Punishing Morton Fullerton: Louis Auchincloss's "The 'Fulfillment' of Grace Eliot"

Abstract

Louis Auchincloss, the prolific novelist and short-story writer, has always been a reliable guide to Wharton, both the writer and the person. His admirable biography, Wharton: A Woman in Her Time (1971), is doubly readable because of the author's familiarity through kinship and friendship with Wharton's associates, through lifelong collecting, and through sympathy as a fellow writer in the same tradition as his subject. Not as well known are Auchincloss's two Edith tales, based on important revelations about Wharton's private life. first story, The Arbiter, was published in the collection Winthrop Covenant in 1976, just a year after R.W.B. Lewis's Wharton: A Biography (1975), in which details about and Teddy's private life (as well as the identification of her lover) were revealed. tale is an invention in which Auchincloss sees Teddy Wharton as Edith's victim, one who magnanimously gives in to her drive to live her life as her genius dictates. It is a defense of Teddy, written around the facts of their lives transposed to fit the conditions of the book's main theme, the heirs of the Winthrop family. Teddy sacrifices himself to Edith's superiority and is aware of the fact that she has given herself the role of martyr without just cause. Neither Teddy, as portrayed in the character of Bob Guest, nor Ada Guest, the character, are accurate facsimiles of the Wharton couple, nor are they meant to be. But they behave amid circumstances very close to the real-life conditions of both Teddy and Edith. Henry James circle, the flat in Paris, the necessity of Edith's