by Lisa Cohen
Throughout the 1920s, Chester also practiced a sexual tourism that he conceived of as research. He made a pilgrimage to the English socialist, pacifist, and pioneer of homosexual rights, Edward Carpenter, talked to him about Walt Whitman, and spent an exciting night in bed with him. Carpenter gave him a letter of introduction to the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who then sent him on to Magnus Hirschfeld, the leader of the fight against the criminalization of homosexuality in Germany and founder of the world’s first sexological institute. (The Institute for Sexual Science and Hirschfeld’s archive were destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.) Chester was looking for an alternative patrilineage as well as sex, but his actual lineage remained important to him.
In the early 1930s, his wife “sued him for divorce for non support, citing the fact that ‘he just wouldn’t work,’” and he moved with another man to a shack in the dunes of Oceano, on California’s central coast. There he and his trust fund became the driving forces of a small community of mystics, hermits, vegetarians, psychics, and nudists known as Dunites. He presented his vision for “a collective endeavor…that would lead the world into the Aquarian Age,” threw all-night parties, welcomed the Indian mystic Meher Baba to the community, and founded The Dune Forum, of which he published five issues, running photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. The idea of the place was self-sufficiency, living off the land and sea, but the group collapsed when Chester left and his patronage ended. He then attached himself to the Utopian Society, an organization that was a brief force in California politics in conjunction with Upton Sinclair’s 1934 gubernatorial campaign, during which Sinclair proposed reforms that included giving the state control of inoperative farms and factories to turn them into cooperatives. The goal of the Utopian Society was the abolition of the profit system and the education of “the masses” in modern economics, but the group was also inspired by the Masons, and membership involved pledges of fidelity and a requirement that the novitiate attend a sort of socialist morality play—“a series of pageants,” in the words of one observer, “portraying the pilgrimage of the petty bourgeoisie through capitalist to Utopian society.” At its height, the group had over half a million members.
Esther’s politics and money made her a target for Chester’s fund-raising when he arrived in New York to set up an East Coast branch of the society in September 1934. The Depression, the deaths of her parents, and the mismanagement of the Mark Cross Company, which Patrick Murphy had left in the control of a mistress, meant that Esther’s income amounted more to the habit of having money and an inability to economize than actual wealth. But her name meant something to the moneyed radicals Chester wanted on his board of directors; both Harold Loeb, heir to a Wall Street fortune and founder of the literary magazine Broom, now writing on economics, and Alfred Bingham, the founder and editor of Common Sense, told Chester that they would not lend their names to the organization unless Esther was involved. Five years into the Depression, with fascism ascendant in Europe and capitalism failing there and in the United States, some form of socialist reform seemed like a solution to many Americans—from Republicans such as Bingham, to lifelong Democrats such as Esther, to those who had previously paid no attention to politics. Upton Sinclair’s progressive candidacy and victory in the California Democratic gubernatorial primary was one sign of the times—as was the ferociousness of the campaign against him by Republicans and the Democratic establishment.
It is hard to believe that Esther found something to like in the Utopian Society’s concoction of didacticism, spectacle, and inscrutability. Yet she allowed her name to be used, sold some of her family silver to donate to the cause, and even became the secretary of the organization for a short time. Her association lasted less than a year, and to some friends she always denied her involvement. Her attraction to Chester, whose anti-intellectualism was profound—Edmund Wilson described him as “full of a goofy kind of idealism,” and Sybille Bedford saw him as a paragon of political naïveté—is at once easier and more difficult to fathom. Being the focus of his charm and libido flattered her, and his open bisexuality reassured her. They were often together—at the Dalí Ball, elsewhere around town, and in Walter Winchell’s column—in the autumn and winter of 1934–35, and once again she became engaged within a few months.
She was thirty-seven years old when she married him, in April 1935, in a ceremony performed by a justice of the peace in a small town outside of New York City. The wedding party, at the home of Gilbert and Amanda Seldes, brought together “high-class old relics of the Chester Arthur family and Administration,” Edmund Wilson observed, and “the usual Seldes cocktail crowd.” Wilson recorded the uncertain tone of the event: “The bride and groom drove up, started to get out, then got back in again and drove away—it was said vaguely that Esther had to go to a drugstore. Then they finally arrived…It was all very queer and a little depressing: I got the impression that the bride and groom did not like to be congratulated and changed the subject as soon as anybody began to do so.” Gerald and Sara had moved back to New York—he to rescue the Mark Cross Company—and the sudden death of their son Baoth, Esther’s nephew, cast one pall on the party. (He died of a mastoid infection and meningitis after “ten days of hideous suspense and five operations on the brain entailing the cruelest suffering,” Esther wrote to Muriel Draper.)
Marrying Chester, Esther seems to have been guided by some combination of blindness, desire for intimacy, and the knowledge that he would leave her alone for much of the time. “They are apparently very sensible about it,” Gerald wrote, “and realize that it is not a romantic match.” Edmund Wilson thought that they had felt pressure from friends to marry. Chester recalled that she had proposed to him, that they had “promised to be true to each other heterosexually,” and that they had both been “lonely, and…felt we could be happier with each other than we could be separately.” In the beginning there seems to have been passionate feeling on both sides. “I feel that sense of a union of a oneness with you that I never felt with John Strachey,” Esther wrote, “and knew…he never could feel for me…I miss you…in every way, emotionally mentally, physically.” When they were apart, Chester wrote, “Are you disciplining yourself…? Or are you just wasting all your marvelous energy in talk? Well, whatever it is, I just can’t help adoring you. My angel.” And he reported to Havelock Ellis a “more intimate than…anticipated” sex life. It was queer for Esther, however, when she become pregnant again, although Chester assured her that he would take complete responsibility for the child. (Again she had a miscarriage.) And it was more than a little depressing for her when he brought home rough trade. There were frequent separations, some accompanied by long, loving letters, others by his vitriolic attacks and her remorse. “I know I am a very high strung and nerve ridden woman, with arbitrary instincts only too thinly veiled by an intellectual acceptance of the idea of tolerance,” she wrote. “I have no illusions about how difficult and how wearing it must be to be with me day after day.”
In the summer of 1935, they left New York and drove in “an enormous zig-zag across the country, six thousand miles in all,” a trip that acquainted Esther with parts of the United States that she had never known. In New Mexico, she had what Chester called “a slight nervous breakdown,” which a doctor “wrongly diagnos[ed]…as a cerebral hemorrage.” She had no intention of moving to California, and he loathed New York City, so they agreed to spend half of each year on the other’s coast. In New York they rented an apartment on East Fifty-first Street that, in Chester words, they envisioned using “as a meeting place for radicals of all kinds.” One gathering, to help raise money for the Theatre Union, featured Clifford Odets, Elmer Rice, Irwin Shaw, and Thomas Wolfe. Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, Virgil Thomson, and Pavel Tchelichew also frequented the place. It was Esther’s salon—her own, for the first time, just at the moment when political and literary life had self-consciously merged. Archibald Mac Leish called it “the most brilliant in New York.”
They also became inv
olved in party politics. In 1936, Chester met privately with FDR at the White House, a visit that was more personal than anything else. Esther’s respect for the president had grown and she asked Chester, “Do write me what you felt about the President as a human being…is he truly a historical minded man?” In Washington two years later, they both met with “various congressmen and other New Deal favorites,” including Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. They had lunch with the president at Hyde Park in the summer of 1938, and Esther, who deeply admired Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote a profile of her for Harper’s Bazaar. In short, they were part of the fever in the air as the New Deal was set in motion that Dawn Powell described in her novel A Time to Be Born: “Everywhere people were whispering to each other, ‘I’ve just got back from Washington,’ with mysterious, significant looks as if now they knew the secrets of all nations…The mere name of the city, hitherto evoking only images of cherry blossoms and grisly state banquets, now invested whoever mentioned it with curious, enviable knowledge.”
In 1938, they sublet the New York apartment and moved to a house in Oceano full-time. They had run through Chester’s inheritances (his mother had died in 1935 and his father in 1937) and were living on the income from a small trust from Anna Murphy and on Esther’s intermittent freelance journalism. She wrote a short profile of the American miser and financier Henrietta Green—“one of the great silent powers in American finance,” who had had so much ready cash that she was “one of the six people whom J. P. Morgan sent for during the panic of 1893” as he prepared to bail out the Treasury. She began work on a biography of Madame de Pompadour. She agreed to collaborate with Chester on “a corrective biography” he wanted to write of his family—a triple portrait of his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father. She wrote a “scenario for Pompadour,” which she recited one night, “taking all the parts in turn,” Chester noted. “I never realized what a born actress she was!”
“Chester & Esther ARTHUR Send their warmest greetings and wish you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year,” reads the printed text on the reverse of this image. Card sent to Edmund Wilson, December 17, 1940, from Oceano, California (General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, courtesy Estate of Edmund Wilson)
And she turned her attention to political organizing in California. She became the head of the Speakers Bureau of the Democratic State Central Committee (Chester was secretary of the committee), and wrote to John Strachey that the coming California election was “full of issues which will have great national repercussions” and that the “whole state is packed with political and economic dynamite, and has the most savage extremes of wealth and poverty, reaction and radicalism.” She also worked on behalf of congressional candidates, for New Deal Democrats against conservative members of the party. “The Republican Party,” she told an audience in June 1941, has won “again and again [even] when we have had a better cause and a better candidate, a more logical case to put before the voters of the country, because we failed on organization. But they have finally defeated themselves through a plethora of money and organization, and a bankruptcy of ideas.” She lectured about the New Deal and foreign policy to party groups, women’s clubs, and book clubs, and on the radio. Even in later years, when he most resented her, Chester still called her “a superb political speaker.” And she was urged to run for national office. “You really might make us a hell of a representative in congress,” wrote one observer of the local and national scene. “I’ve been fooled before—but at the present writing I think you have it all over the other potential candidates for the 11th District seat when it comes to understanding international affairs, an understanding which is woefully lacking in congress now, however imperative it is. If you are going to run, get in the race and tell the world you’re in it.”
She did not. She continued to write long analytical letters to her friends, saw clearly that appeasement was and would be a disaster. When Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, she wrote to Muriel Draper that the English prime minister had “betrayed far more than any man with his kind of a mind could ever envisage or estimate…nothing less than European civilization as we have known it.” To Amy Strachey:
the most charitable thing one can say about him is that he is consummately stupid. Heaven knows, I am as near to being a Pacifist as my sense of reality will permit me to be. I believe with Benjamin Franklin that “There never was a good war nor a bad peace.” I absolutely agree that almost every conceivable compromise and sacrifice should have been made to avert the incalculable catastrophe of another general European war which, as we all know, would become a world war. But I simply cannot see that Chamberlain and poor intimidated Daladier…have done anything to prevent just such a war breaking out. In fact, I think they have done all in their power to make it almost inevitable by bowing to Hitler’s bullying and blustering and thereby encouraging him in his mania for supreme power over Europe and all the rest of the world.
“Each new disaster comes over the radio to us as a fresh shock,” she wrote in April 1939 to Janet Flanner, from whom she felt intolerably cut off. At the beginning of the 1930s, Esther’s example had inspired Flanner to start research on a work that she believed would be taken more seriously than the journalism for which she was admired: “a book on the women of the seventeenth century…tentatively titled ‘Without Men.’” And throughout the decade, Esther had parsed the American scene for Flanner. “The ‘recession,’” she wrote,
it is never referred to as a “depression,” which is a metaphysical subtlety, was chiefly caused I am convinced by…the fact that the President listened to his more conservative advisors last spring and stopped the government spending too rapidly…Roosevelt is surrounded by counsellors of two diametrically opposing schools of thought…[T]he conservative or Old Guard senators and representatives who head the important congressional committees believed that the 1929–32 debacle was simply a normal if severe crisis in capitalism which needed some, but not too much government intervention to start the wheels going round again. The other school who might be called the real New Dealers…believe that if capitalism is to be saved…a great deal of government intervention and government control is absolutely indispensable. I, myself…do not believe that laissez faire can come back in any of the advanced and industrial countries during our lifetime nor for a great long while after it.
Chester Arthur, Janet Flanner, Esther, and Solita Solano, in Oceano, California, early 1940s (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)
Now Flanner’s New Yorker columns were keeping Esther and others informed about life in Europe on the verge of war. But “the incorrigible optimism of Americans,” Esther wrote to her,
still leads them to feel that somehow everything must come out right in the end, in spite of the fact that there is very little chance of its doing so, and in consequence the country is very disconcerted when no sign of any amelioration in the European situation appears…I am abjectly pessimistic about the prospects of avoiding war. But I hope I am wrong. Chester and I lunched with Mr. Roosevelt at the end of June at Hyde Park, and, as I told you, he…said that if we managed to get through another year without a war it would be a miracle…the pattern the world seems doomed to follow is such a stupid and a tragic one. The one consolation is that human beings have lived through just as grim epochs in history as this one is before and have survived catastrophes as disastrous as the one now impending seems likely to be. It is a negative consolation, but, after all, it is something. I long to see you and to talk to you about all sorts of things for hours and hours. Whenever the new New Yorker comes I seize it to see if one of your letters is in it, so that I can read it and have the illusion that I am hearing the sound of your voice.
During the Spanish Civil War, Esther had called the Neutrality Act “one of the crassest blunders ever perpetrated,” and when war began in Europe, she campaigned energetically against American isolationism and for FDR. “We are not only confronted with an extraordinary situa
tion in the world,” she told one audience,
we are faced with a state of affairs outside of our own borders that has never existed since we became an independent nation…The so-called Neutrality Act, which was a compromise born out of the isolationist doctrines, was one of those noble experiments like prohibition which was passed with the best intentions in order to keep us out of trouble; and just as the Prohibition Act, which was meant to bring about temperance, ended by bringing us into the worst orgy of drunkenness we had ever known, so the Neutrality Act which was mean to keep us at peace will probably get us into war under the most disadvantageous conditions unless we repeal it.
This work was the high point of her life in California. She continued to exist in conflict with herself, writing a little for the public—speeches, radio broadcasts, and a few published essays—while pouring her energy into correspondence, reading, and drinking. “On the side” of the Pompadour book, she was also “trying to write a short story about her, with a view to making some money—I hope I succeed.”
Early in her marriage she had described Chester proudly to Muriel Draper as “that poltergeist…born into a solid republican family for its undoing,” but he wreaked havoc in her already disorderly life as well. Neither of them was equipped for living with the other. He was drinking heavily, too, and there may have been physical violence between them. In late 1942 or early 1943, she wrote to him about “[a]ll the fights and rows and intrigues of the last three years” and said she had been “as close to a nervous collapse” during that time “as I have ever been in my life.” For most of the four or five years she spent in California, she felt lonely and exiled. Early on she had appreciated Chester’s “insatiable curiosity,” through which she met “all sorts and kinds of people,” and in California his hospitality and their location halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco meant a constant flow of guests. There were her friends (Muriel Draper and Langston Hughes from New York; Flanner and Solita Solano, who had left France in 1939) and his (Robinson and Una Jeffers, Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter). But his “diversified circle of acquaintances” was also distressing, since it included the sailors and other men he brought home for sex.