EDITH: Inst. 14
PART III: People with Worlds
Notes on this Text
Thank you so much for reading EDITH! If you’re new to my serialized novel, you can find Parts I & II here, along with a brief account of how the story came to me and links to some of my research.
This installment is connected to this research in particular. Wharton’s opinions are her own, drawn from The Letters of Edith Wharton and Hermione Lee’s hefty biography. For the scandalous story Wharton wrote to compete with Faulkner and Hemingway, you can follow this link: Beatrice Palmato. The original letter that Walter Berry wrote to Edith Wharton, quoted towards the end of this installment, can be viewed online with the permission of the Beinecke Library at Yale.
September 1925
She had thought that it would be her salvation, the courtesan’s house outside of the city, but in some respects the place was more fatiguing than Paris, for when the French came to luncheon, they stayed to tea. When an American contingent arrived, the evening feast was prolonged till 7.30. Sometimes, when they were congenial (to herself and to each other), she actually liked it; but even then it left her pounded to a jelly. And the other times – then, oh then, the thread that held her to life seemed to be so tenuous that she rather expected to wake up the next morning among the Blessed.
She wrote through the mornings as was her custom, but her attitude towards the arrival of the post had changed. Instead of anticipation, she felt dread. What curious new reason would she be given for the rejection of her work?
The current rage was for every self-respecting American magazine to refuse her stories on the grounds of immorality. She, whom the Academie Francaise had awarded the Prix Montyon for Virtue!! (Granted, she wrote a friend, the Prix was for oeuvres de guerre – not private ones.) The Woman’s Home Companion did not like the end of her story Duration, the story they themselves had commissioned. The editor – an Alice Nobody – had asked if Mrs. Wharton could perhaps adjust the plot so that the ending to the story, a comedy about the one hundredth birthday of a cold Boston spinster with a nasty secret, did not suggest anything “upsetting.” Alice Nobody had had the audacity to use a question mark, as if she were not ordering Edith Wharton, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, to change her plot!
Edith responded that she was not in the habit of altering her endings to suit an audience – an audience who had surely encountered upsetting occurrences in everyday life, if not in American literature – but she would accommodate the Woman’s Home Companion. She altered Duration. She, Edith Wharton, changed the ending to a story at the request of an editor who was younger than the pen she’d written it with.
Where was this sudden prurience coming from? America was too young a country to censor its literature, what little it had. What had become of Nathaniel Hawthorne? Was his fiction now too scandalous to be read by school children? What was the fate of that son of Boston, embarrassed by the very real witch hunts of his forebears – men who had called themselves chosen by God while burning local women at the stake?
Had the ladies of The Woman’s Home Companion not noticed that the guise of innocence is more often than not the cloak of sin? Each nation had its illusions: morality was America’s.
I only write life, Edith told the dog on her lap, as I experience it.
She had wanted to experience what other women did, and she had. Morton Fullerton had helped her accomplish that aim. The man was a cipher. Edith never had gotten him to divulge the full extent of his secret history with his adopted sister, though he had shared news of Katharine’s marriage to another, which came about rather quickly after Morton had broken his so-called engagement in Paris. Incest was the oldest taboo; the Woman’s Home Companion could stick their heads in the sand over minor indiscretions, ignorant of the fact that the history of literature was built upon the biggest sins.
One old tale told of a Renaissance woman named Beatrice, who had been raped by her father. Beatrice plotted to murder him and was arrested. Because she was not allowed to testify in court, she had died an ignominious death by execution. In Shelley’s version, Beatrice Cenci, both the woman and her sister had been raped by the father. Edith had referenced Cenci in The House of Mirth – she could not do more than that, certainly not now that the Woman’s Home Companion could not even read the word ‘divorce’ without calling for smelling salts.
Or could she? Who would publish it?
The question of incest evolved over the course of several sketches. Meanwhile, the celibates at the Woman’s Home Companion responded to her revised version of Duration. They admitted that they had ordered Duration. They acknowledged that they had asked Edith to revise it. But they insisted that they could not publish it. Stories about spinsters were apparently too much for the American mind.
Edith had humiliated herself by re-writing the ending; she had come to the end of what was left of her patience. She did not withhold her rage in her response. I am really staggered, she wrote, by the insolence of this letter...I cannot write down to the present standard of the American picture magazines.
She would not bother to send them the first section of The Buccaneers, a new novel she had begun for serialization; that would have to go elsewhere, wherever reality did not offend readers. In what country could that be published? Not her own!
What a country, she wrote Minnie. With Faulkner and Hemingway acclaimed as the greatest American novelists, and magazine editors still taking the view they did when I began to write! Brains and culture seem nonexistent from one end of the social scale to the other. Half the morons yell for filth, and the other half continue to put pants on piano-legs.
If they thought divorce was evil, wait until those naive eyes read her incest story. Edith would write her own Beatrice, but with the surname Palmato – palm for where she’d have her readers, right in her hand! Yes, she would! Beatrice Palmato would not only come from mysterious origins, would not only suffer from the sexual abuse of her father, but Beatrice Palmato would enjoy it. AND SO WOULD THE READER. Until – until when, until what, Edith could not yet say. She was too occupied with drafting the slow manipulation of the girl in her father’s capable, artful hands – hands that resembled those of one William Morton Fullerton.
Edith sketched Beatrice’s marriage upon on her own: her animation and brilliancy have vanished, she noted. Beatrice gives up all her artistic interests, and appears to absorb herself in her husband’s country tastes.
She remembered a stolen hour on a chaise longue and her lover’s question about her wedding night. He had been so confident what her answer would be. She put his question in the voice of the fictional father; she put her answer in the girl’s open mouth.
I’ve written quite the story, she wrote Lapsley at Harvard. Which, when it is ready, will show those critics just what a real writer can do. It will out-filth them all!
But before she could send a draft of the filth to Berry, a telegram arrived: he was about to go into surgery at the hospital. Appendicitis. Could she please find a nurse for his recovery at home?
His home was her old apartment at the Rue de Varenne; he’d taken over her lease there after the War, when she’d moved into the courtesan’s house outside Paris. When she arrived, she found that her friend already had a nurse. The surgeon had recommended a generic, picture-postcard beauty, and Walter Berry could not believe such a pretty girl to be anything but incompetent.
How sick he must be to want an unattractive nurse! Edith dismissed the beauty and hired a solid nurse, one who possessed a smile as bright as it was bewilderingly ugly – something like a spotlight beaming straight into one’s face, so that one was blinded for a few seconds afterwards.
Walter required little more than a week or two of ‘fussing,’ as he called her attention, and so she took the Train Bleu to her second home in the South of France. When her driver picked her up at the station and brought her to the former convent at Ste. Claire, Edith was pleased to see that her letters to the mayor had borne fruit: not only was the steep turn up to her home amended, but the toll gate was freshly painted and decorated with potted plants. Still, something was amiss on the boulevard, and it took Edith all of a week to realize that the local residences had faulty dustbins.
Stray animals were knocking these flimsy devices over in the late nights and early mornings, creating a din as well as a dismal scene. Edith wrote again to the Mayor, proposing yet another solution: sturdier dustbins, regulation of trash collection, et cetera. While she awaited a response, she began to plan her Christmas festivities.
The Bourgets lived in a house nearby, and Gaillard Lapsley was coming from London, as was his protégé. Minnie Jones would spend the holiday in New Haven with her daughter and son-in-law; she planned a spring visit. The Berensons would come from I Tatti in Italy – well, BB would come, but Mary was indisposed. And then there was Walter Berry. Of course there would be Walter.
Christmas did bring Walter. But twelve days later, he suffered a stroke. Edith did not need a doctor to tell her this was worse than the appendicitis. When she entered the old apartment on the Rue de Varenne, Walter Berry was propped up on pillows without even a book at hand.
He blinked in her general direction. She put a handkerchief to his chin and helped him close his mouth before she settled down in the chair beside his bed and took his hand in her own. His fingers were stiff and cold.
You cannot write, can you? she asked quietly. She knew he could not speak. He could, at least, shake his head no.
She did not want to prattle on – who would she be reassuring, really? Not Walter; not herself. Nor did she have a conscious audience for long: as if relieved simply to see her, Walter soon fell into a deep sleep. Edith had taken a room at the Ritz. She did not want Walter to feel she was hovering over him, and as he had his reliable nurse to watch over him, Edith went to Ritz to prepare herself for whatever was coming.
Disrobing for her bath, she felt an unusual vulnerability creeping in at the edge of her awareness. She suspected she was feeling what a wife felt when her beloved husband was dying. Walter was not her husband. Walter would not die.
Only once had he spoken directly to her about his own feelings, and even then, he had used a letter to do so. He had written of their summer at Bar Harbour, the summer that Edith Jones had met Walter Berry. There was one moment in that lost world which had haunted him ever since. He had been rowing a catboat; Edith had been reading aloud. The air moved gently, neither cool nor hot. The sky was blue and open as all the future felt. The sun held itself somewhere behind a cloud, bringing the curve of the ocean over the earth into focus. Edith had come into focus. Walter had set the oars and kissed her. He had wanted that moment to last his entire life.
That summer so long ago, Walter had lain awake all night, wondering if he could have that moment as his future. Setting the oars, leaning towards her, lifting her face in his hands: had these gestures meant that he should make her his wife? Could he make her his wife?
He struggled all night: propose or run?
For seven years, he ran away into a world of laws and books and clerkships where a young woman’s face, framed by flame-red hair against green water and open sky, was a hallucination. A folly, he had called it then – a folly he had not made.
But, he wrote Edith, so many ages later: it would have been good.
When Walter died, this was the one letter she would not burn.
Aw, Walter...