True Pleasures (21 page)

It's dusk as I emerge onto Place Vendôme, and the whole world has changed. The sky is an intense, deep blue. The sun has disappeared, but the moon and stars are not yet out. It's
l'heure bleue
. Suspended between day and night, the Place Vendôme takes on a different aspect. Its formal perfection reveals itself under the low, deep square of sky. The blue hue of the buildings deepens as the first lamps illuminate the square. I begin to understand its beauty.

Here, each day between 1878 and 1894 a woman would emerge from number 26 to take a turn in the evening air. She was draped and swathed in black veils so that no one could see her face. But everyone knew who she was: Madame La Castiglione, one-time
femme fatale
, mistress to Napoleon III and well-known narcissist, who asked photographers to produce no less than 434 portraits in tribute to her beauty. Unable to bear the demise of her looks, unable to cope with the inevitable ravages of time, she lived reclusively in her apartment in semi-darkness; the walls were painted black and mirrors were banned. Three locked doors barred the entrance. La Castiglione had defined herself by her feminine beauty alone, and when it died, then somehow her will to live died as well. She didn't have what it took to reinvent herself: she just gave up.

I leave the Place Vendôme. Ugly? Beautiful? I really don't know. But I feel its power.

Compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in the kindergarten.

Edith Wharton

I
T CLUNG IN MY MIND
like the edge of a dream as I surfaced this morning. The sun streamed in, the curtains lifted and swayed and I glimpsed some – if not all – of what my journey is about. At the age of thirty-five, as I start the rest of my life, am I not simply wondering this: How to be? Or more exactly, how to be
as a woman
?

And surely this question is mine to explore, for was it not first put to the world by a French woman and most famously taken up by an Australian? Without intending to, I find I've put myself in the footsteps of women's ideas, as well as their lives.

Simone de Beauvoir said it in 1949:
Woman is not born,
but made
. It was one of those eureka moments when everyone slaps their forehead and says, but of course! Woman was the second sex: woman was the made-up gender. Her identity was fabricated. And the making of a woman was framed by all kinds of unjust or untested assumptions. Women were to be the mothers, the helpmeets, the handmaidens. Discriminated against in work and education and society, women were constructed to be second class.

And yet, there's that ringing phrase:
Woman is not born, but made
. Today women like me have all the freedom in the world. We can decide what and who we want to be. Whether we want a capital-C career or not. Whether we want marriage. Whether we want children. We can
make
ourselves. We can decide.
I
can decide.

And here I am in Paris, the city that attracts women who want to make themselves, from Edith Wharton to Gertrude Stein. Paris is where a woman can make – or remake – herself.

And then, like a one-two punch, there's the famous follow-up question, bluntly put by a six-foot-tall Australian libertine with huge dark eyes:
What will you do?
asked Germaine Greer in concluding
The Female Eunuch
.

In liberal societies, women can do anything men can do. We can be as important or modest as any man, as brave or cowardly, as brilliant or foolish. But the thing that Paris reminds us is simply this: whatever we do, we will always be women – it's our one irreducible fact, it's our destiny, it's our responsibility to discharge.

And, I don't always think this, but right now, today, as the sun lifts the curtain on a Paris morning, I can't help thinking it's also our good fortune.

There's a plaque to Edith Wharton outside her house in 53 rue de Varenne, one of the most exclusive locations in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Translated into English the plaque says:

In this building from 1910–1920 lived
Edith Wharton
American Writer
1862–1937
She was the first American writer to move to France
for the love of this country and of its literature.
‘My years of Paris life were spent entirely in the rue de Varenne –
rich years, crowded and happy years.'
Like Henry James, the work of Edith
Wharton brought to life – in delicate and biting style –
the high society of which she was a part.
Association la Mémoire des Lieux

The French admire Edith Wharton because she was a great writer who lived in Paris. And they appreciate her because, unlike so many, she stayed in Paris during World War One. She worked tirelessly to assist impoverished refugees and campaigned to persuade the United States government to enter the war. The French gave Mrs Wharton a Legion of Honor and even today regard her as something of a national monument.

Edith Wharton actually looked a bit like a monument, rather large and solid. Her jaw-line was square enough to serve as a plinth. The patrician's aristocrat, Edith actively encouraged strangers to feel intimidated by her. After all, her aunt was the exclusive Mrs Jones of New York, whose
relocation to a house further up 5th Avenue gave rise to the term
keeping up with the Joneses
.

Even her best friend, Henry James, was a little frightened of Mrs Wharton, and referred to her variously as The Angel of Devastation, Bonaparte and Attila. On the rare occasions when he was persuaded to visit Edith Wharton, Henry James felt like a captive prisoner. From the luxury of rue de Varenne he wrote to a friend:
I am kept here in golden chains, in gorgeous bondage, in breathless attendance and beautiful asservissement
.

I suspect it suited Edith Wharton to retain some distance in most of her relationships. She wasn't a confessional type: she liked to keep her own counsel. In society she approved of stimulating general conversation, not personal revelation. And she was particularly careful to keep strangers and hangers-on at a distance. Mrs Wharton is never more aloof than in this truly pompous segment of her autobiography,
A Backward Glance
:

Among the friendships then made I should like to record with particular gratitude that of the Countess Papafava of Padua, from whom I first heard of the fantastic Castel of Cattajo, and through whose kindness the intricately lovely gardens of Val San Zibio were opened to me; of Don Guildo Cagnola of Varese, an authority on Italian villa architecture, and himself the owner of La Gazzada, the beautiful villa near Varese of which there is a painting by Canaletto in the Brera; of the countess Rasponi, who lived in the noble villa of …

And so, I regret to advise, Edith Wharton continues on for some paragraphs. Much of
A Backward Glance
is like this, and, as a tactic to distance the presumptuous reader, it works superbly.

Edith Wharton, the formidable hostess, the magisterial author, the patrician American – these personae were real. But there was more to Edith Wharton than this.

From the outside Edith Wharton's former home is austere and severe, surrounded by embassies and other grand homes. But as I peer into the privacy of her courtyard, I can see a burst of wisteria – delicate, mauve, playful – springing up the sandy walls and tumbling over the black wrought-iron balconies.

Now meet another Edith Wharton, a woman unravelled by passion.
She felt like a slave, and a goddess, and a girl in her teens …

In June 1909, at the age of forty-seven, Edith Wharton consummated a romance with a journalist named Morton Fullerton. He was the grand folly of her life; the one man for whom she sacrificed all pride, all dignity, all
hauteur
. She had always kept a daily diary; now she kept a separate love diary in which she addressed Fullerton as
you
, recorded all their moments together and traced the hopeful surges and timid retreats of her emotions.

Morton Fullerton was a complex man, a character who might, in fact, have been found in a novel by either Henry James or Edith Wharton. He was bisexual. He was also itinerant, decadent, charming and unreliable. His nature made it impossible for him to live in the bright sunlight of his American homeland; he was better suited to the more forgiving shadows and corners of European capitals. Even while he was conducting his affair with Edith Wharton, Fullerton was managing several other complicated relationships.

In
The Age of Innocence
and
The House of Mirth
, Mrs
Wharton has mastery of a chaotic universe. She is sane, compassionate, satirical. Who would have thought a love affair with a second-rate journalist would undo this great author? Yet it does. She is reduced to the same embarrassing clichés used by every woman in love. She writes terrible poetry in honor of their sexual encounters. She is grateful, anxious, tremulous.

Here she is worrying about clothes:
There is the black dress I had on the first time we went to the Sorbonne to hear B[aker] lecture last December. I remember thinking: Will he like me in it? … There is the tea-gown I wore the first night you dined with me alone … You liked it, you said …

Here she is, amazed that wonderful
he
could love unworthy
her
:
I don't suppose you know, since it is more of my sex than yours – the quiet ecstasy I feel sitting next to you in a public place, looking now and then at the way the hair grows on your forehead, at the line of your profile turned to the stage, your attitude, your expression – while every drop of blood in my body whispers: ‘Mine-mine-mine'
.

Of course, Fullerton wasn't hers, hers, hers at all, and the relationship eventually fizzled out in a sad flurry of pleading letters from Edith. But I don't think we need to pity Edith Wharton her painful love affair. It was one of the great experiences of her life. Worse than too much pain was the prospect of no sensation at all. Edith once wrote a searing image of a life lived without deep experiences, a life untouched:

I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of
whose doors are never turned, no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes
.

This, in fact, expresses Edith's view of the kind of life she felt condemned to live in America – a life of surface activity but deep inner loneliness. Edith was in her late forties when she began her affair with Morton Fullerton. She was at her peak as a writer and a woman. She wanted to open all the doors of her soul, no matter how invasive the visitor might be.

In Edith's expansion as a woman, Paris was important. America, she felt, condemned a woman to live within a category:
I was a failure in Boston…because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable
. In Paris, however, there was space for Edith Wharton to be fully herself, to explore the heights and depths of her own character.

Moreover, unlike the Americans, the French understood pleasure, and its importance.
It is only in sophisticated societies that intellectuals recognize the uses of the frivolous
, she said. Edith Wharton wanted to be fashionable and frivolous and sophisticated and intelligent all at the same time. She wanted the precious right to be contradictory. Why shouldn't she transcend the tedium of strict categories for women and their behavior? She realized she couldn't be various, spicy and contradictory in America. It was a society that dealt in simplicities. But in Paris, well, it was quite different.

After her death, when the first biographies of Edith Wharton were being written, Morton Fullerton wanted people to understand the extent to which Mrs Wharton had achieved complexity and completeness.
Please seize the event
, he urged,
however delicate the problem, to dispel the myth of your heroine's frigidity …