All We Know: Three Lives (10 page)
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 situation 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.
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,