International Herald Tribune Article

My mom found this article online the other day. I was a little confused as to whether Lily had purposely killed herself or that she had been careless and that it was an accident. I definitely agree, though, that Lily Bart can't die a messy death.

The House of Mirth: Wharton letter reopens a mystery

By Charles Mcgrath
Published: November 21, 2007


Literary biography is never finished, Hermione Lee, the Goldsmiths'
professor of English at Oxford and author of acclaimed books about
Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, said the other day. New information
keeps turning up. In the case of Wharton, what has just turned up is a
letter that casts new light on the vexing question of what exactly
happens at the end of her 1905 novel, "The House of Mirth." Does Lily
Bart, the novel's heroine, kill herself or die of an accidental
overdose?

The text is ambiguous. Lily, honorable but not always smart in her
decisions, has so fallen from her perch in New York society that she
is living in a boarding house, and so broke that she needs to work for
a living. She has quit one job, as secretary to a tasteless social
climber, and has failed miserably at another, sewing for the
fashionable milliner Mme. Regina, and to get through the nights has
become addicted to chloral hydrate.

On the evening of her death, lonely and depressed, a step away from
prostitution, she packs away her few remaining gowns and carefully
settles her accounts, writing a check that will clear her last
remaining debt, and then deliberately takes a larger dose than usual.

"The action of the drug was incalculable," she tells herself, "and the
addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more
than procure for her the rest she so desperately needed. "

Some critics have argued that the suggestion of mere risk-taking here,
and not intentional overdosing, is simply a euphemism of the kind
frequently employed in Lily's world, where well-bred people never
referred to suicide. In an e-mail message the novelist Roxanna
Robinson, author of the introduction to the new Wharton anthology,
"New York Stories," said, "I think the reader knows on some deep level
that the event was deliberate, that Lily Bart knew she'd exhausted her
possibilities, and knew that going on would mean a life of unbearable
ignobility."

Robinson added, "If she doesn't take action here, if her death occurs
by chance (or if Anna Karenina had fallen under the wheels by
mistake), the tragedy is drained of much of its power."

Others have argued that it is precisely the careless, accidental
nature of Lily's death that is so tragic, because carelessness, a
failure to think things through, is her great flaw, while her great
strength is an ability to bounce back. Had she only lived through the
night, according to this view, she might have married Gilbert Selden,
her soul mate, and reclaimed her place in society.

The newly revealed letter, written by Wharton herself, seems to point
to the suicide theory. It is dated Dec. 26, 1904, or just a month
before "The House of Mirth" began appearing in monthly installments in
Scribner's Magazine, and is addressed to Dr. Francis Kinnicutt, a
well-known society doctor who specialized in the mental ailments of
the well-to-do. At the time of the letter, in fact, he was treating
Wharton's manic-depressive husband, Teddy, who was beginning to behave
in ways — eventually embezzling her money, setting up a mistress in
Boston — that would lead to the dissolution of their marriage.

The letter begins by resorting to the timeless disguise of the
advice-seeker. "A friend of mine has made up her mind to commit
suicide," Wharton writes, "& has asked me to find out ... the most
painless & least unpleasant method of effacing herself."

Only on the second page does Wharton reveal that her "friend" is in
fact a fictional character appearing in the pages of Scribner's,
explaining, "I have heroine to get rid of, and want some points on the
best way of disposing of her." Later she asks: "What soporific, or
nerve-calming drug, would a nervous and worried young lady in the
smart set be likely to take to, & what would be its effects if
deliberately taken with the intent to kill herself? I mean, how would
she feel and look toward the end?"

The letter was found stuck into a first-edition copy of "The House of
Mirth," along with a poem, dated 1906, by someone apparently besotted
with Lily Bart. Stephanie Copeland, the president of the Mount,
Wharton's house in Lenox, Massachusetts, which has been restored and
turned into a museum, has speculated that the poet must have been a
friend of Kinnicutt.

"The poem is pretty awful," she said last month. "My guess is that the
author is one of those people who just didn't want to believe in the
suicide, and that, knowing of his interest, Kinnicutt gave him the
letter, or the first part of it. It breaks off just where Wharton
starts to talk about Teddy's health."

Since the mid-1980s the first edition, letter and poem have belonged
to Amy Beckwith, of Dedham, Massachusetts, who got them from her
husband's uncle and aunt, John and Betty Moses. Dr. John Moses, now
retired, was for many years a physician in Scarsdale, New York, and in
a telephone conversation recently he recalled that the first edition
containing the Wharton letter had been given to him in the late '60s
or early '70s by a grateful patient named Laurence Gomme, head of the
rare book and binding department at Brentano's bookstore.

"To be honest, I didn't care much about old books or about Edith
Wharton, so I just put it on the shelf," he said. "My interests were
more medical and scientific. Now, if the letter had been by Galen,
that would have been something else." He did not object when, learning
that Beckwith was a Wharton fan, his wife made her a present of the
book and its contents.

For years, Beckwith thought the letter might be important, but she put
off doing anything about it until she happened to be listening to the
audio version of Lee's biography of Wharton, published earlier this
year by Alfred A. Knopf. "I got to the part where she says that Lily's
death was 'probably an accident,' and I thought, 'Well, let's not be
so sure about that,'" Beckwith said. "That was what prompted me."

She got in touch with the Mount, where no one seemed terribly
interested, she recalled, until she showed up with the actual letter.
"As soon as Stephanie saw it, she recognized Wharton's handwriting and
letterhead, and she got very excited," Beckwith went on. "She
recognized that the letter filled a gap."

Lee, who was shown the letter by Copeland, said earlier this week:
"One of the things that's so interesting is the reference to
serialization. We think of Wharton as a 20th-century novelist, a
master of form, and here she is writing like Dickens or Thackeray. The
book is about to start coming out, and she hasn't finished it yet. The
other great thing is what the letter suggests about her practical
meticulousness, the way she wants to get things right — her literary
pragmatism, you could say."

She added, "Does the letter prove that all along Lily intended to kill
herself? I think it's quite likely that in December 1904, Wharton was
thinking that Lily was going to commit suicide, and that by the time
she came to the ending, months later, she changed her mind, because of
the way those last pages hold onto so many moral positions at once. I
think that, as she went on, she decided that it would be more
effective if she left the ending ambiguous. It's actually a much
greater book if we don't know for sure."

Another person who has seen the letter is the 90-year-old novelist
Louis Auchincloss, who may have more Whartonian connections than
anyone still alive. His grandmother knew Edith Wharton in Newport,
Rhode Island. His parents were good friends of Freddy and Le Roy King,
New York lawyers who were Wharton's executors and also, in her later
career, when she was living in France, her advisers about contemporary
American diction.

"They were the least American gentlemen I've ever met," Auchincloss
said recently. "That's why in her late novels you get dialogue like
'By Jove, I've had a beastly, fagging sort of day.'"

Auchincloss is himself the author of a Wharton biography, a book so
fond and intimate that it sometimes reads as if he had known her.
"While I was writing it, I sometimes thought I did," he said, and then
declared his position on "The House of Mirth" to be unchanged by the
letter.

Taking down his own first edition, he read the concluding pages aloud
in his Brahmin accent, and said: "I don't see what the fuss is about.
It's perfectly clear what happens. Lily doesn't mean to kill herself
but risks death in a desperate bid for rest. Edith Wharton wrote to
Kinnicutt because she needed to find a drug that wouldn't disfigure
Lily's beautiful body. She didn't want that dreadful Mme Bovary thing,
with the arsenic. I mean, how can you have Lily Bart die a messy
death?"