The Composite Husband

Edith Wharton's marriage, mildly companionable at first but never sexually fulfilling, became increasingly burdensome with the passage of time. The more she developed as a writer

and intellectual the less companionship could she find with her husband Teddy. Kindly but perplexed, Teddy had difficulty finding a role for himself in the marriage. He wrote to Edith's friend Sally Norton of his pride in outfitting her automobile "with every known accessorie [sic] for comfort. You know I am no good on Puss's high plain of thought,—but you will agree that no lady of talent is as well turned out as she is."^[1] Although proud of his wife, this amiable outdoorsman felt foolish among her sophisticated friends and generally excluded from the interests that drove her life. He seemed "positively frightened" by her literary work, almost convinced that "it was a kind of witchcraft."^[2] Having no real work of his own, he was largely dependent on her income, much of it earned through her writing.

Coming to feel like a mere "passenger" in her fast-moving world, he became irascible and sometimes irresponsible. As his mental afflictions became more extreme, he openly flaunted his sexual adventures, which appear to date from the beginning of the Fullerton affair. Although Edith was pained and embarrassed by his flagrant disregard of appearances, as one who herself had strayed she tried to pass off his behavior with humor. On a motor trip with Daisy Chanler, Edith was signing into a hotel in a town that she had never before visited when she noticed an entry in the register, "Mr. and Mrs. Edward Wharton." She "observed with a slight smile and shrug: 'Evidently I have been here before.' "^[3]

Sometimes, when Teddy had difficulty meeting the expenses of his mistresses, he helped himself to funds that Edith had entrusted to his care. Though irritated by his behavior, she felt compassion for his situation, as she revealed in a late summing-up: "There was no cruelty & no unkindness in him. Yet he was cruel & unkind through weakness."^[4] She tried to find him effective psychiatric help, but increasingly the marriage seemed to her an intolerable prison. After years of painful consideration, she dissolved the twenty-eight year marriage by divorce under French law in 1913.

By this time she had created around herself a system of male companionship that functioned almost as a composite

husband, although without provision for physical intimacy. Bernard Berenson's friendship came into Edith Wharton's life when Morton Fullerton was phasing out of it. With Berenson she shared intellectual and esthetic tastes and a love of travel. He became her ami or camerado, the companion of many a lively art and architectural tour, but could not give her the unequivocal admiration that she needed. Furthermore, he was married.

Gradually, she built around herself a society of intellectual young men—including, among others, Gaillard Lapsley, Howard Sturgis, Robert Norton, and Percy Lubbock. The group, generally known as the Qu'Acre set, found its physical center in Queens Acre, Howard Sturgis's home near Windsor in England. Along with Henry James the group formed a close circle of which Edith Wharton was the central female, a position that kept her feeling feminine and flirtatiously alive.

Despite her gaiety within this bachelor group, Percy Lubbock recognized her personal insecurity, her divided selfhood, and her essential loneliness:

She liked to be surrounded by the suit of an attentive court, and she like to be talked to as a man; and both likings were gratified in a world of men and talk. And there was another reason too, not quite so obvious. The friendships that will go far and last long with a little impersonal dryness in them, the salt of independence, were those in which she was happy, and it was mainly with men that she found them.

She felt perhaps safer with men—safer from the claims and demands of a personal relation: from some of which she shrank so instinctively that intimacy, what most people would call intimacy, was to her of the last difficulty.^[5]

Her fear of intimacy is corroborated by words recorded by a friend during Wharton's final days: I like to love, but not to [be] loved back, that is why I like so much gardens [sic]."^[6] Lubbock's observations make little sense without awareness that the mate company that she relished and in which she felt safe was the society of "benedicks," either confirmed bachelors such as Walter Berry or overt homosexuals such as How-

ard Sturgis. For the latter part of her life she surrounded herself with intellectual, verbally swift men with whom flirtation was both exciting and safe. As her niece observed, she expected ideological submission from women, but with men "she welcomed divergent points of view and adapted herself to them, feeling their stimulation."^[7]

The most durable and comfortable of all her male relationships was with a friend from her old New York world—the lawyer and diplomat Walter Berry. They came to know each other after her broken engagement to Harry Stevens and before her ill-fated marriage to Teddy Wharton. Apparently, she and Berry approached the idea of marrying at that time but let it pass, ostensibly because Berry had not yet established himself in a career. They were from the same social world, and she felt completely at ease with him, sharing appreciation of books, languages, and architecture. Berry was her earliest literary adviser and the first to encourage her aspirations to be a professional writer: "He helped me more than anyone, in fact he alone helped me to believe in myself."^[8]

To the surprise of most of her friends, this dry, acerbic, and fastidious bachelor became the long-term companion of her life. Puzzled by Wharton's devotion to Berry, Percy Lubbock felt called upon to say that "none of her friends, to put it plainly, thought she was the better for the surrender of her fine free spirit to the control of a man ... of strong intelligence and ability—but also, I certainly know, of a dry and narrow and supercilious temper."^[9]

The primacy of this relationship is as puzzling in its way as that with Morton Fullerton. When read today by an outsider, Berry's letters to Wharton seem breezy and trivial. Flavored with words like "cheerfuller," "stummick," and "critter," they exude a raunchy, adolescent humor. On the other hand, he had considerable political importance and was a dear friend not only to Edith Wharton but to other discerning people, including Henry James and Marcel Proust.

Although for a while some assumed that Berry and Wharton were lovers, very few of her close friends really believed this.^[10] Despite Berry's flirtations with women in social situations, many observers doubted that this behavior extended to a sexual interest in them. Wharton's travels with Berry suggested to Henry James and to the Berensons that they were indeed lovers, but R. W. B. Lewis treats this as a debatable question. Lewis acknowledges a "hovering and gratifying sexual element" in their long relationship but expresses doubt that Berry was greatly interested in sex with either women or men. He views Berry "as the prototype of the old-time American dandy who ogled the ladies, tugging at his moustache" and elbowing the other men knowingly.^[11]

Marcel Proust's amorous letters suggest both that Berry was more substantial a person than he appeared to some observers and that he was capable of arousing powerful erotic feelings, whether or not he reciprocated them. In characteristically extravagant style, Proust praises Berry's political importance (claiming that he brought America into the war and thereby saved France), his prose style, his voice, and his physical presence. I know of nothing more beautiful than your face or more agreeable for ears to hear than your voice . . . I particularly hope that you realize that there is nothing at all of Monsieur de Charlus in my purely aesthetic admiration and that I speak like a collector, as if you were painted by Tintoretto." And in 1921, reminiscing about the beginning of their friendship and missing Berry's company, Proust asks himself," 'Have I passed the age of love?' (Lafontaine, nothing of Charlus)." Frequently and excessively protesting that his love for Berry has nothing of Charlus in it, he allows, shortly before his death, that Berry is "probably the being whom I love most in the world."^[12]

At times Walter Berry lived near Wharton in Paris, but as a diplomat he traveled frequently, so that their contact was often through letters and at a distance. Wharton's late reflections on this subject indicate that although she may have longed for the emotional security of marriage, she was proba-

bly more comfortable with a distanced relationship: "He wrote me a real love-letter once . . . How glad I am that I dealt with it as I did. I should never have [had] his precious friendship all my life [if] it had been otherwise."^[13]

In her memoirs she wrote of him, I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation of one's soul. Such a friend I found in Walter Berry, [and despite separations] whenever we did meet the same deep understanding drew us together. That understanding lasted as long as my friend lived" (Backward Glance, 117). She concludes her tribute with: "I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been to me without him. He found me when my mind and soul were hungry and thirsty, and he fed them till our last hour together" (119).

Wharton's publicly expressed devotion to Berry, her desire to be buried near him, and her desolation at his death in 1927, indicate that she regarded him as her life companion. Berry was the witness of almost the whole arc of her adult life and aspirations. It was he who knew and reflected back to her the continuity of her experience. Even though he may have disappointed her in not proposing marriage after her divorce from Teddy in 1913, they faced the world in their later years very much like a couple. On the day of Walter Berry's death, she sent Gaillard Lapsley this comprehensive tribute: "All my life goes with him. He knew me all through, & wd see no one else but me" (October 12, 1927).

With continuity and easy communication supplied by Berry, aesthetic conversation by Berenson, flirtation by the young men of the Queens Acre set, it was her relationship with Henry James that Wharton deemed the "pride and honor" of her life. And her life, that of an expatriate American woman fighting to realize her destiny, has been called a Henry James novel.^[14] James was twenty years older than Wharton. When they started corresponding in 1900, he was at the peak of his

career, she at the beginning of hers. Although the friendship began slowly, it blossomed quickly. He became her literary ideal and mentor, a source of professional counsel whom she addressed in letters as Cher Maître .

Their friendship was so satisfying that it supplied more mutual nurturance than many a marriage. Wharton's statement in A Backward Glance that "Henry James was perhaps the most intimate friend I ever had, though in many ways we were so different" (173) says a great deal about the kind of intimacy she needed. Even more than physical closeness, she desired to be registered in a sympathetic and wholly perceptive mind.

Soon he would he address her as "Beloved Edith" and "Firebird" and, in reference to her fierce energy, describe her jocularly as "the Angel of Devastation." His language reflected back to her a glorious, mythic image of herself: "Paris, as I look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel, you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings" (April 12, 1909).^[15]

Except for occasional tumultuous visits and motor trips that rather overwhelmed the aging James, the fifteen-year friendship was primarily epistolary. To both authors, letters were not a distancing of the relationship but an enhancement of it. Again and again his letters image himself as a settled barnyard fowl and Edith as a golden eagle. Her restless appetite for travel and experience overwhelmed the introspective quiet of his bachelor routines. Desiring nothing so much as to perfect his final works, he needed no new adventures. As far as outward experience goes, he had become, as one friend put it, "complete." "Be easy with me, dear Edith, be easy—my days are over for the grande vie; I should have been caught younger & must crawl very quietly at best through what remains to me of the petite " (January 31, 1909).

Protected by distance and his characteristic verbal extravagance, James could safely hint at erotic possibilities. Within tacitly understood boundaries, both could enjoy the titillation

of seductive talk. They referred frequently in a language of secret innuendos to the torrid love life that George Sand had lived at Nohant with her many lovers. Once they visited together this house that they alluded to as a shrine of lustfulness. Addressing her as "My dear, dear Edith," he wrote: "I love you all the while as much as ever, & there hasn't been a day when I haven't hung about you in thought & yearned over you in spirit, & expended on you treasures of wonder & solicitude" (April 14, 1909).

Her failed marriage had left Edith Wharton deprived not only of sexual experience but of the human communication that she ardently needed. She desired above all things the sense of perfect comprehension by another human being, the sense of being fully "seen," known, and understood. In letters she could confide to James stories of her troubled marriage, love affair, and divorce and know that they were genuinely perceived. James brooded over the details in imaginative sympathy and begged for more. "But the things, the things, the things—i.e. the details—I yearn for—!" (May 9, 1909).

I've been uncannily haunted in respect to your situation (that is on the side of Teddy's absence, his condition, & the conditions over there &c) with something or other in the way of an apprehension or divination of evil . . . Please don't become unconscious of how exceedingly & intimately I am with you & how infinitely desirous of further news.
(December 24, 1909)

But my interest attaches itself to every detail . . . my imagination & wonder play so fondly over the whole subject . . . Well your finer appreciations will float you through all deep waters—& they'll become finer & finer than anything but my own appreciations of them!
(December 30, 1909)

Henry James was the ideal spectator for a woman who needed to have her existence and her value affirmed. The quality of his attention enabled Wharton to feel cherished in the way that mattered most. In his capacious imagination she found the space in which she could extend her wings. Little wonder that he saw himself in this relationship as a hen brooding over and hatching a golden eagle.

In a sense these two shared Morton Fullerton; both wrote erotic letters to him and wrote to each other about him. It was an epistolary ménage à trois in which James abetted Wharton's sexual adventure and reveled in his imagination of their enacted love. He invited all possible details about the relationship. James dined with the two of them in their chambers at the Terminus Hotel the evening before their most celebrated night together. In 1910 he thanked her for her words about "what befell you & Morton at Chantecler. The latter circumstance intensely interests me—it floods the subject with light that in the midst of my troubles I have been sourdement invoking" (March 2, 1910). If Walter Berry's consciousness was the realistic mirror of Edith Wharton's selfhood, that of Henry James was the imaginative one. She required both kinds.

James functioned as her professional father and psychological mother, and she tried to ease his financial worries and agonized over the gradual failure of his health. Their concern for each other and ability to fulfill a range of emotional needs was a genuine anchor for these two souls who felt lonely amidst some of their era's best society. In this relationship both partners experienced real love and the exhilaration of an erotic dance within safe boundaries. But James, who came into Wharton's life when she needed a professional mentor, died in 1916, when she still had two decades of life ahead of her.^[16]