Spinster (33 page)

In 1901 Edith went a step further, converting her architectural principles into bricks and mortar, and designed and oversaw the construction of her own country house. Set on 130 acres of rolling greensward in Western Massachusetts, The Mount, as she called it (after a home of her great-grandfather's), is, like the woman herself, a welter of contradictions masterfully contained.

Anyone can visit today. You enter the property along a dirt road that wends for a half mile past the greenhouse and stable and through thick, shady stands of evergreens, before dipping slightly and culminating in a walled courtyard abutting the back of a white stucco-and-wood mansion modeled on a seventeenth-century English manor (she'd hoped for stone or brick but couldn't afford it). The front of the house faces the opposite direction, looking out onto Laurel Lake and the mountains beyond, as if its maker, so wrapped up with broader vistas, didn't even think to try to impress you, her visitor.

Instead, you discover, she wished to nourish and entertain—
herself and others. I've never been to a house so grand that, once you're inside, feels so intimate. The spacious entry hall, dining room, drawing room, and library are big without being cavernous, and they are convivially interconnected with copious doors. Wandering through and between them, you feel Edith's presence not in a ghostly, hair-raising sort of way, but in the particularity of the layout and details, and how they allow you to physically experience the inner workings of a unique mind.

In Edith's opinion, the standard American nineteenth-century conception of what a house should be—essentially, a safe haven, a refuge from the world beyond—was a morbid holdover from feudal times, when castles and forts were designed with the sole intent of protecting their inhabitants from barbarous intruders. She far preferred the ancient Roman ideal of civic sociability, when people did their living not shut away indoors, but on the street and at the baths and forum (for men, that is; women stayed home with the children).

The estate is a rejection not only of conventional standards, but also of the “flat frivolity” of her upbringing, particularly her nearly two decades of dutifully playing society wife. Unlike the massive mansions of Newport, intended for show and big, garish parties, The Mount is designed for seclusion, work, and quality time with close friends and colleagues (most famously, Henry James). For the first time in her life, Edith was free to spend her time as she wished. All through the summer and fall, “small parties of congenial friends succeeded each other,” as she wrote in her memoir, without putting a dent in her own productivity.

A rejection is significantly different from outright rebellion, however; as she wrote about décor in
The Decoration of Houses
, “Originality lies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions.” Edith didn't want to leave her past in the dust, instead to retain the best parts and refashion them into her own version of the good life,
what she called the “complex art of civilized living”—an elegant balance of work, leisure, and socializing. To this end, the estate is something of a proto-live-work space writ large, with each room serving a highly specific function.

The executive suite, so to speak, was Edith's wing on the second floor: an antechamber opening onto two high-ceilinged rooms with four big windows apiece and a bathroom between. Sunlight floods the east-facing bedroom in the morning, and in the afternoon filters gently into the west-facing boudoir. Otherwise, the two spaces are as different as night and day.

The room to the left, the boudoir, was her “public” space, where she conducted housekeeping business with her staff, wrote letters, and received her closest friends. The walls are a saturated blue-green, not unlike the famous Tiffany's box, and richly ornamented with elaborate decorative moldings and inset panels depicting large vases of roses. The massive fireplace is made of an unusual red-and-white marble; matching ruffled toile curtains hang to the floor. Outside, tall, closely set evergreens brush the windowpanes. The overall effect is one of seclusion and contemplation, a comfortable haven for quiet conversation or for administering quotidian details.

In comparison, the bedroom is a monk's cell (Teddy had his own). Her most intimate space, where only her maids and beloved dogs were allowed, it's the innermost room mentioned in one of her most frequently quoted passages, in which she compares a woman's nature to “a great house”:

There is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the
innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

The innermost rooms common to most women of her class were decorated to encourage idle repose; Edith planned hers for maximum productivity, as efficient as a modern-day office. The walls were kept bare, and the ceiling is plain. The fireplace is an inconspicuous gray marble. The windows are hung with simple white curtains that don't obstruct the view, making the landscape itself the only decoration (anticipating by half a century the “views as wallpaper” in Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House). On a clear day, the room feels like a container of air suspended on miles of silence.

Edith did her writing in bed, “after bath and before breakfast,” as she once told a friend. On a typical morning she'd wake with the sun, prop herself up against her pillows—she liked goose down, and a delicate linen sheeting—lean her writing board across her knees, and work steadily until noon, filling sheaves of foolscap with her neatly looped cursive, letting each page drop to the floor as soon as she'd finished. Afterward, while she lunched with houseguests outside on the terrace, her secretary would gather the mess of fallen papers and type them into order.

Other than Edith's servants, few ever witnessed this tableau, but descriptions of it were passed from one friend to the next until it became part of her lore. Like the large pocket sewn onto the front of Emily Dickinson's sole remaining dress, stocked with envelope scraps and a pencil should inspiration strike, or Mark Twain's flamboyant white suit, the image encapsulates what we imagine to be Edith's very essence: her queenly stature, steely discipline, silverware and bone china glinting in the sun—a gimlet-eyed critic embedded (literally!) in the belly of the beast.

Afternoons held a group excursion of some stripe: long walks,
gardening, horseback riding, touring in her motorcar through the countryside. After a sumptuous dinner, she and her guests would retire to the library and give readings (Walt Whitman was a favorite choice; she and James both considered him “the greatest of American poets”) or stargaze from the terrace.

And so the template was set. The period of 1902 to 1911 was the most transformative of Edith's entire life. She published six novels, three short-story collections, three works of nonfiction, and one volume of poetry. She freed herself from what had become an unhappy marriage (officially divorcing in 1913). She experienced passionate love for the first time, during (and after) a brief affair with an American journalist named Morton Fullerton. Most important, perhaps, she forged the work and social habits that allowed her to live alone, very happily, until she died at seventy-five.

As she wrote in her memoir, by 1905, the year she published
The House of Mirth
, an immediate bestseller and the novel that made her famous, “At last I had groped my way through to my vocation…. The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country, and I gloried in my new citizenship…. The incredible had happened!…My recognition as a writer had transformed my life.”

By dreaming The Mount into being, she'd set the stage for her own singularity.

It's almost too good to be true: while urging America to cut loose from tradition, Edith herself had “broken through the chains which had held me so long in a kind of torpor,” as she described in her memoir. Picture Bruce Banner as a Victorian lady morphing into the Incredible Hulk, her exploding figure reducing her corset
and hat and parasol to mere shreds, whole matching bedroom and dining sets falling away like shattered china.

Except, this Victorian lady didn't become a green-skinned monster. She remained a lady, a larger, stronger, and more formidable version of the one she'd been. This was the irony of Edith's great escape: she broke free of convention while remaining in place. In the doing she redefined her relationship to the home and, along with it, ours.

And so it dawned on me: taste, like appetite, is something we're born with. Both are subject to and even shaped by culture. Interior decorators—the good ones, at least—are people who have an exceptionally high sensitivity to their environments, as well as an intuitive ability to manipulate color and spatial relations.

At the magazine, a lot of my time was spent looking very closely at the rooms of a house, decoding why one room felt dramatic, say, and another calming, and translating these visual equations into words. It was surprisingly fun to discover the ways in which interior decorating conforms to its own innate laws, like science. Oh, not rocket science—but a genuine system that, when properly understood and applied, has the ability to shape our moods and how we think.

Some of the variables were blessedly obvious: A pair of matching lamps establishes a pleasing sense of symmetry. Pale colors make a room feel larger; dark colors create a close, cozy feel. More intriguing were concepts such as scale. I learned that if you want to combine many different patterns in one room, just keep them all in the same palette, and the result won't feel chaotic. Or, a tight, close floral print is nice in small doses, but she who wallpapers an entire room in tiny roses with matching curtains and bedclothes invites eyestrain and headaches.

In her autobiography, Elsie de Wolfe—a contemporary and fan of Edith's, as well as the woman credited with inventing the
profession of interior decorating—recalls the day she came home from school to discover that her parents had redone the drawing room. Like Neith, she refers to herself in the regal third person:

She ran [in]…and looked at the walls, which had been papered in a design of gray palm-leaves and splotches of bright red and green on a background of dull tan.

Something terrible that cut like a knife came up inside her. She threw herself on the floor, kicking with stiffened legs, as she beat her hands on the carpet…. She cried out, over and over: “It's so ugly! It's so ugly.”

Whether you interpret that passage as the tantrum of a spoiled child or early evidence of the legendary interior decorator to come depends perhaps on your own hardwiring. For me it was like looking in the mirror.

I'd been carrying around a similar memory for as long as I could remember, and one I simply didn't know what to do with; there was nothing
memorable
about it—no point, no drama. I'd written it down several years before, when R's mother had invited me to a daylong writing workshop in the Berkshires (not far from Edith's house, though I didn't know it at the time), and we'd been instructed to “free write,” which I hate doing, so I'd petulantly grabbed the first thing that came to mind, a stubborn, pointless memory:

I am seven years old, and I have just come home from school. I set my books on the stair and wander into my favorite room, as I do every day—and scream.

The walls have changed. When I left for school that morning the living room was its usual deep, dusky orange; now it's a tart cranberry.

The orange-ness of those walls was the spirit of that room, the point of it. At night, after dinner, I would sprawl with my schoolbooks on the rug before the fireplace, my parents stationed reading in their armchairs, and watch the orange flames cast onto the orange walls flickers of scorched, shadowy apricot, and sink into this all-embrace of heat, parents, bedtime, rug. There was no better pleasure than letting my head rest on my papers and surrendering completely to the warmth, a sensation made blissfully painful by knowing that giving in meant waking to a cold, dark room, body aching and stiff, the fire burned down to a few ginger embers. Now all of this is gone!

This cranberry color—it repulses me. It is overbright and public. What had been a glowing brick oven is now a cheerful bandstand. Where before the thick, bisque cornices framing the ceiling and windows had seemed stately and important, now they were white, like festoonery, as strained as a forced smile, or a stiff, starched bow. How could this happen? How could a world be gone in an instant? Why hadn't anyone consulted me?