All We Know: Three Lives (9 page)

Esther considered Barney to be or to have a false character. Writing about Barney while citing and using the conventions of famous literary ruses, she satirized the intrigues of at least two subcultures, lesbian Paris and Catholic cloisters. She also skewered the belief in progress—the joke that is the logic of historical determinism, or “the fundamental laws of Hegelian philosophy”—and religious belief. Her reference to Jane Heap’s involvement in the Crusades was a swipe at sexual and devotional heat: Heap was the charismatic former editor, with Margaret Anderson, of
The Little Review
, the first publisher of Joyce’s
Ulysses
. She had been Anderson’s lover, then became a disciple of the mystic Gurdjieff and disseminator of his “wisdom.” Referring to the
Letters of a Portuguese Nun
—one of the exercises in ventriloquism that are the basis of the realist novel—Esther was also invoking the conversation between that emerging genre and the modern discipline of history. As the latter, with its emphasis on facts and evidence, rather than narrative, developed in relationship to the former in the eighteenth century, both emerged as separately gendered forms—history as the province of men, and fiction of women. In other words, Esther’s satire was also returning the practice of historical writing to its own history as a literary form, and one that had had a more fluid relationship to documentation than was accepted in the twentieth century. Esther’s own strangeness and novelty were partly to do with this paradoxical history of history—the fact that it was a male preserve that had worked to distinguish itself from its own past as a form “animated by rhetoric, not by evidence,” as the historian Jill Lepore has put it.

From England in 1929, Esther had written to Draper about her encounter with a pleasurably contradictory figure: “a landed proprietor of Gloucestershire, who left England to assist Lenin in establishing the soviet republic…who still is a formal communist, but who is at present disquieted by the fact that the vicar who holds the living in his gift is in favor of ‘the reservation of the sacrament’ [setting aside some portion of the communion bread and wine for the ill or others absent from the service, rather than consuming it immediately after it has been blessed] which the squire feels is directly subversive of the Establishment.” The ironies of this juxtaposition of communism and the traditional English sources of power (the Anglican church and the aristocracy) delighted Esther. “I walked across his acres with him,” she went on, “while he told me the story of the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg at which he assisted—stopping only to point out with pride a great clump of trees, planted on top of a hill to commemorate Victoria’s golden jubilee by his father, which is an object of his particular solicitude.”

Esther saw something similar in FDR, who seemed to her “the liberal…‘born out of his due time’ [here she is quoting the apostle Paul]—and his very appearance on the stage of history an anachronism.” She also likened him to an impressive seductress, a gesture that allied him with Natalie Barney. He had, she wrote in 1936,

This sort of analysis—at once historical, contemporary, and prescient; factual and literary; generous and incisive—saturates the hundreds of letters Esther sent and the several articles she published during the 1930s. In “Have You Heard About Roosevelt…?” which appeared in
Common Sens
e in 1938, she analyzed the hysterical “whispering campaign” against the president and argued, “Not since the great statesman Turgot worked to save the French monarchy from itself, has anybody worked as hard as Mr. Roosevelt has, to reform and to modify American capitalism so that it can survive.” In “The Energists,” for
Harper’s Bazaar
, she wrote about the “incalculable influence” American women social reformers had had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She told John Strachey that she regretted

Although it was not unusual for a liberal observer to be thinking about the history of reform in America during the Depression and New Deal, it was, once again, rare for such an observer to be focusing on women in that history. Esther was also unusual in her treatment of Willard as a serious political figure; following the repeal of Prohibition it was more ordinary to dismiss this temperance figure. Esther’s use of the phrase
social history
is striking, too, since it was not common among historians for several decades to come.

Writing to the editor of
Harper’s
, the great Carmel Snow, Esther proposed another essay, which she envisioned as “a sort of pendent to ‘The Energists’”; she would discuss “critics and portrayers of the American scene,” including Henry James, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, and Margaret Chanler, and several lesser-known figures who had written about Native American culture, such as Mary Austin, Gertrude Atherton, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. There is no trace of that intriguing project (whether it was not assigned or not completed is not clear), but she did review, elsewhere, the “curious and ambitious work” that was the final volume of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoirs,
Edge of Taos Desert
. Socialite, patroness of the arts, bohemian, and latter-day settler of New Mexico, Luhan had an “almost unlimited capacity for making herself ridiculous,” Esther wrote. But even as she acknowledged Luhan’s obliviousness to history, penchant for melodrama, “bitter hostility to abstract ideas and…deep fear of them,” Esther still tried to give her book a place in history and called the “derision and indignation” Luhan had “provoked…almost everything except critical.” Luhan may have been “totally incapable of realizing the distortion of her own point of view,” but Esther read her as “an ardent and intransigent romantic of the school of Rousseau…with its glorification of the man of emotion and instinct as against the thinking man.” Today, Esther noted, “socialists, fascists and anarchists, the reformers and the seekers after personal salvation, may all appeal to Rousseau’s doctrines for justification,” but “Mrs. Luhan’s…rebellion against [society], though uncompromising, was essentially personal and always remained so.”

Esther’s own curious and ambitious work in the 1930s was productive and thwarted. There were inevitable distortions in her own point of view, the only ugly example of which is the evening in 1934 when she screamed drunkenly at a Jewish fellow guest at Muriel Draper’s home, “You live on corruption!…you all ought to be extirpated!” The recorder of this event was a young Lincoln Kirstein, then Draper’s lover, who said that Draper despaired at hearing such virulence from an antifascist like Esther. Her outburst was at once plausible and out of sync. Malice of this sort was not unusual in the 1930s, even or especially among New Deal liberals, and there are two anti-Semitic remarks, about Jews taking over the Hamptons, in Esther’s teenage correspondence to Gerald—ironic, given that the Irish-Catholic influx into the Hamptons took place in her lifetime. In general, she saw her time more lucidly than most and saw others with compassion. A few years after this incident, she wrote to John Strachey that she was moved to learn that Edith Wharton had returned an honorary degree from the University of Leipzig because “as far as she could see, culture and the freedom of the human mind had been banished from the Third Reich.” Esther had seen Wharton in Paris not long before and considered her gesture “one of the very few decent things that a person who came from the upper strata of privileged society has exerted themselves to do in these last few disastrous years.”

“As the late President Harding observed,” she wrote to Draper in 1935, “‘the world is in a bad way.’” The news of the Munich Pact was so distressing that “one is forced to fall back on Talleyrand’s famous comment on Napoleon’s dull and dastardly murder of the Duc d’Enghien. ‘It is worse than a crime it is a blunder.’…I wonder if that sly and stupid man [Neville Chamberlain] has any intuition of the enormity of what he has done.” Quoting Jeremy Taylor’s
Holy Dyin
g (but shifting his words into the first-person plural), she wrote, “As one grows older I think individual destinies take an added strangeness and sadness.—‘We dream fair things all the way but our dreams prove contrary and become the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow.’”

Few events in Esther’s life lent themselves to the sort of historical imagining she favored, allowed her to engage so richly with anachronism, and brought her so close both to her own failures and to those of postbellum America as her marriage to Chester A. Arthur III, grandson of the twenty-first president of the United States. In 1935, she wrote to Draper announcing her engagement:

Here was another venture at being married to the past. It was also something like her own history repeating itself as farce. If in her first marriage she had aligned herself with a serious intellectual socialist, in her second she became involved with a character who embodied “the man of emotion and instinct as against the thinking man,” whose belief in economic justice was tied to astrology and a muddy utopianism, and whose privilege made plenty of room for indolence.

Esther liked to tell people that “the only two things accomplished by [President] Arthur in his rather uninteresting administration had been civil service reform and taking the troops out of the South.” (He also modernized the navy and was the first president to sign legislation restricting immigration.) Her boast about his ineffectual government was also a way to express her gratification at now being several steps closer to the Civil War and Reconstruction, at her newly intimate connection with this time. “It is curious to think,” noted Edmund Wilson, “that, for Esther, to have married the grandson of Arthur means almost what it would have meant for Proust to have made an alliance with the Guermantes”—a suggestion that itself blurs history and fiction. Although she signed herself “Esther Murphy” on the title page of her Madame de Maintenon manuscript, elsewhere—in print and in private, and even after her long estrangement from the president’s grandson—she was “Esther Arthur” for the rest of her life.

The first Chester Alan Arthur was “a man whose career was entirely in the Horatio Alger nineteenth century American tradition,” Esther wrote to Draper, “up from the farm to riches and the presidency.” Born in 1830, the son of a Baptist preacher, he grew up in Vermont and upstate New York, then trained as a lawyer. He was involved with several cases defending the rights of African Americans in New York, but spent most of his early career as part of the Republican Party machine in New York City and State, was a compromise candidate for vice president on the ticket with James Garfield in 1880, and became president after Garfield’s assassination in 1881. He refused to move into the White House until it was redecorated, entertained lavishly once there, and took a great deal of the presidential wine cellar with him when he left.

This valuable purloined collection was the part of his inheritance that his son, Chester  A. Arthur II, known as Alan, most treasured. Her father-in-law, Esther wrote, was “a marvelous character—very, very complete.” She loved the way his conversation ranged “from the White House of the eighties through late Victorian and Edwardian society to the Saint Petersburg of the Grand Dukes. He discusses General Grant with the same sardonic objectivity as…[he does] Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish.” He was “one of the most notable fornicators, and one of the greatest dandies…of his time,” had divorced his first wife, Chester’s mother (“Isabel Archer in ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ is her prototype”), and even at seventy-one was “utterly fascinating and entirely selfish.” He reminded Esther of her own father.

Chester A. Arthur III was similarly preoccupied with his own pleasures, but his taste ran to working-class men rather than French actresses, and his politics diverged from his father’s conservative Republicanism and toward a utopian socialism flavored with various precursors of New Age expression. Several years younger than Esther, he was handsome and self-dramatizing. In the early 1920s he had renamed himself Gavin, after a great-great-grandfather, dropped out of Columbia University, married a young dancer who had studied with Ruth St. Denis, and moved to Ireland, where he claimed to have spent four years as a member of the Irish Republican Army. Back in the United States at the end of the decade, he was commissioned by a newspaper to write about working his way around the world on a cargo ship, but after the first stage of the trip, from California to New York, he ended up in Bellevue Hospital with a strep infection, where, he wrote, he “almost died of acute arthritis” and was left “with a crippled wrist to add to my stammer and other spastic handicaps.” Returning to Europe, he appeared in Kenneth Macpherson’s 1930  film
Borderline
, an experimental melodrama about racial prejudice and sexual tension that starred Paul and Eslanda Robeson, the poet H.D., and Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), who was H.D.’s lover and Macpherson’s wife.

Throughout the 1920s, Chester also practiced a sexual tourism that he conceived of as research. He made a pilgrimage to the English socialist, pacifist, and pioneer of homosexual rights, Edward Carpenter, talked to him about Walt Whitman, and spent an exciting night in bed with him. Carpenter gave him a letter of introduction to the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who then sent him on to Magnus Hirschfeld, the leader of the fight against the criminalization of homosexuality in Germany and founder of the world’s first sexological institute. (The Institute for Sexual Science and Hirschfeld’s archive were destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.) Chester was looking for an alternative patrilineage as well as sex, but his actual lineage remained important to him.

In the early 1930s, his wife “sued him for divorce for non support, citing the fact that ‘he just wouldn’t work,’” and he moved with another man to a shack in the dunes of Oceano, on California’s central coast. There he and his trust fund became the driving forces of a small community of mystics, hermits, vegetarians, psychics, and nudists known as Dunites. He presented his vision for “a collective endeavor…that would lead the world into the Aquarian Age,” threw all-night parties, welcomed the Indian mystic Meher Baba to the community, and founded
The Dune Forum
, of which he published five issues, running photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. The idea of the place was self-sufficiency, living off the land and sea, but the group collapsed when Chester left and his patronage ended. He then attached himself to the Utopian Society, an organization that was a brief force in California politics in conjunction with Upton Sinclair’s 1934 gubernatorial campaign, during which Sinclair proposed reforms that included giving the state control of inoperative farms and factories to turn them into cooperatives. The goal of the Utopian Society was the abolition of the profit system and the education of “the masses” in modern economics, but the group was also inspired by the Masons, and membership involved pledges of fidelity and a requirement that the novitiate attend a sort of socialist morality play—“a series of pageants,” in the words of one observer, “portraying the pilgrimage of the petty bourgeoisie through capitalist to Utopian society.” At its height, the group had over half a million members.

Esther’s politics and money made her a target for Chester’s fund-raising when he arrived in New York to set up an East Coast branch of the society in September  1934. The Depression, the deaths of her parents, and the mismanagement of the Mark Cross Company, which Patrick Murphy had left in the control of a mistress, meant that Esther’s income amounted more to the habit of having money and an inability to economize than actual wealth. But her name meant something to the moneyed radicals Chester wanted on his board of directors; both Harold Loeb, heir to a Wall Street fortune and founder of the literary magazine
Broom
, now writing on economics, and Alfred Bingham, the founder and editor of
Common Sense
, told Chester that they would not lend their names to the organization unless Esther was involved. Five years into the Depression, with fascism ascendant in Europe and capitalism failing there and in the United States, some form of socialist reform seemed like a solution to many Americans—from Republicans such as Bingham, to lifelong Democrats such as Esther, to those who had previously paid no attention to politics. Upton Sinclair’s progressive candidacy and victory in the California Democratic gubernatorial primary was one sign of the times—as was the ferociousness of the campaign against him by Republicans and the Democratic establishment.

It is hard to believe that Esther found something to like in the Utopian Society’s concoction of didacticism, spectacle, and inscrutability. Yet she allowed her name to be used, sold some of her family silver to donate to the cause, and even became the secretary of the organization for a short time. Her association lasted less than a year, and to some friends she always denied her involvement. Her attraction to Chester, whose anti-intellectualism was profound—Edmund Wilson described him as “full of a goofy kind of idealism,” and Sybille Bedford saw him as a paragon of political naïveté—is at once easier and more difficult to fathom. Being the focus of his charm and libido flattered her, and his open bisexuality reassured her. They were often together—at the Dalí Ball, elsewhere around town, and in Walter Winchell’s column—in the autumn and winter of 1934–35, and once again she became engaged within a few months.

She was thirty-seven years old when she married him, in April 1935, in a ceremony performed by a justice of the peace in a small town outside of New York City. The wedding party, at the home of Gilbert and Amanda Seldes, brought together “high-class old relics of the Chester Arthur family and Administration,” Edmund Wilson observed, and “the usual Seldes cocktail crowd.” Wilson recorded the uncertain tone of the event: “The bride and groom drove up, started to get out, then got back in again and drove away—it was said vaguely that Esther had to go to a drugstore. Then they finally arrived…It was all very queer and a little depressing: I got the impression that the bride and groom did not like to be congratulated and changed the subject as soon as anybody began to do so.” Gerald and Sara had moved back to New York—he to rescue the Mark Cross Company—and the sudden death of their son Baoth, Esther’s nephew, cast one pall on the party. (He died of a mastoid infection and meningitis after “ten days of hideous suspense and five operations on the brain entailing the cruelest suffering,” Esther wrote to Muriel Draper.)

Marrying Chester, Esther seems to have been guided by some combination of blindness, desire for intimacy, and the knowledge that he would leave her alone for much of the time. “They are apparently very sensible about it,” Gerald wrote, “and realize that it is not a romantic match.” Edmund Wilson thought that they had felt pressure from friends to marry. Chester recalled that she had proposed to him, that they had “promised to be true to each other heterosexually,” and that they had both been “lonely, and…felt we could be happier with each other than we could be separately.” In the beginning there seems to have been passionate feeling on both sides. “I feel that sense of a union of a oneness with you that I never felt with John Strachey,” Esther wrote, “and knew…he never could feel for me…I miss you…in every way, emotionally mentally, physically.” When they were apart, Chester wrote, “Are you disciplining yourself…? Or are you just wasting all your marvelous energy in talk? Well, whatever it is, I just can’t help adoring you. My angel.” And he reported to Havelock Ellis a “more intimate than…anticipated” sex life. It was queer for Esther, however, when she become pregnant again, although Chester assured her that he would take complete responsibility for the child. (Again she had a miscarriage.) And it was more than a little depressing for her when he brought home rough trade. There were frequent separations, some accompanied by long, loving letters, others by his vitriolic attacks and her remorse. “I know I am a very high strung and nerve ridden woman, with arbitrary instincts only too thinly veiled by an intellectual acceptance of the idea of tolerance,” she wrote. “I have
no
illusions about how difficult and how wearing it must be to be with me day after day.”

In the summer of 1935, they left New York and drove in “an enormous zig-zag across the country, six thousand miles in all,” a trip that acquainted Esther with parts of the United States that she had never known. In New Mexico, she had what Chester called “a slight nervous breakdown,” which a doctor “wrongly diagnos[ed]…as a cerebral hemorrage.” She had no intention of moving to California, and he loathed New York City, so they agreed to spend half of each year on the other’s coast. In New York they rented an apartment on East Fifty-first Street that, in Chester words, they envisioned using “as a meeting place for radicals of all kinds.” One gathering, to help raise money for the Theatre Union, featured Clifford Odets, Elmer Rice, Irwin Shaw, and Thomas Wolfe. Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, Virgil Thomson, and Pavel Tchelichew also frequented the place. It was Esther’s salon—her own, for the first time, just at the moment when political and literary life had self-consciously merged. Archibald Mac Leish called it “the most brilliant in New York.”

They also became involved in party politics. In 1936, Chester met privately with FDR at the White House, a visit that was more personal than anything else. Esther’s respect for the president had grown and she asked Chester, “Do write me what you
felt
about the President as a human being…is he truly a historical minded man?” In Washington two years later, they both met with “various congressmen and other New Deal favorites,” including Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. They had lunch with the president at Hyde Park in the summer of 1938, and Esther, who deeply admired Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote a profile of her for
Harper’s Bazaar
. In short, they were part of the fever in the air as the New Deal was set in motion that Dawn Powell described in her novel
A Time to Be Born
: “Everywhere people were whispering to each other, ‘I’ve just got back from Washington,’ with mysterious, significant looks as if now they knew the secrets of all nations…The mere name of the city, hitherto evoking only images of cherry blossoms and grisly state banquets, now invested whoever mentioned it with curious, enviable knowledge.”