All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  It was wonderful to see her…Her explanations of the U.S. to the French ladies of her circle have long been a specialty of hers, and she and I performed admirably together, upsetting the Europeans’ preconceptions and astonishing them at every turn. I explained that the South had been an occupied country for ten years after the Civil War—thirteen, Esther corrected—and had never been reconciled to the Union…But the conversation may have been more enjoyable for us than it was for the people we were talking at, for they very soon withdrew.

  She also explained to him that the rue Gît-le-Coeur, which she called “‘the most beautiful street name in Paris,’ commemorated the grave, not of Louis XIV’s mistress, as had once been supposed, but merely of his favorite chef.” On another visit to Paris, Wilson contrasted the discreet “quietness and flatness and…conversational rhythm” he had fallen into recently in England with the markedly American way that Esther and he were “soon walking up and down the room and interrupting and shouting at one another.” Thinking back over her life, he was sensitive to how she had been shaped by “her gawky girlhood, her dubious social position as an Irish girl in New York,” and he wrote that he felt with her “the special characteristics of our race of the twenties: habit of leisure and at least enough money…freedom to travel and read, to indulge and exhaust curiosities, completely uninhibited talks, resistance to challenge of the right to play, to the idea of growing old, settling down to a steady maturity.” It was a clear statement of how they had differed from their parents’ generation. After one of these reunions in the 1950s, Esther was filled with affection for him, but amused by his new embrace of his own history: “I had always known that he was a Protestant—but he apparently had not and the discovery gives him the greatest pleasure. It is easy to see that he is descended from Cotton Mather and a long line of Protestant Divines.”

  Edmund Wilson, 1922, photographed by Nickolas Muray (General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, courtesy Estate of Edmund Wilson)

  In the 1920s, uninhibited talks about—or “at one another” about—literature and history superseded more intimate reflections. Esther wrote to Wilson about Hume, Nietzsche, Saint-Simon, and Metternich. She praised his admiring essay on H. L. Mencken, published in The New Republic, but argued that “the Philistines are flogged and the elect feasted by Mr. Mencken with no suspicion of the difficulty of distinguishing between them.” Her embrace of irony was tempered by an expansive humanism, and she found herself increasingly drawn to the “redeemers of mankind…and away from the pure cynics who, particularly in their 18th century incarnation, used to delight me.” The nineteenth-century philosopher Auguste Comte was one such figure, and she approached him with a biographer’s eye:

  Perhaps he interests me more as a man than as a philosopher. He was a strange being…and he ended up by proclaiming a new religion of which he was the pontiff and his dead mistress, Clothilde de Vaux the tutelary divinity. (It was at this stage that George Eliot withdrew her adherence!)…His life has that something at once pathetic and impressive that clings about the men who believed they had found the faith in which humanity stands in need.

  But at a time when American history and literature were not widely seen as worthy of serious critical thought, Esther also focused on America. In her generation of critics, Wilson and Gilbert Seldes, who also became a close friend, championed what they saw as genuinely American forms of expression, paying attention to popular culture as well as to literature. Esther’s instincts were of a piece with their work, with at least one difference: the feminism, although she did not use the word, that informed her thinking. Although she may not have finished the “Victorian” essay, she began writing occasionally for the New York Tribune, including shrewd reviews of Jane Austen’s posthumously published juvenilia and of her final, uncompleted novel, The Watsons. Austen’s dissections of character and social circumstance, like Wharton’s, were a touchstone for Esther, who reread her novels all her life. She called Austen “among the greatest writers of the world” and “probably the keenest satirist and the most relentless opponent of the romantic school in all English literature.” She also noted the “extraordinary frankness” with which Austen treated the marriage market. Her “recognition of the fact that matrimony was the only profession that a well-bred woman could enter,” Esther wrote, “was always complete. And she was quite aware that it frequently presented itself in the shape of a painful necessity rather than as a matter of choice.”

  With an article Wilson was writing on Nathaniel Hawthorne in mind, she sent him an unpublished excerpt from Hawthorne’s journal and her exegesis of it. Both concern Hawthorne’s “obsession” with Margaret Fuller. Writing about Fuller, Esther was describing a frenetically scholarly American woman of letters and politics—another progenitor. Writing about Hawthorne, she was criticizing misreadings of such women’s lives.

  Hawthorne’s animosity toward M. Fuller is most interesting to me. She appears to have disturbed him almost more than anyone he ever met. I’ve always thought it was due, not to any personal antagonism, for Margaret always appears to have tried to conciliate him; as to the fact that Margaret Fuller symbolized to Hawthorne, all the things he was afraid of and yet had obscure leanings to. I think Hawthorne had that malady, so characteristic of all the luminaries of the New England movement:—he was dreadfully afraid of life. Margaret Fuller was not, in fact she had a hunger and a capacity for living, unexampled in a woman of her day and her position. Hawthorne’s morbid fear of coming to grips with existence, and his hatred of the woman who had done so, are clearly displayed in the passages concerning Margaret’s marriage being the result of Margaret’s reprehensible desire “to try all things and fill up her knowledge in all directions.” I think, (though it may seem a very obviously Freudian attempt at analysis,) that Hawthorne’s fanatical preoccupation with ethical problems, his insistence on the ultimate judgment being a moral one, was due to the fact that all his life he was torn between his theories of conduct and his smothered but not extinct desires for things very incompatible with those theories. The bitter outcry against “Raphael’s sensuality” which his son reports he gave vent to, when he was in Italy, (he was so unpleasantly affected by Raphael’s treatment of the female anatomy that it almost overshadowed his trip) is on a par with his distrust of Margaret Fuller and her way of life. Both she and Raphael’s women, were in different ways, a challenge to the part of his own nature, that he was always on guard against. The man was an artist and had a sense of beauty—when all is said and done, and in another age and milieu from 19th century New England might have been other than he was…I know this thing is not quite what you want for your “New Englander Abroad” theme. But it did seem to me to have a bearing on it and to be (at least so it struck me) a most astonishing document. The business about Margaret not leaving any “deep witness of her integrity and purity” is very precious. The judgment of her generation on her in short, was that she was not a nice woman or she would not have been quite as she was. I’ve always thought that Margaret’s shrinking from facing that verdict with all its implications, was perhaps what made her so reluctant to desert a sinking ship in favour of her native land. The general, vague condemnation about her not being “a nice woman” is so curiously like the comments I hear all the time on Edith Wharton, from the women who were her contemporaries.

  A childhood prodigy and a whirlwind of intellect whose so-called peculiar appearance and manner were remarked on as much as her learning; a writer, translator, journalist, editor, and feminist; a friend and colleague of Emerson and other “luminaries of the New England movement” in the 1830s and ’40s; and a woman whose writings, her friends said, never measured up to her talk—Fuller was a woman Esther could appraise herself against and perhaps model herself on. Fuller’s “Conversations,” the structured, semi-public lecture-discussions she conducted in Boston to give women a place to debate the issues of the day, were a version of the sort of public discourse that Esther favor
ed. When Fuller moved from the claustrophobia of Boston to New York, she went to work for Horace Greeley on the New York Tribune, becoming the first full-time book reviewer in American journalism. (Esther began reviewing for the Tribune in September 1922, the same month she wrote this letter to Wilson.) Fuller then reported for the Tribune in England and Italy, supported Giuseppe Mazzini’s work for Italian unification, and had a child with an ally of his. She died on her return to New York when her ship ran aground and sank off Long Island.

  Esther argued that both Fuller and Wharton encountered resistance that had nothing and everything to do with their work. “The comments I hear all the time on Edith Wharton” had been and were a burden for these women, as they were for an aspiring writer like Esther. With her half-joking suggestion that Fuller stayed on a sinking ship because American moralizing about women’s sexuality was so difficult and endless, Esther turned Fuller’s drowning from an accident into a judgment on such judgments. Which is to say that, reading Hawthorne’s journal, Esther posited the past not as a difference to be repudiated but as a moment—at once distant and almost within living memory—that resonated in the present. And she saw failure as an attribute not of Fuller’s and Wharton’s persons or writing but of their critics.

  Something like this view of American literature and sexual politics existed in the United States in the early 1920s, but it is now hardly remembered. Dorothy Parker, a friend of Esther’s, is probably the only critic of her generation whose work is generally known, or at least known of, today. But she is seen more as a poet and fiction writer than a critic, and more as a wit than a writer. Katherine Anne Porter, reviewing regularly for the Herald Tribune and The New Republic in the 1920s, often focused on women’s rights, but this interesting work is now virtually unread. Still, most critics of Esther’s time—whether writing about aesthetics or politics, whether modernist, feminist, or both—proposed radical breaks with the past, while Esther posited affinities across half a century for Fuller and the woman she called “the Great and Only Mrs. Wharton.”

  That her view of these two writers was connected to her thinking about biography is clear from another letter to Wilson, also from 1922. To mark their shared appreciation of Wharton, Esther sent him a first edition of Wharton’s 1901 short story “The Angel at the Grave.” “I’m going to let ‘The Angel at the Grave’ speak for me,” she wrote. This was all she wrote. But the story speaks for her. She speaks through it. Sending it to Wilson was a kind of massive act of citation.

  “The Angel at the Grave” is a meditation on portraiture, reputation, and the gender of intellectual life in mid-nineteenth-century America. Wharton’s protagonist grows up in the shadow of her philosopher grandfather’s fame to become the keeper of his flame—“the custodian of th[e] historic dwelling” outside of Boston that was Orestes Anson’s home—and his biographer. Toiling away on this book for years, Paulina gains “prominence as the chief ‘authority’ on the great man.” She also, Wharton says, becomes her own biographer: “All her youth, all her dreams, all her renunciations lay in that neat bundle [her manuscript] on her knee. It was not so much her grandfather’s life as her own that she had written.” But the great work on the great man, when Paulina finally completes it, is no longer of interest—the man himself is no longer of interest—and her publisher rejects the book. Anson’s own metaphysics and her biography, Wharton writes, were nothing but disuse, decay, death: “It was the sense of wasted labor that oppressed her…There was a dreary parallel between her grandfather’s fruitless toil and her own unprofitable sacrifice. Each in turn had kept vigil by a corpse.”

  After the initial shock of rejection, Paulina tries to understand how she could have missed the signs of his diminishing reputation. “She passed from the heights on which he had been grouped with the sages of his day to the lower level where he had come to be ‘the friend of Emerson,’ ‘the correspondent of Hawthorne,’ or (later still) ‘the Dr. Anson’ mentioned in their letters.” Years go by. Then one day she is surprised by a visitor who is convinced of her grandfather’s importance, an idea she has long since abandoned. The young man is interested in Orestes Anson not as a philosopher, however, but as a pioneering researcher in the natural sciences. Evolutionary biology has had nothing to do with Paulina’s idea of her ancestor, but the story ends on a hopeful note as she unearths a document that supports her visitor’s theory. She agrees to help him with his work, and is herself restored in some way. When he leaves, she “looked as though youth had touched her on the lips.”

  Edith Wharton in Esther’s photo album, later labeled by Chester Arthur (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

  With Fuller, Esther had disentangled the writer from Hawthorne’s and Emerson’s views of her. With “The Angel at the Grave,” she was giving Wilson an Edith Wharton whose stories about literary production, identification, and inheritance were equal to any of Henry James’s work on these themes. As the title, with its play on “the angel in the house”—the nineteenth-century ideal of domestic womanhood—suggests, this is a story about women’s intellectual work that both echoes and critiques that ideal of self-abnegating service, whether to the needs of a husband and family or to a laudatory text about a significant male progenitor. Writing about the bitterness of literary guardianship and the elusiveness of reputation, Wharton is of course thinking about different approaches to writing a life—and perhaps about the terror of living one’s own. Paulina’s aunts, Orestes Anson’s daughters, are the archivists of his daily life and his fans. When pilgrims arrived at the “historic dwelling,” these women pointed to his desk and dispensed facts about “what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off his boots in the hall.” But if Wharton is scathing about their devotion—“as pious scavengers of his wastepaper basket, the Misses Anson were unexcelled”—she is also skeptical about Anson’s achievement and its commemoration. Paulina’s years of dedication are a folly in which the “rock of her grandfather’s celebrity” turns out to be something less than durable. “‘It ruined my life!’” Paulina tells the young writer; “‘I gave up everything,’ she went on wildly, ‘to keep him alive.’” Her encounter with this researcher is apparently a happy outcome, a turn of the screw in which the valuable, become worthless, regains value—albeit for reasons other than those that first established its importance.

  Although it is not the case that Esther “gave up everything” for any of her biographical subjects, the ways that she was exceptional had everything to do with a similar readerly devotion. And her life and work, like Wharton’s story and the genre of biography itself, continually beg the question of reputation. Djuna Barnes’s barb notwithstanding, it was not “great Women in History” who caught Esther’s imagination but women whose reputations were not at all secure. Or perhaps it makes more sense to say that in Esther’s lifetime a biography of a “great woman” who was not a religious figure was necessarily a book about a woman whose reputation was not secure. Esther’s first subject, Lady Blessington, rose from an impoverished Irish girlhood to a series of dubious liaisons with powerful Englishmen, socially advantageous marriage, and friendship with Lord Byron. She spent much of her life in a threesome with her husband and another man; weathered scandal and was shunned by society, but patronized by writers; wrote a book about Byron; and was the hostess of the most intellectual literary salon of mid-Victorian England. Although Esther referred to her in a 1922 letter to Wilson as “a dull enough person, I think. Really, a thoroughgoing mediocrity, save for her extraordinary personal beauty,” she must have become intrigued, because in April 1928 the publisher Payson and Clarke announced “‘The Life of Lady Blessington,’ by Esther Murphy” as “scheduled for future publication.” Reading and writing about Madame de Pompadour and then about Madame de Maintenon, as Esther did for the second half of her life, she was focused on women whose status at the French court was uncertain, who were maligned by contemporaries and historians, and for whom judgments about their sexual conduct had long been part of even the scho
larly work on their lives.

  In “The Angel at the Grave,” failure is overdetermined. There is Orestes Anson’s early failure and the failure of perception about that work (“the specialists of the day jeered at him”). Paulina’s biographical failure is steeped in a “sense of wasted labor” and “fruitless toil.” Her inability to reconcile the two parts of Anson’s career (“after a hurried perusal she had averted her thoughts from the [scientific] episode as from a revelation of failure”), Wharton suggests, was one reason her biography failed. Her guardianship was a success, however, because she kept the evidence of that episode from the flames. Her aunts had “said it was of no use,” she tells the young man, “—that he’d always meant to destroy the whole edition and that I ought to respect his wishes. But…I wanted him to feel that I was always here, ready to listen, even when others hadn’t thought it worth while.” In this romantic view of biography, keeping vigil by a corpse is hardly “of no use.” “Don’t you see that it’s your love that has kept him alive?” says the researcher.

  Wharton is also thinking about the temporality of failure in this story—about what it means to make the right judgment at the wrong time, about the chasms in our ability to understand the present. She is thinking about discontinuity and anachronism, about misapprehension and missed opportunities, about occupying the wrong time in history, and about the possibility of rectifying the mistakes of the past—about how history itself fails and might yet be retrieved and revised. Everything that precedes the story’s happy ending suggests that the final rescue, too, is provisional; that while Paulina may be restored in some way, assessments of Anson’s work could change again; that there is no triumph over failure.