Everybody Was So Young (34 page)

The spirit of forced gaiety began to tell on Parker, however, and when the Hemingways and Dos Passoses left after Christmas she went with them, returning to New York for some rest and relaxation. But Sara and Gerald and the children were never far from her thoughts: when she met the MacLeishes at a “big arty rout” thrown by Hoytie Wiborg, it was the Murphys they talked about. In the meantime Bob Benchley, probably under the influence of her lengthy and tearstained account of the Murphys’ tribulations (and possibly also motivated by guilt over the huissier contretemps), had sent Sara a check for $320. She promptly sent it back with the words “an impossible sort of cheque” scrawled across the face of it. “Don’t be mad at us,” she implored. “Can’t you—with this horrid bit of paper, buy a nightclub evening,—a grandfather clock—a Saks bill or an ocean voyage? . . .. Any time you feel you could come over & join us—(with a stout cane & a pr of galoshes) a lot of people at least 3—or 6—would give you a warm welcome—& we could have great fun in the eternal snows.”

Although Patrick had had a slight relapse just before Christmas, by February, under a cure regime that emphasized nutrition, rest, and exposure to fresh air and sunlight, he seemed to be slowly improving. He would sit for hours in his “cure chair” on the balcony, bundled up in steamer rug, coat, cap, and muffler, and work at etching, which had become a passion, or talk with Sara or Miss Roussel or Gerald. Honoria had been pronounced healthy and was allowed to resume normal activities around Christmas, and in February she went with Gerald, Sara, and Baoth on a flying visit to Antibes so that Gerald could appear before the Nice Correctional Court. Gerald cabled the outcome to Benchley: “
DEUX
CENTS
FRANCS
D’
AMENDE
[
TWO
HUNDRED
FRANCS
FINE]
AND
LAST
WALTZ
OF
THE
EVENING
WITH
THE
JUDGE
SARA
LOOKED
LOVELY
IN
BLACK
LACE
BAOTH
WAS
MY
MATRON
OF
HONOR
. . . WE
MISS
YOU
STILL
,
MURPHYS
.”

Later in the spring Gerald and Sara went briefly to Paris to revisit old friends and old haunts, but it was a disturbing trip. During their anxious fall and winter they had heard next to nothing from the Fitzgeralds, who had been undergoing difficulties of their own. Zelda was volatile, Scott persistently drunk and seemingly unable to work. A trip to North Africa, meant as a restorative, had done nothing for either of them. And they had returned to Paris in a kind of armed truce, interrupted every now and then by Scott’s disparagement of Zelda’s obsession with ballet, and Zelda’s suspicions (fueled by a canard put about by the expatriate litterateur Robert McAlmon) that Scott was a closeted homosexual who was having an affair with Ernest Hemingway.

Although Gerald and Sara knew nothing of these developments, they could see at once that something was very wrong. One day they made arrangements to take Zelda to an art exhibit, and arrived at the Fitzgeralds’ apartment to find her, Scott, and John Peale Bishop standing on the pavement outside. The three of them had been having lunch, and inexplicably Zelda had been overtaken by some kind of paranoid frenzy. Now, although she barely spoke to the Murphys, which was most unlike her, she turned on Scott and Bishop. “Were you talking about me?” she demanded suspiciously. Gerald was stunned: how could they have been talking about her without her knowledge? “I mean, she was sitting right there with them!”

Deeply concerned for Zelda, they returned to Switzerland; it wasn’t until later that they heard she had had a breakdown on April 23, and had been admitted to the Malmaison Clinic outside of Paris. By the time they learned all this, Zelda had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and had come to Switzerland herself, to Dr. Oscar Forel’s asylum at Prangins, on the shores of Lake Geneva.

Meanwhile the Murphys, desperate to move from the gloomy confines of the Palace Hotel, had leased a large chalet, called La Bruyère, on the winding road from Montana to Vermala. It was a tall, half-timbered stucco building, four stories high, perched on a steep incline with a spectacular view of the forested slopes above, the Rhone valley below, and the cold majesty of Mont Blanc in the distance. Patrick, who preferred the fragrant Aleppo pines and mimosa and blue seascapes of his beloved Antibes, pronounced it “melancholly skenery”; but Honoria quite liked it, reporting cheerfully to Yvonne Roussel, who had returned to Antibes, that “there is no more snow here, some little flowers are coming out.”

The renewing force of springtime was elusive, however. Just as the Murphys were preparing to move into their new house, Sara was summoned to New York: Frank Wiborg had come down with pneumonia and was not expected to recover. She took Baoth with her, but they were too late. Frank died on May 12, and Sara and Baoth stayed only long enough to go to the funeral and hear the will read before returning to Switzerland. Rather surprisingly, Frank had named Gerald as coexecutor of his estate along with Hoytie.

When Sara and Baoth sailed back to Europe they brought Dorothy Parker with them to help the family get settled in La Bruyère. In addition, they had a new project, one that sounds as if it had been cooked up over Christmas with the Dos Passoses and Hemingways: they took over a house in the village and turned it into “Harry’s Bar,” naming it after the famous watering hole at the Ritz in Paris. It was a real bar, with mirrors and rattan furniture and red-and-white-striped awnings and printed matchbooks and tiny morocco-bound pocket diaries as giveaways, and Sara had hired a first-rate chef and got a Munich dance band to come and liven up the Alpine evenings. Sometimes, at the end of a set, she and Gerald would sit down at the piano and sing. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in Montana-Vermala, Honoria noted proudly: “My father holds a bar now called ‘Harry’s Bar,’ and he has great success.” There were family visits from Hoytie and Frank Wiborg’s Cincinnati sister Mary (Aunt Mame). In July, Robert Benchley came to see them—Sara had tried to send him passage money, but he refused it—and, fortified by Cinzanos at Harry’s Bar, Dottie drove down to Sierre to meet him at the train. Because of the potency of strong liquor at high altitudes, she had really tried to stay on the wagon in Montana; but the presence of her old Algonquin crony proved too much for her, and the two of them stayed up late drinking at Harry’s Bar almost every night. Then they’d lurch home through the silent streets, with Benchley bellowing “With the Crimson in Triumph Flashing” in case some lonely tubercular Harvard men needed bucking up—and the next day they’d repair to Harry’s for a dose of hair of the dog.

Patrick was steadily improving, as Honoria breathlessly reported to Yvonne Roussel: “I have a great surprise to tell you, guess what? Patrick gets up now! he goes and plays in the fields (for there are beautiful fields in front of our house) and he goes out for walks. . . . In about a month we are going on a trip with Patrick, we are going to a place called bushy [Bussy], near Lausane it is just on the lake Leman, so you can imagine how well he is to take trips now! Patrick eats at table now too with us. We are all very happy that he is well.”

While not recovered, he was indeed well enough for Sara and Gerald to get away together, with Benchley and Parker, for what was meant to be a real holiday—to Venice for coffee at Florian’s and the Titians in the Accademia, and trips to the Lido and the Murano glass factories. From Venice they went on to Munich, where they saw a film that electrified Sara and Gerald, Der Blaue Engel, featuring the then unknown Marlene Dietrich in her elegant drag. Gerald spent the rest of their visit scouring the record shops for her recordings; and Parker bought a dachshund puppy whom she named Robinson, as in Swiss Family Robinson—a nod to Gerald and Sara and the children, whom she had dubbed “The Swiss Family Murphy.”

Benchley went home from Munich to the United States, but toward the end of August another Villa America regular reappeared: Scott Fitzgerald, who was living in Geneva in order to visit Zelda at Dr. Forel’s asylum in Prangins, midway between Geneva and Lausanne. (Poor little Scottie was in Paris, where she was being partially looked after by Richard and Alice Lee Myers.) Scott was devastated by Zelda’s descent into madness and by the wreck it had made of his family; and he was struggling with his defensiveness over the accusations Zelda made to Dr. Forel—that he drank too much, that he was a closeted homosexual who could never really love her. Sara and Gerald shared his grief—they loved him and Zelda, after all, and mourned the good times they had all had together—but they were incredulous when, self-centered as always and maudlin after a drink or two, he turned to Sara and said, “I don’t suppose you have ever known despair.” Parker gave him a tongue-lashing, but Sara for once was speechless.

When Don and Bea Stewart came to visit soon after they sensed (as Don rather portentously put it) that “even though Patrick was ‘improving,’ . . . Death seemed to be waiting mockingly in the cold clear air outside [for] the two people who had been our models for the Happy Life.” You had to look hard to see this: on the surface Sara and Gerald had made real efforts to create the same kind of enchanted realm in Switzerland that they had achieved in Antibes. La Bruyère was exquisitely decorated and pulsing with Murphy life, with fresh flowers and the latest phonograph records; as he had done in Antibes, Gerald rented current films—features like La machine infernale as well as newsreels and short subjects—to show on Saturday nights; and underfoot there was the usual menagerie of pets. In addition to the Murphys’ Scottie and Sealyhams, there was a rabbit, and Dottie Parker’s dogs Timothy and Robinson, and Honoria’s canary, Dicky—who narrowly survived having his cage dropped when Dottie, somewhat the worse for drink, insisted on cleaning it. She had also bought Gerald a parrot named Cocotte (French for “trollop”), of whom he was terrified, although he carried her around on his shoulder everywhere. When they went to Paris Gerald and Sara had brought back a monkey, named Mistigris, “and two enormous turtles and a male parrot for Cocotte,” reported Honoria to Miss Roussel.

But La Bruyère was almost a parody of Villa America, right down to its cuckoo-clock kitsch; and the presence of all the friends from their old life only made them realize how thoroughly that life was lost. After a year in the anxious and extreme climate of their Magic Mountain, Gerald was disintegrating. “The Black Service”—his old nemesis, what Dorothy Parker called “that morbid, turned-in thing”—had made its reappearance, and with it a barely controllable volatility. One day he became enraged over some misbehavior of Baoth’s, which was compounded by the boy’s adolescent feistiness: unable to control his temper, he slapped Baoth with a slipper. Dottie Parker and he had a blazing row afterward: he should not have hit the boy, she shouted; he told her to mind her own business, whereupon she announced her intention of leaving. They patched things up, but it just wasn’t the same.

There was another row, this time with Sara, over a trip Gerald had to make to New York in September. Of course you’ll cable the MacLeishes that you’re coming, said Sara—but Gerald refused. They fought for an hour. Why wouldn’t he want to see them? what was the matter with him? Finally she burst out, “I think you are afraid to have people like you.” But Gerald was not to be moved. In the end Dottie Parker cabled Benchley of Gerald’s arrival and Benchley met him at the dock, to Gerald’s intense discomfort. He managed to avoid everyone else. “Gerald is here,” wrote Archie (who of course had found out) to Scott Fitzgerald, “but no one has seen him. Skulks like a shadow. Why I can’t think. He likes us all. But he has deflated the world so flat he can’t breathe in it.”

Gerald himself tried to explain this withdrawal some months later in a letter to Archie. Typically elegant, extremely careful, it was the closest thing to a confession he ever wrote.

After all these years—and in one sudden year—I find myself pried away from life itself by the very things that make up my life. . . . I awaken to find that I have apparently never had one real relationship or one full experience. It would seem that all my time has been spent in bargaining with life or attempting to buy it off. . . . [I]t is never quite possible to believe that all that one does is unreal, or that one is never oneself for a moment—and that the residue of this must needs be a sense of unreality, all-pervading. I don’t think I hoped to beat life. Possibly I thought that mine was one way of living it, among many thousand ways.

My terms with life have been simple: I have refused to meet it on the grounds of my own defects, for the reason that I have bitterly resented those defects since I was fifteen years of age. (I once tried to tell you that I didn’t believe in taking life at its own tragical value if it could be avoided. It was this I apparently meant.) You of course cannot have known that not for one waking hour of my life since I was fifteen have I been entirely free of the feeling of these defects. In the vaults of the Morgan Museum on Madison Avenue I was shown once when I was twenty the manuscript of Samson Agonistes, and while I was listening to a recital of its cost I read “O worst imprisonment! To be the dungeon of thyself.” I knew what it meant, then. Eight years of school and college, after my too willing distortion of myself into the likeness of popularity and success, I was left with little confidence in the shell that I had inhabited as another person.

And so I have never felt that there was a place in life as it is lived for what I have to give of myself. I have doubtless ended by trying, instead, to give of my life as I lived it.

My subsequent life has been a process of concealment of the personal realities,—at which I have been all too adept. . . . The effect on my heart has been evident. It is now a faulty “instrument de précision” working with accuracy in the direction of error. It makes a poor companion, I assure you.