Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story

by Amanda Vaill

  It’s very old—wide corridors, bedrooms with ball-room dimensions, aged furniture, the grains and knots of the wood of which are outlined with deep cracks, the brocades on the chairs are worn nearly thro’; but have not been replaced. On my writing-desk is an elaborate silver stand containing ink and a shaker full of powdered sand! . . .. To the modern it would all appear as “shabby genteel”—but these people love their worn rugs and cracked teacups. You and I prefer “shabby genteel” to its inverse i.e. “smart chintzed apartments” with their skillful imitation hyacinths in painted pots,—and general air of having been inspired by Vogue’s latest hints to the housekeeper.

  “Smart apt,” in fact, became a private term of opprobrium, used to dismiss anything that smelled of the chichi. “A bit too smart apt,” they would say to each other, with a barely perceptible arch of the eyebrows.

  Gerald went back to work at Mark Cross, leaving his cozy nineteenth-century nest every morning to mope in the sterile modern surroundings of his Fifth Avenue office, where Sara would send him little notes during the course of the day which said no more than “how much and how dearly I love you.” At this point, when they were at last together, separation of any kind was wrenching. A short summer visit by Gerald to his Yale friend Arthur Howe was so unnerving that Gerald had to comfort himself by going to an antique store and purchasing “2 blue vases for your room, a glass bottle of an indescribable colour, a lamp with a lyre base and two painted globes you’ll love, 3 white glass goblets, 2 monstrous bird pictures done in feathers, etc.” As he wrote Sara then, “You were beside me at every step, and I felt so near you that I dreaded going out into the street.”

  She was spending the summer with her family at the Dunes (the shackles of daughterhood proving rather hard to shake off), and Gerald was commuting to East Hampton on weekends, as he had during their courtship; the only difference was that now they were permitted to share a bed. Even that comfort was denied Sara come Tuesdays, though; “this a.m.—I was just going to say something to you,” she wrote him plaintively, “when I remembered—with a pang, that you weren’t there—There was such a strange unwelcome flatness in the bottom of your mattress.”

  They both hoped desperately for a child—“the real rock of our future happiness,” as Gerald described it—and thought Sara might be pregnant in the autumn. She was doing hospital volunteer work at the time and had caught a persistent cold, which brought on a torrent of maternal concern. “The work you are doing is very dangerous when you have any kind of a cold,” wrote Adeline warningly from East Hampton, “and really you should not go about in hospitals while you are so susceptible to all infection.” She barraged her daughter with cold prescriptions that, she said, should be filled immediately (she enclosed $1 to pay for them). In the end she persuaded Sara to come back to the Dunes to be coddled.

  The pregnancy proved to be a false alarm, however; and in November, Adeline’s own health took a turn for the worse. Although she had dwindled of late into a kind of professional state of delicacy, this new development seemed potentially critical: returning to New York alone, having left Sara in East Hampton, Gerald felt a preliminary pang of regret. “I’m so glad to have seen your mother,” he told Sara in a note written from the train. “I wish I’d kissed her hand. Do it for me.” His sense of farewell was prophetic: just after the New Year, Adeline Wiborg died at home at 40 Fifth Avenue.

  In five scrapbooks, bound in black leather and individually wrapped in the gaily printed cotton called tissu de Provence, Sara Wiborg Murphy chronicled the first dozen years of her new life with Gerald. Photographs, lovingly captioned, alternate with clippings and bits of memorabilia: cards, snippets of fabric, locks of hair. In the first scrapbook, the first entry is a clipping taken from the New York Herald on the Friday after Olga’s wedding to Sidney Fish: “MISS WIBORG TO BE BRIDE OF GERALD MURPHY,” it says. There is no trace of Adeline Wiborg’s tersely correct obituary, which appeared in the New York Times on January 4, 1917, and mentioned neither the date nor the cause of its subject’s demise. Instead, the next item in Sara’s scrapbook is a rather saccharine poem, cut from a newspaper, entitled “First Born.” It begins, “Your little hands clutch at the world / As something new and strange.” Under it Sara has written a date, December 19, 1917. On that day, as Gerald noted in Sara’s diary (Sara being too weak to do so), “Honoria Adeline [was] born at 8 P.M. Showed much spirit and alertness even when held up by the heels.”

  Gerald always claimed, in later life, that his daughter was not named for anyone in either family; but in fact she carried the name not only of his late mother-in-law, but also of Honoria Roberts Murphy, his great-grandmother, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1832. You could put this lapse down to forgetfulness, or you could suspect that Gerald was covering his tracks. Among the papers he left behind after his death is a loose sheet bearing a litany of names redolent of Celtic twilight—Cormac, Aongus, Baoth, Niall, Brighid, and “Honor or Onora.” Elsewhere, in a little pigskin notebook, is a similar list containing the name Honoria Adeline Murphy. It seems as if, in naming her, Gerald was covertly reaffirming the Irishness that Patrick Murphy had come to New York to escape. And in adding Adeline’s name to Honoria’s, just as he and Sara had furnished their house with the quaint castoffs of their parents’ generation, he made another nod in the direction of the past.

  Certainly the past must have seemed safer that December than the bright future they had imagined for themselves. In April the United States had entered the Great War, and all through the summer and fall Gerald’s classmates and contemporaries had been enlisting in the fight. Fred, at first rejected because of his physical frailty, fought his way into the army as a private in the Sixth Field Artillery Division and by the end of the year was waiting to be shipped out to France. Hoytie, distressed, as they all were, by stories of the casualties in the trenches, had decided to volunteer as a nurse in the ambulance corps. Gerald tried for months to arrange an officer’s commission—one intercessor on behalf of “my friend, Gerald Murphy” was the muckraker Ida Tarbell—and in November, the week after Sara’s birthday, he went to Washington in person to try to move things along. But he was discouraged to learn that it would probably take at least two months more before he could be commissioned. He and Sara were anxiously awaiting Honoria’s birth, which perhaps made him feel all the more strongly the need to commit himself. On November 22 he, like Fred, enlisted in the army as a private. To commemorate the occasion he had a photographic portrait taken: in it he stands, braced and solemn, in his private’s khakis, his breeches neatly creased, his puttees wrapped as tightly as mummy bandages. His face, under his broad-brimmed doughboy’s hat, appears apprehensive and uncomfortable. It is perhaps the only photograph of Gerald in costume in which he does not seem completely at ease, as if this were one part for which he was miscast.

  That Christmas was a bittersweet one for the Murphys. They were still in mourning for Adeline, and Sara was confined to bed, recovering from a painful and difficult delivery. They made a brave effort at gaiety: they put a small Christmas tree in Sara’s room and trimmed it with miniature ornaments; they pinned a sprig of mistletoe to Honoria’s crib, and placed her Christmas and birthday gifts—a silver mug from Anna Murphy, silk dresses, jewelry, money, and a bank passbook from Frank Wiborg—under the little tree. But over their celebration hung the pall of Gerald’s imminent departure.

  On December 30, her parents’ second wedding anniversary, Honoria was baptized at home, wearing a christening dress of cherry-colored silk overlaid with embroidered lace—“royal and overpowering—but quaint in effect,” commented her mother, who was still forbidden to get up and had to watch the proceedings, which took place in the adjoining bedroom, in a “courting mirror” held by Helen Stewart, the baby nurse. As an anniversary present (or a christening gift?) Frank Wiborg bought 50 West 11th Street from Patrick Murphy and presented the deed to his daughter and soldier son-in-law. Now, whatever happened, they had a home that was truly their own. Two days l
ater, on New Year’s Day, came “the greatest anguish of our lives”: kissing his wife and infant daughter good-bye, Gerald went to Pennsylvania Station for the train that would carry him to Ground Officers’ Training School in Texas, and thence, he hoped, to war.

  The train journey was miserable: it was bitterly cold, and the men were crowded into narrow berths in a mostly unheated sleeping car. Gerald had a sore throat and runny nose, and dosed himself from the traveling medicine chest Sara had given him. For comfort he had packed one of Honoria’s little baby shirts, and through the night he held it next to his cheek. The warmth of it, and its sweet baby scent, contrasted with the “ugliness” and the “permeating smell of cold steel” that enveloped him, and, he wrote Sara, “brought me back with a pang to you both in that lovely white room with its suffused candle-light and flowers.”

  Fort Kelly, a mile and a half outside of San Antonio, was a long way away from that lovely white room. Rows of dark khaki tents flanked a central drill ground, with the whole surrounded by “miles of flat dust-lands, not white with a good clear glare,—but black & cruel yellow-black, stale and unprofitable.” Gerald had at first been attracted by the endless space and “featureless horizon” of the level Texas landscape, but soon the rigors of the recruit’s life made him see it differently. The men slept nearly thirty to a tent on canvas cots with straw mattresses; the showers (cold) were situated at the end of the barracks, and the only working latrine was outside. The climate was fierce: a week after Gerald’s arrival the camp was devastated by a sandstorm that filled the air with black dust, blotted out the sun, blew down tents, sent pack mules on a rampage, and caused truck drivers to crash blindly into barracks. In two hours, the thermometer plunged sixty-one degrees as rain, sleet, and finally snow mixed with the flying dust. During the night four enlisted men froze to death and four more killed themselves out of desperation and terror. Those less afflicted still suffered from the dust, which brought with it pinkeye and all kinds of bronchial ailments. At night the tents were so filled with the barking sound of coughing that they sounded like a kennel. And it was so cold and damp that Gerald slept in a woolen union suit, sweater, muffler, bathrobe, and bed boots under four layers of blankets.

  Sara, distressed at his situation, kept sending him packets of clothing—puttees, pajamas, shirts from Brooks Brothers, caps lovingly knitted by her mother’s sister, Aunt Mame—as well as homemade bran muffins and squares of washed cheesecloth for him to use as disposable handkerchiefs. Anna Murphy was less sympathetic, writing him “that I must get a lot out of this experience, that it was good for me and that the War was ‘a great developer.’” Anna had written him the same sort of letters at school “and I thought her heartless,” Gerald said, but now he could bear such exhortations with equanimity. For he had Sara and “our fragrant garden baby,” whose tiny shirt he kept under his pillow. “It gives me such courage now to think of us established as a little family,” he wrote Sara. “I believe so in us—it is my creed—we can do anything with ourselves.”

  At the end of January, to his relief, he was accepted for the School of Aeronautics and was shipped out to Ohio. The train trip to Columbus took three days and nights, all spent sitting up in three overcrowded day coaches. Gerald discovered two Yale friends, the Kentuckian Menefee Clancy and Dan Nugent of St. Louis, among his comrades-in arms, and after the three sons of Eli had sat up all night in their uniforms Nugent suggested they disembark during a stopover in St. Louis and accompany him to the Racquet Club for a shower. Although Gerald was suffering from a cold, he thought the whole experience was a fine adventure. But when he telephoned Sara to regale her (the first time they had spoken since he left), the sound of his hoarse voice undid her.

  “It has made me too homesick for you—to hear your voice,” she wrote him in a tearstained note immediately afterward; “some things seem too much for one—to be borne—I try not to cry—on account of Honoria, but today I can’t succeed.” Then, scrawling, “I’ll go on with this tomorrow,” she enclosed a rose petal that she and Honoria had kissed.

  This breakdown was uncharacteristic, for in general Sara had kept busy and cheerful learning to look after Honoria and getting her own strength back. Her letters were full of the baby’s looks and doings—her weight (satisfactorily gaining), her “brilliant dark gray blue” eyes, her “pale bronze lashes,” her way of stretching her toes to the fire or staring intently into her mother’s face. But although Sara clearly reveled in every aspect of her new life as a mother, it was far from the only thing on her mind. She was keeping up with the war news, sending Gerald clippings from the New York papers about the likelihood of a German counteroffensive along the Marne, and speculating about the divisive effects of the Bolshevik revolution on the internal affairs of Austria and Germany. “What a triumph for Socialism,” she wrote, “the war won by Psychology,—instead of Steel—what a slap in the eye for Force of Arms. . . . (How we should love it, shouldn’t we?)”

  She had drawn together a kind of nursery salon on 11th Street: her old friend Rue Carpenter came with her husband, John, whose new symphony was about to have its premiere in New York; and Monty Woolley dropped by to update her on his vicissitudes with the draft board (he was trying to get exempted from military service). He was charmed by Honoria, to Sara’s surprise—but not everyone was so comfortable with the novel and unembarrassed way Sara blended her roles as mother and hostess. Two gentleman friends were present one afternoon when (as Sara wrote Gerald afterward, with endearing candor) the baby had “the most fearful movement . . . a real cannonnade (too many n’s—never mind) . . . But instead of laughing,—as I hoped they would—as honest men,—they became most offhand—& talked loudly of other matters—their faces growing more & more refined—How false to try to ‘carry off’ anything of the kind. And it put me in the position of‘Mortified Young Mother’ whereas I felt nothing of the kind.”

  Her serenity and composure stood in some contrast to the emotional storms raging around the corner at 40 Fifth Avenue, where her family were all “miserable.” Hoytie was preparing to leave for France and the ambulance corps; Frank, doubtless anxious about the menace of German submarines and concerned about the dangers his daughter would face behind the lines, went into scolding paterfamilias mode, warning her to get her affairs in order before she sailed because she might not come back—but no one paid him any attention. Olga, grass-widowed when Sidney Fish joined the army, had come to stay at Number 40, and she and Hoytie and Frank had been quarreling fearfully over trifles like the amount of time each family member spent on the telephone; after one particularly stinking row Olga moved to the Brevoort Hotel in a huff. Everyone had colds, and Frank had come down with what was at first thought to be mumps (it was only a bad sore throat). But Sara reported to Gerald that she felt “exactly as though I were in a calm backwater,—watching logs and debris piling and plunging along in the flood. I don’t even enter the fights as umpire now,—as I always used to be tempted to do,—(thereby invariably being drawn in, sooner or later).”

  It helped that she had a place of her own, “surrounded by the beautiful things” he had picked out for them. In the days of their courtship she and Gerald had often dreamed of some pastoral place to which they could escape. In their recent, wartime letters “our little farm” had been a recurring theme, and 11th Street represented an urban version. Like the Australian bower-bird that attracts its mate by furnishing its nest with bright found objects, feathers, and flowers, the Murphys took turns embellishing “our beautiful house.” Even on his way to San Antonio Gerald had found time, during a brief stopover in New Orleans, to acquire an Empire chest of drawers, six oyster plates (“only .75 each”) with an antique M in the middle, a pair of Empire candelabra, assorted old vases and lamps, curtain tiebacks, a hot toddy set, a “strange large lavender pitcher for Honoria’s bath,” and a set of antique children’s plates, each decorated with a French puzzle sentence—a marvelously eccentric list. Now Sara was busying herself making new mulberry red curt
ains for the sitting room—to drape over the pale blue chiffon under-curtains already in the window (“the blue makes quite a lovely light,” she commented)—and looking for an old pier glass to hang between the windows.

  But as much comfort as she took in it, “our house—where I have never been without you”—made her wistful, too. “I still find my ears straining for your key in the lock—and that bang of the knocker when the door is opened—and then I have a sinking recollection, when it turns out to be Miss Stewart, coming in. Jerry dearest,—don’t let’s ever separate again. . . . Because without you I am only existing—I am less than half of myself.” She missed him so much, it was a tangible, physical hunger. “I was thinking today,” Sara wrote, as Gerald was on his way to Columbus, “of how much I’d like to kiss that little hole in the front of your neck—or either side of your mouth—Perhaps I will—very soon.”

  With Gerald’s transfer to flight training school a reunion now became possible: Sara could come out to Columbus and he could join her and the baby at a hotel in town when he had liberty. The very thought threw Sara into a spasm of anxiety: Would Gerald be embarrassed by her appearance, dressed as she still was “in rusty black” in mourning for her mother? Would the lunch and supper hours Gerald was allowed conflict with Honoria’s nursing schedule? Gerald’s own temper was short: there was a mix-up about her hotel reservation which delayed her arrival by a day, and he grouchily accused her of staying in New York to see Hoytie off for France (she hadn’t), wasting a whole twenty-four hours of the leave he had arranged for himself. But finally Sara, Honoria, and Miss Stewart, accompanied by enough equipment and clothing to outfit a small army, arrived at the Hotel Deshler in Columbus for a ten-day stay.