Housing Crisis! Save The Mount!

A long post about a college term paper, interior design, a great American novel, and a great American landmark that may be lost...

I am one of those people who loves Edith Wharton. I would say it was a subtle, quiet adoration, but since Wharton wrote of fiery passions beneath the surface of propriety, I have no problem being vocal about it. I remember sharing this with one of my college roommmates, only to be told that Wharton was elitist, snobbish, and totally antiquated. Okay, point taken, yet I can do nothing but respect the Whartonian societal structures, manners, and great design of…everything. Her entire oeuvre deals with the intricacies of design: social, aesthetic, moral, and the great trouble that begins when things begin to change.

The Mount in Fall by David DashiellDuring one of my final quarters of college – way back when (when? 10 years ago) – I took a random Art History course: AHI 198 – The American Home. The course was about the architecture and design of the American Home – how we live the way we do now. Yes, it was your typical upperclassmen fluff course for over-stimulated collegiates very close to graduation who had already taken all the other courses in the department. It wasn’t too memorable, but I did write one heck of a term paper. I cannot remember the specifics of the assignment, but it had to do with choosing from among a list of fiction novels, and discussing how the American home was depicted within. Apart from studio art, my other major was English, so this assignment was right up my alley. You can only imagine how overjoyed I was to find that one of my favorite novels was on the list of choices!

I cannot remember the first time I read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, but its imagery and mores have stayed with me so vividly for years. (Of course, Scorsese's film definitely helps with this!) Images and scenes just pop into my head at the oddest times. Mostly, I think of how Newland Archer always sends the Countess Olenska yellow roses after he visits her, but never leaves a calling card. Wharton had such an elegant, romantic way of describing caddish male behavior that one couldn’t help but find it endearing. Maybe I should blame her for my tendency to put up with non-committal men in my own life? Hmmm….

To write my paper, I re-read The Age of Innocence, of course, as well as researched tomes on interior design from turn-of-the-century America. While I dove deeply into Edgar de Noailles Mayhew & Minor Myers, Jr.’s book A Documentary History of American Interiors, From the Colonial Era to 1915, I was surprised to discover that Wharton herself had actually written the book on interior design of the era. Wharton, along with Ogden Codman, Jr. wrote The Decoration of Houses in 1897. Then came the dawn for my twenty-year-old academic-aesthetic mind, so eager to draw connections between all things. “She wrote the book!” I thought… No wonder. In fact, this book on interior design was the third book she wrote, with all but one of her fiction works coming after this one. Wharton and Codman deplored the heavy-handed Victorian style of the era, calling for simplicity, ease, and comfort for the American home. To Wharton, this comfort and usability showed the true modernity of American households, and a break from the ornate old-fashioned aesthetic so common among old New York.

If you were to re-read The Age of Innocence from this point of view, you would notice Wharton's expertise. Her writing is used to develop and support the personalities, quirks, tolerances, and relationships of all the characters by describing their spaces and interiors. Granny Mingott’s pink stone house in the “wilderness” near Central Park, the Beaufort’s home that hosts the annual after-opera party that was “...boldly planned with a ballrooom, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d’or), seeing from afar the many candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where comillias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.” (Subscribers - click through to read more!)

It is ironic that the most impressionable interior in the plot is that of Countess Ellen Olenska, whose home is much more atmospheric than architectural. Newland Archer is bewildered by the look of the place, and this off-center puzzlement enflames his intrigue which grows to desire, even love. The interior is much more pixellated and uncertain, with descriptions of “dec acc” (decorative accessories) as we say in the industry.

“What he saw was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known. He knew that the Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her – bits of wreckage, she called them – and these, he supposed, were represented by some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little Greek bronze on the chimney-piece, and a strecth of red damask nailed on the discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in old frames.”

In re-reading my rather subtle, somewhat high-brow paper for AHI 198, I wrote this about Newland’s visit to the Countess:

“The oddness for Archer, is the fact that the interior is indefinable. It is neither Ruskin, nor Eastlake, but individually distinctive to the Countess alone…The house has been transformed “into something intimate, ‘foreign’” and because there is no object-oriented anchor for his senses, Archer realizes that “the atmosphere of the room was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure.”

“He tried to analyse the trick, to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and tables were grouped, in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his elbos, and in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.”

When the Countess does finally arrive to meet Archer, she immediately asks: “ “How do you like my funny house? To me it’s like heave.””

This exotic interior runs in direct counterpoint to Archer’s future marriage to May Welland, and the life they will surely live. “The neighborhood was thought remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce; but the plumbing was perfect.”

This description, both poetic and practical, is pure Wharton. People often overlook her apt wit in the presence of her elegant grandeur. She is also incredibly prophetic; last week in New York I looked out many a taxi window to see the cut stone frontages of the ubiquitous brownstones. I remember saying to myself: "So Edith Wharton!"

"La Liseuse" - 1890, by A. GrogaertOf course, all of my precocious collegiate arguments are a little bit much ten years later. My dot-matrix printed pages are full of meticulous footnotes and a careful bibliography. I supported everything with paintings and images of “Ruskinian Gothic” and Second Empire-America rooms, as well as maps of New York City showing how the fictional homes of the novels’ characters met up with Wharton’s actual homes in the city. The high Victorian style of potted palms, precious objects, examples of Eastlake furniture, and carved wood built-ins… My fourteen pages of text had just as many pages of imagery, showing the very antithesis of the Wharton interior aesthetic. My professor chided me for being more of an English major than an art major in writing the paper, giving me an A grade, but saying: “It would have been better had you exited more quickly from the craft of the novel and into the home she depicts…I’d prefer more attention to the structure and use of the house, but your way is consistent and you’ve done a great job using that approach.” How little we change!

This evening my friend Sophia at Chic & Charming shared some sad news with me via Google Reader: Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts is facing foreclosure unless it raises $3 million dollars by October 31^st. Wharton built The Mount using the guidelines set out in her and Ogden Codman, Jr’s book, culminating her interest in American interior architecture and design. It was here that she wrote The House of Mirth, the beginnings of Ethan Frome, many other works, and where she continued to live until 1911 when she moved to France.

Section of the flower garden at The Mount by David DashiellThis home is indeed a national treasure which will be sold to a private owner unless funding is provided to save it. This is the only American monument devoted to this great American writer, and one of only five percent of our national monuments devoted to American women.

Money is tight for everyone now, but it would be a shame to lose such an important landmark of American history and creativity. Please visit the website for The Mount to learn more about the estate and Edith Wharton. Help save a monument to American style, design and literature!