I’m not sure I want anyone to see my library when I’m dead.
I use the words ‘library’ but what I really mean is the stack of books next to my bed, jammed into the bookcase and piled up in boxes in the barn. Books are personal. Jewelry, clothes, photos, knick knacks and cars all reveal things about you. They announce what you value, how much money you have and how you spent your time but they don’t uncover your soul.
If you have a soul, your books lay it right on the table. They proclaim what you believed, dreamt about, planned for, escaped to (and from) and pondered. If you keep a book after reading it, it usually means there was a connection, a reason to keep it around. If you keep a book it meant something to you, unless you’re one of those creepy people who collect books just so they can make their living room feel warm and inviting.
Sometimes, when I want a ‘weird’ book from the library that doesn’t fit my mom/teacher personae, I’m embarrassed to check it out. I’d rather drive to another town to pick it up then have it sent to my library. While I can’t imagine that my librarian is keeping track of all the strange trends and self-help books that I’ve read over the years, it is a really small library, and she probably can’t help judging a little bit. You know, kind of like when you take in the contents of someone’s grocery cart and make a snarky comment in your head?
So I wonder if Edith Wharton felt the same way about her books. I know she loved and valued them deeply but I wonder if she wanted to keep them private. When Wharton died in 1937 she left her books to Colin Clark, her godson, and also the son of her friend, the historian Sir Kenneth Clark. They were sold to George Ramsden and finally sold back to The Mount, her estate in Massachusetts and set up on the shelves for everyone to see.
If her decision to leave the books to Colin was deliberate, then perhaps she didn’t intend for the collection to be on display for every Wharton groupie to ogle over (she probably couldn’t even imagine having groupies). It’s possible she didn’t want strangers to know what her friend Henry James wrote in his dedication (“in sympathy”) or what lines she marked in George Santayana’s poems or what touched her in Robert Browning’s letter to Elizabeth (“It is hard to make these sacrifices”).
I use the words ‘library’ but what I really mean is the stack of books next to my bed, jammed into the bookcase and piled up in boxes in the barn. Books are personal. Jewelry, clothes, photos, knick knacks and cars all reveal things about you. They announce what you value, how much money you have and how you spent your time but they don’t uncover your soul.
If you have a soul, your books lay it right on the table. They proclaim what you believed, dreamt about, planned for, escaped to (and from) and pondered. If you keep a book after reading it, it usually means there was a connection, a reason to keep it around. If you keep a book it meant something to you, unless you’re one of those creepy people who collect books just so they can make their living room feel warm and inviting.
Sometimes, when I want a ‘weird’ book from the library that doesn’t fit my mom/teacher personae, I’m embarrassed to check it out. I’d rather drive to another town to pick it up then have it sent to my library. While I can’t imagine that my librarian is keeping track of all the strange trends and self-help books that I’ve read over the years, it is a really small library, and she probably can’t help judging a little bit. You know, kind of like when you take in the contents of someone’s grocery cart and make a snarky comment in your head?
So I wonder if Edith Wharton felt the same way about her books. I know she loved and valued them deeply but I wonder if she wanted to keep them private. When Wharton died in 1937 she left her books to Colin Clark, her godson, and also the son of her friend, the historian Sir Kenneth Clark. They were sold to George Ramsden and finally sold back to The Mount, her estate in Massachusetts and set up on the shelves for everyone to see.
If her decision to leave the books to Colin was deliberate, then perhaps she didn’t intend for the collection to be on display for every Wharton groupie to ogle over (she probably couldn’t even imagine having groupies). It’s possible she didn’t want strangers to know what her friend Henry James wrote in his dedication (“in sympathy”) or what lines she marked in George Santayana’s poems or what touched her in Robert Browning’s letter to Elizabeth (“It is hard to make these sacrifices”).
And I’m no Wharton scholar, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t her intention to show off the poem that her lover, Morton Fullerton, wrote on the flyleaf of Tristan et Iseut which he gave her as a gift a few year before she divorced her husband.
The Mount website states that, “the books have great value for scholarship in what they reveal about Wharton’s thoughts, the influences on her writing, and her intellectual development.” And in his catalog of her books, George Ramsden said “Edith Wharton’s library, her palace of dreams, the scene of her ‘aloneness’ but the key to her closest friendships, is the expression of a supremely imaginative life.”
So while we pry into Wharton’s heart and mind, reveal all her secrets and consider what each margin scribble signified, her 19th century sensibilities are probably bringing a blush to her cheeks and making her wish her books were buried with her.
p.s. please donate my books to the Salvation Army.
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