In honor of Father’s Day

Edith Wharton found herself—and her calling—in her father’s library. Her parents may have been, as she says in her 1934 memoir, A Backward Glance, “far from intellectual, [people] who read little and studied not at all,” but her father possessed a “gentleman’s library” crammed with classics, where young Edith was given leave to roam and dream. (Novel reading, on the other hand, was verboten.) When Wharton conjures up her childhood in A Backward Glance, she does so with one eye, and the whole of her heart, fixed on that library:

“But the library calls me back, and I pause on its threshold, averting my eyes from the monstrous oak mantel supported on the heads of vizored knights, and looking past them at the rows of handsome bindings and familiar names. … [L]ong before the passing of years and a succession of deaths brought them back to me, I could at any moment visualize the books contained in those low oak bookcases.”

And a few pages later:

“Whenever I try to recall my childhood it is in my father’s library that it comes to light. I am squatting again on the thick Turkey rug, pulling open one after another the glass doors of the low bookcases, and dragging out book after book in a secret ecstasy of communion.”

Finding herself was the easy part. Recalling the volumes of Keats and Shelley given her one birthday at the express recommendation of “Mr. North at Scribner’s,” she says:

“Then the gates of the realms of gold swung wide, and from that day to this I don’t believe I was ever again, in my inmost self, wholly lonely or unhappy.”

Following her calling was harder:

“For my parents and their group, though they held literature in great esteem, stood in nervous dread of those who produced it.”

And again:

“In the eyes of our provincial society authorship was still regarded as something between a black art and a form of manual labour.”

Thus she concludes the section on her early youth with this lament:

“How could I ever have supposed I could be an author? I had never even seen one in the flesh!”

Fortunately for Wharton—and, even more, for all of us—she did suppose she could be an author, her parents’ genteel prejudices notwithstanding. On this Father’s Day, we thank and celebrate George Frederic Jones for his unwitting foresight in keeping the library that set his daughter free.

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Words on Wharton is an occasional series of musings and jottings inspired by (and generously spiced with) Wharton’s words.