by Amanda Vaill
In January 1943 Alexander Woollcott died of heart failure, to Gerald’s great sadness. He had been in declining health but had nonetheless managed to have dinner with Gerald and Sara almost weekly, sometimes alone and sometimes in company. On one occasion Gerald offered him a choice of other guests:
1) dinner Tuesday at 7:45: Cole & Linda Porter are coming. He dresses . . .
2) dinner Thursday at 7:30. Professor Kazin & his wife are coming. We don’t dress . . . I’ve just finished his brilliant series of lectures at the New School.
Later Gerald scolded Woollcott for ducking dinner with the Kazins “(just because they’re not in your set).” Parochial Woollcott might have been, but, said Gerald to Archie MacLeish, “His gift was to make the people he loved feel valuable.” Gerald himself had begun to wonder more and more about his own worth.
He saw other men going to war—Alan Campbell, Jarvis, even the alcoholic forty-eight-year-old formerly tubercular Dashiell Hammett—and he asked MacLeish, who was now the director of the Office of War Information, “what kind of service” he could be eligible for “when the moment comes.” He wrote, “Granted my age (55 this March) am I fitted for anything in which I would be of value? Physically I’m in pretty good condition, although Sara and I do notice that we have recently been pretty much slowed up due to the wallop that bumpy period of Baoth’s and Patrick’s illnesses took out of us.”
There was no response to this query, and Gerald spent the war years at “that monument to the inessential, the Mark Cross Company,” putting away forever his hopes, unrealized in two wars, of doing something substantive for his country. When he saw Archie he realized it might be for the best: for his friend was entirely consumed by the bureaucracy he was charged with running, and had written hardly a line of poetry since the war began.
Not that the MacLeishes were living in a philistine desert. On the contrary, when the Murphys visited, there were dinners with the Dean Achesons (Archie’s old Cambridge crony was now assistant secretary of state) and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (who thought Gerald “charmingly civilized”), or an arts festival with a “first Stravinsky performance, a first Piston performance, and three brand new ballets,” or simply at-home evenings when Gerald played songs from Richard Rodgers’s new hit musical Oklahoma! and Ada sang. But at the heart of all this gaiety, Gerald could see, was the dutiful emptiness of service. “Archie is being pulled thin over what he calls this ‘blood and disaster,”’ he had written to Woollcott earlier. “His skull shows through and his eyes are farther away.”
In March 1945 the MacLeishes and Murphys went together to the Homestead, a grand old resort hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, for a short spring holiday. Archie had left OWI—and the Library of Congress, to which he had briefly returned—to become assistant secretary of state for cultural and political affairs. He had survived a bruising confirmation battle (a group of conservative senators were alarmed by the elevation of the author of Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City to a position of public trust), but now felt conscience-stricken at taking even a week away from Washington. His vacation worked on him “like a stone bruise on the heel,” he wrote his mother.
As if in compensation, Gerald exerted himself to amuse his godson William, taking him riding every day and drawing him out, as he was so masterly at doing, on any number of subjects. Gerald was still reading and memorizing Gerard Manley Hopkins, and one morning, during breakfast, he came to stand behind his godson’s chair and recited the sonnet “The Windhover” from start to finish:
. . . My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! . . .
The tenor voice rang on, declaiming Hopkins’s hymn to the unfettered beauty of the wild hawk, his symbol of poetic inspiration. “I thought I was going to cry,” says William MacLeish, remembering it, “and I looked at my pa, and realized that he was going to cry. He hadn’t been writing any poetry for years and it was driving him crazy. So that was one of the great, great times with Dow.” It was Gerald’s present to Archie: a reminder of his essence, a reminder that he had to return to it to survive.
24
“Isn’t it strange how life goes on?”
“PEOPLE SHOULD NEVER be themselves, least of all their old selves," Gerald once remarked, rather sardonically, to John Dos Passos; and although the war ended in August 1945, life didn’t pick up where it had left off in 1939. In 1946 Alan Jarvis returned from England to America, but there was no reunion with Gerald, who wanted to avoid “the revisitation of scenes of the past.” As he told Jarvis, “the reopening of relationships (even after a three day absence) are more trying than termination,—commensurately with one’s affection. . . . I’ve felt we would see each other one day,—but par hasard [by chance].” Whatever their friendship had been, it could go nowhere—or nowhere that Gerald could imagine. And so he renounced it. But it had marked him ineffably, and its loss left him with a feeling of real desolation: “I think it’s only fair to tell you,” he wrote, “of that wake which was left in a trackless sea. I hope you agree. You’ve sensed it I know.” He signed the letter “Love . . . Gerald.”
Before Jarvis left New York for Canada, however, he defied Gerald’s proscription and stopped at the Murphys’ one evening; Gerald, returning at six from the office, entered the apartment by the upstairs entrance and thus didn’t see him in the living room below. He heard his voice through the little monastic window, though, sounding “grave but harmonious . . . You laughed and sounded well. I was very glad of it.” But Gerald didn’t—couldn’t—come downstairs: “the shock of recognition seemed too much. . . . Albeit I’ve found my heart to be a somewhat faulty instrument of precision, all at once I was constrained to protect the past from the present. Life may one day allow of my being proven right. I hope so. It all seems to me so sad. Unutterably. I feel it . . .”
There it is again—the instrument de précision about which he had written to Archie MacLeish in 1930; the one he had painted in the year of Fred’s death, which now hung in his living room downstairs. A watch, his heart, measuring out the empty days. He sent the packet of letters that he had stored at Mark Cross during the war back to Jarvis, and they never saw each other again.
And what about Sara’s empty days? In 1943, to her, and Gerald’s, delight, Honoria had met and married a young English naval officer named John Shelton. The wedding took place in the East Hampton church, and Phil and Ellen Barry, who had a substantial house nearby, lent it for the reception. Afterward Honoria returned to live with her husband in England, and the Murphys’ nest was finally, definitively vacant.
Possibly to fill the emptiness, Sara had become a volunteer at the Wood Memorial nursery, a day-care center on “the Polyglot Rim of Harlem” for thirty children whose “daddies have gone off to war and [whose] mothers are obliged to work,” in the words of a fund-raising brochure. The children were a diverse group but all were living in considerable poverty and suffering from a variety of greater or lesser illnesses. Every morning, when they arrived at the nursery, they lined up to have their throats looked at and their scalps inspected for lice, and afterward they were dosed with cod liver oil and given a snack of fruit juice and crackers. During the course of the day there were games and stories; art classes and trips to the park; a “nutritious luncheon”; naps and more snacks; most important, the children were listened to and cuddled and cared for.
Sara took to this work with almost frightening enthusiasm, eventually becoming president of Wood Memorial’s board as well as a caseworker. She attended psychology seminars, keeping careful notes of the nursery’s structure and personnel, and followed a full load of cases (she had to do an early evaluation of each child in her dossier as well as follow-up in three and six months). She also edited the nursery’s fund-r
aising brochure and helped to refine its mission statement. But these executive functions weren’t as important to her as the children themselves. Singing “Au clair de la lune” with them, she might have been with Baoth and Patrick in the garden at Villa America. One day Honoria—who had returned to the United States when her husband was posted to the Pacific—came to visit Sara during a music class and was so moved by the experience that she left the room in tears.
Sara even brought two of the children—brothers named Charlie and Toopie, who she suspected were being mistreated at home—to East Hampton for weekends; and although she and Gerald were both by now in their sixties and out of training as playmates for anything larger than a small dog, she made an attempt to adopt them. Honoria thought it was “touching—wrenching might be a better way to describe it—to watch her being a mother of sons again”; but her effort to turn the clock back (if that’s what it was) was doomed to failure. The boys’ grandmother, their legal guardian, opposed the adoption; when Sara’s term as president ended not long afterward she stepped down from her post, and her involvement with Wood Memorial seemed to end. At the same time, Honoria’s marriage, like many wartime romances, was coming apart; she returned to America permanently, and although she set up her own apartment, the Murphys were parents again.
Others in the Murphys’ circle of friends seemed to be having a hard time finding a new rhythm for their lives in the days after the war. Katy Dos Passos remained in Provincetown, in the house that Gerald had likened to a ship’s cabin with its view of the water. She wrote Sara long, funny reports of quotidian Cape Cod life; but her husband was still overseas, filing stories for Harpers from the Philippines, fortifying himself with vitamins that Sara had given him against “the constant aeroplane hopping, jeep and truck riding and the heat and the dust and the mud and the general carnage.”
Archie and Ada MacLeish were stuck in Washington, where Archie was working—in the aftermath of the death of the president who had given him the job—to establish the United Nations and sell it to the American people. In July their daughter, Mimi, was married to Ensign Karl Grimm in their house in Alexandria, and Sara lent the bride her own pearl-encrusted satin-and-lace wedding dress for the occasion. “Mimi looked like a picture out of Vogue,” recalled her aunt Ishbel. But with every step she took “the pearls went crunch,” and, Mimi said, “I couldn’t wait to take the damned thing off.” Archie felt the same way about his government duties, but he wouldn’t return to civilian life, or to the little stone house in Conway where he wrote his poems, for more than a year, after a stint as chairman of the first UNESCO conference; and when he did he found it hard to follow Gerald’s advice and reignite the Windhover’s lovely and dangerous fire. One day, struggling to put a match to a pile of damp wood outside the house, he thought despairingly, “It’s just like me, I’m that way inside, I just won’t burn inside.”
Hemingway wrote Sara from Cuba to tell her of his exploits in the closing days of the war in Europe, which he had been covering as a correspondent for Collier’s. Typically he felt it necessary to cast his participation in the most combative, macho light possible: “went with an infantry division for the St. Lo breakthrough, and stayed with them, or up ahead with the French Maquis, in the fighting through Normandy. . . . We assaulted the Siegfried line on Sept. 14th. From then on it was a terribly tough fall and winter . . . terrible fighting, Sara, all winter long.”
He also informed Sara that he and Martha Gellhorn had broken up. “I need a wife in bed,” he wrote, “and not just in even the most widely circulated magazines.” But, he reported, in a typical combination of braggadocio and camaraderie, he was marrying someone else, “a girl named Mary Welsh . . . [who] is a great believer in bed which I believe is probably my true Patria. . . . Also she is the only woman ever knew besides you who really loves a boat and the water: which is a break for me.”
But he wasn’t doing any writing. “As you know I was out of business as a writer except for 6 Colliers pieces and the poems . . . from early 1942 to 1945,” he told a critic some years later. And the two novels he worked on in the years after the war—his exploration of androgyny, The Garden of Eden, and an ambitious multilayered epic that was planned as part of a trilogy—proved intractable. Neither one was published (or publishable) in his lifetime. His fire was proving just as hard to rekindle as MacLeish’s, but he was reluctant to admit it. All of them, it seemed, were waiting for a signal to move on to the next chapter of their lives.
Just before the war Gerald and Sara had made the acquaintance of Dawn Powell, a commercially underappreciated but critically esteemed novelist (she had published nine books by 1940, when her friendship with the Murphys really began) who was ten years younger than Gerald. A plump, rather dowdy woman with a paradoxically sharp eye for elegance and style, she had been married since 1920 to an alcoholic, occasionally successful advertising man named Joseph Gousha, and they had a mentally handicapped son who was in and out of institutions. Despite this strain, however, and the Goushas’ near constant money troubles, Powell managed to keep her wit dry and her perspective bemused, at least in public. Being themselves practiced in keeping up the same sort of appearances, Gerald and Sara took to her at once; they not only relished her cleverness and her talent, they also responded to her aura of wounded gallantry. “Darling Dawnie” was asked to dinner, showered with presents—from bunches of flowers to dresses to occasional infusions of cash—or invited for the weekend. Sara managed all this in an almost distracted way, as if it weren’t really happening. “I enclose a bit of cash,” she’d say, “which never hurt anybody.” Gerald made more of a production: “I don’t really know whether you cared for that bag and those gloves or whether you were partly insulted,” he wrote Powell early in their friendship, on a hilariously tacky postcard of a “Penguin Duck” whose white pom-pom crest makes her look very like Dawn Powell in a hat: “Maybe the whole thing was just a sordid assignation that I would boast about at my club later. Or maybe life as the Belle of the Latin Quarter has made you accept as your lot the gifts that men vie to lay at your feet. As for me, what I expect is a little goddam civility and that of the most expensive kind. No Yale 1912 man is designing and making bags for his health & you can go to our 30th reunion (I’m not) this year & ask. Love, G.”
Powell wrote the ending of her novel My Home Is Far Away during a stay at Swan Cove; later, she started another, The Wicked Pavilion, as the result of conversations she’d had with Gerald about a book he was reading, a collection of eighteenth-century family letters called The Creevey Papers. During another “wonderful weekend of restoration” with “these miraculous two people” Gerald taught her to confront the Atlantic surf by diving through the first two breakers, as he did, until she could float serenely on the far side. “This conquering of the deep is something,” Powell confided to her diary; in fact it enabled her to throw off a paralyzing case of writer’s block.
Something else happened during that weekend, too, something so strange that Powell could articulate it only later. Talking to Gerald, she said, she felt they each became aware of some other presence, what she called “the finger of death.” It was pointing at him.
“Sal dear,” wrote Gerald to Sara a week later, from a Pan Am Clipper nine thousand feet over Long Island Sound, “we’re veering over Connecticut and Montauk goes out to sea with a line of fleecy torn clouds over it . . . over Boston now and I think of dear Dos lying there below . . . And of the anguish in his mind when he wakes.”
For the finger of death that Dawn Powell had seen on Gerald had, Powell believed, been “deflected to Katy.” On September 12, driving from Cape Cod to Connecticut in the late afternoon, Dos had been momentarily blinded by the setting sun and the Dos Passoses’ car had collided with a truck parked by the side of the road. Katy was killed outright—the top of her head sheared off by the windshield—and Dos lost an eye. “Where can he put this nightmare?” Gerald asked. “I keep wondering what he’ll do.” Taking a cue from his own experience,
he added, “Stand it, I guess.”
When the call came, Gerald was just leaving for a business trip to London during which he was to discuss arrangements for a possible partial sale of the Mark Cross Company, so he could not go to comfort his friend; but Sara went to Boston at once. As Ada MacLeish and Alice Lee Myers had done for her, she organized visitors to the hospital, helped make arrangements for the funeral in Truro, and urged Dawn Powell to take her place at Dos’s side when she had to return to New York. Then, because he couldn’t bear to stay in Provincetown where he and Katy had been so happy, she invited Dos to come to New York and then travel out west with her and Honoria and two mutual friends of the Murphy and Dos Passos families, Lloyd and Marion Lowndes.
“We have all come to the part of our lives when we start to lose people of our own age,” Ernest Hemingway had written the Murphys when Baoth died; now it was really true. First Scott Fitzgerald and Alec Woollcott, then, in 1945, Bob Benchley. Now it had happened to Katy, from whom there would be no more chatty letters addressed to “Dear Mrs. Puss,” with whom there would be no more Waddell Girls jokes or cruises on the Weatherbird. And in December 1949, very suddenly, Philip Barry was killed by a massive heart attack. The smell of death, and age, seemed to be in the air: in a time that should promise renewal, there seemed little to hope for. “[Y]ou & I alike feel it,” wrote Archie MacLeish to Gerald in the fall of 1948. ‘“A kind of boding’ you say. It is true. Or at least it is true for you & me. But why, unless because autumn is the time for change & we await it, our hearts beating faster than the season, I do not know.” A year after Katy’s death Sara sent flowers to her grave in the Truro cemetery. Dos, who had gone to Havana, spoke for all of them when he told her, in thanks, “I cant yet find words to write. After a year the void is as deep as ever.”