The Wharton Plot

The personal life of Edith Wharton has been a subject of interest ever since R. W. B. Lewis published her first authorized biography in 1975. This Pulitzer Prize–winning book inflated the imagination of scholars by revealing that Wharton had had an adulterous, well-documented, and ardent love affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton. In addition, the biography included the now notorious “Beatrice Palmato” fragment that the writer had left buried among her papers at Yale, for the delectation of her future biographer. Lewis’s book revolutionized the image of Wharton, and since then her sexual life has been an important topic in her subsequent biographies (Wolff; Benstock; Lee) except for Eleanor Dwight’s handsomely illustrated one. The new biography, based on recently discovered archival material, on which Laura Rattray and Virginia Ricard are working will perhaps throw further light on this aspect of Wharton’s life, which by now has also been a subject of interest to various scholars. The affair with Fullerton is even the subject of a novel by Jennie Fields, The Age of Desire (2012), which covers the period from winter 1907, when Wharton and Fullerton met in the Parisian salon of Rosa de Fitz-James, to the troubled end of the relationship in spring 1910.Mariah Fredericks’s beautifully written and cleverly plotted novel The Wharton Plot is also concerned with this love affair but only covers the period of its demise. Fredericks’s book is a work of biographical fiction that, I believe, only apparently could be defined as a crime novel, even though it centers on the real assassination of David Graham Phillips (1867–1911), who was shot by a lunatic, Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, on 23 January 1911, in full daylight in Gramercy Park in New York. The assassin shot himself after shooting Phillips, who died of his wounds the following day, 24 January, Wharton’s forty-ninth birthday.The temptation to bring together the stories of Phillips and Wharton was irresistible, and in Fredericks’s novel Wharton becomes the unlikely investigator of the murder. The two writers are brought together fortuitously when they meet on 22 January at the Belmont Hotel and are introduced by Wharton’s editor Brownell. Here Fredericks scrambles events somewhat, because, although it is true that Wharton was stranded at the Belmont waiting for Dr. Kinnicut to visit her husband, this was in October 1910, and she sailed back to France on 15 October. She was not therefore in New York at the time of the murder, nor was she then yet “homeless”: she was yet to experience her most memorable and last summer at The Mount in 1911, to then learn, on her arrival back in France, that her husband had sold the house and that “her American life was at an end” (Lewis and Lewis 229).Had such a meeting really happened, it is probable that Wharton and Phillips would have disliked each other, as it happens in the novel. Phillips was the epitome of the muckraker, and it seems in fact that Theodore Roosevelt invented the term to fit him. Phillips was an investigative journalist and novelist, author of two dozen novels, articles, short stories, and an interesting play, The Worth of a Woman (1908), dealing with the oppression of women, which, together with social injustice and political corruption, was one of his favorite themes. Not only did he invent the new genre of “reportage fiction,” but he is also credited with instigating the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which superseded the way senators were appointed by state legislatures. This was due to the scandal raised by a series of articles he published in the Cosmopolitan, later collected in The Treason of the Senate (1906), his denunciation of the way rich families like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers lobbied and corrupted candidates to represent their private interests. His attacks on twenty-one senators cost their office to seventeen of them. In the novel, one of the New York senators who is about to lose his post is Chuncey Depew, whose son is one of the many individuals Detective Wharton successively suspects of being responsible for Phillips’s murder.Wharton is drawn into the affair by the conviction—expressed by Phillips’s family and friends—that the writer was killed by those who have reason to fear the publication of his next book, which turns out to be the posthumously published Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), possibly Phillips’s best novel and the story of an illegitimate orphan girl who falls into prostitution but is finally rescued by an idealistic writer who leaves her his fortune. In Fredericks’s novel, Wharton appears to share with the murderer a disdain and dislike both for the matter and the style of Susan Lenox. In reality, she thought highly of this novel. In her letter to Sinclair Lewis of 6 August 1921 she asserts that his Babbitt and the unexpurgated edition of Susan Lenox have been “the only things out of America that have made me cease to despair of the republic” (Lewis and Lewis 445). According to Cynthia Wolff, she “ardently recommended” this unexpurgated edition to all her friends (365). And in an unreferenced letter Fredericks quotes in her author’s note, and that Wharton wrote to Rutger Bleecker Jewett in 1917, the writer extols the newly published Susan Lenox as “the most remarkable novel I have read in a long time,” a book of such “tremendous vitality” that it survives even its “unnecessary lecturing and moralizing” (Fredericks 291).The Wharton Plot is a cleverly concocted novel, and the brief conversation between Phillips and Wharton in the Belmont tearoom shows that the two writers share a common ground: the criticism of the wealthy leisure class that encourages American women to be spoiled and live parasitical lives. In fact, as Shari Benstock reminds us, a review had associated The House of Mirth with Phillips’s The Reign of Gilt, a collection of short stories also published in 1905, for their condemnation of New York affluent high society. However, as Benstock notes, for Wharton the threat to society came from wealth not accompanied by a sense of inherited social responsibility—that of the new rich, not “old” wealth like her family’s (151). Phillips’s social commentary of the Gilded Age instead focuses on the impact of wealth on social structures and political systems and the inner threat it poses to democracy.Although Fredericks is the author of a series of mystery novels having a female detective, Jane Prescott, as the sleuth, The Wharton Plot is not, in my view, a crime novel stricto sensu. Rather than collecting clues, formulating hypotheses, and testing them in the light of known facts, Wharton proceeds on the basis of suspicions she successively entertains for the characters, starting with Algernon Okrant, whom she suspects to be the sender of threatening messages to Phillips, and hence his murderer, because of the expensive paper, the literary vocabulary and the elegant handwriting of the missives. Then she starts speculating, as the inveterate novelist she is, on the personal lives of people in Phillips’s entourage. Was Anna Walling his mistress, and could her husband be the perpetrator? Was Phillips’s sister in love with Anna’s husband? Was Carolyn’s husband jealous of Phillips? We see the novelist, irresistibly attracted by the possibility of making up stories about people, easily overwhelm the amateur detective. She then explores the possibility that Phillips has been shot not by a sicario hired by the Vanderbilts but by a follower of Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), the notorious upholder of Christian morality, persecutor of so-called obscene literature and inspirer of the infamous Comstock Acts prohibiting, among other things, the publication and dissemination of information about venereal diseases, abortion, and birth control. Finally, Wharton enlists the help of the “American Agatha Christie,” the celebrated crime mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958), who, Wharton believes, being so good at writing about crime, might “have some idea of how one might go about catching the person who did it” (234). She does not see the real perpetrator even though she is in daily contact with him and not until she is threatened by his loaded pistol.The Wharton Plot is, however, remarkable for the portrayal of Edith Wharton’s emotional state at a crucial moment in her life, when she has multiple problems to confront. She has produced no best seller since The House of Mirth (1905). Her subsequent novel, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), regardless of the critics’ praise had disappointing sales, which she attributes to the lukewarm marketing of her publisher, Scribner’s. In the last four years she has produced collections of short stories, travel writing, and poetry but has been unable to deliver anything but the first chapter of The Custom of the Country, another novel of fashionable New York promised to Scribner’s since 1907. She is also battling not only with her growing awareness that her love affair with Fullerton is now spent but also with the humiliating realization of the intrinsic mediocrity of this man she had loved so much and expected so much from: he will never be a creative writer, and he has never been and cannot be an honest man. We see her also battling the conviction that, to survive, she must divorce Teddy Wharton and leave him to his fate of mental disease. She is cutting her last ties with her native country and transferring her life from a rented flat at 53 Rue de Varenne to her own flat at No. 58. And she is contemplating abandoning her publisher of twenty years, Scribner’s, in favor of the more lucrative and dynamic Appleton, to whom she did in fact offer her next novel, The Reef, in 1912. The detachment from Scribner’s, however, was gradual because the following year she did let them have The Custom of the Country, the novel they were so much looking forward to in the wave of the success of The House of Mirth.The book we see Wharton embarking on at the end of The Wharton Plot is, however, like The Fruit of the Tree, another tale about the poor of rural Massachusetts, as dreaded by Brownell: Ethan Frome, which saw the light in 1911. Fredericks’s novel gives a sensitive and plausible portrayal of Edith Wharton as a middle-aged, sickly, and exhausted woman at a turning point in her life, and the value of the Phillips murder interlude is in having helped her understand the “vampiresque” quality of Morton Fullerton, achieve detachment from their love affair, and move on, finding, as always, comfort in her creativity.