Reporter at the Front and Organizer at the Rear: 1915

Abstract

edith wharton had spent the autumn and the winter of 1914 organizing war charities and raising money for the refugees flooding Paris. She told Mary Berenson, who had been staying with her during the creation of the American Hostels for Refugees and who had asked how the new organization was getting along, that the hostels took “a lot of nursing, & reams of letter writing.”¹ The writing was of a kind, however, that did not lend itself to producing fiction. In a New Year’s greeting excusing “put[ting] off even the letters one most wanted to write” she said she wished she could write “when evening came, [if] my brain were not too sodden & my hand too tired to pick up a pen.”² She confided to Charles Scribner that while she had managed to raise $100,000 during the previous five months, the daily demands of fund raising had left her “absolutely pen-tied.”³ Her literary production had fallen off so sharply that for 1914 she filed taxes on an income of only $900.⁴

War is the greatest of paradoxes: the most senseless and disheartening of human retrogressions, and the stimulant of qualities of soul which, in every race, can seemingly find no other means of renewal.

—Edith Wharton, Fighting France, 53