All We Know: Three Lives (11 page)

After Chester injured his foot in basic training (a long drama about his medical discharge ensued), they returned to New York, in the spring of 1943. That summer, he enlisted in the Merchant Marine. He spent much of the rest of the war on a supply ship in the Mediterranean. Esther moved into an apartment at the Gladstone Hotel, on East Fifty-second Street, her home for the next several years, and regained her New York friends. She held court at the Gladstone’s bar, which had a reputation as a hangout for gay women; at the nightclub and restaurant Tony’s; at ‘21’; and at the Stork Club. She spent time with the actress June Walker, who also lived at the Gladstone, and she continued to be a resource for others—summarizing the history and significance of the French Third Republic for the Time-Life journalist Rosalind Constable, for example. She became a regular panelist on the ABC radio program
Listen—The Women!
, a nationally broadcast weekly discussion of contemporary issues before a live audience that was moderated by Janet Flanner and featured Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, and the popular novelist Fanny Hurst, among other guests. When they debated the role of memory, Esther’s contribution was uncharacteristically brief: “A perfect memory is the enemy of thought,” she said. Early in 1944, writing to a friend in California, she described herself as “very busy writing a book, which I expect will be published next year and doing some Red Cross work.” A few months later she signed a contract with Harcourt Brace for her biography of Madame de Pompadour.

In debt to a number of friends and businesses, she sold more of her belongings at auction and waited for dividends from Mark Cross and for news about the company’s sale or recapitalization. She assured Chester that if she died before she turned fifty-five (when her shares became hers), he would be her beneficiary, along with Gerald, and that if she did not, she would then “make a will leaving everything to you.” She ended this letter, sent from Martha’s Vineyard in the autumn of 1945, “It is terrible to think that I won’t see you for another four months—but never never doubt how much I love you.” Placating him this way was all very ambivalent, as well as fearful, since she was now living with the young European refugee and aspiring writer Sybille Bedford, with whom she had fallen in love.

As for her history repeating itself as farce in the person of Chester Arthur: From the late 1940s to his death in 1973, Chester’s life was an amalgam of countercultural gestures and attempts at self-promotion. He counseled inmates at the state prison in Carson City, Nevada, and at San Quentin and appeared on
The $64,000 Question
. At San Quentin he met Alfred Kinsey (there studying male sexual behavior), and befriended Neal Cassady (there doing time). Through Cassady, he became close to Allen Ginsberg. (“Gavin Arthur smiled at me angry / for disbelieving Visionary sun / & Paradise we both believe in,” wrote Ginsberg in the mid-1960s.) He sold newspapers on San Francisco street corners and made a reputation for himself as a gray eminence of gay bohemia. He appeared in
The Bed
, a short film by the gay poet and experimental filmmaker James Broughton; was a friend of the Zen philosopher Alan Watts; became an astrologer; selected the date for the first Human Be-in; and never stopped bragging about his grandfather. His nutty New Year’s forecasts appeared in Herb Caen’s popular column in the San Francisco
Chronicle
: “Gavin Arthur predicts Martians will make contact with earthlings this year!”

Writing to Janet Flanner in 1967, he described himself as a creature free of financial concerns: “I have no bank account, no savings or insurance, no car to be attached. Yet I have everything. I go where I please & am lovingly taken care of by hippies.” He protested too much: Along with a penchant for self-display he had a love of propriety and power. If in some contexts he styled himself a sexual activist, in his disputes with Esther he described “the social institution of marriage” as having “to do with something permanent rather than something ephemeral,” and he was as obsessed with money as only someone who had grown up with wealth and lost it could be. He felt victimized because Esther and he had relied largely on his inheritance while they were married and he had never benefited from what he imagined were the Mark Cross millions. He saw himself as entitled to her money during their long separation; even after her death he demanded compensation from Gerald. In the 1950s, completing his college degree, he submitted a paper to one course that was, in fact, a thirty-eight-page letter to his lawyer in which he argued that his financial history with Esther “may prove an important legal case involving the new balance in the relationship of the sexes brought about by the new freedom and equality of women and their disproportionate share of the national wealth.”

In 1966, he published
The Circle of Sex
, a book that combined his interests in sexology and astrology. Here he proposed a new vocabulary for sexual behavior—
“Homogenic
,
ambigenic
, and
heterogenic”
being “better in every way than
homosexual
,
bisexual
, and
heterosexual
”—and he outlined a twelve-point division of gender and sexual types along a continuum that corresponded to the clock, the seasons, and the phases of the zodiac. Twelve o’clock represented the “
paterfamilias
, completely heterogenic” type—“the ideal to which every male human must pretend to belong, whether he does or not.” Six o’clock was the “female heterogenic category.” In between, among others: the eight-o’clock type, which included “many business women,” who were “very smart, very feminine in dress and toiletry, belonging definitely, in the alchemical sense, to the earth and water elements.” He used friends and acquaintances as examples, outraging his first wife with his reference to her affairs with women, and classing Olivia Wyndham and Alice De Lamar—both unnamed but clearly described—in the “10 O’Clock, Homogenic, Late Morning” category, also termed the “Dyke Type.”

Esther, who was no longer alive to object when this book was published, appears in several forms. He described the visit he and she (“my brilliant second wife”) made to Havelock Ellis and quoted her conversation with Ellis. He invoked her without naming her, by calling Madame de Montespan, Madame de Maintenon, and Madame de Pompadour instances of the “Five O’clock hyper-heterosexual female category” or “Courtesan” type. And he denounced her, in a thinly veiled, oddly prudish description of “a selfish Nine O’clock woman who has allowed her girlfriend [meaning Sybille Bedford] to poison her against her husband, to denounce him as a ‘homo’ and hold him up to the scorn of society, and who yet keeps his name for the prestige attached to it.” There was something queer about this homosexual liberationist calling on the clichés of “predatory” lesbian behavior. “As Mrs. Arthur,” he had written to Esther as early as 1947, “you have dragged a famous American name in the mud—by your open & ostentations liaison with an adventuress.” The idea of Sybille Bedford using Esther for her money or social position is itself farcical. “I realized that this young woman,” he wrote to his lawyer, “must be exerting an almost Svengali influence over her.” And he invoked the notorious French play by Édouard Bourdet about a woman who leaves her husband for a woman—the Broadway production of which was shut down in 1927. “Memories of the play called ‘The Captive’ disturbed me greatly,” he wrote.

While Esther’s split with John Strachey had been painful, her separation from Chester Arthur was a strain and an embarrassment. But even ashamed of her former intimacy with him and upset by his periodic eruptions in her life, she could not help but see him as ridiculous. At the moment of their long-deferred divorce, in 1961, he was at once trying to extract money from her and attempting to marry a wealthy seventy-one-year-old woman. “What a pair they are,” she wrote to Sybille. “Rather like characters in a very second rate Restoration comedy—Lady Maskwell and Mr. Plyant—who are both mutually deceived in each other when their manias collide.”

Chester ended his days “in a crummy downtown apartment-turned-museum,” its walls covered “with autographed photos of…Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Walt Whitman, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Robinson Jeffers, Alfred Kinsey, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Wallace, Aneurin Bevan, [and] Ernest Hemingway”—many of whom were Esther’s friends. But his sense of his own historical importance did her at least one good turn. After his father’s death, she had helped him organize President Arthur’s private papers for donation to the Library of Congress. When she moved back to New York from California, she left behind hundreds of her own letters, some dating from the 1920s, a family photo album, miscellaneous papers, and many books. This material survived the Second World War, the occupation of the house in Oceano by the Coast Guard, and the almost three decades that followed. When Chester died, in 1973, much of it was donated, along with his archive, to the Library of Congress, where it now resides as part of the “Arthur Family Papers.”

If Esther saw others as literary characters, she often struck others as one herself, and she figures in the fiction of the first half of the twentieth century more than once. In
This Circle of Flesh
, by the novelist and academic Lloyd Morris, Sheila Conway is “a strange girl” who “‘substituted erudition for experience’” and proffered an “irresistible, if somewhat exhausting, hospitality.”

This roman à clef did capture some of Esther’s aura, even though Morris, whose own wish was to provoke desire in men, was also using her for this (somewhat exhausting) display of misogyny.

Her young friend Max Ewing put her in two stories, in one of which, an homage to Ronald Firbank, she was “Miss Bodicea Hangover, an appallingly erudite heiress…[who] declaimed excitedly, her voice resounding…On and on she went, Meditation after Expostulation, her memory never failing.” But Ewing’s close and constant observation of Esther, from the mid-1920s until his early death in 1935, suggests that the facts of her life were also broader than what was plausible for any fiction. “A very melodramatic incident occurred” as Esther prepared to sail to London to marry John Strachey, he reported, describing what sounds like a bit of business from a Marx Brothers movie:

“They are now,” he concluded, “achieving almost international importance.”

Of all the writers who made use of Esther, Sybille Bedford best captured her shyness and gregariousness, skepticism and naïveté, gallantry and didacticism; the barrage of fact and fancy that made up her train of thought; the hauteur and slanginess of her diction; the fog of distraction about her; the physical authority and unease. Writing to Sybille in 1953, Martha Gellhorn congratulated the younger writer on her first book,
The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey
(now published as
A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico
), an account of the time Esther and Sybille spent in Mexico after the Second World War. The figure called “E.,” wrote Gellhorn, “is one of the finest characters you will ever invent.” As Sybille insisted, however, E. was not invented; she was a faithful representation of Esther. “The wonderful thing is I never put words in her mouth,” she said. “She
was
like that.” In
A Visit to Don Otavio
, Esther is genuinely eccentric and is human—herself. In life, she was the impetus for the book and the reason it almost never got written.

Sybille Bedford had fled France in May 1940, just ahead of the German occupation. Born in Germany, she had grown up in Italy, England, and France. The most stable part of her peripatetic upbringing was in Sanary-sur-Mer, a town in the South of France where a number of English writers, including Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence, had settled in the 1920s. Sybille’s mother and step-father ended up there as well, and Thomas Mann and other exiles from the Third Reich later emigrated to the town. Befriended by Aldous and Maria Huxley, Sybille also became close to Mann’s wild, brilliant children, Klaus and Erika. In the late 1930s, she learned that she was on a Gestapo list—she was part Jewish and, living outside of Germany, had been “free to indulge in being an early anti-fascist”—so when the Germans broke through the Maginot Line, she and her friend Allanah Harper crossed the border to Italy. One of the Bright Young Things in London in the 1920s, Harper had moved to France in the 1930s and founded
Échanges
, a literary review in which she presented the work of contemporary English and French writers in translation. Sybille and she spent six anxious days in Genoa until the Huxleys, in California since 1937, secured them passage to the United States. Traveling on the last American ship out of Italy, it took them twenty-one days to reach the United States. They thought they would never see Europe again.

On her first day in New York, Sybille met Klaus Mann by pure chance and was enlisted to drive his father’s car, beloved dog, and two African American servants from Princeton to Los Angeles, to which the elder Mann was moving. This trip made it possible for Sybille to reunite with the Huxleys, but she and Harper soon returned to New York. There she lived a precarious exile’s existence, teaching English to other refugees, doing occasional translations for the art critic Clement Greenberg, keeping house for herself and Harper, worrying constantly about friends and relations in Europe and England. She had produced drafts of several novels, but nothing she or others yet deemed worth publishing. She spent time with Greenberg, Mary McCarthy, and others in “the
Partisan Review
crowd”; with Margaret Marshall, the literary editor of
The Nation
; with Jane Bowles, with whom Harper was having an affair; with Cyril Connolly’s American wife, Jean, whom she had known in Sanary, and her sister Anne, with whom she had a passionate affair; and with members of what she called the “Trotskyite and Peggy Guggenheim milieu.”

Allanah Harper had written to Esther in Oceano when she and Sybille reached California in 1940, but Esther had been too ashamed of her life with Chester to reply. Harper had moved in the same circles as Olivia Wyndham in London in the twenties, and it was probably Wyndham who reconnected them after Esther returned to New York in 1943. A stream of historical references flowed from Esther when she joined Harper and Sybille Bedford at their apartment for cocktails one stormy winter night. In the elevator on their way out to dinner, she produced a discourse on the “Marseillaise” and the composer Lully. She took them to Tony’s for the best meal they had had in years—the first of many evenings beyond her means to which she invited them. Harper went home after dinner, and Esther and Sybille adjourned to the Stork Club, two blocks from the Gladstone Hotel, where they talked for hours, until even the nightclub closed. Sybille, in her mid-thirties, was bowled over. Esther wrote, “I have never in my life felt about anyone the way I feel about you. I ask you to believe this.” It was the kind of avowal she had made before, but it was the first time she had made it to a woman who was her intellectual equal, who admired her, and who wanted to be her lover. After they parted one evening, she sent Sybille a note describing her “elation, at the thought of your existence.” As she was wont to do, she also made Sybille a character in her past, spinning a story of having met her some fourteen years earlier in France. She had been in Le Vigan, “that lost town in the Cévennes mountains,” she wrote, sitting in a café “reading Albert Sorel’s
L’Europe et la Revolution Française
,” waiting for her car to be repaired, when a young Sybille appeared. With this story she also transplanted them both into a more distant past: The Cévennes were a stronghold of Protestant resistance during the religious wars that are part of Madame de Maintenon’s story.

Falling in love with Sybille meant knowing much less than usual: “I know nothing,” Esther ended this letter, “except that I love you and miss you much, much more than I can express or that I could have imagined missing anyone ever again. So I shall see you Monday night. Otherwise I shall send bailiffs after you so be careful.” For Sybille, Esther—“super-naturally erudite”—was a way back to a seriousness she had been missing. Guilty about sitting out the war in New York, she also experienced Esther as a connection to Europe. And Esther’s “goodness of heart, her lovingness” moved Sybille, who thought of her as having “the mind of [the] Founding Fathers combined with a fragile and tender nature.” She was also baffled by her: Esther was shabby, even unkempt, yet she commanded respect wherever they went. The Stork Club operated on a strict hierarchy, was one of the first nightclubs to use celebrities to attract an exclusive public, and worked out its seating (whom one could see and the extent to which one could be seen) almost scientifically. But in clothes covered with cigarette burns—and wearing slacks and an overcoat, not a dress or gown—Esther was shown to a prime table on the floor that first night. “She just swept into the Stork Club in old flannels and said to the maitre d’, ‘I
must
warn you that Mrs. Bedford does
not
like ice in her highballs.’” Esther was incapacitated by much of daily life and had “no aptitude whatsoever” for domesticity, but she was also fearless. When Sybille moved into her room at the Gladstone, Esther would call down and order breakfast for them both, not caring what the hotel management thought of her having a woman there.

Still, Esther—older, published, and at home in New York—put herself in Sybille’s hands. She was frightened before the broadcasts of
Listen—The Women!
(Janet Flanner had returned to Europe and the journalist Dorothy Thompson was the new host), so Sybille accompanied her to these performances, trying to calm her nerves. The biography of Madame de Pompadour was due in eighteen months; Esther was a mass of knowledge about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France; and Sybille did not doubt that Esther would complete the book in time. But she also saw that Esther would need support. “I thought I could make her work,” she recalled. Despite or because of the time Sybille had spent in her late adolescence tending her mother—another brilliant talker and “writer manqué”—through a catastrophic addiction to morphine, she believed that she could help Esther stop drinking.

When the war in Europe ended, Allanah Harper returned to France. Her letters were full of warnings about the shortages of food and every other necessity, and about the gulf between those who had lived under occupation and those who had left. Booking passage across the Atlantic was close to impossible, since servicemen had priority; getting train reservations across the United States was difficult for the same reason. But Sybille wanted to travel before she returned to Europe, and Esther wanted to stay with her and not rejoin Chester in California, so when two tickets to Mexico City became available, they took them. On the eve of their departure for Mexico, in the summer of 1946, Edmund Wilson and Dorothy Parker joined them for farewell cocktails. When Wilson looked down at his glass and saw something floating in it, Sybille grabbed the glasses and retreated to the kitchen. She had been thinning the bourbon with tea, and a few tea leaves had made their way into the bottle. They left New York on the St. Louis Express of the Great Eastern and Missouri Railroad. They arrived in Mexico City knowing no one, knowing little of the country or language, carrying little money and “much too much luggage”: too many clothes and “the bottom of [their] bags…falling out with books”; Esther also carried the notes for her study of Pompadour.

Esther is the first dedicatee and main character of
A Visit to Don Otavio
, and her influence permeates Sybille’s book. She is a foil for the narrator’s observations about travel in general and this journey in particular. “She hated to travel—God, she hated to travel,” Sybille said half a century later. (Bouncing around Mexico was not like sitting on an ocean liner on the Atlantic, or in a café in Paris.) “She said, ‘It took years out of my life.’” Esther’s body was a problem: She was too tall for the spaces allotted her on buses, carts, and other vehicles; she got stuck in the trapdoors and secret passages of a clandestine convent built during the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico; she became “eloquent on the various phenomena of heat prostration.” Her refusals of tourism have a life of their own in
Don Otavio
: “‘
I will not go to this volcano
,’ said E. in the manner of Edmund  Burke addressing the House of Commons.” And: “In my native country I successfully avoided seeing the Grand Canyon; I avoided the Painted Desert, my nurse did not manage to drag me to Niagara.” Her characteristic gesture, in the face of every unnerving landscape, uncomfortable conveyance, or quotidian need, was to bury her head in
Mansfield Park
. “I laugh when I think of her in Mexico,” said Sybille. “It was very, very funny—this tall Don Quixote figure, with a head like Jefferson, bowing to everybody and saying,
‘Viva Mexico,’
with an American accent. It’s the only Spanish she learned.”

Sybille Bedford’s style is her own—philosophical, hilarious, at once lush and elliptical, viscerally precise—but Esther also inhabits the texture of her prose. In Puebla, she writes, Esther “stalked past it all, the way Dr Johnson must have stalked about the Hebrides.” The book’s meditations on the vertigo of historical consciousness also owe something to Esther: “In the spaces of the Plaza Mayor, walking over the grave of a pyramid, one is assailed by infinity, seized at the throat by an awful sense of the past stretching and stretching backwards through tunnels of time…One is in a legend, one is walking in Troy.” So does its mixture of fact and fiction; Sybille acknowledged that she did invent parts of it. (Esther’s cousin “Anthony” is one fabrication.) The reading the two did in preparation for their trip also bears Esther’s stamp. It included the diary of Fanny Inglis, Madame Calderón de la Barca, an American who married the first Spanish ambassador to Mexico in the 1830s, “became governess to one of the various children of Queen Isabella…and…was created, like that other royal governess, Madame de Maintenon, a marchioness.”