Edith Wharton’s Vienna Waltz : HENRY JAMES’ MIDNIGHT SONG, <i> By Carol de Chellis Hill (Poseidon Press: $23; 576 pp.)</i>

I loved this novel, and can only write about it admiringly. When I came to its last page I felt bereft, as if suddenly deprived of a world I had inhabited with fascination; like one who has attended a seance, and is forced to abandon the voices summoned up by the medium. Here the word medium is apt, as the author of this singular murder mystery, Carol de Chellis Hill, resurrects historical characters--Freud, Edith Wharton, Henry James--and intermingles them with ones of her own invention: among them the memorable Inspector Maurice LeBlanc and the enigmatic nymphomaniac countess, Bettina von Gerzl. The result is a provocative page-turner--as sinuous as a Klimt, as rich and multilayered as a Dobosch torte.

The imaginative device works wonderfully well in the setting and period Hill has chosen: Vienna, at the last fin de siecle , that hotbed of intellectual, social and artistic ferment and Mayerling-esque suicides; the morbid, mauve world captured in Frederic Morton’s “A Nervous Splendor.”

The premise of the story, and the Chinese puzzle way it unfurls--through the “discovery” of a manuscript--are ingenious. The women of Vienna are dying, by murder or by suicide. A body, discovered one night in Freud’s study by his wife and sister-in-law, eerily disappears hours later. It is left for the famous Inspector LeBlanc, recruited from Paris, to determine whether it was a murder or mere hysteria on the part of the two women; whether, in short, it is part of the larger web of the city’s recent murders.

Enter the suspects, all deftly portrayed and attributed a possible “motive” for the murder. The veracity of each motive is a tribute to the author’s knowledge and grasp of the period: its warring philosophies, rifts and rivalries; the larger shadows cast by psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, the burgeoning movements of feminism and anti-Semitism.

It is a daunting canvas, to be sure, and one which throws into relief Hill’s considerable gifts as a novelist: her ability to tell the story with a cacophony of voices, at once distinct from each other and seamlessly integrated into the whole; her skill at creating characters from scratch, and to make them interact perfectly with those that are “real”; her way of describing love affairs and familial relationships, all with a humanity, irony and compassion; her sensual, poignantdepiction of love-making from the points of view of both men and women. Last but not least is her brilliant use of the characters and chronology of the period as a way of knitting together the whole--the result, one would assume, of great research.

At the core is the playful idea--inherent in all novels, but all the more crucial here--”What if?” What if Edith Wharton had met Freud, and what would she have thought of him? What if Henry James and Wharton had visited Vienna together? (I have since looked into R.W.B. Lewis’ biography, and a chronology of Edith Wharton’s life published in the Library of America edition of her autobiography, and could find no mention of Freud, Vienna or even Austria. But no matter--it is clear, from “Henry James’ Midnight Song,” that if she hadn’t visited Vienna, she should have.) Was there, in fact, a connection between Freud’s incest theories and the writing of Wharton’s now-famous, and recently discovered, elegantly pornographic fragment, “Beatrice Palmato”? (The answer, from this story, would seem to be yes.)

The wry, intelligent re-creation of Wharton and James as characters themselves fascinated me: their fondness, yet slight wariness of each other; James’ patronizing attitude toward Wharton--the “Angel of Devastation” he called her--and his jealousy of her ability to make money. (It is said he once complained that his royalties permitted him to buy a wheelbarrow, while Wharton’s provided her with a new Packard.) Hill’s portrait is of a man strangely fearful of any physical touch, riddled with a strange inner violence, yet already smugly sure of his place in literature. Here is James on Wharton:

” . . . Of course one did want one’s works to last, and when he looked at Edith he just couldn’t imagine that hers would. Oh, he loved her, of course. He thought she had the finest mind, the most entertaining, the most wide ranging and incisive mind he had ever encountered in a woman. He had always wished she had been rather more attractive, but she was so magnificent and had such sweep it almost made up for it. But her sentences. They were perfectly serviceable of course, but what was between the writer and the world were the writer’s sentences. When he desperately wanted to reach out and touch the world, or bring it into himself, the only thing he had were sentences, his very own sentences, winding and unwinding down the dusty racks of his thought . . . And Edith--he didn’t know, but he imagined it was all rather different for her. She seemed to dash off the books, and he couldn’t imagine she was really as attached to her sentences as he to his.”

And here is Wharton on James--very much the Wharton of “A Backward Glance,” affectionate toward her friend, if impatient with his ellipitical sentences”:

” . . . Edith Wharton got dressed that evening for the theater. She was hoping for Henry’s sake it would not prove to be too much of a disaster. Henry, in her opinion, had no feel for drama. His world was an interior one, where the drama involved an odd arrest of confrontation, a subtlety she thought totally unsuited to the requirements of the stage.”

In the portrayal of Wharton, Hill has met the challenge of creating the paradoxical creature who must have been; the bluestocking in love, delirious after a tryst with her lover, Morton Fullerton; the intellectual snob; the rapier-keen observer and aesthete. Hill’s fictional character, the feminist Ida Main, describes Wharton thus:

” . . . Now, Mrs. Wharton was holding forth about something else. Nietzsche, whom she apparently had recently discovered. Aunt Ida hid a smile: She wondered what Nietzsche would have thought of a woman who spoke about him in one breath and about the table settings at the Last Supper in the next.”

So memorable is Hill’s evocation of Wharton and James that I doubt I will ever be able to read their works again without thinking of their portrait here. Indeed, when I recently saw the Martin Scorcese film of “The Age of Innocence,” I could not hear the narrator’s voice--Wharton’s, that is--without thinking, with a smile, of the formidable personage who stalks Hill’s novel.

Therein lies the joy of this book, and the proof, it seems to me, of Hill’s sureness of touch. The spell cast by “Henry James’ Midnight Song” lingers long after one has turned the last page. From first sentence to last there is the feeling that one has with an authoritative storyteller: that one is in the hands of someone from whom, in the words of one writer, “one can accept the anesthetic with confidence.” I, for one, would happily submit to Carol De Chellis Hill’s ether any time.