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

by Amanda Vaill

  They did, of course—when had they said no to someone they loved?—and the trip turned out to be a success, with ten thousand viewers coming to the MOMA show in twenty days. Sara was able to get to New York for the vernissage, and Léger, with his usual playfulness, told her and Gerald that one of the paintings on view belonged to them—if, that is, they could pick it out. They walked through the crowded galleries until, at the foot of some stairs, Sara saw a picture called Composition à un profil—a stark, surreal rendition of tubular forms reminiscent of the primordial aloe plants that grew on the Côte d’Azur; its predominant color was brown, Gerald’s favorite, but one Léger used infrequently. They were standing in front of it when Léger came up behind them and said, “I see you found it.” Turning the picture around, he showed them what he had written on the back of the frame: “Pour Sara et Gérald.”

  It was a fitting gift, for despite being beleaguered with Mark Cross’s affairs, Patrick’s illness, and his grief over Baoth, Gerald was putting Léger up at the Hotel Russell, and acting as a nearly full-time artistic, business, and personal adviser to him. Who to see, what to say, how to treat this potential buyer—all such questions were addressed to Gerald, along with requests for funds to tide Léger over when promised sales didn’t come through or checks were slow to arrive. At one point, Léger hoped to enlist Mark Cross as a corporate patron and went so far as to suggest the architect Le Corbusier (whom Gerald had known as the painter Jeanneret in Paris) as a potential designer for the store’s new premises on 53d Street. He himself would create murals for it. “We’re both at the complete disposal of Mark Cross, if you wish,” he wrote, but unfortunately this grand project never got off the ground. On a smaller scale, at the beginning of his stay in America, in order to encourage Marie Harriman, who was acting as his dealer, Léger asked Gerald to buy a small drawing for $100—“the price isn’t important; it’s the fact that I have a ‘sale.’” Later on, when he needed $1,000, it was again to Gerald that he came. “We don’t buy pictures to own,” rationalized Gerald to Sara, so “I’d rather give him what we can afford. . . . He is giving us in return a toile [canvas], which is all right.” Thus the Murphys acquired another Léger, Nature morte, tête et grande feuille (Still life with head and leaf). Léger wrote them that it was “thanks to you two that all this”—his exhibitions, his contacts with and sales to museums and collectors from coast to coast—“has been made possible, and I am eternally grateful.”

  Léger had always had a tenderness for Patrick, and made sure to send him a telegram on his fifteenth birthday, October 18. He also came to visit him in Saranac Lake, when each did a drawing of the other. Patrick’s portrait of Léger, a strong, sure likeness whose firm lines have something of the subject’s own forceful character, is a testament to the youthful artist’s gift. Légers drawing, which shows his young friend reading in a white iron bed, is less straightforward, more unsettling. The bedside table, with its sickroom paraphernalia, is at the center of the composition, while Patrick—who is shown engulfed in heavy sweaters and a knitted cap against the winter chill of his screened porch—is off to one side, marginalized by his illness.

  When he got Léger’s telegram, Patrick was still very sick indeed. He weighed only fifty-nine pounds, about half what a healthy boy of his age would, although Sara courageously maintained that he was “on the mend,—definitely.” Gerald knew better, and he knew, too, that Sara was suffering—not just from loss but from loneliness. He asked for help from the only person he knew who might understand.

  Dear Scott:—

  . . . It has occurred to me in all this that you alone have always—known shall I say—or felt?—that Sara was—that there was about Sara—something infinitely touching,—something infinitely sad. . . . Life begins to mark her for a kind of cumulous tragedy, I sometimes think. . . . She needs nourishment—from adults—from those who are fond of her.

  Fitzgerald was shuttling between Baltimore—where Zelda stayed, unimproved, at the Sheppard-Pratt sanatorium—and Asheville, North Carolina, with short visits to New York. He was currently struggling with the painful self-examination involved in writing the essays that would form The Crack-Up, and he had to be smarting from Sara’s tart disdain of Tender Is the Night But he found time to write Sara a letter to tell her not just what she meant to him, but what she meant to anyone whose life she had touched. Typically, for in their relationship they had never beaten about any bushes, he went straight to the subject that had been the latest source of friction between them:

  Dearest Sara:

  . . . In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction i.e. that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character—in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender:

  “Her face was hard & lovely & pitiful”

  and again

  “He had been heavy, belly-frightened with love of her for years”

  —in those and a hundred other places I tried to evoke not you but the effect you produce on men. . . . And someday in spite of all the affectionate skepticism you felt toward the brash young man you met on the Riviera eleven years ago, you’ll let me have my little corner of you where I know you better than anybody—yes, even better than Gerald. And if it should perhaps be your left ear (you hate anyone to examine any single part of your person, no matter how appreciatively—that’s why you wore bright clothes) on June evenings on Thursday from 11:00 to 11:15 here’s what I’d say:

  That not one thing you’ve done has been for nothing. . . . The people whose lives you’ve touched directly or indirectly have reacted to the corporate bundle of atoms that’s you in a good way. I have seen you again & again at a time of confusion take the hard course almost blindly because long after your powers of ratiocination were exhausted you clung to the idea of dauntless courage. You were the one who said:

  “All right, I’ll take the black checker men.”

  I know that you & Gerald are one & it is hard to separate one of you from the other, in such a matter for example as the love & encouragement you chose to give to people who were full of life rather than to others, equally interesting and less exigent, who were frozen into rigid names. I don’t praise you for this—it was the little more, the little immeasurable portion of a millimeter, the thing at the absolute top that makes the difference between a World’s Champion and an also-ran, the little glance when you were sitting with Archie on the sofa that you threw at me and said:

  “And—Scott!”

  taking me in too, and with a heart so milked of compassion by your dearest ones that no person in the world but you would have had that little more to spare.

  Well—I got somewhat excited there. . . .

  It’s odd that when I read over this letter it seems to convey no particular point, yet I’m going to send it. Like Cole’s eloquent little song.

  “I think it’ll tell you how great you are.”

  From your everlasting friend,

  Scott

  20

  “Life itself has stepped in now”

  IN SARANAC LAKE, alone in her huge Adirondack lodge except for the company of a sick child and his nurse, Sara was, as she wrote to Scott Fitzgerald, “raw to the feelings toward me of my friends (like the man who scraped his fingers to feel the combinations of safes).” So Scott’s letter to her “did me a lot of good,” but it wasn’t enough. Archie MacLeish noticed that Sara was “very unhappy . . . [with] the kind of unhappiness you can’t reach because it is not only about Patrick but about another winter at Saranac and about the headaches she has so much of the time and about a lot of other things she won’t talk about.” As autumn drew on, the undertone of panic in her voice became more and more noticeable.

  My Dearest Scott,—

  . . . . I hope you are coming up to see us in Sept.? Gerald thought you would & we are delighted. Would you like to bring Scotty? There isn’t the least danger . . . we have had lots of guest-children & so take infinite pre
cautions.

  My Dearest Hemingways,—

  . . . . Is there any chance of your coming up to these parts? Really? Because I am pining to see you. I have such a good wine cellar, & a good cook, & lots of new music—Room for the children too, if you want to bring them—Our guests are in a separate guest-house apart—& all Patrick’s dishes—silver laundry etc etc are separate so there isn’t the slightest danger about that, & people have been confiding their children to me all summer—oh we sleep under piles of blankets and have a roaring wood fire most of the time—and we love you so much.

  My Dearest Pauline,—

  I sent you off a wire today to please all come. . . . My dears, do, do come here—and just sit for a spell until you can find & arrange what & where you want to be—& I shall—& it will be my pleasure—to cozen & feed you & make you little drinks & what not (& wrap your feet in a red blanket)—I am fixed up so well here! With a good cook, a heated camp, a licensed guide (how that man talks!)—all alone, mind you, all alone—Honoria is off to school on the thirtieth & my Merchant Prince Dowdow only comes every two wks & sometimes not that—Here Patrick & his nurse & I live in solitary state & he P. is off in isolated quarters & on his porch, so I roam the place in desolate grandeur.

  I can’t go away to New York to live too—P. counts on me to be here & tell him jokes & bully him. . . . So please darlings, come along & cheer me up & I have such a lot of new music & wines & spirituous liquors, & a boat & hunting. . . .

  So I don’t see how you can not come, unless it was just wilful—& God knows you aren’t that—. . . .

  My dearest Ernest,—

  Just by a curious coincidence—Some of my mother’s estate has just, this month, been settled up. . . . and so I have some Cash. Quite a lot of cash—(It nearly never happens!) Before it is re-invested—ugh—Will you (& I hope you aren’t furious?)—do me the greatest compliment one friend can do another, & take some?

  Please, please don’t say no right off like that without thinking—now listen: we have plenty—we don’t need it.—We have no boy to put through school—Our friends are the dearest things we have (after the daughter, & she is fixed up). . . .

  I enclose a small amount which would get you all North . . . (I sent some to Dos & Katy too) . . . It is just a short cut, if you really want to start your book & get settled, where it is cool. . . .

  Neither Ernest nor Pauline needed money—she was independently wealthy and he was by now extremely successful—but they responded to her tone of desperation, and came to visit her and Patrick that fall, most likely in September. And in October, around the publication date of Green Hills of Africa, galleys of which Ernest had specially sent to Sara, he saw her again. What he saw worried him enough that he hounded John and Katy Dos Passos to go cheer her up, “even though I knew you couldn’t and shouldn’t,” because “Sara seemed so dismal about nobody coming.”

  Not the least self-centered of men, Hemingway had come to feel uncharacteristically tender, almost sentimental, about Sara. One of his biographers says he had developed what amounted to “a crush" on her. He’d always been good at making grandstand plays for her and Gerald’s sympathy, but now this talent was expended only on her. In September he had told her that “maybe I am bad luck and . . . should not have to do with people”; to which she protested, “It isn’t true—it’s a lie—When have you been anything but good for people?” Now he complained to her of feeling like a “skyzophreniac”—on the one hand a workaholic, on the other a hard-partying all-around guy. “Only place these rival skyzophreniacs agree is do not like to sleep alone,” he added suggestively. He had (he did not mention) taken steps to prevent this. From 1932 to 1934 he had been carrying on an intermittent flirtation or affair—his biographers differ over its extent—with a blond, Havana-based New York socialite named Jane Mason, which had placed a strain on his marriage to Pauline. By the winter of 1935–1936 the relationship had cooled, however, and Hemingway may have been feeling as sorry for himself as he did for Sara. He was especially sorry that it seemed as if she would not be coming to Key West that winter and hoped she would reconsider. He signed his letter “With very much love much love and love also with love, Ernest.”

  The Murphys had given up their New York apartment and had taken a small flat for Gerald only, first in the Hotel Russell on Park Avenue, and then at the New Weston on 52d Street. There Gerald occasionally saw New York friends like the Myerses, Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott, who had begun to play an increasingly prominent part in Gerald’s life. Woollcott was that dangerous thing, someone who really was a legend in his own time: a 250-pound gourmand whose flamboyant clothes (he was known to wear a scarlet-lined cape flung about his shoulders) and acid wit were currently being immortalized by his friend George S. Kaufman in the eponymous The Man Who Came to Dinner. (Gerald did his part to burnish the legend by using Woollcott’s radio show as the inspiration for a Mark Cross “Town Crier” cocktail shaker in the shape of a bell.) As a youth Woollcott had been photographed in Victorian drag, but he was far too frightened of the idea of sex to give in to any homosexual impulses. He sublimated by giving himself nicknames like “She-Ancient” and “Pretty,” which he asked other friends to adopt; but here Gerald drew the line. He called him “Alexis,” “Alexis, Prince of the Heavenly Flocks,” “Alexis lunaire,” “Alexis borealis,” or “Great White Heron.” If their banter ever took on overtones of flirtatiousness (“You show signs of being embarrassed by my material attentions,” wrote Gerald after sending him a gift, “or is it that you were brought up never to accept gifts from strange gentlemen?”), it was always demure. The two of them frequently went to the theater together while Gerald was alone in New York, and Gerald saw in Woollcott what few could discern behind his smoke screen of bombast and punditry: a “gift . . . to make the people he loved feel valuable.” During the next few years, during which he and Sara frequently led separate lives, he would confide some of his most painful and vulnerable feelings to this outwardly outrageous man.

  Sara and Patrick had left Steele Camp and had moved for the winter into the town of Saranac Lake, to a lofty barn of a house at 129 Church Street, within range of the bells of four different churches. Dick and Alice Lee Myers came with Fanny to the Winter Olympics in nearby Lake Placid in February, and Sara had made friends with the family of Dr. Trudeau, with whom she sometimes went bobsledding. But there may have been an edge to these amusements. Honoria remembers her mother hurtling down the most difficult slopes, laughing and laughing, whether from gaiety or desperation she doesn’t try to guess.

  Sara and Gerald were going through a difficult time—more difficult, perhaps, than their years at Montana-Vermala. The death of their healthy son, on Gerald’s watch (although Sara would never put it that way); the cumulative sense of time passing, for themselves and for their friends, what Archibald MacLeish, in “You, Andrew Marvell,” had called “the always coming on of night”: all this made things worse. And their physical separation, which had become almost a constant with Sara’s move to Saranac, merely underlined the isolation each had begun to feel. December 30 was their twentieth wedding anniversary, a date that in the Antibes days would have been celebrated by the three children, in festive clothes, bringing them flowers on their balcony. In Saranac, on December 31, this is what Gerald wrote to Scott Fitzgerald:

  Of all our friends, it seems to me that you alone know how we felt these days—still feel. You are the only person to whom I can ever tell the bleak truth of what I feel. Sara’s courage and the unbelievable job she is doing for Patrick make unbearably poignant the tragedy of what has happened—what life has tried to do to her. I know now that what you said in “Tender is the Night” was true. Only the invented part of our life,—the unreal part—has had any scheme any beauty. Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroyed. In my heart I dreaded the moment when our youth and invention would be attacked in our only vulnerable spot,—the children, their growth, their health, their future. How ugly and b
lasting it can be,—and how idly ruthless.

  At the beginning of February, Gerald left for a six-week European buying trip for Mark Cross, his first. And it seems as if Sara, unnerved by the prospect of so solitary a winter, wrote the Hemingways to ask them to return to Saranac. They couldn’t. “Damn I wish we could come there for the winters sporting,” wrote Ernest, “but I have to work like the devil the rest of the winter.” Then the inflection of his voice changed: “How are you dear beautiful Sara?” he asked. “I had a gigantic dream about you about ten days ago and woke up determined to write you a long letter (longer than this one) and tell you how highly I thought of you. . . . There are about three records that I never hear without think of you. I wish you were here, Sara.”

  Her next letter to him is missing. From his response, it seems to have been concerned not only with her own sense of isolation and despair, but with her feelings about Gerald and her marriage: “Poor Sara,” said Hemingway. “I’m sorry you had such a bad time. These are the bad times. It is sort of like the retreat from Moscow and Scott is gone the first week of the retreat.” (Although in this case it was Gerald who was gone, in Europe, Ernest never could resist a jab at Fitzgerald, especially in front of Sara.) The last half page, or more, of this letter is missing; what is left cuts off after a description of the paternal qualities of a mutual friend. It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to wonder if the rest of the letter dealt with the father of her children, and if it was Sara who scissored it off so she could save the remainder, as she did everything else, for a keepsake.