Public Triumph, Private Pain THE LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON Edited by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis; Scribner's; 654 pages; $29.95

By Paul Gray

On Nov. 27, 1909, a famous American author temporarily staying in Paris wrote a note to the local correspondent for the Times of London: "Cher ami -- Can you arrange, some day next week -- before Wednesday -- to bring, or send, me such fragments of correspondence as still exist?" The writer continues, "In one sense, as I told you, I am indifferent to the fate of this literature. In another sense, my love of order makes me resent the way in which inanimate things survive their uses!" Edith Wharton, then 47, was referring to her love letters in the possession of Morton Fullerton, a charming rotter who alternately pursued and ignored her. She was also, and none too subtly, trying to make her unpredictable suitor do something -- anything. But Fullerton did not send back his married lover's mail, then or later, after the affair had finally sputtered out. In 1980 some 300 of these "inanimate things" turned up for sale and were bought by the University of Texas at Austin. Most of those included in The Letters of Edith Wharton appear in print for the first time.

The Wharton-Fullerton correspondence makes this book more than simply a companion to R.W.B. Lewis' Pulitzer-prizewinning Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975). Her affair with the journalist was no secret to intimate friends or later biographers, but her private responses to it were. And the dignified vulnerability she displayed during this period softens the austere image she cultivated during her 75 years. The regal bearing and the profile with its generous, slightly prognathous jaw remain intact. It is now possible to see with what effort, and after what struggles, she held her head so high.

Wharton's letters offer a look at the private pains of a publicly triumphant life. Born during the Civil War, Wharton flourished until almost the beginning of World War II. She inherited considerable wealth and earned a great deal in addition by her writing; such novels as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence were critical and commercial successes. She became so formidable a literary icon during the 1920s that F. Scott Fitzgerald, invited to meet her, drank more than was advisable to steady himself before his audience with the great lady. As a result, he told off- color jokes. Wharton noted in her diary that evening: "To tea, Teddy Chanler and Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist (awful)."

Fitzgerald might have been less intimidated beforehand had he realized how well his hostess understood human insecurities and frailties. "Goodbye, goodbye," she had written Fullerton in 1908. "Write or don't write, as you feel the impulse -- but hold me long & close in your thoughts. I shall take up so little room, & it's only there that I'm happy!" She was then internationally renowned but also trapped in a long, misbegotten marriage to / Edward R. (Teddy) Wharton, a hale fellow and manic-depressive whom her good friend Henry James suspected of being "cerebrally compromised." On the other hand, the Harvard-educated Fullerton, some three years her junior, had drifted into his 40s without accomplishing much of anything except a string of ex- lovers, male and female. Yet she listened with a lover's ears to the grand plans of her perpetually promising gentleman: "And when you spoke of your uncertain future, your longing to break away & do the work you really like, didn't you see how my heart broke with the thought that, if I had been younger & prettier, everything might have been different."

Such passages, the self-abasements of a clearly superior partner, make painful reading. But Wharton's love letters are stirring in other ways. She could discreetly hint at sexual arousal intensified by social constraint: "You can't come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame." Writhing under Fullerton's sporadic indifference, she could summon up reserves of anger and pride: "What you wish, apparently, is to take of my life the inmost & uttermost that a woman -- a woman like me -- can give, for an hour, now & then, when it suits you; & when the hour is over, to leave me out of your mind & out of your life as a man leaves a companion who has accorded him a transient distraction. I think I am worth more than that."

All disappointed lovers feel this way, of course, but not every one of them commands the interest of strangers. In these letters, Wharton does. And for the rest of the time, she is an incisive guide through the glories and vicissitudes of her own amazing life. She knew everyone, from Henry James, Bernard Berenson and Teddy Roosevelt to Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Kenneth Clark. She usually remained mute about her generosities with money and time, but the helpful annotating of Biographer Lewis and his wife Nancy fills in many gaps. She read extensively and exhaustively in a number of languages; in one letter she casually mentions enjoying a new translation of Aeschylus into German. She was often quite funny, even naughty; she writes of seeing a ballerina, noted for dancing barefoot and suggestively unclothed, "even to the most intimate interstices of her person."

In retrospect, it is easy to see why Henry James at first viewed the younger Edith Wharton with some alarm. He might have invented her, except that she was a Jamesian heroine even richer and brighter than his imagination had dared. And her novels made more money than his. The record of their growing friendship is only one of many happy adventures in this brimming, brilliant collection.