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

by Amanda Vaill

  The reunion was sweet, even if it was only for ten days in less than ideal circumstances: they could share meals in tearooms and laugh at the surly waitress, play with their adored baby daughter, hold hands and whisper in darkened taxis, even (when Gerald had no guard duty) spend the night together. It had been a long time since they had been able to be with each other in this way, and Sara was desolate when Frank Wiborg came out to Columbus to accompany his daughter and her entourage home. “You see,” she wrote Gerald afterward, “I can only be happy where you are.”

  For the next few months Gerald buckled down to his preflight studies as he never had to his undergraduate work at Yale. To prepare for the dreaded elimination exams he woke at 3:30 a.m. to pore over his books in the latrines, the only place with enough light to read by, until 6:00. Sara hoped the result would be a staff posting in Washington or, even better, at Mineola on Long Island, where she could set up housekeeping with Olga, and she offered to have Frank Wiborg pull some strings to make this happen. But Gerald wanted the real thing: flight training and transfer to the front lines in France, where Fred, who had transferred to the Tank Corps and been promoted to the rank of second lieutenant, had already seen action.

  By the end of March, Gerald had passed his exams and was commissioned as a second lieutenant, assigned to the 838th Aero Squadron in Garden City, New York. In June he was made intelligence officer of the post, but by the end of the summer he was no closer to France; and on August 22 he was transferred again, to the Aviation Recruit Receiving Depot at Fort Wayne, outside of Detroit, where he was pigeonholed as a “casual,” to serve as and when needed, a real blow to his pride. Although he formed warm friendships with his brother officers, he disliked his superiors, who, “while the British in Palestine destroy two whole Turkish Armies,” spent their time bickering over “whether the girls in the Motor Corps and Canteens are of sufficiently good social standing to be given a dance.” Impatient to get overseas, he pulled every string he could: he approached a former Yale and Hotchkiss colleague who was an officer in the Aviation Section in Washington; Frank Wiborg wrote a general he knew; Fred and Hoytie were delegated to try to wangle him a staff job with General Henry T. Allen in France; Patrick Murphys friend J. M. Tumulty, President Wilson’s secretary, did “everything I properly can to be of service.”

  Uncertain about his situation, he wanted desperately to see Sara but couldn’t quite commit to the idea of having her move to Michigan to be with him. He was able to get them married officers’ quarters on the base, and she began shuttling back and forth from New York to Detroit by train, spending weekends with Gerald and speeding back to Honoria afterward. Their visits were sweet. “What fun we had—all week! in that fusty old place! And how much [underlined with two squiggly lines] I love you,” Sara wrote. But the partings were painful. They clung to each other so passionately at the railway station on one occasion that a fellow passenger remarked on it sympathetically in the train afterward. They comforted themselves with talismans: when Gerald found her unfinished cigarette in their quarters he lit it and smoked it down to the end, just to feel closer to her—then he saved the holder.

  A greater comfort than talismans was the possibility that Sara might be pregnant again. By the end of September they were certain of it, and Gerald was cautioning her not to take any risks that might endanger her health or the baby’s. Soon there was more encouraging news: a wire and then a letter from Tumulty, followed by orders from the War Department, announced Gerald’s transfer to the Air Service Training Brigade in Mineola, Long Island. “You ought to be proud of this boy,” wrote Tumulty to Patrick Murphy—the sort of praise Gerald had so rarely heard from his father’s lips. It appeared as if he might finally be on the verge of going overseas. But then, on November 11, the guns along the western front fell silent for the first time in four years. The German army had surrendered, and the Great War was over.

  “Jerry my Berry dearest,” wrote Sara, using a nickname she had invented early in their courtship:

  Just a line before I go to bed to say how much I love you and how [underlined twice] I look forward . . . to the time when our little family (of 3½) will be all together under one roof. . . . And the little one half will arrive to a happy, united family and not one separated, or about to separate. . . . I wonder if you have regrets—about not going to France—even though I cannot (personally) help thinking . . . that it might not have done you good but harm. . . . For us—(so it seems to me) separation does not bring a spiritual development, rather it delays it. . . . But I could not bear it if you felt you had missed a chance—that it was something you would half regret and have to explain—always. . . .

  God bless you and keep you safe—I love you.

  Your wife,

  Sal

  He did have regrets. Not just about missing action, but about what he felt his war service had shown him about his character. On December 11, as the men who had served under him filed past and shook his hand in farewell, he was surprised to find himself “completely knocked out.”

  I must have cared for them more than I knew—and more than they knew. It is this that pains. All that I have made them feel is a cold kindness and a decent interest in their welfare,—while all the time I have loved them! . . .. It enrages me to think that this consciousness of relationship that I feel toward those whom I want to have like me—should blur my true feelings. I longed so to have them know—and they are gone. . . . It is my fault. How meagerly equipped I am for human expression. . . . I have felt—at all times—complex and forced in my efforts to show these men how I felt. . . . I must resign from the world of human relationship—I’m no good at it, if I have failed to show these simple souls my real feelings. . . . Thank God for you—to whom I—alone—feel that I have shown in full the love I bear.

  It was the old story for Gerald—this feeling that he existed as if behind a glass wall that kept him from honestly connecting with the people he truly cared for. And it would become a familiar one in the years to come, as he and Sara began in earnest to make the life they had been dreaming of since their marriage.

  8

  “The idea is thrilling to me”

  TO CELEBRATE HONORIA ADELINE MURPHY’S second Christmas her parents gave gifts in her name to the Red Cross and the Belgian Babies’ Fund. Remembering those whom fate had treated less kindly than their own “little family of 3½,” they also sent checks to Fatherless Children of France in lieu of lavish presents to each other or to others in their families. But even as they enjoyed the blessings of peace, they found themselves wondering what the next step was.

  They loved their pretty house on 11th Street (Sara was already planning additions for when the new baby arrived), and they played the part of young parents with enthusiasm, dressing Honoria in a dazzling array of Kate Greenaway-inspired outfits and chronicling her every weight gain or new tooth in Sara’s scrapbook. When Honoria was separated for a few days from her favorite playmate, a neighbor’s boy of her own age, Gerald concocted an excruciatingly polite miniature letter from the little boy, saying he had been ill but would be able to play with her soon. The letter was enclosed in a tiny envelope no bigger than a postage stamp with a tiny dot of “sealing wax” and a tiny pretend stamp with a tiny cancelation mark on it.

  Entertaining though such nursery games were, they were only games. Gerald was going to have to do something to “get a grip on our future,” as he put it. Mark Cross, it was clear, was worse than a dead end for him. He had always felt ill at ease, like an impostor, in the boardrooms and at the dinner tables that were his father’s natural habitat, and he had failed in his one attempt to leave his imprint on the company. In 1915, before the war, Patrick had asked him to try his hand at designing an inexpensive safety razor, and Gerald was on the verge of patenting the result when King Gillette beat him to market with his own version. Now, he felt, his father would always second-guess him, as he did Fred (who was demobilized and working for Cross in England). When the elder Murphy asked Geral
d what he planned to do when his demobilization papers came through, he made a life-changing decision. He wanted to go to Harvard, he said, and study landscape architecture.

  “I had to say something,” he explained later, “and that’s what came out.” But it wasn’t quite so haphazard a response as he maintained. He had always had an eye for space and color: even his bleakest wartime letters were lit up by images—of the Mexican market in San Antonio with its jumble of colors, of the “spangled tights” of a Seuratesque tightrope walker at a street fair, or the “enormously fat Percherons” he saw pulling a sledge in Columbus, “dappled grey (handpainted!) with heavy manes and fetlocks, soft grey noses, and the beloved crease down the back.” That winter, after his demobilization, he had been studying drawing in New York with a Miss Weir at the School of Design and Liberal Arts, a pursuit Sara applauded: “I do think it so remarkable,—not that you could do it,—but that, as you could do it as well as that, you had never found it out before now. It’s amazing.”

  “My parents had a plan,” Honoria said many years afterward, a plan that sounds like something one of Tolstoy’s utopian-minded characters might have sketched out at the dinner table. Part of the plan was a bucolic setting (“our little farm”), but a more important part of it was a life centered around some kind of artistic endeavor, where work and life were one, and where man and wife could—would—be able to work shoulder to shoulder. As Gerald envisioned it: “When we wake up in the morning the question and work of the day will belong to both of us. Think what this means!! To be able to work together over the same thing. What husbands and wives can do this?! Think of our being able to add to all that we already share—the very work of our hands and brains. The idea is thrilling to me.” Whether they were making gardens, like Candide and Cunegonde, or painting or potting seemed almost beside the point.

  As bitter a pill as Gerald’s repudiation of Mark Cross may have seemed to Patrick Murphy, he swallowed it with good grace, possibly because his wife uncharacteristically supported her son’s decision. And whatever his feelings, he was jubilant when he, Fred, Frank Wiborg, and Hoytie (all of whom were in London at the time) received a cablegram announcing the birth, in New York, of a “male Murphy” on May 13, 1919. “There was wild yelling,” reported Sara, “and they all opened champagne and caroused over the heir—& the grandpapas did a lot of handshaking & yelling—Hoytie says Father takes on as though he had given birth to a son himself.”

  The new baby was named Baoth Wiborg Murphy (Baoth was one of those old Irish names on Gerald’s original list), but for the first few months of his life his parents called him either “the boy” or (Sara’s preference) “Dubbedy,” which may have been Honoria’s version of “the baby.” Sara was enchanted with his gold hair and merry face—“How alike we are!” she wrote on the back of one photograph of him. Soon her scrapbook was full of exquisite watercolor sketches of Baoth, in celadon greens, pinks and peaches and golds, like the ones she had done of Honoria.

  Gerald did not have long to enjoy his little son, however, for by the beginning of June he was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living at the Brattle Inn and enrolled in Harvard’s School of Landscape Architecture. He was immediately enthralled by the work: surveying a lily pond at the botanical gardens, covered with white, yellow, pink, and lavender blooms; bisecting tree trunks “at 300 ft. distance with a telescope which has a double lens with cobwebs [crosshairs?] transversely across it”; or cramming Latin for botanical classifications. He had got Sara a catalogue for the Women’s School—which offered identical graduate classes with the same professors, but under a different roof—so she could enroll in the same courses he had. And he was scouting out houses for them in the fall. They had decided, reluctantly, to give up 50 West 11th. They still loved the house but “look[ed] upon it as an invaded retreat,” subject to sudden incursions from 40 Fifth Avenue and surrounded by the alien forces of New York society. So Gerald got Alice James (the wife of William James, Jr., and one of Cambridge’s social and intellectual arbiters) to go with him while he looked at square Georgian clapboards and modern stucco villas and even “one manor with immemorial elms on the lawn, barricades of lilac, a cupola, etc.”

  Rue and John Carpenter had also turned up in Cambridge (John was a Harvard graduate, class of 1897), and through them Gerald was introduced to Amy Lowell, the cigar-smoking scholar, poet, and scion of a definitively Brahmin Boston family. Lowell had taken over leadership of the imagist school of poetry from Ezra Pound in 1914, and she had recently published a pioneering study of new verse, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. She was “an amazing creature—rather like a large, formidable frog, with a brain like a dynamo”—and she startled Gerald by demanding that he and the Carpenters come to dinner with her that very evening.

  Lowell lived in grand style in Brookline, across the river from Cambridge, in a beautiful Georgian house built by her ancestors and surrounded by pre-Revolutionary gardens that fascinated the neophyte landscape architect. She and Gerald had much to talk about, for in addition to her passion for gardening—she had become a keen student of the work of the English landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll—she was deeply versed in an astonishing array of other subjects. Her interests ranged from fairy tales and Orientalia to carriage-driving and English literature (her collection of Keats editions and incunabula was remarkable) and coaching, and at the time she was immersed in translating a collection of Chinese poetry, written in 700 B.C., from the Mandarin. As Gerald discovered, she had a rather mandarin quality herself.

  After dinner, while her companion, the actress Ada Russell, entertained the ladies, Lowell offered her favorite cigars to the gentlemen and then spirited Gerald off for a discussion of Russian novels. He wasn’t the least bit nonplussed by the postprandial arrangements, being a habitué of Elizabeth Marbury’s, Anne Morgan’s, and Elsie De Wolfe’s dinner parties. But his tête-à-tête with Lowell took an alarming turn when he observed that he found many of the characters in Russian fiction to be “such weak animals that the hopelessness of it all becomes unreal.” Whirling on him, Lowell demanded, “Repeat that!” And when he did, rather haltingly, she whipped out a pencil, wrote down his words, and then muttered, “Weak animals, weak animals is right, weak animals is good!” To the consternation of the other awestruck guests, Gerald roared with laughter. “She knows everything about everything,” he told Sara, “yet she’s so cordial and human.”

  What Lowell represented for Gerald was something he had been hungering for, a combination of unconventional aristocracy and intellectualism, of social and cultural engagement. This was a world where he and Sara could flourish, and he could hardly wait until they could be transplanted to it. The only element of uncertainty was financial: somehow, with the return to civilian life, Baoth’s birth, the removal to Cambridge, and other expenses, Gerald was overextended, and it took an infusion of cash from Fred to pay off his outstanding bills. Gerald was grateful, but inclined to be a little defiant. Although he lamented his inability “to anticipate the need, use, and value of money,” he felt that his own family, and his in-laws, paid entirely too much attention to the subject. “I’m so glad,” he told Sara huffily, “that there’s no evidence of it up here.”

  Perhaps he felt he could afford to be grand, for Frank Wiborg had decided, like King Lear, to divide his assets among his three daughters before his death, and Sara would soon be mistress of a substantial amount of capital. In preparation, Frank had taken to thrusting pamphlets about “The Safe Keeping of Securities” into her hands at opportune moments. Sara tried to be appreciative but admitted to feeling mystified. “Who can we get to teach us about amortization, & assessments & depletion?” she asked. “It all sounds like diseases to me. . . . Can’t we just go on trusting in God & the Columbia Trust Co.?” Of course she knew they couldn’t: although she told Gerald she agreed with him in principle that money wasn’t a fit object for obsession, “Nothing, I think, chains one so much to it, as entirely disregarding it does. Mismanagement brings it
always before the eye.”

  With 11th Street rented out, Sara had packed up all their belongings and, with the children and Miss Stewart, moved to East Hampton for the summer. Although the sea and the sand held a perpetual allure for her, she felt “exasperated” by this return to her old life. “I’ve never been away from it enough as yet,—and I feel its claws still in me,” she told Gerald. Frank, as usual, was “running the legs off his guests” with mornings of nonstop golf, lawn bowling, and croquet, punctuated by walks about the estate to view the livestock and drives to Montauk or other points of interest, and Hoytie and Olga (Gerald referred to them as Scylla and Charybdis) were at each other’s throats again. Hoytie had given Olga a surprise party for her birthday, hanging lanterns in the trees and smuggling a dance band and caterers and all of Olga’s best friends into the house while Sidney and Olga were out to dinner. But instead of being pleased, Olga was furious, complaining that the house had been overrun by “hoodlums” who misplaced the bric-a-brac. She went off to bed in the middle of the party and spent all the next day complaining about the noise and the damage, to which Hoytie responded histrionically, “Things, things: Olga’s life is made up of nothing but things.”

  Caught in the middle yet again, Sara blamed herself for not being able to keep the peace, and raged inwardly that her own plans and hopes seemed to be so easily blown off course by these familial storms. Gerald comforted her long distance as best he could: “I believe in you so,” he wrote. “Our new life is but one thing: your ideals and principles and character organized and put into actuality by me. You were a woman and couldn’t do it—on account of your family—I am a man and can, in spite of everything. Don’t you see, my dear girl, how you taught me to do the things that life and society forbade you to?!” In fact she was beginning to see it, and was beginning to put her ideals and principles into practice by herself.