Verdun. In World War One. Doesn’t sound like a tourist destination, but Edith Wharton tours it, among many other villages and trenches along the frontiere-front.
Men die for a song, say “Land of the free, home of the brave,” or in WWI France, a tune from the recent 1870 War, “Sauvez, suavez La France,/ Ne l’abandonnez pas!” Sung in the village church of Sainte Menehould that had been turned into a hospital, “The church was without aisles, and down the nave were four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets”(142). The women wailed it from the altar, women dressed in black “(they all seemed to be dressed in mourning),” with “silver haze floating out from the acolyte’s censer.”
Wharton uses the word ambulance in its French meaning, a field hospital, possibly movable though not just a cart pulled by mules—which reminds me, this must have been the last war when cavalry actually rode horses. Our writer describes the rutted mudhole between buildings in Verdun, hard to tramp through, because of the horses having roiled it.
It’s a wealthy book, in more than one sense, filled with insights and analysis, but also with delightful comparisons, say, a Moroccan child, the youngest of many, “lay like a squirrel” in his father’s arms (205).
Nuggets of insight appear throughout this book, chinks of density, so it does not read like a travel book, but more like comparative cultures, France, Italy, and Morocco. Look at this: “England and France: the one feels the need of defining what the other finds it simpler to take for granted. England has never had a written Constitution, yet her constitutional government has long been the model of free nations. England’s standards are all implicit. She does not feel the French need for formalizing and tabulating” (174).
As Thoreau’s Maine Woods includes a great Penobscot dictionary, Wharton uses French and German phrases, like marmitons, cook’s boys, with which this edition prefaces the “Preface.” S.B. Wright’s introduction informs us that young Edith grew up in Europe from age four to ten, in Paris and Rome. Just post-Civil War. Yet this collection takes us into WWI, a long career of foreign commentary—unless Europe was really her home, like Isabel Archer’s.
Edith Wharton, née Jones, grew up in Europe, Paris and Rome, just after the American Civil War. She spent from age four to ten there, so in fact, Wharton is as European as any American like Henry James or Hemingway, both of whom were much older when they encountered the Old World. She writes with insight on my daughter’s Milano, where the Ospedale Maggiore, a grand columned space built for lepers, a lazaretto, impressed northern visitors who saw it as a stately as palace “compared to the miserable pest-houses north of the Alps.” “One wonders whether this poetizing of philanthropy, this clothing of charity in the garb of beauty, may not have had its healing uses: whether the ugliness of the modern hospital may not have made it, in another sense, as unhygienic as the more picturesque buildings it has superceded”(105).
May I testify that beauty does tend to heal: consider the art of Susan Mohl Powers, which was first exhibited at Squibb International Headquarters, and was invited to Sloan Kettering by none other than Lewis Thomas, and now graces the foyer of Prima Care in Fall River, MA, as well as fourteen walls of the schizophrenic ward in Butler Hospital, Providence. Childrens Hospital Boston showed a large piece for years. (Check her name on wikipedia.) Perhaps the most salubrious effect (in its etymological sense) has been on this reviewer and critic whose bilious contempt has been brightened through large stained-glasslike wall colors and images.
This collection ends with Morocco, where our writer admires the “instinct of skillful drapery,” “Moroccan crowds are always a feast to the eye”(188). But she finds the harem ignorant, uncleanly, and only treating childhood illness with amulets and Koran verses. She explains the premature sexuality of the harem, “At eight or nine the little girls are married, at twelve the son of the house is ‘given his first negress’; and thereafter, in the leisured class, both sexes live to old age in an atmosphere of sexuality without seduction”(204). ( )

Very hard going at first, but picked up towards the end. Overall, I was disappointed - for me there was too much art history and discussion of garden architecture and not enough writing about the places visited. ( )

i bought this book because it was by edith and i like women writers and travel writing but this was very disappointing. the first part was old travel writing with no zip. the parts on wartime france and morocco were better. ( )