All We Know: Three Lives (40 page)
What remains is not an article of clothing. When the fashion school at the Royal College of Art marked its fiftieth anniversary, it commissioned a scent in her honor. Described as “feminine and sensual, with white hyacinth and lily of the valley, and bright top notes of tangerine and rhubarb to bring it into the 21st Century,” this evanescent memorial was distributed to guests at the student fashion show in 2000. Teddy Wolfe’s painting of Madge hangs in the Geffrye Museum in London, to which Madge donated it in the 1970s. Marie Laurencin’s portrait of her belongs to Colombe Pringle.
What remains is writing that describes a commercial arena but is often saturated with such feeling and vision that it conjures her presence and experience. The postwar fashion shows in Italy, she wrote, used
the [Palazzo] Pitti as a showroom and the Strozzi as a meeting-place where the actual selling was done, while the Boboli gardens were the scene of flood-lit fêtes for the buyers. Rarely have clothes been seen in more palatial surroundings than in the vast ballroom of the Pitti, air-conditioned against the summer’s heat, its huge chandeliers winking in the lights, white-gloved attendants handing around iced drinks, a bar (free) in another room, the commentary spoken in four different languages, magnificent guards in the full panoply of Renaissance costumes to herald the lovely Italian model girls.
A monument sits solidly, referring to the past but defying time. But velvet is very important, and Madge Garland’s life attests to something as powerful as monumentality. In their materiality and their ephemerality, their capacity to make history present and to index the passage of time, a dress and her story offer something that a monument cannot: some mixture of the texture of daily life and of the vertigo of history, with all of their immediacy and loss, and all of their distortions.
Even in her eighties, loss and distortion still marked her relationship with Dody, any mention of whom would make Madge blanch, snap at her interlocutor, and change the subject. When Olivier Todd was writing about his grandmother and inquired about speaking with Madge, “she said, ‘No, under no circumstances.’” The refusal is even more striking, since she sought out Ewart Garland’s son, Patrick, around the same time, wanting to know him—but of course she had wounded Ewart, not been hurt by him. Dody appears and recedes in the attempts at autobiographical writing that Madge imagined might be read by a public: missing, incompletely named (as “my friend” or “the English editor of
Vogue
”), or present only as a sort of implication. At no point in the drafts of her memoir does Madge indicate that the “friend” with whom she “shared a house” and “the English editor of
Vogue
” were the same person. In the 1950s, visiting the novelist Anthony Powell, she listened to him criticize the characterization of Pierre in
War and Peac
e as implausible. She replied that Pierre—intelligent but highly irrational, and always searching for meaning—made sense to her; she had once known someone just like him. She did not go on, but Powell knew that she was referring to Dody. She spoke about Dody directly once, in the last year of her life, to Hilary Spurling, who insisted that she unburden herself and leave a record of that relationship and its rupture. “She was a brilliant woman, absolutely brilliant,” Madge said. “But erratic. She was a very strange character, and she had a fearful end. She was
so
gifted. She had the best and kindest of hearts. But she was a woman who ruined herself.”
She was able to speak publicly about that part of her life through clothes and the business of fashion journalism. Reviewing Caroline Seebohm’s biography of Condé Nast in 1982, she commented on Nast’s “less-than-always-honorable methods of dealing with staff” and described him as “a man whose whole life was based on pursuing an absolute balance of perfection: his own blinkered vision of what women
should
wear, what a page of the magazine
should
look like, the
exact
relation of illustration to text.” In this book review, she was able to say that the magazine “smelled of snobbery so extreme that it [now] seems sometimes obnoxious, sometimes hilarious.” In the process, she turned again to the question of importance and suggested what she considered the proper material and scope of a biography. This portrait was disappointing, she wrote, because the real substance of Nast’s character—including threatening staff with “disclosure to avoid paying up for a broken contract”—was “glossed over here in two or three lines,” whereas “trivia—the number of bottles of drink consumed at a party, or a three-line, conventional letter of thanks—are given in full.”
Writing in the early 1960s, Madge had described Edna Woolman Chase as “the first journalist to foresee the influential rôle a fashion paper could play in commerce”; later she acknowledged all that she had learned from Chase. Reviewing Nast’s biography, she did not say that he and Chase had broken her more than once. But she did write that it was a “relief” to emerge back into the present moment after having read at length about those potentates who had exercised such control over not just the fashion world but the lives of their employees, even to the point of dictating in which neighborhood they could reside. “One emerges from this world of false values, of rooms furnished by Elsie de Wolfe in false Louis XV style, into a world where young people today go about their business with carrier bags, wear no hats—and live where they like.” Chase, she explained, used to insist that every woman working on the magazine wear a hat and clean white gloves, and Madge wrote that she regretted the disappearance of both. “But,” she concluded, “one can pay too high a price for anything—even for clean white gloves.”
I have standardized the idiosyncrasies of Esther Murphy’s writing in just one way: I have silently corrected her spelling, for ease of reading. In her hands
particular
was usually
particuliar
and
extraordinary
was
extradinary
, for example. She was also capable of misspelling the names of her closest friends (
Magaret
for
Margaret
) and of her subject (
Maintenon
was often
Maintainon
). I have let most her punctuation stand, because—odd as it sometimes appears to a contemporary eye, and although some of her habits were hers alone—some was common practice in her day.
ABBREVIATIONS
AFP | Arthur Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress |
CBD | Cecil Beaton unpublished diaries, courtesy of the Literary Executors of the late Sir Cecil Beaton |
CNA | Condé Nast Archive |
EWP | Edmund Wilson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library |
GSMP | Gerald and Sara Murphy Papers. I consulted this archive when it was still in possession of the family and known as the Donnolly Family Papers. It is now part of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. |
IAP | Isabelle Anscombe Papers. Consulted privately; now housed at the Newnham Literary Archive, Newnham College, Cambridge University. |
JFP | Janet Flanner/Solita Solano Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress |
JSP | John Strachey Papers, private collection |
MdAP | Mercedes de Acosta Papers, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia |
MDP | Muriel Draper Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library |
MEP | Max Ewing Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library |
MGP | Madge Garland Papers. Consulted in a private collection. Now acquired by the Royal College of Art Archives, London. |
MHFP | McHarg Family Papers, private collection |
RCAA | Royal College of Art Archives |
RWP | Rebecca West Papers, General Collection of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library |
SBP | Sybille Bedford/Allanah Harper Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center |
THREE LIVES
“one likes romantically…gloom”
: Virginia Woolf, “Lives of the Obscure,”
The Essays of Virginia Woolf
, vol. 4: 1925–1928, Andrew McNeillie, ed. (London: Hogarth, 1994), 119.
“What is style?…thinking”
: Marguerite Young, “Inviting the Muses,” in
Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews
(Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 114.
A PERFECT FAILURE
“a nonstop conversationalist”
: Calvin Tompkins,
Living Well Is the Best Revenge
(New York: Viking, 1962, 1971), 13.
“a wonder
”…
“a ‘genius’”
: Patrick Murphy to Gerald Murphy, July 23, [1909], GSMP. He went on: “It has been remarkable: a continuous string of laurels.”
“with a dissertation…Turgenev”
: Quoted in Honoria Murphy Donnelly, with Richard N. Billings,
Sara and Gerald
(New York: Times, 1982), 130.
“to several magazines…write!”
: Gerald Murphy to Sara Wiborg, July 28, 1913, GSMP.
“ask[ed] why in…night”
: Max Ewing to parents, Wednesday May 9, 1928.
“Bounding Bess, noted…Fact”
: Djuna Barnes,
Ladies Almanack
(New York: New York University Press, 1992 [1928]), 32.
“I don’t remember…talking”
: John Peale Bishop to F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in Elizabeth Carroll Spindler,
John Peale Bishop: A Biography
(Morgantown, W.V.: West Virginia University Library, 1980), 185.
“But you were
”…“‘
Esther’”
: Quoted in Edmund Wilson,
The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960–1972
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 210.
“going through all…audience”
: Ibid., 207. He was reporting a story that Gerald told him and Dawn Powell, after Esther’s death.
“personally and professionally…arrogance”
: Dawn Powell to Gerald Murphy, December 13, 1962, GSMP.
“it could be a…anything”
: James Douglas to author, interview, Paris, September 20, 2002.
“All we know is”
: Sybille Bedford to author, conversation, London, June 28, 1999.
“There has never…failures”
: Quoted in Richard Holmes, “Scott and Zelda: One Last Trip,”
Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer
(New York: Random House, 2000), 322.
“I am certain…failure”
: Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,”
Lectures in America
(Boston: Beacon, 1985 [1935]), 172.
“fond of saying…failure”
: Gertrude Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
(Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1993), 88.
“the speeded-up…money”
: Edmund Wilson, “The Author at Sixty,”
The Portable Edmund Wilson
, Lewis M. Dabney, ed. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1983), 23. Wilson considered his father an example of this phenomenon.
“the most important…crash”
: EM to Leonie Sterner, November 11, 1930, MDP.
“rescued the forgotten…Jansenists”
: EM to Sybille Bedford, n.d. (postmarked December 21, 1954), SBP.
“Did she realize…failure?”
: EM, Madame de Maintenon drafts, GSMP.
“with her usual historical gusto”
: Edmund Wilson,
The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period
, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 251.
“was all about…research”
: Sybille Bedford to author, interview, London, March 30, 2000.
“Statistics,” wrote Dawn…“jewels”
: Dawn Powell,
The Diaries of Dawn Powell
:
1931–1965
(South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth, 1995), 249.
“I will now…through”
: EM to Muriel Draper, April 27, 1933, MDP.
NO SUCH WORD AS FAIL
“Esther is without…dialogue”
: Max Ewing to parents, March 7, 1927, MEP. Anna Murphy, he wrote, “finally wanders off to bed. Esther and her father linger for an hour or so at the table, and are an amazing pair.”
“so proud…straight”
: Anna Murphy to Gerald Murphy, June 24, 1909, GSMP.
“life and…tragically”
: Gerald Murphy to Sara Wiborg, August 25, 1915, GSMP.
“Mother was devoted…life”
: Gerald Murphy to EM [1957]. Gerald’s biographer describes Anna Murphy as “devoutly Catholic,” but Esther told Sybille Bedford that her mother was Protestant, which this letter seems to confirm.
“Our father who…Europe”
: Donnelley,
Sara and Gerald
, 77.
Born in Boston
: The facts about Patrick Murphy’s early years are unclear. According to his descendants, he attended the academically rigorous, public Boston Latin School, but a contemporary source notes that he was educated “in the Quincy Grammar and English High Schools, Boston.” (
Boston Morning Journal
, January 2, 1878, 4.) Most of Cross’s fine harnesses and saddles were produced in the town of Walsall in the English Midlands, a center of leather goods manufacturing, and Murphy may have been apprenticed for a time at a Walsall factory. Before buying Mark Cross, he may have first started his own firm: In late 1891, he was writing on stationery headed “London Harness Agency—P. F. Murphy & Co.—Harness, Saddlery and Horse Furnishings.” Gerald called Patrick Murphy a self-made man, but Murphy’s own father must have had some means, because he is said to have loaned his son the $6,000 he needed to purchase the Mark Cross Company. One obituary of Murphy asserts, “Incidentally, the company never was headed by any one named Mark Cross, but it won that name by its practice of marking its shipments with a cross.” (“Patrick Murphy Dies; Famed as Dinner Speaker,”
New York Herald Tribune
, n.d., GSMP.)
“was still a…Frenchman”
: Mrs. Winthrop Chanler [Margaret Chanler],
Roman Spring
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), 234, 238.
“to be regarded…Association”
: “Horse Show Luncheon Prelude to Opening,”
New York Times
, November 19, 1906, 10. At another of these early events, “loud cries of ‘Murphy!’ resounded through the dining room, which were renewed as the official orator arose to acknowledge the greetings of those present,” “Horse Show Opens with a Luncheon,”
New York Times
, November 18, 1907, 8.
“clear fluent monotone”
:
New York Times
, n.d.
“He who breeds…applause”
: “Horse Show Ready for Opening Today,”
New York Times
, November 14, 1904, 7.
“The art of…stop”
: Ms., GSMP.
“Buying inferior articles…time”
: GSMP. “Many a False Step is made by Standing Still,” read another ad. “This is a paradox. A paradox is ‘truth standing on its head to attract attention.’ Something seemingly absurd but true in fact. The purpose is to direct attention to the fact that Mark Cross Has Grown A New Branch At 175 Broadway.”
Wall Street Journal,
October 10, 1923, p. 11.
“Before we knew…her”
: Anna Murphy to Gerald Murphy, June 24, 1909, GSMP.
“instigated”
: Anna Murphy to Gerald Murphy, August 1, 1909, GSMP. She also tells him that “Esther is upstairs writing—she has been asked to send something to the Paris ‘Matin’ and has been offered ten [?] cents a word for them.”
“Edgar Allan Poe–ish”
: Sybille Bedford to author, interview, London, March 29, 2000.
“History is simply…history”
: “Fifteen Waggish Epigrams—Delivered at the Lambs’ [Club] Spring Gambol by Patrick Francis Murphy,”
The World
, Sunday, May 6, 1923.
“Happily…fail”
:
New York Times
, November 18, 1907, 8.
“He looked like…gloves”
: “Patrick Murphy Dies; Famed as Dinner Speaker,”
New York Herald Tribune
, n.d., GSMP.
“distinguished and remarkable…women”
: EM to Sybille Bedford, n.d. [postmarked July 3, 1959], SBP.
“a clever and…Ma’s”
: EM to Sybille Bedford, n.d. [1954], SBP.
“the Black Service”
: Gerald Murphy to Sara Wiborg, Friday, n.d. [1915], GSMP.
“a defect over…time”
: Gerald Murphy to Archibald MacLeish, January 22, 1931, Archibald Mac Leish Papers, Library of Congress.
“fail[ure] to grasp…married”
: Gerald Murphy to Sara Wiborg, August 26, 1915, quoted in Amanda Vaill,
Everybody Was So Young
:
Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story
(New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1998), 64.
“a peculiar form…indigestion”
: Quoted in Vaill,
Everybody Was So Young
, 23.
“My appearance is…attractions”
: EM to Gerald Murphy, n.d. [postmarked November 18, 1916], GSMP.
“as light in…Amazon”
: EM to Gerald Murphy, July 6, 1915, GSMP.
“I assure you…wandered”
: EM to Gerald Murphy, July 13, 1915, GSMP.
“All the masculine…Gerald”
: Wilson,
The Sixties
, 62.
“Come, brace up
…failure”: Patrick Murphy to Gerald Murphy, November 20, 1909, quoted in Vaill,
Everybody Was So Young
.
He died without
…
father
: “I have never ceased to regret that I was unable to bring Fred and Father into at least human terms at the last,” Gerald Murphy to EM, September 9, 1937, AFP.
“in a bad…alone”
: EM to Gerald Murphy, n.d. [postmarked November 18, 1916], GSMP.
“a more
completely…
again”
: EM to Chester Arthur, June 17, 1943, AFP.
“if you are…indelible”
: Mary McCarthy,
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(New York: Harcourt, 1985 [1957]), 24.
“it is also…civics”
: Ibid., 25.
“together with much…non-Catholics”
: Ibid., 26.
“knowing the past…own”
: Ibid., 25.
TO FILL UP HER KNOWLEDGE IN ALL DIRECTIONS
“‘The American Woman’…Magazine!”
: EM to Gerald Murphy, April 13, 1917, GSMP.
“I will limit…to”
: EM to Gerald Murphy, November 21, 1916, GSMP.
“You are my…robust”
: Ibid.
“both men and…it”
: EM to Chester Arthur, June 15, 1936, AFP.
“incontrovertible” proof of…“table”
: Esther Arthur, “Have You Heard About Roosevelt,”
Common Sense
, August 1938, 15.
“of seeking to…aspired”
: Esther Murphy, “The President’s Appeal,” Letter to the Editor,
New York Times
, October 22, 1920, 12.
“normalcy” as his…“situation”
: Esther Murphy, “Democracy in Action” an address by Mrs. Chester A. Arthur Delivered Before a Joint Breakfast of the Los Angeles Democratic County Central Committee and the Young Democrats of California, June 1, 1941, AFP.