by Amanda Vaill
Gerald and Sara planned to spend the summer before the move in East Hampton, where they were building a modest house—the first they had ever had constructed to their own specifications. La Petite Hutte stood just behind the dunes on the old Wiborg property, next to the pink stucco garage and chauffeur’s quarters that the Murphys had been using after the sale of Swan Cove and Hook Pond in the 1950s. It was a low building that nestled protectively into its site, and its only extravagant feature was the spacious living room, with its cathedral ceiling, which overlooked the Atlantic; on the other side of the house the view, which could have been painted by Constable, extended over what had been the Wiborgs’ fields to Hook Pond, and beyond to the treetops and steeple that marked East Hampton Village.
While they were still in East Hampton, Gerald had sobering news: his doctor, William Abel, discovered a cancerous tumor in his intestinal tract, which was removed by an operation in August. Gerald was more worried for Sara than anything else; but she and Honoria were both relieved when the operation seemed to be successful and he returned to East Hampton to recuperate. What they didn’t know, but Gerald did, was that the surgery was merely “palliative.” It had been undertaken simply to make him more comfortable, and it was only a matter of time before the cancer would recur, and with it, a lessened chance of survival.
He didn’t tell Sara. Together they had heard hopeless news from doctors too many times for him to inflict more on her now. While he was in the hospital, Sara had written to him from East Hampton, as she had so often done in the days before their marriage when they were separated for a few days. It was a love letter, as those old ones had been, but distilled now to its essence:
Dearest Gerald—
Here I am “at home”—“without you,”—and it is no longer a home, just a place to live—You must know that without you—nothing makes any sense—I am only half a person,—and you are the other half—it is so, however I may try—and always will be—Please please get well soon—and come back to me.
With love—all I have—
Sara
So he went home to East Hampton and spent the Indian summer days “sitting in the sun and gazing out over the Ocean to a featureless horizon” until he had “mended to the doctors’ satisfaction,” as he wrote Archie MacLeish. The phrase was an old one—he had noticed that same “featureless horizon” in Texas when he was stationed there in the First World War. Archie picked up on it at once.
Featureless horizon—yes. That is precisely what one sees from the uninhabited bare hills old men climb to, though only you would think of the just word. But the point is—or at least I think the point is—the horizon, not the featurelessness. When one expects to go on “forever” as one does in one’s youth or even middle age, horizons are merely limits, not yet ends. It is when one first sees the horizon as an end that one first begins to see. And it is then that the featurelessness, which one would not have noticed, or would have taken for granted, before, becomes the feature. . . . So that this featureless sky is as far as it is possible to be from negation. It is affirmation. It says the world is possible to man because to man there are horizons, there are beginnings and ends, there are things known and things unknown.
Gerald’s strength returned, and he and Sara finished clearing out Cheer Hall by November; then they went to Washington to spend the winter at the Fairfax Hotel, where they could help Honoria and William Donnelly settle in to their new house in McLean and visit with Ellen Barry, in Georgetown, and Scottie Fitzgerald, now married to a lawyer, Samuel Lanahan, and living near Honoria. Scottie (Sara reported to Dawn Powell) even gave a party for the Murphys, with “dinner and dancing, no less,” that was written up in the gossip column of the Washington Star—the potent magic of Murphys and Fitzgeralds still had drawing power. To Sara, however—and to some of the gentlemen guests—the highlight of the party was a young woman wearing “one of the NEW Paris dresses, cut down to the waist in front—There was nothing there to hide, however—which makes it worse.”
That spring of 1964 was a beautiful one, full of fair weather and promise—paradoxically so, Gerald thought, when all of a sudden he felt age (and death) creeping up on him “in the night or when one is off one’s guard.” Early in the year Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art offered to mount a one-man show of his work, but although he had welcomed previous exhibitions in Dallas and San Francisco, Gerald seemed suddenly weary of the limelight, and turned the Corcoran down. “All of that is as if in a sealed chamber of the past and has somehow become unreal,” he explained. “Je n’en peux plus. Trop tard.” (“I can’t do any more. Too late.”)
In April, back in East Hampton, Sara learned that Hoytie had died in Paris, and the news upset her terribly. Not that she grieved for her sister—it was too late for that, too—but she realized that Hoytie “had been the only enemy she had ever had,” said Gerald. The memory hurt still. But there was worse to come: in May, Sara and Gerald received the equivalent of a poison-pen letter sealed years ago in a bottle that had only just then washed up on the beach.
The “letter” was Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his early years in Paris, A Moveable Feast, which he had been working on in the late 1950s and had completed in 1960 shortly before his death. Although ostensibly a nostalgic reminiscence of “how Paris was in the old days when we were very poor and very happy,” it was also the vehicle through which Hemingway, suffering through increasing depression, tried to rewrite the past and avoid self-recrimination for any of the wrong turnings his life had taken, to create for himself what one biographer has called “a life without consequences.” How else can one explain his vicious treatment of people who had helped him when he most needed help, people like Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and most spectacularly Gerald and Sara Murphy? Fitzgerald he was jealous of; Zelda he knew had distrusted him; and Dos Passos he had never forgiven for portraying him, thinly disguised, in his novel Chosen Country, as an “Indian-like boy with dirty fingernails” who runs off to join the Marines, a description Dos had clearly gleaned from Katy’s memories of her childhood friend Ernie. He had already called Dos a “one-eyed Portuguese bastard”—a slur made worse by the fact that each word in it was true—and in 1957, when he was writing A Moveable Feast, he must have felt he still had a score to settle. But what score was he settling with Gerald and Sara?
Here is what he says about them:
The rich have a sort of pilot fish [Dos Passos] . . . who talks like this: “. . . I like them both. Yes, by God, Hem; I do like them. I see what you mean but I do like them truly and there’s something damned fine about her . . . You’ll like him (using his baby-talk nickname) when you know him. . . .”
Then you have the rich and nothing is ever as it was again. . . .
Hemingway blamed them for his own transgressions: it was the rich, he implied, who were responsible, by association, for his attraction to Pauline Pfeiffer (“another rich”), and who thereby corrupted his marriage to Hadley. And they did worse: “Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and stupid as a bird dog. . . . I even read aloud a part of the novel I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get . . . When they said, ‘It’s great, Ernest. Truly it’s great. You cannot know the thing it has,’ I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life . . . instead of thinking, ‘If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?”’
There was no way Gerald, or Sara, could have read these passages and not remembered Ernest reading The Sun Also Rises to them by the tile stove in Schruns, or heard the dim echo of their own voices, telling Ernest he had written a book so magnificent it was “hitched to the universe.” Nor was there any way to avoid seeing A Moveable Feast stacked in bookstore windows and splashed across the front pages of book reviews. “I am—contre coeur [against my will]—in Ernest’s book,” wrote Gerald to Archie MacLeish in May. “What a strange kind of bitterness—or rather accusitoriness. . . . What shocking ethics! How well written
, of course.”
Sara’s reaction went unmentioned. But it was during this spring that her memory began to fail: first for small things, like conversations she had just had, then for more significant ones, and possibly her forgetfulness shielded her from the effects of Ernest’s posthumous vitriol. It was just as well that she never saw some of the passages that were deleted from the published text of the book: the one in which Hemingway referred to Gerald, not by name, of course, as someone who paints, but is not really a painter; or, worse, the one about “these rich” who “had backed me and encouraged me when I was doing wrong,” which said that “They were bad luck to people but they were worse luck to themselves and they lived to have all their bad luck finally; and to the very worst end that all bad luck could go.” Even posthumously and after the fact, it put Hoytie’s curse to shame.
Shortly after A Moveable Feast appeared Gerald went into the hospital again; the cancer for which he had been operated on the previous summer had recurred, and this time there was no masking the consequences. Gerald was very firm with Dr. Abel: there were to be no heroic measures taken to prolong his life—it would end when his clock, his faulty instrument de précision, ran down. “I had so wanted to know and greet old age,” he lamented to the MacLeishes; but instead he would try to cultivate Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘“patience exquisite, which plumes to peace hereafter.’”
He spent the summer watching the sea or walking in the garden or sitting with Sara on the bench looking out over Hook Pond. When Dr. Abel called, as he did regularly, Gerald would proudly take him to see the roses, and then, still the perfect host, draw the doctor out about his work in Alsace or his travels in the tropics. Archie MacLeish had sent, at long last, a privately printed copy of the sermon he had given about Job to the Farmington Congregational Church; and during those summer months Gerald mulled over its contents. On the cover Archie had written:
Dear Dow: I don’t think I sent you this when I did it seven or eight years ago. Rereading it today I thought at once of you because you have said it all so much better. At bottom it is still a question of the love of life, isn’t it? We will be down very soon
love Archie
Gerald gracefully ignored the acknowledgment of his own gift to this old friend; instead he responded to the substance of the sermon itself. Recalling his own oppressive religious upbringing, and the “nightmare of bigotry” that the Catholic Church had made of “Sara’s and my ‘Mixed Marriage,”’ he said that Archie’s statement of faith “was like drinking from a pure source. I only wish it were not so late. I bless you for sending it. I heard every note of your clarion-call.”
MacLeish had one last payback to make, however. Nearly twenty years previously, when he recited “The Windhover” aloud to Archie on that spring morning, Gerald had been trying to give him a renewed sense of himself as an artist; now Archie tried to do the same thing for him. The Museum of Modern Art had shown some interest in Gerald’s painting, and MacLeish proposed to give them his picture Wasp and Pear, which he had exchanged years ago for Watch. Normally, such proposals take months, if not years, to be processed and accepted, but MacLeish wanted his friend to die “thinking of himself as a painter,” and he persuaded the Modern’s director, Alfred Barr, to make the acquisition official immediately. When Honoria told him the news Gerald was so weak that all he could do was smile, and say, “How wonderful.”
On October 4 Sara wrote to Calvin Tomkins:
Dear Tad,—
I must write you—in all sadness,—Gerald is very ill, & the doctors have warned us that any day may be the last. . . . He simply sleeps waking only once in a while. . . . It is terrible to see him—once so strong—waste away. Honoria is with me most of the time—& we are doing our best—(whatever that is). . . .
Affectionately,
Sara
For almost two weeks more he drifted in and out of consciousness. On October 17, sensing the end was near, Honoria and William Donnelly asked if they could bring a Catholic priest, a former army chaplain, to give him last rites. They couldn’t have known, and Gerald must have realized they couldn’t have known, how bitterly he had expressed himself on the subject to Archie only the month before. “Get me the Army man,” he said now; by then it hardly mattered, except to Honoria. Seeing her griefstricken face, and Sara’s, hovering behind the priest, he smiled, muttered, “Smelling salts for the ladies,” and slipped away forever.
“DEAREST SARA DEAREST SARA,” went Dorothy Parker’s telegram. It said everything. At Gerald’s funeral, an elegantly brief service at the little Episcopal church on the green, “Sara was marvelous,” reported Dawn Powell to John Dos Passos: “controlled & I believe relieved that Gerald did not have to go through any more of the unchic indignities and embarrassments of pain & dying.” The funeral service was preceded by a gathering of friends at home and followed by “a small perfect Murphy party” with the bartender from the Maidstone Club mixing drinks and “four lovely local waitresses serving delicacies to about 20 or 25,” including the MacLeishes, Powell, Fanny and Hank Brennan, Olga’s son Stuyvesant Fish, Ellen Barry, and Calvin Tomkins, who was one of the pallbearers. (Among the absentees was Cole Porter, who had died two days before Gerald.) It was a perfect golden October afternoon, and as guests left for the long drive back up the island to New York or elsewhere, they stopped to kiss Sara good-bye. But instead of weeping, or pressing her hand, they said, “What a lovely party.”
“It was,” Dawn Powell said, “a lesson in courage disguised as taste.”
After Gerald’s death Sara carried on the way someone who has lost a limb carries on without it; she was not whole, but she functioned. Alone and increasingly frail, she took an apartment in New York at the Volney, a residential hotel on the Upper East Side where Dorothy Parker also lived, and the two of them kept an eye on each other. Parker’s housekeeping had not improved over the years; she appeared to live on dust and drink, and Sara worried over her poor appetite. Dottie worried about Sara’s “keepers,” as she called the caregivers she relied on, and about her lapses of memory: “Don’t go and see Sara,” she told Lillian Hellman. “She won’t know you.”
Occasionally, though, Sara still showed her true steel. A year after Gerald’s death she received a letter from an assistant to Mary Hemingway, telling of Mrs. Hemingway’s intention to place Ernest’s papers in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. “We know from the files,” the letter said, “that Ernest corresponded with you and it would mean a great deal to have copies of those letters included in the Hemingway Collection.” Sara, private as always, refused. “Dear Mrs. Hemingway,” she wrote reprovingly, bypassing the nettlesome assistant: “Upon reflection, I do not think that Ernest would have liked a public exhibition of his letters to his friends. . . . [T]hey (the letters) are really personal & topical, & not necessarily interesting to the public view—I shall keep them for what they are:—amusing and affectionate letters from a good friend, who is gone.”
Mary Hemingway couldn’t accept defeat. She proposed to visit Sara personally at the Volney in the hopes of overriding her veto in person. But Sara, veteran of so many costume balls, had taken precautions: she sent her nurse-housekeeper, who normally dressed in street clothes, out to Bloomingdale’s to get a nurse’s uniform; she drew the blinds in her apartment, powdered her cheeks to produce a ghostly pallor, and lay down on a chaise longue. When Mary Hemingway arrived, she found an invalid, seemingly at death’s door, whose “nurse” explained that Mrs. Murphy was resting, and mustn’t be overexcited. Weakly, wordlessly, Sara waved away her visitor’s entreaties. Mary Hemingway had no choice but to leave empty-handed, her breathing uneven and her face blotchy with fury.
Although Sara was more and more fragile and “stuck with rather unpleasant nurses . . . [who] argue every point until you are ready to drop,” she still kept in touch with what remained of her and Gerald’s extended “family.” Ada and Archie MacLeish praised her “wonderful talking letters,” and Dos Passos frequently called to see her whe
n he was in New York. She read his 1966 memoir, The Best Times, with a mixture of delight and painful nostalgia. “It is such fun to read that I dread finishing it!!!” she wrote. “So I reward myself (when I’ve been a good girl, & often finished the Soup!—) I do wish I could see you all.” And she still went to East Hampton in the summers to sit by the sea she had always loved.
In 1974, partly at the urging of Archie MacLeish, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of the work of Gerald Murphy. For the first time, all the extant canvases from Gerald’s anni mirabili in France were reunited: the missing Boatdeck, Portrait, and Engine Room/Pression were represented by blown-up black-and-white photographs, and Turbines (MOMA called it Pressure), Laboratoire, and Roulement à Billes, for which no photos were available, were represented by plaques on the wall. The catalogue, by William Rubin, then curator of painting and sculpture at the museum and one of the world’s foremost modern art historians, referred to Gerald as “a major American artist”; the New York Times’s John Russell, reviewing the exhibit, called it “a distinct contribution to the history of American painting”; and Hayden Herrera, writing in Art in America, said he was “an astonishingly original, witty and prophetic painter.” The show earned for him what he had never had in his lifetime, not even when he had been “discovered” in Dallas in 1960—crowds, admiring and influential reviews in both the scholarly and mainstream press, a real place at the table of American twentieth-century art.