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

by Amanda Vaill

  At the end of July the country had been shocked by an outbreak of racial violence in Washington, D. C., that began when a white mob spearheaded by two hundred sailors and marines swept through black neighborhoods searching for two youths who had been apprehended and released after reportedly insulting the wife of a naval officer. A policeman was shot in the process, setting off a rampage in which black men and women were beaten and their homes burned, and blacks in their turn invaded white neighborhoods; there were many injuries and at least ten deaths, and more than two thousand troops and police officers were required to restore order. Against this background of racial unrest, Mary McLeod Bethune, one of the leaders of the National Association of Colored Women, arrived in Long Island on a fundraising tour for the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls, a school she had founded in Florida. And when her train pulled into the East Hampton station, Sara Wiborg Murphy was there to meet it.

  Despite her father’s political connections and aspirations, Sara was something less than activist: she didn’t march for women’s suffrage or sign petitions. But Bethune, the seventeenth child of former slaves, stirred her: her “dignity of labor” philosophy, her kindness, directness, and grace, spoke to Sara, and she felt impelled to help Bethune’s cause. Hoytie was less enthusiastic (Frank was away in Washington consulting to the Tariff Commission), and she drew the line at inviting Bethune to spend the night at the Dunes. What, she asked her sister, would the servants think? Reluctantly Sara compromised on allowing Bethune to stay with a local black family, but she insisted on inviting her to spend the day at the Dunes, and held a fund-raising meeting to which the eleemosynarily inclined of East Hampton’s elite were invited. They had lunch in the enormous baronial dining room—the Irish maids frostily handing around the peas—and discussed the Washington riots. Bethune’s comments were “frightfully interesting,” thought Sara. Earlier she had proudly showed off Honoria and Baoth to her visitor. “Has she ever seen a Negro before?” Bethune inquired about Honoria and, when Sara admitted that she hadn’t, remarked, “Oh, then she will be afraid of me.” Said Sara to Gerald later, “I was so glad that she wasn’t.”

  At the end of September the Murphys moved to 149 Brattle Street in Cambridge, a pleasant, square frame house with a wide porch, shaded by old trees. Sara was delighted with the change. “We need a new place,” she had sighed in her last weeks at East Hampton. “Isn’t it amazing what a refreshed outlook it gives one?”

  Gerald certainly showed its effects: he had done unusually well in his summer courses and now took on a substantial load of new ones, freehand drawing and architecture, as well as courses in landscaping. Unfortunately, burdened with setting up a new household and satisfying the demands of two very small children, Sara couldn’t join him. Her scrapbooks tell the story: whereas she had chronicled the great events of Honoria’s infancy—first step, first tooth, first haircut—with pasted photos and carefully inked captions, Baoth’s milestones were recorded on slips of white paper tucked into the book, as if awaiting some leisurely afternoon (which never materialized) when she would have time to do it all properly.

  She did find the time to begin cultivating a widening circle of friends, among them her girlhood friend Hester Chanler, who was studying seriously to be a painter and had married a proper Bostonian (and rising young historian) named Edward Pickman; William and Alice James; the portraitist John Singer Sargent, whose lectures Gerald attended at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, patron of Bernard Berenson. One acquaintance they did not make was that of a Harvard Law School student who had been at Yale, and in Bones, just three years behind Gerald: Archibald MacLeish was beginning to be known as a poet; his wife, Ada, was a promising singer of opera and art songs; both were friends of Amy Lowell’s; and they would have seemed a perfect fit for the socially connected but artistically aspiring Murphys. But MacLeish, who knew that Gerald was a fellow Bonesman, felt skittish about them, a residue, perhaps, of the Yale wariness with which the gridiron star MacLeish viewed the social butterfly Murphy. When he saw Gerald on the street in Cambridge he said to himself, “He isn’t the real thing—he just doesn’t look right to me!” Later MacLeish amended this story, claiming to have admired Sara and Gerald from a distance. “I would like to know those people,” he said he thought. “They look so well-laundered.”

  Certainly the Murphys were moving in exalted circles. The formidable Mrs. Gardner invited them to dinner (with the Jameses and Sargent) at Fenway Court, the neo-Venetian palazzo she had filled with Bellinis, Giottos, Vermeers, and what the transplanted Boston exquisite Harry Crosby would later refer to as “the next-best Raphael I ever saw.” Afterward she begged them to sing some of the duets for which their own parties were famous. Instead of Wagnerian numbers like those Sara had once performed with her sisters, the Murphys’ entertainments had a distinctively American stamp: Gerald had been collecting old sheet music for some time and had built up a considerable library of forgotten American songs of the late nineteenth century. He had also become interested in African American spirituals, which were virtually unknown at the time except as arcane folkloric artifacts. Somehow he had stumbled across some examples in the Boston Public Library and laboriously copied out the scores and the words. So for Mrs. Gardner he mingled his tenor with Sara’s contralto in “Oh, Graveyard” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The next day, in a typical gesture, the Murphys sent their hostess a copy of Henry Krehbiel’s Afro-American Folk-Songs, the academic classic on the subject, as a bread-and-butter present.

  Their gift was an expression of their interest and respect for African American culture and their wish to share what they felt about it—an attitude light-years away from the condescending burlesques of Edwardian “coon song” performances. Although Eugene O’Neill’s African drama The Emperor Jones, starring the Negro actor Charles Gilpin, was raising eyebrows on the New York stage in 1920, and although Countee Cullen’s poetry—which urged God to “Make a poet black, and bid him sing!”—was beginning to be published in literary magazines, people of the Murphy’s class rarely took black people, or black culture, seriously. While the Murphys’ peers were clapping their hands for the finale of the 1919 Ziegfeld Follies, Irving Berlin’s “I’d Rather See a Minstrel Show,” which featured “The Follies Pickaninnies” and blacked-up white men like Eddie Cantor, Sara and Gerald had left the “coon song snatches” of their youth behind. Now, on trips to New York, they found excitement in the emerging Harlem club scene and the music of artists like Fats Waller (Sara’s self-proclaimed favorite). As in other things, Sara and Gerald had begun to go their own way.

  Despite their passion for American art forms, they were also beginning to be aware of artistic developments in Europe. In the autumn of 1920 they traveled to New York with Sargent to see the first American exhibition of the work of Nicholas Roerich, the exiled Russian cubist who had designed the decors for the Ballets Russes’ Sacre du printemps. Both Gerald and Sara had been to the legendary Armory Show of 1913, which had awakened America to the possibilities of modern art, but only Sara had been particularly stimulated by it. She had, in fact, wanted to buy some of the exhibited works, but was “dissuaded by reactionaries.” Now Roerich’s pictures stirred them both equally. Later Gerald told of how two of Sargent’s Boston Museum auditors—one of whom was William James, Jr.—disparaged Roerich to the master, and Sargent replied, “A little of Roerich’s virus would do you good!” Gerald never identified the other speaker; perhaps it was himself. If so, the virus was already in his system, and the symptoms were about to appear.

  The Murphys spent the summer of 1920 in a spacious Greek Revival house in Litchfield, Connecticut, called the Glebe; another season in East Hampton, with the merry-go-round of guests and the constant family sniping, was simply impossible to contemplate. Sara was pregnant again, and the cool rooms and luxuriant gardens of the Glebe were a tranquil refuge: it was the closest she and Gerald had yet come to that idyllic cou
ntry existence they had once imagined for themselves. In Connecticut, Baoth’s hair was trimmed for the first time, and Sara saved the gold wisps in her scrapbook. He and Honoria romped under the shade of the great trees in dresses and playsuits of gossamer linen, all lovingly captured by Gerald’s Kodak. In September they returned to Cambridge, this time to a larger house at 4 Willard Street; and there, on October 18, Patrick Francis Murphy II was born.

  By this time Gerald had begun to feel again a nagging dissatisfaction with the direction their life was taking. The landscape architecture program at Harvard was, he felt, increasingly “veering away from designing estates,” his passion, “to town planning and engineering. Unsatisfactory.” Certainly for someone with his lack of interest or aptitude in mathematics, it was. Nor had Sara been able, as they had envisioned, to take her place by his side at the school; for the past year and a half she had been either pregnant or nursing a baby. Gerald’s work began to suffer from his disaffection: he found himself unable, or unwilling, to complete some of his course assignments. The old cycle of inattention and loss of direction, which had plagued him at Yale, at Mark Cross, and in the army, seemed to be repeating itself.

  Perhaps the “new place” just wasn’t new enough. Malcolm Cowley later described “Cambridge in the early 1900s” as “good manners, tea parties, Browning, young women with their minds adequately dressed in English tweeds. I think it was T. S. Eliot who said that life there was so intensely cultured it had ceased to be civilized.” Things hadn’t changed much by 1920, and although Sara and Gerald had formed some happy friendships there, Cambridge itself had come to seem confining. And the increasingly philistine and isolationist feeling of American society in general made them uncomfortable.

  During the time the Murphys were in Cambridge, The Dial, a literary magazine with which Amy Lowell was closely associated, had been publishing a series of essays by Harold Stearns which inveighed against the conformity and mediocrity of the American cultural scene; these essays must have been an item of table talk at Brattle Street dinner parties, and they would have found a sympathetic partisan in Gerald. Certainly he was familiar with the work of Waldo Frank, who in 1919 was writing about the repressive force of Puritanism in American society: “Whole departments of [the American’s] psychic life must be repressed. Categories of desire must be inhibited. Reaches of consciousness must be lopped off.” Gerald himself described it somewhat flippantly when he claimed that “a government that could pass the Eighteenth Amendment [prohibiting the sale or consumption of alcohol], could, and probably would, do a lot of other things to make life in the States as stuffy and bigoted as possible.” He and Sara resented the fact that if they wanted a glass of wine with dinner or a cocktail—that daring new invention—beforehand, they had to seek refuge in “the basements of old sandstone houses.” He had put up with so much bluenosed disapproval from his own family during his lifetime that he was disinclined to put up with more from his country.

  And that, finally, was the problem. All the disapproval, the materialism, the stifling restrictiveness that he and Sara had experienced within their respective families now seemed to be manifested by society at large. How could they reinvent themselves in such an atmosphere? It was a question asked by others than themselves. During the years since the war increasing numbers of Americans had left the United States for Europe: in 1921 there were six thousand Americans in Paris; by 1924, thirty thousand. Although some were war veterans returning to taste the fruits of peace in the lands they had fought over, still others were artists, writers, musicians, intellectuals, who, “feeling like aliens in the commercial world” of the 1920s, as Malcolm Cowley put it, “sailed for Europe as soon as they had money enough to pay for the steamer tickets.” Suddenly Europe seemed like the answer, at least for the short term. Gerald and Sara were, for the first time in their lives, financially independent, thanks to Frank Wiborg’s property settlement. In Europe, where in 1920 the dollar was strong, Sara’s income, which now came to about $7,000 a year, would go that much further. They could put the Atlantic Ocean between themselves and what Gerald thought of as their “two powerful families,” and make a new start in an old place.

  They didn’t plan very far ahead. Gerald asked for a leave of absence from Harvard; he hadn’t completed his course work for the 1920–21 academic year, and he was a number of credits short of qualifying for his degree. Although he told Harvard that he would return in February 1922, he took the somewhat ambiguous step of having the family’s passports stamped “Foreign Residents.” He and Sara intended to spend at least the summer in England. Perhaps, if things worked out, he could find work as a landscape designer there, and they could settle abroad. They gave up the lease on Willard Street, put their furniture into storage, and on June 11, 1921—accompanied by Honoria, now three and a half; Baoth, two; Patrick, eight months; and their nurse, Lillie Nyberg—sailed for Southampton on the SS Cedric.

  9

  “An entirely new orbit”

  THE SUMMER OF 1921 was hot and dry, and although Sara dutifully escorted Gerald on a tour of the houses she had been welcomed in as one of the beautiful Wiborg sisters, the gardens of England’s stately homes were parched and brown and most unrewarding to study. London, although they could renew friendships with Stella Campbell, the Headforts, and others, “didn’t seem to fill the bill,” as Sara put it, so the Murphys repaired to Croyde Bay, a seaside village in Devon, for the remainder of the summer. Then, following Wiborg tradition, they proceeded to Paris, where on September 3 they installed themselves and the children at the Hotel Beau-Site in the rue de Presbourg near the Etoile.

  It was meant to be a short stay; frustrated by their English sojourn, Gerald and Sara had decided to return to the United States sooner rather than later. But then they discovered that their Boston friends, the Pickmans, had settled in Paris temporarily (Edward Pickman was gathering material for a book). And Cole Porter had set up residence near the Eiffel Tower with his new wife, Linda Lee Thomas, an American “alimony millionairess” some eight years older than himself who was reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Although the Pickmans and the Porters didn’t find one another entirely congenial (Hester Pickman, with old money’s queasiness at ostentation, thought Linda Porter “overdressed”), they were both agreed on one thing: the Murphys must stay in Paris, if only for the winter.

  So Gerald and Sara found a furnished apartment on the rue Greuze, a curved bow of a street that arced away from the place du Trocadero in Passy, a chic, modern district of leafy streets and substantial limestone apartment houses bordered by the Seine on one side, the Bois de Boulogne on another, and the green belt of the avenue Foch on another. The area might reek of “smart apt,” but the children could play in the Trocadero gardens nearby, or in the Bois, and with the franc at less than twenty cents on the dollar the rent seemed like nothing. And, as the Murphys soon discovered, something was going on in Paris that made it unlike any other place in the world.

  In the autumn of 1921 Paris was a city transformed by the twentieth century. Although pounded by zeppelins and cannonades during the war, most of the buildings had survived. The wide boulevards were still shaded by plane trees, and the cafes, which had been forced to close during the worst of the bombardments, had put out their awnings again. But in the streets the war’s effects were readily apparent. “The thing I used to notice in Paris,” said Archibald MacLeish, who would arrive in the city in 1923, “was the total absence of the young. . . . The youth of [France] had been slaughtered.” In their place had come other young people—and some not so young—from Russia or Spain or Ireland or America, all of them drawn by a feeling that here they could (as one of their number, Ezra Pound, famously put it) “make it new.”

  James Joyce had already published Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and was living on the boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse, working on the manuscript that would become Ulysses. The Catalan painter Joan Miro had joined his compatriot Pablo Picasso, already famous as the p
ioneer of cubism, on the roster of the dealer Jean Rosenberg. The American painter and photographer Man Ray had been persuaded by Marcel Duchamp to come to Paris, where he was experimenting with a new kind of photography he called “the rayograph.” Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev were composing in Paris rather than in newly Bolshevik Russia. They were all there, or on their way there: George Antheil, Virgil Thomson, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Samuel Beckett, Berenice Abbott, John Dos Passos, Leonide Massine, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Bricktop, Ford Madox Ford, e. e. cummings, Aaron Copland, Scott Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan, Constantin Brancusi, George Balanchine—an infinite roll call of modernism.

  And, pace MacLeish, there were any number of survivors of the prewar avant-garde, all of whom found themselves stimulated by this infusion of fresh talent, with noisy and dramatic results. The year immediately preceding the Murphys’ arrival in Paris had opened with the first dada manifestation at the Palais des Fetes on January 23, 1920. Dada—the name is a nursery term for “hobbyhorse”—was an anarchic artistic movement that grew out of, and made serious fun of, the nihilistic despair caused by the war; and this first manifestation was a kind of multimedia performance-art happening that included a reading and literary discussion by André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault; a recitation by Tristan Tzara of the entire text of a newspaper article he had chosen at random, accompanied by clanging cowbells, clattering castanets, and rattles; and the ritual erasing, by Breton, of a chalk painting by Francis Picabia that hung amid an installation of work by Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and Giorgio de Chirico. The audience, whose initial befuddlement at the proceedings had given way to frustration and rage, went wild, whistling, hissing, and hurling insults at the delighted dadaists.