The keys to the kingdom
It’s almost time to pack up your car and head somewhere interesting. For three successive years we’ve spent a few golden moments at The Mount, the home of Edith Wharton, the late American writer whose novels highlighted the true nature of The Gilded Age society in New York. Wharton and her husband Teddy built The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, in a vain effort to heal their broken relationship.
There is new buzz about The Mount since Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame signed a contract with NBC to write and produce a series similar to the British counterpart, using Wharton et al as the model. It’s enough to jar the silk stockings off of Lady Violet’s slender feet. “Bring in the Darjeeling, Carson, and make it snappy.”
My husband I were sitting in a beam of sunshine on the porch of The Mount. When I say porch, I mean a space that is five times the length of the place we call home. The birds in the eaves were chirping their lucky little heads off, a hawk was lifting and falling over the marsh, the conical evergreens in Edith’s famous garden were clipped, snipped, trimmed. On one particular morning we’d beaten the tour- ist season and had the vista and the porch to ourselves.
Henry James was perhaps Wharton’s closest friend and a frequent visitor to this house. Ergo, I do believe, his famous line, “Summer afternoons, summer afternoons; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
I had just read the Hermione Lee biography, so a stroll along the famed Lime Walk seemed to be the thing. We strolled, followed the Woodland Path for a bit, had a little sit in the folly in the Italianate garden, looked across to the French part, returned to the porch for further sitting à la Henry James.
A young man was there, fixing something with a drill.
“You are the luckiest person I can think of, having a job here,” I offered.
“Oh yes. I am.” He shook our hands and introduced himself. He seemed to be in charge of the gardens. I have a theory about Master Gardeners: make ’em talk.
He had more information about Edith Wharton than many a scholar might muster and he had read the Hermione Lee biography. We’d been handed the Keys To The Kingdom.
“So calming here, so restorative,” I said. “A wonder it didn’t help the poor benighted Teddy Wharton to heal from his emotional complexities.”
“That theory about Teddy may be unjust. My colleagues and I here at The Mount were chatting about this very thing. Edith told the story in her way. It is thought that she burned the letters that Teddy sent to her. We’ll never know the story as told by him.”
This Literary Gardener taught us about the planning of the gardens, about how Edith’s trips to Italy and France had informed their scale, about how the house had gone into ruin after it became a girl’s school and about how now, after several years of restoration, the gardens look as they did when Edith sailed away from Teddy and The Mount to Europe, where she would do incredible work in Paris for First World War refugees while at the same time hosting her famous salons. She once commented that the same modicum of care is necessary in producing both a soufflé and a salon...
We’re still sitting in the sunny patch on a marble porch that is bigger than our house. Henry James is not too far from my elbow (I’m sure of it.) Birdsong everywhere. Nobody in sight.
Just the Head Gardener and the two of us. The Mount and the two of us. Henry James and the two of us.
And the Gardener’s stories of how this garden came to be, of how this house was put back together, of how Teddy Wharton may have been an all-right fellow after all.
“He was the sportsman, she the intellectual” he is saying. “Their friends were different types. Their interests didn’t match up. They’d been married for 26 years. It happens. Her stories may have been formatted to suit her purposes.”
Uh huh. Had her love affair with Morton Fullerton needed an excuse? Who’s to say?
This lovely fellow who ensures that the Linden tree branches don’t overreach the Lime Walk, who orders plants to live together in perfect symmetry, who may even oversee the ferns in Edith’s cool forest glade, has his theories. He lives in harmony with nature, so why wouldn’t he have worthy notions about nature of the human kind?
We shared our own small bits of knowledge about other gardens and about the small bits we knew of Edith’s life in Paris.
It was a bit of this for a bit of that, tit for tat; a sharing, small shining threads of mutual enlightenment that make the sun land on the porch.