All We Know: Three Lives
Page 8
Esther and the news, February 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van Vechten (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, courtesy Estate of Carl Van Vechten)
In another of Esther’s stories about Natalie Barney, which she also sent to Muriel Draper around 1926, she cast Barney as the oversexed abbess of a convent in thirteenth-century Italy. The hapless Alice Robinson appeared again, this time as a novice whom Barney hoped to deflower. Isabel Pell, another lesbian rake of their circle, haunted the convent, Esther wrote, taking the form of a dog to enter the cloister and debauch young nuns. “The Barney or ‘Clotilde’ as she was then called, but to avoid confusion we will speak of her under the name which she bears now,” Esther wrote,
was the favorite child of that extraordinary man, [Emperor] Frederick II, and had inherited many of his gifts. She collaborated with her father in writing that celebrated work “De Tribus Impostoribus” in which the doctrines and revelations of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed are held up to ridicule…The Emperor had wished her to marry the King of Naples, but upon her expressing a great repugnance to matrimony and requesting she be made Abbess of the beforementioned convent, he bowed to her wishes. She had ruled the convent for some ten years with an iron hand though on somewhat original principles, when Pell made her first appearance there…I hope to be able to give you an account of the very remarkable part which Miss Barney played in Constantinople during the last years of the Eastern Empire and of her amazing activities during the Crusades (in which she was very closely associated with Jane Heap,) but for the present this fragment drawn from the long history of her incarnation as an Abbess [an extremely long parenthetical comment follows]…is the only one which I can deal with here…Thus you see, dear Muriel, how all these events have their roots in the far past. How the Barney has always been a maleficent influence in the lives of our friends since the very dawn of history…The connection may seem very remote at a first glance—but according to the fundamental laws of Hegelian philosophy it is both self evident and menacing.
I submit this to your wisdom and judgment
And remain
Yours In Christ
A Portuguese Nun
The story was the fervid creation of someone not included in Barney’s seductions, but it was also far more than clever sniping. As Djuna Barnes did in Ladies Almanack and Virginia Woolf did in Orlando, Esther used literary history to make excited and critical claims about anachronism and modernity; to link local and larger historical details; to suggest a relationship between lesbian sexuality and historical consciousness; and to argue that literary characters are themselves part of history, as are one’s friends. Esther signed herself as the narrator and putative author of the seventeenth-century French novel the Lettres Portugaises, or Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Ostensibly and long believed to be five missives from a cloistered Franciscan nun to her lover, the text is now recognized as the fiction of a seventeenth-century Frenchman, the Comte de Guilleragues, and as one of the important precursors of the novel. The other text she refers to, De Tribus Impostoribus (The Three Imposters), one of the early manifestos of atheism (the “imposters” are Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed), is attributed variously to Frederick II, Boccaccio, Hobbes, and Spinoza; one version from the 1750s was published with the fictive date of 1598.
Esther considered Barney to be or to have a false character. Writing about Barney while citing and using the conventions of famous literary ruses, she satirized the intrigues of at least two subcultures, lesbian Paris and Catholic cloisters. She also skewered the belief in progress—the joke that is the logic of historical determinism, or “the fundamental laws of Hegelian philosophy”—and religious belief. Her reference to Jane Heap’s involvement in the Crusades was a swipe at sexual and devotional heat: Heap was the charismatic former editor, with Margaret Anderson, of The Little Review, the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. She had been Anderson’s lover, then became a disciple of the mystic Gurdjieff and disseminator of his “wisdom.” Referring to the Letters of a Portuguese Nun—one of the exercises in ventriloquism that are the basis of the realist novel—Esther was also invoking the conversation between that emerging genre and the modern discipline of history. As the latter, with its emphasis on facts and evidence, rather than narrative, developed in relationship to the former in the eighteenth century, both emerged as separately gendered forms—history as the province of men, and fiction of women. In other words, Esther’s satire was also returning the practice of historical writing to its own history as a literary form, and one that had had a more fluid relationship to documentation than was accepted in the twentieth century. Esther’s own strangeness and novelty were partly to do with this paradoxical history of history—the fact that it was a male preserve that had worked to distinguish itself from its own past as a form “animated by rhetoric, not by evidence,” as the historian Jill Lepore has put it.
From England in 1929, Esther had written to Draper about her encounter with a pleasurably contradictory figure: “a landed proprietor of Gloucestershire, who left England to assist Lenin in establishing the soviet republic…who still is a formal communist, but who is at present disquieted by the fact that the vicar who holds the living in his gift is in favor of ‘the reservation of the sacrament’ [setting aside some portion of the communion bread and wine for the ill or others absent from the service, rather than consuming it immediately after it has been blessed] which the squire feels is directly subversive of the Establishment.” The ironies of this juxtaposition of communism and the traditional English sources of power (the Anglican church and the aristocracy) delighted Esther. “I walked across his acres with him,” she went on, “while he told me the story of the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg at which he assisted—stopping only to point out with pride a great clump of trees, planted on top of a hill to commemorate Victoria’s golden jubilee by his father, which is an object of his particular solicitude.”
Esther saw something similar in FDR, who seemed to her “the liberal…‘born out of his due time’ [here she is quoting the apostle Paul]—and his very appearance on the stage of history an anachronism.” She also likened him to an impressive seductress, a gesture that allied him with Natalie Barney. He had, she wrote in 1936,
that insidious charm which one is too apt to associate only with the great courtesans of history and which as a matter of fact every now and again a man is endowed with, and which by that being so rare an event, is twice as effective.—Franklin has taken his into politics instead of into the salon and the alcove, and it is such a novel element to be injected into the rough and tumble of the American political scene, that his “bonne fortunes” have been more striking than Lord Byron’s own. He is the Mary Stuart–Cleopatra the Serpent of Old Nile of American politics and his seductions have certainly worked cruel ravages on the Grand Old Party’s health and prospects. It is one of the minor ironies of history that the man who probably possesses more sheer charm…than any other figure in American history should have had as his chief opponent the man [Herbert Hoover] who had the least. The spectacle of Roosevelt and Hoover mutually competing for the popular favor is rather like what it would be to see Madame de Pompadour opposed to Sairie Gamp [Sairey, the drunken nurse in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit].
This sort of analysis—at once historical, contemporary, and prescient; factual and literary; generous and incisive—saturates the hundreds of letters Esther sent and the several articles she published during the 1930s. In “Have You Heard About Roosevelt…?” which appeared in Common Sense in 1938, she analyzed the hysterical “whispering campaign” against the president and argued, “Not since the great statesman Turgot worked to save the French monarchy from itself, has anybody worked as hard as Mr. Roosevelt has, to reform and to modify American capitalism so that it can survive.” In “The Energists,” for Harper’s Bazaar, she wrote about the “incalculable influence” American women social reformers had had in the nineteenth and early twent
ieth centuries. She told John Strachey that she regretted
that in dealing with the amazing Frances Willard I was not able to give an account of the part she played in the Labor movement of the seventies and eighties. She put the whole strength of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, one of the most powerful organizations this country has ever seen, back of the Knights of Labor, and came out for the forty-hour week. All that is a curious and little-known chapter in American social history. I wish to God we had a replica of Frances Willard on the Left today. She had a knowledge of American psychology and a grasp of the American political method as uncanny as Franklin Roosevelt’s own.
Although it was not unusual for a liberal observer to be thinking about the history of reform in America during the Depression and New Deal, it was, once again, rare for such an observer to be focusing on women in that history. Esther was also unusual in her treatment of Willard as a serious political figure; following the repeal of Prohibition it was more ordinary to dismiss this temperance figure. Esther’s use of the phrase social history is striking, too, since it was not common among historians for several decades to come.
Writing to the editor of Harper’s, the great Carmel Snow, Esther proposed another essay, which she envisioned as “a sort of pendent to ‘The Energists’”; she would discuss “critics and portrayers of the American scene,” including Henry James, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, and Margaret Chanler, and several lesser-known figures who had written about Native American culture, such as Mary Austin, Gertrude Atherton, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. There is no trace of that intriguing project (whether it was not assigned or not completed is not clear), but she did review, elsewhere, the “curious and ambitious work” that was the final volume of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoirs, Edge of Taos Desert. Socialite, patroness of the arts, bohemian, and latter-day settler of New Mexico, Luhan had an “almost unlimited capacity for making herself ridiculous,” Esther wrote. But even as she acknowledged Luhan’s obliviousness to history, penchant for melodrama, “bitter hostility to abstract ideas and…deep fear of them,” Esther still tried to give her book a place in history and called the “derision and indignation” Luhan had “provoked…almost everything except critical.” Luhan may have been “totally incapable of realizing the distortion of her own point of view,” but Esther read her as “an ardent and intransigent romantic of the school of Rousseau…with its glorification of the man of emotion and instinct as against the thinking man.” Today, Esther noted, “socialists, fascists and anarchists, the reformers and the seekers after personal salvation, may all appeal to Rousseau’s doctrines for justification,” but “Mrs. Luhan’s…rebellion against [society], though uncompromising, was essentially personal and always remained so.”
Esther’s own curious and ambitious work in the 1930s was productive and thwarted. There were inevitable distortions in her own point of view, the only ugly example of which is the evening in 1934 when she screamed drunkenly at a Jewish fellow guest at Muriel Draper’s home, “You live on corruption!…you all ought to be extirpated!” The recorder of this event was a young Lincoln Kirstein, then Draper’s lover, who said that Draper despaired at hearing such virulence from an antifascist like Esther. Her outburst was at once plausible and out of sync. Malice of this sort was not unusual in the 1930s, even or especially among New Deal liberals, and there are two anti-Semitic remarks, about Jews taking over the Hamptons, in Esther’s teenage correspondence to Gerald—ironic, given that the Irish-Catholic influx into the Hamptons took place in her lifetime. In general, she saw her time more lucidly than most and saw others with compassion. A few years after this incident, she wrote to John Strachey that she was moved to learn that Edith Wharton had returned an honorary degree from the University of Leipzig because “as far as she could see, culture and the freedom of the human mind had been banished from the Third Reich.” Esther had seen Wharton in Paris not long before and considered her gesture “one of the very few decent things that a person who came from the upper strata of privileged society has exerted themselves to do in these last few disastrous years.”
“As the late President Harding observed,” she wrote to Draper in 1935, “‘the world is in a bad way.’” The news of the Munich Pact was so distressing that “one is forced to fall back on Talleyrand’s famous comment on Napoleon’s dull and dastardly murder of the Duc d’Enghien. ‘It is worse than a crime it is a blunder.’…I wonder if that sly and stupid man [Neville Chamberlain] has any intuition of the enormity of what he has done.” Quoting Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying (but shifting his words into the first-person plural), she wrote, “As one grows older I think individual destinies take an added strangeness and sadness.—‘We dream fair things all the way but our dreams prove contrary and become the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow.’”
All Very Queer and a Little Depressing
Few events in Esther’s life lent themselves to the sort of historical imagining she favored, allowed her to engage so richly with anachronism, and brought her so close both to her own failures and to those of postbellum America as her marriage to Chester A. Arthur III, grandson of the twenty-first president of the United States. In 1935, she wrote to Draper announcing her engagement:
You are too young to remember, (though I understand you are 65 years old,) [Draper was not yet 50] my awful disappointment in July 1882 when President Chester Alan Arthur failed to propose to me at Saratoga Springs. He was a widower, he had payed me marked attentions, I saw myself as mistress of the White House,—but he jilted me. I was not young in 1882—not in my first youth—it did not improve my matrimonial chances to be thrown over by President Arthur.—But I am marrying his grandson whose sense of chivalry had made him feel that it is the only right thing to do to repair the wrong his grandfather did me.
Here was another venture at being married to the past. It was also something like her own history repeating itself as farce. If in her first marriage she had aligned herself with a serious intellectual socialist, in her second she became involved with a character who embodied “the man of emotion and instinct as against the thinking man,” whose belief in economic justice was tied to astrology and a muddy utopianism, and whose privilege made plenty of room for indolence.
Esther liked to tell people that “the only two things accomplished by [President] Arthur in his rather uninteresting administration had been civil service reform and taking the troops out of the South.” (He also modernized the navy and was the first president to sign legislation restricting immigration.) Her boast about his ineffectual government was also a way to express her gratification at now being several steps closer to the Civil War and Reconstruction, at her newly intimate connection with this time. “It is curious to think,” noted Edmund Wilson, “that, for Esther, to have married the grandson of Arthur means almost what it would have meant for Proust to have made an alliance with the Guermantes”—a suggestion that itself blurs history and fiction. Although she signed herself “Esther Murphy” on the title page of her Madame de Maintenon manuscript, elsewhere—in print and in private, and even after her long estrangement from the president’s grandson—she was “Esther Arthur” for the rest of her life.
The first Chester Alan Arthur was “a man whose career was entirely in the Horatio Alger nineteenth century American tradition,” Esther wrote to Draper, “up from the farm to riches and the presidency.” Born in 1830, the son of a Baptist preacher, he grew up in Vermont and upstate New York, then trained as a lawyer. He was involved with several cases defending the rights of African Americans in New York, but spent most of his early career as part of the Republican Party machine in New York City and State, was a compromise candidate for vice president on the ticket with James Garfield in 1880, and became president after Garfield’s assassination in 1881. He refused to move into the White House until it was redecorated, entertained lavishly once there, and took a great deal of the presidential wine cellar with him when he left.
This valuable purloined collection was the part of his inherita
nce that his son, Chester A. Arthur II, known as Alan, most treasured. Her father-in-law, Esther wrote, was “a marvelous character—very, very complete.” She loved the way his conversation ranged “from the White House of the eighties through late Victorian and Edwardian society to the Saint Petersburg of the Grand Dukes. He discusses General Grant with the same sardonic objectivity as…[he does] Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish.” He was “one of the most notable fornicators, and one of the greatest dandies…of his time,” had divorced his first wife, Chester’s mother (“Isabel Archer in ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ is her prototype”), and even at seventy-one was “utterly fascinating and entirely selfish.” He reminded Esther of her own father.
Chester A. Arthur III was similarly preoccupied with his own pleasures, but his taste ran to working-class men rather than French actresses, and his politics diverged from his father’s conservative Republicanism and toward a utopian socialism flavored with various precursors of New Age expression. Several years younger than Esther, he was handsome and self-dramatizing. In the early 1920s he had renamed himself Gavin, after a great-great-grandfather, dropped out of Columbia University, married a young dancer who had studied with Ruth St. Denis, and moved to Ireland, where he claimed to have spent four years as a member of the Irish Republican Army. Back in the United States at the end of the decade, he was commissioned by a newspaper to write about working his way around the world on a cargo ship, but after the first stage of the trip, from California to New York, he ended up in Bellevue Hospital with a strep infection, where, he wrote, he “almost died of acute arthritis” and was left “with a crippled wrist to add to my stammer and other spastic handicaps.” Returning to Europe, he appeared in Kenneth Macpherson’s 1930 film Borderline, an experimental melodrama about racial prejudice and sexual tension that starred Paul and Eslanda Robeson, the poet H.D., and Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), who was H.D.’s lover and Macpherson’s wife.