All We Know: Three Lives (14 page)

Once the sense of promise is gone, what is left? No more potential, only sour certainty—and the troubled conviction of those nearby that this foreclosure is transmissible, their terror of duplicating your failure. All of Esther’s virtuosity and lack of tangible accomplishment intimidated and exhausted the writers who were her friends and chosen milieu, since if calling someone else a failure protects one from it, it also raises the specter of one’s own vulnerability. She was a stimulant, irritant, and warning who made it easy to reassure oneself (
I am not that
), even as it made it impossible to avoid turning anxious questions on oneself (
Am I?
) and back on her (
What should she have done? Why couldn’t she do it?
).

On November 23, 1962, she woke up late as usual. As she moved around her apartment preparing to take her habitual walk across the Seine to Galignani, the English-language bookstore on the Right Bank, she had a stroke and died instantly. She was sixty-five years old. The awkwardness of the next few days—her body had to be kept (packed in dry ice) in her home over a long weekend; a local priest insisted on blessing her body—was managed by Noel and Sybille. Her funeral was held at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery four days later. There was a funeral mass at the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés organized by Eileen Hennessy, which some friends did not attend. Mary McCarthy confided to another mourner at this service that she planned to write about Esther. She never did, although she did mention her briefly in an autobiographical essay published at the end of her life. Sybille and Noel, executors and heirs, put Esther’s affairs in order and burned various papers. After that initial work was done, Sybille found it impossible even to “put [her] foot in the rue de Lille which was still permeated with Esther.” Noel shipped her ashes to Gerald, who buried the urn in the East Hampton cemetery, next to his sons’ graves, and designed a headstone. Noel tried to interest Farrar, Straus in the Maintenon manuscript, in vain; apparently Harcourt, Brace had bowed out.

John Strachey, working in Africa, sank into “melancholy” when he got the news. “Do you know she was my oldest friend?” wrote Mercedes de Acosta, one of several who made this claim. Her intimates sent up a chorus of regret and compensatory effusions. “My darling Sybille,” wrote Allanah Harper, “I had no idea how fond of her I was until I found myself calling out Esther, Esther. I cried all the morning. One loved Esther not for her fine intelligence, but because…she was so generous, so kind. There was nothing small about her, she had the mind and vision of a magnanimous man.” Janet Flanner: “The great tragedy is that her extraordinary intelligence, wit & historical comprehensions & interpretations will be remembered only by us and in fragments: and alas never written down in the really brilliant books she could have written whose non-existence is a loss to literature of a special quality and dazzling distinction.” Dawn Powell: “I am sure that her brilliant monologues on Madame Maintenon & Louis & Pompadour are stamped on her friends’ memories far more vividly than any written works which we would have applauded but skipped. But how nice to have confounded her friends with Documents.” Nancy Mitford, writing to Evelyn Waugh, called her “a large sandy person like a bedroom cupboard packed full of information, much of it useless, all of it accurate.” She added: “I was truly very fond of her.”

Sybille Bedford, London, 2005, photographed by Luciana Arrighi (Courtesy Luciana Arrighi)

Sybille Bedford was haunted by Esther until the end of her long life. Esther had died four decades earlier, but Sybille’s anguish at what she felt to be Esther’s failure remained alive. She talked about Esther with a mixture of amazement and despair: “What’s the use of being brilliant,” she asked, “if you sit at a café all day and are considered the greatest bore because you don’t know when to stop talking and never write anything down?” She talked around what she felt she could not talk about: The romantic tangle of the first two years she and Esther spent in Europe after Mexico and New York was still so painful that at first she tried describing it as an algebraic equation. She struggled with who Esther had been and what it would mean to make her visible again in all of her thwarted complexity—not just as the brilliant, comic, picaresque figure in
Don Otavio
—including the “sordidness” of her marriages. She still considered Esther an inspiration. She still missed her. When her last book,
Quicksands
, was published in 2005, she said that she wished Esther could know that her life had turned out well.

All we know: For thirty years or more Esther Murphy carried with her the idea of a book, or books, which she performed, over and over—to audiences small and large, to people who were moved, galvanized, worried, and frustrated by the performance. “Wellll,” she would reply to almost any utterance, drawing out the word, preparing for a peroration. This preface, like “All we know,” announced that she had seized on a subject and was about to be off, that her listener was in for much more. It was a sign of promise.

Her perfect memory never failed her, but as the years went by, her ability to speak distinctively about the past sounded more like deficiency than promise, looked more like the end and a commitment to the ephemeral than like a preamble to something more permanent.

Where, or what, was the impediment? Was it the ease that was the result of brilliance that made intellectual struggle unfamiliar and a certain kind of disciplined work seem unnecessary? The ease that was the result of relative wealth that did away with economic pressure and made such work less necessary? A vision of her success, her own and others’, that she felt she could not live up to? “Finishing a book,” she wrote to Sybille, who was in the last stages of
Don Otavio
, “is as lonely as beginning it—and brings other apprehensions.” Was it fear, drunkenness, depression? All of these she carried with her, too. No single reason explains how someone so abundantly talented was unable to fulfill her ambitions.

The effortlessness: what she described as her “facile gift for verbalization,” the fact that thinking sentences and paragraphs was like drawing breath to her. The comfort, for many years, of her material circumstances: not being required to apply herself to anything she found unpleasant or difficult, including the often lonely, chaotic task of writing. The widespread perception that she was exceptional—and her own sense that she was inadequate in almost every way: “I have never had much confidence in life,” she wrote to Sybille soon after meeting her, “but I have tried and will continue to try to act as though I did. For some unknown reason that seems to be the thing to do unless one wants to succumb completely to cowardice and self pity.” Her desperate need to communicate and equally powerful need to keep intimacy at bay: “She talks constantly,” wrote Dawn Powell, “on nothing trivial, not as an exhibitionist but as a tireless defender of her own privacy.” Her dependence on alcohol: She was “ruined by Prohibition,” said Sybille, shattered like so many of her generation by the romance and necessity of forbidden alcohol. “She sat and talked and drank with John Peale Bishop and Wilson and Dorothy Parker, instead of writing.” “She would talk about her eternal Mazarin, or Madame de Pompadour, while one was leaving for Europe and the ship was steaming out,” Allanah Harper complained. “It is a form of selfishness and egomania, to speak as much as she does. Of course it is because she drinks too much and does not know how much or how long she is speaking, when she has not had four whiskies she is quite different.” But if alcohol stimulated and hindered Esther, it did not wholly account for her verbosity, which dated from childhood.

Was it a fear of failure, or an unwillingness to risk it, that made her such a prodigious disappointment to herself and others? To fail: to make the mess one almost always has to make before a book achieves the form in which it appears to be inevitable. To fail: to expose oneself by producing the approximation of the book one had imagined. Or was failure just a way of holding on to hope?

In many ways, Esther could and did face the worst about herself. “I am not impressed by most human beings’ stories about themselves,” she told Chester in 1943; “(not that I suspect them of being liars,) but because I am so aware of the torturous self-deception of which I myself am capable.” Perhaps the parallels between her own life and Maintenon’s (as in her observation that “Madame de Maintenon had more sympathy for her unmentionable father than she had for her ill-used mother”) were too difficult for her to reckon with. She herself had pronounced a damning verdict on the value of her own knowledge—and twenty years before Nancy Mitford’s description of her mind as a useless but accurate storehouse—when she told the audience of
Listen—The Women!
that a perfect memory was the enemy of thought. “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory,” Jane Austen writes in
Mansfield Park
. “There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.” Esther had used the word
failure
writing to Gerald in 1949. When Muriel Draper died in 1953, Esther wrote a bit more obliquely to Sybille about resigning herself to disappointment in herself. “For me, her irremediable absence from the world marks the end of a period of my life…still in the shadow of my youth,” when it was still possible to expect some “kind of happiness…It is very salutary—if not very joyful.” But she signed a letter the following year “ageing but hopeful.”

What is it that allows some people to rescue themselves—to make something of what they know and have lived through—while others sink? What compels one person to set it down on paper, driven by the desire to get it right in writing, and keeps another from doing so? What is it that makes us recoil from that inability and call it waste or failure?

Her depression may have been a cause, or an effect. Or perhaps her failure, like her sense of history, confounds cause and effect. Certainly her life begs the question of why talking is seen as commensurate with failure, and why and how writing and publication mean success. Perhaps what Esther had to say could not be translated to print. Or to a book: Despite or because of her effusiveness, shorter forms suited her better; in her essays and letters she is a convincing, idiosyncratic critic. It may be (to quote her review of a Marxist study of Reconstruction politics and politicians) that it was “not historically possible” for her to complete those long works. Certainly her story is part of the dominance, during the first half of the twentieth century, of print culture. Her days and her world revolved around reading. She made of her life and the lives of her friends a kind of literary object. It was her belief and others’ that accomplishment meant publication. Her orations were valued when it seemed that they would lead to a book. Still, had she not said that she was working on books—and convinced publishers that she would complete them—she might have been seen simply as that rare but known figure: salonnière, conversationalist, akin to some of the women she admired, including Margaret Fuller (in one of her incarnations) and Madame Scarron.

When Fitzgerald said, “There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures,” did he mean that there were no American tragedies, or that when Americans look at tragedy they see only failure? Esther was unable to write a biography, or to bend the genre to her uses, or the genre was incapable of expressing what she wanted to say. She failed at the genre, or it failed her. But every biography is a disappointment of some kind, premised on unbearable impasses and opacities, on the impossibility of bringing someone back to life, and on the paradoxes of representing, inhabiting, and balancing the past and the present. All of these failures make history as we know it and as we refuse to know it. Esther’s life seems to both call for a biography and suggest its futility, and to demonstrate the seductiveness of the facts and the necessity of fictions.

As she knew, failure has been a central subject of American literature from at least the mid-nineteenth century. Ahab and Bartleby and Gatsby; James’s protagonists in
The Beast in the Jungle, The Aspern Papers
, and more; Wharton’s “The Angel at the Grave,” Willa Cather’s
The Professor’s House
, Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould, Truman Capote’s
Answered Prayers
—these are only a few examples. All are characters or stories about ambition and its refusal; about grand, doomed, or nonexistent projects that their projectors could not relinquish; about a lust for knowledge that destroys oneself and others; about greatness imagined but never realized or bestowed; about literary transmission and guardianship, successful and thwarted; about ruinous relationships to a subject or literary model; about enormous nonevents and misapprehensions and self-deceptions; about elaborate but never quite realized, or even real, lives and works, which their subjects or authors-to-be—fictional, real, and somewhere in between—talk about until they collapse or the works evanesce, confounding themselves and their observers with a great, unachieved oeuvre. These are realist fictions and true accounts, but we experience many of them as horror stories. Some take up questions about aesthetics and representation; all testify to a terror about production that seems profoundly American.