Prologue to a Detective Story

Paris

There was a note under the door when I came in. Yale University letterhead. The writer was the official biographer of the novelist Edith Wharton, and the U.S. cultural attaché had suggested . . . Could I telephone?

Up the long dusty Rue de Lourmel, empty in the dead of August. Hôtel-café, baker. Le Roi des Fournaux, the Stove King, with his display of electric heaters. Four vacant shops awaiting demolition. Wine merchant. This undistinguished Left Bank arrondissement, the Fifteenth, is being upgraded by construction of résidences de grand standing. On past the high wall with the iron gate at the corner which sometimes swung open and disclosed a house set back in a garden. A convent, MAISON DES DAMES DU CALVAIRE was painted over the wicket door. House of the Ladies of Calvary. On across the broad leafy Avenue Emile Zola to the post office and its telephone booths in the basement.

Yes, I could come. . . . Tomorrow? Yes.

Edith Wharton brought to mind novels bound in old-rose buckram with titles stamped in gilt, The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and a dynamic woman who swooped Henry James up for motor tours. With James or—what was his name?—Walter Berry, she would walk around a cathedral studying the clerestory while her husband followed after, burdened with wraps and boredom. Stereotype, doubtless wrong . . . Why Yale?

Yale had the Wharton Papers, a professor of American studies explained next day in the bar of the Hôtel Port Royal. Access had been limited for years, but now, as biographer, he had the use of them.

He summarized Wharton’s life: Born in 1862, raised in Old New York, Edith Jones had a disappointment in love, Walter Berry, and married Edward Wharton. She and “Teddy” lived in New York and Newport and built a house in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Mount. She was a successful writer by 1907, when they took a flat in Paris. Teddy broke down, and after scandals involving women and money Edith divorced him and settled in France. She died here in 1937.

Obviously, there was routine research to be done, legal records and so on. But there was more.

Specialists had known for a long time that when she was in her forties Edith Wharton was in love, because she had left an unpublished journal written as a love letter to an unnamed man. It was taken for granted that the man was Walter Berry, that she fell in love with him again—and again in vain, since he didn’t marry her though he was her constant escort till his death ten years before hers.

The Wharton biographer, however, had been let in on a secret by the literary representative of the Wharton estate, William Royall Tyler. Mrs. Wharton had indeed been in love, around 1907–1908; had even had a love affair. But the man was not Walter Berry. He was a William Morton Fullerton.

Morton Fullerton, though an American, had succeeded the famous Blowitz as chief correspondent of the London Times in Paris. His liaison with the novelist was also known to his literary executor, Hugh Fullerton, a retired American diplomat now living in Paris, for when Morton was dying he had boasted to Hugh of having “had” Edith Wharton, and he’d given Hugh a poem she had written to him, which Hugh destroyed, convinced that it would damage Mrs. Wharton’s reputation.

The dying Morton had divulged another fact startling to Hugh. Long ago, in France, he had been secretly married and divorced.

On top of all that, unpublished letters of Morton Fullerton’s friend Henry James reveal that at the time of the Wharton affair Morton was being blackmailed by a Frenchwoman, perhaps a landlady or housekeeper, and that James and Edith Wharton paid the woman off.

Such was the background offered by the biographer.

Morton Fullerton, then, was of paramount importance in Wharton’s history: as her lover, of course, and also because the blackmail might have had to do with her. She might have sent him compromising letters. His wife might have been the blackmailer. His divorce and Edith’s might have been linked.

When Wharton and Fullerton were old and no longer in close touch, a graduate student beginning a life’s work on Henry James, Leon Edel, sought them out as people who had known James well.

James and Fullerton had met in London around 1890, when James was in his late forties and Morton his mid-twenties. James, Edel found, had drawn on Morton for the journalist Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove, who “looked vague without looking weak—idle without looking empty.”

Edel worked backward imaginatively to this indeterminate young journalist from the solidity of a “handsome, heavy man working in a comfortable office” at the Figaro, in the Champs-Elysées: Morton Fullerton at sixty-four. That Fullerton—“his large moustaches were waxed; a fresh flower reposed in his buttonhole”—played to perfection the role of “an homme de coeur,” a man of feeling, “creating a haze out of his past in which nothing was sharp or clear; everything was soft and impressionistic.”

When Edel went on to visit Edith Wharton, he noticed a copy of James’s novel The Golden Bowl inscribed to Fullerton. “Oh dear,” she said, “I guess I still have some of the books that Morton once left with me.” She pulled down other James volumes, all inscribed to Fullerton. Something gave Edel an inkling of “a greater intimacy than might have been supposed, by a researcher coming into their lives so late in the day.”

Long afterward, Edel saw Fullerton at eighty, frail and unkempt, in a Paris barely freed from Nazi occupation, and Fullerton pointed to piles of boxes in his study: “letters from Henry James . . . from Edith Wharton . . . there you are—there is my life.”

James, Wharton, Fullerton: an association eventful, not long-lived, never quite stable. If in every couple there is one who loves, etc., in this trio James and Edith loved Fullerton, and Fullerton let himself be loved. “You absolutely add,” James told him, “to my wish, and to my need, to live the life of—whatever I may call it!—my genius. And I shall, I feel, somehow, while there s a rag left of me. Largely thanks to you.”

Edith Wharton’s relations with him can be traced in what may be the most various written record of a lover left by any woman, ranging as it does from business letters to love letters to poems to highly wrought pornography to novels—for Fullerton is recognizable as a character not only in James’s Wings of the Dove but in two Wharton books, The Buccaneers and The Reef. Moreover, he believed himself to be the original of the pivotal anti-Puritan in The Last Puritan, a “memoir in the form of a novel” by the philosopher George Santayana, a Harvard classmate and friend who became an enemy.

When I took on the job of investigating him, no William Morton Fullerton appeared in any Who’s Who or Who Was Who: which seemed odd for a man who had held a key position in journalism and—usually a laissez-passer to such compendiums—had published books.

His absence was all the stranger as it became apparent that there was much more in his life than was needed for a biography of Edith Wharton. His coverage of the Dreyfus case, the case of the nineteenth century, caused an “explosion of public indignation” in the Anglophone countries at racist persecution of an innocent man. During the First World War he advised U.S. military intelligence on policy toward an emergent USSR and a Yugoslav union of the “suspicious, vindictive, parvenu little Powers” Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia. In the 1920s and 1930s many French readers, oblivious of Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Henry Miller, regarded him as a spokesman for “Anglo-Saxon” culture.

During the Second World War the Gestapo raided his study and removed some of his letters, leaving thousands more from a most impressive array of correspondents. His was a curious case history in the holocaustic Occupation of Europe, which people had begun to think of as past and gone but is now being reexamined in more than one nation, sometimes grudgingly, by institutions of justice, religion, art, and banking.

Had the public, publishing man figured in Who’s Who, an entry based on the data given me at the start of work would have read:

FULLERTON, William Morton, b. 18 Sept. 1865, Norwich, Conn., s. Rev. Bradford Morton & Julia (née Ball) Fullerton. Educ. Phillips Acad., Andover; Harvard Coll.; Lit. Ed. Boston Advertiser. Staff Times London 1890, Paris 1891, Chief Corresp. 1902. Resigned partially 1907, fully 1910. Problems of Power 1913. Staff Figaro, Journal des Débats, d. Paris 26 Aug. 1952.

Several items would have been incorrect, and of course the episodes that I was to explore would have been absent:

Marriage and divorce: dates and identity of wife unknown. Possible blackmail: grounds, date, and identity of blackmailer unknown. Ca. 1907–1909, liaison with Edith Wharton.

In her memoirs, A Backward Glance, Wharton mentioned men and women she met in aristocratic salons of the Belle Epoque: the Marquis de Ségur, Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James, Comtesse Anna de Noailles, others. I should trace their descendants and learn what they knew about her and possibly about Fullerton, to whom she made no reference whatever in her book.

That he had one connection in that circle was known. Anna de Noailles, born a Romanian princess, had great prestige as writer, conversationalist, and beauty. Fullerton reviewed a volume of her poems in 1907, the year he met the Whartons, and sent her the review with ornate compliments. Now, if she knew both Edith Wharton and Fullerton, did she perhaps know of their liaison?

“Morton Fullairton? Non. I don’t think my mother knew him. I don’t believe I ever heard of M. Fullairton.”

This was in a dusky boudoir, dark wood and yellow satin, shaded against the afternoon sun and hung with portraits of a woman with a famous horizontal face and two pitch balls stuck in it for eyes, the mother of Comte Anne-Jules de Noailles.

“I wasn’t old enough to know the salons before the First War,” said M. de Noailles. “Later there was Mme Mühlfeld’s, where you worked at getting people elected to the Académie. The only literary salon now is Mme de la Rochefoucauld’s, two Wednesdays a month. You used to have a day once a week. You didn’t invite people; they came, and there were petits fours.”

The name Edith Wharton meant nothing to M. de Noailles. He was désolé. He went down a list of names culled from Wharton’s memoirs and a few writings I’d found by Morton Fullerton. “I know—I knew—many of these people. It will be very difficult to document your study because almost everyone is dead. . . . Mes hommages, Madame.”

But some people still alive remembered Morton Fullerton. Their recollections, as well as books, newspapers, government records, and letters—above all, letters—gradually brought information.

Today he can be found on the Internet. He can be seen, or rather characters based on him (but with a difference) can be seen, in films. He is the journalist loved by two women in The Wings of the Dove, the heroine’s true love in a televised version of Wharton’s Buccaneers. He comes into all the books about James and Wharton. Many readers and viewers know something about him.

Not much, however; and a good deal of what is thought to be fact is error. A systematic liar, Morton Fullerton hinted at mysteries to divert attention from secrets. Misinformation has accumulated, and mistakes about him have led to mistakes about Wharton (the story of their liaison has never been fully or accurately told) and to a lesser extent about James.

When he applied for his first passport, at twenty-two, Fullerton’s height was one meter fifteen point five, five foot six. Eyes blue, nose aquiline, hair brown, complexion fair, face oval, chin round. In later applications he gained an inch, his nose straightened, and his chin became firm. He had a big moustache. Everyone called him handsome. He had a strong heart, serviceable lungs in spite of lifelong smoking, a tricky gall-bladder, an agile, catholic penis; he had a soft voice, and charm. The charm hardly ever comes through in things he wrote; but we don’t see the wind, only the reeds that bend and the oaks that break, as in Aesop; and from his impact on intelligent and sophisticated people we have to accept that he was very charming.

This book tells the story of the research into his life. The first part covers work done for the official biography of Wharton. The following parts cover work done independently later, and for a longer time, that concentrated on him. Throughout, questions arose and answers bred new questions, answers to which shaded into mysteries. Often what seemed to be true at one stage of work turned out to be false or had to be reinterpreted.

The quest for Morton Fullerton led to discovery of events more appropriate to drama than to literary biography. Kings and queens crossed the stage. Treason, stratagems, and spoils abounded. Hundreds of the letters that document his life, now decorously housed in some of the world’s great libraries, are extant because after his death one woman took them from another woman at revolver point.

Research has its dangers. “Enter these enchanted woods, you who dare!” as George Meredith, Fullerton’s literary idol, wrote in a different context. Unposted trails may lead to buried treasure, but also to bias, overconfidence, folly—may even lead, and in this search did lead, to folie, madness, or to the brink of it.

(c) Copyright 2000 Marion Mainwaring

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