Everybody Was So Young (48 page)

When the war broke out Stella Campbell had been living in France, most recently in the Murphys’ Ferme des Orangers, unable to return to England because of the quarantine laws that would have imprisoned her beloved Pekingese, Moonbeam. In the spring of 1940 Gerald received news from her nurse-companion, Agnes Claudius, that Stella was in the Pyrenees, ill and destitute. She needed medicine but couldn’t afford it; she had to be hospitalized, but the war had made the local hospital uninhabitable. As they never failed to do when they were needed, the Murphys responded, wiring funds immediately to her and to Claudius; but it was too late. On April 9 came the news that Stella had died. Claudius used the money they had sent for medicines to buy her a burial plot in the Cimetière Urbain at Pau. Sad days indeed.

One of the Murphys’ strongest links with the Europe of their past remained Léger, who had been characteristically pragmatic and sardonic in the early days of the war, when it seemed as if the declaration were just a formality and, he complained, “Everything goes so slowly!” He urged Gerald to come back to France and start a new line of luggage: “You can do amazing things with ‘German hide’—the ‘Siegfried valise’ or something like that,” he said.

In the summer, he wrote the Murphys that he had been invited to give the Harrison lectures in art at Yale University, and thus had been granted a visa to the still neutral United States; but he was reluctant to desert his country because “a Frenchman could not do that.” Then, however, the Germans marched into Paris: with half of France under German control and the remainder “self-governed” by the accommodationist Vichy regime, Léger was desperate to get out. He had been in a German prison camp in the last war and had no desire to repeat the experience. To Gerald, a fellow artist, he painted a grim picture of the present and future: “Everything is hard, and will get harder and harder. . . . We know what it is because we’ve already seen it in all its colors—only the colors change. The grays darken—they will deepen to black, broken only by a few rays of light.” Léger saw a terrible inevitability in what had happened. “We have paid a dreadful price for our taste for Impressionism, for the unfinished, the seductive, the charming. Our bourgeois culture hated anything that was too constructed: . . . [it preferred] the inspired sketch, the adorable, lightly-sketched indication. Unfortunately for us Hitler’s tanks aren’t sketches.”

His next letter to the Murphys described an arduous journey to the south, during which one of his suitcases, containing the bulk of his travel funds, was lost. At Bordeaux there were air raids, and the city’s prominent Jews were fleeing en masse; in the unoccupied zone there were discreet signs posted in the train stations for all trains whose destination lay in the Nazi-occupied north: NO
NEGROES
, NO
JEWS
. “They’re whispering in Vichy that Hitler is going to make us a present of all the Jews in the Occupied Zone—and some people say they’re all going to be sent to a colony.” Whatever apologists for America’s neutral stance might say, the sharp-eyed Léger saw what was up; and so, through him, did the Murphys.

From Marseille, Léger cabled Gerald and Sara to ask them to wire U.S. dollars to his account so he could pay for his passage; Gerald sent them that very day. And when the Murphys heard that Jeanne Léger (who had no visa and had to stay in France) had been dispossessed by German officers occupying the Légers’ Normandy farm and Paris apartment, they gave her shelter at the Villa America, which lay in the unoccupied south. “You have always been ‘my mighty refuge’ in difficult times,” Léger wrote, rather biblically, “and your great friendship pervades every part of my life.”

These gestures cost the Murphys considerably at a time when they could ill afford it. Poor Copley Amory, their Boston Brahmin man of business, kept up a futile chorus of protest about their expenditures all through the forties, but Gerald would just sniff, “Anyone can live on his income,” and then do exactly as he pleased. Doing as Gerald pleased meant keeping up a certain style—but, perhaps more important, it meant helping friends whenever generosity dictated, or when, as in Légers case, “one’s very Life is at stake.”

Léger’s letters made the newspaper headlines real, and as the conflict in Europe accelerated from phony war to blitzkrieg with no sign that America would intervene, Gerald grew increasingly unhappy. He went to work against inaction in the best way that he knew how: at the Mark Cross Company, which had an English factory since Patrick Murphy had established it in 1892, and thus had unique ties with beleaguered Britain. During one week in 1941 (he reported to Archie MacLeish) he removed the luxury leather goods from Mark Cross’s Fifth Avenue windows and substituted photographs of where they came from: the blacked-out factory in Walsall, four miles out of Birmingham, and the air-raid shelter that protected the factory workers from German bombs. These displays excited so much comment that he came up with another idea: that of asking his fellow members of the Fifth Avenue Merchants’ Association to join him in creating a week’s worth of windows “calculated to stop the passer-by in his tracks and make him think about what he stands to lose right now” from the advance of fascism.

The Fifth Avenue merchants declined—they were afraid of offending clients who didn’t care what happened elsewhere as long as they were free to shop—but Gerald went ahead with the plan anyway. For a week Mark Cross’s six windows were each filled with five-foot-high white posters lettered with black type large enough to be read at thirty feet (shades of the Within the Quota backdrop!): On one was Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech (“Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?”); on another, Thomas Paine’s words about the times that try men’s souls; on another, Daniel Webster’s “God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to defend it”—on the others quotations from George Washington, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, all elaborating on the theme that the only way to preserve freedom at home was to defend it anywhere it was attacked.

The displays were a sensation. An average of three thousand people a day stopped to read every word; sometimes there were seventy to eighty people clustered at a window at one time, and foreign-language speakers were overheard translating them for those who couldn’t read English. It’s impossible to know whether they ultimately had the public impact Gerald was aiming for; but they did have a powerful effect on the man who put them in place. Delving into the writings of these bygone Americans had reawakened Gerald’s “sophomore predilection for reading from Ralph Waldo [Emerson] and Thoreau”; writing to Archie MacLeish to tell him all this, he closed with a quotation from Emerson: “This pale Massachusetts sky, this sandy soil and raw wind, all shall nurture us. Unlike all the world before us, our own age and land shall be classic to ourselves.” It was another answer, a decade later, to Archie’s “American Letter.” For Gerald, it was the beginning of a new direction.

The Murphys had by then moved from their New Weston penthouse, impelled not only by the nomadic custom of New Yorkers at the time, but by some deeper need to reinvent themselves—or if not themselves, their surroundings. After a year’s stay at an apartment on West 54th Street behind the new Museum of Modern Art, they installed themselves in a duplex at 131 East 66th Street, one of a pair of Doric-pedimented limestone buildings designed at the turn of the century by the eminent architect Charles Platt. Grander in scale than their most recent apartments, it was a house for people who wanted to fill their lives with other people—old friends, certainly, but also new ones like Dawn Powell and Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman, the poet and translator Jacques LeClerq, the lyricist and translator John La Touche, and various contemporaries of Honoria.

Their visitors came up against the Murphy style immediately: in the entry hall was a built-in glass utility cabinet filled with fireman’s tools, including a coiled hose and a handle that bore the label “Pull in case of emergency.” Most tenants would have covered up this eyesore with an Oriental screen or some other elegant camouflage, but the Murphys not only left it out in plain view, they treated it as if it were serious art. Léger, only half joking, called the installation the best picture in the house. And everyone remembered it, as they remembered the huge double-height living room, which, the writer Brendan Gill recalled, was “more than simply odd and amusing; some true emotion—an emotion beyond the desire to please—had gone into its creation.” It was a room for entertaining, and for display: on the vast expanse of one wall there was finally space for one of Gerald’s pictures: Watch, which Archie MacLeish had exchanged for Wasp and Pear because the former wouldn’t fit comfortably in his Alexandria house. From the living room a staircase led up to several bedrooms, including one in the back of the house which looked out on the wall of a neighboring apartment building; Dos Passos, who frequently occupied it when he came through New York, called it “the inside cabin.” Gerald, however, continued to occupy a white-painted monastic cubicle with a tiny window overlooking the living room, like a priest’s hole in a Reformation house. Although outwardly he had reassumed the role of “organizer of gaiety,” he was more and more an ascetic at the bone.

Not that he turned away from the world around him. Just before the war he had been called to serve on the Grand Jury of New York County, where the usual menu was larceny, second-degree rape, sodomy, and assorted drug-related crimes. His collector’s appetite—for people, for strange stories, for peculiar names or speech patterns—was whetted, and he wrote down in his notebook fragments of particularly evocative dialogue (“They started ransackin’ thro his pocket”; “Tell Reuben his ass belongs to me”; “he made ’em all lie down on top of me on the bed face down”; or, from the district attorney, “Don’t tell us what you said to yourself, tell us what you did”).

From the court he went on to a new enthusiasm. Always something of an autodidact—who had made lists of vocabulary words in his school notebooks at Andover, and learned everything there was to know about Napoleon during the years he was in Antibes—Gerald had begun taking classes in the fall of 1940 at the New School for Social Research, a combination of graduate and extension school staffed by notable intellects—Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Thomas Mann, among others—who had fled Nazi tyranny. One of them was Hemingway’s friend, the Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla, who had settled in New York and East Hampton, where he often saw the Murphys, and was teaching a course in art appreciation in which Dawn Powell was enrolled. Gerald made up for what he thought was time wasted in college by taking a survey course on “Ideals of Western Civilization,” which swept from Plato and St. Augustine to Machiavelli and Voltaire to Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, and William James, with stopovers at John Dewey, Jakob Burkhardt, and Oswald Spengler. During the 1940–41 academic year he also took “Introduction to Modern Politics” (the French Revolution, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler); Latin American history; “Japan and the New Order in the Far East”; a course on international politics based on a reading of quarterlies like Foreign Affairs; a study of Bach; and a course on American literature—which covered work by Hemingway, MacLeish, and Dos Passos, in addition to the more predictable Howells and James—taught by Alfred Kazin. The Bach and Kazin’s course, it seems safe to say, were a personal indulgence; the rest of Gerald’s curriculum was a kind of immersion in the context of the time that, like all Gerald’s enthusiasms, sometimes verged on the obsessional.

Such zeal made him an easy mark for cynics: according to Lillian Hellman, it set him up for one of Dorothy Parker’s rather prickly jabs. She was having dinner with the Murphys one evening after not having seen them for some time, and Hellman—who had met them on their rather shell-shocked 1937 visit to Europe—was asked also. On the way to dinner Dottie bet Hellman that she could guess “who Gerald will have discovered this time—what writer, I mean.” Parker made three guesses: Madame de Stael, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and “Philippe de Swartzberger . . . [an] Alsatian who moved to Tibet. Born 1837, died 1929, or so it’s thought. A mystic, most of whose work has been lost, but two volumes remain in Lausanne under lock and key, and Gerald invented him this afternoon.” Hellman took the bet; after dinner, unaware of this conversation, Gerald produced a slim volume along with the cognac and asked if he could read a few poems from it. Hellman and Parker looked at each other meaningfully. It was Hopkins. Or that was the story Hellman told.

In fact Gerald had become fascinated with Hopkins, a Victorian Jesuit whose dense, alliterative, highly charged language would seem the antithesis of Gerald’s cool artistic expression. He memorized whole stanzas of Hopkins’s poems by copying them out—as he had with passages from Shakespeare that he found beautiful, moving, or to the point—and taping them to his shaving mirror. “Poetry doesn’t become your own until you’ve memorized it,” he said. So, trying to make Hopkins his own, he would stand with lather on his face declaiming, “Glory be to God for dappled things” in his ringing, dramatically tuned tenor. Not just for the pleasure of the sound the lines made, but for the substance of them.

Gerald had turned his back on his Catholic upbringing; he had buried his two sons, who were baptized Catholics, in the Episcopal Church; and he was still seething over the affront of the church’s refusal to allow Scott Fitzgerald eternal rest next to the bones of his ancestors. But something in Hopkins’s faith—his belief that despite pain and tragedy “God’s grandeur” can still be discerned in nature, and that suffering and loss can be a means to greater understanding—spoke to him. David Pickman remembered how he would recite “yards and yards of‘The Wreck of the Deutschland,”’ Hopkins’s tortured elegy to five Franciscan nuns killed in a shipwreck:

Thou mastering me

God! giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living and dead

Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,

And after it almost unmade, what with dread,