Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (51 page)

Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman.

‘What are you doin’ here?’ asked the officer.

‘Nothin’,’ said Soapy.

‘Then come along,’ said the policeman.

‘Three months on the Island,’ said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next morning.

O. Henry describes himself in a letter of his early New York years, when his best work was done, as ‘living all alone in a great big two rooms on quiet old Irving Place three doors from Wash Irving’s old home’. A widower, Porter remarried in 1907, unhappily. He had been a heavy drinker all his life and was now clinically alcoholic.

It was probably as much an occupational hazard as moral delinquency. His
tales have a great deal of brass rail, sawdust and spit, bar-room story about them; like Walt Whitman, he fed on the New York street life. Two quarts of whisky a day, although it hastened his death, never slowed his pen.

Between 1907 and 1910, O. Henry published some seven volumes of collected short stories. He died, aged only forty-eight, of alcohol-induced cirrhosis of the liver, in North Carolina where he had gone to recover his health. His posthumous fame (as the ‘Yankee Maupassant’) grew with constant reprintings of his work and film adapations. In 1919 an annual ‘O. Henry Award’ was established for the outstanding short story of the year. Few of the winners have been as readable as him.

The sweetest Violet in England.
Oscar Wilde’s flowery compliment

The daughter of the novelist Margaret Raine Hunt and artist Alfred William Hunt, Violet was born in Durham and – the family moving to London in her childhood – grew up among the Rossetti circle. She sat for a number of painters, notably Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Sickert. In later life she became a sworn enemy of D. G. Rossetti for his treatment of his model, Elizabeth Siddal, whose biography she wrote – tendentiously. From girlhood she was spectacularly beautiful: ‘Botticelli by Burne-Jones,’ according to the actress Ellen Terry. Hunt was governess-educated, and precociously literary. She was publishing poems, and being paid for them, before she was in her teens. Her father, himself a leading watercolourist, intended her to be a painter and she studied at Kensington Art School until the age of twenty-eight, turning her skills to connoisseurship rather than practice. Thereafter she was, like her mother, a well-known London hostess and woman of letters, admired by, among many others, Oscar Wilde, who is popularly supposed to have proposed to her.

If Oscar did offer to make her his wife (a dangerous thing, it would later prove) she had the sense to refuse. But other choices in her love life were less sensible. A consort of the novelist Ford Madox Ford (i.e. Hueffer, ten years her junior) she was for a while after 1911 known as ‘Mrs Hueffer’ – illegitimately since the first Mrs Hueffer, from whom Ford separated in 1909, was unwilling to divorce her husband.
Hunt nevertheless defiantly entered ‘married 1911’ into her
Who’s Who
entry – one of her more imaginative works of fiction. ‘Who’ she married she did not mention.

Her previous lovers included the novelists Oswald Crawfurd, Walter Pollock and Somerset Maugham. She preferred married men, she once said, because they were harder to catch. She was, true to her name, a hunter. Her later lovers included H. G. Wells, who had the distinction of seducing her rather than being seduced by her. ‘I rather like her,’ said D. H. Lawrence, who met her at one of her London parties, ‘she’s such a real assassin.’ He, evidently, escaped her sexual clutches. She was nicknamed ‘Violent Hunt’ by her friends who tended to agree with Lawrence about how dangerous she was. Crawfurd was among her longer-lasting paramours. He was married, a notorious philanderer, and infected her with the venereal disease which eventually killed her – although it can hardly be said to have cut short her life (she died in Kensington, during the German Blitz on London – waving her fist, one would like to think). As a director of Chapman and Hall and an influential figure in the London literary world, he was able to assist her career.

Hunt took an active interest in feminist causes and founded the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. She was a friend of Henry James and an early patron of D. H. Lawrence. Her own fiction includes
The Maiden’s Progress
(1894), a ‘novel in dialogue’ which follows the career of ‘Moderna’, a modish heroine of eighteen, first discovered in her bedroom in Queen’s Gate, languishing on her bed in a white peignoir; and
The Human Interest
(1899), a story of modern ‘sex problems’ with a novelist heroine, Egida, who is a ‘great Ibsenite’. Hunt’s dozen or so novels are cynical in tone and often funny. Her ghost stories,
Tales of the Uneasy
(1911), retain some popularity. Her weird tale, ‘The Prayer’, displays Hunt’s light Jamesian touch. It opens with a wife, kneeling by her just deceased husband’s deathbed:

‘Edward – dear Edward!’ she whispered, ‘why have you left me? Darling, why have you left me? I can’t stay behind – you know I can’t. I am too young to be left. It is only a year since you married me. I never thought it was only for a year. “Till death us do part.” Yes, I know that’s in it, but nobody ever thinks of that! I never thought of living without you! I meant to die with you …

‘No – no – I can’t die – I must not – till my baby is born. You will never see it. Don’t you want to see it? Don’t you? Oh, Edward, speak! Say something, darling, one word – one little word!’

Her prayer is answered. Edward is pulled back with ‘reluctant moans … over the threshold of life’. Bad things happen thereafter for Mr and Mrs Arne and their baby.

The last years of Hunt’s life (‘flurried years,’ she dismissively called them in her 1926 memoir) were excessively troubled with money problems (although she left
almost £9,000 on her death), illness, lawsuits and the personal disappointments of a beautiful woman who had outlived her beauty, her money, and her time. She is best remembered to posterity as the original of Florence in Ford’s masterwork,
The Good Soldier
(1915). Somerset Maugham based Rose Waterford on her in
The Moon and Sixpence
. Novels remember her, even if her own novels are forgotten.

The continued cry that I am an echo of Mr James … makes me feel rather hopeless.
Wharton to her editor at Scribner’s, 1904

Wharton’s life is fascinating; even more so is the Whartonian lifestyle. What stands out from any examination of it is the extraordinary wealth of the ‘leisure class’ into which Edith Jones was born (and which, in her later fiction, she anatomises as precisely as did her favourite sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who invented the term). Her immediate family was not quite among the fabled New York ‘400’ upper-crust families. Their riches were not ‘embarrassing’, but they were well within the privileged enclave of what the future novelist would call the Age of (New York) Innocence – before, that is, Europe poured its racial dregs through Ellis Island.

The young Miss Jones was spared from the need ever to work by a bequest from a distant relative that left her, in modern currency values, a millionairess for life. Edith Wharton, as she became, was raised in a milieu of opulent furniture and emotional frigidity. When she was eleven, she ‘timorously’ showed her mother the opening of a story she had written in which a Mrs Tompkins says to a Mrs Brown, ‘If only I had known you were going to call I would have tidied up the drawing-room.’ Mrs Jones’s ‘icy’ rebuke to her daughter was ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ Wharton, chronically ill during childhood, was tutored at home, in a series of tidy drawing-rooms. Thereafter, she taught herself in libraries. This education served her well and in her prime she was able to hold her own in salon conversation with Henry James and André Gide – in either French or English, as required.

Bustled into marriage with a philistine mate, Wharton endured twenty-eight years before divorcing him. The union was probably sexless. Wharton’s
fulfilling relationships were with friends as cultured as she had made herself, and her husband ‘Teddy’ (Edward Robbins Wharton) did not fall into that category. His congenital dimness was compounded by late-onset congenital madness. He casts a paler shadow in biographies of Wharton than his wife’s lap-dogs (there survives a wonderful photograph of Wharton with a couple of pooches draped around her neck like a fox fur).

For the better part of her life, Wharton would be half-rooted in upper-class New York, while physically resident in France, where she died in 1937 and where her now grown-over grave is. However, the grass does not grow over Wharton’s literary reputation, and after a posthumous slump it has boomed in recent years. Posterity now knows her much better than did her contemporaries. In the 1960s, private papers were released for the benefit of R.W.B. Lewis’s authorised biography. As a result Wharton was no longer encased in the sophisticated corsetry of her public image – ‘Henrietta James’ – nor the delicately bred lady in front of whom André Gide did not think he could discuss the ‘perversions’ in his writings, such as
Si le grain ne meurt
.

Wharton had destroyed all her intimate correspondence – even more incineratingly than Henry James – but traces of her private life remained in the archive, recoverable to the ‘publishing scoundrel’ of Aspernian inclinations. Lewis gleefully spilled exciting details about Wharton’s adulterous fling, in middle age, with the ‘bounder’ Morton Fullerton. ‘You are dazzling … You are beautiful … But you’re not kind,’ observed Henry James – whose heart may also have been a little broken by the caddish young man. There were, manifestly, raging fires beneath the Whartonian ice. Looking beneath the surface of novels such as
Ethan Frome
(1911), contemporary readers are privileged to see them in ways their predecessors were not – the work of a writer of passion.

Most exciting of all (until Lewis came along) was Wharton’s unpublished sketch ‘Beatrice Palmato’, with its breathtakingly graphic – and outrageously erotic – description of a father’s rape of his half-daughter. Lewis printed it as an appendix: thus assuring that his biography would be everywhere discussed and sell like hot cakes. The fragment had long been available in open files of her papers at Yale and other scholars knew of it, but had refrained doing any more than gossip among themselves out of deference for Wharton’s memory. She herself would no more have wanted it published than to be seen riding naked on a white horse down the Champs Elysées.

‘Beatrice Palmato’ was written around 1917, when the author was in her late fifties. According to surviving notes, the heroine of the tale was to be the half-daughter of a Portuguese banker, living in London. Her mother has committed suicide in
a lunatic asylum. She is married – without little physical satisfaction, we assume.

The fragmentary narrative opens with the father’s words ‘I have been, you see, so perfectly patient.’ Patient no longer, under the parlour’s ‘pink-shaded lamps’, he plunges her hand beneath her peignoir into her bosom. She feels ‘her two breasts pointing up to them, the nipples hard as coral, but sensitive as lips to his approaching touch’. Having touched, and kneaded the breasts ‘like the bread of angels’, his tongue twists like a ‘soft pink snake’ around them, ‘till his lips closed hard on the nipples, sucking them with a tender gluttony’. So it goes, to a climax of fellatio and cunnilingus. It’s described graphically:

Suddenly his head bent lower, and with a deeper thrill she felt his lips pressed upon that quivering invisible bud, and then the delicate firm thrust of his tongue, so full and yet so infinitely subtle, pressing apart those close petals, and forcing itself in deeper and deeper through the passage that glowed and seemed to become illuminated at its approach. ‘Ah –’ she gasped, pressing her hands against her sharp nipples, and flinging her legs apart.

Any printer, publisher or bookseller handling this kind of material could have expected a police raid. What was Wharton doing writing it? She did not, one may surmise, expect to submit it to Scribner’s. Its purpose was, as lawyers say, to ‘lay a foundation’. Incest would play, allusively and atmospherically (but never graphically) about the published story – were she ever to get round to writing it up.

From another quarter, Wharton has also been a beneficiary of the post-1960s feminist criticism. Her latest 853-page biography – probably the most authoritative which will ever be written – is by her first woman biographer, Hermione Lee, one of whose motives was to rescue Wharton from what she ironically terms ‘gallant male biographers’ – men like Lewis, that is, who, whatever their ‘gallantry’, could never know what it was like to be a woman. The third boost to Wharton’s current reputation has been Technicolor, notably Martin Scorsese’s sumptuous 1993 adaptation of
The Age of Innocence
(1920) exploring what Henry James would call the ‘solidity of specification’ in Wharton’s ornately descriptive fiction (not to say her own formidable expertise in interior decoration and gardening) which works extraordinarily well on the screen. Her melodramatic plotlines – as in Terence Davies’s 2000 film adaptation of
The House of Mirth
(1905) – work somewhat less well. None the less Hollywood has done more to put Wharton’s fiction on bookshop shelves than all the professors in the English-speaking world.