Everybody Was So Young (23 page)

Both these pictures, which Gerald was working on in 1924, have the clean surface and the crisp edges of cubist paintings, portraying the shapes of things without the sloppy shading of sentiment. But they are far from contentless. For someone as eager for precision and control as Gerald was, the creation of overtly nonemotional works like Razor and Watch provided a way to make abstractions of feelings that otherwise might threaten his equilibrium. Gerald said almost nothing about his brother’s death, and very little about the complicated relationship between himself, Fred, and their father. But he made two pictures in the year his brother died, and each of them tells more than he probably wished it to about how he felt. Perhaps it’s no accident that in later years he used the words instrument de précision, usually applied to a high-quality chronometer, to stand for that hopelessly imprecise and unreliable thing, the human heart.

Spring brought the summertime expatriates back to Paris: John Dos Passos; Gilbert Seldes, with his fiancée, Alice Hall; Donald Ogden Stewart, who was working on a humorous novel about an Ohio couple called Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad. Stewart became an almost nightly dinner guest of the Murphys, bringing each day’s pages of his manuscript around to the quai des Grands-Augustins to read them aloud to his hosts, and sometimes to Seldes or Dos Passos. He found an appreciative audience, particularly in Sara, who had a wonderfully raucous laugh when she was really amused. Sometimes, Stewart recalled, they all went to Joe Zelli’s nightclub in Montmartre, “where being a guest of the Murphys entitled one to ‘the royal box.’” Zelli’s had succeeded Le Boeuf sur le Toit as the hot club of the moment, and had “the best jazz band and the prettiest girls.”

At some point that spring Stewart finally got the Murphys together with Archibald and Ada MacLeish. MacLeish—a lanky, sandy-haired, sleepy-eyed former football star from Glencoe, Illinois, whose father, a Scottish immigrant, had made a fortune with the Chicago dry goods firm of Carson Pirie Scott—had quit his job with a Boston law firm the day he made partner. He wanted to come to France to learn about poetry, and his wife, Ada, a pretty, plump, birdlike singer with a silvery soprano, wanted to pursue a concert career. They had arrived in Paris in the fall, and were living in a cold-water flat on the boulevard St.-Michel that they’d found through another couple the Murphys knew, Richard and Alice Lee Myers. Stewart, who had gone to Yale with Archie MacLeish, brought them around to the quai des Grands Augustins; but at first Gerald and Archie circled one another warily, like young bucks in spring. Gerald, Archie said later, “was just instinctively leery of ‘Bones’ men”; and Archie and Ada were somewhat envious of and put off by the familiarity the Murphys so evidently had with the inner circles of the avant-garde. “We went . . . to the Strawinsky festival,” MacLeish wrote sniffily to a friend early that summer. “Don Stewart was there with the Murphys & [they] proudly retired at the beginning of the second part of the program to miss Pachinella (?) & came back later for Noces.”

Soon after seeing the MacLeishes at the Stravinsky festival, the Murphys returned to Antibes for the summer. They invited Dos Passos and Stewart to join them later at the Hotel du Cap, and they encouraged Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to think about coming south for the summer also. They knew how much Zelda loved to swim, and how much the Fitzgeralds wanted to economize—and they were delighted when their new friends rented a villa in Valescure, about twenty-five miles away along the coast. Soon, however, the Murphys found themselves truly put to the test in their roles as surrogate parents.

At first Valescure seemed the ideal solution to the Fitzgeralds’ needs: there was quiet and solitude for Scott to work on his novel, there was a nanny to look after two-year-old Scottie, and Zelda had the beach for a playground and a group of young aviators from the Frejus air base a few miles away for playmates. She and Scott befriended them, and he seemed glad of the distraction they provided for her.

When Gerald and Sara came over to Valescure from Antibes for the day, however, they noticed at once that something was going on between Zelda and one of the pilots, a golden-haired youth named Edouard Jozan. “I must say,” remarked Sara, “everybody knew it but Scott.” The Murphys saw Zelda on the beach with Jozan, and dancing with him at the casino. “I don’t know how far it really went,” said Gerald—but in her semiautobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, Zelda intimated that it went pretty far indeed. “He was bronze and smelled of the sand and sun,” wrote Zelda of the blond, aquiline Jacques Chevre-Feuille, who plays Jozan’s part in the novel; “she felt him naked underneath the starched linen. She didn’t think of David [her husband]. She hoped he hadn’t seen; she didn’t care.” When Scott finally did see what was happening, Gerald Murphy remembered later, “It did upset [him] a good deal. I wonder whether it wasn’t partly his own fault?”

On July 13, according to Fitzgerald’s ledger, there was a crisis. Whether Scott confronted her about Jozan, or she him; whether Zelda was “locked in my villa for one month to prevent me from seeing [Jozan],” as she later claimed; or whether Jozan was fortuitously transferred; Jozan and Zelda were suddenly no longer seen together. But the crisis wasn’t over, merely shelved. Gilbert Seldes brought his bride to the Cote d’Azur at the beginning of August on their honeymoon. Driving to the beach with the Fitzgeralds he was alarmed when Zelda demanded that Scott give her a cigarette just as the narrow road made a hairpin turn. Scott, taking his hands off the steering wheel to rummage in his pocket, only barely managed to keep the car from plunging over the side of the road. On other occasions, Sara and Gerald noticed, the Fitzgeralds would leave parties and go to Eden Roc, at the tip of Cap d’Antibes near the hotel, where Zelda would strip off her evening dress and dive into the sea in her slip from thirty-five-foot rocks. Scott, terrified but unwilling to admit it, would take off his dinner jacket and pumps and follow her. When Sara tried to tell Zelda it was dangerous, Zelda merely fixed her with what Gerald described as her “unflinching gaze, like an Indian’s,” and said, “But Say-ra, didn’t you know? We don’t believe in conservation.”

On one such evening the Murphys prevailed on the Fitzgeralds not to drive back to Valescure, but to stay the night at the Hotel du Cap. In the small hours of the morning Gerald and Sara were awakened by a furious knocking on the door of their room. Outside stood Scott, clutching a candle and clammy with fright. “Zelda’s sick,” he said; and, as Sara and Gerald followed him to the Fitzgeralds’ room, he added, “I don’t think she did it on purpose.” When she found out that Zelda had swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills, Sara tried to get her to drink olive oil to counteract the drugs. But Zelda protested, irrationally, “Sara . . . don’t make me drink that, please. If you drink too much oil you turn into a Jew.” So Sara and Gerald made her walk up and down until dawn to keep her awake. In the morning the Fitzgeralds went back to Valescure, and the incident was never mentioned again.

That summer there were forest fires in the hills behind the coast, and the air was perfumed with the smell of burning eucalyptus, the blue sky hazed over with smoke. But there was more than eucalyptus in the air. This sleepy stretch of coastline was beginning to be discovered. The owner of the Château de la Garoupe, where the Murphys had first stayed with the Porters in 1922, would come over to the Hôtel du Cap and ask Antoine Sella, “Who are all these people I don’t know?” Rudolph Valentino, the film star whose slinky, slightly sinister sexuality had made him a heartthrob on three continents, came to stay in a château in Juan-les-Pins with his wife, Natasha Rambova (née, somewhat less exotically, Winifred Hudnut). Noel Murphy and John Dos Passos and Donald Ogden Stewart all came in Noel’s old six-cylinder Renault on their way back from Pamplona, in Spain, where they had gone to see the running of the bulls at the Fiesta of San Fermin with their friend Ernest Hemingway. The nearsighted Stewart had two cracked ribs from a tussle with the yearling bull Hemingway had dared him to fight: he’d had to take his glasses off and he hadn’t seen the bull come at him. But Gerald and Sara soon nursed him back to health with daily trips to La Garoupe and delicious Provençal meals eaten on the shady porch of the Hôtel du Cap, and all of them went to Nice to the bookshop where the expatriate literary magazine the trans-atlantic was on sale with a “Work in Progress by Donald Ogden Stewart” advertised on the cover. The Picassos came back to Juan-les-Pins, and the de Beaumonts, and the Barrys and the prince and princess de Faucigny-Lucinge returned to their villas in Cannes. (Johnny Lucinge, as everybody called him, claimed that the Murphys invented the Riviera in the summer.)

That was when, Gerald said, “we saw what was happening down there—the crowd of people that was coming in—and realized that if we wanted to live simply we would have to hit out and get our own villa.” On the slope above Golfe Juan, between two dirt tracks called the Chemin de Mougins and the Chemin des Nielles, they found a 7,600-square-meter piece of property with a modest turn-of-the-century villa called the Chalêt des Nielles. The villa was nothing much, fourteen rather small rooms under a peaked chalet roof, but there were some tumbledown outbuildings on the property, including an old donkey stable, which could be made into a studio, and the view from the hillside was breathtaking: You could see Juan-les-Pins to the north, and the Cap to the south, and the blueberry-colored Mediterranean stretched away to the west toward the Iles de Lérins and Cannes. On a clear day, with the mistral blowing, the dark cones of the Esterel Massif behind Cannes looked close enough to touch. And the garden was spectacular: the current owner, a French army officer who had spent his career as a military attaché in the Middle East, was an enthusiastic amateur gardener, and he had brought back numerous exotic specimens from his travels. There were lemon trees, date palms, and genuine cedars of Lebanon; pepper trees, persimmons, and whiteleaved Arabian maples; Pittosporum coriacaeum, desert holly, eucalyptus, and Punica granatum; olive and fig trees, mimosa and heliotrope, and a huge linden tree that shaded the terrace near the house.

“I think,” Gerald had written to Sara during their courtship, “we shall always enjoy most the things we plan to do of our own accord—and together, even among others, but in our own way.” Now they had found the “little farm” they had longed for since before their marriage, the plot of land on which they could nurture their family and become, at last, the people they had always planned to be, doing things in their own way. It took only a minute’s hesitation before they agreed to pay 350,000 francs—about a quarter of Sara’s yearly income—to buy it. On the deed, which they signed in September, Gerald listed his profession as “artiste peintre.” By the time they left Antibes to go back to Paris, they had engaged a pair of Ohio architects named Hale Walker and Harold Heller to remodel the house. And they had given it a name. They called it Villa America.

13

“Our real home”

BACK
IN ST.-
CLOUD
that autumn of 1924, Gerald and Sara found that Archie and Ada MacLeish had fled the high Parisian rents and were now their neighbors at 10 Parc Montretout. As Ada MacLeish wrote to a friend, “the Gerald Murphys, whom we like enormously, live near us, so we really haven’t a want.”

Between Archie and Gerald there now sprang up a friendship that—on Gerald’s side at least—was perhaps the longest and most truly fraternal of his life. The two men shared a certain sense of dislocation articulated in MacLeish’s notebook description of his poetic protagonist, L. T. Carnavel, who “had all his life from adolescence the conviction—at first merely sensed, that his consciousness of time & space, his individualness, his being himself, his detachment from conscious matter etc.—was the source of his unhappiness, or rather of his not-happy-ness. As a young man he tried to subject the universe to his consciousness (i.e. to annihilate the gulf between himself & the universe by translating the universe into terms of himself.” Carnavel was meant to be MacLeish’s self-portrait; but he could just as easily have been Gerald’s.

In this friendship between brothers, however, Gerald had the advantage of the firstborn. Archie was spending long hours at the Bibliothèque Nationale and at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop, reading the books he hoped would help him to become the poet he wanted to be—works by Dante, Rimbaud, Laforgue, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, whose absence from his curriculum at Yale made him feel his four years in New Haven had been wasted time. Gerald—who had become a voracious reader and copied out passages he liked in Pushkin or Shakespeare so as to memorize them—had similar feelings about their shared alma mater. But he had spent the past few years getting the real-life grounding in modern culture that MacLeish now aspired to. “Gerald was a remarkable companion,” said MacLeish, “and very knowledgeable, not scholarly, but very knowledgeable.”

He knew the composers Ada MacLeish was studying and whose works she wanted to sing: Satie, Poulenc, Stravinsky. He and Sara had sung Negro spirituals from his collection, as they used to do in Cambridge, for Satie after a dinner party, just the two of them at the piano; and Satie, after listening once, made them turn around and sing them again, a cappella. “Never sing them any other way,” he said. And Satie, like Poulenc and Marcelle Meyer (who brought her baby to be admired), came out to visit “les Murphy” at St.-Cloud, turning down an invitation from Vincente Huidobro, the publicist for the Ballets Suédois, to do so; his rendezvous with these “useful and precious Americans,” he said, was “very important” (underlined three times). Gerald was a friend of the modern French writers, like Cocteau and Radiguet, who interested MacLeish. Then there were the painters: Léger, who, on the strength of the Murphys’ introduction became an intimate of both MacLeishes, and Picasso, with whom they never got quite so close. MacLeish was no rube, and he would have learned to appreciate these figures by himself. But he would not have known them in the same way. In February he wrote to a friend that he was “stirred by poetry by music now as I wish I might still be by my less elaborate desires. That is to say—I never more see beautiful women. I see lonely and uncapturable gestures, swift nuances of an arm, curves of a breast, a throat—lines, forms. . . . To write one must take the world apart and reconstruct it.” It sounds like Gerald talking, or Goncharova speaking through him. And the immediate result of this thinking was perhaps MacLeish’s most famous poem, begun in his notebook in March: