All We Know: Three Lives (15 page)

In the 1950s, Edmund Wilson wrote that “Esther’s left eye is now partly closed all the time, and this gives her a perpetually waggish look—half of a jolly Irishwoman, half of an old New York clubman who is drinking with you and winking” (Private collection)

Esther was herself a figure or character in this tradition. Still, literary as it is, her story is about not only her unfinished business, but American business. The epithet
failure
as we use it is a metaphor, writes the historian Scott Sandage, “the language of business applied to the soul.” The term now “conjures such vivid pictures of lost souls that it is hard to imagine a time, before the Civil War, when the word commonly meant ‘breaking in business’—going broke.” Failure became a question of character and a condition of the American dream in the nineteenth century, Sandage argues, “when capitalism came of age and entrepreneurship became the primary model of American identity.” One effect of this shift is that what Sandage calls “the constituency of failure” expanded: “Women, workers, and African Americans were put on notice: ruin was no longer just for white businessmen.”

It is a commonplace of modern history that the emergence of women of Esther’s generation into public life was one of the major shifts of the twentieth century. In the decades before, so the story goes, white women of means, energy, and intellect who were not interested in manipulating the social order were, with few exceptions, bereft of vocation or public pastime—unless, like Alice James, they took to their bed and enjoyed a long and productive marriage to their ailments. Now a brilliant career was conceivable; much professional, literary labor could be expected of a person such as Esther. Still, there was nothing simple about this shift in expectations and possibilities. As a young woman, Esther gravitated to Edith Wharton and other women whose ambitions and achievements became less exceptional in her lifetime. Yet she was always skeptical about conventional historicist assertions about a progressive relationship between past and present—about the idea that modernity was a promising improvement over the past—and her own story both followed and flew in the face of this logic. It was partly her inability to conform to a script of “onward” inevitability that made her failure so disturbing to her friends and observers. In the same way, it is possible to understand her life of unfulfilled promise as one that refutes the tired template of biographical writing, which asserts that what was in childhood will be.

As for the gender of failure: Edmund Wilson was obsessed with the collapses of his friends of the 1920s and had an idea for a novel that would consist “of a round of visits among ‘the blasted young men’” of his youth. In his early sixties, he told two younger friends “that the twenties had in some ways been a dreadful wasteful time,” and he meditated on the “casualties” of his generation, meaning the heroic, lost quality that he saw in many of his male friends. He was thinking of various Princeton contemporaries who lost their way or destroyed themselves, including John Peale Bishop, who published several books and worked for
The Nation
, but never seemed to come into his own. Most of all, he was thinking about Scott Fitzgerald, whose place in literary history is now secure but who, during his life, was constantly outrunning ruin and humiliation. In the essay “The Crack-Up,” published in 1936, Fitzgerald wrote that he had seen his kind of breakdown everywhere: “My self-immolation was something sodden-dark,” he wrote. “It was very distinctly not modern—yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honor and industry since the war…And of those who had given up and passed on I could list a score.” In his notebooks, referring to his competition with Ernest Hemingway, he wrote, “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.” When “The Crack-Up” and two subsequent essays appeared in
Esquire
, these revelations mortified Fitzgerald’s friends, who felt that they would damage an already faltering career—and critics indeed attacked him. Wilson, however, paid tribute to him by publishing this essay and the notebooks after his death, and they are now seen as an important part of Fitzgerald’s oeuvre.

Esther’s stasis troubled Wilson, but it was Janet Flanner, Nancy Mitford, Sybille Bedford, and Dawn Powell who worried most ardently about her disappointed promise. Powell was a specialist in persistence—the will to keep writing despite financial and family trouble, insufficient recognition, and her own hard drinking—and literary failure was often her subject, as well her as quotidian fear. “After 21 years or more of writing novels steadily with inch-like progress,” she wrote in her diary in 1944, “I am about where most of my contemporaries are who wrote one play, one book, of moderate success, and basked in increasing glory, prestige and (in some cases) affluence, ever since. They took care to nurse what fame came on their one outburst—they cultivated the rich, the publicity spotlight.” In
A Time to Be Born
, set in wartime New York and populated by writers, editors, and publishers, one of Powell’s characters lies in bed comparing himself with an ex-lover, composing an anxious rhapsody on failure:

Esther was so unsettling to Powell that her death spurred an extraordinary consideration of Powell’s own need to write and of the pressure she felt to conform to expectations about femininity. After noting that it would have been nice if Esther had “confounded her friends with Documents,” leaving some written work after all, she wrote to Gerald, “But we read ourselves into those we love, and occasionally I catch a glimmer that some people don’t want to
be
the action—they really
want
to be spectator. I daresay,” she went on, “someone will sympathize with me for being obliged to write instead of breeding a big Xmas family on the range and I won’t be able to use the grave’s intercom to shout ‘No No No! I had what I wanted!’”

The grave’s intercom: Powell’s startling image of the need to defend her ambition and speak to posterity is also a way to describe the work of a biography, a genre that can let someone who no longer speaks be heard. Her cry makes the intercom real while describing it as impossible, and it suggests the continuing need for an angel at the grave—someone who listens, keeping vigil by a corpse—even as it imagines doing away with that intermediary. But Powell was not quite right about Esther, who did want to “be the action,” who loved and needed her own spectators, and wanted to instruct, amuse, distract, inform. Esther’s need for an audience was so great that she could not isolate herself to write, so it was a lifelong performance rather than a document that she produced. The performance both kept her from writing and was a form of obsessive creation; it  guaranteed her failure and immunized her from it. The performance was a way to create an intimacy with her subject and with her audience while distancing herself from both. Those who did not know Esther well, a friend wrote, could not see “the kindness that lay under that river of talk, or the loneliness, accepted and understood.”

Esther alarmed Powell, but they shared a worry about the kind of American success that Powell criticized in
A Time to Be Born
. “Amanda” in that book is based on Clare Booth Luce. Married to a media magnate, like Booth Luce, this character achieves a bestselling romantic novel, which, ludicrously, leads the press to treat her as an expert on world politics. In the spring of 1953, as Booth Luce arrived in Rome as President Eisenhower’s ambassador to Italy, Esther wrote to Sybille, “I don’t know Mrs. L. and I have always considered her a terrifying kind of go-getting American woman with everything as grist to her mill, art, politics, religion.—undertaking everything without understanding anything—and then of course her blatantly reactionary politics and the vulgar publicity given to her conversion to Catholicism…Eisenhower blundered when he made that appointment.”

Looking at the shipwrecked lives of her friends and associates, Esther herself focused on the women. She wrote about the wasted years and suicide of her friend Emily Vanderbilt Whitfield. She ruminated about the decline of Louise Bryant, another friend of the 1920s, whose bold journalism on the Russian Revolution had rivaled, but is now eclipsed by, John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
. Bryant married the wealthy diplomat William Bullitt after Reed’s early death, developed a rare and painful illness, drank to alleviate it, and ended her days in poverty in Paris.

If American women’s successes, in Esther’s view, were often either phony or fatal, talking was perhaps a way around this conundrum. But it was also, she believed, an ethical stance, crucial to democracy. In 1950 she sent Gerald a newspaper clipping headlined “Our Tongue-Tied Democracy,” a copy of a speech in which the author made a version of this argument. By talking, always talking, Esther also kept her material alive, made sure that it never lost its immediacy—or that she did not lose her access to it—as she could not have had she finished her book. Her performance was a way to keep the Sublime Governess herself alive. Not finishing her book, she was also not finishing herself, sustaining the quality of attention she had received as a precocious child: praise, wonder, and interest. It may be that she also felt an obligation to her audience, to compensate for what was not forthcoming—to live up to at least one image of herself. It may have been a way to allay the fear that people would forget her or lose interest if she disappeared for the time it took to write a book. If so, she was at least partly right (as Powell partly believed): It is unlikely that a book on Madame de Maintenon would have been remembered and discussed as much as its absence was.

In the meantime, Esther succeeded as a thinker and a friend, as an original voice that was at once seemingly endless and bound to disappear, and as one that, if it sometimes seemed to shut out conversation, nevertheless included and channeled the many other voices she read and listened to. She thought of herself as inhabiting a world of living and dead people who were worth quoting. The habit was serious, sententious, ironic. “Winter is come and gone but grief returns with the revolving year[s],” she wrote to Sybille, quoting Shelley’s “Adonais,” on the reappearance of a slightly de-ranged friend whose advent always seemed to bring “the usual disasters, inconveniences and misfortunes.” She cited not only writers and other known actors in history, but also living friends and acquaintances. “As Muriel Draper’s Negro maid, Maude, used to say of many of Muriel’s friends when she first saw them after a long absence ‘She’s disimproved, Mrs. Draper.’” Predicting de Gaulle’s victory on the eve of the French elections in 1958, Esther wrote to Edmund Wilson, “As a workman who told me he had always voted socialist but said he was going to vote for de Gaulle, told me the other day, ‘On votera pour de Gaulle par ce que la France est lasse.’” (We will vote for de Gaulle because France is exhausted.) She told Gerald that she had the impression that the French were “relieved to have someone in power who is midway between a President and King” and said she was “reminded of de Tocqueville’s remark: ‘Nous avons l’habitude de la Monarchie, mais on en a perdu le goût.’” (We are used to a monarchy, but have lost our taste for it.) Referring to the fierceness with which Sybille’s half sister guarded a late-in-life love affair, she wrote, “As Jane Bowles once said to me, ‘Life has more imagination than we have’ so we must grab shamelessly what it throws us.”