All We Know: Three Lives (3 page)

By her late teens, she had developed an ironically inflated, self-deflating way of speaking about her body: “My appearance is more than usually attractive owing to the gargantuan proportions of one cheek,” she wrote Gerald. “An ulcerated tooth does not add to one’s attractions.” From the Maine resort where she and her mother stayed in the summer of 1915, she asked him to send her a set of golf clubs, the doctor having ordered exercise. She wanted equipment that was “as light in weight as possible, because although my height might impress the casual observer to the contrary, I am
not
an Amazon.” Her body and her books were in constant conversation: “I assure you I shall probably be fairly apoplectic with physical well being when I leave here,” she wrote. “I brought with me among my books a new and formidable French biography of the reign of Louis XIII, and so far have only read eight chapters…so you see down what alien byways I have wandered.” Later, some would say that Esther looked like Gerald—only less pretty. “All the masculine traits seem to be concentrated in Esther,” wrote Edmund Wilson, quoting John Dos Passos, “and the feminine ones in Gerald.”

The message about inadequacy was general in the family; it was an upbringing in which one was encouraged to think of oneself both as exceptional and as a failure. Patrick Murphy sent his sons to Yale, expected them to excel, took it for granted that they would then work for Mark Cross, and gave them executive positions when they graduated, but his dissatisfaction with them was constant. “Come, brace up,” he wrote to Gerald during his second year at Yale. “You can’t afford to let this thing [his studies] go
now
. It means
failure
.” Although Gerald never resigned his position on the board of directors of Mark Cross, he stopped working for the company for almost twenty years when he enlisted in the army in 1918. His allergy to his father and to the commercialism of American life propelled him to Europe in 1921, where he spent the next decade, partly in the South of France that he and Sara Murphy helped to popularize, painting, living a carefully arranged life of the senses, and trying to be the kind of father he had not had—funded, of course, by his father and father-in-law’s enterprises.

Fred, who was Esther’s favorite, worked for the company, then enlisted as a private in the army at age thirty-two, over a doctor’s objections, as soon as the United States entered the First World War. Commissioned as a lieutenant several months later, he fought at the battles of the Somme, Saint-Mihiel, and the Argonne Forest and served as a liaison officer between the French and American armies. He had his thigh shattered by machine-gun fire and his politics radicalized by what he saw on the battlefield, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French. He had dabbled in the theater when he was younger and in 1920 he married Esther’s close friend Noel Haskins, a Park Avenue debutante and trained lieder singer who had acted with the Provincetown Players. For a short time after the war, Fred continued to work for Mark Cross, in New York and England. But his old ailments, war injuries, shell shock, and disagreements with Patrick Murphy about how to run the company soon made work impossible, and he and Noel moved to France. He died in 1924 at age thirty-nine, from complications of his ulcer or his war wound. Six months earlier, the French government had made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his wartime work. He died without being reconciled to his father.

Just as Patrick Murphy subjected his sons to pressures that he would not have dreamed of imposing on Esther, Anna Murphy made demands on her daughter that she did not make on Fred or Gerald. She had longed for a girl (another child, Doris, had died young) and she was overjoyed when Esther was born. But her dissatisfaction was soon profound and expressive. It was always clear to Esther that she had failed her mother by being the wrong kind of girl, intellectual and ungainly. It is a truth not universally acknowledged, moreover, that a girl in possession of a mother whom she has disappointed often feels responsible for that parent. When her mother telephoned “in a bad condition…so depressed,” saying “she was always alone,” Esther proposed leaving school to keep her company. When Fred was dying, Esther stayed in New York with Anna Murphy, instead of sailing to France to be with him, and she cancelled plans to go to France later that summer to comfort Noel.

Esther’s education was often a site of family conflict. Although her father was a worldly, Irish-Catholic atheist, her mother was apparently a pious Protestant who nevertheless felt it her duty to raise her children in her husband’s tradition. Esther was first enrolled at the Sacred Heart, on East Fifty-fourth Street, the international school for the daughters of well-to-do Catholics, where Mercedes de Acosta was one of her classmates. But when she tested the nuns with the “paradox of the stone”—the series of questions about God’s omnipotence that asks if it is possible for God to create a stone that is too heavy for God to lift—her teachers deemed the line of inquiry blasphemous, told her to sit in the corridor, and notified her parents. Thirty years later, Esther wrote that while she could not imagine

Esther and her mother (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

Yet, as she noted, she was strongly marked by her Catholic education. Mary McCarthy, writing about her own—and writing when she had become a close friend of Esther’s—observed that “if you are born and brought up a Catholic, you have absorbed a good deal of world history and the history of ideas before you are twelve, and it is like learning a language early, the effect is indelible.” But, she added,

This training also taught, “together with much that proved to be practical, a conception of something prior to and beyond utility…an idea of sheer wastefulness that is always shocking to non-Catholics.” Both that sense of wider engagement with the world—“knowing the past of a foreign country in such detail that it becomes one’s own”—and the devotion to a beautiful uselessness were legacies that Esther carried.

Patrick Murphy responded to the nuns’ punishment of his daughter by enrolling her in the Brearley School, founded in 1884 to give upper-class New York girls a secular education comparable to what was then available to their brothers. Esther was at Brearley from 1910 to 1913, made lifelong friends, and was in the company of young women who went on to Bryn Mawr. At the Swiss finishing school that Anna Murphy then insisted on, Esther was too studious to fit in and was devastated by the social aggression of the other girls. Back in New York during the Great War, at a school just outside the city, she participated in every social, athletic, and dramatic activity. Her father then offered to send her to college, but her experience in Switzerland and sense of obligation to her mother deterred her. Instead of enrolling her at Bryn Mawr, he arranged for her to follow the Harvard curriculum at home.

To Patrick Murphy, who was inclined to retreat to his study to read Macaulay’s
History of England
and Pascal’s
Pensées
, Esther’s intellectual achievements were one of his own successes, helping to fulfill his idea of himself as something more than a triumphant entrepreneur. For Esther, immersion in history and politics was a way to be close to him, to find some purchase in the miasma of depression and fear of withdrawn favor that was the family climate. But reading was not an achievement for her; it was life. And it had as much to do with imagining a relationship to the women who had preceded her as it did with connecting to and escaping from her family.

By age nineteen, Esther was already writing the kind of criticism that she pursued for the rest of her life: self-conscious, dense with historical allusion, attuned to the politics of gender and to conditions of publication. “‘The American Woman’ whom Edith Wharton pursues with unusual malevolence under the guise of Undine Spragg and Lily Bart was also Mr. Phillips’ pet preoccupation,” she observed to Gerald of David Graham Phillips, after she “cast an astigmatic eye over the two volumes” of his popular novel
Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise
, in the spring of 1917. “He seriously believed that she [‘the American woman’] was the cancer at the heart of modern civilization,” she wrote. “Every one of his novels is on the theme and they all are written with the venom of a 16th century Calvinist Pamphleteer writing upon the Pope. It was in a kind of blind savage anger against our fictional tradition of the deification of woman and sentimental falsehood about life, that he wrote his story,” she noted. “And yet the story itself is one of the most wildly unreal, fantastic and romantically false novels ever written. In vain did he try to destroy the Hearst Magazine conception of life: his effort was doomed to be published in a Hearst Magazine!” The interest in American popular culture, the surprising historical analogy, the fascination with genre, the delight in contradiction, the use of Wharton as a touchstone—all were characteristic of Esther’s style.

She was working her ideas out in letters, not yet publishing. Her correspondence often exceeded the space allotted to it, covering twenty pages, then filling the margins of the final page. In 1916, writing to Gerald, she noted, “I will limit myself to normal note-paper this time and normal length.” What followed was another missive that mingled history; contemporary politics (America’s stalled involvement in the Great War); sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dogma, texts, and events; and scholarly and sexual desire—all of it powered by quotation. “One somehow realizes,” she wrote, “how entirely blind all the course of human events is from a contemporary view point. It’s all such a tangle that one feels that the sixteenth century’s attempts to probe the whole matter with horoscopes and astrologers, was not…transparently ridiculous.” In the midst of this letter, Esther recorded what seems to be her first encounter with Madame de Maintenon and quoted Maintenon’s comment on her rise to power as the intimate of Louis XIV:

In this extraordinary testimony of her own, Esther grappled with her contemporary viewpoint and with the emotional and intellectual uses to which she could put the past, confronting the idea of greatness and the constraints of her body. It was, in effect, an attempt to marry history. Here is her vigorous sense of herself as an instrument of excess, a continuing affront to the normal. Here are the wide range of reference and the habit of letting others speak for her. Here she was, trading the present for past, her life for another’s, the facts for a personal fiction. Here was history as both an escape and a dead end, since the choices she imagined were impossible (marrying someone who had lived almost two centuries earlier), mortal (early death from smallpox), or self-abnegating (celibacy). Here she was, too, fantasizing about proximity to Madame de Maintenon. Here, despite the vivid fantasy and inflation, was a curiously banality (“no other destiny will be quite as suitable. Everything would have been so completely satisfactory”), when she wrote about sexual and political union. And here was the mention of money, which dogged her relationship with Gerald: “You are my nearest substitute for the Duc de Bourgogne,” she concluded, “and I long to see you…Thank you so much for the [bank] deposit. It is
too
generous. My constitution is at last really quite robust.”

But if history was a place for her imagination, it was also the stuff of political analysis, six months before the United States declared war on Germany, as President Wilson vacillated about the role the country would play in the European conflict. Under Patrick Murphy’s influence, Esther grew up steeped in Democratic Party politics, while most of her peers—the gilded youth of the age—were rich and Republican, the men landing on Wall Street, the women landing husbands. Twenty years later, in the Hamptons for the weekend with the artist Betty Parsons, Esther ran into some of them, “both men and women…pretty drunk and cursing Roosevelt and praying that Landon would be elected. Very typical and pretty dreary. They were all cordiality itself to me,” she wrote, “made a terrific fuss over me, and accused me of ‘deserting my old friends.’ I did not tell them how true it was and with what a light heart I had done it.” She quoted Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”: “Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned / The soul doubtless is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.” And she noted, “Hatred of Roosevelt is their theme song…It seems incredible that I once partly belonged to it [that milieu].” Partly: By the time she was eighteen, Esther knew that her politics was not theirs. Yet partly belonging made her privy to the hatred of Wilson and slanders against his second wife—Edith Galt Wilson, whom she knew and admired—that were part of the theme song of the Republican milieu in the teens and early twenties. It meant being invited to parties like the one on Long Island, a few months before the Armistice, at which a prominent lawyer told her that he had “incontrovertible” proof of Mrs. Wilson’s treason, an assertion, she recalled, “accepted by everybody at the dinner table.”

Partly belonging made it possible to understand history as a lesson about failure rather than triumph. In October 1920, after the Senate had twice defeated the Treaty of Versailles,
The New York Times
published Esther’s letter to the editor comparing Wilson’s work for the League of Nations to the stand of François Guizot, the nineteenth-century French statesman and historian, against a xenophobic foreign policy. Published as “The President’s Appeal,” her letter described how, as prime minister of France in the 1840s, Guizot had refused to be pushed to war with England. Like Wilson, Guizot had been accused by opponents “of seeking to sacrifice the ind[e]pendence of his country to foreign domination.” Wilson’s support of the League of Nations, she wrote, his “greatest contribution to the welfare of his own country and the world,” was subjecting him similarly “to the most willful distortion and misinterpretation which partisanship or personal spite could dictate.” But even if his opponents prevailed, “posterity will judge him not by what he failed to achieve but by the end to which he aspired.” The next month, in November 1920, Esther voted in her first presidential election—the first in which American women could participate—for the losing Democratic ticket of James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt, against Warren G. Harding and his vision of a return to “normalcy.” “Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,” Harding said in his inaugural address. Nothing was more inimical to Esther’s way of thinking than Harding’s incoherently progressive nostalgia. Twenty years later, campaigning for FDR, she referred to Harding’s coinage of “normalcy” as his invention of “a nonexistent word for a nonexistent situation.”

Esther, full-length, during a “monotonous sojourn” in Southampton, 1923 (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

In her early twenties, she was still living alone with her mother much of the time, in Manhattan during the year and enduring “rather monotonous sojourn[s]” on Long Island during the summer. Unease had supplanted her childhood confidence: She knew that what had been charming to some in a child—her intellect and articulateness—was bizarre in a woman of marriageable age. But the unorthodox alliances of two of her Park Avenue friends soon gave her the kind of companionship she had otherwise known mostly with her father. In the spring of 1921 her parents allowed her to sail to Europe unchaperoned with a friend from Brearley, Margaret Grosvenor Hutchins, whose father was a banker and chairman of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. In London they stayed with Fred and Noel. In Paris they saw “nothing but other Americans.” Back home Hutchins pursued the poet John Peale Bishop, Princeton-educated but middle-class and from the South. At the Bishops’ wedding, their friend Alice (Amanda) Hall met the young critic Gilbert Seldes, who was Jewish and had grown up on a utopian farming community in New Jersey. Esther met Edmund Wilson, Bishop’s college friend. She did not fall in love, but it was, she wrote him, “one of the best things that have ever happened to me.” Over the next year, Wilson found himself “more and more devoted” to her. Their shared absorption in ideas, mutual admiration, and compatible lack of social skills made it a lasting and “unclouded” friendship.

She towered over him—he was just over five feet six inches—but as interlocutors they were a perfect fit. In the early 1920s he was working for
Vanity Fair
and writing for
The New Republic
. She struggled with a “‘Victorian’ article” for
The New Republic
, an assignment he had helped her get. This essay seems never to have been published, but she sent Wilson essay-length letters about her reading and his writing, long reports to someone who cared about books as much as she did. The quality she told him she appreciated in Shaw’s preface to
St. Joan
—“the sheer intellectual passion which pervades the whole thing”—saturated her correspondence, which continued to be dense with citation. She urged him to be her guest in Southampton for a weekend: “We could discuss an infinitude of subjects and make ‘many philosophical researches of every description of the advantage of human nature at large,—’ as Lady Hester Stanhope told the Duke of Wellington she had done.” Thanking him for lunch, she quoted
Love’s Labour’s Lost
: “the only complaint that I can make is that…you listen to me with so much patience, that I ‘draw out the thread of my verbosity finer [than] the staple of my argument,’—and talk instead of listening to you as much as I should like to.” This verbosity was shared: A colleague described Wilson holding forth didactically, sometimes pausing in such a way that you would think it an invitation to respond, then breaking “ruthlessly in at the exact spot where he had left off.” Esther was one of the few people whose compulsive talking matched his and to whom he listened. There were times, Wilson said, when she made it hard for even him to get a word in edgewise.

In the 1950s, they met in Paris after an absence of several years. “We fell on each other’s neck,” he wrote in his diary.

She also explained to him that the rue Gît-le-Coeur, which she called “‘the most beautiful street name in Paris,’ commemorated the grave, not of Louis XIV’s mistress, as had once been supposed, but merely of his favorite chef.” On another visit to Paris, Wilson contrasted the discreet “quietness and flatness and…conversational rhythm” he had fallen into recently in England with the markedly American way that Esther and he were “soon walking up and down the room and interrupting and shouting at one another.” Thinking back over her life, he was sensitive to how she had been shaped by “her gawky girlhood, her dubious social position as an Irish girl in New York,” and he wrote that he felt with her “the special characteristics of our race of the twenties: habit of leisure and at least enough money…freedom to travel and read, to indulge and exhaust curiosities, completely uninhibited talks, resistance to challenge of the right to play, to the idea of growing old, settling down to a steady maturity.” It was a clear statement of how they had differed from their parents’ generation. After one of these reunions in the 1950s, Esther was filled with affection for him, but amused by his new embrace of his own history: “I had always known that he was a Protestant—but he apparently had not and the discovery gives him the greatest pleasure. It is easy to see that he is descended from Cotton Mather and a long line of Protestant Divines.”