by Lisa Cohen
Allanah Harper had written to Esther in Oceano when she and Sybille reached California in 1940, but Esther had been too ashamed of her life with Chester to reply. Harper had moved in the same circles as Olivia Wyndham in London in the twenties, and it was probably Wyndham who reconnected them after Esther returned to New York in 1943. A stream of historical references flowed from Esther when she joined Harper and Sybille Bedford at their apartment for cocktails one stormy winter night. In the elevator on their way out to dinner, she produced a discourse on the “Marseillaise” and the composer Lully. She took them to Tony’s for the best meal they had had in years—the first of many evenings beyond her means to which she invited them. Harper went home after dinner, and Esther and Sybille adjourned to the Stork Club, two blocks from the Gladstone Hotel, where they talked for hours, until even the nightclub closed. Sybille, in her mid-thirties, was bowled over. Esther wrote, “I have never in my life felt about anyone the way I feel about you. I ask you to believe this.” It was the kind of avowal she had made before, but it was the first time she had made it to a woman who was her intellectual equal, who admired her, and who wanted to be her lover. After they parted one evening, she sent Sybille a note describing her “elation, at the thought of your existence.” As she was wont to do, she also made Sybille a character in her past, spinning a story of having met her some fourteen years earlier in France. She had been in Le Vigan, “that lost town in the Cévennes mountains,” she wrote, sitting in a café “reading Albert Sorel’s L’Europe et la Revolution Française,” waiting for her car to be repaired, when a young Sybille appeared. With this story she also transplanted them both into a more distant past: The Cévennes were a stronghold of Protestant resistance during the religious wars that are part of Madame de Maintenon’s story.
Falling in love with Sybille meant knowing much less than usual: “I know nothing,” Esther ended this letter, “except that I love you and miss you much, much more than I can express or that I could have imagined missing anyone ever again. So I shall see you Monday night. Otherwise I shall send bailiffs after you so be careful.” For Sybille, Esther—“super-naturally erudite”—was a way back to a seriousness she had been missing. Guilty about sitting out the war in New York, she also experienced Esther as a connection to Europe. And Esther’s “goodness of heart, her lovingness” moved Sybille, who thought of her as having “the mind of [the] Founding Fathers combined with a fragile and tender nature.” She was also baffled by her: Esther was shabby, even unkempt, yet she commanded respect wherever they went. The Stork Club operated on a strict hierarchy, was one of the first nightclubs to use celebrities to attract an exclusive public, and worked out its seating (whom one could see and the extent to which one could be seen) almost scientifically. But in clothes covered with cigarette burns—and wearing slacks and an overcoat, not a dress or gown—Esther was shown to a prime table on the floor that first night. “She just swept into the Stork Club in old flannels and said to the maitre d’, ‘I must warn you that Mrs. Bedford does not like ice in her highballs.’” Esther was incapacitated by much of daily life and had “no aptitude whatsoever” for domesticity, but she was also fearless. When Sybille moved into her room at the Gladstone, Esther would call down and order breakfast for them both, not caring what the hotel management thought of her having a woman there.
Still, Esther—older, published, and at home in New York—put herself in Sybille’s hands. She was frightened before the broadcasts of Listen—The Women! (Janet Flanner had returned to Europe and the journalist Dorothy Thompson was the new host), so Sybille accompanied her to these performances, trying to calm her nerves. The biography of Madame de Pompadour was due in eighteen months; Esther was a mass of knowledge about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France; and Sybille did not doubt that Esther would complete the book in time. But she also saw that Esther would need support. “I thought I could make her work,” she recalled. Despite or because of the time Sybille had spent in her late adolescence tending her mother—another brilliant talker and “writer manqué”—through a catastrophic addiction to morphine, she believed that she could help Esther stop drinking.
When the war in Europe ended, Allanah Harper returned to France. Her letters were full of warnings about the shortages of food and every other necessity, and about the gulf between those who had lived under occupation and those who had left. Booking passage across the Atlantic was close to impossible, since servicemen had priority; getting train reservations across the United States was difficult for the same reason. But Sybille wanted to travel before she returned to Europe, and Esther wanted to stay with her and not rejoin Chester in California, so when two tickets to Mexico City became available, they took them. On the eve of their departure for Mexico, in the summer of 1946, Edmund Wilson and Dorothy Parker joined them for farewell cocktails. When Wilson looked down at his glass and saw something floating in it, Sybille grabbed the glasses and retreated to the kitchen. She had been thinning the bourbon with tea, and a few tea leaves had made their way into the bottle. They left New York on the St. Louis Express of the Great Eastern and Missouri Railroad. They arrived in Mexico City knowing no one, knowing little of the country or language, carrying little money and “much too much luggage”: too many clothes and “the bottom of [their] bags…falling out with books”; Esther also carried the notes for her study of Pompadour.
Esther is the first dedicatee and main character of A Visit to Don Otavio, and her influence permeates Sybille’s book. She is a foil for the narrator’s observations about travel in general and this journey in particular. “She hated to travel—God, she hated to travel,” Sybille said half a century later. (Bouncing around Mexico was not like sitting on an ocean liner on the Atlantic, or in a café in Paris.) “She said, ‘It took years out of my life.’” Esther’s body was a problem: She was too tall for the spaces allotted her on buses, carts, and other vehicles; she got stuck in the trapdoors and secret passages of a clandestine convent built during the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico; she became “eloquent on the various phenomena of heat prostration.” Her refusals of tourism have a life of their own in Don Otavio: “‘I will not go to this volcano,’ said E. in the manner of Edmund Burke addressing the House of Commons.” And: “In my native country I successfully avoided seeing the Grand Canyon; I avoided the Painted Desert, my nurse did not manage to drag me to Niagara.” Her characteristic gesture, in the face of every unnerving landscape, uncomfortable conveyance, or quotidian need, was to bury her head in Mansfield Park. “I laugh when I think of her in Mexico,” said Sybille. “It was very, very funny—this tall Don Quixote figure, with a head like Jefferson, bowing to everybody and saying, ‘Viva Mexico,’ with an American accent. It’s the only Spanish she learned.”
Sybille Bedford’s style is her own—philosophical, hilarious, at once lush and elliptical, viscerally precise—but Esther also inhabits the texture of her prose. In Puebla, she writes, Esther “stalked past it all, the way Dr Johnson must have stalked about the Hebrides.” The book’s meditations on the vertigo of historical consciousness also owe something to Esther: “In the spaces of the Plaza Mayor, walking over the grave of a pyramid, one is assailed by infinity, seized at the throat by an awful sense of the past stretching and stretching backwards through tunnels of time…One is in a legend, one is walking in Troy.” So does its mixture of fact and fiction; Sybille acknowledged that she did invent parts of it. (Esther’s cousin “Anthony” is one fabrication.) The reading the two did in preparation for their trip also bears Esther’s stamp. It included the diary of Fanny Inglis, Madame Calderón de la Barca, an American who married the first Spanish ambassador to Mexico in the 1830s, “became governess to one of the various children of Queen Isabella…and…was created, like that other royal governess, Madame de Maintenon, a marchioness.”
Esther is the voice of history in the book. As their train navigates a vertiginously steep “side of the Western Sierra Madre,” she muses, sanguine, to Sybille’s terror: “I be
lieve this is a very great engineering feat…We had the same problem in the Rocky Mountains. No rail-bed can take that kind of stress long. You remember the Colorado Pass Rail Wreck in ’39?” During and after their trip, she educated Sybille about Maximilian and Carlota, the perpetrators and victims of one of the European maneuvers for Mexico, who were made emperor and empress of the country in 1864. Esther stands for Northern liberalism, declaring to a Republican lady from Virginia long resident in Mexico, “My father voted for Woodrow Wilson twice; I cast my first vote for James Cox against the unfortunate Harding; I voted for John W. Davis against Coolidge…Personally, Mrs Rawlston, I am a strong Roosevelt woman.” She represents North American impatience in the face of “Latin” modes of life and work. She is the New World to Sybille’s Old. “‘I am an American,’ said E. in an uncertain tone…‘I am an American. I will not be pushed around.’” Yet her consciousness of European history never leaves her. At the miraculously peaceful establishment presided over by “Don Otavio,” where they stayed for several months, she marveled at their host: “‘Don Otavio,’ said E., ‘you must have seen great changes. Like a man born in France in 1770.’”
Getting stuck in the secret passage of a convent is an apt metaphor for Esther’s writing impasse. But lodging with Don Otavio, she was transformed: She ate well, gained weight, drank in moderation, and at siesta time would pace “swinging a small stick, the single upright figure during the slow hours…composing step by step, clause by clause the periods of an exegesis of one of the more incomprehensible personages of seventeenth-century France.” Here, although she was not writing, she was composing, in her head or out loud. The personage in question was Madame de Maintenon, however, not Pompadour. During their first summer in Mexico, their luggage had been stolen, and along with her suitcase and briefcase (both from Mark Cross), Esther lost her notes on Madame de Pompadour, as well as most of her clothes and a precious bundle of letters from her father. It was on one of those afternoons chez Don Otavio that Sybille was seized by the idea for a book that blended the history of Mexico, travelogue, memoir, and invention, a comedy about some of the tragedies of history.
They put off their return for months—at times because Sybille wanted to see more of the country, at others because they did not have the return fare or a place to live in New York—finally flew back in March 1947, and spent several difficult, impoverished months in the city while Esther tried to sort out her life. She negotiated with Gerald about Mark Cross and met with an insistent Chester, who had arrived from California wanting money and to reunite—or at least not to lose her to a woman. Sybille was under pressure to return to France before her visa expired, but she suspected that Esther was being treated unfairly by her family and felt that she could not leave her to manage her finances and Chester alone. Esther had at some point agreed to send Chester funds every month and, with Sybille’s help, had mailed him several checks from Mexico. She wanted nothing to do with him, but was frightened of his vindictiveness in the event of a divorce and was used to ignoring what she hoped was not true. So she met with him almost daily, sometimes with Sybille and sometimes alone, at a bar on Sixth Avenue halfway between their apartment and his hotel. She and Sybille finally found passage to Europe on a converted troopship. Margaret Marshall “staged” a “mad farewell party” for them, and they sailed on June 9, 1947. Allanah Harper met them when they arrived at Le Havre ten days later. Sybille was thirty-six, Esther almost fifty years old.
During that first long, hot summer in France, which followed the coldest winter in Europe for years, Esther moved between the Hotel des Saints-Pères, an old Bloomsbury haunt near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and Noel Murphy’s house in Orgeval. Sybille was often with old friends from Sanary who were now living on a farm in the Touraine, who then invited Esther as well: “She came, she stayed, she spellbound her hosts,” Sybille wrote, “with her broad evocations of French and American history delivered in an oratorical voice in near flawless French with a heavy not disagreeable accent, while she vaguely stirred about the noisette de porc aux pruneaux congealing on her plate.” Meals continued for hours, while Esther talked and failed to eat. Janet Flanner and Noel—separated for most of the war and now involved in a complicated pas de trois with Flanner’s new lover, Natalia Danesi Murray—also came to visit.
Sybille later described that homecoming to Europe as “part jubilant…part traumatic.” Part of the trauma was that almost immediately on their arrival Esther became embroiled in romantic complications of her own, succumbing to the manipulative attentions of a woman who had once been entangled with Sybille and whose lover was now leaving her for Allanah Harper. Esther was “infatuated with her,” she wrote when it was over, “and flattered by her infatuation for me.” The result was two years of confusion, equivocating about her commitment to Sybille, and melodrama among the five of them: Esther, Sybille, Allanah, and the other two women. Neither Esther nor Sybille was writing. When Sybille left for Italy that autumn, Esther stayed behind, vacillating—her inability to follow Sybille, whom she loved, akin to her inability to focus on her book.
Over the next two years, she promised to join Sybille, and they spent stretches of time together in Rome, Florence, Ischia, and Capri. In 1949, she agreed to lecture at the Italian American Institute in Rome about “the twenty years preceding the Civil War, roughly from 1840 to 1861 (annexation of Texas, Missouri Compromise, ‘Free Soil’ policy, constitutional issue on slavery, Lincoln, birth of the Republican party). Tell them not to be alarmed, I can and have done it in an hour.” But she always returned to France and romantic entanglement with a woman she did not particularly like or respect. “I have played fast and loose with our relationship,” she wrote to Sybille, “and I would not blame you at all if you felt that my conduct has killed something in it that cannot be revived.” Sybille, increasingly frustrated by Esther’s “clouds of talk,” began immersing herself in the book that became Don Otavio, working with the urgent knowledge that she had to commit herself to a writing life and accepting that Esther would never settle down to disciplined composition. From Ischia she wrote to an old friend, “E. is now an almost impossible person to live with because she is absolutely idle, and I fear will remain so…One must not put the blame on the other person. But I feel I cannot go on with this and must make myself another existence somehow.”
“I love you really at last, the way I should have loved you always” Esther wrote in the spring of 1950. “But everything comes too late or too soon.” By then, Sybille had decided to settle in Rome and had met someone else; Esther stayed on in Paris. Sybille remained her closest friend for the rest of her life and was the “only person,” in Noel Murphy’s view, whom Esther allowed to influence her behavior. “Next to my father and Muriel Draper,” Esther wrote to Sybille in 1957, “I owe more to you than to any human being I have known.”
Allanah Harper, walking into Esther’s room at the Hotel des Saints-Pères in October 1950, found a “table…covered in notes on Madame de Pompadour or is it Maintenon, now?”
The Sublime Governess
Sometime during the autumn of 1683—the exact date is uncertain—Louis XIV, King of France and Navarre, who was the most powerful man on earth, was married to a woman of doubtful antecedents who had been the governess of his illegitimate children. The marriage took place under circumstances of extraordinary secrecy. The ceremony was performed at night in the palace of Versailles by the king’s confessor, Father La Chaise, assisted by the Archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvallon…No public or official announcement of the marriage was ever made, but in spite of this and of the elaborate precautions that were used to conceal the fact that it had occurred, the news of it spread throughout France and the rest of Europe with great rapidity.
Thus begins the principle exhibit in the case for Esther Murphy’s failure: her unfinished study of Madame de Maintenon, born Françoise d’Aubigné.
There are several undated drafts of this project on which Esther spent at least the last fifteen yea
rs of her life. One version, probably the earliest, is written in an Italian notebook decorated with fleurs-de-lis. The rest are a collection of loose pages—type- and handwritten, incomplete, inconsistently paginated, now disordered. Although there are differences among the drafts, most revisit the same material, sometimes word for word. All are punctuated idiosyncratically. All are dense with citation. All begin with the secret wedding ceremony. The version written in the Italian notebook ends with the baptism of the infant Françoise d’Aubigné. The loose pages do not progress beyond her marriage at age sixteen to the writer Paul Scarron.
The material in the notebook is headed:
A Marriage of Conscience
by Esther Murphy
Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon
She subtitled the first section “The Sublime Governess.” She used three lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” as her first epigraph: “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities.” A second epigraph is from the eighteenth-century Huguenot writer Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle: “With respect to Madame de Maintenon who was regarded at Saint Cyr as a saint, at the court as a hypocrite, in Paris as a person of intellect and in all the rest of Europe as a woman without morals; I have let the facts speak for themself.”