The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

IF YOU SUFFER from the rage for reading and rereading, you are rewarded by lucky surprises. I intended to write this brief commentary upon one of three indubitable masterpieces by Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence. I had reread them several times and written about all of them, as well as about Ethan Frome. My friend R. W. B. Lewis (1917–2002), who wrote a large biography of Wharton, and edited several volumes of her work, in the year 2000 urged me to read The Reef. I have taken eighteen years to follow Dick's advice and have just completed two readings of The Reef.

It is a sinuous and disturbing novel, with a complex relation to Wharton's erotic life. She met Morton Fullerton in 1907, when she was forty-five and he was forty-two. Fullerton, an American journalist, was a fabled seducer, androgynous, whose major distinction was that he gave both Edith Wharton and Henry James their first full sexual experience. Part of his charm was an ability to insinuate incest, a repressed and powerful element in the psychosexuality of both Wharton and Henry James. Wharton when very young had an incestuous relationship to her father and perhaps to her brother. Some have speculated that the basis for Henry James's homoeroticism might be found in his early love for his brother, the philosopher and psychologist William James. What is clear is that Fullerton liberated Henry James into many subsequent homosexual relationships, and gave to Edith Wharton the sensual culmination she had not found in her sexless marriage to Edward Wharton.