by Amanda Vaill
During the course of their journey Ada and Archie confided to the Murphys their growing feeling that a return to the United States was inevitable—for all of them, possibly, and for the MacLeishes, certainly. The favorable exchange rate, which had made it so much cheaper to live in Europe than America, was evening out. Although Ada had begun to have some success in Europe—she had been asked to sing Debussy’s Melisande at the Opera Comique and was to give a concert at the Conservatoire in May, where she would sing songs by their mutual friend Richard Myers as well as by Lully and Scarlatti—she hankered after an American career. Perhaps more important, Archie’s father was in failing health and Archie felt the old pull of filial responsibility. And, said MacLeish later, “We wanted our children to be Americans.”
The Murphys disagreed. They’d heard enough grumbling from Frank Wiborg about the Frenchified upbringing of his grandchildren. They had tried to mollify him by legally changing Baoth’s name earlier that year to Baoth Wiborg, thus giving Frank a named descendant, something he desperately wanted. It was an extraordinary gesture, almost biblical; wasn’t it enough? They’d had enough lectures about responsibility. They felt that the only responsibility you should have was toward your children and your art. As Archie huffily overstated it, “They really couldn’t let anyone act as though anyone could ever have responsibilities toward anyone.” There was a quarrel—at least, there was a quarrel between Gerald and Archie, one of “these damn school girl quarrels of Gerald’s,” as Archie put it in a letter to Hemingway, “that make it so hard for me to believe in his affection.” And for a while matters between the two men were prickly.
For Gerald was still immersed in the cultural life of the Continent, and devoted, sometimes to the exclusion of personal commitments, to his work. It had become a small bone of contention between him and Sara: although she had encouraged him to go on a solo trip to Germany earlier in the year to paint, she found herself more and more carrying the burden of their complicated household alone and occasionally complained about it. But neither of them was ready to leave the freedom and ferment they had found in Europe. Gerald, for one, could feel changes coming in the artistic climate and was eager to experience them.
‘You’re right,” he wrote Hemingway. “The ballet’s as dead as the theatre. The world needs to know what it’s looking at and listening to for a while.” Not for him, anymore, the sort of project he’d proposed in his notebook around the time of Within the Quota and Boatdeck: a “ballet of metiers” in which goggled construction workers in overalls and young toughs in apache clothes dash about a set composed of girders and cranes and warehouses. Now he wanted to work in a new medium.
He had been talking with Fernand Léger about collaborating on a film. Léger had done a cinematic version of George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, featuring piano, airplane propeller, automobile horn, and other objects, in 1924, and followed it with other versions, either recut or reshot, and now he and Gerald made plans to begin shooting their project in May, in Gerald’s studio. The movie, whatever it was, was never named, and Gerald never mentioned it again after the spring of 1927. But some time during that year, a version of Ballet mécanique that Léger made, featuring the same surreal collection of moving objects used in previous versions, appears to have been filmed in a large, light, bare interior that might have been 69 rue Froidevaux.
Hemingway had moved out of the studio just in time; his divorce from Hadley had come through and he and Pauline were married on May 10, with a small luncheon afterward at Ada and Archie MacLeish’s studio flat on the rue du Bac. MacLeish and Hemingway had become very close while the Murphys were in America that fall, taking bicycle excursions, going skiing in Switzerland at Christmas, and falling into the kind of boys’ locker-room talk that Hemingway frequently seemed to call forth from his correspondents (“my testicles give me no end of trouble at these interseasonal periods,” was the kind of thing MacLeish felt obliged to confide to Hemingway in this vein). But they, too, had had a falling-out. On an autumn trip to Zaragoza, in Spain, for the feria of Santa Maria del Pilar, they had a quarrel that MacLeish described in a poem, “Cinema of a Man”:
He walks with Ernest in the streets of Saragossa
They are drunk their mouths are hard they say qué cosa
They say the cruel words they hurt each other. . . .
Although the cruel words were occasioned by Archie’s suggestion that Ernest might learn a thing or two from Joyce’s fiction, the argument had begun as a kind of literary-historical shoving match over the sexual proclivities of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, and various popes (Hemingway was in the process of becoming a Catholic in order to marry Pauline). MacLeish, Hemingway complained in a letter to Gerald and Sara, said they were “all Fairies.” He reported this exchange jokingly, but only barely—for Ernest, Gerald later recalled, “was extremely sensitive to the question of who was and who wasn’t.”
The sensitivity spilled over into his fiction. In Gerald’s studio, that autumn, he had written a story, “A Simple Enquiry,” about an officer’s homosexual come-on to his orderly. “You are quite sure that you love a girl?” asks the major in the story. “And that you are not corrupt?” “I don’t know what you mean, corrupt,” the orderly replies, evasively, although Hemingway leaves little doubt that both he and the major know what’s being spoken of. Later, the major wonders if “the little devil” lied to him; at the story’s end, the reader is wondering the same thing. A few months after he finished “A Simple Enquiry,” Hemingway began a novel about a boy and his soldier-of-fortune father; the manuscript seemed to founder on a long digression about how to recognize and deal with homosexuals (who, according to the boy’s father, make good interior decorators but lousy writers).
Hemingway’s preoccupation with this subject matter was in part the inevitable obverse of his own compulsive maleness. But part of it also came from his exposure, in Gerald Murphy, to a man whose sexual persona was so troublingly different from anything he had experienced before. Gerald was athletic: he was a sailor and a long-distance swimmer. He had a beautiful wife with whom he had had three beautiful children. He had recently bought that manifestation of machismo, “a 4CV Terrot motocyclette” which, he boasted to Ernest, “does 90 kilos without losing a spangle.” But on that “motocyclette” Gerald would sometimes ride tandem—in full evening dress, including top hat—with the red-bearded and flamboyant Monty Woolley, to the consternation of the Antibes shopkeepers who saw them whizzing by. Indeed, he dressed so exotically, in his brief bathing costumes or sailor’s jerseys or beautifully pressed suits; he paid so much attention to decor and to other people’s clothes, even to choosing dresses for Sara and Ellen Barry; he had so many sexually ambiguous friends, from Cole Porter to Cocteau to Etienne de Beaumont, that Hemingway didn’t know how to pigeonhole him. And it made him uncomfortable.
Sometimes the discomfort showed. That spring the Murphys invited the Hemingways to a preview performance of Oedipe Roi, Stravinsky’s new operaoratorio to Jean Cocteau’s text, at the hôtel particulier of Winaretta de Polignac, who had commissioned the piece. Predictably, Hemingway hated the whole thing, thinking it too effete and arty, and complained about it later to Gerald. His appreciation of the piece can’t have been helped by having Cocteau (whom some wit had referred to as “the feminine of cocktail”) twittering on Gerald’s other side. “What a remarkable profile the Princesse de Polignac has!” Gerald remarked to Cocteau (who didn’t like her). “She looks like Dante.”
“Oui,” responded Cocteau. “La Mère Dante,” which, literally translated, means “Mother Dante,” but which is also a vulgar pun (“L’emmerdente”), the equivalent of “pain in the ass.” Hemingway, who (Archie MacLeish said) spoke French like a butcher, probably didn’t get it, which would only have increased his feeling, when with Gerald, of being a bull in a birdcage.
Whether such feelings were the cause, a chill entered his relationship with Gerald during the spring of 1927. Hemingway complained about it to Archie MacLe
ish, who counseled him that “Gerald would get over whatever was eating him the moment he saw” Ernest. “I didn’t know for sure,” he continued, “that you’d get over your irritation with Gerald ditto.” The two of them patched up their quarrel, and Ernest and Pauline came to visit at Villa America that summer. But between them and around them, all kinds of things had begun to change.
At first only Sara seemed to notice. “People have now started to crowd onto our beach,” she wrote to Zelda Fitzgerald in Delaware, where the Fitzgeralds had rented a house for a time:
discouragingly undeterred by our natural wish to have it alone—However, by means of teaching the children to throw wet sand a good deal, & by bringing several disagreeable barking dogs & staking them around—we manage to keep space open for sunbaths. . . . The Old guard of last year has changed, giving place to a new lot of American Writers & Mothers. . . .
We miss you and the MacLeishes dreadfully. . . .
Is Scott working? And how’s the book coming on? We haven’t had any fights but then the season is barely opened—give us time.
In place of the Fitzgeralds and the MacLeishes, who were in Massachusetts for the summer, a new, more social crowd had come to La Garoupe, people who were less interested in painting or poetry and more interested in parties: people like the Charles Bracketts and Harpo Marx (who asked the Murphys how one arranged a trip to Pamplona). The Algonquin smart set, personified by Woollcott, Benchley, and others, had made a permanent beachhead. There were more and more distractions, and the relationships that had nourished the Murphys’ sense of community and accomplishment were weakening. Dos Passos came to stay, as well as Pauline and Ernest; and they saw Picasso at least once, but the old sense of intimacy had ebbed. At a Paris concert the previous winter, MacLeish had seen Gerald cut Picasso dead. Still, Gerald hoped to have Picasso come to his studio that summer—he was particularly eager to show him the pictures he’d been working on—but it wasn’t possible. “Hélas, alors,” Gerald lamented.
The pictures Gerald wanted Picasso to see were, most likely, the ones he also wrote to Hemingway about in June. “I’m working all the time,” he said, “and feel that I’ve knocked one or two things on the nose. Before I die I’m going to do one picture which will be hitched up to the universe at some point. I feel it now and can work quietly.”
One of these paintings seems to have been Bibliothèque, a composition in gray-blues, browns, and blacks showing objects from Patrick Murphy’s study—a globe, books, a magnifying glass, and a bust of Emerson—arranged around a central column or pilaster topped with a classical cornice. The architectural forms of Doves are repeated here, but the addition of Emerson—and of the globe, which shows the continents of North and South America—gives Bibliothèque a strongly American flavor. Years later Gerald would say that in his paintings he was reaching for a kind of native classicism “such as the Greeks must have craved . . . what Emerson meant when he wrote, ‘And we [Americans] shall be classic unto ourselves.’” But if Gerald was trying to celebrate this classicism in Bibliothèque, he did so with some ambivalence. The sober palette of Bibliothèque is far from the pearly tones he used in Doves. Rather, this painting carries with it the gloom of a Victorian town house. (In his notebook, Gerald proposed painting the base of the globe in “blk. fond”—deep black, as in the bottom of a well.) And although Doves had played with optical tricks of magnification and reduction, the magnifying glass here reveals only a blank, empty lens. Similarly, the title plates of the spines on the three bound books are blank, and the countries and continents depicted on the globe have no names. The New World, the world of his father, is an empty world, and it’s not clear that he is ready to reenter it.
The other picture Gerald finished around this time, Cocktail, is altogether jauntier, a gleaming assemblage of cocktail glasses, corkscrew, crosscut lemon, and cocktail shaker, all surrounding an open cigar box whose painted lid has been replicated in photographic detail (the reproduction took four months to complete). Its inspiration, like Bibliothèque’s, was familial. In this case, it was Patrick Murphy’s bar tray, the same one from which Gerald, Sara, and Pauline Pfeiffer had been served cocktails on their recent visit to New York. A gin-and-vermouth tang relieves the rigorous geometry of the composition and grisaille palette of the background: bright yellow lemon, yellow and gold cocktail glass, crimson cherry, and squiggly corkscrew.
But the center of the picture is the cigar box, within which rest five rather phallic cigars—that magic number five, standing, perhaps, for Gerald, Sara, and the three children, that crops up in so many of his pictures. On the box’s lid, a woman in classical robes and crown points to a globe showing the continents of Africa and Europe; the woman’s index finger rests where the Mediterranean should be. Also in the scene are a tiny schooner, a flywheel (like the ones in Watch and Pressure), and a painter’s palette—all objects drawn from Gerald’s personal iconography. If Bibliothèque represents the world of his father, the cigar box is Gerald’s world—on his father’s cocktail tray, but not of it. Sara may have sensed the climate changing at Antibes, but Gerald didn’t seem quite ready to give it up.
He had ordered a new boat, a bigger, faster boat than the “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null” Picaflor, in which he and Dos nearly came to grief that summer. They had been cruising to Genoa overnight when an epic Mediterranean gale blew them into the port of Savona under full sail. Not knowing the harbor, and unable to take in Picaflor’s sails because the halyards were jammed, they miscalculated the channel and nearly smashed up on the breakwater, but just managed to drop anchor in time. The new boat, Honoria, was a “hot boat” in Gerald’s words, a sixteen-meter sloop designed by Vladimir and custom-built in Bordeaux for racing as well as cruising; she had a motor for getting her skipper out of tight spots, and Gerald was already full of plans for racing her as soon as she was delivered, in the spring, when he hoped Archie MacLeish would join him.
The MacLeishes returned to France in the fall, but they had bought a farm in Conway, Massachusetts, and planned to move there permanently when the reconstruction on the house was completed. Ada was pregnant with her third child—“the child of my old age,” she said in a letter to a mutual friend of the MacLeishes’ and the Murphys’—and Archie’s father was dying; they wanted to go home. They came to Antibes for a valedictory visit in February, but the cruel winter of 1928, in which snow fell on the Villa America, put paid to Archie and Gerald’s plans for a maiden cruise aboard the new Honoria. In March the Murphys came to Paris for a series of farewells. For they were losing more than the MacLeishes: Pauline Hemingway was also pregnant, and she and Ernest wanted their baby to be born in America; they had rented a house in Key West and would sail there via Cuba in a few weeks’ time.
When the Murphys saw them Ernest was looking particularly piratical: he had a thick bandage around his head where he’d cut himself on a skylight a few days before, after a dinner with the MacLeishes. Rather oddly, he struck up a conversation with Gerald about homosexuals: “I don’t mind a fairy like X,” he said, with studied casualness, “do you?”
“For some reason,” Gerald later recalled, “I said ‘No,’ although I had never met the man . . . and he gave me a funny look. Afterward I almost wondered whether it had been a trap he laid for me. After that I always felt he had a reservation about me.” Whatever the trap was, whatever its purpose might have been, nothing was ever quite the same between them.
The Hemingways left for Key West in March, and the MacLeishes sailed for New York in May. But almost at the same time the Fitzgeralds, who had been living an increasingly chaotic and unproductive life at Ellerslie in Delaware, decided to come back to France: “They were on their way to Paris,” Zelda wrote in Save Me the Waltz. “They hadn’t much faith in travel nor a great belief in change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.”
Gerald and Sara were just as glad to see them. “We are very fond of you both,” Gerald wrote Scott i
n anticipation of their arrival. “The fact that we don’t always get on has nothing to do with it, Americans are apt only to feel fond of the people whom they see most or with whom they run. To be able to talk to people after almost two years is the important thing.” And they seemed to pick up things right where they had left off the summer before. “We are friends with the Murphys again,” Fitzgerald wrote Hemingway. “Talked about you a great deal + while we tried to say only kind things we managed to get in a few good cracks that would amuse you—about anybody else—which is what you get for being so far away.”
The Murphys had recently given up their apartment on the quai des Grands-Augustins and had taken another at 14 rue Guynemer on the corner of the rue de Vaugirard, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens; but they planned to be in Antibes for the summer and offered to lend it to Scott and Zelda. The Fitzgeralds didn’t think much of the decor—“it looks like the setting for one of Madame Tussaud’s gloomier figures,” wrote Zelda to a friend—but they were glad to have a Paris base.