Works in Progress
the daughter of the woman who married all of Edith's friends
All of Edith Wharton’s friends?
Okay, three of them: Bayard Cutting, Geoffrey Scott, and Percy Lubbock. But also at least one documented affair with a fourth friend, Bernard Berenson. And when you think of Undine Spragg as an extreme example of the repeat bride in Custom of the Country, and then generalize as I like to do, three husbands and at least one lover seems like a lot from one friend group. In my experience, once a person has exited a relationship, the person then strikes afar, in different fields, on different apps. But not Sybil Cutting. She found her barrel of fish and stuck to it — or at least that was Wharton’s perspective.
My real focus here isn’t Sybil Cutting; it’s her daughter Iris, who became the writer Iris Origo. But I found both of them through my Wharton research, so what I’m going to do is draw a highly technical diagram, make sense of the gossip, and then get to Iris Origo resisting fascists1 and Nazis on an enormous farm in Italy during the second World War.
Because I don’t know about you, but I am always looking for examples of people who know how to live through difficult times2. A woman with no country who birthed children while saving people from fascists and Nazis seems like a good one.
My Highly Technical Diagram
Bayard Cutting was descended from the sort of Americans who owned Bunker Hill before it was called Bunker Hill3; for non-Americans, that’s a fort in New York City where a major battle of the Revolutionary War was fought by the colonists against the British. In other words, Cutting was of the same American “aristocracy” as Wharton, which she noted “does not often produce eagles.” By Wharton’s standards, as well as Harvard’s, Bayard Cutting was an eagle. A brilliant scholar with great ambitions, his final position was working as a diplomat trying to help Italians after an earthquake, despite the fact that he was so wealthy he did not need to work and suffered from the ticking time-bomb of tuberculosis. Bayard and Sybil Cutting moved their daughter Iris around the world with them in search of a climate that would extend his life; Bayard died in Egypt when Iris was 7 years old. He was 31.
Geoffrey Scott was an odd choice for a second husband. For a hot minute, he was Edith Wharton’s assistant, but he otherwise works his way into this diagram because Mary Berenson had initially secured him as a chaperone for her daughters,4 along with Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes. (YES, that Maynard Keynes, the economist who would work out Britain’s bills in WWI, write the book about how Germany would start another war because of the Treaty of Versailles, then lost his job and got it back when it happened.5) Mary Berenson fell for the young architect herself; she hired him and another guy whose name I always forget to work on I Tatti, her home in Florence with Bernard Berenson (B.B.), which took so long to complete that their neighbor, Lady Sybil, moved from an affair with B.B. to an affair (and marriage) with Scott.
Wharton wrote to B.B. that she “shrank to an inarticulate squeak” and “practicised liking” the news of Sybil and Scott “for 24 hours” but “the results aren’t promising.” This is the kind of viciousness I need in my life.
Iris later wrote that her own “instinct told me the choice was not wise.” Iris was often the only adult present in her mother’s life, such as when, on a short vacation, Sybil and Scott went out for a walk, the weather changed, and a search party had to be sent out for them. Scott, oddly enough, had an affair with Vita Sackville-West during his marriage to Lady Sybil; it was Sackville-West’s one (documented) affair with a man.
I also should probably explain who Bernard Berenson is, but he deserves a full post of his own. For now, please accept a brief description of him as a leading art critic of his time who singlehandedly assembled Isabella Stewart-Gardner’s art collection. And yes, he was sleeping with Lady Sybil and yes, both Wharton and his wife knew about it. But that is another post!
Percy Lubbock: Wharton had been able to joke about Scott and Sybil’s marriage, but here’s how she processed the news of Sybil’s third marriage:
Percy’s book is indeed a strange product in the light of his private affairs.6 I was told yesterday (via London): “Oh, yes, Lady S. is divorcing Scott to marry Percy Lubbock.” It all makes me rather sick—for him.
This is the 3d of my friends she has annexed, & I see you & Robert going next, & then B.B., & finally even Walter—kicking & screaming!!! Isn’t it queer? When you think of the unintelligible “glapissements,” & all the elderly archery—Apparently, with Percy, the fainting did it. He is still much impressed, early Victorianism probably never having come his way before.
The fainting is explained in a footnote to the letter, which Wharton had written to Gaillard Lapsley, a friend with an impossible first name: “From Lady Sybil, EW had heard several times of the occasion when Percy Lubbock had fished his burning cigarette from the back of her {Sybil’s} dress, whereupon she had fainted into his arms.”
First of all, is the woman not viciously funny? I plan to start using the phrase elderly archery in my everyday speech. Do I need further justification for multiple exclamation points in any/all of my personal correspondence? And lastly: if someone dropped their burning cigarette down my dress (front or back) and then fished it out, I would not faint into their arms. I would exact violence upon them. Which is also what I’d do if the fainter told me the story multiple times.
The book of Lubbock’s that Wharton mentions was basically written in either imitation or flattery of Henry James and succeeded at neither. Marrying Lady Sybil was something Wharton never forgave Lubbock for doing, and he never forgave her for not forgiving him — he wrote the equivalent of a take-down biography of Wharton after she died.7
Lady Sybil
Lady Sybil was the sort of woman who made for good stories and a terrible childhood; she was the sort of mother one can only survive through writing. I suspect that Edith Wharton liked the daughter as much as she detested the mother because she had survived a terrible mother herself. When Edith Wharton’s mother died, Edith sent Teddy Wharton to the funeral, what I like to think of as A Decision with Subtext.
Virginia Woolf also liked Iris Origo, describing her as “tremulous, nervous - very - stammers a little…but honest eyed…She’s clean and picks her feet up.” Woolf never had the opportunity to make a Decision with Subtext because her mother died when she was on the verge of adolescence, but their lack of a relationship has been the fodder for various books and essays. Almost the opposite of Lady Sybil, Julia Stephen spent all of her time caring for sick people outside of her home, and very rarely spent time with Virginia before dying of illness herself.
What I’d like to read — what I’d like to write — is a book about women who became writers despite their mothers, a sort of mash-up of Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives and Colm Tóibín’s two books on men who write and their parents. Perhaps that is what Works In Progress really is: essays on daughters who finally got the last word. And so back to the project at hand!
Sybil Cutting was a piece of work: no dispute there. “Sybil’s always ill when she can’t get what she wants,” said Sybil’s mother — imagine having a mother whose most cutting criticism of you is repeated in your daughter’s biography! Yet the cut slices through the generations: a “more unmotherly figure is hard to imagine,” Origo’s granddaughter wrote in the afterword to Iris’s war diary, A Chill in the Air8.
Iris herself tried to do her mother credit:
It was perhaps in a Venetian gondola…that she found the mode of progression most suited to her…lying back on the black cushions, with a parasol over her head and a guide-book in her hand.
“Tell him not to miss San Zenobio,” she would say to me, “there’s a small Bellini Madonna over the third altar on the right, and an unfinished Tiepolo sketch in the sacristy.”
The information was always accurate; the picture, church or palazzo always worth seeing. Then, as the evening approached, she would tell [me to tell] the gondoliers to row us out across the lagoon, sometimes as far as the island where Byron used to visit the Armenian monks…There, tied up against a pylon, we would eat our evening meal, with the water lapping against the boat and the last breath of wind dying away with the sunset; then we would slowly row back under the stars…
It was at such times that I knew—the anxieties and embarrassments of the day forgotten—that I was lucky to be with her.9
The “anxieties and embarrassments” were not forgotten, obviously. Sybil was constantly making her daughter do her bidding: ten-year-old Iris having to scold someone about smoking a cigar two train cars down when Sybil had a headache. Twelve-year-old Iris knocking on strangers’ doors so her mother could look at the architecture and decor inside. Sybil kept her daughter isolated and at her command in a villa outside Florence, not at school and rarely with people her own age of her own choosing. She was “lucky” to be in a gondola in Venice; “lucky” to be in a villa. But also not.
Towards the end of his life, Bayard had asked Sybil to burn his letters, which she did—except for one letter with his wishes for raising Iris. Bayard Cutting knew his family didn’t like Sybil10, but he thought that was because she was Anglo-Irish; for this reason, he wanted their daughter to be raised without a nationality. He never seemed to consider that people did not like Sybil because of her personality.
He did consider money, and left Sybil plenty of it, allowing for the possibility of both mother and daughter living independently. By the time Iris was ready to leave the Florentine nest where she had been kept isolated to do her mother’s bidding, Sybil was single and in no mood to give up someone who did her bidding. She forced Iris to debut three times in three different countries rather than allow her daughter to study at Oxford — and then refused Iris’s wedding for six months on the grounds that her daughter’s fiancé was too good looking and Sybil’s health could not handle a wedding. Sybil’s health was not going to handle her daughter’s wedding, ever, advised a doctor—so no point waiting.11
What is that quote about tragedy is life up close and comedy is life from a distance? From a distance, having a mother like Lady Sybil seems like having a mother like Edina Monsoon from Absolutely Fabulous: hilarious and fashionable, all SWEETIE DARLING SWEETIE DARLING. But up close, she’s a self-absorbed hypochondriac who will ruin your life until you can get away from her.
The hypochondria came in handy for Iris just once. When the Italians joined the Germans in WWII and declared war on the English, Iris was able to obtain emergency visas to Switzerland for her “invalid” mother and Lubbock.
Iris Origo
Either because of or in spite of her childhood, Iris was the best sort of dork. She was sensitive and responsible and wanted to learn everything she could. Second Husband Scott told Sybil that Iris would maybe be attractive by the time she was 30, which Iris overheard. He must have known she would.
At the age of 12, however, a piece of great good fortune befell me. BB, to whom I shall always be grateful, advised my mother to let me receive a classical education and even supplied her with the name of a brilliant tutor with whom I worked for the next three years, Professor Solone Monti. It was with him that I spent the happiest hours of my childhood—perhaps the happiest I have ever known.
Living next door to one of the greatest living art scholars was also an education in and of itself: “to be with him was to realise, once for all, what was meant by the art of looking.” Iris never forgot a lesson.
In 1939, as she sat on a train in Rome, Iris Origo noticed the squadristi “going home to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the foundation of the Fasci and to hear the Duce’s speech.”12 The “six in our carriage are all middle-aged men — stoutish, with their black shirts bulging at the waist; their boots, too, have an air of being too tight for them.” It’s sort of amusing, at first, to read about these middle-aged Italian businessmen in their too-tight black shirts, trying to recover their youth and celebrating il Duce.
But you can’t help feeling disconcerted as Mussolini’s speeches start blaming England for the war Germany started. “Meanwhile the accounts of events in the Far East and in Palestine and, above all, of the negotiations with Russia, continue to present English foreign policy as tortuous, hypocritical and totally ineffective.” Origo was half Anglo-Irish, half American—and living in what was beginning to look like enemy territory. Her entries note her alarm at “the growing tendency (on both sides) to deny any sincerity or good faith to their opponents. If there is a naïveté in too blind a faith in the essential decency of human nature, there is also a naïveté in denying any idealistic motives to one’s opponents.”
That sentiment, in hindsight, might seem naïve, but Origo was not only divided among three nations, she also had reliable sources from each. Her godfather was William Phillips, the American ambassador often interacting directly with Mussolini. It is the ambassador who tells Iris that “the only way the US ever is swung [is] on a wave of emotion.” Roosevelt had tasked Phillips with presenting an unofficial plan to Mussolini “for the settlement of the Jews. It was that if England were to give…the greater part of Kenya for the formation of an independent Jewish state, Italy would also cede the portion of Southern Abyssinia adjoining with Kenya.”
The world map is being cut into hypothetical pieces as well as real ones right before Origo’s eyes. Those around her, people who have been “taught not to think,” convince themselves that their leader will not make them fight a war for the country that was their enemy 25 years before. Some of those middle-aged men in their tight black shirts still suffer from injuries inflicted by the Germans in 1915.
The moment out of Iris’s 1939-1940 diary that strikes me most is when she drops a newspaper on the train when traveling alone:
…an officer came into the carriage…[and] bent down to pick it up, and saw its title: L’Osservatore Romano. (This is the Vatican paper, whose subscriptions have gone up to four times their original number in the last few weeks, owing to the fact that it is the only paper that prints full and impartial foreign news, although with a strong Catholic bias.) As he gave it back to me he said…“I’ll give it back, although I’m an enemy of this paper.”
He then asks her why she reads it, and when she demurs, “Out of curiosity…like other papers,” he is displeased and insists that “it contains poison” and “such influences are dangerous — very dangerous, signora.”13
A fellow passenger mildly intervenes, and after the officer leaves, Origo reveals that she had a far more dangerous paper at the bottom of the pile — the Daily Telegraph. It occurs to both Origo and the other passenger that either could be a spy. “And so, with alternate glances of mutual suspicion and sympathy, but still in silence, we finished our journey.”
But also
It is this sort of spine that Iris Origo exhibits on the day Mussolini announces that he will make a radio announcement. Everyone suspects that he is going to announce war, but they have to wait for him to do it. Iris is on the farm she bought with her husband, waiting with the farmers and their families to hear that the men will be drafted and sent to fight with the Germans, for the Germans, the Germans who tried to kill them all 25 years before. And here is what Iris has to say: “I join the teachers; we discuss how many evacuated children we could put up in the school.” She notes that she smells some flowers, thinks of England, and is bored.
Later, after an air raid drops propaganda on Rome, she has applied for twenty evacuated children, and goes to stay at the embassy in Rome to deliver her second baby. Iris is 38 years old. Her first child died at the age of 7 because of meningitis and this second pregnancy is neither easy nor convenient. She spends some of the hours before her delivery in a bomb shelter, waiting out an air raid, but her writing does not focus on her own discomfort or anxiety.
The details are not about her, but about what she sees and hears around her, about what she can do. And then she does it.
Everything she did
Origo began by taking in evacuated children; she then worked for the Italian Red Cross, often translating for captured Allied soldiers; later, she returned to the farm. There are written accounts from escaped American soldiers of Iris Origo, quietly appearing in the woods where they were hiding, bringing them food and clothing. Sometimes her husband is in the front of the house stalling German soldiers in German (one of four languages he spoke fluently), while Iris is helping refugees in the back. By 1943, biographer Moorehead notes that there were
about a thousand partisans, former soldiers and Allied prisoners-of-war in the area [of Iris’s farm]…and the refugees kept coming…like one destitute grandmother with four small grandchildren, who had struggled all the way up from Chianciano on foot…
The Origos did this even “after the German announcement that anyone found sheltering a prisoner-of-war would be shot.”
Eventually, the war comes to the farm itself. Iris, her two little daughters, and the other women and children are all forced to hide in the cellar of the Origo’s own house for ten days while German soldiers trash the place. And then all of them — men, women, children, farmers, escaped Allies, Iris carrying a baby she had rescued — are ordered to hike up Montepulciano by the soldiers. As they near the mountain, other Italians come running to help them.
Iris Origo wrote and published her war diaries, and then she returned to writing about the lives of others. She researched fourteenth-century Tuscany for The Merchant of Prato; she convinced the descendants of Byron’s last mistress to let her read their love letters for The Last Attachment. Which, I have to say, is proving to be a very entertaining read. After all, the author had herself retraced Byron’s watery pathways through the Venetian nights. And like Byron, she lived as a native English-speaker in a civilization whose history and fate she was willing to risk her life to protect.
Fact: Mussolini’s fascist government had subsidized the renovation of the old farming estate before the war. Also fact: once shit hit the fan, the Origos hid babies, kids, old people, escaped Allied prisoners of war, and resistance fighters, totaling well over a thousand.
In case this is not abundantly clear, I believe we are IN DIFFICULT TIMES NOW. There are fascists and Nazis NOW. We all have personal problems NOW. Allow me to cheer you up with the bad decisions of dead people and the better decisions of their dead offspring. Chin up! Big hug!
It was called Bayard’s Hill.
One of these daughters later marries Adrian Stephen, aka Virginia Woolf’s only surviving brother. See the Bloomsbury region of the Highly Technical Diagram.
I am an affiliate of bookshop.org, which means if you buy the books I recommend, I will collect a percentage. (This has yet to happen so I do not know how much.)
The Letters of Edith Wharton, from which this quote comes, includes this footnote about Lubbock’s book: “The Region Cloud, Lubbock’s only full-length work of fiction…describes the relationship, delicately homoerotic and eventually disillusioned, between an aspiring young writer and a prodigiously successful painter, a much older man.” (p.487)
Moorehead argues that he was MUCH KINDER to EW than she was to him, but I think Moorehead is an apologist for all the wrong people. Like Sybil.
Katia Lysy. But also, my secondhand copy of Moorehead’s biography has a post-it with the phone number for one of Iris Origo’s daughters!!! Do I dare call?
From Images & Shadows; Part of a Life, which is on the afore-mentioned bookshop link.
They also objected to Iris’s name, on the grounds that “Iris Cutting” sounded botanical.
Somerset Maugham, a writer I began reading because an old grump yelled at me when I was a bookstore clerk in 1997, once “published a cruel and barely disguised portrait of the ailing and manipulative Sybil in a short story called ‘Louise.’ Louise, frail and delicate, with a supposedly weak heart, was married twice…When her daughter—Maugham quite blatantly named her Iris — wished to marry, Louise went to devious lengths to get the marriage postponed — and then died on her daughter’s wedding day.” (Morehead, 82)
A Chill in the Air. See bookshop link.
You gotta love when a man tells you what’s dangerous and what’s not. Once, in the same tone you might use to warn someone about a hot plate, my uncle told me that Mick Jagger is dangerous. As if I was going to run into Mick Jagger and burn my fingers. Though his most recent child-producing union was with a woman my age, I remain safe from il Jagger — at present.