by Amanda Vaill
On one such evening the Murphys prevailed on the Fitzgeralds not to drive back to Valescure, but to stay the night at the Hotel du Cap. In the small hours of the morning Gerald and Sara were awakened by a furious knocking on the door of their room. Outside stood Scott, clutching a candle and clammy with fright. “Zelda’s sick,” he said; and, as Sara and Gerald followed him to the Fitzgeralds’ room, he added, “I don’t think she did it on purpose.” When she found out that Zelda had swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills, Sara tried to get her to drink olive oil to counteract the drugs. But Zelda protested, irrationally, “Sara . . . don’t make me drink that, please. If you drink too much oil you turn into a Jew.” So Sara and Gerald made her walk up and down until dawn to keep her awake. In the morning the Fitzgeralds went back to Valescure, and the incident was never mentioned again.
That summer there were forest fires in the hills behind the coast, and the air was perfumed with the smell of burning eucalyptus, the blue sky hazed over with smoke. But there was more than eucalyptus in the air. This sleepy stretch of coastline was beginning to be discovered. The owner of the Château de la Garoupe, where the Murphys had first stayed with the Porters in 1922, would come over to the Hôtel du Cap and ask Antoine Sella, “Who are all these people I don’t know?” Rudolph Valentino, the film star whose slinky, slightly sinister sexuality had made him a heartthrob on three continents, came to stay in a château in Juan-les-Pins with his wife, Natasha Rambova (née, somewhat less exotically, Winifred Hudnut). Noel Murphy and John Dos Passos and Donald Ogden Stewart all came in Noel’s old six-cylinder Renault on their way back from Pamplona, in Spain, where they had gone to see the running of the bulls at the Fiesta of San Fermin with their friend Ernest Hemingway. The nearsighted Stewart had two cracked ribs from a tussle with the yearling bull Hemingway had dared him to fight: he’d had to take his glasses off and he hadn’t seen the bull come at him. But Gerald and Sara soon nursed him back to health with daily trips to La Garoupe and delicious Provençal meals eaten on the shady porch of the Hôtel du Cap, and all of them went to Nice to the bookshop where the expatriate literary magazine the trans-atlantic was on sale with a “Work in Progress by Donald Ogden Stewart” advertised on the cover. The Picassos came back to Juan-les-Pins, and the de Beaumonts, and the Barrys and the prince and princess de Faucigny-Lucinge returned to their villas in Cannes. (Johnny Lucinge, as everybody called him, claimed that the Murphys invented the Riviera in the summer.)
That was when, Gerald said, “we saw what was happening down there—the crowd of people that was coming in—and realized that if we wanted to live simply we would have to hit out and get our own villa.” On the slope above Golfe Juan, between two dirt tracks called the Chemin de Mougins and the Chemin des Nielles, they found a 7,600-square-meter piece of property with a modest turn-of-the-century villa called the Chalêt des Nielles. The villa was nothing much, fourteen rather small rooms under a peaked chalet roof, but there were some tumbledown outbuildings on the property, including an old donkey stable, which could be made into a studio, and the view from the hillside was breathtaking: You could see Juan-les-Pins to the north, and the Cap to the south, and the blueberry-colored Mediterranean stretched away to the west toward the Iles de Lérins and Cannes. On a clear day, with the mistral blowing, the dark cones of the Esterel Massif behind Cannes looked close enough to touch. And the garden was spectacular: the current owner, a French army officer who had spent his career as a military attaché in the Middle East, was an enthusiastic amateur gardener, and he had brought back numerous exotic specimens from his travels. There were lemon trees, date palms, and genuine cedars of Lebanon; pepper trees, persimmons, and whiteleaved Arabian maples; Pittosporum coriacaeum, desert holly, eucalyptus, and Punica granatum; olive and fig trees, mimosa and heliotrope, and a huge linden tree that shaded the terrace near the house.
“I think,” Gerald had written to Sara during their courtship, “we shall always enjoy most the things we plan to do of our own accord—and together, even among others, but in our own way.” Now they had found the “little farm” they had longed for since before their marriage, the plot of land on which they could nurture their family and become, at last, the people they had always planned to be, doing things in their own way. It took only a minute’s hesitation before they agreed to pay 350,000 francs—about a quarter of Sara’s yearly income—to buy it. On the deed, which they signed in September, Gerald listed his profession as “artiste peintre.” By the time they left Antibes to go back to Paris, they had engaged a pair of Ohio architects named Hale Walker and Harold Heller to remodel the house. And they had given it a name. They called it Villa America.
13
“Our real home”
BACK IN ST.-CLOUD that autumn of 1924, Gerald and Sara found that Archie and Ada MacLeish had fled the high Parisian rents and were now their neighbors at 10 Parc Montretout. As Ada MacLeish wrote to a friend, “the Gerald Murphys, whom we like enormously, live near us, so we really haven’t a want.”
Between Archie and Gerald there now sprang up a friendship that—on Gerald’s side at least—was perhaps the longest and most truly fraternal of his life. The two men shared a certain sense of dislocation articulated in MacLeish’s notebook description of his poetic protagonist, L. T. Carnavel, who “had all his life from adolescence the conviction—at first merely sensed, that his consciousness of time & space, his individualness, his being himself, his detachment from conscious matter etc.—was the source of his unhappiness, or rather of his not-happy-ness. As a young man he tried to subject the universe to his consciousness (i.e. to annihilate the gulf between himself & the universe by translating the universe into terms of himself.” Carnavel was meant to be MacLeish’s self-portrait; but he could just as easily have been Gerald’s.
In this friendship between brothers, however, Gerald had the advantage of the firstborn. Archie was spending long hours at the Bibliothèque Nationale and at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop, reading the books he hoped would help him to become the poet he wanted to be—works by Dante, Rimbaud, Laforgue, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, whose absence from his curriculum at Yale made him feel his four years in New Haven had been wasted time. Gerald—who had become a voracious reader and copied out passages he liked in Pushkin or Shakespeare so as to memorize them—had similar feelings about their shared alma mater. But he had spent the past few years getting the real-life grounding in modern culture that MacLeish now aspired to. “Gerald was a remarkable companion,” said MacLeish, “and very knowledgeable, not scholarly, but very knowledgeable.”
He knew the composers Ada MacLeish was studying and whose works she wanted to sing: Satie, Poulenc, Stravinsky. He and Sara had sung Negro spirituals from his collection, as they used to do in Cambridge, for Satie after a dinner party, just the two of them at the piano; and Satie, after listening once, made them turn around and sing them again, a cappella. “Never sing them any other way,” he said. And Satie, like Poulenc and Marcelle Meyer (who brought her baby to be admired), came out to visit “les Murphy” at St.-Cloud, turning down an invitation from Vincente Huidobro, the publicist for the Ballets Suédois, to do so; his rendezvous with these “useful and precious Americans,” he said, was “very important” (underlined three times). Gerald was a friend of the modern French writers, like Cocteau and Radiguet, who interested MacLeish. Then there were the painters: Léger, who, on the strength of the Murphys’ introduction became an intimate of both MacLeishes, and Picasso, with whom they never got quite so close. MacLeish was no rube, and he would have learned to appreciate these figures by himself. But he would not have known them in the same way. In February he wrote to a friend that he was “stirred by poetry by music now as I wish I might still be by my less elaborate desires. That is to say—I never more see beautiful women. I see lonely and uncapturable gestures, swift nuances of an arm, curves of a breast, a throat—lines, forms. . . . To write one must take the world apart and reconstruct it.” It sounds like Gerald talking, or Gonch
arova speaking through him. And the immediate result of this thinking was perhaps MacLeish’s most famous poem, begun in his notebook in March:
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
. . .
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
Many years later Archie said that he had been friends with the Murphys “in French terms,” by which he meant he knew them as Europeans in a European setting, not as Americans uncomfortably transplanted to an alien shore. It was an important distinction. Within this context, the MacLeishes soon developed a “very easy, hometown sort” of relationship with their new neighbors: “We would drop in or suggest that we would drop in, propose ourselves, and if they were going to be home we’d go out [and] see them.” It was a profitable connection: through the Murphys, Ada became “very solid with Marcelle Meyer”—in fact, Ada wrote a friend excitedly, “She has asked me to share a program with her in the spring.”
In April, Archie and Gerald took one of several long bicycle trips together, through the Burgundy countryside. Was it Gerald’s painter’s eye, and his appreciation of all things simple and sensual, that made MacLeish see everything in a new way? Archie’s journal recorded “Stripes of mustard yellow, green, young green, the far blue hills, the cattle . . . luncheon by the rapid brook—the vague sun, the vague green trees, the white, lean bread, the cheese of St. Florentin, the Chablis (G.C. 1911) and the hunger to eat it with.” In a road-mender’s hut near Vézelay they found a message scrawled on the wall: “La vie est un desert, la femme un chameau. Pour voir le desert il faut monter sur le chameau.” (“Life is a desert, woman is a camel. If you want to see the desert you have to ride the camel.”)
MacLeish would not quarrel with that—he had always had an eye for a woman. The preceding spring, MacLeish had an affair with Margaret Bishop, the wife of his friend, the poet John Peale Bishop. Ada had either not known of it or had chosen to ignore it, and the relationship had ended when the Bishops left Paris to return to New York. Now, like many a man before and after him, he found himself admiring Sara Murphy. In his notebook for 1924 to 1925 he began a poem, which he later revised and published, entitled “Sketch for a Portrait of Mme. G——M——,” perhaps not so coincidentally the same title Gerald had given to a proposed painting for which he had made notes. Whereas Gerald saw his wife in terms of objects—“lace, globe, black stems of wood coming at you at an > [he had drawn an angle], magnolia petals, snow flakes vertically falling, mirror, moulding tracery of crossed twigs”—Archie described her physical presence, “the curve her throat made that was not the curve / Of any other.” More than that, though, he tried to capture the way she had of creating her own cosmology:
Sara never lodged in a house. She lived in it.
There was not one—& there had been as many
As there were reasons to be somewhere else—
Of all her houses that had not become
The one house that was meant for her, no matter
Whom it was meant for when the walls were raised—
Even to furnished villas like the one
Above the Seine that had belonged to Gounod. . . .
And that was a strange house.
Not satisfied that he had got her right, MacLeish crossed out this draft and began again. At last he had it:
“Her room,” you’d say—and wonder why you’d called it
Hers . . .
. . . . . .
Whether you came to dinner or to see
The last Picasso or because the sun
Blazed on her windows as you passed or just
Because you came, and whether she was there
Or down below in the garden or gone out
Or not come in yet, somehow when you came
You always crossed the hall and turned the doorknob
And went in;—“Her room”—as though the room
Itself were nearer her: . . .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . “Her room,” as though you’d said
Her voice, Her manner, meaning something else
Than that she owned it; knowing it was not
A room to be possessed of, not a room
To give itself to people . . .
. . . It reserved
Something that in a woman you would call
Her reticence by which you’d mean her power
Of feeling what she had not put in words—
“Very sphinxlike,” Harry Crosby had called her. Whatever her elusive magic, it was the same kind she had exerted on Picasso—and now also upon Scott Fitzgerald, who returned to Paris that spring from a miserable winter in Rome. He and Zelda had found a dreary, dim apartment in the rue de Tilsitt near the Etoile, and since he had finished and sent to his publisher the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, Scott was somewhat at loose ends. This was the spring he described as composed of “1000 parties and no work”—although, as Gerald recalled, the Fitzgeralds “weren’t really party people. It was just that every night they wanted things to happen. It didn’t take a party to start them.” They would drop in and out of whatever was going on—at someone’s house, in a nightclub—and then, often, they would drive out to St.-Cloud and honk their horn outside the Murphys’ gate, shouting that they were leaving France the next day on the Lusitania (a neat feat, as the ship had been sunk by German torpedoes in 1915) and had come to say good-bye. Gerald and Sara wouldn’t answer the door, but the Fitzgeralds kept coming back.
One of the reasons, Gerald believed, was that Scott was “sentimentally disturbed by Sara”—he was “in love with her. She fascinated him, her directness and frankness were something he’d never run into before in a woman.” Sara, who wasn’t attracted by Scott’s pretty-boy looks, pooh-poohed this idea. “He was in love with all women,” she told a friend many years later. “He was sort of a masher, you know, he’d try to kiss you in taxis and things like that. But what’s a little kiss between friends?” In fact, his absorption with Sara was singular: he would stare at her when they were at the dinner table, and if he felt she were paying him insufficient notice, he would demand, loudly, “Sara, look at me.” He would do the most puerile things to get her attention. Once, in a taxi with her and Zelda, he began stuffing filthy old hundred-franc banknotes into his mouth, and Sara—who used to wash coins before giving them to her children—was horrified.
He behaved just as badly with Gerald. One evening the Murphys took the Fitzgeralds and the Barrys out to a new alfresco restaurant near the Champs-Elysées that had a dance floor and a gypsy band. None of these features impressed Fitzgerald, who was uninterested in food and music and almost never danced. (When he did, Gerald recalled, he looked like a college boy of the prewar years.) They had drinks and dinner, but they rose to leave soon after. “Scott used to be very clever while sitting down,” Ellen Barry remembered, “but when he got up he’d be staggering.” Now, whether the cause was drink or sophomoric theatrics, he sank to his knees on the dance floor and clutched at Gerald’s hand, sobbing, “Don’t go! Take me with you—don’t leave me here!” Gerald withdrew his hand, furious. “This is not Princeton,” he said to Fitzgerald tartly, “and I’m not your roommate.”
Despite such rebuffs, Fitzgerald continued to be fascinated by Gerald. He asked him for literary advice—the letters from Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins urging the latter to acquire Raymond Radiguet for the Scribner’s list probably have Gerald as their inspiration—and he made Gerald repeat stories over and over: the one about seeing a factory somewhere that manufactured dolls’ voices, the one about meeting the American Indian named John Spotted Horse at Mitchell Field during the war. He would beg him to demonstrate the trick he’d learned from his father, Patrick: to stand on his hands and th
en walk the length of the room upside down. Scott loved it because it seemed so unlike Gerald. And he persistently tried to discover what made Gerald tick. Eyeing his friend’s exquisite European clothes, he asked, “Are you what they call a fop?” (Scott’s own sartorial expression was more in the Arrow Collar-ad mode.) No, Gerald told him. As he later explained it, “I was a dandy, which is something entirely different. . . . I liked clothes that were smart, without having any interest in fashions or styles, and I dressed just the way I wanted to, always.”
