by Amanda Vaill
The Murphys had by then moved from their New Weston penthouse, impelled not only by the nomadic custom of New Yorkers at the time, but by some deeper need to reinvent themselves—or if not themselves, their surroundings. After a year’s stay at an apartment on West 54th Street behind the new Museum of Modern Art, they installed themselves in a duplex at 131 East 66th Street, one of a pair of Doric-pedimented limestone buildings designed at the turn of the century by the eminent architect Charles Platt. Grander in scale than their most recent apartments, it was a house for people who wanted to fill their lives with other people—old friends, certainly, but also new ones like Dawn Powell and Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman, the poet and translator Jacques LeClerq, the lyricist and translator John La Touche, and various contemporaries of Honoria.
Their visitors came up against the Murphy style immediately: in the entry hall was a built-in glass utility cabinet filled with fireman’s tools, including a coiled hose and a handle that bore the label “Pull in case of emergency.” Most tenants would have covered up this eyesore with an Oriental screen or some other elegant camouflage, but the Murphys not only left it out in plain view, they treated it as if it were serious art. Léger, only half joking, called the installation the best picture in the house. And everyone remembered it, as they remembered the huge double-height living room, which, the writer Brendan Gill recalled, was “more than simply odd and amusing; some true emotion—an emotion beyond the desire to please—had gone into its creation.” It was a room for entertaining, and for display: on the vast expanse of one wall there was finally space for one of Gerald’s pictures: Watch, which Archie MacLeish had exchanged for Wasp and Pear because the former wouldn’t fit comfortably in his Alexandria house. From the living room a staircase led up to several bedrooms, including one in the back of the house which looked out on the wall of a neighboring apartment building; Dos Passos, who frequently occupied it when he came through New York, called it “the inside cabin.” Gerald, however, continued to occupy a white-painted monastic cubicle with a tiny window overlooking the living room, like a priest’s hole in a Reformation house. Although outwardly he had reassumed the role of “organizer of gaiety,” he was more and more an ascetic at the bone.
Not that he turned away from the world around him. Just before the war he had been called to serve on the Grand Jury of New York County, where the usual menu was larceny, second-degree rape, sodomy, and assorted drug-related crimes. His collector’s appetite—for people, for strange stories, for peculiar names or speech patterns—was whetted, and he wrote down in his notebook fragments of particularly evocative dialogue (“They started ransackin’ thro his pocket”; “Tell Reuben his ass belongs to me”; “he made ’em all lie down on top of me on the bed face down”; or, from the district attorney, “Don’t tell us what you said to yourself, tell us what you did”).
From the court he went on to a new enthusiasm. Always something of an autodidact—who had made lists of vocabulary words in his school notebooks at Andover, and learned everything there was to know about Napoleon during the years he was in Antibes—Gerald had begun taking classes in the fall of 1940 at the New School for Social Research, a combination of graduate and extension school staffed by notable intellects—Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Thomas Mann, among others—who had fled Nazi tyranny. One of them was Hemingway’s friend, the Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla, who had settled in New York and East Hampton, where he often saw the Murphys, and was teaching a course in art appreciation in which Dawn Powell was enrolled. Gerald made up for what he thought was time wasted in college by taking a survey course on “Ideals of Western Civilization,” which swept from Plato and St. Augustine to Machiavelli and Voltaire to Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, and William James, with stopovers at John Dewey, Jakob Burkhardt, and Oswald Spengler. During the 1940–41 academic year he also took “Introduction to Modern Politics” (the French Revolution, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler); Latin American history; “Japan and the New Order in the Far East”; a course on international politics based on a reading of quarterlies like Foreign Affairs; a study of Bach; and a course on American literature—which covered work by Hemingway, MacLeish, and Dos Passos, in addition to the more predictable Howells and James—taught by Alfred Kazin. The Bach and Kazin’s course, it seems safe to say, were a personal indulgence; the rest of Gerald’s curriculum was a kind of immersion in the context of the time that, like all Gerald’s enthusiasms, sometimes verged on the obsessional.
Such zeal made him an easy mark for cynics: according to Lillian Hellman, it set him up for one of Dorothy Parker’s rather prickly jabs. She was having dinner with the Murphys one evening after not having seen them for some time, and Hellman—who had met them on their rather shell-shocked 1937 visit to Europe—was asked also. On the way to dinner Dottie bet Hellman that she could guess “who Gerald will have discovered this time—what writer, I mean.” Parker made three guesses: Madame de Stael, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and “Philippe de Swartzberger . . . [an] Alsatian who moved to Tibet. Born 1837, died 1929, or so it’s thought. A mystic, most of whose work has been lost, but two volumes remain in Lausanne under lock and key, and Gerald invented him this afternoon.” Hellman took the bet; after dinner, unaware of this conversation, Gerald produced a slim volume along with the cognac and asked if he could read a few poems from it. Hellman and Parker looked at each other meaningfully. It was Hopkins. Or that was the story Hellman told.
In fact Gerald had become fascinated with Hopkins, a Victorian Jesuit whose dense, alliterative, highly charged language would seem the antithesis of Gerald’s cool artistic expression. He memorized whole stanzas of Hopkins’s poems by copying them out—as he had with passages from Shakespeare that he found beautiful, moving, or to the point—and taping them to his shaving mirror. “Poetry doesn’t become your own until you’ve memorized it,” he said. So, trying to make Hopkins his own, he would stand with lather on his face declaiming, “Glory be to God for dappled things” in his ringing, dramatically tuned tenor. Not just for the pleasure of the sound the lines made, but for the substance of them.
Gerald had turned his back on his Catholic upbringing; he had buried his two sons, who were baptized Catholics, in the Episcopal Church; and he was still seething over the affront of the church’s refusal to allow Scott Fitzgerald eternal rest next to the bones of his ancestors. But something in Hopkins’s faith—his belief that despite pain and tragedy “God’s grandeur” can still be discerned in nature, and that suffering and loss can be a means to greater understanding—spoke to him. David Pickman remembered how he would recite “yards and yards of‘The Wreck of the Deutschland,”’ Hopkins’s tortured elegy to five Franciscan nuns killed in a shipwreck:
Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
“Thou mastering me”—it was a hard lesson for someone who “refused to meet [life] on the grounds of my own defects.” He would have to be “touched afresh,” though, and made to suffer again, before he learned it.
In 1940 Fanny Myers had returned from France and was visiting the New York World’s Fair when, in one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction coincidences, she spied a familiar figure making his way between the exhibits. It was Alan Jarvis, one of the two young Rhodes Scholars who had given her and Honoria such a good time at Oxford the previous summer. After they had caught up with each other’s news she told him that Honoria was in New York as well, working in the theater, and she encouraged him to call on the Murphys, who she knew would be delighted to welcome him.
Jarvis was, as Sara had described him, tall and blond, with a Byronic lock of hair that occasionally tumbled across his forehead; he would sweep it back with what Fanny called “a Noel Coward gesture,” index fin
ger beneath the curl. He was a sculptor and art historian, currently working on a book in which he hoped to interest publishers. And he would go on to a distinguished career as a museum curator in Canada after the war. Despite Sara’s assertion that he had “no feathers anywhere,” he was, in fact, homosexual and deeply conflicted about it; he had turned down her Weatherbird invitation because he was undergoing psychoanalysis in London in an effort to “cure” himself. He kept this turmoil hidden, however, and to the world was the very model of a charming, erudite, witty, and attractive bachelor, the sort of young man any parent would be thrilled to have for a son-in-law.
Very soon he and Gerald discovered their mutual passion for Gerard Manley Hopkins, and for T. S. Eliot and Johann Sebastian Bach; and they began spending more and more time together. As he did for so many other surrogate sons—as he could not for his own boys—Gerald became a sort of mentor. Gerald’s godson William MacLeish recalls that “Dow used to advise me in spiritual matters—which means he would point out the benefits of these wines against the other wines. And he introduced me to oysters vinaigrette, which absolutely blew me away.” To Jarvis, in addition to giving enological and gastronomical advice, Gerald could be more practically helpful: he put him together with several prospective publishers and wrote him a letter of introduction to Archie MacLeish.
But as 1940 gave way to 1941 the friendship became something deeper—what Jarvis’s biographer called “a fierce and joyous relationship centered on their love of poetry,” and expressed through a series of letters that said what could not be spoken between them. In some of them Gerald addressed Jarvis as “A. amatus,” Latin for “beloved.” He had always had a penchant for nicknames: “Oiness” for Hemingway (who couldn’t pronounce R’s), “Sal” or “Sadie” for Sara, “Fanita” and “Scottina” for Fanny Myers and Scottie Fitzgerald, “Alexis” for Woollcott; but this one was more than an affectionate furbelow. It was a declaration. Jarvis, he said, was the soul mate he had been searching for in vain since he was fifteen—that watershed year when (as he had written to Archie MacLeish) he had become aware of, and started to conceal, the “defects” in that “faulty ‘instrument de précision,’” his heart.
It wasn’t that he discounted or repudiated the uncanny closeness that he had always had with Sara—a closeness that Scott Fitzgerald had acknowledged when he told her, “I know that you and Gerald are one.” But their crisis in 1936, when he had spoken of her need for “communicated affection” and his inability to provide it, had made it clear that there were aspects of himself he could not speak of to her without causing her pain, and he loved her too much to do that. He had given some account of himself to Archie MacLeish, in his January 1930 letter, and to Fitzgerald, in their talks in Switzerland; but with each of them he felt a certain reticence. To Jarvis, who was struggling with his own feelings, he could confide it all and know that it would be understood.
In later life Alan Jarvis used to call Gerald the ideal father he had never had; he would say he thought of him as the father of two dead sons who would never see his boys grow up. He never referred to him as a lover. Whatever either of them might have wanted from this relationship, it seems not to have been physical. But on Gerald’s side at least it was intense, it was consuming, and apparendy it was noticed: Sara, who had been so welcoming to Jarvis at first, began to send out little signals of disapproval. “She was rather edgy about him,” Fanny Myers noticed, though Fanny didn’t know why.
There was never any confrontation: there was no need. Sara went away for an extended southern trip in the spring of 1941, and while she was gone Gerald developed a painful abscess in his throat which required hospital treatment. But after his release from the hospital he joined her in Warm Springs, Virginia, for the weekend: her journal records long drives in the country, swimming, and walks through fields carpeted with violets and woods bursting with dogwood and lilac; at night they picnicked in front of the fireplace in her room and toasted each other with sparkling Burgundy that Gerald had bought to go with their steaks. Whatever his relationship with Alan Jarvis, whatever Sara might have thought about it, nothing was said; if it had been, it might have upset the delicate equilibrium of his marriage. As it was, the relationship did unsettle his own internal balance.
As England battled on alone against Hitler, Jarvis began to wonder if he had shirked something by coming to America; he felt he had to go back. Although “Gerald agreed that Alan should go,” said Jarvis’s biographer, “he express[ed] great pain at their separation”: he couldn’t bear to lose Jarvis when he had only just found him—it was like suffering through the boys’ deaths all over again—and he could not fully express his grief. But he helped arrange the “difficult” return to England in the days after Pearl Harbor, when America had also entered the war, and he accepted a cache of Jarvis’s papers for safekeeping, which he stored in the Mark Cross safe “in a concrete container, zinc-lined.”
And there matters rested, as if encased in that same zinc-lined concrete container. Jarvis was in England, and spoken of—when his name came up—as a friend of Honoria’s. But his and Gerald’s interlude had a curious sequel. Not long after his departure, Dorothy Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, took the astonishing step of enlisting as a private in the U.S. Army. Although younger than his wife, Campbell was hardly in the spring of youth; nor was he the Hemingwayesque soldier-of-fortune type from whom such a gesture might be expected. Gerald was much moved by his decision: he gave Campbell a watch engraved with the rather melodramatic encomium QUI SENSAT ACET (“He who feels, acts”). But Bob Benchley, whose irony got in the way of such lofty sentiments, cracked that the inscription should have read WHOSE WIFE FEELS, ACTS—because Campbell was responding as much to the goad of Dottie Parker’s criticism as to his feelings of patriotism.
Parker’s political and social conscience had been stirred up by the war, and her and Campbell’s conviviality, based on a shared appreciation for dogs, drink, and bad housekeeping, had been severely strained. She had begun to resent Campbell’s love and dependence—often she seemed to prefer men who mistreated her—and, more hurtfully, she had begun telling anyone who would listen that her husband was “queer as a goat.” Enlisting was his response; and Gerald’s Beau Gesfeish support of it seems to have made Parker suspicious of him as well.
For around this time, Lillian Hellman remembered, Parker “flatly stated” that Gerald was “sexually confused.” Hellman herself was quick to disavow any personal knowledge: “I never saw any signs of it,” she recalled, “but Dottie says she crossed over on a boat with him once and there were definite signs of it with a young man.” By the time Hellman spoke these words, Parker was dead and unable to clarify or confirm them, and Honoria (to whom she said them) denied their merit. Bearing in mind Hellman’s own penchant for invention and embroidery, it’s possible that her account tells more about Parker’s state of mind at the time than it does about Gerald. In the course of it, however, Hellman did make one unarguable assertion. Gerald, she said, was “a very brilliant and complicated man. To make definite statements about him would be a sin.”
Sara spent New Year’s 1942 with the Dos Passoses; Gerald, for some reason, was absent. “We all talked about and wished for the presence of our old Gaelic cormorants,” wrote Dos to Archie MacLeish. (Archie was in Washington, where he had recently been named head of the new Office of Facte and Figures.) It was to be a trying year for Sara, for—whatever other anxieties she suffered—after a lifetime of discomfort, her long-standing difficulties with her surviving sister flared into open animosity. Except for the few words that passed between them at Maxim’s at the outbreak of the war, Sara and Hoytie had not spoken since—as Sara believed—her sister had put a curse on Patrick and Baoth: one of their few communications had been a barrage of letters from Hoytie’s lawyer, a Mr. Zimmerman, which began less than a month after Baoth’s sudden death. Now Hoytie was in America—her apartment on the quai de Conti had been commandeered by an S.S. colonel—and almost exactly ten
years after she had first confronted Sara at the dock with her tale of financial woe, she initiated a lawsuit against her sister for unlawfully appropriating her property in East Hampton.
The ten-year statute of limitations had run its course and Hoytie was free of legal repercussions from her failed real-estate deals; she could now own property again, and she was determined to do so. The fact that she had sold the Dunes of her own volition, and that she had been paid her own asking price, simply didn’t register: in Hoytie’s cosmology, her needs and wants lay at the center of the universe, and anything else was irrelevant. It was her old complaint of “It’s raining on me” raised to a new level; but what could be overlooked in a nursery squabble was unbearable as litigation. The Murphys’ friends, many of whom had felt the sting of Hoytie’s snubs, were outraged: “What you write about Sara and Gerald makes me feel so bad; the wicked Hoyty,” growled Hemingway to MacLeish, “that I can’t write about it.”
The court ultimately found in Sara’s favor—and commented that Hoytie had sought “the aid of a court of equity to enforce a transaction, which, if it ever existed, was conceived in fraud and bad faith on her part.” But it was two years before it did so, and defending herself against her sister’s suit—as well as against a subsequent flurry of frivolous actions—cost Sara $5,200, and considerable anguish.
Ironically, the house itself, the Dunes, had been pulled down by then. Unable to find tenants or buyers, unhappy at the size of its fuel bill, and unwilling to pay taxes on the “improved” land, Sara had regretfully ordered that her girlhood home be burned to the ground in July 1941. She couldn’t bear to watch that happen, instead deputizing Gerald to oversee the job; but now—just as she used to pull up all the dead annuals in the Dunes’s flower beds at summer’s end—she tore up the last of her sisterly feelings by the roots. “I have contributed to [Hoytie’s] support every month, for my parents’ sake,” she said in an affidavit for the state Supreme Court in August 1942. “However, nothing can force me to jeopardize the future of our only remaining child—our daughter—to benefit a woman who has continually insulted me and my family—and whom I do not like or admire.”