Everybody Was So Young (52 page)

In the summer of 1950 Honoria, who had been living on her own in New York since shortly after her divorce, made a trip to California where she met and fell in love with a World War II veteran, William Donnelly. They were married in November in the chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral—Donnelly was a Catholic, and Honoria, though she had never practiced the faith Anna Ryan Murphy had insisted she be baptized in, had decided to embrace it as well. This presented a difficulty for her parents. Gerald, recalled Archie MacLeish’s daughter, Mimi, “never set foot in a Catholic church as long as I knew him.” But, Honoria says, “they realized it was what I wanted to do, and that was that.” Although they delighted in her happiness, they were inevitably a bit wistful; and their feelings were compounded by their decision that same summer finally to sell the Villa America, which had languished without a buyer since the 1930s.

Although Gerald had been back to Europe on business since the war—and had been saddened to find so much of it devastated or still in the grip of postwar privation—he had resolutely avoided their former home. It was increasingly clear that they would never go back; it was time to let it go. With the war’s end the south of France was again a possibility for traveling Americans and Europeans with money; and keeping an unused property there, even only partially staffed, was a potentially fatal drain on the Murphys’ finances, already strained by the acquisition and renovation of Cheer Hall. A price tag of $40,000 was put on the villa and it wasn’t long before a purchaser materialized. But before a sale could go through, Gerald, who was in Europe on another buying trip, had to make the journey to Antibes to put everything in order.

Imagine him then, driving along the Corniche from Nice to Antibes, past all the new villas, the postwar hotels and marinas, everything that, as Vladimir has warned him, has “spoiled the Cote d’Azur.” He turns onto the Boulevard du Cap, drives past the Jardin Thuret and the Chemin des Mougins. His car goes in at the gate:

Immediately one is caught up by the compelling beauty of it [he writes to Sara]—that shining transparent sea, the high healthy palms, the mixed smell of watered parks with oleander dominating (laurier rose just at its height). The stillness and peace and the air stirred constantly by the sea. I had come with misgivings, prepared to be saddened, but no! The villa is untended in appearance, but the garden no! The palms, the large conifer, the linden, the eucalyptus (like a tower) have now eclipsed the view of the water, so that it’s a secret garden.

Somehow the ghosts—of himself, painting or “saying Mass” over his cocktail shaker, of Sara in her long filmy dresses, of Scott and Zelda and Picasso and Ernest, of the children in their sun hats and “Patrick at his little garden”—were all exorcised by his return; or not exorcised, but transfigured, so that they no longer haunted, but instead blessed him.

In June 1951 Honoria gave birth to a son, John Charles Baoth Donnelly, in Carmel, California. Gerald and Sara, who had just returned to Cheer Hall from a trip to Europe together, were ecstatic: Sara ran from room to room when she heard the news, crying out to the dogs and Theresa the cook and their neighbors the Lowndeses that Honoria had a baby. “Isn’t it strange how life goes on?” she said to Gerald when she could speak coherently. “My mother had me. I had Honoria, and now Honoria has her child.” Two years later Honoria had a second boy, William Sherman Donnelly, and Sara flew to Carmel to be with her at the birth. “How different a dawn than the one we saw in a hospital eighteen years ago,” wrote Gerald to Sara afterward. “I guess that’s how it is. Two boys went out from our family and now two other boys have come into it.”

25

“Back there where they were”

NO
ONE
WAS
QUITE
SURE
what set off the last of the “damn schoolgirl quarrels” between Gerald and Archie MacLeish, but everybody knew where it happened. MacLeish had taken the post of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Harvard University and was dividing his time between Cambridge and Uphill Farm in Conway; but he and Ada spent the winter months in the Caribbean, and the Murphys sometimes came to visit them at the Mill Reef Club in Antigua.

Either Gerald had tracked sand into the MacLeishes’ beach house and had been insulted when Archie reproved him, or Ada and Archie had been insufficiently sympathetic to a bout of flu that Sara suffered while she was visiting, or Sara and Gerald were put off by what they privately considered to be Archie’s too assiduous cultivation of the rich and socially powerful club denizens. Whatever the cause, a pall descended on their friendship. The Murphys even declined to attend the MacLeishes’ fortieth anniversary party in Conway in 1956—although both Gerald and Archie tried strenuously to deny that either was really sore at the other. Paradoxically, however, it was during this period of estrangement that MacLeish drew most heavily on Gerald and Sara for what turned out to be one of the great, and final, successes of his career.

In the days just after the war Archie had traveled to Europe and was saddened, as Gerald had been, by the pervasive destruction, its purposelessness, its capriciousness. Asked to give a guest sermon at the Congregational First Church of Christ in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1955, he explored “the question of belief in life,” using as his departure point the biblical story of Job. How was it possible, he asked the congregation, to “believe in the justice of God in a world in which the innocent perish in vast and meaningless massacres, and brutal and dishonest men foul all the lovely things?” But the sermon didn’t say all he wanted it to say, and in 1957 he began to turn the material into a verse play that was published in 1958.

J.B., as the play was called, begins in a circus tent where two unemployed actors, Mr. Zuss and Nickles, take on the respective roles of God and Satan. Nickles offers Zuss the same wager his counterpart offered God in the Bible: that when misfortune visits a man whom God has blessed with wealth and happiness, he will lose his faith, will turn on God and curse him. MacLeish’s Job, or J.B., is a rich and successful New England businessman with a loving, beautiful wife and five children, but his charmed life is ended by Zuss and Nickles’s wager: a son is killed in a military accident; another son and daughter are victims of a fatal car crash; another daughter is murdered; the youngest daughter dies in an atomic bombing; J.B.’s bank is destroyed and his fortune lost; and he is plagued with boils that cover his body.

Although the afflictions are different in number and in kind, in effect they mirror what Archie MacLeish saw happen to his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy: the loss of their children, their way of life, and, in Archie’s view, their fortune. As he said later to an interviewer, to him the Murphys “had never been ‘rich’ by American standards but they had always spent money as though they were, having a blithe contempt for money as such—a healthy conviction that money should be used for the purposes of life, the living of life, the defeat of illness and death. One has to pay for faith like that and Gerald and Sara paid without a whimper.”

Years before, on one of his ocean crossings, Gerald Murphy had copied out six pages of verses from the Book of Job, line after line of beautiful, agonizing poetry. All alone on top of one page is this verse: “Then said his wife unto him: Dost thou still retain thy integrity? Curse God and die.” That, of course, was what Sara herself had done on the day, more than twenty years ago now, when she had rushed out of St. Bartholomew’s Church with Archie at her side and had shaken her fist at heaven. And Archie had never forgotten it. In the Bible, Job’s wife has no name, and after this one expostulation, she is silent and unmentioned. So in MacLeish’s play, as he himself admitted, the character had to be “an almost total invention.”

MacLeish made her beautiful, and not only beautiful but famous, in the way great beauties of the Edwardian era were famous: “Pretty,” is how one of the characters, a Mrs. Lesure, describes her, to which another, Mrs. Botticelli responds, “Ain’t she. / Looks like somebody I’ve seen.” But another character, Mrs. Adams, clarifies: “I don’t believe you could have seen her. / Her picture possibly. Her picture was published”—just as Sara Wiborg’s picture was published, over and over, in the rotogravure and on the cover of Town and Country. When MacLeish came to give Job’s wife a name, it was almost inevitable that he called her Sarah. “There is no such name in the Book of Job”—even though, as he admitted later, “She is never called Sarah.”

MacLeish had had the parallels between Job’s miseries and the Murphys’ misfortunes in mind ever since Patrick Murphy’s death—reminiscing about it later he compared the silences at the boy’s memorial service to “the confrontation with the Voice out of the Whirlwind in the Book of Job.” But his feelings had been essentially private. Now, however, they became undeniably public: for in addition to the published text of the play, which appeared in March 1958, the Yale School of Drama put on J.B. in April for a limited run of six performances. Surprisingly, even though Yale was still a decade away from the quasi-professional hothouse it later became, these performances were reviewed by the New York Times’s drama critic, Brooks Atkinson. And Atkinson’s rave, which called J.B. “the fable of our time in verse that has the pulse and beat of modern living,” attracted the attention of the producer Alfred de Liagre, Jr., who enlisted the director Elia Kazan to bring the play to Broadway.

J.B. opened at Broadway’s
ANTA
Theater on December 11 during a newspaper strike that, it was feared, would sink the play in oblivion; as it turned out, it was a sensation, with newspaper reviewers taking to the airwaves to proclaim it “brilliant,” “the best play of this, or, perhaps, many seasons,” “one of the memorable works of the century.” There was a line around the block for tickets the day after the opening, and the play ran for a year (a healthy life span in those pre-Cats days); it won a Tony Award for best play, and it gave Archie MacLeish his third Pulitzer Prize.

Gerald and Sara didn’t attend the opening of J.B. that December; in fact they didn’t see the play until the following spring, when they took Dawn Powell with them to a performance on March 18. Powell’s reaction was derisive: “If Hamlet was your Omelette, this is your Jambalaya,” she wrote to Edmund Wilson (the pun was on his long-ago review of Archie’s The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, a review which bore the title “The Omelette of A. MacLeish”). Possibly predictably for someone whose ironic fiction was at such distance from her painful life, she thought the play pompous, facile, a trivialization of tragic possibilities. What Gerald and Sara thought is harder to discern. “Gerald said he feared Archie was now going to be King of Broadway, and was in fact on the sands of Antigua right this minute with Kazan cooking up another big cookie,” Powell told Wilson. Making allowances for Gerald’s frequent reflexive irony, this comment still has the sound of hurt and bitterness in it. If Gerald and Sara had been upset by the use Scott Fitzgerald made of them in Tender Is the Night (at least he dedicated the book to them in gratitude), what can they have thought of MacLeish’s presentation of their private agony?

For at the climax of the play is an important departure from the biblical story that may have said more than either Gerald or Sara would have wanted known about the toll that tragedy had taken on their marriage. In the Bible, Job’s nameless wife makes no further appearance after she cries out, “Curse God and die!” Presumably she suffers on at Job’s side so she can bear him the seven sons and three daughters who bless his life at the end of the story. But Sarah in the play is so outraged and bereaved by what has happened to her family and by what she sees as J.B.’s passivity in the face of suffering that she leaves her husband. Sara hadn’t left Gerald in 1936—to use one of her own expressions, it would have been unlike her to do so. But William MacLeish says that in the years after Patrick’s death “Gerald was going into himself, and no one was there for Sadie. They were moving in opposite directions. They had a very, very bad patch there.” For Sara and for Gerald—who once cautioned Honoria, when she was speculating about the marriage of a couple they knew, “You can never know what goes on between two people”—this twist in the plot of J.B. must have been both painful and invasive.

In the play’s final moments, however, J.B.’s wife returns to him, and the speech Archie wrote for her has the ring of the old songs Gerald and Sara used to sing:

Blow on the coal of the heart.

The candles in the churches are out.

The lights have gone out in the sky.

Blow on the coal of the heart

And we’ll see by and by . . .

We’ll see where we are.

We’ll know. We’ll know.

“Wait till the clouds roll by, Sally,” Gerald had written to her when they were secretly engaged—wait till the sun shines, Nelly, by and by. Archie may have given this speech to Sarah/Sara, but it was she and Gerald who had given him the answer to his question, “the question of belief in life.” Whatever they thought of J.B. as they sat in the darkness of Row C on that March day, they must have understood that.

In the fall of 1958 Richard Myers died, and at his funeral Archie MacLeish “sat between Gerald and Sara,” as he wrote to Ernest Hemingway,

whom haven’t seen for maybe two years, Gerald having written me off. And for good reason. Didn’t behave well. Numerous occasions, as you know, I haven’t. Anyway I felt very sad and far off somehow sitting between them with no relationship anymore except of Sarah’s warmth and generosity and thinking about the years when I knew Dick and everything off at the back of those years. The only friends you make really are the ones you make when you are young—or so, anyway, of my life—and you keep them but don’t keep them. I mean they are always anyway your friends because they once were but only in memory. When you see them again you go back there where they were.

Archie and Ada and Gerald and Sara did go back there: Myers’s death, and the passage of time, made them conscious of how precious their continuing friendship was to each of them. Acknowledging that he had felt “that nuisance—one’s amour propre raising its head,” and heard “the low whine of hurt feelings,” Gerald told Archie that nonetheless “I cannot see life—either past or future—without in it an enduring affection for you and Ada.”