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

by Amanda Vaill

  Gerald returned to America in mid-March, but the difficulties between them that might have seemed implicit before he left became harder and harder to ignore. “There is one thing that has always surprised me,” Gerald wrote to Sara from New York in April, answering “2 type-written and rare semi-philosophical letters” from her, which have not survived:

  and that is one’s tendency to feel that just because two people have been married for 20 years that they should need the same thing of life or of people. You are surprised anew periodically that “warm human relationship” should be so necessary to you and less to me. Yet nothing is more natural under the circumstances. You believe in it (as you do in life), you are capable of it, you command it. I am less of a believer (I don’t admire human animals as much), I am less capable (for a fundamental sexual deficiency, like poor eyesight), I lack the confidence (quite naturally) to command it—or to keep it in its proper relationship to me. Certainly feeling exists in people or it doesn’t. No two people show it in the same degree or manner. Hence the inadequacy of most relationships which are supposed to be kept at a constant emotional pressure.

  Two days later he wrote again:

  Dear Sal:—

  Addenda: I suppose it’s downright tragic (if things in life are tragic,—or just life—) when one person who lives by communicated affection should have chosen a mate who is (damn it) deficient. I have always had (as early as I can remember) the knowledge (conviction, feeling) that I lacked something that other people had,—emotionally. Whether this is due to the absence of degree and depth of feeling, or the result of trained suppression of feelings, distrust and fear of them, I don’t know.

  It’s fashionable now to pigeonhole people, as Hemingway (and to a lesser extent Fitzgerald) tried to do, by either/or sexual preference. But Gerald belonged to a less arbitrary generation, and to a class and milieu—the New York of Stanford White and the polymorphous Paris of Cocteau and de Beaumont—in which ambiguous or bisexual behavior was, if not accepted, at least ignored. He himself maintained to Sara that “nothing which I believe in . . . should cause this lack [of feeling];—nothing against Nature,” and he meant it. He didn’t think of himself as homosexual in an exclusive sense. “Outside of a man and a woman, and children and a house and a garden,—there’s nothing much,” he wrote. But his old feelings of ambivalence, imposture, and diffidence, the ones he had written to Archie about in 1931, had been exacerbated by Sara’s evident need of emotional, and probably sexual, warmth. And although in 1926 he might have told Scott Fitzgerald, as Dick Diver told Rosemary, that his love for Sara was “active love,” by 1936 this was less and less true. At lunch one day with Phil Barry and Archie MacLeish, Gerald responded to their off-color stories about their sexual exploits by exclaiming, “Thank God all that is behind me!” This may have been a pose, adopted to distance himself from his friends’ self-conscious machismo, or it may have been an overstatement. But to Sara he admitted that his “deficiency” must make her feel “rotten.”

  Shortly after Sara got this letter, and despite having said earlier that she couldn’t get south that winter, she drove to Florida with John and Katy Dos Passos and flew by seaplane to join Ernest in Havana. (Pauline, who was visiting her family in Arkansas, wasn’t with them.) Although Dos was correcting proofs of The Big Money and barely looked at a fishing rod, the rest of them went out on the Pilar nearly every day. After an inauspicious beginning in which Ernest raised only one marlin which “Dos blew” (as Ernest sourly put it in his ship’s log), Sara managed to catch three dolphins, one barracuda, and one arctic bonito within two days. In the evenings the Pilar chugged back to Havana harbor with a “fish flag” flying if they’d caught anything, and Dos and Katy and Sara and Ernest had dinner together in the Ambos Mundos Hotel. Very possibly they talked about their absent friend Scott Fitzgerald, whose three autobiographical essays about his professional and personal breakdown, later published as The Crack-Up, had just appeared in Esquire. Ernest, predictably, hated them—“whining in public,” was his comment. When Sara read them she had written to Scott: “Do you really mean to say you honestly thought ‘life was something you dominated if you were any good—?’ Even if you meant your own life it is arrogant enough,—but life!” It’s easy to imagine her saying the same thing to Dos and Katy and Ernest, over dinner at the Ambos Mundos, and adding (as she did to Fitzgerald), “If you just won’t admit a thing it doesn’t exist (as much) . . . [but] rebelling, dragging one’s feet & fighting every inch of the way, one must admit one can’t control it—one has to take it,—& as well as possible—that is all I know.”

  After dinner, when Dos had gone up to his room to work on his galleys, they would sit with their drinks and listen to the three straw-hatted Cubans who played rumbas and Latin versions of “There’s a Small Hotel” for them. One day, after a long night, Sara “breakfasted” Ernest on Bromo-Seltzer and whiskey sours where the Pilar was anchored in a secluded cove. And sometime during this week in Havana, Sara and Ernest dug rather deeply into what each of them had made of their lives.

  “Some people,” Hemingway’s son John acknowledges, “say that Father had some kind of secret thing going on with Sara. Although he “can’t imagine it,” the rumor has never entirely disappeared. The reasons aren’t hard to determine. Like Picasso, Hemingway was the sort of man Sara invariably responded to, magnetic, male, and physical, but with an artist’s intuitiveness; she had always been attracted to him—certainly Scott Fitzgerald had noticed—and at this point in her life she was hurt and needy. And Hemingway, the man who didn’t like to sleep alone, was alone, his marriage to Pauline tacitly on the rocks.

  So what happened next? John and Katy Dos Passos and Sara left Havana after a week. In Miami they telephoned Pauline, who had just returned to Key West, and begged her to see them, if only for an hour, in the Miami airport. Pauline duly arrived, on her way to rejoin Ernest in Havana, looking, Sara said, “like a delicious, and rather wicked little piece of brown toast.” (Pauline, for her part, thought Sara looked “beautiful. . . . She met me at the Pan-American station in pearls and one of her hats and I thought who or whom is that lovely woman expecting and it turned out to be me.”) And when Sara got home to the Adirondacks she wrote Ernest a letter whose lines beg to be read between.

  “About being snooty,” she said: “You don’t REALLY think I am snooty do you? Please don’t. It isn’t snooty to choose.” There’s just the faintest echo here of the old Sara—the Sara of Picasso’s pictures, the Sara who Scott Fitzgerald complained was being “mean to me,” the woman who had chosen one man and was going to stick with him. “Choice, and one’s affections,” she said now to Ernest, “are about all there are.” And, as if to remind him of the choices he had made: “Oh Ernest, what wonderful places you live in and what a good life you have made for yourself and Pauline.”

  Hemingway wasn’t used to people saying no to him—if indeed “no” is what was said—and he doesn’t seem to have risen to the challenge of these choices. Ever since The Sun Also Rises, he had used his fiction as a weapon. Now, in a story he was calling “The Happy Ending,” but which would be published as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he seems to have turned that weapon on Sara. “Snows” takes place on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, where the writer Harry Walden is dying of gangrene, literally corrupted by his relationship with a wealthy woman. He is lamenting the lost chances and lost loves of his life, the good times he had in Paris and in the Vorarlberg when he and the century were young. And he is musing on the pernicious influence of “the very rich,” about whom he has had an argument with “poor Scott Fitzgerald”—the argument sparked by the now mythic exchange about the very rich being different from you and me because (in Hemingway’s view) “they have more money.” Poor Scott (Hemingway grudgingly changed the name to “Julian” in later published versions of the story) “thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing wrecked him.”

 
Although Hemingway had berated Fitzgerald for creating composite characters, he had done it himself (A Farewell to Arms’s Catherine has trace elements of Pauline and Hadley, as well as Hemingway’s lost love Agnes von Kurowsky); and “Snows”’s Helen, while she owes something to Pauline and Jane Mason, bears other marks as well. Like Sara (and like Fitzgerald’s Nicole Diver), she is the heiress to a midwestern industrial fortune; even more like Sara, she has suffered the death of a child. As Harry is waiting for the end to come she says to him—like Sara imploring Baoth to breathe in that hospital room in Boston, or arguing with Fitzgerald about not admitting defeat—“You can’t die if you don’t give up.” But he does die, and before he does he feels death’s presence inextricably linked with hers: “She looked at him with her well-known, well-loved face from . . . Town and Country . . . and he felt death come again.” Although Jane Mason had posed for a face cream ad in Ladies’ Home Journal which Hemingway kept in his files, it was Sara Murphy, when she was engaged to be married to Gerald, who had had her face on the cover of Town and Country. And apparently it was Ernest who, hiking or hunting in the Rockies, had found that photograph tacked to the wall in a deserted mountain man’s hut, and had torn it down and sent it to her.

  Hemingway had once written Archie MacLeish a letter—one of those rather gratuitously cruel letters he occasionally sent to male friends to show how tough he could be—in which he said that “Every woman’s husband is, in a way, after a certain time, her own fault. All women married to a wrong husband are bad luck for themselves and all their friends.” In case Archie didn’t catch his drift, he added: “Cf. Mr. Benchley’s pal and Mrs. Parker’s confidante,” surely a reference to Gerald and Sara. But whatever Sara might have confided to Hemingway about her marriage, she would never think of it as causing “bad luck” for her; she knew where her heart truly lay. She had chosen, and so had Gerald. Later that spring, after she returned from Florida, Gerald told her that, although his “defect” made him “terribly, terribly sorry that I am as I am. . . . only one thing would be awful and that is that you might not know that I love only you. We both know it’s inadequate (that’s where ‘life’ comes in);—but such as it is it certainly is the best this poor fish can offer,—and it’s the realest thing I know. Who knows but that the good Lord may let it make up for its defect in some other way?”

  That summer Sara—in a show of optimism and commitment that she hoped would ensure Patrick’s recovery—bought a camp on Lake St. Regis near the hamlet of Paul Smith’s, the site of Dr. Trudeau’s own original cure, and moved Patrick out there. Camp Adeline (she renamed it after her mother) had a boathouse with a wheelchair-accessible dock, which permitted Patrick to fish, and residents were housed in eight different cottages—including a guest house, servant’s cottage, girls’ bunkhouse (for Honoria and her visiting school friends), and main living quarters—all filled with bright painted and slipcovered furniture, white rugs, Mexican metalware, and potted plants and flowers. As proof that she and Patrick intended to have many summers there, Sara ordered writing paper with “Camp Adeline” engraved on it; at the top, tiny logos of an envelope, a telephone, a telegraph key, and a locomotive indicated the mailing address, phone number, telegraph address, and railroad station outsiders needed to use to reach it.

  Gerald had been having some trouble with his tonsils, and after having them out in July he was persuaded to take a real vacation, for the first time in a long time. A camera caught the two of them, Gerald and Sara, sitting on a bench by the boathouse, Sara’s brown Pekingese, Puppy, at their feet. Gerald is wearing one of his trademark abbreviated bathing suits and a knitted French sailor’s cap; although his hairline has receded, his body is still taut and athletic, and he appears to be reading a postcard, or looking at a photograph, with a slightly quizzical expression on his face. Next to him, Sara has wrapped a thick terry cloth robe over her bathing suit against the Adirondack chill; a broad-brimmed hat nearly covers her eyes. Her long, pretty legs are stretched out in front of her, her feet in the high heels that Ellen Barry said she wore even on shipboard. She looks tired but defiant. She is smoking. She and Gerald sit close together, shoulders touching; they do not look at each other. Probably they don’t need to.

  It was a summer full of superficial gaiety: the Murphys’ home movies show Fanny Myers and Honoria aquaplaning; Dick Myers doing the shimmy on the dock, dressed in a voluminous bathrobe that makes him look like an animated Buddha; Honoria chasing Puppy up and down the little beach. Gerald was more “like his old self—swimming twice a day—singing and even playing the piano,” reported Dick Myers to Alice Lee. One after-supper musicale got so out of hand that Sara jumped on the table to dance the fandango. Gerald bought a car, “a black and chromium mechanical panther,” which was intended for “a good bit of junketing,” and he and Sara drove it to Conway for the MacLeishes’ twentieth wedding anniversary—a party like one of the old parties, with square dancing and a caller, and everybody dressed up in improvised peasant costumes, and lots of wonderful food and drink. They spent a few days with the Dos Passoses on Cape Cod and saw Phil Barry’s new play, Bright Star, which was having a tryout in Dennis; later in the summer they went to Maine. Back at Camp Adeline they heard that Dottie Parker and Alan Campbell had quit Hollywood for a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and that Don and Bea Stewart had built a house in Ausable Forks, just miles away in the Adirondacks, which meant that some of their old friends, at least, were no longer so very far away.

  That summer Gerald did something he hadn’t done in seven years: he opened the little composition book he had used for an artist’s camet and made notes for a series of projects. The first, dated “July 14, ’36,” was for a painting he provisionally entitled State Fair, in which the chief elements were “a prize hog (animal husbandry chart)”; a squash, “(1st prize) bot. [botanical] study stem, leaf, tendril”; an ear of corn with its silk magnified, “(inset of it in black & white”); and a “burlap fertilizer bag.” Surreally inset into the hog’s side would be a window—“edges flous” (French for “blurry”)—with curtains, a potted geranium, a “brilliant blue sponged sky.” A strange picture indeed—considering that any prize hog is destined for the slaughterhouse.

  The second project he outlined was dated “August, ’36”: a “construction in frame” using a rattan rug-beater, a sickle, and parts of various household tools. He had always loved gadgets—he was famous for being unable to pass a hardware store without going in—and he had thought of doing such an assemblage before, in the twenties; but there was something macabre about the mutilated objects—“a hammer (handle sawed 1/2 off?)”—that engaged his imagination now.

  Why, given all that had happened in the years since he closed his studio in Antibes, did he even think of taking up his painting again this summer? He had been working nonstop at Mark Cross since the beginning of Patrick’s most recent illness, and although the business had been an “effective drug,” it had fatally compromised his creative life. But during these summer months he had the leisure to see and think, and the company of friends who stimulated him artistically. Why not just try, and see if he could still do it? So he made those first tentative, secret steps—only to find a memento mori, a butchered hog, a mangled hammer, lurking in every composition like the skulls medieval painters put in their pictures as a reminder of their mortality. It was too much; he never executed either of these projects, and never took up painting again.

  Behind all their activity that summer was the inescapable reality of Patrick’s illness. Sara had fixed things so he could fish from his reclining wheelchair; he had a room full of fishing paraphernalia, trophy heads from Ernest, and his own and Baoth’s guns; and to the extent that it was possible he was included in all the family’s plans and discussions. Honoria even asked him for romantic advice about a boy she admired who was a budding yachtsman. “Honoria, I think you will have to learn to sail,” said Patrick gravely. But he was a very sick boy. He was still running a fever—after nearly two years in
bed—and he had no appetite; he was anemic and needed transfusions; he still weighed less than a hundred pounds. His doctor told Gerald in August that “it is still a very doubtful question as to when and if he gets well.”

  Sara was in denial. Although “everyone remarks on her gaiety and becomingness,” Gerald wrote to Scott Fitzgerald, “[s]he refuses to release her tense grip and is burning white. . . . Even her loneliness I cannot reach. She is gay,—energetic,—but is not well.” She told the Hemingways that she was pining to go to Paris in September:

  I want new clothes & new ideas (in order named) & Hellstern shoes & perfumery & trick hats, & linge [underwear], not to mention the eve. dress & to sit hours with Léger & his friends in cafés, & haunt rue la Boétie, & see every good new play & all music if any, & be back here in about three days & eleven hrs. twenty-seven mins. . . . I’d also like (how I do run on) to dance late at Boeuf or somewhere & go to the Hailes. Dark dawn in Sept. What’s in season? Des chouxfleurs, ma petite dame, des reines marguerites [cauliflower, little lady, and Chinese asters].

  She didn’t get to Paris. Patrick had a setback in October, around the time of his sixteenth birthday, and the Murphys moved into winter quarters in town, a huge half-timbered “cottage” glowering down from a hill above Lake Flower. It had been built in 1928—many locals suspected it was meant to be a speakeasy—and Dr. Francis Trudeau, son of Edward Trudeau, was a neighbor, as was Patrick’s chest specialist, Dr. John Hayes. (The previous summer a Princeton professor, Albert Einstein, had stayed down the street—and had plunged his house into darkness by overloading the electrical circuits. He had had to get his neighbor’s son to change the fuse.)