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

by Amanda Vaill

  25

  “Back there where they were”

  NO ONE WAS QUITE SURE what set off the last of the “damn schoolgirl quarrels” between Gerald and Archie MacLeish, but everybody knew where it happened. MacLeish had taken the post of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Harvard University and was dividing his time between Cambridge and Uphill Farm in Conway; but he and Ada spent the winter months in the Caribbean, and the Murphys sometimes came to visit them at the Mill Reef Club in Antigua.

  Either Gerald had tracked sand into the MacLeishes’ beach house and had been insulted when Archie reproved him, or Ada and Archie had been insufficiently sympathetic to a bout of flu that Sara suffered while she was visiting, or Sara and Gerald were put off by what they privately considered to be Archie’s too assiduous cultivation of the rich and socially powerful club denizens. Whatever the cause, a pall descended on their friendship. The Murphys even declined to attend the MacLeishes’ fortieth anniversary party in Conway in 1956—although both Gerald and Archie tried strenuously to deny that either was really sore at the other. Paradoxically, however, it was during this period of estrangement that MacLeish drew most heavily on Gerald and Sara for what turned out to be one of the great, and final, successes of his career.

  In the days just after the war Archie had traveled to Europe and was saddened, as Gerald had been, by the pervasive destruction, its purposelessness, its capriciousness. Asked to give a guest sermon at the Congregational First Church of Christ in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1955, he explored “the question of belief in life,” using as his departure point the biblical story of Job. How was it possible, he asked the congregation, to “believe in the justice of God in a world in which the innocent perish in vast and meaningless massacres, and brutal and dishonest men foul all the lovely things?” But the sermon didn’t say all he wanted it to say, and in 1957 he began to turn the material into a verse play that was published in 1958.

  J.B., as the play was called, begins in a circus tent where two unemployed actors, Mr. Zuss and Nickles, take on the respective roles of God and Satan. Nickles offers Zuss the same wager his counterpart offered God in the Bible: that when misfortune visits a man whom God has blessed with wealth and happiness, he will lose his faith, will turn on God and curse him. MacLeish’s Job, or J.B., is a rich and successful New England businessman with a loving, beautiful wife and five children, but his charmed life is ended by Zuss and Nickles’s wager: a son is killed in a military accident; another son and daughter are victims of a fatal car crash; another daughter is murdered; the youngest daughter dies in an atomic bombing; J.B.’s bank is destroyed and his fortune lost; and he is plagued with boils that cover his body.

  Although the afflictions are different in number and in kind, in effect they mirror what Archie MacLeish saw happen to his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy: the loss of their children, their way of life, and, in Archie’s view, their fortune. As he said later to an interviewer, to him the Murphys “had never been ‘rich’ by American standards but they had always spent money as though they were, having a blithe contempt for money as such—a healthy conviction that money should be used for the purposes of life, the living of life, the defeat of illness and death. One has to pay for faith like that and Gerald and Sara paid without a whimper.”

  Years before, on one of his ocean crossings, Gerald Murphy had copied out six pages of verses from the Book of Job, line after line of beautiful, agonizing poetry. All alone on top of one page is this verse: “Then said his wife unto him: Dost thou still retain thy integrity? Curse God and die.” That, of course, was what Sara herself had done on the day, more than twenty years ago now, when she had rushed out of St. Bartholomew’s Church with Archie at her side and had shaken her fist at heaven. And Archie had never forgotten it. In the Bible, Job’s wife has no name, and after this one expostulation, she is silent and unmentioned. So in MacLeish’s play, as he himself admitted, the character had to be “an almost total invention.”

  MacLeish made her beautiful, and not only beautiful but famous, in the way great beauties of the Edwardian era were famous: “Pretty,” is how one of the characters, a Mrs. Lesure, describes her, to which another, Mrs. Botticelli responds, “Ain’t she. / Looks like somebody I’ve seen.” But another character, Mrs. Adams, clarifies: “I don’t believe you could have seen her. / Her picture possibly. Her picture was published”—just as Sara Wiborg’s picture was published, over and over, in the rotogravure and on the cover of Town and Country. When MacLeish came to give Job’s wife a name, it was almost inevitable that he called her Sarah. “There is no such name in the Book of Job”—even though, as he admitted later, “She is never called Sarah.”

  MacLeish had had the parallels between Job’s miseries and the Murphys’ misfortunes in mind ever since Patrick Murphy’s death—reminiscing about it later he compared the silences at the boy’s memorial service to “the confrontation with the Voice out of the Whirlwind in the Book of Job.” But his feelings had been essentially private. Now, however, they became undeniably public: for in addition to the published text of the play, which appeared in March 1958, the Yale School of Drama put on J.B. in April for a limited run of six performances. Surprisingly, even though Yale was still a decade away from the quasi-professional hothouse it later became, these performances were reviewed by the New York Times’s drama critic, Brooks Atkinson. And Atkinson’s rave, which called J.B. “the fable of our time in verse that has the pulse and beat of modern living,” attracted the attention of the producer Alfred de Liagre, Jr., who enlisted the director Elia Kazan to bring the play to Broadway.

  J.B. opened at Broadway’s ANTA Theater on December 11 during a newspaper strike that, it was feared, would sink the play in oblivion; as it turned out, it was a sensation, with newspaper reviewers taking to the airwaves to proclaim it “brilliant,” “the best play of this, or, perhaps, many seasons,” “one of the memorable works of the century.” There was a line around the block for tickets the day after the opening, and the play ran for a year (a healthy life span in those pre-Cats days); it won a Tony Award for best play, and it gave Archie MacLeish his third Pulitzer Prize.

  Gerald and Sara didn’t attend the opening of J.B. that December; in fact they didn’t see the play until the following spring, when they took Dawn Powell with them to a performance on March 18. Powell’s reaction was derisive: “If Hamlet was your Omelette, this is your Jambalaya,” she wrote to Edmund Wilson (the pun was on his long-ago review of Archie’s The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, a review which bore the title “The Omelette of A. MacLeish”). Possibly predictably for someone whose ironic fiction was at such distance from her painful life, she thought the play pompous, facile, a trivialization of tragic possibilities. What Gerald and Sara thought is harder to discern. “Gerald said he feared Archie was now going to be King of Broadway, and was in fact on the sands of Antigua right this minute with Kazan cooking up another big cookie,” Powell told Wilson. Making allowances for Gerald’s frequent reflexive irony, this comment still has the sound of hurt and bitterness in it. If Gerald and Sara had been upset by the use Scott Fitzgerald made of them in Tender Is the Night (at least he dedicated the book to them in gratitude), what can they have thought of MacLeish’s presentation of their private agony?

  For at the climax of the play is an important departure from the biblical story that may have said more than either Gerald or Sara would have wanted known about the toll that tragedy had taken on their marriage. In the Bible, Job’s nameless wife makes no further appearance after she cries out, “Curse God and die!” Presumably she suffers on at Job’s side so she can bear him the seven sons and three daughters who bless his life at the end of the story. But Sarah in the play is so outraged and bereaved by what has happened to her family and by what she sees as J.B.’s passivity in the face of suffering that she leaves her husband. Sara hadn’t left Gerald in 1936—to use one of her own expressions, it would have been unlike her to do so. But William MacLeish says that in the years after Patric
k’s death “Gerald was going into himself, and no one was there for Sadie. They were moving in opposite directions. They had a very, very bad patch there.” For Sara and for Gerald—who once cautioned Honoria, when she was speculating about the marriage of a couple they knew, “You can never know what goes on between two people”—this twist in the plot of J.B. must have been both painful and invasive.

  In the play’s final moments, however, J.B.’s wife returns to him, and the speech Archie wrote for her has the ring of the old songs Gerald and Sara used to sing:

  Blow on the coal of the heart.

  The candles in the churches are out.

  The lights have gone out in the sky.

  Blow on the coal of the heart

  And we’ll see by and by . . .

  We’ll see where we are.

  We’ll know. We’ll know.

  “Wait till the clouds roll by, Sally,” Gerald had written to her when they were secretly engaged—wait till the sun shines, Nelly, by and by. Archie may have given this speech to Sarah/Sara, but it was she and Gerald who had given him the answer to his question, “the question of belief in life.” Whatever they thought of J.B. as they sat in the darkness of Row C on that March day, they must have understood that.

  In the fall of 1958 Richard Myers died, and at his funeral Archie MacLeish “sat between Gerald and Sara,” as he wrote to Ernest Hemingway,

  whom haven’t seen for maybe two years, Gerald having written me off. And for good reason. Didn’t behave well. Numerous occasions, as you know, I haven’t. Anyway I felt very sad and far off somehow sitting between them with no relationship anymore except of Sarah’s warmth and generosity and thinking about the years when I knew Dick and everything off at the back of those years. The only friends you make really are the ones you make when you are young—or so, anyway, of my life—and you keep them but don’t keep them. I mean they are always anyway your friends because they once were but only in memory. When you see them again you go back there where they were.

  Archie and Ada and Gerald and Sara did go back there: Myers’s death, and the passage of time, made them conscious of how precious their continuing friendship was to each of them. Acknowledging that he had felt “that nuisance—one’s amour propre raising its head,” and heard “the low whine of hurt feelings,” Gerald told Archie that nonetheless “I cannot see life—either past or future—without in it an enduring affection for you and Ada.”

  Hemingway, however, didn’t seem to have such feelings for his old friends the Murphys—or at least not for Gerald. He had kept in touch with their news since the war, and sent messages to Sara through intermediaries like MacLeish and Dos Passos, but he was personally unreachable. “I always loved to watch Gerald like a snake is fascinated by a brilliant young Gopher,” he told Dawn Powell, “and I loved Honoria and the dead kids. Sara I [c]an’t even kid about.” The passage of time hadn’t changed things: “Poor Sara and Gerald,” he wrote to MacLeish after Dick Myers’s funeral, “let’s not write about it. I loved Sara and I never could stand Gerald but I did.” When he was involved in two separate plane crashes on safari in Africa in 1954 some newspapers erroneously reported him dead, and Archie MacLeish, for one, worried that Sara might have “heard of his death before she heard of his undeath.” Ultimately she found out the truth, but not because he bothered to enlighten her.

  The 1950 publication of Arthur Mizener’s biography of Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, set off a revival of interest in the literature and culture of the 1920s, which focused not only on the familiar players of the time, but also on those, like Gerald and Sara Murphy, whose role was subtler and less known. Gerald seemed rather to enjoy his new role of twenties raconteur, telling Dawn Powell, who had just read Mizener’s book, about how he and Sara had visited Edith Wharton, or entertained Rudolph Valentino. Sara seemed less comfortable, more private, about such anecdotes: “I don’t consider the story worth repeating,” she said once, interrupting Gerald’s description of what really happened when Scott Fitzgerald disrupted one of their parties. “Scott was always throwing ripe figs at people.”

  One person who did feel the story worth repeating was a Sneden’s Landing neighbor, Calvin Tomkins, who made the Murphys’ acquaintance when his two young daughters marched up to the door of Cheer Hall and introduced themselves. The Murphys were entranced with these gregarious children and soon counted them and their parents as friends; in fact, they adopted them, as they had adopted the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds and others. Their empathy and concern for their new young friends was total—and when the Tomkinses decided to separate some time later, “they were a great source of comfort and strength for both of us,” Tomkins remembers. Tomkins, for his part, was smitten with Sara—“I’d never met an older woman, as she seemed to me at the time, who was so attractive”—and mesmerized by Gerald’s stories. He wanted Gerald to write his own book about his Paris years, but Gerald demurred. “I have too much respect for the craft of writing to take it up as a second-rate practitioner,” he said.

  But Tomkins wouldn’t give up. Eventually it was proposed that he tell the Murphys’ story of their part in the flowering of what was increasingly called the Lost Generation; armed with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a notebook he would sit by the Murphys’ fireplace while the pugs, Edward and Wookie, snored on the hearth rug and Gerald and Sara talked about the past. Sara’s contralto drawl was by now husky from too many cigarettes, but Gerald’s tenor still had the bright barking sound of a particularly well bred seal, and the two of them seemed to luxuriate in memories they had suppressed for far too long. By tacit unspoken agreement, however, two subjects remained essentially out-of-bounds—the boys’ deaths and Gerald’s pictures.

  Not that these were hidden from view; they just weren’t discussed. Everyone knew about Baoth and Patrick, but no one talked about them. And similarly, most people knew, if they cared to ask, that Gerald had painted in the 1920s. But the news often came as a surprise: John Hemingway, for one, had been “absolutely shocked” by it (“he didn’t seem the type”), and Jane Pickman, who said she “thought I knew Gerald well as a person . . . never knew he had painted. He never talked about it.” And of course he had left all his pictures except for Watch and Wasp and Pear in France. After the war’s end he had asked Vladimir Orloff to gather them together and ship them to America via Archie MacLeish, who was in Paris on UNESCO business; but the arrangements got bungled and eventually it was Alice Lee Myers who retrieved the paintings from UNESCO and brought them over in September 1947. There were, as it turned out, only four canvases: the enormous Boatdeck was supposedly still in Paris at the warehouse where it had been since the twenties; Portrait had been given as a gift to Vladimir and so was not among the paintings shipped; and Turbines, Pression, and Roulement a Billes—not to mention the forgotten Laboratoire—were nowhere to be found. Gerald seemed not to care: of the paintings that did arrive, only two were framed and hung, and they were consigned to the guest suite at Sneden’s Landing (one in the bathroom). The other two canvases were rolled up and put in the attic.

  And there they might have stayed had not a writer named Rudi Blesh learned about Gerald’s work and decided to include a discussion of it in his book Modern Art USA. “A series of semi-abstract canvases . . . complex in design . . . meticulous in craft, and . . . heroic in size” was how Blesh characterized them. Although he saw resemblances to the work of American painters like Demuth and Sheeler and “the French purists Ozenfant and Jeanneret,” Blesh considered that the Murphy paintings “strike an original note of their own, particularly in their complex design and in their wit.” Blesh’s comments—his book was published in 1956—attracted the interest of Douglas MacAgy, then curator of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, who was planning a show on neglected American artists of the twentieth century. Would Gerald agree to exhibit some of his paintings in Dallas? Somewhat surprisingly, Gerald said yes.

  According to family legend, Gerald announced this development at the
luncheon table with a flourish: “I’ve been discovered,” he is supposed to have said. “What does one wear?” Calvin Tomkins, who was then a nearly constant presence in the Murphys’ house, felt this was less delighted swaggering than “ironic distance.” Or perhaps it was a disguise, like the apache clothes or the fisherman’s jersey, a way of hiding what was really important. When Blesh had asked Gerald about his exhibition history he told him that he had a one-man show at Bernheim Jeune in 1935, a statement that was doubly misleading because the gallery had been Georges Bernheim (a much more “modern” dealer) and the date had been 1929. But he wasn’t indulging in conscious misrepresentation, nor making a postdadaist spoof of artistic grandiosity, as later critics suggested. This was something much more poignant. Gerald had been denying his artist self for so long that he had forgotten the details. He was even unable, when asked, to supply correct titles and dates for the paintings, or to recollect all of them. The Salon des Independents Turbines of 1924, for instance, and the 1926 Laboratoire simply slipped from his memory. Faced with these inevitable lacunae, he covered up with bravura and fake self-assurance.