Everybody Was So Young (24 page)

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

. . .

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean

But be.

Many years later Archie said that he had been friends with the Murphys “in French terms,” by which he meant he knew them as Europeans in a European setting, not as Americans uncomfortably transplanted to an alien shore. It was an important distinction. Within this context, the MacLeishes soon developed a “very easy, hometown sort” of relationship with their new neighbors: “We would drop in or suggest that we would drop in, propose ourselves, and if they were going to be home we’d go out [and] see them.” It was a profitable connection: through the Murphys, Ada became “very solid with Marcelle Meyer”—in fact, Ada wrote a friend excitedly, “She has asked me to share a program with her in the spring.”

In April, Archie and Gerald took one of several long bicycle trips together, through the Burgundy countryside. Was it Gerald’s painter’s eye, and his appreciation of all things simple and sensual, that made MacLeish see everything in a new way? Archie’s journal recorded “Stripes of mustard yellow, green, young green, the far blue hills, the cattle . . . luncheon by the rapid brook—the vague sun, the vague green trees, the white, lean bread, the cheese of St. Florentin, the Chablis (G.C. 1911) and the hunger to eat it with.” In a road-mender’s hut near Vézelay they found a message scrawled on the wall: “La vie est un desert, la femme un chameau. Pour voir le desert il faut monter sur le chameau.” (“Life is a desert, woman is a camel. If you want to see the desert you have to ride the camel.”)

MacLeish would not quarrel with that—he had always had an eye for a woman. The preceding spring, MacLeish had an affair with Margaret Bishop, the wife of his friend, the poet John Peale Bishop. Ada had either not known of it or had chosen to ignore it, and the relationship had ended when the Bishops left Paris to return to New York. Now, like many a man before and after him, he found himself admiring Sara Murphy. In his notebook for 1924 to 1925 he began a poem, which he later revised and published, entitled “Sketch for a Portrait of Mme. G——M——,” perhaps not so coincidentally the same title Gerald had given to a proposed painting for which he had made notes. Whereas Gerald saw his wife in terms of objects—“lace, globe, black stems of wood coming at you at an > [he had drawn an angle], magnolia petals, snow flakes vertically falling, mirror, moulding tracery of crossed twigs”—Archie described her physical presence, “the curve her throat made that was not the curve / Of any other.” More than that, though, he tried to capture the way she had of creating her own cosmology:

Sara never lodged in a house. She lived in it.

There was not one—& there had been as many

As there were reasons to be somewhere else—

Of all her houses that had not become

The one house that was meant for her, no matter

Whom it was meant for when the walls were raised—

Even to furnished villas like the one

Above the Seine that had belonged to Gounod. . . .

And that was a strange house.

Not satisfied that he had got her right, MacLeish crossed out this draft and began again. At last he had it:

“Her room,” you’d say—and wonder why you’d called it

Hers . . .

. . . . . .

Whether you came to dinner or to see

The last Picasso or because the sun

Blazed on her windows as you passed or just

Because you came, and whether she was there

Or down below in the garden or gone out

Or not come in yet, somehow when you came

You always crossed the hall and turned the doorknob

And went in;—“Her room”—as though the room

Itself were nearer her: . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . “Her room,” as though you’d said

Her voice, Her manner, meaning something else

Than that she owned it; knowing it was not

A room to be possessed of, not a room

To give itself to people . . .

. . . It reserved

Something that in a woman you would call

Her reticence by which you’d mean her power

Of feeling what she had not put in words—

“Very sphinxlike,” Harry Crosby had called her. Whatever her elusive magic, it was the same kind she had exerted on Picasso—and now also upon Scott Fitzgerald, who returned to Paris that spring from a miserable winter in Rome. He and Zelda had found a dreary, dim apartment in the rue de Tilsitt near the Etoile, and since he had finished and sent to his publisher the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, Scott was somewhat at loose ends. This was the spring he described as composed of “1000 parties and no work”—although, as Gerald recalled, the Fitzgeralds “weren’t really party people. It was just that every night they wanted things to happen. It didn’t take a party to start them.” They would drop in and out of whatever was going on—at someone’s house, in a nightclub—and then, often, they would drive out to St.-Cloud and honk their horn outside the Murphys’ gate, shouting that they were leaving France the next day on the Lusitania (a neat feat, as the ship had been sunk by German torpedoes in 1915) and had come to say good-bye. Gerald and Sara wouldn’t answer the door, but the Fitzgeralds kept coming back.

One of the reasons, Gerald believed, was that Scott was “sentimentally disturbed by Sara”—he was “in love with her. She fascinated him, her directness and frankness were something he’d never run into before in a woman.” Sara, who wasn’t attracted by Scott’s pretty-boy looks, pooh-poohed this idea. “He was in love with all women,” she told a friend many years later. “He was sort of a masher, you know, he’d try to kiss you in taxis and things like that. But what’s a little kiss between friends?” In fact, his absorption with Sara was singular: he would stare at her when they were at the dinner table, and if he felt she were paying him insufficient notice, he would demand, loudly, “Sara, look at me.” He would do the most puerile things to get her attention. Once, in a taxi with her and Zelda, he began stuffing filthy old hundred-franc banknotes into his mouth, and Sara—who used to wash coins before giving them to her children—was horrified.

He behaved just as badly with Gerald. One evening the Murphys took the Fitzgeralds and the Barrys out to a new alfresco restaurant near the Champs-Elysées that had a dance floor and a gypsy band. None of these features impressed Fitzgerald, who was uninterested in food and music and almost never danced. (When he did, Gerald recalled, he looked like a college boy of the prewar years.) They had drinks and dinner, but they rose to leave soon after. “Scott used to be very clever while sitting down,” Ellen Barry remembered, “but when he got up he’d be staggering.” Now, whether the cause was drink or sophomoric theatrics, he sank to his knees on the dance floor and clutched at Gerald’s hand, sobbing, “Don’t go! Take me with you—don’t leave me here!” Gerald withdrew his hand, furious. “This is not Princeton,” he said to Fitzgerald tartly, “and I’m not your roommate.”

Despite such rebuffs, Fitzgerald continued to be fascinated by Gerald. He asked him for literary advice—the letters from Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins urging the latter to acquire Raymond Radiguet for the Scribner’s list probably have Gerald as their inspiration—and he made Gerald repeat stories over and over: the one about seeing a factory somewhere that manufactured dolls’ voices, the one about meeting the American Indian named John Spotted Horse at Mitchell Field during the war. He would beg him to demonstrate the trick he’d learned from his father, Patrick: to stand on his hands and then walk the length of the room upside down. Scott loved it because it seemed so unlike Gerald. And he persistently tried to discover what made Gerald tick. Eyeing his friend’s exquisite European clothes, he asked, “Are you what they call a fop?” (Scott’s own sartorial expression was more in the Arrow Collar-ad mode.) No, Gerald told him. As he later explained it, “I was a dandy, which is something entirely different. . . . I liked clothes that were smart, without having any interest in fashions or styles, and I dressed just the way I wanted to, always.”

Occasionally—whenever, it seemed, Fitzgerald sensed the balance of their relationship tilting too far in the paternal direction—Fitzgerald’s fascination with Gerald might be tinged with belligerence. Once Scott tore into Gerald for the rather orotund way he sometimes spoke: “I hear a pulsing motor at the door,” he might say, and Scott would respond witheringly, “God, how that remark dates you!” He would even criticize, obliquely, Gerald’s elegance. Because he hated to carry money in his pockets (it spoiled the line of the suit), Gerald had commissioned a saddler to make him a copy of the bag used by messengers at the Bourse, or stock exchange: it was made of black pigskin and had buckled compartments for 500-franc notes and another section for larger notes. One day he was coming out of the bank and met Scott, who said rather hostilely, “I’ve been watching you, and I’ve decided you’re a masochist—you go to all that trouble with buckles and straps and little bags because you’re a masochist.” Nonsense, retorted Gerald, “I like buckles and straps.”

If there was a kind of reductive ambivalence in this exchange, there was also attraction; Fitzgerald had what amounted to a case of schoolboy hero worship for his older, suaver compatriot, colored with something more complicated that he couldn’t yet identify. No wonder that, as Scott and Zelda made plans for the summer, they inevitably found themselves drawn to the Riviera—and the Murphys—again. They took an August lease on a villa in Antibes, and Scott began to make plans for a new novel. It would be, he told H. L. Mencken, “about myself—not what I thought of myself in This Side of Paradise. Moreover it will have the most amazing form ever invented.” He didn’t tell Mencken—he may not yet have known—that it would also be about Gerald and Sara, what he thought about them, and how they affected him. When it was finally published, almost ten years later, it would be called Tender Is the Night.

With Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald—and, to a lesser extent, with the MacLeishes and John Dos Passos—a pattern was emerging in the Murphys’ friendships, a kind of familial bond in which Gerald was the father, a focus for admiration, need, jealousy, and rebellion, and Sara was both mother and Mother, both nurturer and object of desire. Their friends weren’t the only beneficiaries of this arrangement: for both Murphys, such an extended surrogate family filled a reciprocal need. They each felt remote, if not estranged, from their own families, even those family members who lived in Europe and might be presumed to share their attitudes and interests. Hoytie Wiborg, for instance, although she occasionally swooped down upon them, was too grand and socially preoccupied to be congenial, and matters had been sticky between them ever since Sara had refused to invite a houseful of Hoytie’s international society friends over from Cannes to stay. (Hoytie thereupon left in a huff with all her luggage, only to find she had missed the single train out of Antibes that day; she had to return, trunks and all, to the uncomfortable bosom of her family, where she spent the next forty-eight hours without exchanging one word with her sister and brother-in-law.)

Noel and Esther, both living in Paris, weren’t much closer. Esther had taken up with the lesbian circle that had Natalie Barney for its center and was celebrated by Djuna Barnes in her Ladies Almanack. There Esther, “noted for her Enthusiasm in things forgotten, . . . grand at History, and nothing short of magnificent at Concentration,” appears as Bounding Bess. But her relationship with “l’Amazone,” as Barney was called, was uneasy. Barney worshipped beauty in all forms and must have been somewhat put off by Esther’s gaunt figure and her squint, to say nothing of her erratic personal hygiene; and she would have found Esther’s brilliant but obsessional manner of discourse—an acquaintance likened her to “an idiot savant”—unnerving. Esther, on her side, was quick to ridicule Barney’s erotic pretentiousness: she wrote a wicked satirical portrait of l’Amazone lying “on her back in bed, clad only in a silk shirt, . . . eating” while being read to by a female companion from a tome called “Classical Erotology.” When, not surprisingly, she is overcome with indigestion, she must flagellate the poor companion to get relief. Amusing as this portrait may have been to a certain audience, it wasn’t the kind of thing Gerald or Sara found funny, and they saw Esther infrequently. Noel Murphy, who was fond of Esther, found this distancing act inexcusable, which may have partly explained her own cool feelings about Gerald. In addition, a friend suggested, she had herself formed an attachment to Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, and she felt suspicious of someone like Gerald who, she thought, might not be entirely honest with himself about his own sexuality.

It was tricky sailing in these familial waters; but as Gerald and Sara would discover, the currents that raced between themselves and their friends held just as many dangers.

By July 1925 the renovations on the Villa America were completed, and Gerald and Sara were at last able to move their family into what Gerald called “our real home.” The modest chalet had been transformed: it was now a sleek art deco variation on a Mediterranean theme. Its limestone walls had been stuccoed beige; a third story had been added; and the peaked chalet roof had been replaced by a flat Moroccan-style one that also functioned as a sundeck for luxurious and private basking. The dark little house had now been opened up with generous windows through which you could see the gardens and the glorious view; and striped awnings and yellow louvered shutters could be drawn against the midday Provençal sun.

The entrance, on the ground floor, led into a hallway off of which were a guest bedroom and bath, kitchen, pantry, and servants’ rooms, as well as a dining room with a fireplace and French doors. These opened onto a flagged terrace, on which was an enormous linden tree. On the second floor, in addition to a study and sewing room, was a drawing room that ran the entire width of the house; like the dining room, it had a fireplace and French doors, which opened onto a spacious awninged balcony. A spiral staircase led to the third floor, where the children each had a large corner bedroom, and Gerald and Sara a suite with bedrooms and dressing rooms, a bath, and another balcony.