All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Yet Barney’s blond allure and conviction about her own appeal were everything that Esther was not, and for two years Esther was also frantically in love. “We talked again for five solid hours about Miss Barney,” wrote Max Ewing in March 1927. “The conversation becomes mad but always fascinating…After an hour or so the thought of Miss Barney sends her into an absolute extase like nothing on earth.” Esther was crazy about Barney—“and by crazy I mean really almost crazy,” Ewing noted; “Muriel is afraid that if it keeps going on like this Esther may eventually become really cuckoo.” Esther was in love, perhaps for the first time in her life, but with someone who would never reciprocate: Although Barney was promiscuous to a fault, constantly juggling lovers, Esther was unattractive, too obviously smitten, and intelligent in a way that bored Barney and made her uncomfortable. “‘She is not for us!’” declares Dame Musset of Bounding Bess (Esther), in the Ladies Almanack, “and so saying, she cracked her Whip against her Boot, turning toward a Pasty Shop hard by.”

  In June 1927, however, Esther telegrammed Muriel Draper from France: “ON WAY TO CAPRICE,” and that summer she accompanied Barney to her villa at Santa Margherita, near Genoa. They met up with Max Ewing and drove—or were driven, in Barney’s huge Packard—around northern Italy. When Romaine Brooks joined them, they proceeded with Barney and Brooks in one car and the lesser mortals in another, all of them stopping where and when Barney pleased. “Miss Barney directs this trip like a Roman general,” wrote Ewing, “and Esther keeps maintaining that Napoleon would never have lost Waterloo if he had had Miss Barney to organize his troops.” Dorothy Wilde, Oscar’s witty niece and one of Barney’s lovers, wrote to her, “Fancy Esther being with you…Does she sleep in my bed? I don’t like that. Have you made listless love to her—out of charitable curiosity? Tell me if you have.” Wilde’s biographer says that “Natalie ended up in bed with the ‘brilliant, didactic’ Esther Murphy,” but if she did, it was not for long. Years later Esther referred to her “strange stay with Natalie Barney” that summer. But she returned to Paris the following spring “in a state of frenzy,” because she was again on her way to see Barney.

  The appearance in New York of the young English writer and politician John Strachey interrupted her obsession. Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey was Eton- and Oxford-educated, from an old, upper-middle-class English family, second cousin of Lytton, and son of the editor of the conservative journal The Spectator. Although Strachey had left Oxford before getting his degree to help his father run The Spectator, his growing commitment to socialism meant that by the late 1920s he had withdrawn from the journal’s day-to-day management. He was heavily involved in Labour Party politics, editing the magazines the Socialist Review and The Miner, and publishing books on economics. He had traveled to Russia, and his close friend Oswald Mosley, another well-off convert to left-wing politics—then a rising political star, not yet the face of fascism in England—encouraged him to go to the United States to study advanced capitalism. Strachey was in the middle of a steady affair with the young literary editor of The Spectator, Celia Simpson, who was part of his group of Labour-affiliated friends, but as he prepared to travel to New York in the autumn of 1928, a colleague remarked, “I suppose you’re going to the U.S.A. to look for a rich wife.” A few months later, in February 1929, Esther and he were engaged. “Bachelor Heiress to Wed Kin of Lord,” announced a headline in the New York American.

  In 1936, still working overtime as a spokesman for his moment, Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.” This often-repeated dictum about the late teens and twenties may have described him, but it ignored the politics of the Harlem Renaissance, left-wing organizing and publishing, temperance and Prohibition, and feminist and anti-feminist activism during those years. Esther was not one of those American literary figures who first found a social conscience with the Great Depression, and in Strachey she responded to the offer of a life if not in politics, then as a partner in his promising career. Like her, he was an intellectual child of privilege who had embraced progressive politics. She had recently been commissioned to write the life of Lady Blessington, and her publisher, Joseph Brewer, was a young American who had studied at Oxford and worked on The Spectator; it was probably he who introduced her to Strachey. She may have thought that living in England would help her to write this book. She already felt her “inabilities to act,” which she confided to Strachey, and she told him how much she needed his confidence in her. But joining forces with him also made it possible for her to avoid writing and to throw herself into work that was wholly different. It may be that it was only as a political wife that she could conceive of being in an intimate couple with a man. Certainly agreeing to marry him was an attempt to stop pining for a woman who kept in touch with but still disdained her: Barney countered the “startling and revelatory” news of her engagement with skeptical congratulations. “I must rejoice with you that you not only foresee but experience happiness,” she wrote. “I am glad that you recall our meeting not too bitterly.” And she asked, pointedly or obliquely, whether Esther had already slept with Strachey: “Just how your nature may sanction this nouveau régime is a thing already ascertained?” Esther’s nature inclined mostly toward women, but she was also profoundly lonely. “She dreamed of being appreciated,” said Sybille Bedford.

  Strachey was motivated by a mixture of opportunism and genuine fondness. He was ambitious and wanted a career in politics, but did not have the money to finance it. His father had died in 1927, and he and his mother were not close. There was a real chance of a Labour victory in the 1929 election—not just in the working-class, traditionally Tory district of Birmingham, in which he would run for Parliament, but in enough other parts of the country to bring in a left-of-center government—and he insisted on a large dowry from Patrick Murphy, to make his campaign possible. He admired Esther deeply and, knowing about her feelings for Barney, still convinced himself and was convinced by her that their marriage would work. He told her that he wanted to give her “a sort of keel…some heavy fixed centre against which your superb talents could get a purchase” and wrote with kind apprehension about her drinking and their shared tendency toward depression. He saw her strengths and faults clearly, yet he objectified her: “You are truly moving because you have lived and suffered,” he wrote. “I need you very much Esther. You have very much that I lack. You have, for all that it is to some extent caught up and turned back upon yourself, an exuberance of spirit—you are one of your own examples of the…magnificent American Extravagance of type—that is to me immensely satisfying.” He also expected to be able to continue his affair with Celia Simpson.

  To an ex-girlfriend, the French journalist Yvette Fouque, he wrote,

  I’m going to marry a girl called Esther Murphy—New Yorker, Irish descent, extremely intelligent, not pretty, 6 feet tall, 30 years old, with some money and a very, very good person indeed. She, I think, loves me very much. This, my dearest Yvette, is if you will believe me, not foolishness, not mere lachété, or resignation to the lure of the dollar, but a deeply felt, and absolutely necessary, development of my life. Of course, the fact that she has money is vitally important to me—ah, you know me well enough to know that—but please, please believe that I have not foolishly rushed at the money, sacrificing too much for it. She is a deeply civilized, deeply and passionately intellectual person, to whom the cultural heritage of man is life itself. She knows French literature and history, I really believe, as well as you do, and English literature and history far better than I do. She is the only other woman I have ever met whose intellectual equality I could never question. She knows England very little, but France very well. (She goes to France every year.) I know that this marriage will inevitably strengthen and help my life. It will give me the objective ability to go in wholly for politics and also a certain inner strength to do so.

  He did not write to Celia Simpson, who learned of his engagement through a newspaper
announcement. When he contacted her on his return to London, in late January 1929, as he began his run for Parliament, she told him she would never see him again.

  In New York that spring, an epic series of parties preceded Esther’s departure for London. “Last night…at James Leopold’s,” Max Ewing reported,

  Esther Murphy was said farewell to by about fifty people for about five hours. Tonight she will be said farewell to in two places: (1) at dinner at Mary French’s, where Mary, Esther, Muriel, Joseph Brewer, and probably Alice De La Mar and a few others will be at table and (2) later at a party at the Sheldons, to which forty are coming to bid farewell to Esther Murphy. Saturday night Esther Murphy is inviting hundreds of people to say farewell to her in her own quarters in Park Avenue. On the following nights it will be the same hundreds saying the same thing at Sarah King’s, at Muriel Draper’s, and elsewhere.

  A week later, Ewing wrote, “You would think Esther Murphy were going to a nunnery in Siam and never to be seen again in this world. Whereas as a matter of fact everyone she knows will see her in Europe this summer and back here in New York next winter!” The engagement was announced and these parties duly noted in the columns of gossip writer Cholly Knickerbocker, and a hundred people saw Esther off at the pier when she and her father sailed on March 16.

  On shipboard, and then from London, she telegraphed Muriel Draper: “THINKING OF YOU CONSTANTLY.” The wedding, front-page news in New York, took place on April 24, 1929, at the Catholic church of St. Mary’s, in Chelsea. Patrick and Anna Murphy were there, as were Noel and Gerald; Amy Strachey, John’s mother; his sister Amabel Williams-Ellis with her family; and a couple of Esther’s friends. (Draper and Mercedes de Acosta had planned to attend but were unable to.) Oswald Mosley was the best man. In a photograph taken outside the reception at the Carlton hotel, Esther is flanked by her husband, while her father looks on. Her face is largely obscured by her cloche hat, but she is smiling broadly—not at either man or at the photographer, but at one of the women in the group, who beams back at her.

  Immediately afterward, she was “plunged into the General Election of 1929”—the first English election with universal adult suffrage. In addition to bringing money to Strachey’s candidacy, she campaigned with him, appearing on the platform when he spoke and stumping for him at gatherings of women constituents and elsewhere. On a leaflet addressed “To the Woman Elector of Aston,” there is a photograph of her looking distinctly pretty—fresh-faced, clear-eyed, Irish. “Dear Friend,” the broadside reads, “I am writing to you, as a woman voter, in order to ask you to vote for my husband, John Strachey…I know his grasp of the problems which confront women, and his keen realisation of the urgent necessity of improving the living conditions of the people of Great Britain.” The leaflet, which may not have been written by her, invited women voters to a series of meetings, where her speech—on American democratic traditions and the goals of the Labour Party—was certainly her own. She loved these appearances, and audiences responded to her commanding but matter-of-fact style.

  Strachey defeated his Conservative opponent on May 30, 1929, and Esther and he moved into a house in Westminster, close to the House of Commons. He announced that he anticipated “the swift ‘transformation of society into a Socialist Commonwealth,’” but there was little room for him and his colleagues to maneuver. While Labour had enough seats in the House of Commons to form a government, they had only a small majority over the Conservatives (the Liberal Party had the balance of the votes), and their prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, began to undermine their aspirations for reform. In November 1930, as Labour’s hold on government disintegrated, Esther wrote to a friend in New York describing it as “the most important failure since the Wall Street crash.”

  From left: unidentified woman, Lorna Lindsley, Patrick Murphy, John Strachey (sprinkled with rice), Oswald Mosley behind him, and Esther, after their wedding, April 24, 1929 (Muriel Draper Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

  The fatuousness, and incompetence of MacDonald are almost incredible. There may be a general election any time—though no one knows when it will come…Mosley and John assure me that when the general election comes the present government will be snowed under. I don’t doubt it for an instant. John says he is sure to lose his own seat in the debacle…He loathes MacDonald so that he will positively enjoy his own defeat, since it will contribute to Ramsay’s discomfiture. Ramsay now frequents nobody but Duchesses, to whom he tells his troubles while [Chancellor of the Exchequer] Snowden carries on the government employing a financial policy that would have been deemed rather too conservative by Queen Victoria. Though Snowden’s policy and his obstinacy are ruining the Labor party, one can still respect him as a human being…, while Ramsay is a pitiable figure, the mixture of his vanity, his Scotch sentimentality and his snobbery are atrocious. The aristocracy has him eating out of its hand.

  But Esther’s fascination with parliamentary politics was not enough to sustain the marriage, which was itself soon a debacle. Strachey had imagined a union of equals, but still expected his wife to run the household—plan meals, supervise the small domestic staff, make sure the house looked respectable—chores in which Esther had no interest and for which she had no aptitude. She cared about debate and policy, not domestic performance, felt isolated, and continued to drink to excess. She had her own money and had never answered to anyone, so often assuaged her unhappiness by spending weekends in France sitting in cafés drinking and talking with Dorothy Parker, Janet Flanner, and other friends; going to Barney’s salon on Fridays; and visiting Noel, who was now living in the village of Orgeval, about twenty miles northwest of Paris. (Margaret Hutchins Bishop and John Peale Bishop lived in Orgeval for a time, too, and Esther saw them as well.) In the summers of their childhood, Esther and Noel had told other children ghost stories in the Southampton cemetery. During the war, Esther had read her Fred’s eloquent letters from the front. Now Noel was rusticating in a country house she had bought after Fred’s death, but often hosting visitors from Paris (including Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas) and from New York. John Strachey did accompany Esther to France occasionally, and even to Barney’s salon, but it was his duty to be available to his constituency in Birmingham on the weekends, and it was customary for an MP’s wife to provide support on these trips, not flee to France. Their struggles included the question of children: He wanted a family—although her drinking eventually made him reconsider; she did not. When she became pregnant, she felt her whole body revolt against it, or so she said later. She eventually had the miscarriage she hoped for.

  The cultural collision was part of the problem. She was close to one of her husband’s colleagues, Aneurin Bevan, who had worked his way up to a parliamentary career from a mining community in South Wales, and she spent time with the novelists Richard Hughes and Elizabeth Bowen. But most of Strachey’s friends were baffled by what they saw as his choice of an unattractive oddity for a wife. They could not fathom Esther’s intelligence, could not stand her volubility, and considered American history a laughably trivial subject. They also felt that Esther dominated Strachey. She talked so much that he appeared to be in “second place,” said George Strauss, a Labour colleague, who described Esther as a “female policeman.” Strachey’s childhood friend Robert Boothby, a Tory MP, found her “hideous.” Boothby recalled a gathering at Mosley’s country home during which “Esther was going on about” various senators, and “Strachey said: ‘if you go on about that any more, I can’t stand it.’ Esther left the room in tears.” When Strachey first brought her to Mosley’s country house, his biographer notes, “there were many talkative Englishmen to lunch, and Esther, after being silent a long time, wept. Strachey later told Mosley ‘that was because, in America, everyone listens to her.’” These accounts, meant to show Esther as self-absorbed and presumptuous, make the misogyny and insularity of the atmosphere she was moving in vivid.

  Strachey’s
politics at this time were increasingly radical, but as he wrote to Boothby: “Remember, every upper class socialist is a neurotic, on edge, ‘up against it’ and so guilty.” Esther’s first taste of this conflict, and of the differences between American and English versions of elite populism, had been during the election celebrations, when a working-class man had approached Strachey and said, “Congratulations, John!” clapping him on the shoulder. Strachey had recoiled and replied, “I’m Mr. Strachey to you.” Stunned by his sense of affront, Esther later said that this was the moment when her trust in him evaporated. While they were driving through France in the summer of 1929—they stayed for a time with Gerald and Sara Murphy in Antibes—their car broke down, and so did the marriage. As they waited for the repairs, Strachey wrote to Yvette Fouque:

  It is not going well. I am still too young and foolish to have undertaken this…She is so spoilt—how could she be anything else? It is not her fault, of course, it is money, America, everything. But that doesn’t make it any better for me. Isn’t it awful, the poor people are the only possible ones—and they are, well, poor!…They [wealthy Americans] cannot even show enough decency, calmness, niceness to get over the tiny contretemps which the pursuit of their pleasure bring them. And yet we, the poor, are helpless, impotent, cringing before them. God forgive us, we go to the lengths of marrying them!

  While he clung to distorted ideas about his own “poverty,” Esther kept drinking and escaping to Paris and New York. It was not long before he was again seeing Celia Simpson.

  “Darling, darling Muriel,” Esther wrote, “I have missed you so much that nothing could ever convey it to you—at the same time feeling…that I only had to stretch out my hand to touch you…This year has been very strange.” She was referring to the end of her marriage, to the growing economic crisis, and to her parents’ decline. She and Strachey were together in New York in the winter of 1929–30. (Mary McCarthy remembered a gathering of leftist writers that included Esther and Strachey at which he had shocked McCarthy by adjourning to the toilet, leaving the door open, “unbutton[ing] his fly,” and continuing the conversation.) But they spent more and more time apart. When he returned to London, she stayed on with Anna and Patrick Murphy until spring. That summer, he traveled to Russia with Celia and several colleagues. The following summer, Esther toured Germany with Noel and Janet Flanner. Noel drove her old Ford; Esther and Flanner took turns in the front seat. They stayed in country inns in the Black Forest and went to the Jockey Club in Berlin. Noel and Flanner fell in love during the trip—some happiness in the midst of increasing strain. Until the end of Esther’s life, these two women were her family. Back in New York by herself in the late summer and autumn of 1931, Esther held “forth on the politics of all the world” and she had lunch with Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon in Southampton. Her parents had fired most their household staff and put their automobile in storage, Mark Cross was operating at a great loss, and Patrick Murphy’s bewilderment at the Depression was painful to see.