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Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Hermione Lee
Chatto, 854pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Thursday, 25th January 2007

Here, in this self-same glass, while you helped
me to loosen my dress,
And the shadow-mouths melted to one, like
sea-birds that meet in a wave —
Such smiles, yes, such smiles the mirror
perhaps has reflected;
And the low wide bed, as rutted and worn as a
high-road,
The bed with its soot-sodden chintz, the grime
of its brasses,
That has born the weight of fagged bodies,
dust-stained, averted in sleep,
The hurried, the restless, the aimless — perchance it has also thrilled
With the pressure of bodies ecstatic, bodies
like ours,
Seeking each other’s souls in the depths of
unfathomed caresses …’

The Whitmanesque sprawl of this extraordinary poem is testimony to Morton’s capacities, if not to the amenities of the Charing Cross Hotel. In old age, Fullerton implored someone who was proposing to write a life of Edith Wharton, ‘Please seize the event, however delicate the problem, to dispel the myth of your heroine’s frigidity.’

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