True Pleasures

by Lucinda Holdforth

  ‘My years of Paris life were spent entirely in the rue de Varenne –

  rich years, crowded and happy years.’

  Like Henry James, the work of Edith

  Wharton brought to life – in delicate and biting style –

  the high society of which she was a part.

  Association la Mémoire des Lieux

  The French admire Edith Wharton because she was a great writer who lived in Paris. And they appreciate her because, unlike so many, she stayed in Paris during World War One. She worked tirelessly to assist impoverished refugees and campaigned to persuade the United States government to enter the war. The French gave Mrs Wharton a Legion of Honor and even today regard her as something of a national monument.

  Edith Wharton actually looked a bit like a monument, rather large and solid. Her jaw-line was square enough to serve as a plinth. The patrician’s aristocrat, Edith actively encouraged strangers to feel intimidated by her. After all, her aunt was the exclusive Mrs Jones of New York, whose relocation to a house further up 5th Avenue gave rise to the term keeping up with the Joneses.

  Even her best friend, Henry James, was a little frightened of Mrs Wharton, and referred to her variously as The Angel of Devastation, Bonaparte and Attila. On the rare occasions when he was persuaded to visit Edith Wharton, Henry James felt like a captive prisoner. From the luxury of rue de Varenne he wrote to a friend: I am kept here in golden chains, in gorgeous bondage, in breathless attendance and beautiful asservissement.

  I suspect it suited Edith Wharton to retain some distance in most of her relationships. She wasn’t a confessional type: she liked to keep her own counsel. In society she approved of stimulating general conversation, not personal revelation. And she was particularly careful to keep strangers and hangers-on at a distance. Mrs Wharton is never more aloof than in this truly pompous segment of her autobiography, A Backward Glance:

  Among the friendships then made I should like to record with particular gratitude that of the Countess Papafava of Padua, from whom I first heard of the fantastic Castel of Cattajo, and through whose kindness the intricately lovely gardens of Val San Zibio were opened to me; of Don Guildo Cagnola of Varese, an authority on Italian villa architecture, and himself the owner of La Gazzada, the beautiful villa near Varese of which there is a painting by Canaletto in the Brera; of the countess Rasponi, who lived in the noble villa of …

  And so, I regret to advise, Edith Wharton continues on for some paragraphs. Much of A Backward Glance is like this, and, as a tactic to distance the presumptuous reader, it works superbly.

  Edith Wharton, the formidable hostess, the magisterial author, the patrician American – these personae were real. But there was more to Edith Wharton than this.

  From the outside Edith Wharton’s former home is austere and severe, surrounded by embassies and other grand homes. But as I peer into the privacy of her courtyard, I can see a burst of wisteria – delicate, mauve, playful – springing up the sandy walls and tumbling over the black wrought-iron balconies.

  Now meet another Edith Wharton, a woman unravelled by passion. She felt like a slave, and a goddess, and a girl in her teens …

  In June 1909, at the age of forty-seven, Edith Wharton consummated a romance with a journalist named Morton Fullerton. He was the grand folly of her life; the one man for whom she sacrificed all pride, all dignity, all hauteur. She had always kept a daily diary; now she kept a separate love diary in which she addressed Fullerton as you, recorded all their moments together and traced the hopeful surges and timid retreats of her emotions.

  Morton Fullerton was a complex man, a character who might, in fact, have been found in a novel by either Henry James or Edith Wharton. He was bisexual. He was also itinerant, decadent, charming and unreliable. His nature made it impossible for him to live in the bright sunlight of his American homeland; he was better suited to the more forgiving shadows and corners of European capitals. Even while he was conducting his affair with Edith Wharton, Fullerton was managing several other complicated relationships.

  In The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, Mrs Wharton has mastery of a chaotic universe. She is sane, compassionate, satirical. Who would have thought a love affair with a second-rate journalist would undo this great author? Yet it does. She is reduced to the same embarrassing clichés used by every woman in love. She writes terrible poetry in honor of their sexual encounters. She is grateful, anxious, tremulous.

  Here she is worrying about clothes: There is the black dress I had on the first time we went to the Sorbonne to hear B[aker] lecture last December. I remember thinking: Will he like me in it? … There is the tea-gown I wore the first night you dined with me alone … You liked it, you said …

  Here she is, amazed that wonderful he could love unworthy her: I don’t suppose you know, since it is more of my sex than yours – the quiet ecstasy I feel sitting next to you in a public place, looking now and then at the way the hair grows on your forehead, at the line of your profile turned to the stage, your attitude, your expression – while every drop of blood in my body whispers: ‘Mine-mine-mine’.

  Of course, Fullerton wasn’t hers, hers, hers at all, and the relationship eventually fizzled out in a sad flurry of pleading letters from Edith. But I don’t think we need to pity Edith Wharton her painful love affair. It was one of the great experiences of her life. Worse than too much pain was the prospect of no sensation at all. Edith once wrote a searing image of a life lived without deep experiences, a life untouched:

  I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors are never turned, no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

  This, in fact, expresses Edith’s view of the kind of life she felt condemned to live in America – a life of surface activity but deep inner loneliness. Edith was in her late forties when she began her affair with Morton Fullerton. She was at her peak as a writer and a woman. She wanted to open all the doors of her soul, no matter how invasive the visitor might be.

  In Edith’s expansion as a woman, Paris was important. America, she felt, condemned a woman to live within a category: I was a failure in Boston…because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable. In Paris, however, there was space for Edith Wharton to be fully herself, to explore the heights and depths of her own character.

  Moreover, unlike the Americans, the French understood pleasure, and its importance. It is only in sophisticated societies that intellectuals recognize the uses of the frivolous, she said. Edith Wharton wanted to be fashionable and frivolous and sophisticated and intelligent all at the same time. She wanted the precious right to be contradictory. Why shouldn’t she transcend the tedium of strict categories for women and their behavior? She realized she couldn’t be various, spicy and contradictory in America. It was a society that dealt in simplicities. But in Paris, well, it was quite different.

  After her death, when the first biographies of Edith Wharton were being written, Morton Fullerton wanted people to understand the extent to which Mrs Wharton had achieved complexity and completeness. Please seize the event, he urged, however delicate the problem, to dispel the myth of your heroine’s frigidity …

  It’s a solitary figure I make, a thirty-something woman with her bright lipstick and her black leather bag strapped across her shoulder. I’m conscious of my aloneness as I walk through the quiet streets of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and listen to my footsteps rebound off the pavement. No one is waiting for me; no obligations require my attention. I am surplus to social requirements. Perhaps I should feel lonely. But I d
on’t. Like a cat, I choose to be pleased with myself and my own company. I prowl these ancient streets with a sly sense of freedom.

  Dispel the myth of your heroine’s frigidity, urged Morton Fullerton. But frigidity was a myth that clung long and hard to Edith Wharton. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s acerbic Paris correspondent, referred to her after her death as the literary, correct, meticulous Mrs Wharton … She went on, acidly: From the Rue de Varenne [Edith Wharton] finally started her frigid conquest of the faubourg … Mrs Wharton was perhaps too formal even for the faubourg.

  There’s a reason why Janet Flanner was so harsh on Edith Wharton. Flanner was a prominent member of the artistic community in Paris which gathered around the charismatic and revolutionary figure of Gertrude Stein. Mrs Wharton must have seemed quite the stuffy Grande Dame with her belle époque gowns and her Proustian salons compared to the breakthrough salon hosted by Miss Stein at rue de Fleurus.

  What Janet Flanner didn’t, perhaps, understand was just how much Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein had in common. These two women couldn’t have been more different, yet they shared a set of ideas about Paris, about tradition and freedom, about the role of a civilized society and the place of women in it.

  In 1940, Gertrude Stein published a book called Paris, France. It is a love letter to her adopted country. It opens with, and then intermittently repeats, this curious little refrain: Paris, France is exciting and peaceful. At first I hated this phrase. How could somewhere be both exciting and peaceful? The phrase lacked all logic, even poetic logic. It seemed to me sloppy writing of the worst and most pretentious kind. And at first I found the book itself hard going (what grudge did Ms Stein have against punctuation?).

  But this funny little book gradually drew me in. Ms Stein proceeds by degrees to explore why a fundamentally conservative society provided the fertile soil for breakthrough modernism. Through her portraits of bourgeois servants and peasants and shopkeepers and pets she reveals a society based on tradition, order and ritual. She shows us something of the worldly, unsparing French acceptance of human nature and life and death. France, according to Ms Stein, is a complex, unsentimental, deeply civilized society. She says: The French need to be civilized and in order to do so … must have tradition and freedom. Tradition and freedom.

  Twenty years earlier, in 1919, Edith Wharton wrote her own love letter to France, French Ways and their Meaning. Of course, Mrs Wharton’s world is sprinkled rather more with dukes and Académiciens. But, from her very different perspective, she arrives at a similar conclusion.

  Mrs Wharton said:

  There is a reflex of negation, of rejection, at the very root of the French character: an instinctive recoil from the new, the untasted, the untested, like the retracting of an insect’s feelers at contact with an unfamiliar object; and no one can hope to understand the French without bearing in mind that this unquestioning respect for rules of which the meaning is forgotten acts as a perpetual necessary check to the idol-breaking instinct of the freest minds in the world. It may sound like a poor paradox to say that the French are traditional about small things because they are so free about big ones.

  Like the decisive clues in the treasure hunt, up pop those twin ideas again: tradition and freedom. For these two very different women, Paris, traditional and free, created a kind of creative space. A space within which to invent an art, or a life.

  It was easy to tag Edith Wharton as an old fuddy-duddy. It’s well known that she didn’t admire James Joyce or TS Eliot. Nor did she enjoy Radclyffe Hall’s controversial lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. But her objections were aesthetic, not moral. The form of things was very important to her. How you did, artistically speaking, was every bit as important as what you did. And indeed, the traditional nineteenth-century forms and style of Mrs Wharton’s novels have to some extent overshadowed the genuinely progressive ideas within them.

  In fact, Mrs Wharton, traditional on the outside, was wonderfully free on the inside. She relished the flowing dance of Isadora Duncan. It shed light on every kind of beauty, she thought. Diaghilev, with composer Stravinsky and his Ballet Russes, broke down old barriers of convention, she said, with his wild, free measures. She was an admirer of the groundbreaking Le Sacre du Printemps and L’Oiseau de Feu.

  And then there’s Gertrude Stein. She is credited with the birth of modernism in her salon. She was a lesbian, an iconoclast, a revolutionary user of language. Her friends included the literary and artistic avant-garde, like Hemingway and Picasso. Yet this wasn’t the whole story either. Underneath the revolutionary veneer, Gertrude and Alice lived with the order and regularity of the most stolid bourgeois couple. They were as tidy and fussy as maiden aunts, except that instead of pastel landscapes, they had modernist masterpieces on their walls.

  In the end then, Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein – and who would wish to downplay how wonderfully different they were? – created an orderly framework for their extraordinary lives. Mrs Wharton’s rather secretive progressiveness co-existed comfortably with a deep respect for tradition and old gardens and refined manners. Equally, Gertrude Stein’s radicalism co-existed comfortably with dry teas and walking the dogs. Tradition and freedom they sought, and won.

  But there’s more.

  Paris was important both to Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein because of the way it treated women. In Paris, women were not deemed additional or ornamental to civilization: they were the instrument and the evidence of civilization. Women were civilization.

  The more civilized a society is, the wider is the range of each woman’s influence over men, and of each man’s influence over women, said Edith Wharton. Intelligent and cultivated people of either sex will never limit themselves to communing within their own households … The long hypocrisy which Puritan England handed on to America concerning the danger of frank and free social relations between men and women has done more than anything else to retard real civilisation in America.

  Gertrude Stein echoed this view: The relation of men to women and men to men and women to women in a state of being civilized has very much to be considered. Frenchmen love older women, that is women who have already done more living, and that has something to do with civilisation.

  Of all the things Gertrude Stein said about Paris, her most famous line is this: It’s not what Paris gave you but what it didn’t take away from you that was important.

  I think what Paris didn’t take away from Gertrude, or Edith, or the dozens of other women who came here, was their invented selves, their created womanhood. In Paris they could be the kind of women they chose to be, straight or gay, promiscuous or monogamous, creative, independent, open, traditional and free.

  That’s why Paris was exciting. And that’s why it was peaceful too.

  In Australia we do girls very well: young, fresh, ignorant, sexy girls. Not that I was one of them. I was pale and bookish and wore black tights in winter and secondhand sixties’ frocks in summer. It’s not as though I didn’t try to become a sun-burnished bikini type, but it simply didn’t work. I certainly didn’t catch the boys: all I got was a sunburn.

  In France they like women, grown-up women. Ellen once said to me that the French don’t consider that a woman starts to become interesting until she is thirty-five years old. It’s why Paris always attracted older women of fame or substance, like Maria Callas or Olivia de Havilland or Pamela Harriman, who felt appreciated here. (And why so few French women emigrate. When Germaine de Staël went to England she was genuinely puzzled by the way English women were treated. ‘Is a woman a minor forever in your country?’ she asked her neighbor Susannah Phillips. ‘It seems to me that your sister [novelist Fanny Burney] is like a girl of fourteen.’)

  But what does it mean to be a woman, a grown-up woman? When you’re young you imagine that maturity of mind must, automatically, accompany a maturing body. Except it doesn’t happen. You can get to thirty-five and still feel like a little child.

  The truth is, we aren’t psychologically rew
arded for adulthood anymore and all our advertising is directed to how we can stay young and fresh and carefree. It used to be that children were solemnly initiated into adulthood. Menstruation, a twenty-first birthday, or marriage, or the birth of a child – these were the milestones. And causes for ritual celebration. But not anymore. Or at least, not as demonstrations of adulthood.

  Even as a schoolgirl laboring up the hill to the white convent, I knew I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be a worldly woman, although I hardly knew what that meant. And I sensed that it would be hard to achieve this in Australia, an ancient continent but a young country, a teenage nation. In the end, of course, my solution was to seek out exotic travel and interesting jobs and look for the great conversations that would shape the clueless teenager into a sophisticated woman. I’m not sure I had much success.

  Years ago, when I was on my first and only diplomatic posting to Belgrade, the senior local staff member was a plump Serbian aristocrat named Marina. She had been part of the Embassy for twenty years. ‘Darling,’ she said to me, with her ruined smile, ‘I have seen so many of you Australian women. You are all the same. You are romantics.’ She said this as if it were a dirty word. ‘You expect too much,’ she said. ‘You’re always disappointed. You expect the men to be something they are not. Darling,’ she said, ‘you have to learn how to manage men. European women,’ she repeated smugly, spreading her moist ringed hands, ‘we know how to manage men.’

  I hung my head for a moment, and then returned to my dark little office and resumed hand-wringing and heartbreaking over my faraway boyfriend’s infidelities. I knew she was right, but what could I do?

  Edith Wharton thought about this issue too and, with some rare compassion towards her countrywomen, concluded that American women couldn’t help but be immature simply because they were American.

  Why does the European woman interest herself so much more in what the men are doing? Because she’s so important to them that they make it worth her while! She’s not a parenthesis, as she is here – she’s in the very middle of the picture. Where does the real life of most American men lie? In some woman’s drawing room or in their offices? The answer’s obvious isn’t it. The emotional center of gravity’s not the same in the two hemispheres. In the effete societies it’s love, in our new one it’s business.