All We Know: Three Lives (6 page)

To other contemporaries, Barney was almost monstrous. Her friend Bettina Bergery said that “her strongest desire was to dominate.” Sybille Bedford described her as “entirely selfish,” with “no moral compass.” In the last thirty years, she has been claimed as a model of sexual liberation and a catalyst for modernism. Esther saw her as a political throwback and a figure of fun whose conservatism and willful ignorance made her resemble a noxious nineteenth-century American industrialist and political operator. Barney’s “vegetable-placid” manner, Esther wrote to Muriel Draper, was a “Mark Hanna certainty that nothing important happens really.” Barney’s self-serious, Lesbos-leaning literary affectations fed Esther’s sense of the ridiculous—as did the cult Barney fostered around Renée Vivien, a poet and former lover who had died young. But Barney occupied a huge place in Esther’s imagination and was inevitably a provocative literary subject for her. “Above all
don’t
let the old Barney get any inkling that you intend to write about her,” Teddy Chanler cautioned. “Don’t let her see that lean and hungry look of the born novelist.”

“Natalie Barney lay on her back in her bed clad only in a silk shirt and a rather dingy pink[?] kimono,” began one of Esther’s sketches.

Esther enclosed this meandering satire—a twentieth-century tale of sexual manners composed in a Jane Austen mode—with a letter to Draper in 1926. In another letter to Draper she sent a parody of Barney’s “Fridays,” in which she quoted the salonnière giving a long, falsely modest peroration on the blessed memory of Renée Vivien that inspired Romaine Brooks to rush from the room and vomit “copiously” in the hall. Djuna Barnes’s
Ladies Almanack
was a privately printed slap at Barney and her appetites, written in a vigorous, ambiguous combination of historical and modern prose, mixing neologism and farce. Esther’s fascinated but biting stories predate Barnes’s book by two years.

Yet Barney’s blond allure and conviction about her own appeal were everything that Esther was not, and for two years Esther was also frantically in love. “We talked again for five solid hours about Miss Barney,” wrote Max Ewing in March 1927. “The conversation becomes mad but always fascinating…After an hour or so the thought of Miss Barney sends her into an absolute extase like nothing on earth.” Esther was crazy about Barney—“and by crazy I mean really almost
crazy
,” Ewing noted; “Muriel is afraid that if it keeps going on like this Esther may eventually become really cuckoo.” Esther was in love, perhaps for the first time in her life, but with someone who would never reciprocate: Although Barney was promiscuous to a fault, constantly juggling lovers, Esther was unattractive, too obviously smitten, and intelligent in a way that bored Barney and made her uncomfortable. “‘She is not for us!’” declares Dame Musset of Bounding Bess (Esther), in the
Ladies Almanack
, “and so saying, she cracked her Whip against her Boot, turning toward a Pasty Shop hard by.”

In June 1927, however, Esther telegrammed Muriel Draper from France: “
ON WAY TO CAPRICE
,” and that summer she accompanied Barney to her villa at Santa Margherita, near Genoa. They met up with Max Ewing and drove—or were driven, in Barney’s huge Packard—around northern Italy. When Romaine Brooks joined them, they proceeded with Barney and Brooks in one car and the lesser mortals in another, all of them stopping where and when Barney pleased. “Miss Barney directs this trip like a Roman general,” wrote Ewing, “and Esther keeps maintaining that Napoleon would never have lost Waterloo if he had had Miss Barney to organize his troops.” Dorothy Wilde, Oscar’s witty niece and one of Barney’s lovers, wrote to her, “Fancy Esther being with you…Does she sleep in my bed? I don’t like that. Have you made listless love to her—out of charitable curiosity?
Tell
me if you have.” Wilde’s biographer says that “Natalie ended up in bed with the ‘brilliant, didactic’ Esther Murphy,” but if she did, it was not for long. Years later Esther referred to her “strange stay with Natalie Barney” that summer. But she returned to Paris the following spring “in a state of frenzy,” because she was again on her way to see Barney.

The appearance in New York of the young English writer and politician John Strachey interrupted her obsession. Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey was Eton- and Oxford-educated, from an old, upper-middle-class English family, second cousin of Lytton, and son of the editor of the conservative journal
The Spectator
. Although Strachey had left Oxford before getting his degree to help his father run
The Spectator
, his growing commitment to socialism meant that by the late 1920s he had withdrawn from the journal’s day-to-day management. He was heavily involved in Labour Party politics, editing the magazines the
Socialist Review
and
The Miner
, and publishing books on economics. He had traveled to Russia, and his close friend Oswald Mosley, another well-off convert to left-wing politics—then a rising political star, not yet the face of fascism in England—encouraged him to go to the United States to study advanced capitalism. Strachey was in the middle of a steady affair with the young literary editor of
The Spectator
, Celia Simpson, who was part of his group of Labour-affiliated friends, but as he prepared to travel to New York in the autumn of 1928, a colleague remarked, “I suppose you’re going to the U.S.A. to look for a rich wife.” A few months later, in February 1929, Esther and he were engaged. “Bachelor Heiress to Wed Kin of Lord,” announced a headline in the
New York American
.

In 1936, still working overtime as a spokesman for his moment, Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.” This often-repeated dictum about the late teens and twenties may have described him, but it ignored the politics of the Harlem Renaissance, left-wing organizing and publishing, temperance and Prohibition, and feminist and anti-feminist activism during those years. Esther was not one of those American literary figures who first found a social conscience with the Great Depression, and in Strachey she responded to the offer of a life if not in politics, then as a partner in his promising career. Like her, he was an intellectual child of privilege who had embraced progressive politics. She had recently been commissioned to write the life of Lady Blessington, and her publisher, Joseph Brewer, was a young American who had studied at Oxford and worked on
The Spectator
; it was probably he who introduced her to Strachey. She may have thought that living in England would help her to write this book. She already felt her “inabilities to act,” which she confided to Strachey, and she told him how much she needed his confidence in her. But joining forces with him also made it possible for her to avoid writing and to throw herself into work that was wholly different. It may be that it was only as a political wife that she could conceive of being in an intimate couple with a man. Certainly agreeing to marry him was an attempt to stop pining for a woman who kept in touch with but still disdained her: Barney countered the “startling and revelatory” news of her engagement with skeptical congratulations. “I must rejoice with you that you not only foresee but experience happiness,” she wrote. “I am glad that you recall our meeting not too bitterly.” And she asked, pointedly or obliquely, whether Esther had already slept with Strachey: “Just how your nature may sanction this nouveau régime is a thing already ascertained?” Esther’s nature inclined mostly toward women, but she was also profoundly lonely. “She
dreamed
of being appreciated,” said Sybille Bedford.

Strachey was motivated by a mixture of opportunism and genuine fondness. He was ambitious and wanted a career in politics, but did not have the money to finance it. His father had died in 1927, and he and his mother were not close. There was a real chance of a Labour victory in the 1929 election—not just in the working-class, traditionally Tory district of Birmingham, in which he would run for Parliament, but in enough other parts of the country to bring in a left-of-center government—and he insisted on a large dowry from Patrick Murphy, to make his campaign possible. He admired Esther deeply and, knowing about her feelings for Barney, still convinced himself and was convinced by her that their marriage would work. He told her that he wanted to give her “a sort of keel…some heavy fixed centre against which your superb talents could get a purchase” and wrote with kind apprehension about her drinking and their shared tendency toward depression. He saw her strengths and faults clearly, yet he objectified her: “You are truly moving because you have lived and suffered,” he wrote. “I need you very much Esther. You have very much that I lack. You have, for all that it is to some extent caught up and turned back upon yourself, an exuberance of spirit—you are one of your own examples of the…magnificent American Extravagance of type—that is to me immensely satisfying.” He also expected to be able to continue his affair with Celia Simpson.

To an ex-girlfriend, the French journalist Yvette Fouque, he wrote,

He did not write to Celia Simpson, who learned of his engagement through a newspaper announcement. When he contacted her on his return to London, in late January 1929, as he began his run for Parliament, she told him she would never see him again.

In New York that spring, an epic series of parties preceded Esther’s departure for London. “Last night…at James Leopold’s,” Max Ewing reported,

A week later, Ewing wrote, “You would think Esther Murphy were going to a nunnery in Siam and never to be seen again in this world. Whereas as a matter of fact everyone she knows will see her in Europe this summer and back here in New York next winter!” The engagement was announced and these parties duly noted in the columns of gossip writer Cholly Knickerbocker, and a hundred people saw Esther off at the pier when she and her father sailed on March 16.

On shipboard, and then from London, she telegraphed Muriel Draper: “
THINKING OF YOU CONSTANTLY
.” The wedding, front-page news in New York, took place on April 24, 1929, at the Catholic church of St. Mary’s, in Chelsea. Patrick and Anna Murphy were there, as were Noel and Gerald; Amy Strachey, John’s mother; his sister Amabel Williams-Ellis with her family; and a couple of Esther’s friends. (Draper and Mercedes de Acosta had planned to attend but were unable to.) Oswald Mosley was the best man. In a photograph taken outside the reception at the Carlton hotel, Esther is flanked by her husband, while her father looks on. Her face is largely obscured by her cloche hat, but she is smiling broadly—not at either man or at the photographer, but at one of the women in the group, who beams back at her.

Immediately afterward, she was “plunged into the General Election of 1929”—the first English election with universal adult suffrage. In addition to bringing money to Strachey’s candidacy, she campaigned with him, appearing on the platform when he spoke and stumping for him at gatherings of women constituents and elsewhere. On a leaflet addressed “To the Woman Elector of Aston,” there is a photograph of her looking distinctly pretty—fresh-faced, clear-eyed, Irish. “Dear Friend,” the broadside reads, “I am writing to you, as a woman voter, in order to ask you to vote for my husband, John Strachey…I know his grasp of the problems which confront women, and his keen realisation of the urgent necessity of improving the living conditions of the people of Great Britain.” The leaflet, which may not have been written by her, invited women voters to a series of meetings, where her speech—on American democratic traditions and the goals of the Labour Party—was certainly her own. She loved these appearances, and audiences responded to her commanding but matter-of-fact style.