All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  She sailed to England in early November 1931, but returned to New York almost immediately. After years of immunity from illness, her father had contracted pneumonia, and he died on November 23, 1931. Esther and Gerald, both traveling from Europe, missed his enormous funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Several hundred people, including seventy-five Mark Cross employees—the two shops were closed for the day—attended the service, as did several of Esther’s friends, and Murphy was eulogized by a former U.S. secretary of state. As John Strachey prepared to accompany Esther to New York, Celia told him that if he did not return to England within ten days she would leave the country and never see him again. Deeply unhappy, wanting to begin a life with her, but loath to hurt Esther, he sailed to New York, delivered Esther to her parents’ home, and immediately returned to London, sending Esther a telegram to say that he wanted to end the marriage.

  “The whole thing went to pieces en grand,” said Sybille Bedford, with Strachey “letting her down, her beloved father dying, then her mother’s illness, the Mark Cross company [in crisis], Gerald being impossible, suddenly no money.” Anna Murphy had collapsed and been hospitalized when her husband died; within a month she had a stroke and contracted pneumonia. Esther, in shock at her father’s death and deeply hurt by Strachey’s failure to honor him—if not for her sake then as the man who had helped make his career possible—kept vigil over her mother, who lay semiconscious for five months, “a living corpse.” She died that spring. Gerald, preoccupied with the illness of his eldest son, did not return to New York for her funeral. John Strachey moved with Celia to a house in rural Sussex, struggled with his ambivalence about divorcing Esther, “became ill with worry and guilt,” and went into analysis. Muriel Draper’s “sympathy and understanding” as Anna Murphy was dying were crucial. Draper and Joe Brewer also tried to broker a rapprochement. Esther “does love you,” Draper wrote to John Strachey, “but…does not depend on you in any way—emotionally, intellectually, or actually; nor is she, as far as I can perceive, waiting for you as the one hope and solution of her life. She does believe that some sort of equality is possible between you, or that in any case some arrangement of your lives can be made which will prove less disastrous and ridiculous than this.” Strachey’s career was also in turmoil. Oswald Mosley had resigned dramatically from the Labour government, and in 1931 he, Strachey, and a few others founded the New Party, a short-lived experiment in opposition. But Strachey soon withdrew, seeing Mosley’s turn to the right, and in the October election of that year he lost his seat in Parliament. Mosley went on to found the British Union of Fascists.

  The women in John Strachey’s family were not threatened or disgusted by Esther the way his male friends were. On the contrary: “She is a hero and a goddess,” his sister Amabel wrote to him. “I have seen a good many great women, but never one to surpass Esther, and never one so vulnerable and inexperienced and exposed to the hard fate of being a human being.” His mother could be forbidding—she was tall and thin and looked “like a Victorian coat stand,” wrote Celia, “with scarves & chains and lace and shawls hanging from her”—but she adored Esther and emphatically took her side. Amy Strachey had encouraged her son’s trip to the United States in 1928 as a way to separate him from Celia; she refused to see him when he was living with Celia in 1932; and she did not attend their wedding in the autumn of 1933, immediately after Esther and John divorced. “My heart quite literally bleeds when I think of” Esther, she wrote to Gerald. When Esther remarried, five years later, Amy Strachey told her that her new husband was “charming,—almost worthy of you, but you know my feelings that nobody is quite.”

  Within a few years, Esther and John Strachey had become friends. On her last trip to Europe before the war, in the spring of 1937, she visited him and Celia. Twice in the 1930s, on lecture tours of the United States, he was incarcerated at Ellis Island, accused of being a Communist advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, a charge based on Hearst press pressure on the Department of Labor. In both cases, Esther pulled every string she could in Washington, even contacting FDR, and she wrote to Amy Strachey to reassure her. Strachey went on to have a long career as a leading theorist of the Labour Party and in world democratic socialism. The Coming Struggle for Power, his 1932 primer on the logics of capitalism and communism, is still seen as one of the most cogent expositions of the economic situation of the time. He helped found the Left Book Club, a populist publishing venture that produced millions of volumes (by George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and others) and helped shift the British national consciousness to the left, enabling Labour’s postwar ascendance. He was a member of Parliament and he continued to publish on economics and empire until his death in 1963. Esther liked and admired him.

  But in New York in 1932, as she waited for him to come to a decision about whether to divorce, she was miserable. She faced and avoided her own failings, writing to him about eighteenth-century French history, not about their marriage, telling friends that it had not worked out because she belonged in New York, not London. She lived in a hotel and depended on Amanda and Gilbert Seldes. On Christmas Eve at their home, she pulled off her wedding ring and gave it to their young daughter, Marian. She had no real financial independence, because Patrick Murphy had made a “dotty…eccentric will” that appointed Gerald her trustee until she was fifty-five, meaning that she did not actually own the shares of Mark Cross her father had left her. Even if she had been capable of steady work, it would have been hard to find. Across the country, more than thirteen million people were unemployed. In New York, along Broadway and Fifth Avenue, shops were closed or empty, breadlines threaded through Times Square, and food was scarce and of poor quality even if one had money or a job. In June, Esther listened to the suspenseful Democratic convention with Draper, Max Ewing, the actress Kay Francis, and the lesbian nightclub singer Spivy LeVoe. She and Draper outlasted everyone, glued to the radio. Finally the maneuvering for delegates ended, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated. Esther was relieved, but skeptical when he was elected by a huge majority, and the Democrats won both houses of Congress, on November 8, 1932. She saw in the new year at Draper’s annual party, then returned to London to wait for her divorce. From Paris in the spring of 1933, she wrote to Draper:

  Never have I loved my country so much—and never have I been as despairing. Roosevelt seems to me to be applying homeopathic remedies that only lull the patient to sleep while the disease saps him.—I hope this is only a delusion, because I am over here and out of touch and don’t grasp that great wave of enthusiasm and confidence which I am told Roosevelt has kindled in the country. But I cannot believe it.—Dearest Muriel, you are the only person I could write to…like this. Forgive me…My divorce was too squalid and depressing.

  The year before, Strachey had written to Joseph Brewer, “I feel the frightful tragedy of our marriage as a heavy, heavy weight which I shall carry all the rest of my life. And I am more than willing to take all the blame…[T]he thought of Esther, and of her inestimable goodness, of the startling, beautiful and so overwhelmingly moving core of purest gold that lies beneath all surface irrelevancies haunts me.”

  The Rumble of the Tumbrels

  One July 4 in the early 1920s, the drama critic Alec Woollcott had visited Esther in Southampton and watched as she responded to her father’s drunkenness and mother’s paranoia by reciting a litany about the English royal family, “saying, ‘The Duke of York had three sons and two daughters,’ etc., etc.,” and gesticulating anxiously. In 1938, introducing an essay of hers on FDR, the editors of the progressive journal Common Sense described her as “celebrated for her mastery of American history.” Dawn Powell, after seeing her at Gerald and Sara’s in 1945, portrayed her as

  tall, gaunt, in tweed suit with folded cravat, regretting the necessity of a body whose needs interrupt her conversation, studded with statistics on Third Empire, Economics, and European politics…her contact with the human race (she is concerned with only its major figures)
is in shy revelations made to her that the great (in diadems of dates and robes of sparkling statistics) also were interrupted by body or mortal demands…Some alien hand might intrude or pry in silence, so barriers of statistics must be piled up like sandbags to protect the small shy bird within.

  Powell’s brilliant portrait is, like Esther herself, at once precise, exaggerated, and inadequate. If Esther piled up facts and handled them like jewels—work that takes discipline and a delicate touch—she also played with facts and distorted them. She understood the present, including herself and her friends, as historical because she saw history as the medium in which we all live, the thing we are always making. Reading history, Esther wrote to Janet Flanner in April 1938, “or at any rate the tiny little bit of recorded history that has any semblance of authenticity, one realizes that the human race has survived in the last analysis not because of any of its qualities of virtue or intellect, but on account of that slavish pliant adaptability which has enabled it to survive even the mischief which it plots for its own self-destruction.”

  “To focus” Esther’s “attention on [something] outside divorce and death” in the summer of 1932, Muriel Draper invited her to give a series of public lectures at her apartment. In the first talk, for which “quite a crowd for a hot night turned out to hear her,” Esther compared the previous postwar period—the years following the Civil War—with their own moment in the wake of World War I. Two years later, she published an essay on Ulysses S. Grant and Reconstruction in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, “Godfather to American Corruption,” covering some of the same ground. “At the close of Grant’s administration,” she wrote,

  the pattern of the future had been fixed. On the ruins of that agrarian civilization which the Southern slave-holders had sought to keep, the most powerful industrial country in the world was being built…America was to be…conducted for profit by business men. Government was to be something that did not interfere while men made money. And in all of these decisions Grant had acquiesced without understanding any of them.

  The statesmen and party bosses of President Grant’s time “were actually more materialistic in their fundamental philosophy than most Marxians,” she wrote in a review of a Marxist history several years later. The comparison was only partly tongue in cheek: Their “political talents [were]…great if ruthless,” she argued, describing these politicians as “something more than the puppets” this writer “makes them out to be.” “They discovered the necessity for unqualified party orthodoxy and the efficacy of the ‘party purge’ long before Moscow did. And they were all avowed believers in the dictum that all power is a permanent conspiracy.” Esther’s thinking about postbellum America was probably shaped by her reading of the historian Charles Beard, who argued in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution that the framers were driven by financial interest. She was certainly influenced by the historian Henry Adams, a witness to Grant’s administration, whom she described as incapable of understanding “Grant’s particular kind of stupidity.” Adams was “primarily concerned in attempting to discover a meaning or a logic in history” and she admired his “devastating” portrait of his “class and…caste in one of their most triumphant periods in America.”

  Esther was herself primarily concerned not with finding history’s logic but with making it vivid and visible in the present. It was second nature to her to think about the crises and characters of her own time in terms of the European and American past—and anachronism and incongruity were as productive a way of thinking about that relationship as continuity. The Spanish Civil War, she told Flanner in 1938, was “like the religious wars in sixteenth century France and the Thirty Year War in Germany.” She added: “Though I never idealized the Spanish government and disagreed with many of its policies, I think Franco’s victory will be an unmitigated disaster both for Spain and for Europe.” Writing to John Strachey that same year, she evoked both Roman decadence and the French Revolution and the Terror: “I have just been spending a few days in Santa Barbara, that Pompeii without a volcano.” She added: “All the California millionaires and the Eastern plutocrats who inhabit the marble palaces in its hills are in a very strange state of mind…[and] are behaving as though they already heard the rumble of the tumbrels coming for them.” “Well,” she wrote to Amabel Williams-Ellis as the world careened toward war, “it is strange to live in a dissolving world…‘Toute la boutique s’en va au diable,’ as Madame Pompadour observed to Louis XV on another occasion, which also turned out to have serious historical consequences.” She planned to write a play about Louis Napoleon, because she saw that president turned emperor as “the great prototype of the present fascist leaders, since he was the first modern dictator.” To her potential collaborator she noted, “It won’t be easy to write as it is the sort of thing that has to come off absolutely or else be a complete failure.”

  At the same time, she articulated the European past in colloquial American terms. Years later, describing her frustration at trying to capture Madame de Maintenon’s character, she announced that she had decided to think of her as “The Slippery Sam of French History.” And she constantly traveled the border between history and fiction, peopling her world not only with the living (“the uncertified lunatics amongst whom we live,” as she wrote to Draper) and the Great Dead but also with figures from literature and of her own invention. It was a fluid vision. She had set pieces that could be requested—or averted, since “when she got onto one of these stories, it would take two or three hours to tell,” as Sybille Bedford observed. One of these stories was about the Hanseatic League, a complex patch of Northern European history that Esther would declare she was one of the few to understand—and would now explain. “I used to say you had to steer her, like the Queen Mary,” recalled James Douglas, a friend of her later years, referring to the inexorability of these long discourses. There were other personages and events that Esther related as if they were true, and were believed to be by many of her listeners, but were her own creation. One of these was “The Reverend Mother,” the corrupt abbess of a convent in Louisiana who had the dirt on so many cardinals that she had successfully thwarted the efforts of the Church hierarchy to expel her. Esther retailed this woman’s deeds as a report on the outrageous state of the Catholic Church in the American South, but “the R.M.,” as she also called her, was largely or wholly a fiction, a long-running joke, and both a particular character and a malevolent force whom she would pretend to blame for all manner of disasters, personal and global.

  Blending past and present, European and American, high and low, Esther imagined contemporary politicians as literary characters, saw figures from literature as her friends, and posited her friends as players in historical intrigues. She called FDR someone out of a Philip Barry play—suave, upper-class, and too removed from most Americans’ experience of the Depression. She used Pride and Prejudice to describe the way her old friend Peggy Fears “flirted with me and threw me many a lewd glance” at a gathering in 1950: “like Sir William Lucas at Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s party.” In 1958, at the height of the French atrocities in Algeria and with the end of the Fourth Republic imminent, she wrote to Gerald that the previous six months had “resembled nothing so much as the Queen’s Croquet Party in Alice in Wonderland—but which nearly came to a denouement that would have been tragic and bloody.” It was “eerie,” she said, “to see the streets [of Paris] patrolled by the special police carrying machine guns.” She had a theory about one longtime friend—a difficult woman who had fallen out with Noel Murphy but to whom Esther remained loyal—“that she traveled all over the world looking for the Boston Tea Party” (excitement, opposition, conflict). Edmund Wilson recalled that Esther’s train of thought had to do with the fact that this mutual friend’s “great-uncle (I think) was a renegade to the Republic in the War of 1812—he was an admiral who made an attempt to betray Boston Harbor to the British.” When Wilson related Esther’s idea to Janet Flanner, he “said something about Esther’s
theory not necessarily being reliable.—‘But,’ said Janet, ‘I’m sure it’s brilliantly illuminating.’” Esther’s “talking, her devouring of history, is of course a release of energy,” Wilson observed, “and the things she makes up, imagines, show that she has had partly to live in a fantasy not too close to reality.” But as Flanner saw, Esther also transposed her friends and acquaintances to other centuries and locations and reinvented them as fictional characters to comment on their personalities in the present. History itself was about large political and social shifts, but it was also about character, in both the ethical and the fictional senses. And the constant literary allusions helped her to talk about the human repercussions of policy.