All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Chester’s strategy was to describe her flaws confidently, insult her physical being, and suggest that they split. “The lonely eager little girl that I fell in love with,” he wrote to her, “is turning into a grim virago who seems to be trying to talk her way out of hysteria, who talks thru Beethoven, talks thru sunsets and moonlight, talks & talks & talks until I think I will go mad. And the fact that I know this hysteria to be largely my fault does not help at all. But I also know that no one could stand it, day after day, night after night.” She was “so bound by inertia,” he said. She was “a huge & rather clumsy tank or juggernaut car” on which was “mounted a loudspeaker which blares forth brilliant ideas no one can refute and which everyone wants to listen to for just so long.” Addressing her in the third person, he told her, “If she can’t write or dictate or get herself a lecture platform every night, she had better go back to New York where she might inspire some real writer.” He wanted her to find “an outlet to the public for your ideas, & above all, a sense of work.” More kindly, he insisted, “You must really begin to assume your rightful place in the world of letters, and not just be known as a brilliant talker.”

  Instead of responding in kind, she exhorted him to “have confidence in yourself—I have always lacked it—it is a great handicap,” and suggested that they “take heart and try to utilize our failures.” She interpreted the “fundamental trouble” between them as the fact “that although neither of us are believers, you are a Baptist by temperament and I am a Catholic…You have all the optimism and the intense desire to see man perfect…which was the essential spirit of the Reformation…You are amazed and outraged by men’s vices, I am astonished by their virtues and only amazed that they are not infinitely more vicious than they are.” She told him she would rather be married to him “than to anyone else in the world no matter what happens” and continued to treat him as one of her interlocutors about the state of the union.

  When he enlisted in the army in the fall of 1942, at age forty-one, she moved to Santa Barbara to live with his great-aunt, whose early proximity to President Arthur’s White House made Esther exclaim, “She has seen so much of the dessous des cartes of the Seats of the Mighty—Arthur and Blaine and Conkling and Frelinghuysen as a young girl, (do you realize that the year she was born was the year of Antietam, and of Napoleon III’s invasion of Mexico!).” She forwarded a “very kind and gracious letter” she had received from Eleanor Roosevelt. She dissected the midterm elections of 1942, in which the Democrats lost many seats. “Some of the best and most disinterested democratic members of congress have been beaten and some of the worst of them triumphantly returned…A streamlined phoney like Claire [sic] Luce wins a large majority over a very decent, courageous and progressive democrat—and so forth.” She predicted, with acumen,

  the republicans will join hands with the southern democrats to try and repeal or undermine every social reform the New Deal has put in. The hue and cry against labor has already started! The republicans have not had an idea since Benjamin Harrison’s time and the southern democrats have not had one since Appomattox—and I foresee an unofficial coalition of them running the country.

  After Chester injured his foot in basic training (a long drama about his medical discharge ensued), they returned to New York, in the spring of 1943. That summer, he enlisted in the Merchant Marine. He spent much of the rest of the war on a supply ship in the Mediterranean. Esther moved into an apartment at the Gladstone Hotel, on East Fifty-second Street, her home for the next several years, and regained her New York friends. She held court at the Gladstone’s bar, which had a reputation as a hangout for gay women; at the nightclub and restaurant Tony’s; at ‘21’; and at the Stork Club. She spent time with the actress June Walker, who also lived at the Gladstone, and she continued to be a resource for others—summarizing the history and significance of the French Third Republic for the Time-Life journalist Rosalind Constable, for example. She became a regular panelist on the ABC radio program Listen—The Women!, a nationally broadcast weekly discussion of contemporary issues before a live audience that was moderated by Janet Flanner and featured Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, and the popular novelist Fanny Hurst, among other guests. When they debated the role of memory, Esther’s contribution was uncharacteristically brief: “A perfect memory is the enemy of thought,” she said. Early in 1944, writing to a friend in California, she described herself as “very busy writing a book, which I expect will be published next year and doing some Red Cross work.” A few months later she signed a contract with Harcourt Brace for her biography of Madame de Pompadour.

  In debt to a number of friends and businesses, she sold more of her belongings at auction and waited for dividends from Mark Cross and for news about the company’s sale or recapitalization. She assured Chester that if she died before she turned fifty-five (when her shares became hers), he would be her beneficiary, along with Gerald, and that if she did not, she would then “make a will leaving everything to you.” She ended this letter, sent from Martha’s Vineyard in the autumn of 1945, “It is terrible to think that I won’t see you for another four months—but never never doubt how much I love you.” Placating him this way was all very ambivalent, as well as fearful, since she was now living with the young European refugee and aspiring writer Sybille Bedford, with whom she had fallen in love.

  As for her history repeating itself as farce in the person of Chester Arthur: From the late 1940s to his death in 1973, Chester’s life was an amalgam of countercultural gestures and attempts at self-promotion. He counseled inmates at the state prison in Carson City, Nevada, and at San Quentin and appeared on The $64,000 Question. At San Quentin he met Alfred Kinsey (there studying male sexual behavior), and befriended Neal Cassady (there doing time). Through Cassady, he became close to Allen Ginsberg. (“Gavin Arthur smiled at me angry / for disbelieving Visionary sun / & Paradise we both believe in,” wrote Ginsberg in the mid-1960s.) He sold newspapers on San Francisco street corners and made a reputation for himself as a gray eminence of gay bohemia. He appeared in The Bed, a short film by the gay poet and experimental filmmaker James Broughton; was a friend of the Zen philosopher Alan Watts; became an astrologer; selected the date for the first Human Be-in; and never stopped bragging about his grandfather. His nutty New Year’s forecasts appeared in Herb Caen’s popular column in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Gavin Arthur predicts Martians will make contact with earthlings this year!”

  Writing to Janet Flanner in 1967, he described himself as a creature free of financial concerns: “I have no bank account, no savings or insurance, no car to be attached. Yet I have everything. I go where I please & am lovingly taken care of by hippies.” He protested too much: Along with a penchant for self-display he had a love of propriety and power. If in some contexts he styled himself a sexual activist, in his disputes with Esther he described “the social institution of marriage” as having “to do with something permanent rather than something ephemeral,” and he was as obsessed with money as only someone who had grown up with wealth and lost it could be. He felt victimized because Esther and he had relied largely on his inheritance while they were married and he had never benefited from what he imagined were the Mark Cross millions. He saw himself as entitled to her money during their long separation; even after her death he demanded compensation from Gerald. In the 1950s, completing his college degree, he submitted a paper to one course that was, in fact, a thirty-eight-page letter to his lawyer in which he argued that his financial history with Esther “may prove an important legal case involving the new balance in the relationship of the sexes brought about by the new freedom and equality of women and their disproportionate share of the national wealth.”

  In 1966, he published The Circle of Sex, a book that combined his interests in sexology and astrology. Here he proposed a new vocabulary for sexual behavior—“Homogenic, ambigenic, and heterogenic” being “better in every way than homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual”—and he outlined a twelve-point division
of gender and sexual types along a continuum that corresponded to the clock, the seasons, and the phases of the zodiac. Twelve o’clock represented the “paterfamilias, completely heterogenic” type—“the ideal to which every male human must pretend to belong, whether he does or not.” Six o’clock was the “female heterogenic category.” In between, among others: the eight-o’clock type, which included “many business women,” who were “very smart, very feminine in dress and toiletry, belonging definitely, in the alchemical sense, to the earth and water elements.” He used friends and acquaintances as examples, outraging his first wife with his reference to her affairs with women, and classing Olivia Wyndham and Alice De Lamar—both unnamed but clearly described—in the “10 O’Clock, Homogenic, Late Morning” category, also termed the “Dyke Type.”

  Esther, who was no longer alive to object when this book was published, appears in several forms. He described the visit he and she (“my brilliant second wife”) made to Havelock Ellis and quoted her conversation with Ellis. He invoked her without naming her, by calling Madame de Montespan, Madame de Maintenon, and Madame de Pompadour instances of the “Five O’clock hyper-heterosexual female category” or “Courtesan” type. And he denounced her, in a thinly veiled, oddly prudish description of “a selfish Nine O’clock woman who has allowed her girlfriend [meaning Sybille Bedford] to poison her against her husband, to denounce him as a ‘homo’ and hold him up to the scorn of society, and who yet keeps his name for the prestige attached to it.” There was something queer about this homosexual liberationist calling on the clichés of “predatory” lesbian behavior. “As Mrs. Arthur,” he had written to Esther as early as 1947, “you have dragged a famous American name in the mud—by your open & ostentations liaison with an adventuress.” The idea of Sybille Bedford using Esther for her money or social position is itself farcical. “I realized that this young woman,” he wrote to his lawyer, “must be exerting an almost Svengali influence over her.” And he invoked the notorious French play by Édouard Bourdet about a woman who leaves her husband for a woman—the Broadway production of which was shut down in 1927. “Memories of the play called ‘The Captive’ disturbed me greatly,” he wrote.

  While Esther’s split with John Strachey had been painful, her separation from Chester Arthur was a strain and an embarrassment. But even ashamed of her former intimacy with him and upset by his periodic eruptions in her life, she could not help but see him as ridiculous. At the moment of their long-deferred divorce, in 1961, he was at once trying to extract money from her and attempting to marry a wealthy seventy-one-year-old woman. “What a pair they are,” she wrote to Sybille. “Rather like characters in a very second rate Restoration comedy—Lady Maskwell and Mr. Plyant—who are both mutually deceived in each other when their manias collide.”

  Chester ended his days “in a crummy downtown apartment-turned-museum,” its walls covered “with autographed photos of…Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Walt Whitman, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Robinson Jeffers, Alfred Kinsey, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Wallace, Aneurin Bevan, [and] Ernest Hemingway”—many of whom were Esther’s friends. But his sense of his own historical importance did her at least one good turn. After his father’s death, she had helped him organize President Arthur’s private papers for donation to the Library of Congress. When she moved back to New York from California, she left behind hundreds of her own letters, some dating from the 1920s, a family photo album, miscellaneous papers, and many books. This material survived the Second World War, the occupation of the house in Oceano by the Coast Guard, and the almost three decades that followed. When Chester died, in 1973, much of it was donated, along with his archive, to the Library of Congress, where it now resides as part of the “Arthur Family Papers.”

  Too Late or Too Soon

  If Esther saw others as literary characters, she often struck others as one herself, and she figures in the fiction of the first half of the twentieth century more than once. In This Circle of Flesh, by the novelist and academic Lloyd Morris, Sheila Conway is “a strange girl” who “‘substituted erudition for experience’” and proffered an “irresistible, if somewhat exhausting, hospitality.”

  She was a trifle too tall and a trifle too heavy. She had the figure of a valkyrie, the broad and candid face of a plain boy, with a boy’s brown hair, close cut. She had the warm, friendly, impersonal manners of a boy, likewise. But her eyes were those of a woman, and the puzzled eagerness that seemed to be their characteristic expression was, he thought, the look of a woman who has found no means of provoking desire in men.

  This roman à clef did capture some of Esther’s aura, even though Morris, whose own wish was to provoke desire in men, was also using her for this (somewhat exhausting) display of misogyny.

  Her young friend Max Ewing put her in two stories, in one of which, an homage to Ronald Firbank, she was “Miss Bodicea Hangover, an appallingly erudite heiress…[who] declaimed excitedly, her voice resounding…On and on she went, Meditation after Expostulation, her memory never failing.” But Ewing’s close and constant observation of Esther, from the mid-1920s until his early death in 1935, suggests that the facts of her life were also broader than what was plausible for any fiction. “A very melodramatic incident occurred” as Esther prepared to sail to London to marry John Strachey, he reported, describing what sounds like a bit of business from a Marx Brothers movie:

  A girl whom Esther does not like very much…sent Esther a pair of [live] armadillos as a gift. The commotion on the boat was vast…They were delivered on the boat, crated, and wrapped in straw. Esther refused them. The steward said she had to take them because they were her property, and her responsibility on the voyage…She was furious and paced the deck, and ordered the animals away. They were carried away, only to [be] brought back by a ship official. The ship refused to take care of them. Esther refused to accept them…When I left, the armadillos were still going up and down from deck to deck in the lift, being refused wherever they went.

  “They are now,” he concluded, “achieving almost international importance.”

  Of all the writers who made use of Esther, Sybille Bedford best captured her shyness and gregariousness, skepticism and naïveté, gallantry and didacticism; the barrage of fact and fancy that made up her train of thought; the hauteur and slanginess of her diction; the fog of distraction about her; the physical authority and unease. Writing to Sybille in 1953, Martha Gellhorn congratulated the younger writer on her first book, The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey (now published as A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico), an account of the time Esther and Sybille spent in Mexico after the Second World War. The figure called “E.,” wrote Gellhorn, “is one of the finest characters you will ever invent.” As Sybille insisted, however, E. was not invented; she was a faithful representation of Esther. “The wonderful thing is I never put words in her mouth,” she said. “She was like that.” In A Visit to Don Otavio, Esther is genuinely eccentric and is human—herself. In life, she was the impetus for the book and the reason it almost never got written.

  Sybille Bedford had fled France in May 1940, just ahead of the German occupation. Born in Germany, she had grown up in Italy, England, and France. The most stable part of her peripatetic upbringing was in Sanary-sur-Mer, a town in the South of France where a number of English writers, including Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence, had settled in the 1920s. Sybille’s mother and step-father ended up there as well, and Thomas Mann and other exiles from the Third Reich later emigrated to the town. Befriended by Aldous and Maria Huxley, Sybille also became close to Mann’s wild, brilliant children, Klaus and Erika. In the late 1930s, she learned that she was on a Gestapo list—she was part Jewish and, living outside of Germany, had been “free to indulge in being an early anti-fascist”—so when the Germans broke through the Maginot Line, she and her friend Allanah Harper crossed the border to Italy. One of the Bright Young Things in London in the 1920s, Harper had moved to France in the 1930s and founded Échanges, a literary revie
w in which she presented the work of contemporary English and French writers in translation. Sybille and she spent six anxious days in Genoa until the Huxleys, in California since 1937, secured them passage to the United States. Traveling on the last American ship out of Italy, it took them twenty-one days to reach the United States. They thought they would never see Europe again.

  On her first day in New York, Sybille met Klaus Mann by pure chance and was enlisted to drive his father’s car, beloved dog, and two African American servants from Princeton to Los Angeles, to which the elder Mann was moving. This trip made it possible for Sybille to reunite with the Huxleys, but she and Harper soon returned to New York. There she lived a precarious exile’s existence, teaching English to other refugees, doing occasional translations for the art critic Clement Greenberg, keeping house for herself and Harper, worrying constantly about friends and relations in Europe and England. She had produced drafts of several novels, but nothing she or others yet deemed worth publishing. She spent time with Greenberg, Mary McCarthy, and others in “the Partisan Review crowd”; with Margaret Marshall, the literary editor of The Nation; with Jane Bowles, with whom Harper was having an affair; with Cyril Connolly’s American wife, Jean, whom she had known in Sanary, and her sister Anne, with whom she had a passionate affair; and with members of what she called the “Trotskyite and Peggy Guggenheim milieu.”