August 26, 2008
The Love Song of Edith Wharton (1908)
[The Mount, Lenox, Mass.]
August 26 [1908]
Dear, won't you tell me soon the meaning of this silence?
At first I thought it might mean that your sentimental mood had cooled, & that you feared to let me see the change, & I wrote, nearly a month ago, to tell you how natural I should think such a change on your part, & how I hoped that our friendship—so dear to me!—might survive it.—It would have been easy, after that letter, to send a friendly: "Yes, chère amie—" surely, having known me so well all those months, you could have trusted to my understanding it?
As 1907 opened, Edith Wharton was on the cusp of a change. She had moved to Paris, a city she had loved as a visitor. Her loveless marriage to her husband was cracking. They were intellectually and emotionally incompatible, and he would take off at times for treatment of his mental illness. They would eventually divorce.
In Paris, she met the American expatriate, W. Morton Fullerton, who knew France intimately through his work as Paris correspondent for the London Times. She was 45; he 42. He was also handsome, with a flamboyant moustache, smooth dark hair and intense blue eyes. He was an engaging companion. They fell in together. She sought his advice on serializing a French translation of her novel, "The House of Mirth." She invited him to dine. They discussed literature, the French, her writing. She was returning to her home in America, The Mount, and invited him to visit. He accepted.
There, during a motor trip, as snow began to fall, they stopped and waited while the servant put chains on the tires. They smoked and chatted quietly by the side of the road. She found a shrub of witch-hazel, which blooms in late autumn. When Edith opened a note from him, she found inside, without comment, a sprig of witch-hazel. She was in love.
But the silence continues! It was not that you wanted? For a time I fancied you were too busy & happy to think of writing—perhaps even to glance at my letters when they came. But even so—there are degrees in the lapse from such intimacy as ours into complete silence & oblivion; & if the inclination to write had died out, must not you, who are so sensitive & imaginative, have asked yourself to what conjectures you were leaving me, & how I should suffer at being so abruptly & inexplicably cut off from all news of you?
Throughout the year, they found time to be together. When she was not at her work and he was not at his. Between visits from friends such as Henry James, who was a confidant to both and occasional appearances by her husband. They had to be circumspect, even among their servants. They would prearrange "surprise" meetings in Paris and wander the neighborhoods and take day trips into the countryside. Edith wrote in her diary they places they would visit — Provins, Montfort, Beauvais, Senlis — and each name would inspire memories of what they saw, where they ate, who she was with.
I re-read your letters the other day, & I will not believe that the man who wrote them not feel them, & did not know enough of the woman to whom they were written to trust to her love & courage, rather than leave her to this aching uncertainty.
They communicated by notes and letters, delivered by the Paris postal system several times a day. She would find a message from Morton on her breakfast tray. None of them survive. Hers were a mix of practical ("Here are some possibilities by motor .... Start at 11 sharpissimo & get to Les Andelys ...") and romantic ("If you knew how I love it!") and sometimes both ("There's a train for Amiens at 12, one for Chartres at 12:50 — All I can see or feel about it is the divine possibility of being with you, away & alone, for one long golden day, at last — anywhere!").
What has brought about such a change? Oh, no matter what it is— only tell me!
I could take my life up again courageously if I only understood; for whatever those months were to you, to me they were a great gift, a wonderful enrichment; & still I rejoice & give thanks for them! You woke me from a long lethargy, a dull acquiescence in conventional restrictions, a needless self-effacement. If I was awkward & inarticulate it was because, literally, all one side of me was asleep.
The day she received the sprig of witch-hazel, she began keeping a second diary, in which she would write to him because she had found "someone to talk to." "If you had not enclosed that sprig of wych-hazel in your [thank-you] note ... the note in itself might have meant nothing — would have meant nothing to me — beyond the inference that you had a more ‘personal' accent than weekend visitors usually put into their leave takings." But the sprig told her "you knew what was in my mind when I found it blooming on that wet bank in the woods."
I remember, that night we went to the "Figlia di Iorio," that in the scene in the cave, where the Figlia sends him back to his mother (I forget all their names), & as he goes he turns & kisses her, & then she can't let him go—I remember you turned to me & said laughing: That's something you don't know anything about."
For all his charms, Morton was feckless. Sometimes, he would not respond to her notes, her letters. "Mr. Fullerton," she wrote to a friend, "... never lets an occasion go by without telling me how low he rates ‘women of letters.'
Well! I did know, soon afterward; & if I still remained inexpressive, unwilling, "always drawing away," as you said, it was because I discovered in myself such possibilities of feeling on that side that I feared, if I let you love me too much, I might lose courage when the time came to go away!—Surely you saw this, & understood how I dreaded to be to you, even for an instant, the "donna non più giovane" who clings & encumbers—how, situated as I was, I thought I could best show my love by refraining—& abstaining? You saw it was all because I loved you?
Almost from the beginning, Edith felt this mix of joy and despair: "... from moments of such nearness, when the last shadow of separateness melts, back into a complete néant of silence, of not hearing, not knowing — being left to feel that I have been a ‘course' served and cleared away!"
And when you spoke of your uncertain future, your longing to break away & do the work you really like, didn't you see how my heart broke with the thought that, if I had been younger & prettier, everything might have been different—that we might have had together, at least for a short time, a life of exquisite collaborations—a life in which your gifts would have had full scope, & you would have been able to do the distinguished & beautiful things that you ought to do?—Now, I hope, your future has after all arranged itself happily, just as you despaired—but remember that those were my thoughts when you were calling me "conventional" . . .
When he complained of feeling trapped in daily journalism, she tried encouraging him to move onward. She promoted his work to American publishers and suggested that he write a book about Paris. When he was in financial trouble, she sold an expensive book he gave her for £100.
I never expected to tell you this; but under the weight of this silence I don't know what to say or leave unsaid. After nearly a month my frank tender of friendship remains unanswered. If that was not what you wished, what is then your feeling for me? My reason rejects the idea that a man like you, who has felt a warm sympathy for a woman like me, can suddenly, from one day to another, without any act or word on her part, lose even a friendly regard for her, & discard the mere outward signs of consideration by which friendship speaks. And so I am almost driven to conclude that your silence has another meaning, which I have not guessed. If any feeling subsists under it, may these words reach it, & tell you what I felt in silence when we were together!
There was also the matter of his relationship with his "sister," Katherine Fullerton. Her father was the half-brother of Morton's father and was desperately in love with her cousin. He had even proposed marriage to her shortly before seducing Edith with witch-hazel, overcame his parents' (understandable) objections, and then never followed through. Small wonder that Henry James wrote to Fullerton, "You are dazzling, my dear Fullerton; you are beautiful; you are more than tactful, you are tenderly, magically tactile. But you're not kind. There it is. You are not Kind."
Yes, dear, I loved you then, & I love you now, as you then wished me to; only I have learned that one must put all the happiness one can into each moment, & I will never again love you "sadly," since that displeases you.
Edith went to some lengths to not love Morton "sadly." When his French mistress blackmailed him over some papers she had stolen, Edith and Henry James hatched a plot. James convinced a publisher to give Morton a book advance of £100 — "the sum he [Morton] has to pay to the accursed woman isn't really a very considerable one," he wrote — that really came from Edith.
You see I am once more assuming that you do care what I feel, in spite of this mystery! How can it be that the sympathy between two people like ourselves, so many-sided, so steeped in imagination, should end from one day to another like a mere "passade"—end by my passing, within a few weeks, utterly out of your memory? By all that I know you are, by all I am myself conscious of being, I declare that I am unable to believe it!
In the winter of 1910, Wharton wrote, "What you wish, apparently, is to take of my life the utmost & 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 have me out of your mind & out of your life as a man leaves the companion who has accorded him a transient distraction. I think I am worth more than that . . ."
You told me once I should write better for this experience of loving. I felt it to be so, & I came home so fired by the desire that my work should please you! But this incomprehensible silence, the sense of your utter indifference to everything that concerns me, has stunned me. It has come so suddenly . . .
Wharton wrote about love, its pleasure and betrayal, before her affair with Morton. But afterwards, her writing carried on a greater authority. The one area where she did not use her history with Morton was in her memoirs. He is not mentioned at all.
This is the last time I shall write you, dear, unless the strange spell is broken. And my last word is one of tenderness for the friend I love—for the lover I worshipped.
Goodbye, dear.
Oh, I don't want my letters back, dearest! I said that in my other letter only to make it easier for you if you were seeking a transition—
Do you suppose I care what becomes of them if you don't care?
Later, when she worried that gossip about her impending divorce would harm her reputation, she wrote to Morton: "In one sense, as I told you, I am indifferent to the fate of this literature. In another sense, my love of order makes me resent the way in which inanimate things survive their uses! Et voilà tout."
Is it really to my dear friend—to Henry's [James] friend— to "dearest Morton"—that I have written this?
The affair dribbled on for six more months before falling into something closer to friendship on Wharton's part. They corresponded for the rest of Wharton's life. She would offer advice on his career, critique his work and in turn seek advice on some of her writing. He would continue his habit of attracting and pulling away, and while sometimes there would be a resurgence of her feeling toward him, she had taken his measure at last. She observed that Morton Fullerton's greatest accomplishment was "that exquisite art in him of not bringing it off." It seems appropriate that her last letter to him was a plea for him to come visit her, and that his response was silence.
Also from the Reader's Almanac:
- Last act for Chekov (1904)
- Hemingway's first blood (1918)
- Katharine Mansfield elopes (1909)
- Suicide attempt exposes H.G. Wells (1923)
Died: Charles Scribner, publisher, editor, Lucerne, Switzerland, 1871; William James, psychologist, Chocorua, N.H., 1910; Frank Harris, novelist, critical essayist, memoirist, Nice, France, 1931; Franz Werfel, novelist, poet, playwright, Hollywood, 1945; Charles Lindbergh, aviator, memoirist, Maui, Hawaii, 1974; Mika Waltari, novelist, Helsinki, Finland, 1979; Tex Avery (ps. Fred Bean Avery), animator, Burbank, Calif., 1980; Irving Stone, novelist, Los Angeles, 1989; Evelyn Wood, educator, Tucson, Ariz., 1995.
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