by Amanda Vaill
Once he had managed that metamorphosis, another took place: the emergence of Gerald/Seth as the main character, instead of the callow Francis. In his “General Plan” for this revision, Fitzgerald proposed that “The novel should do this. Show a man who is a natural idealist, a spoiled priest, giving in for various causes to the ideas of the haute Burgeoise [sic], and in his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism [and] his talent. . . . Background one in which the liesure [sic] class is at their truly most brilliant and glamorous such as Murphys.” His new central character, now called Dick Diver, shared some of Fitzgerald’s qualities, notably his alcoholism and his wife’s insanity. But these elements were arguably less essential to the real theme of the novel as it now presented itself to Fitzgerald: the story of Dick Diver’s feelings of emptiness and imposture, his betrayal at the hands of a world he thought he could manipulate, his struggle to come to terms with the renunciation of his idealism and talent. These feelings, this betrayal, this struggle—Fitzgerald now saw—all were Gerald Murphy’s. As everyone knows, Dick Diver would lose his battle. For Gerald Murphy, during that autumn in Switzerland, the issue was still in doubt.
18
“The geodetic points of our lost topography”
CONTENDING WITH HIS OWN DEMONS, Gerald seemed not to notice that Sara’s health was showing the strain of the past year. In October, though, she was admitted to the American Hospital in Paris for tests. Doctors diagnosed a gallbladder disorder. She and Honoria, accompanied by Dorothy Parker, went to Cannes for a rest and change of scenery, and then Dottie, who by this time was suffering acutely from cabin fever, returned to the United States. Baoth was sent off to boarding school in Germany—an establishment called Rosenheim, near Munich, which the Murphys had learned about from their old friends the Pickmans. “The orderliness, organization and simplicity of the life is just what he needs,” said Gerald, managing to repress his and Sara’s miserable boarding school memories.
Sara spent October sailing on Honoria. When she returned to Switzerland she and Gerald, for perhaps the first time since they had come to Montana, took inventory of their lives. They could see they’d have to make changes. The stock market crash and ensuing depression had weakened their financial situation, and the continuing drain of Patrick’s medical expenses, not to mention the upkeep of three residences, had to be reckoned with. Because the favorable exchange rate that had floated their expatriate existence had flattened out, it was now cheaper, and maybe safer, to live in the United States.
The Murphys also had to come to terms with profound changes in their personal geography: the avant-garde they had known in Paris in the early twenties had disbanded or grown bourgeois, their idyllic undiscovered paradise in Antibes had become a millionaire’s playground. So Gerald and Sara decided to let the Paris apartment go, and they rented the Ferme des Orangers. They also sold Honoria, to a young Englishman who was apparently attracted by the powder blue enamel plates in the galley which Gerald had found at Girl Scout headquarters in New York. Finally, and most reluctantly, they made up their minds to sell Villa America. It was unclear whether Patrick would ever be well enough to return there to live, and now the place was haunted with the spirit of might-have-been. They had given Léger a commission for the villa: a series of panels for a screen, showing white comets on a black background, which would echo their black-and-white decor. The comets looked more like ghostly apparitions, though, and because they planned to sell the villa they let the panels go to another collector.
But, being the Murphys, they couldn’t live in a state of total retreat. “In spite of thunder,” wrote Gerald to Archie MacLeish, they planned to build a new, spacious, seagoing schooner, twenty-seven meters long, with both regular and marconi (or racing) rigging, a big deckhouse and plenty of room below for living and sleeping quarters. They planned to use her as a floating villa and living classroom in which the children would soak up lessons in history and geography as they sailed the Mediterranean coast. They drew an outline of the boat on the lawn outside Patrick’s window, so he could get an idea of her size; and when she was still in the dry dock at Fécamp in Normandy they sealed into her keel a recording of Joe “King” Oliver’s song “Weather Bird,” played in jaunty, swinging counterpoint by Louis Armstrong and Earl “Fatha” Hines. Naturally, they named the boat Weatherbird.
The new year of 1931 brought what seemed like better times: Vladimir Orloff arrived in January to help plan the specifics of Weatherbird and, incidentally, to build a cage for Mistigris, the monkey, who had recently managed to fingerpaint one of La Bruyères rooms with ink; the MacLeishes came to visit in February and taught Honoria how to ski; Helen Stewart, who had been baby nurse to all three little Murphys in America, came to take care of Patrick. He soon seemed improved enough to start ice skating lessons with Honoria, and when Baoth came home for his Easter break the two boys went skiing before Gerald and Sara took Honoria and Baoth to Venice. In fact, Patrick was now considered sufficiently recovered to leave Montana for the summer—not for sea level, which the doctors still thought dangerous, but somewhere in some other mountains.
Gerald and Sara found a hunting lodge called Ramgut for rent in the Austrian Alps, at Bad Aussee, and the family moved there in July. It was a beautiful old house, large but simple, with whitewashed walls and scrubbed pine floors, set in the middle of ripening wheat fields. The cook, Frau July, made delicious Austrian meals, and the children, even Patrick, rode their bicycles all around the lovely rolling countryside. Honoria remembers Ramgut with pleasure, and certainly Gerald and Sara were making an effort to enter into the spirit of the place: a local photographer captured the whole family, outfitted authentically in lederhosen and dirndls and Tyrolese hats, for a formal portrait. But the gay costumes, and the jaunty bouquet of flowers in Sara’s hands, belie the glum expressions on all their faces.
Sara’s guest book recorded a number of visitors that summer: The Pickmans came to stay, as did Léger, who was struck by the regulated quality of the Murphys’ household. It was almost as if Time were a member of the family, he wrote to his mistress Simone Herman: “someone who is always consulted and who dominates everything.” And in August, Scott Fitzgerald asked if he could bring Zelda, who was better and was gradually being given more exposure to the world outside the asylum. She had been allowed visitors in the spring, and the first person she asked to see then was Gerald. “Absolutely terrified,” he had nonetheless gone to Prangins, and had made charming inconsequential small talk with her about the basket she was weaving. “I said that all my life I had wanted to make baskets like hers, great heavy, stout baskets.” Now, although he and Sara were “petrified at the idea,” they wrote Scott to say it was “great . . . that you all can really come here.” The Fitzgeralds brought Scottie with them, and although Scott confided to Alice Lee Myers that “Scotty + the little Murphys begin to glare as soon as they’re in a radius of a hundred yards from each other,” everyone was for the most part well behaved. Zelda seemed to find the Murphy ambiance healing, and the only difficulty occurred when the children’s nurse put bath salts in Scotties bathwater. Scottie thought the cloudy water had been used to bathe all the Murphy children and ran to complain to her parents. Scott, afraid that Patrick had used it first, made a scene. The incident turned up later in Tender Is the Night—without, however, the undertone of terror that came from Scott’s fear of tuberculosis.
Hoytie Wiborg descended on Ramgut for a visit on her way from some fashionable watering hole to Paris, and Scott and Zelda left soon after—but not so soon that Scott wasn’t exposed to a dose of both Hoytie’s grandeur and her solipsism, which would reappear in his portrait of Baby Warren in Tender Is the Night. Shortly after the Fitzgeralds’ departure the Murphys packed up also. Baoth had to return to Rosenheim, and Patrick, Honoria, and their parents were headed for Paris with Miss Stewart. As a treat, Honoria rode with godmother Hoytie in her smart chauffeur-driven car; but on the road they got into a minor accident with another motorist, wh
ich so infuriated Hoytie that she rolled down the window and shouted “Judel Jude!" (“Jew! Jew!”) at the driver of the other vehicle. “She was terribly anti-Semitic, and it was the worst name she could think of,” remembered Honoria. Sara and Gerald were appalled. “This is typical, just typical,” Sara muttered. Whether she meant it was typical of Hoytie, or typical of what was starting to happen all over Europe, she didn’t say.
Although Gerald continued to find American society stultifying—“My God, what a race of people!” he had written to Archie MacLeish after his last visit—he and Sara continued to think about reestablishing a base in the United States. There was a small farmer’s cottage on the Wiborg land at East Hampton, on the parcel that Sara had inherited, which could be remodeled for their use. In September, leaving Patrick in Paris with Helen Stewart, they took Honoria with them to New York while they began construction and attended to other business, including a trip to Massachusetts to see their three-year-old godchild, Peter MacLeish, for the first time. They also brought Fernand Léger along on his first visit to New York, putting him up with them at the Savoy Plaza and taking him to what he called “Broderie” (Broadway) and Times Square, where the lights and garish billboards “delighted him.”
Now that it seemed Patrick was on the mend, Sara could not bear to return full-time to Montana. It was too full of horrors for her, and too lonely. Although she and Gerald had given up their rue Guynemer apartment, they decided that on their return to Europe Gerald would accompany Patrick back to Switzerland; Honoria and Sara would remain in Paris, at the Hotel Prince de Galles, where something could be done about the state of Honoria’s education. Miss Roussel had returned to Antibes and because Montana had few teachers—people who went there weren’t seriously expected to survive —Honoria’s schooling would have to take place elsewhere. Baoth was thriving at Rosenheim, although his academic performance wasn’t stellar—he was ranked only thirty-eighth in his class, with a 78.9 average. But Sara resisted sending Honoria away as well. Instead she and Gerald engaged a down-on-her-luck German aristocrat whom they had met at Rosenheim, Countess Lieven, to give Honoria lessons in Paris, where she would have the added bonus of being close to her favorite friend, the Myerses’ daughter Fanny.
Bob Benchley sailed with the Murphys and kept Sara company in Paris, squiring her to Zelli’s in Montmartre and elsewhere. Sara went shopping and to the theater and had fittings with her vendeuse, Mme. Hélène, at Groult. Ellen Barry, who was in Paris at the same time with her husband, remembered her buying a “gorgeous” black evening dress, “a Madame Bovary dress,” Barry called it. (She must have forgotten that Emma Bovary, overwhelmed by the pettiness and frustration of her provincial life and adoring but unsatisfying husband, committed suicide.) Honoria, a wistful thirteen-year-old with a watercolor prettiness, used to sit on Sara’s bed and watch her mother dress and put on her make-up in the evenings: “She used Helena Rubinstein make-up, or Cyclax, and she kept her lipstick, a pinkish red lipstick, sort of a geranium color, in a little round case—she’d dab in her little finger and then put two or three spots of color on her lips, and then rub her lips together. And then she’d wipe off her finger.” After that, Honoria remembers, she’d put on powder, a touch of her favorite Lanvin perfume, and the pearls; then, over her dress, a black fox fur piece. Finally, a last glance in the mirror and she was ready—with a face prepared to meet the faces she would meet.
In the end the Paris experiment didn’t work: the countess was more interested in the Almanach de Gotha (and her place in it) than in Honoria’s education, and the Prince de Galles was ruinously expensive. So after an extended Christmas holiday at Montana, Sara took Honoria to Villa America, which remained unsold. Honoria was enrolled in Mademoiselle Fontaine’s day school in Cannes until the end of the school year, when the Murphys planned to leave for America.
In the meantime, however, another unforeseen event had taken place. In November Gerald’s father went on a business trip to the Kodak laboratories in Rochester, New York. As usual, he wore no overcoat, but this time his iron will could not prevail over the blustery weather. Coming from the overheated lab to the train he had caught a chill that settled in his lungs and turned into pneumonia. As soon as Gerald heard the news he sailed for New York with Esther; but before they could reach him, on November 23, Patrick Murphy died. Neither of his surviving children was present at his enormous funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was attended by several hundred people, including the political cartoonist Finley Peter Dunne, creator of “Mr. Dooley,” and Senator Robert F. Wagner. But they arrived for the burial and the reading of the will, in which, Gerald later said, “my father left a company, not an estate.” The Mark Cross Company’s assets, at the time estimated at $2,000,000, were left to Gerald and Esther (Anna Murphy was otherwise provided for). But control of the company, and therefore of their inheritance, was left to its new president, Patrick Murphy’s former secretary and longtime mistress, Lillian Ramsgate.
Gerald was outraged. Not because he had been passed over in the corporate succession—after all, he had left the company in no uncertain terms more than a decade ago—but to be placed in a position of subservience to his father’s paramour was more than he could stand. Although his mother wailed that he must “take care of Esther,” whose marriage to John Strachey was foundering, he resigned his position as vice president and left Miss Ramsgate to run the company by herself.
Sailing back to France on the Europa, Gerald sought out Shakespeare’s classic work on inheritance, King Lear, in the ship’s library. As he sometimes did in times of stress or reflection, he copied out some passages that give a clue to his resentful and conflicted state of mind:
He cannot be such a monster
To his father who tenderly and entirely loves him
But then:
And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his offense honesty!
And again:
Is it the fashion that discarded fathers
Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?
His conclusion was bitter:
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
Soon after Gerald’s return to Switzerland, Anna Ryan Murphy had a stroke and never recovered her faculties. She died in April; Gerald did not travel back to New York to see her. By then Sara and Honoria were in Antibes, which—after Montana’s “melancholly skenery” and the gray drizzle of Paris in the winter—they found “a paradise: mandarines, lemons, oranges, camellias, anemones, mimosa, & lunch on the terrasse.” Sara made a ceremony of throwing out all the medicines in her traveling case—prematurely, as it turned out, for at the end of March her old gallstone trouble returned and kept her in bed off and on for a month.
She wasn’t too ill, however, to enjoy the arrival of Weatherbird, which Vladimir had sailed from Normandy to Antibes through the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean in a series of howling gales. “A thing of great solid beauty” was how Sara described the boat to Gerald: not just seaworthy and sturdy but gracious. The deckhouse had windows on all sides, with benches beneath covered with navy blue cotton, and was spacious enough to accommodate a long table at which everyone could eat above decks, even when the weather was bad. Below decks were the cabins: Honoria’s decorated in pink, Sara’s and Gerald’s in green, another for the boys to share; Vladimir Orloff and a crew of five had quarters on board as well. The saloon, which held four bunks for guests, was also furnished with comfortable upholstered chairs, a long table, and an upright piano, painted white, for convivial evenings. The galley had a refrigerator—Ada MacLeish called Weatherbird a bâteau à Frigidaire—and there was also a bathtub on board, although it was rarely used because it took so much water to fill it.
Gerald and Baoth came down for an inaugural cruise at Easter, but “poor little Pook” had to stay in Switzerland. The doctors felt the air and heat at Antibes would tax his still fragile lungs. “O—I wish I had another sickness!” Patrick lamented
to Gerald, in a rare outburst. At last, however, the doctors gave him permission to leave, and in mid-May he and Miss Stewart arrived at Villa America to find the garden alight with lanterns to welcome them.
Finally the whole family was reunited, for—alarmed by the rising tide of Nazi sentiment in Germany, and mindful of their impending departure for the United States—the Murphys had removed Baoth from Rosenheim in March.
The spring and early summer passed in a kind of valedictory haze: there were visits from the Barrys and the Myerses and from Stella Campbell; cruises to Port Cros and St.-Tropez and Portofino; evenings at the casino, where Sara and Gerald took Caresse Crosby; or at the ballet in Monte Carlo to see Balanchine’s Cotillon and Concurrence; the children swam at La Garoupe and had parties in Honoria’s playhouse and went fishing. At the end of May, Patrick went to Canada with Helen Stewart; and Mistigris (who bit everybody but Sara, whom he adored) was left with the Légers. Fernand Léger later sent Sara a photo of him, along with the news that he was behaving perfectly; Jeanne Légers postscript, however, added that Misti was betraying Sara: “he kisses me on the mouth with his tongue, it’s true love,” she said. At Villa America trunks were packed, linens and china laid away, books and records crated. On July 5 Honoria wrote in her diary, “Put away my house in the afternoon.” Eight days later, having put away not only their house but a chapter of their lives, the Murphys sailed for New York on the Aquitania.