Everybody Was So Young (29 page)

Things were patched up between them. As Fitzgerald rather churlishly put it in a note to Hemingway, who had returned to Paris at the end of August, “We saw the Murphys before they left, got stewed with them at their party—that is we got stewed—and I believe there was some sort of mawkish reconciliation. However they’ve grown dim to me and I don’t like them much any more.” The fact that the Murphys had lent the vacated Villa America to the Fitzgeralds for the remainder of the autumn seemed not to have abashed Fitzgerald in the slightest. He was much more interested in the news that Ernest had confided to him, and to Sara and Gerald before their departure: he and Hadley had decided to separate.

Fitzgerald said he was “depressed and . . . baffled”; on their side, Gerald and Sara were stunned. It was only weeks ago that they had written to the Hemingways as one person, literally: the letter began “Dear Hadern.” But, although the Murphys had proclaimed Hadley and Ernest, together, to be “close to what’s elemental,” with their “values hitched up to the universe,” when the crunch came it was with Ernest that their sympathies lay. Aware that Hadley had a private income but that Ernest was now living on $200 installments of his publisher’s advance, Gerald quietly deposited $400 in Hemingway’s Paris bank account. “When life gets bumpy,” he wrote to Ernest afterward, “you get through to the truth sooner if you are not hand-tied by the lack of a little money. I preferred not to ask you: so Sara said just deposit and talk about it after.” (Ernest had guessed they would do something of the sort, and even told Hadley not to worry about his finances as a result.) He and Sara both felt, Gerald went on, that “Hadley and you . . . are after two different kinds of truth in life . . . I hold in very sacred respect the thing that Hadley and you have enjoyed between you [but] your heart will never be at peace to live, work and enjoy unless you clean up and cut through.”

Gerald offered Ernest the loan of his studio at 69 rue Froidevaux, as a temporary residence, and Ernest moved in there on his return to Paris. He didn’t tell them that he was divorcing Hadley to marry Pauline, or that Hadley had made his divorce contingent on a hundred-day separation from her rival, who had returned to America. Perhaps he was afraid they would respond as his parents did when he finally announced his divorce and remarriage. His father attacked him with a harangue against “Love Pirates” and “persons who break up your home etc.,” to which Ernest rather pathetically replied, “You would be so much happier and I would too, if you could have confidence in me. . . . You could if you wanted be proud of me sometimes—not for what I do for I have not had much success in doing good—but for my work.”

Contrast Clarence Hemingway’s reaction with the note Gerald wrote Ernest after an evening the Murphys spent with him at the end of September, just before they sailed for their autumn visit to America: “We said to each other last night and we say to you now that: we love you, we believe in you and all your parts, we believe in what you’re doing, in the way you’re doing it. Anything we’ve got is yours: somehow we are your father and mother, by what we feel for you.” Sara’s contribution, sealed in the same envelope, was less reasoned but no less emphatic: “Dear gros Patron [Big Boss, her nickname for Hemingway], We certainly believe in you as Gerald says—Thank you for talking to us—and don’t think you were the only one helped by it! In the end you will probably save us all,—by refusing (among other things) to accept any second-rate things places ideas or human natures—Bless you & don’t ever budge—”

15

“How can a wise man have two countries?”

“
EVERYONE
IN
AMERICA
is discontented, unhappy, or complaining,” reported Gerald to Ernest Hemingway when the Murphys arrived in New York in 1926; but somehow he and Sara managed to insulate themselves from the prevailing angst. On a piece of hotel stationery Gerald copied out a verse from Genesis: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

They couldn’t leave their fathers and mothers totally: New Year’s was spent with Frank Wiborg, or “grang pere,” as eleven-year-old Honoria called her grandfather. In her usual phonetic French, in her diary, she also wrote, “mais ma tent n’etait pas la.” Hoytie evidently had other things to do. When Pauline Pfeiffer turned up in New York during her hundred-day separation from Ernest, Gerald and Sara took her to the senior Murphys’ for Patrick’s bootleg cocktails. Pauline’s smart mouth and short haircut shone in the Murphys’ drawing room like a good deed in a naughty world—and afterward the three of them went up to Harlem to listen to jazz in “three nigger hives,” as Pauline described them. The Murphys, she told Ernest, were “adorable.” Don Stewart, who was in between trips to the West Coast in search of film work, gave a party for the adorable Murphys, and for the Barrys and Dorothy Parker—the Algonquin Round Table’s muse and Gerald’s long-ago schoolmate at Blessed Sacrament Academy. The climax of this affair was a talk, given by Robert Benchley in his best ladies-club-lecture manner, on wildflowers, including his newest discoveries, “drovers wet lace or false goatsbeard.”

Jazz and bootleg booze and snappy conversation weren’t their only defense against gloom. For Gerald at least, there was work. Rocketing along Third Avenue on the elevated train, he saw his old city with a painter’s eye.

Picture [he wrote in his notebook]:—

(1) from 3rd Av. El down into shops, lighted windows dressed, eggs in crates, kitchen utensils, drug store,—across at sills and windows, up at roof cornices: 3 perspectives

(2) electric signs (green gold yellow) topping buildings (in silhouette) against a sky darker than signs and lighter than buildings: use lighted windows

Everywhere he went that fall in New York, pictures suggested themselves: a view down the darkened canyon of Madison Avenue toward the golden space of Madison Square with the Metropolitan Life Insurance tower lit by the afternoon sun; viaducts and derricks and cranes slicing the Manhattan skyline; the rhythmic procession of rooftop water tanks, like miniature silos or Monet grain stacks, silhouetted against the sky. Unlike the tight close-up perspective of such paintings as Watch, Razor, and the recently completed Roulement a Billes, these notebook images have a kind of cinematic architectural grandeur, as if the artist were shooting them in long focus, then zooming in. Gerald even used the word shot in describing them.

Both architecture and film had begun to play a part in his artistic thinking, as if he were looking for new ways of saying the things he wanted to say with paint. During the last year he’d finished a painting entitled Doves: “Capital, ionic, corinthian, in large scale, with deep shadows (constructive),—with one or more pigeons clustered flat on it,” was how he sketched it verbally in his notebook. It was a large (48 5/8 inches by 36 inches) canvas in muted tones of slate, silver, rose, beige, and brown, in which segmented views of a variety of classical columns and cornices were intercut with three stylized images of a pigeon—in close-up, reversed in medium range, and in long shot. Gerald hated pigeons—a friend later recalled that he recoiled from their fluttering and cooing—but by distancing himself as if with a camera’s lens he was able to make something almost beautiful out of them.

At the end of January the Murphys returned to Antibes—the children with newly acquired cowboy and Indian costumes, the better to disguise themselves for lightning raids on the kitchen. In mid-February, having hired a charming and sensible young woman named Yvonne Roussel to act as the children’s tutor, Gerald and Sara set off on a two-week tour through eastern Europe with the MacLeishes. Sara and Gerald wanted to take their friends to Moscow to see what was going on in experimental theater—they hadn’t forgotten the excitement they’d felt at the Kamerny’s Paris performances—and they thought they would be able to float the trip with the rubles the Kamerny’s director had borrowed from them four years previously. But by the time they secured their Russian visas, “the theatres had closed,” said Sara, and “the snow started to melt not to mention the season for Executions.” They consoled themselves with Sacher torte in Vienna and a trip to Berlin, where Gerald was electrified by Fritz Lang’s Gothic expressionist film Metropolis, a moving embodiment of the picture proposals he had sketched in his notebook in New York. He was also intrigued by “a new opera (half revue half film—ballet—& moving abstract scenery, stern light etc.) by a guy 27 yrs,” which sounds as if it might have been Bertholt Brecht’s first experiment in “epic theater,” Mann ist Mann.

During the course of their journey Ada and Archie confided to the Murphys their growing feeling that a return to the United States was inevitable—for all of them, possibly, and for the MacLeishes, certainly. The favorable exchange rate, which had made it so much cheaper to live in Europe than America, was evening out. Although Ada had begun to have some success in Europe—she had been asked to sing Debussy’s Melisande at the Opera Comique and was to give a concert at the Conservatoire in May, where she would sing songs by their mutual friend Richard Myers as well as by Lully and Scarlatti—she hankered after an American career. Perhaps more important, Archie’s father was in failing health and Archie felt the old pull of filial responsibility. And, said MacLeish later, “We wanted our children to be Americans.”

The Murphys disagreed. They’d heard enough grumbling from Frank Wiborg about the Frenchified upbringing of his grandchildren. They had tried to mollify him by legally changing Baoth’s name earlier that year to Baoth Wiborg, thus giving Frank a named descendant, something he desperately wanted. It was an extraordinary gesture, almost biblical; wasn’t it enough? They’d had enough lectures about responsibility. They felt that the only responsibility you should have was toward your children and your art. As Archie huffily overstated it, “They really couldn’t let anyone act as though anyone could ever have responsibilities toward anyone.” There was a quarrel—at least, there was a quarrel between Gerald and Archie, one of “these damn school girl quarrels of Gerald’s,” as Archie put it in a letter to Hemingway, “that make it so hard for me to believe in his affection.” And for a while matters between the two men were prickly.

For Gerald was still immersed in the cultural life of the Continent, and devoted, sometimes to the exclusion of personal commitments, to his work. It had become a small bone of contention between him and Sara: although she had encouraged him to go on a solo trip to Germany earlier in the year to paint, she found herself more and more carrying the burden of their complicated household alone and occasionally complained about it. But neither of them was ready to leave the freedom and ferment they had found in Europe. Gerald, for one, could feel changes coming in the artistic climate and was eager to experience them.

‘You’re right,” he wrote Hemingway. “The ballet’s as dead as the theatre. The world needs to know what it’s looking at and listening to for a while.” Not for him, anymore, the sort of project he’d proposed in his notebook around the time of Within the Quota and Boatdeck: a “ballet of metiers” in which goggled construction workers in overalls and young toughs in apache clothes dash about a set composed of girders and cranes and warehouses. Now he wanted to work in a new medium.

He had been talking with Fernand Léger about collaborating on a film. Léger had done a cinematic version of George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, featuring piano, airplane propeller, automobile horn, and other objects, in 1924, and followed it with other versions, either recut or reshot, and now he and Gerald made plans to begin shooting their project in May, in Gerald’s studio. The movie, whatever it was, was never named, and Gerald never mentioned it again after the spring of 1927. But some time during that year, a version of Ballet mécanique that Léger made, featuring the same surreal collection of moving objects used in previous versions, appears to have been filmed in a large, light, bare interior that might have been 69 rue Froidevaux.

Hemingway had moved out of the studio just in time; his divorce from Hadley had come through and he and Pauline were married on May 10, with a small luncheon afterward at Ada and Archie MacLeish’s studio flat on the rue du Bac. MacLeish and Hemingway had become very close while the Murphys were in America that fall, taking bicycle excursions, going skiing in Switzerland at Christmas, and falling into the kind of boys’ locker-room talk that Hemingway frequently seemed to call forth from his correspondents (“my testicles give me no end of trouble at these interseasonal periods,” was the kind of thing MacLeish felt obliged to confide to Hemingway in this vein). But they, too, had had a falling-out. On an autumn trip to Zaragoza, in Spain, for the feria of Santa Maria del Pilar, they had a quarrel that MacLeish described in a poem, “Cinema of a Man”:

He walks with Ernest in the streets of Saragossa

They are drunk their mouths are hard they say qué cosa

They say the cruel words they hurt each other. . . .

Although the cruel words were occasioned by Archie’s suggestion that Ernest might learn a thing or two from Joyce’s fiction, the argument had begun as a kind of literary-historical shoving match over the sexual proclivities of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, and various popes (Hemingway was in the process of becoming a Catholic in order to marry Pauline). MacLeish, Hemingway complained in a letter to Gerald and Sara, said they were “all Fairies.” He reported this exchange jokingly, but only barely—for Ernest, Gerald later recalled, “was extremely sensitive to the question of who was and who wasn’t.”

The sensitivity spilled over into his fiction. In Gerald’s studio, that autumn, he had written a story, “A Simple Enquiry,” about an officer’s homosexual come-on to his orderly. “You are quite sure that you love a girl?” asks the major in the story. “And that you are not corrupt?” “I don’t know what you mean, corrupt,” the orderly replies, evasively, although Hemingway leaves little doubt that both he and the major know what’s being spoken of. Later, the major wonders if “the little devil” lied to him; at the story’s end, the reader is wondering the same thing. A few months after he finished “A Simple Enquiry,” Hemingway began a novel about a boy and his soldier-of-fortune father; the manuscript seemed to founder on a long digression about how to recognize and deal with homosexuals (who, according to the boy’s father, make good interior decorators but lousy writers).