by Lisa Cohen
These mixed feelings thread through her correspondence, alongside allusions to illness, politics, reading, financial trouble, and social life. “The book is not going too badly as a whole,” she wrote in the summer of 1956. The next month: “But the figure of Madame de M. is very perplexing. She was full of such evasive candour which was obviously in no way insincere, because she believed it herself. One conclusion I have come to, whatever she was—she was not a hypocrite. But Saint Beuve was probably right when he said ‘Françoise d’Aubigné est une protée insais[iss]able.’ [Françoise d’Aubigné is protean and elusive.] Oh Dear!” In January 1959, after a visit from Sybille, she wrote, “I am so glad you liked what I read you about the Old Governess. She was quite a person. I find myself with a strange sympathy for her—though I started with none at all—only curiosity.” Several weeks later she reported that “Madame de M. is going well” and that she found “her odder and odder, most unsympathetic, very extraordinary and absolutely fascinating. Do you know what she said when she was shown some filthy and obscene libels that were distributed about her[?] ‘I am accustomed to live on poison.’” In the spring of 1962, six months before her death, Esther wrote to Sybille, “I am glad you liked my description of the Maintenon as the ‘poor, crouching, human being.’”
Such swings of discouragement and hope are the usual, humiliating highs and lows of writing—focused, in the composition of a biography, on an actual historical human being. It is possible that the latter part of Maintenon’s life eluded Esther because she was used to being able to learn what she wanted to know, say what she wanted to say, and—because she could not find the right mixture of irony and sympathy in this case—could not decide what she thought of her subject. Once Maintenon arrived at the court of Louis XIV, Esther would have had to contend with Maintenon’s highly theatrical piety and with the conservative nature of her advice to young women: While the pedagogy she developed at Saint-Cyr was progressive, emphasizing dialogue between teacher and student and among students, the curriculum’s focus on domesticity, conformity, and submission was not. The paradox of Maintenon preaching virtue to aristocratic girls when she was herself of uncertain reputation and low birth appealed to Esther. But there was no map to writing about a woman who, up to that time, had been the subject of either hagiography or attack, no clear precedent if one wanted to neither glorify nor slander. The most proximate attempt to tackle her subject is a resolute attempt at recovery. In Madame de Maintenon, published in London in 1929, the author, Maud Cruttwell, writes, “She, stigmatized as cruel, capricious, vindictive, fatal to France, was in reality a paragon of honesty, loyalty and magnanimity; very simple, very straightforward, supremely charitable; a saint, whose sole ambitions were to convert her King and alleviate the misery caused by his wars.”
Esther could not write for publication about why Maintenon mattered to and troubled her, even though such personal speculations had long been part of her letters and even essays. Today there are many self-reflexive works of biography. When Esther was thinking about Maintenon, there was one stunning example: A.J.A. Symons’s 1934 The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, a double portrait that tells the story of the difficult and prodigious Frederick Rolfe while tracing Symons’s own “step[s] on a trail that led into very strange places” in pursuit of Rolfe’s story. Symons himself wrote with the conviction that the entire genre of biography was a failure. In a 1929 lecture titled “Tradition in Biography,” he argued that of all the literary forms, “biography alone has no convention save the sober one of truth, and yet biography alone has failed.” Lytton Strachey’s irreverent and condensed Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, is usually seen as having revolutionized English-language biography. But despite the book’s impact, the Victorian biographical tradition (hagiographic, multivolume) still held sway in the late 1920s in England and the United States. The genre “has failed in beauty as it has in truth,” Symons argued: “in beauty, for what biography could be re-read for the pleasure of its form alone? and in truth, for biography is still a form of panegyric. Its future is uncertainly hopeful; its past history is certainly bad; for so far as it has a tradition it has a bad tradition; and though of all forms of art it has perhaps most to say, it has certainly, in the way of accomplishment, least of all to show.”
Symons’s reinvention of the genre in Corvo notwithstanding, his own life has also been seen as one of thwarted achievement. Julian Symons, who edited a posthumous volume of his brother’s published and unpublished work, described him as a man who lived at cross-purposes to his own goals as a writer and who was “absorbed…continually” by this contradiction and by his sense of failure. The men Symons wrote about “showed an imbalance between intention and achievement which fascinated him because it was echoed in his own nature,” wrote Julian, and because he believed “that failure is almost always more interesting than success.” At his death, A.J.A. Symons also left an unfinished biography of Oscar Wilde, about which Julian wrote, “He never really made a final organization of the great mass of material he had collected,” yet “enough remains, I think, to show that the book would really have been a study that made others unnecessary and that it might have been one of the high points of English biography.” No one has made this claim about Esther’s Maintenon manuscript. Sybille Bedford referred to it as “thirty pages of Lytton Strachey’s prose,” but it was not clear whether she was criticizing Strachey, or Esther for not sounding more like herself. But Esther’s unfinished book, like Symons’s, was made of long study and personal shortcomings; of the challenges of producing a biography about a figure it was difficult to celebrate (Wilde in the 1920s and ’30s was still a pariah); and of the question of how and where a biographer’s own story might fit into such a work.
The Grave’s Intercom
What if one cannot finish it? What if it is unreadable, impossible, undesirable, an embarrassment, when it is done? What if it is over, lost, when it is done? What if it is unclear why one began, when it is done? What if it never gets done?
She went on collecting material. In the spring of 1950 she described herself to Sybille as “sitting in triumph in an obscure tabac-café near the bookshop where I got for 200 francs, an unprocurable book on the Governess. Full of the royal low-down on her.” She did “some research…in the Vatican library—which is very fruitful.”
She went on writing, or saying that she was. Her travel plans, she wrote in the summer of 1956, were contingent on whether “work goes well this month.”
She went on provoking questions: “Esther still believes herself to be working on her book on Mme. de Maintenon, and that she is coming back home when she has finished it,” noted Edmund Wilson. “This must have been going on for twenty years. I wonder how much writing she does.” Another friend wrote, after her death, “In the 10 or 12 years I knew her, the answer was always the same. ‘Oh’—terrific arm sweep—‘it’s about a third done, you know’—quick pull on the cigarette—‘yes, around a third done now.’”
In the last fifteen years of her life, she was frequently waiting for a dividend from Mark Cross. She still depended on the small income from her mother’s trust, and on gifts from Gerald, Noel, Sybille, and Alice De Lamar. Her need for money was a constant refrain in her relations with Gerald: “I am sorry to be just another middle-aged failure,” she wrote from Rome in 1949, “but things are pretty grim and worrying for me materially and I am not getting any younger. Will you find out if I can raise money on my stock, or sell part or the whole of it. Otherwise I literally don’t know what I will do in the future.” She wanted “a place of my own to live in, instead of always being in cheap hotels and pensions or in other people’s houses when they can have me…liv[ing] in terror of any accident or emergency, like another illness.”
Esther, “gaunt as a shad,” wrote Janet Flanner, and Noel Murphy, at Noel’s home in Orgeval (Private collection)
In 1935, Gerald had taken over the Mark Cross company, which had fallen into debt and was on the verge o
f liquidation. He made it a success again, running it for the next two decades, but felt that he wasted years of his life doing so and called the company “that monument to the inessential.” When he sold it, Esther’s financial pressure eased for a time, and in 1951 she bought an apartment on the rue de Lille, in the Seventh Arrondissement. She asked Sybille’s half sister—who was half-Jewish, had lived out the war in France in difficult and sometimes dubious circumstances, and was now at loose ends—to move in with her and run her household. This woman’s stylish, spendthrift arrangements made it possible for Esther to live in comfort and entertain, but quickly depleted her funds. Esther was “so changed, gay, buying herself clothes,” Sybille wrote to Allanah Harper, but “I’m afraid much too generous and spending most of it on other people.” There was a neighborhood joke that one could never park in front of her building because the van from the specialty food shop Prunier was invariably making a delivery. By the late 1950s she was again in desperate straits: sustained by loans, eating in cheap restaurants or going hungry, still fielding “blackmailing letters” from Chester, and talking about selling her apartment. “She should go to New York & get a job as a reviewer,” wrote Noel to Gerald, “but that is assuming that she is capable of acting with some normalcy.—Not the case.” But Noel also believed that Esther had been treated badly by her family, and she never stopped pressing Gerald to send his sister more money. She reported to him that Esther had “really sent more pages to her publisher” and that the book was “magnificent as far as it goes. That is all I know,” she concluded. “Esther is proud, generous & secretive.”
Esther succumbed to and fought off depression, which she described as such, but also as “a strange spiritual and intellectual lethargy,” “a tail spin,” and “an attack of tedium vitae—which may be merely an excuse for indolence—but which is less enjoyable.” Her drinking accelerated and abated. To Sybille, she wrote, “I am rigidly observing my diet and take no alcohol.” But the next sentence—“I wish [miss] you terribly my darling”—looks like an orthographic version of a drunken slurring of words. Apologizing for having mistaken the date of Sybille’s birthday, she quoted Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying to describe herself as “‘dishonoured and made unhappy by many sins’ including procrastination, tobacco and indolence.” She became ill—“skeleton thin, & her clothes hanging like old sheets,” wrote Noel to Gerald—and in the summer of 1960 was diagnosed with epilepsy, “probably a pre-disposition activated by alcohol & a debilitated nervous system.” There was a regime of “barbiturates to take every night of her life—no wine, beer or cigarettes, & if she shows undue excitement she should never be left alone.”
Ashamed about her body, her writing, and her handling of money, Esther was now even more inclined to ignore her circumstances, physical as well as fiscal. Scattered, impractical, and “fatalistic” when it came to daily life, she was known for her bizarre handling of her body, including urinating when and where she felt like it and not eating. (“Her scrambled eggs got even more scrambled on her plate,” said Sybille about Esther’s habit of stirring her food endlessly while she talked.) Both behaviors were characteristic of her alcoholism and of her ability to lose herself in her ideas; both were forms of abandon that at once indulged and denied physical need. And she talked to the point that her friends wondered how she could take in what was going on around her. In fact, she took in everything. “Two things about Esther that puzzle me,” wrote Wilson in the mid-1950s:
She repeats [to others] at length what people have told her, yet I don’t know how she can have heard them say anything, since she is always talking herself…Janet Flanner seems to think that she hears what people are saying when they are talking to other people, while she is talking about something else—says that she will read a book rapidly and be able to repeat passages from it, and at the same time listen to what is being said in the room. The second riddle: How is it that she has lived in France so long and still speaks French so badly? It seems to me that she actually gets worse…I asked Janet whether she thought Esther did it on purpose, as some English people seem to do, and she said that she didn’t think that Esther did anything on purpose.
But Esther could be intensely aware of her own “inertia and cowardice” and she was a keen analyst of the uses of inaction, of the ways that an impasse—the sort of “situation that no one concerned wants to solve,” as she wrote to Sybille—could in fact be productive, “because it fits in perfectly with [a person’s] own form of inertia and activity and it…would need a readjustment that no one is willing to make, to change it.” She quoted “that wise seer Bob Chanler” about the paradoxical satisfaction people derived from such “impossible situations”: “‘Everybody’s just as pleased, my dear child,’” he would say, “‘but they won’t admit it.’—I was too young then to know how right he was!”
“I have been a neurotic since birth God knows!” she wrote to Chester in 1943; “it simply is a thing you have to control as well as you can, in order that the dark waters of neurasthenia should not flood your mind and paralyze your will to live.” But beginning in the mid-1950s, she also became—in the evocative phrase that Edmund Wilson used of his father—“at home with [her] own singularity.” After a visit with her in 1954, Wilson wrote, “She is perhaps more comfortable, happier, now—freer and more at ease—than at any other time in her life. This life must have been full of frustrations, failures to find sympathy, alienation from persons she loved; but I have never seen a sign of self-pity.” She did not retreat into anticommunism during the cold war, as many of her contemporaries did. Holding forth in Paris, “she would launch into a fantastically detailed, yet Olympian analysis of the character of…Senator McCarthy.” Writing to Wilson in 1958, she concluded, “Dulles thinks Communism comes out of a bottle like the Genii in the Arabian Nights and that he can put it back in the bottle, and Eisenhower does not think at all.” Unlike some of her male comrades, she was not invested in a romance of her own greatness or ruin, and she was never twisted by her incapacities into resenting what others accomplished.
Although she could not believe in herself, she did believe in Sybille. She encouraged Sybille, gave her concrete editorial criticism, answered historical questions, took enormous pride in her successes, and did all she could to promote A Visit to Don Otavio when it was published in New York in 1953, sending it to friends, many of them editors and reviewers. “I can’t tell you how excited I am about your book,” she wrote to Sybille in Rome, “much more excited than I am about my old Governess, however I am plodding away at her.” At a flush moment, she gave Sybille a large loan or gift to allow her to finish her second book, the novel A Legacy, and she promoted it, too—notably giving Nancy Mitford a copy and asking her to pass it on to Evelyn Waugh, whose review saved the novel from obscurity in England and effectively launched Sybille’s career. Over the years, Esther sent or recommended Sybille’s work to Wilson, Carson McCullers, Lillian Hellman, Gilbert Seldes, and many others, and she told Sybille that it was one of her “very few satisfactions as well as one of the greatest…to be able to be of some help.” Envy of the younger writer, who had begun to outstrip her, appears only once in their correspondence, and with more humor than bitterness. In the late 1950s, when Sybille began receiving praise for her legal reporting, Esther wrote:
I fear that to my great regret, I may be forced to break off all relations with you. Your connections are really becoming too high. First a Judge of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court—now the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics! My connections are too shady and too compromising. Many of my intimate friends have been drug-addicts and one at least died as the result of an overdose of morphine, others have been habitual drunkards, several of them have had communist and other subversive sympathies and one of them is a philosophic anarchist and believes in no form of government at all: none of them would be well regarded by the Federal or State Judiciary. I am myself a Conservative Christian Anarchist and a follower of Thomas Jefferson, whose ideas are no longer
regarded as very respectable in the U.S. In view of all this, I feel that your connection with me may be highly compromising for you as you mount ever higher into these altitudes where the mighty and repressive of the earth, sit in judgment.
She went on socializing: With Nancy Mitford, disdainful of Americans but making an exception for Esther, who was “my learned friend Mrs Arthur” and “my dear Mrs Arthur”; with Natalie Barney, who still insulted and unnerved her; with “Alice De Lamar and her inevitable entourage”; with the poet and activist Nancy Cunard, brilliant and increasingly unstable, “passing through [Paris] like an uncharted comet whose movements defy the astronomers”; with other old friends such as Katharine Cornell, and new ones such as the young novelist Patricia Highsmith and the writer and composer Brion Gysin. John Strachey came to dinner when he was in France on business, as did the fashion editor Madge Garland, another friend from the 1920s. Mary McCarthy and Esther became closer friends; Esther was part of the small wedding party when McCarthy remarried in 1961. Janet Flanner and Noel Murphy were constant presences. “Noel brought me a recipe for cookies & Janet a crochet pattern,” Esther joked to Sybille about her birthday one year; “(as a matter of fact they gave me 5,000 francs to buy books.)” “She had a great capacity for keeping friends,” said De Lamar, “both old ones and new ones.” And she mourned those she lost. “A whole part of my life is gone with her and with our mutual memories,” Esther wrote to Sybille when Amanda Seldes died in 1954. Then she quoted Pascal.
She went on being a resource for and inspiration to others. Edmund Wilson, in Paris in the mid-1950s, began “under Esther’s influence” to “almost imagine myself, as I had never done before, becoming a mellow old expatriate discussing world literature and history, and explaining America to Europeans, in some comfortable familiar café.” A nostalgia for the canonical Paris of the twenties inspired some to approach her; when Hemingway died, she was interviewed on the radio. Others may have been looking for a link to the more open lesbian lives of the interwar years: “They came for stories of Djuna Barnes and Miss Alice Toklas,” wrote a friend, “and got instead an up-to-date précis of, let us say, the politico-sexual anxieties of Monsieur Soustelle, delivered in enormous parentheses with elaborately cigarette-punctuated emphasis. It was all very confusing for them.” (Jacques Soustelle was an anthropologist and member of the French Resistance, of postwar governments, and then of the anti–Algerian independence movement.)