THE EDITH WHARTON AFFAIR
Maloff, Saul
THE EDITH WHARTON AFFAIR SAUL MALOFP Edith Wharton: A Biography R.W.B. LEWIS Harper & Row, $15 Without the unexpected discovery of the "Fttllerton Papers," which establish in breathless...
...There was that side of Edith Wharton, the grande dame, superior to her class but very much a creature of it...
...her own fragment, "Beatrice Palmate," can bear comparison with the best work of its kind (though we can be grateful, I think, that she never completed the projected work...
...When it ended, it was over...
...Now it is there, the essential element...
...Not long out of Harvard, Morton Fullerton had become a disciple and friend of Henry James, and it was James who years later introduced him to Edith Wharton...
...Convention, of course, abundantly, urgently supports this illusion: the idea of romantic love, the sexual determinant, the grand passion, is so deeply embedded in our ways of thinking and feeling, that without it we are adrift, quite at a loss to come to terms with our subject, with the dross of a lifetime...
...He makes the effort, but the case is flimsy, at best in-, conclusive...
...rather a redirection of energy...
...and later in life quite mad...
...We are in no need of such hypotheses...
...It ended as it is in the nature of these things to end...
...though her "circle" and Proust's overlapped, they never met...
...It was an affair, by no means the only one Fullerton was conducting throughout its duration (1906-09...
...even with Fitllerton, he gets very damp, soggy, telling us, as he does, what Edith Jones wore at her wedding but of the "dive-don set" only that it was-the "gadfly of Parliaments," and passing over her mindless, benighted, class-bound social and political views and attitudes with the lightest of brushes...
...For Lewis, it was a boon, the great unlooked-for, unexpected gift from the skies, the narrative and dramatic center without which the life would all ebb and flow, like most lives, even Edith Wharton's, a progression of days and ways: Edith Wharton in the morning, Mrs...
...But a life however hectic does not necessarily constitute a Life: so many pages written, an unending flow of titles, stories, novels, sundry other writings, people seen, dear friends, gardens tended, royalties received, checks signed: Edith Wharton's life, packed though it was, always seemed incomplete, a novel rising toward and falling away from an essential element which wasn't there...
...In 1906 Edith Wharton, already a celebrated writer, was approaching her forty-fifth birthday...
...As it is, the book is heavily burdened by sheer sodden quotidian data: when Mrs...
...But what if it's hot The Event, but only an event among others, another episode in the ongoing sequence...
...No great cataclysm...
...To make capital of it Lewis is bound to show its effect upon subsequent writing, else the discovery loses some- much-of its value...
...As a character, he is not without interest (in fact a full-scale biography of him is in the making...
...Perhaps essence is the clutter, clutter the essence...
...recording inconsequential meetings with, among a multitude of others, Santayana, Moravia, Malinowsky merely because the archives rev-eal that the encounters took place and therefore must be recorded as if by force of contractual obligation...
...After all, it was only an affair...
...Not quite everyone: though she sat at fable with Yeats, awe overcame her and they spoke not...
...The erosion of the marriage, Teddy's decay and intermittent madness, the divorce: these elements, until now, had been pressed into service as the dramatic apex in the narrative of her life...
...The received version: growing up in the Gilded Age of post-Civil War America, enduring the progressive alienation of becoming a serious writer in an essentially philistine provincial society that scarcely tolerated it of its men much less its women, her gradual then permanent retreat from-renunciation of-America and choice of the expatriate life-Paris and the great world of the Faubourg St...
...nor Hemingway-nor Gertrude Stein and her circle...
...no Jones, no Newbold had ever been divorced-people of their class and time regarded that too an inconceivable thing, the ultimate scandal...
...would have been another of James's inconceivable things...
...and after a visit that went less well she lamented those "two sad hours:" "zwei traurige Stunden...
...but Lewis errs in a kindred way by summoning to his aid a rather spectral father, the actual one, who once tried his hand at some verses and was known to have read some books...
...nor did she meet Joyce-his Paris and hers were in different countries and in a state of permanent war...
...And now in the midst of this maelstrom that has always been our impression of life, we have a set-piece of a most surprising and disconcerting kind: Edith transported, Edith in love, rapture, the grand passion...
...Now we have Morton Fullerton and a passionate affair of the heart in her middle age...
...Dining out was experience...
...It was over...
...but not the sort of figure who resists die biographical imagination...
...And always her friends, the "happy few," the society of devoted, cultivated men and women...
...What is a biographer to do when he stumbles upon such archives...
...What are we to make of this-in the context of her life, or, for that matter, of any life...
...Overwhelmed by the experience, she experienced it as...
...An impious notion that goes against the grain...
...and this example, too, is not art but craft, not literature but writing, an exercise in writing, an immensely gifted writer who thought Joyce had got it all wrong, showing how it should be done...
...Teddy himself was an affable bumbler, ineffectual, supported by an allowance from his mother,4 given to riding, hunting, fishing, mad for cars, indifferent to art, bored and bewildered by ideas about anything...
...But by the same token, an "essence" maladroitly selected from the welter of experience, even-r-or rather especially-the "essence" which most commands our attention and seems most to answer our needs, will compound the clutter while illuminating nothing...
...and no matter how powerful the emotion sweeping her she was a writer, self-regarding, an observer of her own turbulences, scrutinizing her feelings in several languages, making phrases of them...
...there's nothing in the work that can't be readily accounted for by the usual accretion in time of observation and experience...
...LEWIS Harper & Row, $15 Without the unexpected discovery of the "Fttllerton Papers," which establish in breathless detail the history of Edith Wharton's adulterous affair with Morton Fullerton, the novelist's biographer would have found it hard if not impossible to impose anything like significant dramatic form or compelling narrative rhythm on the flow and stutter of her life...
...Well, why not Edith Wharton...
...but he doesn't concern us here except in his role of Edith Wharton's only lover, as the man who told an earlier biographer: "Please seize the event, however delicate the problem, to dispel the myth of your heroine's frigidity.'' Marriage was never a possibility, even if they had been "free...
...Yet divorce was unthinkable...
...Incest, of course, confers a special piquancy...
...She knew Henry James, of course, and Bernard Berenson, and their circles...
...And when she wasn't traveling and touring, she was visiting and receiving, dining-out and giving luncheons and dinners...
...She consumed worlds, James said, "eating up one for her luncheon and one for her dinner" and left the company of her friends "ground to powder, reduced to pulp, consumed utterly...
...Desmond MacCartby would say of her that she caved too much for luxury and the company of agreeable and undemanding friends...
...Certainly, she had read pornography...
...By then, he was Paris correspondent for the London Times, and later a correspondent for Le Figaro, like' her an expatriate, and like her he remained one all his life...
...Her modest attempt at the genre, after all, places her in the most admirable company of major writers and artists...
...indeed it didn't so much end as run out, die of inanition...
...The trouble with Lewis's as with so many definitive biographies is that essences, whatever they may be, are so entangled with the eternal clutter of days and years that we cannot see one for the other...
...What is the essence of a life," Leon Edel, thinking of James, asked in his Literary Biography, "and how do we disengage that essence from the eternal clutter of days and years, the inexorable tick of the clock-and yet restore the sense of that very tick...
...looking back was experience...
...and the Journal notes are of a kind...
...and as herself, a woman of extraordinary sensibility and intelligence, experiencing it: in short, as "experience...
...They will clamor for elevation to the status of Eriksonian "Event," the key, the dramatic turning-point-the heretofore missing element which unravels the mystery...
...She seemed altogether knowable and therefore as a subject for biography not very interesting-or no more interesting than her characters...
...Germain...
...with exclusive access to the huge documentary deposits in the Yale University's Beinecke Library (some fifty thousand items of all sorts) as well as everything else bearing on her life, the problem was survival, the danger drowning...
...Definitive" is hardly the word for R.W.B...
...Throughout the course of the affair, she not only lived it, she wrote itturned it into writing, as if thereby to make it real and durable, usable as experience, as material for literature...
...and everyone else...
...or what seems...
...Something of a bounder, he was the sort of man who, acting out of neurotic compulsions, seems to possess a fatal gift for ensnarling his life, and that of others, in emotional and sexual complication...
...Without Fullerton, R.W.B...
...In her best work she remained what she had been, an uacommonly fine novelist of manners...
...Lewis gives short shrift to the persistent rumor of her "illegitimate" birth (the putative father her older brother's British tutor)-a rumor originating, no doubt, in the inability of her class to account for the appearance of a major writer in its midst by the customory routes...
...Pining would have been sordid, silly, a form of sentimentality she would have despised, in life as in art...
...an overwhelming experience...
...SAUL maloff's most recently published novel is Heartland (Scribner's...
...Fullerton, one feels, just happened to be there...
...When she completed her morning's work, she turned toward the world, each a crowded life, the two taken together a hectic, overflowing one...
...The peculiar circumstances of their marriage, "incompatibility" aside, would not have mattered to the guardians and adjudicators of manners and morals of the institution: the marriage had not been consummated until three weeks after the exchange of vows, and the evidence appears convincing that there had not been, a second time...
...She had her writing and friends and travel...
...Post hoc, ergo propter hoc...
...Lewis's exhaustive biography...
...They are romantic in the bad sense, just as at her worst Edith Wharton so often wrote the kind of trash once designated by the term "ladies' magazine fiction...
...but he was then simply an old friend, and seemingly scarcely even that...
...was unthinkable...
...The fragment is essentially Gothic in conception, the repressed underside of Gothic, even to the name of the heroine, and the depiction of the exotic father...
...affairs, contrary to legend, don't move mountains and neither do they change lives, at any rate lives that have already congealed...
...In ecstasy and sorrow both, she was nothing if not a gifted linguist...
...Wharton was appallingly energetic, Lewis's pages seethe and churn with activity...
...Her turbulent comings and goings are set down dizzy-ingly, sometimes-often-for no better reason than the facts are there to be recorded-notoriously, the besetting vice and lamentable definition of "definitive", lives...
...Wharton or Edith in the afternoon and evening: touring the Italian countryside with Berenson, visiting churches and galleries, swooping down like an eagle on the quaking Henry James to gather him up for a motor-car tour, taking tea with her friends, dining at some grand table...
...but in fact the tides of Edith Wharton's life engulfed it, swept over it, buried or absorbed it...
...Pornography, however finely done, is still pornography...
...She was no heroine of melodrama, and when she tried the role she proved no better at it than might be expected...
...Bad literature: the verses that record states of feeling gush and strike attitudes, catch their breath, turn and posture...
...she had other things to do like writing...
...Yet exaggerated claims, literary or psychological, must be guarded against...
...The fragment, a primal scene between the heroine and her father, is perfectly executed, fit and meet in every detail, each stroke of the pen beautifully measured...
...It ill became her: she was hardheaded, willful, resourceful, intimidating...
...To claim more than this is to trespass in the mined salient that separates art from life, and to circle endlessly in the uncharted darkness...
...he had trout, foxes, expensive newfangled cars, and even, in a late blooming of wild oats, girls-what is worse, whom he recklessly flaunted...
...As Mrs...
...Fullerton reappears on the crowded scene that was her life...
...perhaps the quest for essence is a sentimental convention, a dramatic device that does deep violence to the truth of human life...
...She asked to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Paris near her older and dearer friend Walter Berry...
...and there was die eminent writer...
...After one of Fullerton's visits to her bed, she saluted a "new life:" "Qui comincia la vita nuova...
...What we then call essence may be nothing other than the necessary lie art tells as a means of penetrating mystery and creating illusions of truth, at its best creating an overpowering sense of truth, and even new truths...
...as she knew "everyone," they swell and . sag with names, seeming at times a guest-list to a dazzling banquet in literary history's largest ballroom...
...Lewis would have sunk in seas of material, in the matter of a bustling life...
...Wharton wasn't writing, and she wrote immensely, she traveled--for her, crossing the Atlantic seemed simpler, and certainly more attractive, than crossing the Hudson, some sixty return crossings, and that doesn't begin to touch her incessant travels in Europe and elsewhere...
...and it was an affair for her as well, a storm after a long drought...
...and there she lies...
...Why this should be necessary in the first place is not explained...
...probably she'd read that classic of pornography Gamiani, Alfred dp Musset's tribute to her greatly admired Georges Sand...
...Nor are we much edified (however delighted or startled or alarmed we may be) by the volume's other "sensational" disclosure-that Edith Wharton wrote a fragment of out-and-out pornography and the-scenario of the never-written work ok which it was to be a part...
...Before Morton Fullerton was discovered, the central dramatic episode was the collapse of her marriage to Teddy Wharton, who married the fashionable Jones girl of good "old New York" family only to learn to his bewilderment that, the nice, thoroughly acceptable, modestly rich, socially certified Edith Newbold Jones who always had been different from other girls of her class and place (places: New York and Newport) in that she read books and thought long thoughts and occupied herself with scribbling things-that that girl, instead of developing decently into a society matron, developed into Edith Wharton...
...was never considered...
...Perhaps it is to put the question falsely, or to put the wrong question...
...When its quantum of energy was exhausted, it was over...
...in the conventional view, to be that...
...Knowing Teddy, knowing Edith, James described the marriage, as only James could, as "an almost-or rather an utterly inconceivable thing...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 1
