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Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Hermione Lee
Chatto, 854pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Thursday, 25th January 2007

For this new-found freedom she had to thank the love of her life, Morton Fullerton, who liberated her from her frozen existence with a torrential effect scarcely rivalled until the advent of global warming. Fullerton was assistant to the famous Henri Blowitz in the Paris office of the Times, though a Harvard man. He had affairs with everyone, English lords, American poets, Blanche Roosevelt, the Ranee of Sarawak. Henry James wrote to him, ‘You are dazzling, you are beautiful, you are more than tactful, you’re tenderly, magically tactile. But you’re not kind’ — which about summed it up. As with many Don Juans, there was or seemed to be something inscrutable about him. As James warned Edith, ‘He will never pose long enough for the Camera of Identification.’

There were blissful hours in Paris under the chestnut trees, intense hours of communion in cool cathedral naves and there was, above all, the night of the Fourth of June in Suite 92 in the Charing Cross Hotel. They had crossed over to London to see Henry James. The three of them dined together under the dim red lamps of the hotel dining-room, then James went back to the Athenaeum, returning again in the morning to say goodbye to Fullerton who was leaving for France. As Lee remarks, ‘Really he might have spent the night with them!’ One cannot help thinking of Max Beerbohm’s cartoon entitled ‘A Rage of Wonderment’, which shows the ancient Henry James kneeling rather arthritically outside the door of a hotel bedroom and glaring at a pair of men’s shoes and lady’s high heels ranged neatly side by side for the boots to shine up. Nor was this the end of one of the great nights of literary passion, for as Fullerton left the room in the morning he saw Edith propped up in bed with her writing board across her knees, already scribbling the first words of the poem she later sent to him, ‘The Terminus’:

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