From "Edith Wharton and the War on Terror" by Garrison Keillor
(Submitted by EWS members)

. . .

There is no fighting these boondoggles and politicians know it. The stuff gets passed and signed into law and taxpayer groups fire off a barrage of press releases and a week later it's old news. The sensible thing is to fight for your own boondoggle.

I belong to an enormous special-interest group that, unlike Alaskans or hobby pilots, has never exercised much clout, and that is the English-major community. For us, the equivalent of the Gravina Island bridge is the public library equipped with leather sofas and an espresso bar and librarians who are trained in pressure-point massage. Greek columns would be nice, and a pair of stone lions, and a rare book collection and a three-story lobby with marble floors so your footsteps echo as if you were in an Edith Wharton novel. And a statue of Minerva.

I imagine that a super-library of that caliber might cost $223 million if you add in the books, the banks of computers with high-speed Internet connections, the movie theater, the Children's Room, the Steam Room, the Nap Room, the Hobnob Room where English majors can gather for a libation, the underground parking garage, and the kindly reference librarian with the bun, the faint moustache on the upper lip, the navy-blue knit dress, the sensible shoes, and the glasses on a chain around her neck. Those ladies have become rare and do not come cheap.

We English majors need a mouthpiece in Congress of the caliber of Rep. Don Young of Alaska. And we need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror.

How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one. Therefore, the reading of Edith Wharton is a proven deterrent to terror. Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense?

Which side is your congressman on? If we English majors would make our voices heard and flood Congress with angry sonnets, we would get a major library bill passed. I hope that Minnesota will get the first $223 million library, but if Ketchikan wants one too, fine.

From Jonathan Bank of the Mint Theater Company:

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A VERY SPECIAL EVENT!
Monday, October 17th at 7:30
Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the publication of
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

Join us for a reading of the Edith Wharton/Clyde Fitch dramatization of Wharton’s novel, as adapted by Jonathan Bank.

Edith Wharton joined with “the playwright of the hour in America” Clyde Fitch to dramatize her first great success. The result played on Broadway for only two weeks in 1906—but the Mint production in 1998 was a great success. Artistic Director Jonathan Bank revised the original text using material from the novel.

Attend the reading only or plan to have dinner before the show with adapter/director Jonathan Bank and hear the story of how Wharton and Clyde Fitch were brought together in the first place and learn about the fascinating changes Wharton made to her original story and why.

Tickets for the reading only: $25
Tickets for dinner (location TBA), discussion and reading: $85

All proceeds to benefit Mint Theater Company
311 West 43rd St, 3rd floor
NY, NY 10036

Box office: 212-315-0231
Or visit our website: http://www.minttheater.org/onstage/next.html

Prof (Alan Price) found PSU Hazleton perfect

From MSNBC.com http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9025267/

Prof found PSU Hazleton perfect
By Craig Eisenberger
The Standard-Speaker

*********
While teaching, Price conducted literary research. Two writers stuck out in his mind during his time in college, Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton. Researching Wharton led him across the country and the world, looking at manuscripts and other documents.
Looking through Wharton's papers, Price came across photos of children. Now he found this odd since she divorced her husband in 1913 and had no children. "I was wondering where these kids are from," Price said. "I'm nosy and that kind of curiosity is necessary for an academic researcher."
"What I found out was that she ran a refugee organization responsible for saving thousands of people at the same time she was writing novels."
That led him to write The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War. "I wrote about her World War I work, as a novelist but mostly as a humanitarian."
It took 20 years to get everything together and finally write the book. "The New York Times gave it a good review," Price recalled.
While other Americans were fleeing Paris because of the impending German invasion through Belgium, Wharton stayed to help the children. However, she was not alone.
"When you write big projects there is always something left over," Price said.
During his time researching Wharton's efforts to assist refuges, he came across 200 other organizations run by American women in France and Belgium, which were later consolidated by the Red Cross.
"I didn't get to talk about those organizations," he said.
The workers in France faced miserable conditions, Price said. "These were noble efforts and they are gone as if they evaporated." He feels that he may return to this topic one day.

Age of Innocence (1934 version) on Turner Classic Movies.

The 1934 version of The Age of Innocence will run on the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) channel on Thursday, August 18, at noon Eastern Daylight Time (9 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time). This version is not available on VHS or DVD, and it is only rarely shown on television.

Home truths
The Back Half
Stephen Bayley
Monday 15th August 2005
From The New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/200508150028

The interior-design craze was fuelled by the publication of The Decoration of Houses, by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, in 1897. The book was a significant influence on Elsie de Wolfe, the inventor of the modern profession. A social-climbing lesbian, she is the spiritual ancestor of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. With her cheerful motto "plenty of optimism and white paint", de Wolfe introduced new American money to old French furniture when, one day in 1913, she unloaded $3m-worth of cabriole-legged stuff on to Henry Clay Frick. For years afterwards, possession of French furniture was a token of status. In her novel The Custom of the Country (1913), Wharton parodied this affected Francophilia and coined the useful term "Looey". As late as 1950 - when, remember, the abstract expressionists were already at work - the decorator Billy Baldwin was still telling students at the Parsons School of Design in New York that all they really needed was a perfect pair of "Looey XVI" console tables and life, hitherto unsatisfactory, would be complete.

A writer's other great passion, restored
Edith Wharton's garden reblooms

By Carol Stocker, Globe Staff | August 11, 2005

LENOX -- The mistress had a corner bedroom so she could look down on her flower garden while writing longhand in bed. This she did each day from about 6 a.m. to noon, often with a dog propped under one arm as she dropped each completed page on the floor to be collected by her maid and typed by her secretary.

This was how Edith Wharton wrote ''The House of Mirth" at The Mount, her vacation home in the Berkshires, 100 summers ago. Her novel about Lily Bart, a sincere and vulnerable young woman destroyed by the hypocrisy of high society, became a record-breaking bestseller and gave Wharton the confidence to pursue a career as a writer.

To celebrate the centennial of Wharton's first literary masterpiece, her beloved flower garden was replanted at The Mount this June through a $500,000 grant from an anonymous Boston foundation.

''You don't often get a chance to plant a 3,000-perennial garden in this day and age. It's very exciting," said Susan Child of Boston, who designed the garden with former associate M. Christopher Alonso.

The magnificent garden looks like it was planted years ago. Hundreds of fragrant lilies, old-fashioned mignonettes, and stately delphiniums recreate the luxurious abundance that hallmarked the Gilded Age. The color scheme is sparkling white, vivid blue, and deep purple with bright splashes of pink from the garden phlox that Wharton especially loved.

Tall filigree thalictrum and filipendula contribute the airy effect that Wharton sought in defiance of her era's convention of compact and regimented plants. Asters and fall-blooming anemones are among the many flowers designed to carry the garden through October, when The Mount closes for the season. The four large rectangular borders enclose a rebuilt fountain. Child describes the scene as ''exuberance within the confines of rigor."

The flower garden is the climax of a $35 million restoration project that has brought The Mount back from the brink of collapse. ''This garden is the crown jewel of the entire restoration project," said project manager David Andersen. ''The flowers cost $150,000. But it cost four times that for the layers upon layers of work in this garden that people never see, such as the archeology, the engineering, and the irrigation."

Wharton often spent her afternoons gardening. Despite 10 live-in gardeners and groundskeepers, she liked to get her hands dirty, said Child, ''something women of her class never did." Though her childless marriage proved unfortunate, Wharton lived a very full life here, entertaining her friends and managing an elegant ''great house" with 35 rooms and a staff of 20.

From the Poughkeepsie Journal

Mansion starred in classic tale
Staatsburgh part of Wharton's 'House of Mirth'
By Angela Batchelor

It is her first novel, however, 1905's "House of Mirth," that has a connection to the Staatsburgh State Historic Site in Staatsburg. The novel, serialized by Scribner's Magazine, became a best-seller and has become a classic.

Many believe the country estate described in Wharton's novel, Bellomont, was based on Staatsburgh, the Dutchess County mansion owned by Ogden and Ruth Livingston Mills.

Special tours

To honor the centennial of the publication of Wharton's book, Staatsburgh State Historic Site is offering special "House of Mirth" tours the first Sunday of every month through October. Tours begin at 3 p.m.

"The 100th anniversary of the novel is important," said Julie Olin-Ammentorp, a member of the Edith Wharton Society. " 'House' has such an important place in American literature. It is an amazingly accomplished novel. Wharton's characters, plot and literary style are all impressive."

Land's End in Newport
From Washington Lifein September 2002. The original article is here http://www.washingtonlife.com/backissues/archives/02sept/newport.htm and includes a picture of the house as it stands today.

Rumor has it that Edith Wharton purchased the remote property at the southern end of Ledge Road because she wanted to live as far as possible from her mother without leaving Newport. . . .

In 1897 Edith Wharton purchased Land's End from Robert Livingston Beeckman, a former U.S. Open Tennis Championship runner-up who would go on to become Governor of Rhode Island. At that time Wharton described the main house as "incurably ugly." She agreed to pay $80,000 for the property, and spend thousands more to alter the home's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds. Ultimately, Wharton would allow that she and Ogden Codman, Jr., a revivalist architect who supervised the renovations, had finally helped the home achieve "a certain dignity." The newly constructed gardens were especially impressive having been laid-out in classical design by Beatrix Ferrand, the landscape architect responsible for the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks.

From The Literary Almanac for June 29, 2005:

It was on this day in 1921, Edith Wharton (books by this author) became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence, which opens, "On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York."

Submitted by Emily Orlando

Edith Wharton's grave

I live in Paris and have been to Edith Wharton's grave in Versailles.
It was unkempt, unoticeable if it was not for a competent cemetery guardian.
It cannot be identified, the inscription on her grave is unleadgible etc...
Something must be done. I will make myself avaiblable to anyone who is willing to do something!

Sophie Latraverse
sadral@yahoo.fr

A Drawing-Room of Their Own from The New York Times
(free registration required)
[. . . ] The Causeries du Lundi - the name, which means Monday chatterings, was taken from Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve's weekly literary column in a 19th-century Parisian newspaper - is one of the oldest women's literary societies in the country. It is both a relic of a vanishing New York and a poignant reflection of the lives women have led over the past century and a quarter.

Nearly continuously for 125 years, this extremely private and exclusive group has gathered at a member's home almost always on the first Monday of every month during the New York social season, from November to May, to read aloud essays that members have written on topics that interest them. [. . . ]

The surnames of early Causeries members read like a Baedeker of Edith Wharton's New York: Roosevelt, Delafield, Lefferts, Huntington, Van Cortlandt, Beekman, Van Rensselaer. One story passed down through the years is that many early members were wives of men who had helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wanted something to do for themselves.

Literary Map of New York City

This interactive map of New York by the New York Times includes a quotation from The Age of Innocence.http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/20050605_BOOKMAP_GRAPHIC/

From L.A. Weekly:
The co-publishers of L.A.’s newest press, Bük, are relying on those unlikely literary venues to revive Paine’s unlikely literary form, the pamphlet. Neither a book nor a magazine, Bük comes in 16- and 32-page formats that showcase exactly one piece of writing: an Edith Wharton short story, a Jonathan Swift essay or a collection of Lynn Davis photographs, for instance.

From the Berkshire Eagle:
Wharton novel topic of exhibit

LENOX -- "Lily's Downfall," a collaborative exhibit with the Museum of the City of New York, will open to the public at The Mount on Sunday. The exhibit celebrates the centennial of "The House of Mirth," Edith Wharton's first bestseller, by bringing the novel to life in the house where it was created.
Designed by former Yale Repertory Artistic Director Stanley Wojewodski Jr., the exhibit features six tableaux depicting key moments in the tragic downfall of the novel's heroine. The tableaux showcases historic Gilded Age costumes from the Museum of the City of New York's extensive collection.

Visitors can see a range of period clothing and accessories, from delicate lingerie to a rare deep mourning dress. The items are more than 100 years old and were worn by women from Wharton's era.

From the Weekend Standard (China):

The only film of the three that works, on its own and as part of the trilogy's larger thematic aim, is Wong Kar-wai's The Hand, a lush, elegant, quietly erotic parable starring Gong Li and Chang Chen. The sublime Gong plays a courtesan in 1960s Hong Kong who hires a tailor (Chang) to be her personal dressmaker after securing his loyalty with a sexual gesture that manages to be as bold as it is discreet. As the relationship between the two changes with their twisting fortunes, The Hand takes on the tragic grandeur of Edith Wharton at her most politely ruthless.

May 1st 2005; Sunday NYTimes Book Review, p. 31

"We'll Map Manhattan," by Randy Cohen

Randy Cohen proposes "to create, with the help of the Book Review's readers, a literary map of --not of its authors' haunts but those of their characters..."

Lily Bart's walk up Fifth Avenue toward Lawrence Selden's apartment in the Benedick is prominently featured in this essay, which provides both a map and the following quotation from THE HOUSE OF MIRTH:

"As she reached 50th Street...she decided to walk across to Madison Avenue." She notices "the Georgian flathouse with flowerboxes on its balconies...A few yards ahead was the doorway they had entered together."

Submitted by Deborah Hecht, hechtd@tourolaw.edu

From the Berkshire Eagle (includes pictures)

LENOX -- Edith Wharton Restoration Inc. is expected to be honored in a White House ceremony by President Bush for its restoration and preservation of The Mount.

The Mount, author Edith Wharton's Lenox estate. Photos by Ben Garver / Berkshire Eagle Staff


The Mount and three other preservation sites and programs -- the Texas Heritage Trails Program, a statewide initiative; Bolduc Historic Property of Sainte Genevieve, Mo., and the Isaiah Davenport House Museum of Savannah, Ga. -- are expected to receive awards, said Bruce Milhans, spokesman for the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

"[The Mount] is very significant from a cultural perspective and a literary perspective," said Milhans. "It has become a very significant draw not only for heritage tourism, but also as an educational program. It was an absolute save."

The Fatherless Children of France Exhibit (Wharton items at Holy Cross)

Currently on display on the second floor of Dinand Library, The Fatherless Children of France: “Their Book” exhibit is a rare event. Given to the College by Mrs. David Johnson in 1953, the collection was a gift in memory of her husband, who from 1891-1893 attended the Holy Cross Preparatory School, which was affiliated with the College until 1909. The collection contains autographed messages, manuscripts, photographs and artwork from the greatest political and military leaders, writers and artists of the World War I era. The items were originally assembled for a fund-raising auction to benefit the Fatherless Children of France Society, an organization founded in 1915 by American women to help French war orphans.

The auction items range from autographed poems by Robert Frost and Edith Wharton, to a 1918 autographed musical score for “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” by John Phillips Sousa . . .

From The Age (Australia):

To maintain the rigid status quo of high society New York, sacrifices must be made and rebellion punished. By Avril Moore.

The EROTICISM represented by the perpetually blooming red flowers overlaying the lace and perfect copperplate in the title sequence of The Age of Innocence conveys the film's main theme: old-world values colliding with the new.

And yet if May Welland epitomises the strict adherence of the New York aristocracy to what was socially acceptable for the time, then the irony of the title cannot be lost.

For here, as in the novel by Edith Wharton from which the film is faithfully derived, is a world where the intransigent preservation of wealth and power is paramount, and any whiff of individualism must be sacrificed, if not eradicated.

This tension, or outright hostility, exists beneath a brittle veneer of impeccable manners, taste and morality - a harmony shattered by a whisper and a subterfuge so sophisticated that it warrants decoding by an arch, third-person narrator.

Screenwriter and director Martin Scorsese said the narrator was a "tricky" character. The narrator "presents the story in this way to teach us a lesson".

"I love the idea of the female voice setting us up for a fall. You get to trust her, and then she does you in, just like he (Newland Archer) gets done in," he said. [. . . ]

The New York Times Magazine
March 13, 2005
Interview with Meireille Guiliano (by Edward Lewine, p. 28-29)

"Best book she read recently:

It is called, "True Pleasures: A Memoir of women in Paris. Actually, it was written by an Australian named Lucinda Holdforth. I connect to it because she talks about great women in Paris like Colette, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, but also because she visits the neighborhood where I live there."
--Submitted by Deborah Hecht