Miller, he likes to watch the spectacle of a pretty woman rather than take her seriously as a human being.
He mocks Lily’s initial hunt for a husband, undermining her quest for Percy Gryce (not that Gryce was her soul mate) while giving her no alternative in terms of emotional support or affection.
He is stirred by the vision of Lily at the tableau vivant, yet he’s willing to believe the worst of her as she escapes from Gus Trenor. In this, he’s not using any logic: why would Lily be Gus’s mistress when it would destroy her chances for a $$$ marriage? She’s not stupid, and yet he lets his conventional ideas and misperceptions read her escape as utterly damning.
All right, he shows up one time–one time–with an actual plan to help her out, first telling her to leave Bertha Dorset’s yacht and then escorting her to Jack Stepney’s to stay the night. Then–nothing. She’s on her own.
He tries to get her away from Mrs. Hatch, who employs her, without offering her anything in the way of actual monetary support. Sensing a theme here? He has a lot of ideas about how she can live a “republic of the spirit” life without any of the money that supports it. Thanks a lot, Lawrence.
Finally, when she visits him for the last time, he has no idea what she’s sacrificed for him. He’s focused on her fragility and physical translucence. He takes hold of her thin hand, tells her “you can never go out of my life,” which she correctly interprets as “see ya,” without any obligation on his part.
The next day he bounds up the steps to her rooming house like an eager puppy, now that he has “the word which made all clear,” but it’s too late. Question: since he had never bothered to visit her before, in all those months of trial, how does he even know where she lived? Gerty must have told him, and if she did, how damning is it that he knew what dire straits she was in and never bothered to send a note or a word?
Here is the big question:
Why didn’t Selden drop a dime on Bertha Dorset at one of the many opportunities he had when she was persecuting Lily?
Oh, sure, “gentleman’s code” and all that, but he had as much means of blackmail as Lily did–more, even. His reputation wouldn’t suffer.
As Bertha’s former lover, he could have called her and told her to lay off Lily. Or dropped a knowing reference in one of those withering triple-meaning and ironic statements that Wharton’s characters are so fond of using. Or even shot her a knowing glance when she’s ordering Lily off the yacht.
What does our boy Selden do?
Nothing.
On an intellectual level, I know that this is part of Wharton’s point, the tragic consequences of a rigid social order, and all that.
Sure, everyone justly hates Selden on one reading. But part of the brilliance of this book is that there are a thousand tiny points, like the “points of interrogation” about Lily’s character that Rosedale mentions, that allow you to hate Selden fully, madly, deeply.
Donna M. Campbell 