All We Know: Three Lives (7 page)

Strachey defeated his Conservative opponent on May 30, 1929, and Esther and he moved into a house in Westminster, close to the House of Commons. He announced that he anticipated “the swift ‘transformation of society into a Socialist Commonwealth,’” but there was little room for him and his colleagues to maneuver. While Labour had enough seats in the House of Commons to form a government, they had only a small majority over the Conservatives (the Liberal Party had the balance of the votes), and their prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, began to undermine their aspirations for reform. In November 1930, as Labour’s hold on government disintegrated, Esther wrote to a friend in New York describing it as “the most important failure since the Wall Street crash.”

From left: unidentified woman, Lorna Lindsley, Patrick Murphy, John Strachey (sprinkled with rice), Oswald Mosley behind him, and Esther, after their wedding, April 24, 1929 (Muriel Draper Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

But Esther’s fascination with parliamentary politics was not enough to sustain the marriage, which was itself soon a debacle. Strachey had imagined a union of equals, but still expected his wife to run the household—plan meals, supervise the small domestic staff, make sure the house looked respectable—chores in which Esther had no interest and for which she had no aptitude. She cared about debate and policy, not domestic performance, felt isolated, and continued to drink to excess. She had her own money and had never answered to anyone, so often assuaged her unhappiness by spending weekends in France sitting in cafés drinking and talking with Dorothy Parker, Janet Flanner, and other friends; going to Barney’s salon on Fridays; and visiting Noel, who was now living in the village of Orgeval, about twenty miles northwest of Paris. (Margaret Hutchins Bishop and John Peale Bishop lived in Orgeval for a time, too, and Esther saw them as well.) In the summers of their childhood, Esther and Noel had told other children ghost stories in the Southampton cemetery. During the war, Esther had read her Fred’s eloquent letters from the front. Now Noel was rusticating in a country house she had bought after Fred’s death, but often hosting visitors from Paris (including Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas) and from New York. John Strachey did accompany Esther to France occasionally, and even to Barney’s salon, but it was his duty to be available to his constituency in Birmingham on the weekends, and it was customary for an MP’s wife to provide support on these trips, not flee to France. Their struggles included the question of children: He wanted a family—although her drinking eventually made him reconsider; she did not. When she became pregnant, she felt her whole body revolt against it, or so she said later. She eventually had the miscarriage she hoped for.

The cultural collision was part of the problem. She was close to one of her husband’s colleagues, Aneurin Bevan, who had worked his way up to a parliamentary career from a mining community in South Wales, and she spent time with the novelists Richard Hughes and Elizabeth Bowen. But most of Strachey’s friends were baffled by what they saw as his choice of an unattractive oddity for a wife. They could not fathom Esther’s intelligence, could not stand her volubility, and considered American history a laughably trivial subject. They also felt that Esther dominated Strachey. She talked so much that he appeared to be in “second place,” said George Strauss, a Labour colleague, who described Esther as a “female policeman.” Strachey’s childhood friend Robert Boothby, a Tory MP, found her “hideous.” Boothby recalled a gathering at Mosley’s country home during which “Esther was going on about” various senators, and “Strachey said: ‘if you go on about that any more, I can’t stand it.’ Esther left the room in tears.” When Strachey first brought her to Mosley’s country house, his biographer notes, “there were many talkative Englishmen to lunch, and Esther, after being silent a long time, wept. Strachey later told Mosley ‘that was because, in America, everyone listens to
her
.’” These accounts, meant to show Esther as self-absorbed and presumptuous, make the misogyny and insularity of the atmosphere she was moving in vivid.

Strachey’s politics at this time were increasingly radical, but as he wrote to Boothby: “Remember, every upper class socialist is a neurotic, on edge, ‘up against it’ and so guilty.” Esther’s first taste of this conflict, and of the differences between American and English versions of elite populism, had been during the election celebrations, when a working-class man had approached Strachey and said, “Congratulations, John!” clapping him on the shoulder. Strachey had recoiled and replied, “I’m Mr. Strachey to you.” Stunned by his sense of affront, Esther later said that this was the moment when her trust in him evaporated. While they were driving through France in the summer of 1929—they stayed for a time with Gerald and Sara Murphy in Antibes—their car broke down, and so did the marriage. As they waited for the repairs, Strachey wrote to Yvette Fouque:

While he clung to distorted ideas about his own “poverty,” Esther kept drinking and escaping to Paris and New York. It was not long before he was again seeing Celia Simpson.

“Darling, darling Muriel,” Esther wrote, “I have missed you so much that nothing could ever convey it to you—at the same time feeling…that I only had to stretch out my hand to touch you…This year has been very strange.” She was referring to the end of her marriage, to the growing economic crisis, and to her parents’ decline. She and Strachey were together in New York in the winter of 1929–30. (Mary McCarthy remembered a gathering of leftist writers that included Esther and Strachey at which he had shocked McCarthy by adjourning to the toilet, leaving the door open, “unbutton[ing] his fly,” and continuing the conversation.) But they spent more and more time apart. When he returned to London, she stayed on with Anna and Patrick Murphy until spring. That summer, he traveled to Russia with Celia and several colleagues. The following summer, Esther toured Germany with Noel and Janet Flanner. Noel drove her old Ford; Esther and Flanner took turns in the front seat. They stayed in country inns in the Black Forest and went to the Jockey Club in Berlin. Noel and Flanner fell in love during the trip—some happiness in the midst of increasing strain. Until the end of Esther’s life, these two women were her family. Back in New York by herself in the late summer and autumn of 1931, Esther held “forth on the politics of all the world” and she had lunch with Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon in Southampton. Her parents had fired most their household staff and put their automobile in storage, Mark Cross was operating at a great loss, and Patrick Murphy’s bewilderment at the Depression was painful to see.

She sailed to England in early November 1931, but returned to New York almost immediately. After years of immunity from illness, her father had contracted pneumonia, and he died on November 23, 1931. Esther and Gerald, both traveling from Europe, missed his enormous funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Several hundred people, including seventy-five Mark Cross employees—the two shops were closed for the day—attended the service, as did several of Esther’s friends, and Murphy was eulogized by a former U.S. secretary of state. As John Strachey prepared to accompany Esther to New York, Celia told him that if he did not return to England within ten days she would leave the country and never see him again. Deeply unhappy, wanting to begin a life with her, but loath to hurt Esther, he sailed to New York, delivered Esther to her parents’ home, and immediately returned to London, sending Esther a telegram to say that he wanted to end the marriage.

“The whole thing went to pieces
en grand
,” said Sybille Bedford, with Strachey “letting her down, her beloved father dying, then her mother’s illness, the Mark Cross company [in crisis], Gerald being impossible, suddenly no money.” Anna Murphy had collapsed and been hospitalized when her husband died; within a month she had a stroke and contracted pneumonia. Esther, in shock at her father’s death and deeply hurt by Strachey’s failure to honor him—if not for her sake then as the man who had helped make his career possible—kept vigil over her mother, who lay semiconscious for five months, “a living corpse.” She died that spring. Gerald, preoccupied with the illness of his eldest son, did not return to New York for her funeral. John Strachey moved with Celia to a house in rural Sussex, struggled with his ambivalence about divorcing Esther, “became ill with worry and guilt,” and went into analysis. Muriel Draper’s “sympathy and understanding” as Anna Murphy was dying were crucial. Draper and Joe Brewer also tried to broker a rapprochement. Esther “does love you,” Draper wrote to John Strachey, “but…does not depend on you in any way—emotionally, intellectually, or actually; nor is she, as far as I can perceive, waiting for you as the one hope and solution of her life. She does believe that some sort of equality is possible between you, or that in any case some arrangement of your lives can be made which will prove less disastrous and ridiculous than this.” Strachey’s career was also in turmoil. Oswald Mosley had resigned dramatically from the Labour government, and in 1931  he, Strachey, and a few others founded the New Party, a short-lived experiment in opposition. But Strachey soon withdrew, seeing Mosley’s turn to the right, and in the October election of that year he lost his seat in Parliament. Mosley went on to found the British Union of Fascists.

The women in John Strachey’s family were not threatened or disgusted by Esther the way his male friends were. On the contrary: “She is a hero and a goddess,” his sister Amabel wrote to him. “I have seen a good many great women, but never one to surpass Esther, and never one so vulnerable and inexperienced and exposed to the hard fate of being a human being.” His mother could be forbidding—she was tall and thin and looked “like a Victorian coat stand,” wrote Celia, “with scarves & chains and lace and shawls hanging from her”—but she adored Esther and emphatically took her side. Amy Strachey had encouraged her son’s trip to the United States in 1928 as a way to separate him from Celia; she refused to see him when he was living with Celia in 1932; and she did not attend their wedding in the autumn of 1933, immediately after Esther and John divorced. “My heart quite literally bleeds when I think of” Esther, she wrote to Gerald. When Esther remarried, five years later, Amy Strachey told her that her new husband was “charming,—almost worthy of you, but you know my feelings that nobody is quite.”

Within a few years, Esther and John Strachey had become friends. On her last trip to Europe before the war, in the spring of 1937, she visited him and Celia. Twice in the 1930s, on lecture tours of the United States, he was incarcerated at Ellis Island, accused of being a Communist advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, a charge based on Hearst press pressure on the Department of Labor. In both cases, Esther pulled every string she could in Washington, even contacting FDR, and she wrote to Amy Strachey to reassure her. Strachey went on to have a long career as a leading theorist of the Labour Party and in world democratic socialism.
The Coming Struggle for Power
, his 1932 primer on the logics of capitalism and communism, is still seen as one of the most cogent expositions of the economic situation of the time. He helped found the Left Book Club, a populist publishing venture that produced millions of volumes (by George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and others) and helped shift the British national consciousness to the left, enabling Labour’s postwar ascendance. He was a member of Parliament and he continued to publish on economics and empire until his death in 1963. Esther liked and admired him.