Everybody Was So Young (53 page)

Hemingway, however, didn’t seem to have such feelings for his old friends the Murphys—or at least not for Gerald. He had kept in touch with their news since the war, and sent messages to Sara through intermediaries like MacLeish and Dos Passos, but he was personally unreachable. “I always loved to watch Gerald like a snake is fascinated by a brilliant young Gopher,” he told Dawn Powell, “and I loved Honoria and the dead kids. Sara I ©an’t even kid about.” The passage of time hadn’t changed things: “Poor Sara and Gerald,” he wrote to MacLeish after Dick Myers’s funeral, “let’s not write about it. I loved Sara and I never could stand Gerald but I did.” When he was involved in two separate plane crashes on safari in Africa in 1954 some newspapers erroneously reported him dead, and Archie MacLeish, for one, worried that Sara might have “heard of his death before she heard of his undeath.” Ultimately she found out the truth, but not because he bothered to enlighten her.

The 1950 publication of Arthur Mizener’s biography of Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, set off a revival of interest in the literature and culture of the 1920s, which focused not only on the familiar players of the time, but also on those, like Gerald and Sara Murphy, whose role was subtler and less known. Gerald seemed rather to enjoy his new role of twenties raconteur, telling Dawn Powell, who had just read Mizener’s book, about how he and Sara had visited Edith Wharton, or entertained Rudolph Valentino. Sara seemed less comfortable, more private, about such anecdotes: “I don’t consider the story worth repeating,” she said once, interrupting Gerald’s description of what really happened when Scott Fitzgerald disrupted one of their parties. “Scott was always throwing ripe figs at people.”

One person who did feel the story worth repeating was a Sneden’s Landing neighbor, Calvin Tomkins, who made the Murphys’ acquaintance when his two young daughters marched up to the door of Cheer Hall and introduced themselves. The Murphys were entranced with these gregarious children and soon counted them and their parents as friends; in fact, they adopted them, as they had adopted the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds and others. Their empathy and concern for their new young friends was total—and when the Tomkinses decided to separate some time later, “they were a great source of comfort and strength for both of us,” Tomkins remembers. Tomkins, for his part, was smitten with Sara—“I’d never met an older woman, as she seemed to me at the time, who was so attractive”—and mesmerized by Gerald’s stories. He wanted Gerald to write his own book about his Paris years, but Gerald demurred. “I have too much respect for the craft of writing to take it up as a second-rate practitioner,” he said.

But Tomkins wouldn’t give up. Eventually it was proposed that he tell the Murphys’ story of their part in the flowering of what was increasingly called the Lost Generation; armed with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a notebook he would sit by the Murphys’ fireplace while the pugs, Edward and Wookie, snored on the hearth rug and Gerald and Sara talked about the past. Sara’s contralto drawl was by now husky from too many cigarettes, but Gerald’s tenor still had the bright barking sound of a particularly well bred seal, and the two of them seemed to luxuriate in memories they had suppressed for far too long. By tacit unspoken agreement, however, two subjects remained essentially out-of-bounds—the boys’ deaths and Gerald’s pictures.

Not that these were hidden from view; they just weren’t discussed. Everyone knew about Baoth and Patrick, but no one talked about them. And similarly, most people knew, if they cared to ask, that Gerald had painted in the 1920s. But the news often came as a surprise: John Hemingway, for one, had been “absolutely shocked” by it (“he didn’t seem the type”), and Jane Pickman, who said she “thought I knew Gerald well as a person . . . never knew he had painted. He never talked about it.” And of course he had left all his pictures except for Watch and Wasp and Pear in France. After the war’s end he had asked Vladimir Orloff to gather them together and ship them to America via Archie MacLeish, who was in Paris on
UNESCO
business; but the arrangements got bungled and eventually it was Alice Lee Myers who retrieved the paintings from
UNESCO
and brought them over in September 1947. There were, as it turned out, only four canvases: the enormous Boatdeck was supposedly still in Paris at the warehouse where it had been since the twenties; Portrait had been given as a gift to Vladimir and so was not among the paintings shipped; and Turbines, Pression, and Roulement a Billes—not to mention the forgotten Laboratoire—were nowhere to be found. Gerald seemed not to care: of the paintings that did arrive, only two were framed and hung, and they were consigned to the guest suite at Sneden’s Landing (one in the bathroom). The other two canvases were rolled up and put in the attic.

And there they might have stayed had not a writer named Rudi Blesh learned about Gerald’s work and decided to include a discussion of it in his book Modern Art
USA
. “A series of semi-abstract canvases . . . complex in design . . . meticulous in craft, and . . . heroic in size” was how Blesh characterized them. Although he saw resemblances to the work of American painters like Demuth and Sheeler and “the French purists Ozenfant and Jeanneret,” Blesh considered that the Murphy paintings “strike an original note of their own, particularly in their complex design and in their wit.” Blesh’s comments—his book was published in 1956—attracted the interest of Douglas MacAgy, then curator of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, who was planning a show on neglected American artists of the twentieth century. Would Gerald agree to exhibit some of his paintings in Dallas? Somewhat surprisingly, Gerald said yes.

According to family legend, Gerald announced this development at the luncheon table with a flourish: “I’ve been discovered,” he is supposed to have said. “What does one wear?” Calvin Tomkins, who was then a nearly constant presence in the Murphys’ house, felt this was less delighted swaggering than “ironic distance.” Or perhaps it was a disguise, like the apache clothes or the fisherman’s jersey, a way of hiding what was really important. When Blesh had asked Gerald about his exhibition history he told him that he had a one-man show at Bernheim Jeune in 1935, a statement that was doubly misleading because the gallery had been Georges Bernheim (a much more “modern” dealer) and the date had been 1929. But he wasn’t indulging in conscious misrepresentation, nor making a postdadaist spoof of artistic grandiosity, as later critics suggested. This was something much more poignant. Gerald had been denying his artist self for so long that he had forgotten the details. He was even unable, when asked, to supply correct titles and dates for the paintings, or to recollect all of them. The Salon des Independents Turbines of 1924, for instance, and the 1926 Laboratoire simply slipped from his memory. Faced with these inevitable lacunae, he covered up with bravura and fake self-assurance.

In preparation for the Dallas exhibit, the paintings in the attic were taken out, unrolled, and framed, and Gerald made an effort to recover the paintings he knew he had left behind in France: Boatdeck, which had been stored at the artists’ supplier Lefebvre-Foinet in Paris, and the self-abstraction Portrait. To his and Sara’s dismay, neither could be found. Perhaps it was naive to expect that Boatdeck could have made it through the war unscathed in Paris; but the disappearance of Portrait was hard to fathom. Vladimir Orloff maintained that it had been destroyed when his hut in the hills was bombed during the war—but there were no bombardments on that part of the coast. It appeared that Vladimir was being less than truthful, and that hurt. Had he sold the painting, or bartered it during the war for food or fuel? Had he simply mislaid it? Resignedly, Gerald told Tomkins, “There’s nothing more to be done.”

MacAgy’s show, “American Genius in Review,” opened in May 1960, and included—alongside work by four other artists, Tom Benrimo, John Covert, Morgan Russell, and Morton Schamberg—five canvases by Gerald Murphy: Watch, Razor, Wasp and Pear, Doves, and Cocktail. (Bibliothèque, rolled up in a corner of the attic, wasn’t even discovered until later.) The exhibit was warmly received, and Gerald was so grateful to have his work treated seriously at long last that he donated two of the pictures, Watch and Razor, to the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts. He was even more gratified by MacAgy’s determination, which predated the exhibition itself, to write a long critical appraisal of his oeuvre for the journal Art in America.

This necessitated a series of exchanges between the two men about Gerald’s creative life in the 1920s—exchanges in which, for the first time in years, Gerald allowed himself to revisit his apprenticeship with Natalia Goncharova, his artistic method, and his aims and aesthetic. At the same time he and Sara were also recollecting, for Calvin Tomkins, their lives in Paris and Antibes and their friendships with Picasso and Léger, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It was as if they had each turned a corner and suddenly come upon their old selves; and if they couldn’t or didn’t wish to be those old selves, at least they now accepted them. Gerald even considered, very cautiously and diffidently, whether it might be possible to pick up a brush once more: “O to be young again!” he told Tomkins, surveying the very American art being produced by Rauschenberg and Rosenquist. “And yet Ucello, a mathematician, started painting at 60!” He knew that Ucello had given up painting for mathematics, “but returned to painting after a long lapse.” Why couldn’t he do the same? Possibly he was toying with this idea when he took his young grandson, Sherman Donnelly, down to his ground-floor workroom at Sneden’s Landing to show him how he’d painted the cigar box label in Cocktail, which hung on the wall. Pointing out the label’s tiny train to the boy, he told him how hard it had been to get the smokestack right: “he had to keep scraping off that plume of smoke and painting it again, but he said the beauty of oil paint was that you could keep doing that, over and over, until you had it the way you wanted.”

The following spring Gerald and Sara had news of Picasso, whom neither had seen since Sara’s nonencounter with him at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris before the war. Reinventing himself, as he often did, with a new woman, he had married Jacqueline Roque, his companion of the past few years, in March. Sara had a sudden impulse to write to him in congratulation. Her letter, though, has more of the ring of an elegy. “One remembers so well,” she mused—in French, with its useful impersonal pronoun—

(and one is sure you remember also) the beautiful days we all had together back then at Antibes—on the beach at La Garoupe and also at the Hotel du Cap—with your wife, your mother (such a dear), and Paullo—Some people even think you and we, and our three children, started the summer season in the Midi! Alas, we lost our two sons, to our great sorrow—. . . How life changes!

Please accept all our fondest memories, and all our wishes for happiness, and long life, and just being happy—which you deserve.

The next year, a mutual acquaintance was traveling through Paris and stopped to give Picasso the Murphys’ regards. “Tell Sara and Gerald that I am well,” Picasso said, “but that I’m a millionaire and I’m all alone.”

In September 1960 Life magazine published a two-part article by Ernest Hemingway, “The Dangerous Summer,” his chronicle of the bullfighting duel between the matadors Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguin—the latter the uncrowned king of Spanish bullfighters, the former the young prince vying to take the elder’s place. Gerald thought the piece “stunning.” It brought back with unexpected force his memories of his own dangerous summer with Ernest, in Pamplona in 1926. Hemingway had not been well recently: the injuries he had sustained in the two African plane crashes, along with the effects of too much alcohol and hard living, had resulted in headaches, kidney trouble, high blood pressure, mood swings, and depression. In addition he had begun to suffer from paranoid delusions that he was on the brink of financial ruin or that unidentified agents were out to kill him. Arriving in New York from Spain that autumn he went into seclusion at the apartment Mary Hemingway had taken there; he saw no one—certainly not the Murphys—and refused even to go out. By the end of November, when a return to his beloved ranch in Ketchum, Idaho, had done no good, he was hospitalized for a complete workup—and, finally, a course of electroshock therapy—at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where Gerald Murphy had brought Fred so many years ago.

Inevitably the news got into the papers, although they merely repeated the official story, that Hemingway was being treated for high blood pressure. Sara, with her infallible instinct for the bogus, and her laserlike attentiveness to those she loved, sensed something was really wrong.

Dear Ernest,—

We read—too often, in the papers—about your being in the Mayo Clinic,—mentioning various ailments, and please write me a card, saying it isn’t so,—or at least that you are all recovered—It isn’t in character for you to be ill—I want to picture you—as always—as a burly bearded young man—with a gun or on a boat—Just a line, please—I always remember old times with the greatest pleasure—and that you were helpful to me at a time when I certainly needed it.

Ten days after she wrote this, Ernest Hemingway crept downstairs at dawn to the gunroom in Ketchum, took his old double-barreled shotgun, and blew himself into oblivion.

When she heard the news, Sara was devastated. It wasn’t just the loss, so terrible and final, of someone she loved. It was his failure to keep faith with her creed that “If you just won’t admit a thing it doesn’t exist (as much),” that even “rebelling, dragging one’s feet & fighting every inch of the way, one must admit one can’t control it—one has to take it.” His action was a rebuke to her, a refutation of all she had lived by. “Sara is repairing slowly,” said Gerald to Calvin Tomkins, “but it’s been a wretched business. Ernest’s death affected her deeply. . . . He always warned us he would terminate any such situation. Possibly one has the right. I don’t know. But what happens to ‘grace under pressure?’” Grace under pressure—that elusive quality that Ernest had descried in him on the slopes at Schruns and in the ring at Pamplona—was what Hemingway had most admired about him, and most despised. In the end, somehow, it marked the sad difference between them.