Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

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       Nothing by halves

      The Letters of Edith Wharton EDITED BY R. W. B. LEWIS AND NANCY LEWIS

      EDITH WHARTON’S POWERS OF mobilising people and making things happen extended, famously, far beyond her fiction. Her good friend Henry James pretended awe in the face of her energy, wealth and social appetites and heard in the sound of her car-horn (‘your silver-sounding toot’) an echo of the Last Trump. He consented, of course, to be called back to life every time, but got his revenge by portraying her as a comic figure, a matron of misrule.

      This picture was given new depth by the revelations about her passionate affair (at 45) with fellow expatriate journalist and writer W. Morton Fullerton, in R. W. B. Lewis’s 1975 biography; and in this book of the letters he’s able to reveal more by printing letters to Fullerton which came mysteriously to light only in 1980. The intensity of her response to Fullerton took her by surprise (‘you woke me from a long lethargy … all one side of me was asleep’) and so did his absences, mystifications and lies:

      Dear, won’t you tell me the meaning of this silence … this aching uncertainty … we might have had together, at least for a short time, a life of exquisite collaborations …

      But it was not to be.

      Morton seems to have been a practised juggler, who liked to keep several ladies in the air at once, so that Edith found herself, humiliatingly, elaborating a whole love-story round a man who only wanted the occasional intimate episode:

      What you wish, apparently, is to take of my life the inmost & uttermost that a woman – a woman like me – can give, for an hour, now & then, when it suits you; & when the hour is over, to leave me out of your mind & out of your life. I think I am worth more than that …

      Professor Lewis suggests that these complaints ‘cannot but strike a disquieting note for a reader in the late 1980s’, but I’m not sure why. It isn’t as if this particular problem has dated. It’s true that Edith revealed her vulnerability, but she also copes with it splendidly. In the end, you feel, she proves that she was simply better at loving than Fullerton – more able to rise to the occasion, rather as she did when she set about gruelling war-work six years later in 1914. She did nothing by halves (this was what terrorised James) but she was very good at patching up disasters, and before long she’d rewritten Morton as one of her entourage of friends.

      She had already radically rearranged most parts of her life; it only remained to divorce mindless and increasingly manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, who’d married her as ‘Pussy’ Jones back in Old New York and whom she’d long left behind in the senses that counted. She could look back on the ready-made, dull distinction that stifled her so long with brisk aversion: ‘… for 12 years I seldom knew what it was to be, for more than an hour or two of the 24, without an intense feeling of nausea … this form of neurasthenia consumed the best years of my youth … Mais quoi! I worked through it, & came out on the other side …’

      Born to a fortune, she earned a bigger one from her writing; born into a monstrous network of cousins and snobbish connections, she invented her own (equally snobbish it has to be said) cultural and literary world; born American, she improved her heritage by settling in France the better to celebrate and satirise her native land. Rumour even had it that she was illegitimate, based, it seems, mainly on the fact that there was not the slightest precedent in her family for her talent or energy.

      Energy is the key word. Given the busyness of her social life, and the impression left by the photos (semi-regal, all corseted curves, pearl chokers and small dogs), it’s easy to conclude that she merely swapped one established role for another. However, the letters tell a different story: she designed and sustained her personal world rather as she restored houses and made gardens.

      The letters aren’t mostly meditative or analytic (she never wrote much about her writing); instead they’re a vivid jumble of plans, aperçus, provocations, descriptions. Gossip she prized; and over the years the writer she came to feel closest to was Trollope. ‘I’m trying now to think out his case in relation to his contemporaries,’ she wrote to Bernard Berenson in 1934 ‘& a strange and interesting one it is. To them he was simply a good story-teller, whose books one could “leave about.”’

      She felt the same fate overtaking her work. Would the novels have been better if she hadn’t had to invent her life alongside them? She would have thought not, would have said – unlike most of her modernist, male contemporaries – that you can’t separate the two.