Everybody Was So Young (22 page)

Not all their new acquaintances were as congenial as Harry Crosby. Robert McAlmon, the writer and publisher of Contact Editions (which brought out Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans as well as books by William Carlos Williams, H.D., Mina Loy, and the newcomer Ernest Hemingway), thought the Murphys “chic (which was unpardonable).” So he would try to horrify them by sprinkling his conversation with four-letter words, confiding intimate details of his sex life in mixed company, or shouting, “Where’s the wotter clozit?!” in their quai des Grands-Augustins living room.

Sometime in May 1924 the Murphys met someone else who could, on occasion, be as maladroit as McAlmon, but who seemed to them infinitely more sympathetic. Scott Fitzgerald had made a reputation in America as the author of two novels, This Side of Paradise—the book that had defined the Jazz Age—and The Beautiful and Damned. His short stories, which appeared in all the glossy magazines, had established the stereotype of the flapper. He had married Zelda Sayre, “the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia” (as he described her to Dorothy Parker), and the two of them had been painting New York City pink for the past several years. Their wading expeditions in the fountain in front of New York’s Plaza Hotel—or was it the fountain in Washington Square Park?—were already the stuff of legend, but bootleg booze and night-long parties had taken a toll both on their finances and on Fitzgerald’s creative output. So they had come to France to live more austerely while he tried to finish the novel that was to become The Great Gatsby.

In New York they had been friends of Gilbert Seldes and John Dos Passos and Esther Murphy—all of whom they invited to Christmas dinner in 1923 along with Edmund Wilson, a mentor of Fitzgerald’s from Princeton. So when they arrived in Paris to live it was natural that they should seek out Gerald and Sara, who were so well established and well connected, and so much fun besides.

The two couples, outwardly so unalike, were instantly attracted to each other. Gerald saw their relationship as a kind of mystical symbiosis: “We four communicate by our presence rather than by any means,” he told the Fitzgeralds later. “Currents race between us regardless: Scott will uncover for me values in Sara, just as Sara has known them in Zelda through her affection for Scott.” But it wasn’t entirely a friendship of equals: from the first it was also a bond between parents and children.

On their side, the Murphys found the Fitzgeralds’ youth and golden, all-American beauty irresistible. And the Fitzgeralds, who had been acting out like undisciplined, unchaperoned adolescents, were attracted by the Murphys’ unconventional maturity: their paradoxical mixture of spontaneity and settledness, and their ability to balance their family life with their role as friends. Gerald was more than eight years older than Scott, Sara thirteen years older; they belonged to a prewar generation, and with three children to the Fitzgeralds’ one they had a shining aura of parenthood that the Fitzgeralds never managed to achieve. Zelda had had strained relationships with both her parents: her admired but distant and authoritarian father, Judge Anthony Sayre, and her mother, a somewhat fey woman named Minnie Machen Sayre who had seemingly never recovered from her mother’s suicide. Scott’s childhood hadn’t been much more comfortable: his father, Edward Fitzgerald, had failed in business, and his overprotective mother, Molly, made young Scott the uneasy focus of her thwarted ambitions. As he wrote to his Scribner’s editor and confidant, Maxwell Perkins, “My father is a moron and my mother is a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry.” In some important way the Murphys began to seem like glamorous parental substitutes for the younger couple. No wonder they, like Dos Passos, began to call Gerald “Dow-dow,” the nickname that was Honoria’s equivalent of “Da-da.”

For Fitzgerald, the Murphys had an additional attraction: they seemed to be exactly the kind of cultivated, aristocratic easterner he had always worshipped. There was Sara, the millionaire’s daughter who had been presented at court, who had her engagement photograph on the cover of Town and Country, and whose very voice, like one of his own heroines’, was “full of money.” With her beautiful, original clothes—she had dresses from Poiret and Nicole Groult, and suits Gerald ordered for her from a gentleman’s tailor named O’Rossen in the Palais Royale—she was elegant without being fashionable, the same way her idol, Violet, duchess of Rutland, had been. And there was Gerald, who had been Best Dressed at Yale, a member of
DKE
and Skull and Bones, whose accent was so upper-class that he pronounced the word first as if it had an umlaut in it—and who was not only glamorous and (apparently) wealthy, but successful in a way Fitzgerald did not feel himself to be.

For although his books had propelled Fitzgerald onto the bestseller lists and into the gossip columns, they hadn’t attracted the kind of critical acclaim he longed for; and on his arrival in France he was still smarting from the failure of his play, The Vegetable, which had self-destructed six months earlier during its out-of-town tryout. “It was a colossal frost,” the chastened playwright said later. “People left their seats and walked out, people rustled their programs and talked audibly in loud, impatient whispers.” The contrast with Gerald—whose photograph was in the rotogravure section but who also got praise from Picasso and Léger, and whose only foray into the theater had been a success on both sides of the Atlantic—was not lost on him. His admiration for the older man was tinged with envy, and something darker: “When I like men I want to be like them,” he wrote. “I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I don’t want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out.”

Shortly before the Fitzgeralds met them, Gerald and Sara had fallen in love with a beautiful old house in suburban St.-Cloud that belonged to the heirs of the French composer Charles Gounod. Three stories high, built of rosy brick with pointed gables, it was surrounded by green lawns and enormous oaks; a high brick wall went around the property, but from the upper windows one could see the Eiffel Tower far away across the river.

The Gounod family had fallen on hard times and wanted to rent the house; and since the quai des Grands-Augustins was crowded and inconvenient for children, the Hotel des Reservoirs too far from Paris to work as a family headquarters, the Murphys jumped at it. St.-Cloud had a true village character, with a cobbled main street and quaint old town hall; but it was only fifteen minutes by train from the center of Paris, and there were fifty-two trains a day back and forth. It seemed like a perfect place for the children, and by keeping the Paris apartment as a pied-à-terre Gerald and Sara ensured that they wouldn’t settle down into suburban stolidity. Gerald, certainly, had some ambivalence about the materialistic drag a bourgeois existence could put on him: in his art notebook he outlined a surreal composition in which tiny people are seen “climbing seriously” onto gigantic furniture, or laboriously manipulating a “huge pencil to write notes on square feet of paper.” Whether this represented “man’s good-natured tussle with the giant material world” or “man’s unconscious slavery to his material possessions,” Gerald didn’t seem sure.

By April the Murphys had moved into the Gounod house and were able to welcome both grandfathers, Frank Wiborg and Patrick Murphy, to a luncheon and Easter egg hunt, won by Baoth, then nearly five. Blond and sturdy in his shorts, Eton collar, and hand-knit pullover, he quickly filled his arms to overflowing with brightly painted eggs, easily outpacing his more tentative three-and-a half-year-old brother, who found only one and seemed unsure of what to do with it. Honoria, with the demure maturity of her nearly six years, disregarded the eggs entirely; instead she amused herself with a tin whistle that one of the grandfathers brought. The adults watched them as if they were at a play: Frank Wiborg in the formal morning coat, high collar, and four-inhand he believed constituted proper church attire; Patrick Murphy, bald and bow-tied; Gerald and Sara, in their well-cut Sunday suits, she with her pearls looped around her throat.

There were no other family members at the party, although Hoytie was still in Paris and Fred Murphy was also living there. He had returned from the war a hero and in shattered health; and in 1920 he had married a friend of Esther’s named Noel Haskins—a willowy blond beauty who was an aspiring lieder singer. They had settled at first in New York, but Fred had been unable to strike a balance with his father that would permit him to remain actively involved with Mark Cross. There was some kind of final rupture between them about which no one would say anything directly, and he and Noel had come to France; but because of Fred’s congenital ill health they lived quietly and didn’t frequent the vernissages and manifestations in Gerald and Sara’s orbit, so the two couples saw little of one another.

On this particular Easter, however, Fred’s health, as well as what Noel called “the trouble with his father” and the lingering effects of his war experience, had brought him to a critical juncture. He was in persistent pain from the thigh that had been shattered in the attack on the Somme; although the French government awarded him the Cross of the Legion of Honor for his wartime gallantry in October 1923, neither this decoration, nor surgery that winter, alleviated his increasing distress. In addition he had been losing weight steadily and suffering from what now would be diagnosed as posttraumatic stress disorder: sleeplessness and delirium in which, Noel reported, he was “quite off his head, but with no fever.” Gerald and Sara, sensing he did not have much more time, had taken the children to see him. Honoria remembers him, barely, as a long-limbed form in a narrow white iron hospital bed, his red hair bright against the white linen pillowcase.

He had tried a cure at a spa called Divonne, but it had only minimal effect. In desperation Noel had written to Anna Murphy. Fred’s doctors, she reported,

all agree that overlooking the fact of who is to blame—(that’s not the point)—the mental unrest—(caused by the misunderstanding)—& the pains go hand in hand.

I wrote Mr. Murphy that several times but received no response.

I don’t care who is right or wrong—I only want Fred to get well.

Have I made myself plain?

If this was the reason for Patrick’s Easter visit, the reunion didn’t do much good. Although the rift between father and son may have been patched over, Fred’s condition worsened. In 1914, when Fred had been sent to the Mayo Clinic with his ulcer, Gerald had been the one to “take charge” and “step into command,” but this time he could do nothing to help his brother. On May 23, 1924, Frederic Timothy Murphy died—whether from the aftereffects of his leg wound, a perforated ulcer, or some combination of the two was never entirely clear—and Gerald was left an uneasy only son.

It was during this spring that Gerald began work on two paintings whose family iconography gives them a painfully poignant edge. He made notes for some of his paintings now, a few words and sometimes a partial sketch in a schoolboy’s camet, and checked them off when he completed them:

Picture: razor, fountain pen; etc. in large scale nature morte big match box.

In the finished painting, which measures 32 5/8 inches by 36 1/2 inches, the safety razor and pen are crossed, like heraldic quarterings, in front of a gigantic box of matches that appears to be balanced on three other boxes or cubes. Although the picture seems straightforward and accessible, it’s subtly unsettling. The perspectives in the painting are awry: the matchbox top is presented flatly, as if seen from directly above, while the section that holds the matches is done in receding perspective. The razor, as Gerald himself described it later, was shown “mechanically, in profile and in section, from three points of view at once.” Even the pen is given a yellow highlight where a shadow should be.

It’s a powerfully elegant painting, and at first glance it seems to fulfill Gerald’s ambition to “re-present . . . real objects which I admired . . . along with purely abstract forms.” But there’s something monumental and brooding about the objects in the picture that seems to hint at a deeper personal significance. There’s the pen, the instrument of office life that Gerald, and Fred, had left behind when they immigrated to France; and the razor, which Gerald had tried to patent for the Mark Cross Company. The model was even a Gillette, the kind that had beaten his own entry to the market. And there’s the box, whose label, “Three Stars Safety Matches,” could stand for the three Murphy children—Gerald’s hope for the future, and his insulation against the hurts of the past.

The other painting he began at this time provides a kind of countervision to the picture he later called Razor. It is a nearly six-and-a-half-foot-square rendering of the inside of a watch, laid against a background of even more watch dials, stems, and wheels. Gerald said he was “struck by the mystery and depth of the interior of a watch”; and this mystery is heightened by his use of color, or noncolor. Watch is painted in more than fourteen shades of gray, with the merest touches of gold and ocher to highlight and shade the watchcase.

The image has obvious modernist connections: By his own admission Gerald was trying to do with paint what Poulenc had done in his Mouvements perpétuels, which the composer had played for Gerald and Sara on their piano at home; he may also have been stimulated by seeing Man Ray’s 1924 rayograph silver print of the interior wheels of a clock’s works. And there is no denying that the enormous wheels of this much-magnified watch make a powerful futurist statement about machine-age complexity. But there are even stronger personal undertones to this painting than there are to Razor.

The picture has two likely models for its literal inspiration. One is the gold pocket watch Sara had given Gerald as a present during their engagement—until then, he told her, he had “never had anything valuable of my own”—which he liked to keep propped on a table with its mechanism showing. The other is a larger “railroad” watch specifically designed for his father’s Mark Cross Company. So the watch in the picture, however abstracted, seems to invoke Gerald’s ambivalent feelings about his family (who had never given him “anything valuable”), and about his father and his father’s business. In addition, the myriad dials and springs and levers in the painting, magnified to hundreds of times their normal size, have an overpowering quality, heightened by the placement of the enormous winding stem at the top of the canvas, where it looks like a crown. As one critic later pointed out, this placement seems to declare that time is king, or, as T. S. Eliot more memorably put it in The Waste Land, which was published in 1922 and which Gerald might easily have read, “Hurry up please its time.” In this picture, time runs out for some: on the watch’s main spring is embossed the initial “F,” which could stand for Fred.