Sexual Awakening in Mid-Life: The Fullerton Affair
"She felt like a slave, and a goddess, and a girl in her teens."
The Reef
When Henry James introduced Morton Fullerton to Edith Wharton in the fall of 1907, Fullerton was forty-two years old, she was forty-five and an established writer. She was preparing herself to shed an unsatisfactory marriage of more than twenty years and hoping for a last opportunity to experience love. By this time her need for profound emotional experience outweighed her disapproval of adultery and divorce. Feeling emotionally stagnant, her soul seemed to demand the tumultuous upheaval of passion. Even more than most women, and in more than just a physical way, she required what psychologist Sophie Freud calls "the passion experience," a focusing of all the psychic energies on a single point, on something or someone outside the self.[5] At the time of their meeting, Morton Fullerton had broken up a brief marriage with a French singer, had become engaged to his adoptive sister Katharine, and was probably frightened by this strange development. With a childless married woman such as Edith Wharton, he could indulge his predilection for familial eroticism without risk of commitment. The friendship quickly flowered into an
intensely passionate love affair for some months following Wharton's move to Paris in 1908.
Morton Fullerton has a bad reputation with Wharton's admirers. Leon Edel calls him variously "an elegant seducer," a "libertine," and a "middle-aged mustached Lothario." R. W. B. Lewis, Wharton's biographer, refers in his edition of her letters to Fullerton's "smiling selfishness" and "sheer slackness of nature." Although generally characterized as a rotter and a scoundrel, Fullerton liberated the sexuality of some remarkably discerning men and women. Furthermore, he was magnetic enough to retain their loyalty even after they learned that they were only a passing phase in his gaudy sexual history. To each he gave the sensation of a unique, transcendent love for a brief period, then moved on to the next. Few ever turned away from this "dashing well-tailored man with large Victorian moustaches and languid eyes, a bright flower in his button-hole, and the style of a 'masher'."[6]
Such was the ripened Fullerton whom biographer Leon Edel met in Paris, an expatriate from a provincial New England ministerial home who had been a brilliant success at Harvard and gone on to a journalistic career as the Paris representative of the London Times . Successful also in literary circles, he was a friend of George Santayana, Bernard Berenson, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde.
To those who perceived the scoundrel and masher in Fullerton, the idea that he could have been the lover of Edith Wharton seemed so improbable that for years biographers assumed that the man addressed in her torrid "Love Diary"[7] was the genteel diplomat Walter Berry. Although she did indeed have great love for Berry, she may well have publicized that fact in her memoir, A Backward Glance, as a red herring to throw people off Fullerton's scent.[8]
Wishing that there be no record of the affair, she returned or destroyed Fullerton's letters and begged him to do likewise with hers. Ignoring her repeated demands, he preserved hundreds of her letters, which are now open to public scrutiny just as she feared. He tended to hold on to letters even though
some of them had already led to threats of blackmail. At one point Wharton and Henry James helped him raise money to buy off a mistress, Henrietta Mirecourt, who threatened him with compromising letters she had found from Lord Gower and others from Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak. In his needy old age Fullerton still had on hand letters from Henry James, which he sold to raise funds.[9]
Edith Wharton's passion for William Morton Fullerton is a mystery in the story of her life and a fascinating puzzle in the psychology of love. The recent emergence of hundreds of love letters she wrote to him (now in the archives of the University of Texas at Austin) intensifies rather than resolves the question of why she chose a chronically faithless man who was also bisexual. To probe the question of her choice we must ask why this particular man was able to release her long-imprisoned sensuality. Why did this moralistic woman yield so readily to an adulterous liaison, and why with a man whose sexual history and personal style pointed so clearly toward her ultimate humiliation? Beyond the obvious answers of age, need, and opportunity, we find a curious matching at the deeper levels of personality.
In Chapter 1 we saw indications of a secret sexual life that young Edith was able to pursue outside of direct maternal surveillance. By giving up normal expressions of sexual curiosity, she permitted herself a florid fantasy life that probably included incestuous elements and may have led to self-stimulation. Given her sense of maternal omniscience, she must have felt that she was being observed even in the "secret garden" of her fantasy, and judged herself guilty for enjoying substitute forms of eroticism. If the outer mother was deceived by Edith's renunciations, the inner one, that Calvinistic god of her own creating, was not. She would have to atone for her hidden pleasures, so that sexuality would never be possible for her without an element of guilt and punishment. This accords with the perverse strategy that psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan finds characteristic of sexually submissive women, a strategy designed to atone for unconscious guilt with conscious tor-
ment. Wharton's adult eroticism, according to Kaplan, "could flourish only in a forbidden relationship where sin and guilt were conscious," i.e., in an adulterous relationship into which was built an element of self-abasement.
Kaplan regards the Fullerton affair not as a grand passion but as a form of perversion, because of Wharton's "insistence on her worthlessness and her willingness to accept his tyranny."[10] Viewing this position as an unconsciously chosen sexual bondage, Kaplan observes: "When this subservience and submissive dependency on an idealized authority, an attitude typical of a young child toward the parents, becomes a pronounced feature of an adult relationship, it is tantamount to perversion."[11] In placing herself at the mercy of a man she herself had endowed with dominance, Wharton was, according to this theory, reenacting a childhood sense of maternal abandonment, with the added element of partial control. The lover "becomes invested with tyranthood by virtue of his physical and emotional comings and goings, which are interpreted as a giving of love and a taking away of love. In extreme submissiveness the erotic desire is not directed toward an actual person but rather toward a situation of tyranny.... The threat of abandonment is an essential ingredient of a perverse script."[12] Kaplan concludes, however, that unlike other slaves to submissive love, Wharton was able eventually to extricate herself sufficiently to regain her own autonomy.
With this picture in mind, we turn to Morton Fullerton—asking first and especially the nature and origins of his amatory style, which was appealing enough to awaken the repressed eroticism of such disciplined celibates as Edith Wharton and Henry James. Addressing the puzzle of Fullerton's appeal to such people, R. W. B. Lewis describes Fullerton's "dreamy vein of idealism" and his "inherited interest in religious matters: meditations on proofs of the existence of God alternated in his pocket diary with references to politics, literature, and art. But religious idealism mingled in Morton
Fullerton's make-up with a no less positively marked erotic impulse and a strong sexual appeal."[13] Fullerton's ability to fuse the religious with the erotic, even his libertinism, can be understood with reference to ideas current in turn-of-the-century artistic circles.
But to understand the lasting appeal of this emotionally exploitative man to morally discerning people requires another kind of inquiry. We must look to the origin of Morton Fullerton's affective life in his relationship to his mother, then to the extension of this to his adopted sister, and thence to an oddly diverse series of lovers. Few ever rejected him on ethical grounds; even Camille Chabert, the French wife he put aside shortly after she bore his child, remained obsessed with him for the rest of her life.[14]
The mustachioed libertine who was to arouse Wharton's slumbering sensuality had performed a similar role, according to Leon Edel, in the erotic life of Henry James. Edel places Morton Fullerton at the very center of James's awakening to homoerotic feelings, treating the encounter of the fifty-year-old celibate author with the young journalist as the opening wedge of a series of such late-life involvements.
The letters James wrote to Fullerton are undoubtedly love letters despite their ostentatiously hyperbolic tone. Thanking Fullerton for a letter, James wrote:
How, my dear Fullerton, does a man write in the teeth of so straight a blast from—I scarce know what to call the quarter: the spice-scented tropic isles of Eden—isles of gold—isles of superlative goodness? I have told you before that the imposition of hands in a certain tender way "finishes" me, simply—and behold me accordingly more finished than the most parachevé of my own productions.... You do with me what you will . . . You're at any rate the highest luxury I can conceive, and . . . I should wonder how the devil I can afford you. However, I shall persist in you. I know but this life. I want in fact more of you . . . You are dazzling, my dear Fullerton; you are beautiful; you are more than tactful, you are tenderly, magically tactile .
(September 26, 1900)
In 1907 he asked, "Can one man be as mortally, as tenderly attached to another as I am to you?" As in his letters about Wharton calling her an "Angel of Devastation," James dared to express genuine feelings under a mask of playful exaggeration. And like Fullerton's mother earlier and Edith Wharton later, James often sounded the wistful cry, "I want more of you!" Fullerton gave of himself intensely in brief encounters, but knew the value of making himself scarce.
Paradoxically, Morton Fullerton's own freedom from conventional constraints provided a model and a sanction for one so painfully inhibited as Wharton. She was delighted to experience at last "what happy women know," even though aware from the start that it would not last and would ultimately prove painful. She was ready for what Sophie Freud's research on women who first experience overpowering love in middle life defines as "the passion experience." Most of her subjects would endorse the following words from one of them who first experienced passion in her forties: "No matter that it ends in sadness because for a little while I've been in touch with what feels like the kernel of my soul."[15]
Fullerton, an experienced sensualist of eclectic appetites, would not long rest satisfied with an older married woman of little beauty who was also his senior in professional accomplishment. Indeed, she was to learn that he could not long rest satisfied with anyone regardless of age or appearance. Even from the beginning she prepared herself for the inevitable termination of the passionate side of the affair while trying to preserve other aspects of the relationship. Wharton maintained the connection through correspondence for the next thirty years, the duration of her life, despite Fullerton's dilatory responses.
Edith Wharton deluged her beloved with missives long after the passion died out, and like the letters of her fictitious novelist, Wharton's have become publicly accessible and many are now published, an eventuality that she dreaded.[16] Remembering her own novella about the posthumous publica-
tion of love letters, she frequently sounded the following note without success.
Cher ami—Can you arrange, some day next week . . . to bring, or send, me such fragments of correspondence as still exist? I have asked you this once or twice, as you know.... My love of order makes me resent the way in which inanimate things survive their uses!
(November 27, 1909)
His failure to comply did not stem the flow of her letters, and Fullerton was not one to destroy documents. He preserved letters from many of his lovers even after such records had caused him legal problems.
Wharton anticipated such behavior in "The Touchstone," which debates extensively the ethics of publishing private letters. Defenders of publication argue that "a personality as big as Margaret Aubyn's belongs to the world . . . It's the penalty of greatness—one becomes a monument historique . Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is always open to the public" (38). Proponents of the right to privacy (who nevertheless devour the letters), exclaim I believe it is a vice, almost, to read such a book.... it's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots—her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care . . . They're unloved letters" (36–37).
Much that Wharton says about Aubyn's motives for pursuing Glennard with unsought missives helps explain the mystery of her own attachment to Morton Fullerton. "The Touchstone" portrays the special intimacy attainable through letters in the absence of physical proximity:
Their friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more and more a banquet of empty dishes. [When they separated they] exchanged the faded pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence. Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her presence . She had adopted ... a note as affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work, she questioned him about his.
(12–13; italics added)
Wharton was to adopt just this kind of "affectionately impersonal" tone of professional banter when the affair descended from passion into camaraderie.
Paradoxically, Aubyn finally emigrated to Europe, leaving Glennard behind, in order, she said, to "see him always . . . to be nearer him" (14). Thereafter the current of her letters became a flood. Like Wharton in matters of the heart, Aubyn sees most intensely through the eye of imagination.[17] This conception of intimacy enhanced by distance helps explain why love letters provided Wharton an especially satisfying means of relationship.[18] Letters liberate the correspondents from mundane reality, giving fuller range to the imagination and permitting idealization of both partners. For a time, the Morton Fullerton of Wharton's imagination became her idealized "other self" as well as the mirror of the self she was yearning to liberate or create.[19]
The personalities generated in epistolary space could act out normally suppressed parts of the self, freeing them from domination by the public persona. Wharton had already prepared the way for this overthrow of conventional restraints by her reading in transcendental thinkers such as Whitman and Nietzsche, a tradition that Fullerton knew how to exploit in his sexual conquests. Good intellectual authority enabled her to build a bridge between religious and sexual anti-nomianism: "I feel as though all the mysticism in me, the transcendentalism that in other women turns to religion were poured into my feeling for you, giving me a sense of immanence, inseparableness from you" (April 2, 1908). Describing herself in "The Love Diary" as "Jenseits von Gut und Böse" ("beyond good and evil"), she threw herself into the religion of passion.
In letters to her lover, this proud, autonomous woman permitted herself to express long-denied emotional needs, to relinquish control and abandon the pose of self-sufficiency. Sometimes abasing herself to the point of begging for response, she marveled in "The Love Diary" that "I, who dominated life,
stood aside from it so, how I am humbled, absorbed, without a shred of will or identity left! . . . How the personality I had moulded into such strong firm lines has crumbled to a pinch of ashes in this flame!" (April 20, 1908).
From these ashes emerged her long-suppressed passional self: "You woke me from a long lethargy, a dull acquiescence in conventional restrictions, a needless self-effacement . . . all one side of me was asleep" (to Fullerton, August 26, 1908). Reveling in the marvel of this late awakening through which she overcame a lifetime of sexual and social inhibitions, she wrote of "throbbing pulses" and the "ripple of flame" stimulated by the mere sight of her lover (March 1908). During these first years of the affair, she composed and inscribed to Morton Fullerton erotic poems such as "Ogrin," celebrating the triumph of love over convention. After a particularly gaudy night at the Charing Cross Hotel in London, Wharton wrote the blank-verse poem "Terminus," which begins "Wonderful was the long secret night you gave me, my Lover," and then follows the spiritual-erotic communion to its conclusion: "And lying there hushed in your arms, as the waves of rapture receded. / And far down the margin of being we heard the low beat of the soul."[20]
The poem "Life," discussed above in Chapter 1, dramatizes an important aspect of Wharton's psychology—a yearning to be mastered by another, a situation that she could then transpose into her own form of domination. The reedpipe that had been rapt out of Lethean torpor by the female personification called Life expresses tremulous delight in being pierced into an instrument that will be played on by the god of love and then is so transported by ecstasy as to become the player rather than the instrument. The poem embodies swift alternations between dominance and submission, so that the precondition of rapture is to be rapt by another, whom the slave then proceeds to master. The reed merged with Life until "she became the flute and I the player. / and lo! the song I played on her was more / Than any she had drawn from me." As the reed finally says to Life, "thy bosom thrill / With the old subjec-
tion, then when Love and I / Held thee, and fashioned thee, and made thee dance / Like a slave-girl to her pipers."[21]
A pattern for this way of loving had been set much earlier in a poem written in Wharton's late teens that expressed her ideal of love:
Ah, yes, to you I might have been
That happy being past recall,
The slave, the helpmeet, and the queen,—[22]
In the course of Wharton's entanglement with Morton Fullerton she was to play all three roles—a slave (the self-abasing woman grateful for any crumbs of love), a helpmeet (the professional comrade who gave tactful advice), and finally a queen who would master the limitations of the affair by transmuting it into priceless experience and art.[23]
After transports of apparent communion came humiliating neglect. Fullerton, as was his wont in love affairs, began to distance himself. We flinch to see this proud woman abasing herself before his sudden indifference, begging for response, endlessly explaining her motives, trying to find a tone and the magic words that would bind him to her:
After nearly a month my frank tender of friendship remains unanswered.... My reason rejects the idea that a man like you, who has felt a warm sympathy for a woman like me, can suddenly . . . lose even a friendly regard for her, & discard the mere outward signs of consideration by which friendship speaks.
(August 26, 1908)
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 as a man leaves the companion who had accorded him a transient distraction. I think I am worth more than that.
(Winter 1910)
In this Wharton echoes her earlier characterization of Stephen Glennard of "The Touchstone," who "requited [Margaret Aubyn's] wonderful pages, her tragic outpourings of love, humility and pardon, with the scant phrases by which a man
evades the vulgarest sentimental importunities" (5). Having thus envisioned and depicted a one-sided love, Wharton still chose a chronically faithless man, a bisexual with a marked preference for older women, who at the time of wooing her was engaged to his cousin and adoptive sister, Katharine Fullerton. Though Wharton did not know all this at first, her discoveries did little to diminish her attachment and may even have served to confirm it.
Wharton, like many of Morton Fullerton's lovers, provided virtually limitless forgiveness for his ethical and sexual lapses. She offered to him the kind of love she most craved for herself, unlimited acceptance despite recognition of faults. Although this one-sided love seems masochistic, it has its proud, autonomous element. Like Margaret Aubyn, Edith Wharton took responsibility to raise the crop for which the man had merely "supplied the seed." She "simply fed on her own funded passion" because, again like her character, "she had the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy" (13). This emotional and artistic alchemy that changes stones into bread, base metal into valuable currency, implies a covert mastery of self, man, and situation.
The relationship that Wharton anticipated in "The Touchstone" was fulfilled in life and then returned to literature in "The Mortal Lease," a sequence of love sonnets written during the affair that plays gravely with Fullerton's doctrine of the transcendental moment. After having complied with the doctrine for a while and experienced its transports, the speaker rejects the "sacramental cup" offered by the personified Moment, who flees, taunting the speaker that now she will never know whether the wine "globes not in every drop the cosmic show." The speaker retorts that her gift of imagination can amplify whatever she has kept from the experience: "I, that could always catch / The sunrise in one beam along the wall." In the final sonnet, she characterizes the lover's heart as a "velvet pliancy" that retains no image of passing experiences, in contrast to her own weary, scarred, and trampled heart, over which "a sacred caravan" moves "alone beneath the
stars."[24] In the term "velvet pliancy" Wharton indicates that she had taken Fullerton's measure very early in the game, but that nevertheless he would serve her needs.
Between this pair were emotional anomalies that dovetailed in odd ways. In the areas of maternal affection and sexual experience, Edith Wharton had been deprived, whereas Morton Fullerton had experienced excess. Wharton's early deprivation created a gap in her sense of being, a deficit to which she owed much of her shyness, fear of intimacy, and delayed sexual awakening. In an early letter to Fullerton Wharton wrote, using the economic metaphor that she often applied to the affections, of "the way you've spent your emotional life, while I've—bien malgré moi!—hoarded mine" (March 1908). Even at the height of her passion, the deprived hoarder was conscious that she had found in Fullerton a remedy for her inhibitions—a model and an authority for spending.
Morton Fullerton, on the other hand, had been almost smothered with maternal adoration. He was the older son of a poor and sickly New England minister and an intense, self-sacrificing mother with cultivated interests. His long residence in Europe as Paris correspondent for the London Times occasioned a great many letters from his mother and sister, allowing us a window into family relationships. Julia Fullerton was a worrier, a wife and mother who felt responsible for the solution of all family problems and burdened by this responsibility. She expected sympathy and admiration for her efforts, even for her intensity: "I sleep about four hours of the twentyfour ... and the rest of the time my brain is active." Often she assumed a role of abused gallantry: I smile tonight simply because it is my custom to smile on Sundays, but I am too tired."[25]
Although overinvolved with all her children, she took less pleasure in the adult children who lived nearby than in the distant one in Paris. William Morton Fullerton (Will, as the family called him) became the center of his mother's emo-
tional life. In her letters, she turned to him for sympathetic understanding: "To whom can I go but you?"
I shall never cease to be sad over the fate that took you away from me—It is cruel—It grows harder and harder for me to bear the separation.... Will, I want more of you.
(February 26, 1899)
Always the sense of loneliness comes over me at our separation, and the feeling that I must have you near. With a longing for you which can never be uttered.
(October 1, 1899)
You more than anyone else have the power to make me happy.... I long for you with such an intensity of feeling that it almost makes me sink from exhaustion sometimes—You are ever present with me.
[Thank you for the gift of a bracelet.] I have a good deal of the feeling a young girl has when her lover makes her a gift.[26]
Although coy enough to speak like a lover, Julia Fullerton was practical with money and free with bracing advice about wholesome Christian living and the management of business affairs. He would give her "untold joy" if he would "leave off tobacco and retire early." She recommended less dissipation and told him how to extract more vacation time from his chief in the Paris branch of the Times . She followed the stock market closely and provided staunch advice about saving money (withdraw savings only in case of positive need) to this son in his forties.
In addition to such practical virtues, Julia Fullerton could converse with her son on literary and cultural matters. She wrote of the new archaeological "finds" in Egypt, shared her reactions to "Quo Vadis" and the works of Kipling, and discussed with Morton her planned addresses to her literary club. She even corrected his spelling, and in 1897, when he was a professional journalist, suggested that he shorten his sentences and guard against stylistic ambiguities. With the exception of smoking, spelling, and Christian pieties, Edith Wharton was later to reiterate much of this advice.
Fullerton apparently basked in his mother's adoration and
concern but feared engulfment. He failed to answer most of her letters, causing her to beg him for replies, for news, for response. "To have to beg for love is humiliating," she wrote in 1904. "I cannot conceive of a harder thing to bear than for parents who idolize a child to feel that they have become of very little importance to that child."[27] She became so desperate that Rob, her younger son, berated Morton for neglecting her feelings. In the mother-son relationship originated a lifelong affective pattern—pursuit and acceptance of female adoration while returning only enough to maintain the flow of love in his direction.
Fullerton came to depend on the advice and devotion of practical, strong-minded women. Although he eventually distanced himself from his mother by the width of the Atlantic, he transferred some of his oedipal feelings to his adoptive sister Katharine, who grew up believing herself to be his true sister. Born in 1879 and about fourteen years younger than Morton, Katharine regarded him as her intellectual mentor and soulmate. He encouraged her erotic feelings and indulged his own under protection of a literal but deceptive interpretation of the incest barrier.
When Katharine learned just before her twenty-fifth year that they were not brother and sister but cousins, she proclaimed her lifelong passion for him and desire to marry him.[28] She wrote to him on November 9, 1907: "Ah, my own, my own—You know that I am quite simply desperately in love with you: that in your own sacred words ...'without marriage there is no life for you nor for me.' " After Morton dissolved his brief marriage to a French woman, Camille Chabert, he and Katharine became engaged despite serious parental objections. The parents blamed Katharine for seducing Morton's affections; for the family's blindness and deception over the years they showed no sign of contrition. Fullerton kept Katharine dangling for several years without marrying her, at the same time carrying on the affair with Edith. After giving Morton one last opportunity to claim her, Katharine married Princeton University professor Gordon Gerould in 1910.[29]
Despite the self-abasement she displayed toward Morton, Katharine was a strong-minded, authoritative, and somewhat feisty woman. She taught English for many years at Bryn Mawr College and eventually became a successful writer of fiction, essays, and criticism (including laudatory and discerning commentaries on the work of Edith Wharton). Wharton even helped place Katharine's first novel, Vain Oblations , with Scribner's. In 1922, long after her marriage, Katharine published a story that presents a slightly disguised version of her relationship with Morton, "East of Eden" (collected in Valiant Dust ).
All his life Fullerton had been playing with incestuous feelings in both directions, as a son toward his mother and as a father—and brother-figure toward his cousin. The overheated mother-son relationship was probably the source of his affair with a woman fifteen years older than himself, Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, as well as of the cruel game he played with Katharine's feelings. His engagement to Katharine narrowly skirted acting out his oedipal impulses within his own family. Over the years, Fullerton acquired considerable emotional versatility, a capacity to play variations on sexual roles, so that he would attract mother-figures and daughter-figures, men and women, and in general mentors to whom he could also teach a good deal by serving as a sexual liberator. Protean and amoral, he learned to alter the valence on his personal qualities, so that he could, for example, represent his self-indulgent weakness as a defiant refusal to play socially determined roles.
In terms of incest desires, Edith Wharton had yearned in imagination for much that Morton Fullerton flirted with acting out. Her interest in oedipal themes and father-daughter incest are pornographically revealed in the "Beatrice Palmato" fragment. This side of her responded to Fullerton's nimble games on the boundaries of incest. Her sense of conflict between a masculine professional identity and an ardent but stifled feminine self responded to Fullerton's alternating gender signals. He activated her repertory of repressed possibili-
ties, she affirmed his versatility. He was languid, she tough and disciplined. He was the spender, she the hoarder. He initiated her sexually, and she mothered him in practical matters, mentored him in professional ones.
His protean qualities are reflected in two of the women who adored him. There were many temperamental and stylistic similarities between Katharine Fullerton and Edith Wharton. Both women needed to explain and analyze themselves to a percipient other and found in Morton Fullerton an "other self" in which to mirror the selves they were creating through words. That self, in both instances, was the noble, self-denying woman whose fulfillment consisted in helping her man to true self-realization, an essentially maternal posture if not that of the "slave" who is also a helpmeet and queen. At especially exalted moments both women offered to make no worldly claims for themselves, mutual love being the only bond worthy of their high-souled devotion.
Wharton often played the self-abnegating mother to which Fullerton was so long accustomed: I could be the helpful comrade who walked beside you for a stretch & helped you carry your load . . . But the last words of all, Dear, is that whatever you wish, I shall understand; I shall even understand your not understanding" (Ransom Center, n.d.). In a similar vein, Katharine depicted herself as secondary, subordinate in importance, ready to be whatever he needed. She asked only to be near him when he needed her, yet claimed to be "ready with equal cheerfulness, to leave you when I hindered."[30]
On November 9, 1907, just after her engagement to Morton and shortly after he met Edith Wharton, Katharine wrote: "For pain of yours I could kill myself in sorrow; for disaster that puts you beyond the reach of my service, I think I should kill myself.... I am but the sword in your hand, my darling: a shield to hold above your head. Use me: for you I am tempered steel." And in words that might have come from Wharton, Katharine wrote on November 22, 1907: "There is something hopelessly and finally humiliating about being so much at another person's mercy, but perfect love casteth out pride."
Such self-sacrificing pronouncements suggest that it is autonomous women who offer extravagant self-abnegation as their love gift. And Morton Fullerton had enough experience with his mother's assertive self-denial to fear the other edge of that tempered-steel sword.
Katharine wrote to Fullerton for the rest of her life, through marriage, motherhood, and grandmotherhood, without significant diminution of affection. In 1940, thirty years after her marriage, she wrote to Fullerton:
I dream about you so often that it must prove I never, in my inmost consciousness, forget you . . . My dreams of you are always happy; there is never a cloud between us and we are always going on, on, not saying goodbye. I think that malgré tout, you and I must always have been a little in love with each other.
Both lovers exalted the importance of his work, the older woman doing so through helpful criticism and the younger through rapt admiration. Since for a period they were writing to him concurrently, Fullerton could enjoy triple measures of the adoration and concern his mother was still serving up to him. Katharine yearned to be his helpmeet, to serve what she called the "immortal part of him," his work. Wharton, on the other hand, spoke as his professional senior and mentor. She urged for his book a "franker idiom" and manlier style without the "heavy tin draperies" of the Times jargon, and if he lacked models, she recommended Emerson, Froude, and Arnold (October 25, 1910).
Throughout the earlier years of her correspondence Wharton continually fortified her lover with bracing advice—how to be more manly, independent, and better disciplined. In one remarkable letter written near the height of their affair, she tells him how to wean himself from his dependency on the Times in order to "recreate" himself and "begin an independent existence." If he will only "form habits of systematic daily work" and cultivate relations with the right people, he will "be Morton Fullerton, at his best & fullest" (October 25, 1910). Repeatedly, she tried to teach him to favor long-range
goals over immediate pleasures so that he might have better control over his life:
Your inclination to make the most of each moment as it comes, & spend the "small change" of present pleasure to the last penny, perhaps inclines you more than you are aware to consider the risks of striking out for yourself & living laborious days . . . You would have to do that with a certain austerity of purpose & resolution of will . . . & this interior discipline is exactly what I believe you need, & what would re-make your life & your personality if you accepted it now, for a few years, before you have stiffened in a few habits .
(May 17, 1910)
The two women shared with Morton Fullerton the consciousness of a psychic division between the imaginative and the analytic faculties. Wharton wrote to him that he and she "are almost the only people . . . who feel the 'natural magic', au delà, dream-side of things, & yet need the netteté, the line—in thinking, in conduct—yes! in feeling too!" (June 8, 1908). Like Wharton, Katharine, too, felt such a division, could love extravagantly, but despised sentimentality, and often broke into French at emotional moments. She wrote to Fullerton near the time of their engagement that she hated equivocal situations, "J'aime les situations nettes."[31] Having lived the most equivocal of lives, Katharine became an anatomist of the ambiguous.
The combination of ardor, intellect, and intense personal morality inclined both the older and the younger woman to make a religion of love, elevating the erotic with the mystic. Morton Fullerton's rather self-serving transcendental code of love, applicable to a wide variety of situations, fueled the ardors of even less distinguished women than Edith Wharton and Katharine Fullerton.
For a sample of his amatory style we must rely on the few surviving love letters that he wrote to other women. To a "darling," probably Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, he wrote at two in the morning:
The beauty, the safety of our love is our sensitiveness, our sense, our sanity; our lack of sentimentality, our deliberate
calm reckoning of the circumstances that have to do with it, that make it what it is, unique. We are both supremely intolerant of any laws that others make for us. We must create our own worlds. This may be sublimely, Satanically immoral, audaciously Promethean; but it is the way we are bound to live and be . . . It came to me just now that we at last were so wise and free, though mutually enslaved, and that all the rest of the world were fools relatively to us in our happy condition as the chosen of the gods.[32]
Echoing these words, one of Fullerton's amours, who signed the letter with her nom de plume, Blanche Roosevelt, wrote to him, I know no law not my own caprice and recognize no will not mine own volition. Yours I might bend to ... but not easily."[33]
Wharton's grounding in the antinomian ideas of Whitman and Nietzsche had prepared the way for Fullerton's assault on the already-shaky citadel of her New York proprieties. Shrewdly using transcendental dogma in his other courtships, he played on established romantic notions of souls so elevated above conventional limitations that their love consecrates itself. By invoking a higher law, he spiritualized the carnal not only for himself but for those lovers who required elevated doctrine in order to free themselves from sexual inhibitions and taboos. Such an invocation spoke particularly to autonomous, high-minded, literary women such as Katharine Fullerton and Edith Wharton.
The ardent sexuality that Wharton could not express within marriage erupted with adolescent fury in an adulterous liaison. Freud's views on the role of the illicit in thawing a woman's frozen sensuality seem particularly relevant to the timing, the intensity, and the liberation of her mid-life extramarital affair:
The long abstinence from sexuality to which [women] are forced and the lingering of their sensuality in phantasy have in them, however, another important consequence. It is often not possible for them later on to undo the connection thus formed in their minds between sensual activities and some-
thing forbidden, and they turn out to be psychically impotent, i.e., frigid, when at last such activities do become permissible. This is the source of the desire in so many women to keep even legitimate relations secret for a time; and of the appearance of the capacity for normal sensation in others as soon as the condition of prohibition is restored by a secret intrigue-untrue to the husband, they can keep a second order of faith with the lover . . . [Women] do not usually transgress the prohibition against sexual activities during the period of waiting, and thus they acquire this close association between the forbidden and the sexual.[34]
Circumstances had prepared Edith Wharton for a Morton Fullerton long before she met him. Like his other lovers, she found in him more than was really there, but something resembling her unmet needs. None of his women could build a home on Morton Fullerton's love, but each could construct around his polymorphous personality a shelter for her own homeless, placeless feelings.
Wharton's relationship to Fullerton was surely anguished, but it was not entirely negative. Although she sometimes complained that he treated their love like a "transient distraction," she always returned to his gift of "all imaginable joy." She wrote that "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 great lethargy . . . a needless self-effacement" (August 26, 1908). This assessment resembles what one of Sophie Freud's clients reported about a late-life passion, experience: "I had been depressed by feelings of mental and soul stagnation. The experience gave me a will to live. I will be eternally grateful to have known what it is/was to feel—really feel. The person who loved me brought me back to being a whole person—allowed me to be me—gave me back a feeling of worth. I am grateful for my life."[35]
Edith Wharton was determined to complete her human experience by pursuing at whatever age and at whatever cost her long-deferred sexual education. In her "summer before
the dark," she was able to find in this shabby man "the thing best worth knowing" ("Love Diary," May 2, 1907). Despite the hurts and humiliations of the affair, she used it for her own development, turned it to creative uses. As she noted in a journal, "Ordinary troubles dry one up; they're as patching as the scirocco; but in every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert. "[36]