Works in Progress

the guy buried next to Edith Wharton

“O Crux Ave Spes Unica / Edith Wharton / Nee Edith Newbold Jones / 24 Janvier 1862 — 11 Aout 1937.” Image from Wikimedia Commons, before The Edith Wharton Society paid to clean up the grave.

Why am I even interested in the guy buried next to Edith Wharton?

My first friend was an elderly woman at The Manor¹ where my great-grandmother was dying. Technically speaking we are all dying all the time, just at different rates—I’m sure you’ve read the piece about how we all slam into decrepitude at ages 44 and 64 (and scientists were too depressed to bother checking about a third whammy after that)—but have you read about the other study that posits we don’t age in two big chonks, but organ by organ?² I’m a huge fan of the organ-by-organ hypothesis. How’s that for a bit of cheer at the start of 2025?!

Anyway, back to my first friend: I remember round tables, unreachable windows, the sound of a radio somewhere higher up (I was a toddler, so everything was pretty high up), and my friend’s smile — not her face, but her smile. And then one day she was no longer there in the room with the windows and tables, because she was dead. Someone pulled me along down a hallway where I found myself at the end of a hospital bed. Lying in it was my still-living great-grandmother. I stood eye-level with her swollen ankles, liver-spotted beneath her pantyhose.

Why wear pantyhose in a hospital bed? To borrow a phrase from A Serious Man, I can’t accept the mystery.³

So, the idea of the end has been with me since my beginning, and though I’m not a particularly morbid person, I do have a preoccupation with our perception of the passage of time. When I was growing up in the ‘90s, the ‘70s were the height of cool and the ‘60s seemed to be equivalent with prehistory. But now the ‘90s are 30 years ago, as well as eerily present in the clothes my students wear. My college years in the aughts are 20 years in the rearview, and I no longer drive. (Not because of decrepitude, but because I don’t like driving and my US driver’s license isn’t valid here; I waited too long.)

Another way of considering the passage of time is to look at the writers I love and try to reconcile the phases of their lives with my own. I was born 120 years after Edith Wharton, who had a different relationship to death in that the only death she brushed as a child was her own. Roaming across Europe during the Civil War, the Jones family paused in the Black Forest / der Schwarzwald in Germany, a region I have not yet explored,⁴ but which I picture as heavily forested and (per the name) dark. It seems like a frightening setting to catch typhoid and nearly die, as Edith Jones did.

Typhoid fever was not easily survived before antibiotics. By Wharton’s own account, her fight against typhoid fever was the only time her mother took care of her in a way that you might call maternal⁵. Mrs. Jones’s behavior towards her daughter was otherwise marked by embarrassment. Edith Jones was born to parents who, by the standards of the time, were almost old enough to be her grandparents.

My hunch is that the embarrassment had less to do with the age of the parents than the identity of the parents. Hermione Lee mentions in her biography of Wharton that there were two rumors about the paternity of Edith Jones: one was that her father was actually her older brothers’ tutor, who conveniently dashed off (to go fight in a war, I think?). The other rumor was that Mrs. Jones had an affair with a red-headed Scottish genius, actually a bit older than Mr. Jones, while they were at some fancy resort in Europe. Hence Edith’s red hair and her genius. Hence her mother’s distance and disapproval.

In other words, just because your parents manage to keep you alive doesn’t mean they love you. (Cue my favorite Philip Larkin poem!) Decades later, Wharton did not attend her mother’s funeral: they clearly had a complicated relationship. But Wharton also had a complicated relationship with herself and the concept of love, both in her writing and in her life. How could she not?

And this is why I’m obsessed with the question of the guy buried next to Edith Wharton: because Edith Wharton tended him as he lay dying, bought his burial plot, burned almost all their letters to each other, buried him, and then wrote in her memoir that he was buried in the plot next to hers (she’d purchased her plot in advance, of course) because he was the love of her life. I’m also obsessed with this situation because his name was Walter. I have a hard time believing anybody named Walter can be that dramatic a figure in one woman’s dramatic life. My apologies to anyone named Walter or loving a Walter, but I believe you must have a calm, steady love that needs no announcement in a memoir. Congratulations; enjoy it.

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Walter Who?

An American lawyer and diplomat at the turn of the twentieth century, Walter Berry might have disappeared from the face of history altogether if not for his relationship with Edith Wharton⁶. Their friends and acquaintances assumed they were sleeping together; various biographers have refused to take a stance on the question, which is as perplexing to me as whether it’s possible to be romantic with a guy who looks like this:

Source: The Mount.

What Wharton wrote about Berry in A Backward Glance, about 6 years after the poem cited above, does not do much to dispel the mystery: 

I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul. Such a friend I found in Walter Berry, and though the chances of life then separated us...yet whenever we did meet the same deep understanding drew us together. That understanding lasted as long as my friend lived; and no words can say, because such things are unsayable, how the influence of his thought, his character, his deepest personality, were interwoven with mine. 

This description is far more adoring – and verbose – than the one Wharton gives of her husband, Teddy, who was “thirteen years older than myself, but the difference in age was lessened by his natural youthfulness, his good humour and gaiety, and the fact that he shared my love of animals and out-door life, and was soon to catch my travel-fever” (90). She might have described a personal secretary in much the same way. What was “unsayable” in 1934 was what actually happened between Walter Berry and Edith Wharton, but what Wharton says instead is far more confusing.

In an interview with The Paris Review in 2008, Kazuo Ishiguro claims that “You should never believe an author if he tells you why he has certain recurring themes.” In her memoir A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton does not bother to blink at her recurring themes. She hardly addresses what she wrote at all. What she does instead is lie about why she became a writer and how. And yes: Walter is involved.

Take this hazy space where she both lies and tells the truth, all in a single sentence: “I had as yet no real personality of my own, and was not to acquire one till my first volume of short stories was published – and that was not until 1899” (112). In other words, by her own reckoning, Edith Wharton did not “acquire” a personality until the age of 37. In the margin, I scrawled LIAR.

You have to have a personality to tell a story, whether out loud or on a page, and Wharton had been telling stories long before she could even read – a fact she shares in the same memoir. As a child, she would stand with a finger pointing to a line in a book, with which she would “make up” a story of her own. Her parents tried writing down some of these stories, which apparently did not work because Edith told them so quickly (there are no extant copies). Naturally this hobby did not win Edith any social rewards. According to Hermione Lee, one of Wharton’s cousins called her “weird Edith.” Weird is a personality, if not the one every kid dreams of having.

Edith Wharton had a “real personality” — she just had to hide it until 1899. Her account of her parents’ world suggests it is not one for writers:

In the eyes of our provincial society authorship was still regarded as something between a black art and a form of manual labor. My father and mother and their friends were only one generation away from Sir Walter Scott, who thought it necessary to drape his literary identity in countless subterfuges, and almost contemporary with the Brontës, who shrank in agony from being suspected of novel-writing. But I am sure the chief element in their reluctance to encounter the literary was an awe-struck dread of the intellectual effort that might be required of them ...In addition to its mental atmosphere, its political and moral ideas might be contaminating...(68-9)

Her judgment of her parents is damning, but certainly not unique. Many writers have parents who do not read books, do not socialize with writers, and are generally suspicious of a career in the arts, if not suspicious of books at large. What strikes me is that Wharton sees the Brontës as shrinking from suspicion, as opposed to poverty-stricken and desperate to publish any way they could – which was, it turned out, all but impossible except under male pseudonyms. I suspect that Wharton does not want to recognize desperation because she does not want to admit to having experienced it.

Even if Wharton’s little lie about her lack of a personality was intended as hyperbole to spice up her story, the device reveals a refusal to admit something. Denial is a lie you tell yourself. And I find Wharton’s denial of her own personality quite familiar. It is as if she is denying her own personhood – personhood, that baseline requirement for a personality – until she had published. This is the exact violence screaming across that sentence.

But maybe Wharton’s denial of her personality (prior to 1899) was not due so much to lack of professional developments as to personal ones. She couches more fiction with fact in the following passage, detailing her return to New York after her father’s death in Cannes in 1882:

My old friends welcomed me on our return, and there followed two gay but uneventful New York winters. I had never ceased to be a great reader, but had almost forgotten my literary dreams. I could not believe that a girl like myself could ever write anything worth reading, and my friends would certainly have agreed with me. . . . I never dreamed that I was in any way their superior. Indeed, being much less pretty than many of the girls, and less quick at the up-take than the young men, I might have suffered from an inferiority complex had such ailments been known. But my powers of enjoyment have always been many-sided, and the mere fact of being alive and young and active was so exhilarating that I could seldom spare the time to listen to my inner voices. Yet when they made themselves heard again they had become irresistible. (88)

The only line here I believe is the last. Yes, Edith Jones came home from Cannes and likely was welcomed — as a young woman about to be married — but that did not last long. Her beau, Harry Leyden Stevens, had been at Cannes with the Jones family when Edith’s father had died; the summer after, his engagement to Edith was announced in Town Topics. The following October, the month the wedding was supposed to take place, the same paper reported that Edith Jones had been jilted. “The only reason for the breaking of the engagement . . . is an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride.”

Those two “gay but uneventful” winters after her father’s death were winters she lived with her mother under the shadow of her broken engagement: not exactly an “exhilarating” situation. If there was any voice ringing in Edith’s ears, it was that of Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, admonishing her weird daughter for the broken engagement. The one thing that Edith Wharton loved to do (write) was what ruined what she was supposed to do (marry). Even if she “could not believe that a girl like myself could ever write anything worth reading,” Wharton is lying about forgetting her “literary dreams.” If she did not have time to “listen to [her] inner voices” for a while, it seems likely due to the fact that the only way to escape living with her mother was to succeed in finding a husband.

Who could blame Wharton for blocking out what must have been two miserable years? At the end of the second summer, when Edith Wharton was still Edith Jones, jilted young woman, the gossip was still so hot that her mother didn’t even take her to Newport as usual; instead, they went to Bar Harbor, where Edith Jones met Walter Berry, an eligible young man about to begin law school. They supposedly went hiking; there was mention of a canoe; and they definitely did some of what the kids call talking.

All Wharton would say in print was that during that summer, Walter Berry “had given me a fleeting hint of what communion of kindred intelligences might be” (108). What he had not given her was a proposal of marriage. So she accepted the next offer that came her way, from Teddy Wharton, one of her older brother’s friends and thirteen years her senior.

And for thirteen years, she did not associate with Walter Berry.

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So they didn’t do it?

When they first met in Maine, probably not. But thirteen years into Edith Wharton’s marriage, Berry shows up again, and he never really leaves. He helps her file her divorce in Paris, followed by a celebratory trip in Spain that ends with the surprise start of World War I. They never marry. But then there’s the whole “love of my life” claim and the burial situation. So: did they have a physical relationship or not?

Some historians have addressed this question by deciding that Berry himself was not romantic. Yes, multiple scholars have dedicated time and energy on whether or not Edith and Walter got down to business; gird your eyes with your preferring reading accoutrements.

In Gloria C. Erlich’s analysis of Wharton’s sexual life, she cites Wharton biographer R. W. B. Lewis’s assessment of Berry:

Despite Berry’s flirtations with women in social situations, many observers doubted that this behavior extended to a sexual interest in them. Wharton’s travels with Berry suggested to Henry James and to the Berensons that they were indeed lovers, but R. W. B. Lewis treats this as a debatable question. Lewis acknowledges a “hovering and gratifying sexual element” in their long relationship but expresses doubt that Berry was greatly interested in sex with either women or men. He views Berry “as the prototype of the old-time American dandy who ogled the ladies, tugging at his moustache” and elbowing the other men knowingly.

Was Berry a man who ogled but did not act? I am more inclined to believe direct contacts such as Henry James and the Berensons than later critics such as R.W.B. Lewis. I know almost nothing about R.W.B. Lewis, but Henry James was one of the most astute observers of humanity that the world has ever produced, and Bernard Berenson was an art expert who could spot a fake blindfolded. You’re telling me they misread the room?

It is also interesting that Erlich refers to “many observers” but cites none who doubted Berry’s promiscuity. In fact, observers of the time seemed to say exactly the opposite: that Berry demonstrated strong sexual interest when he flirted with women. Wharton herself knew that he had a reputation for leaving “ladies” with “a book instead of a baby” — and Berry had also suffered a childhood illness (I don’t know if it was typhoid) that could have rendered him infertile. Later in life, she teased him about his predilection for “faeries” — by which she meant younger women. And she wasn’t the only one. Reading around the early twentieth century, I unexpectedly stumbled on gossip about Walter Berry in the diaries of Edmund Wilson: an older man tried to keep his lover from even meeting Walter Berry by declaring him syphilitic⁷.

Casting aside the question of whether Berry actually had syphilis (he died of a stroke), what matters here is that the older man in question (Horace Wylie), unlike R.W.B. Lewis, did not think Berry a harmless, “old-time American dandy.” Human behavior does not seem to have changed so very much in a hundred years, and while the asexual dandy is certainly a fascinating figure, Walter Berry does not strike me as having been one, because of all of the above but also descriptions like these:

…a fashion plate well over six feet tall…slimness, thinness, wearing a morning coat and striped trousers like a diplomat and highly polished button-shoes…He could be witty, if a little on the pedantic side. His manner with women… was "gallant and wicked." Something frigid and formidable about his countenance, very sec. (Edel)

So why did Lewis need Berry to be asexual? Because of Edith. Because people, for some reason, need to believe that human genius is separate from human body, particularly for women. Nobody runs around shouting that Mozart probably never fucked anybody.⁸ This might be the real reason I’m obsessed with the guy buried next to Edith Wharton: he’s evidence she had some fun.

Edel is another critic who refuses to take a stance on the question, though he has a harsh read of Berry: “He needed the aura, the stimulus of great-ness, a kind of imagination-by-association perhaps to make up for the imagination he lacked.” In other words, Berry was a fan-boy.

Edel continues: “Her friends, who disliked Berry, said that he endowed her with the things they liked least. Perhaps it is truer to say that her less pleasant qualities had always been there, unexpressed, until he freed her to express them.” DAMN. But also: which friends? I think just one, Percy Lubbock, who is a whole other story (an annoying one). Henry James loved Berry, as did Berenson. But back to Edel.

His final thoughts:

Edith Wharton, we may surmise, did not identify herself with [Berry’s] snobbery or his egotism. She was impelled toward his "strong intelligence and ability." It matched her own. She was in love, a little like Isabel Archer, with an image in the mirror of herself, disguised as a man. Some flaw in his self-esteem perhaps found itself mended by the trust and confidence of this gifted woman. In correcting her prose he was lifting her into his realm. Unlike the rigid Berry, Mrs. Wharton had much more flexibility. She could rise above her class. She had liberated herself for art. But she had not yet reached the time when other liberations were possible.

In other words, they didn’t fuck? But she had reached a time “when other liberations were possible” — read: Summer, Roman Fever, and Autres Temps. Read: the early drafts of The Age of Innocence, where Archer takes the key from Ellen and goes to her in her room and THEY DO IT. Read: Edith Wharton, checking into a hotel she’d never stayed, only to find her own name written in another hand next to her husband’s.

“Oh shit,” she says (slight paraphrase). “Turns out I HAVE stayed here before!” [wicked laughter]

Read: Edith Wharton staying in another hotel with her only “confirmed” lover, Morton Fullerton. (My God, you’d have to have skill to overcome a name like Morton!)

Read: Oh, I don’t know. Human history?

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What he really did NOT do

Edith Wharton’s baldest lie is that Walter Fucking Berry taught her how to write.

The lie is constructed in her account of co-writing The Decoration of Houses, a witty book on style that became an instant bestseller, with her decorator, Ogden Codman. First of all, she demurs about her conception of the book: “...finding that [Codman and I] had the same views I drifted, I hardly know how, toward the notion of putting them into a book.” (Emphasis mine) Surprise surprise, neither Edith nor Ogden knew how to write!

Suddenly, in swooped Walter Berry, who was “born with an exceptionally sensitive literary instinct, but also with a critical sense so far outweighing his creative gift that he had early renounced the idea of writing” (108). Wharton asked him for help:

...I remember shyly asking him to look at my lumpy pages; and I remember his first shout of laughter (for he never flattered or pretended), and then his saying good-naturedly: “Come, let’s see what can be done,” and settling down beside me to try to model the lump into a book.

In a few weeks, the modeling was done...and in those short weeks, as I discovered afterward, I had been taught whatever I know about the writing of clear concise English. (108)

Rather than take credit for her own ability, Edith Wharton uses her memoir to blame “whatever” she knows about writing on Walter Berry — a lawyer obsessed with literature, sure, but not a writer. (I know at least two lawyers who are also writers, but neither is named Walter Berry.)

Is it possible that Wharton, without formal education, might have had trouble writing nonfiction? Wharton would not have been taught to write essays – just as she would not have been taught to write poems, stories, or novels. But as she read the latter and taught herself to write them, so I believe she did with the essays that make up The Decoration of Houses. There is no Berry in that book, and though some of the sass may be attributed to Codman (judging by his juicy letters to his mother), the text is owned by Edith Wharton. She never wrote a novel without a house; she never structured a story without architecture. The Decoration of Houses is hers.

Walter Berry was not present when Edith Newbold Jones taught herself to “make up.” He was not there to show her how to hold a pen or read – something she basically taught herself to do. Nor did Berry teach her how to look at the components of a work of literature and dissect and analyze them. If that skill was taught to Edith at all, it was likely taught by Anna Bahlmann, her governess, whom Edith does not credit as a writing teacher, probably because even if a teacher shows you how to write, it is up to you to sit down and do it.

What Walter Berry did was to encourage Edith Wharton through being her reader, perhaps her first reader – and for that he deserves credit. But it is an outrageous shame that Wharton credits him with the gift that was her own. What did he give her?

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Material.

In the Beinecke’s media collections, there is a scan of a letter that Walter Berry wrote to Edith Wharton in 1923 from the Knickerbocker Club⁹ in New York City. I’ve found another reproduction of it here. He remembers the summer they met:

Dearest — The real dream — mine — was in the canoe and in the night afterwards, — for I lay awake wondering and wondering, — and then, when morning came, wondering how I could have wondered, — I a $-less lawyer (not even that yet) with just about enough cash for the canoe and for Rodick’s bill —And then, later, in the little cottage at Newport, I wondered why I hadn’t — for it would have been good, — and the slices of years slid by.

Well, my dear, I’ve never ‘wondered’ about anyone else, and there wouldn’t be much of me if you were cut out of it. Forty years of it is you, dear. W.

You can see why she didn’t want to burn this one, why she wanted to declare him the love of her life, why she wanted her final resting place to be next to his. But even this dream did not fully come true, which I discovered while reading the Edith Wharton Society’s blog; Wharton scholar Julie Olin-Ammentorp writes that

I had remembered from Wharton’s biographies that his grave was “next to” hers. Apparently my memory was not quite accurate: it is not located immediately next to hers, but three graves away. Still, there is no doubt that the two are very close.¹⁰

I think what I’m trying to say here is we never know, when we begin, where we will end. And those things we think we can control, like whose body will be buried next to ours, is really a matter of illusion, or delusion, or (truer than truth) fiction.

1. It was an old folks’ home called The Manor, but I have no idea if it looked like a stately old house or a hospital facility. My paternal grandfather was a doctor involved at both the local hospital and The Manor.

2. I can’t find the link, though I’ll hunt for it if you’re desperate.

3. I’d also like to know why a two-year-old was being left in the waiting room with a dying stranger instead of being brought into her great-grandmother’s room, but it tracks.

4. In case it’s fun to picture, I’m working on this post while traveling southeast by train from Cologne to Salzburg, Austria, where I have been promised sunshine and sightseeing.

5. She wrapped Edith in cold wet sheets and stayed up all night to watch that the child kept breathing.

6. He did have a Fitzgerald-era nephew, Harry Crosby, who shot himself in a prominent Upper West Side apartment building; it’s not the Only Murders building, but nearby.

7. More Edel:

…a letter written by Edmund Wilson to an old friend: "I was very much interested in your account of Walter Berry. I met him once, when he was pretty old, and didn't get much impression of him. But I used to hear about him from Frank Crowninshield, whose picture of him seemed to fit in with Lubbock's -that is, he talked about him as if he were a little too perfect and rather empty. But this may have been partly Crowninshield, who didn't particularly like people who made him feel inconsequential; and it is clear that Percy Lubbock holds it against Berry that he was a hard-boiled rationalist." (p.524)

8. Salzburg was fantastic! Check out some of my notes for pictures.

9. This club still exists; I used to teach at a private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not far from where Wharton used to own two townhomes, and certain students would rave about going to this club to learn how to dance. Try to imagine the facial muscles I would have to control in response.

10. https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/julie-olin-ammentorp-visiting-edith-whartons-grave/