by Amanda Vaill
It was the Murphys who introduced the MacLeishes to the Fitzgeralds, and to the de Beaumonts; the Murphys who asked Picasso to bring his friend Manuel Ortiz de Zarate—a minor cubist painter but major avant-garde personality—to a soiree because he seemed so interesting; the Murphys who gave an enchanted dinner party for Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and the violinist David Mannes and his wife and daughter, Marya. That night, as the Mediterranean moon rose over Gerald and Sara’s fragrant garden, Marya Mannes, responding to a “sense of glowing peace,” turned to Fitzgerald, her dinner partner, and said, simply, how happy she was to be there. In thanks for that evening, she wrote her hosts a poem; David Mannes said the only way he and his wife could repay the Murphys was to give them a private concert of Bach’s four-hand piano pieces the next day. “I’ve never been so moved,” Gerald said, remembering it years later.
The parties weren’t always for the adults: there were costume parties for the children at the screenwriter and movie producer Charles Brackett’s house, and Scott and Zelda staged a memorable battle of tin soldiers in front of a fairy castle in their garden that was guarded by a “dragon,” a large beetle in a wooden cricket cage, who was allowed to run away when the good soldiers won. Perhaps most magical of all was the excursion to the Antibes lighthouse that Gerald planned for Scottie Fitzgerald. He had told her that the lighthouse was populated by fairies who made the light turn round and round, and one evening, dressed to the nines in spats, white Panama, and malacca cane, he took her there to see them. Scottie was afraid to approach the building, so Gerald said tactfully, “The fairies might be busy, so we’ll watch from close by.” The expedition was, of course, a complete success.
It all seems like fairyland now, like grown-ups playing children’s games. But there was a kind of purpose in it. One evening that summer, in the garden at Villa America, Sara and Gerald sat talking long after dinner with Phil and Ellen Barry and Archie and Ada MacLeish at the table under the linden tree. (“Life gets a little denser chemically during talks,” Gerald felt.) Their conversation, which was seemingly at odds with the ease and beauty of their surroundings, revolved around something John Peale Bishop had said about tragedy. Death wasn’t a tragedy, Bishop had said: “it is the horror of evil, of unexpected, sharply contrasted depravity, of helplessness before one’s own nature—not death, but life and its terrible possibilities.” At Villa America, life and its terrible possibilities seemed held at bay, at least for now.
That year Gerald, egged on by Vladimir Orloff, bought a little boat named Picaflor. Gerald himself had done little if any sailing since his youth, and not much of it then; but Vladimir had been an ardent sailor in prerevolutionary Russia, and had longed for the sea ever since. So in June, Gerald gave Vladimir carte blanche to purchase a small, eight-meter racing sloop, and he and Archie MacLeish came down from Paris to try her out. Although MacLeish, a son of the Great Lakes, was a stranger to ocean sailing, he was looking forward to another adventure with Gerald, like the bicycle trip of a month or so ago—but the voyage didn’t turn out as planned. First they were becalmed; and as the boat rolled, gently and nauseatingly, Gerald became violently seasick. After a day and a half of this torture, during which he got horribly sunburned, a fierce mistral came up and blew them into St.-Tropez, an unplanned landfall. There Gerald, somewhat restored by doses of Vichy water, liberal applications of sunburn remedy, and contact with dry land, told Vladimir he was bailing out. “I’m going back to Paris tomorrow,” he said. “Archie can do as he pleases. I’m leaving the boat with you—do what you want with it. But I’m never getting on it again, except to get my suitcase.”
He did as he said; but somehow, eight days later, had a change of heart. He telegraphed Vladimir: “LIVED THROUGH MOST BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURE OF MY LIFE WITH YOU STOP UNDERSTAND CHARM OF SEA AND CRUISING STOP HOPE PICAFLOR NOT SOLD STOP WILL BE AT ST-TROPEZ IN JULY FOR NEW CRUISE STOP WILL YOU PARDON MY STUPIDITY.” On second thought, it appears, Gerald wasn’t about to let a little eight-meter boat defeat him, particularly in front of someone like Archie MacLeish, a former football star at Yale and Hotchkiss.
So sailing became a part of the life of Villa America, and Gerald—who, a friend later said, “always became a native of wherever he was”—adopted not only the craft but the uniform. In July, when he and Archie went out on Picaflor again, they returned with a collection of striped sailors’ jerseys, and rope-soled canvas espadrilles, and knitted fishermen’s caps, which Gerald had bought in the market at St.-Tropez and proceeded to bestow on Archie, Phil Barry, and Don Stewart. None of them wore these things with quite the flair that Gerald did; what might have seemed self-conscious on someone else looked, on him, somehow exactly right. It was the difference between costume and disguise—a difference that Gerald, uncomfortable in his own skin, had understood instinctively all his life.
In December Gerald was asked to show two paintings, Watch and Razor, at the “L’Art d’aujourd’hui” exhibit, alongside works by Picasso and Léger. Watch had already been exhibited at the spring Salon des Independents and had earned glowing comments: it was, noted Florent Fels in L’Art vivant, “at first astonishing and then seductive,” a painting that made machinery “as plastically exploitable as . . . Cezanne’s apples.” (No wonder Archibald MacLeish, who knew a thing or two about globed fruit, purchased Watch for himself.) Picasso (enclosing a review of “L’Art d’aujourd’hui” he thought Gerald might have missed) said “that he liked very much my pictures, that they were simple, direct and it seemed to him Amurikin—certainly not European,” reported Gerald proudly to Philip Barry. Léger seconded the pronouncement: “Gerald Murphy,” he proclaimed, “was the only American painter in Paris.”
At the Independents vernissage, Gerald later recollected, he had met a young writer who was interested in one of the other paintings in the show, a modernist-folkloric picture by Joan Miro called The Farm. The writer, who was already a friend of other Murphy intimates such as John Dos Passos and Donald Ogden Stewart, was Ernest Hemingway; and although the Murphys had been hearing about Hemingway, and vice versa, for some time, he had avoided getting to know them. Possibly he was suspicious of their wealth; certainly, when he struck up a conversation about The Farm with Gerald, it was to confess that he wanted to buy the picture and couldn’t afford it. But Gerald told him his instinct was right, the painting was wonderful—and Hemingway scraped together the $200 it cost by borrowing from friends and working as a stevedore in the market at Les Halles. Gerald was impressed. In December, at the “L’Art d’aujourd’hui” show, when the two men ran into each other again, this time Hemingway didn’t shy away.
14
“The kind of man to whom men, women, children, and dogs were attracted”
IN 1925 ERNEST HEMINGWAY was just twenty-six—ten years younger than Gerald—tall, dark-haired, square-browed, with dazzlingly white teeth and a newly grown mustache that gave his almost too handsome face a raffish, buccaneer look. He was, remarked his wife, Hadley, “the kind of man to whom men, women, children, and dogs were attracted.” The son of a doctor from Oak Park, Illinois, and his failed-opera-singer wife, he had left home (and, in his parents’ view, respectability) to come to Paris and write. He’d been a correspondent for the Toronto Star, and his work was appearing in the expatriate little magazines, where it had begun to stir talk among the café crowd that hung out at the Dome, the Rotonde, or the Closerie des Lilas. Robert McAlmon had recently brought out Hemingway’s Three Stones and Ten Poems, and William Bird had just published the short story collection in our time. Both had appeared in limited editions of no more than a few hundred copies, but the quality of the work, in the words of at least one contemporary literary handicapper, “promises to remove him from the three-hundred-copy class of authorship.” And he was more than just a paper warrior. He had been seriously wounded on the Italian front in World War I, when only a boy of eighteen; and he had a penchant for activities involving physical risk, like bobsledding, bicycle racing, and bullfighting, all of which he
either participated in or wrote about or both.
He and Hadley had a little boy, John (the Hemingways, who were fond of fanciful nicknames for each other, like Waxin and Palty and Cat, called him Bumby), and they lived on Ernest’s small salary and Hadley’s tiny trust fund in a solid, petit bourgeois apartment building in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Montparnasse. Down the street was James Joyce’s studio, and only a few blocks away was the comfortable flat Gertrude Stein shared with Alice Toklas at 27 rue de Fleurus. There was a carpenter’s shop on the ground floor, which made it noisy by day, so Hemingway often wrote at a table at the Closerie des Lilas, a few blocks away. But he found it hard to do so without being interrupted by one or another of his friends dropping by for a drink or a coffee, for the Hemingways had a wide circle of acquaintance among the American and English bohemians who lived in or passed through Paris: Sylvia Beach and her companion, Adrienne Monnier; Ford Madox Ford; Ernest Walsh; Ezra Pound; Stein and Toklas; Joyce; Dos Passos; the MacLeishes.
Gerald and Sara fell for Hemingway at once. To Gerald, who struggled to find the essence in things so as to paint them more truthfully, Hemingway’s dictum that “a writer’s job is to tell the truth”—his use of direct, natural, vernacular language—had the clarity of one of Leger’s paintings, and his prose seemed like something entirely new and exciting. Beyond this, though, Hemingway had a kind of magnetic dominance, what Archibald MacLeish’s son William calls his “alpha male” quality. As Gerald remembered it, “he was such an enveloping personality, so physically huge and forceful, and he overstated everything and talked so rapidly and so graphically and so well that you just found yourself agreeing with him.” He was the complete opposite of Gerald, who won you over by charm, not domination, and so by the laws of physics Gerald was naturally attracted to him.
As for Sara, she adored Hemingway from the outset. His artistic sensibility, keyed to sharp glimpses and startling observations, matched her own rather off-balance perceptiveness; but perhaps it was his intense physicality, his macho swagger—tempered disarmingly by his occasionally self-deprecating grin—that struck her most. “Sara loved very male animals,” recalled a friend; she had been preconditioned for it by Frank Wiborg, whose strong physical presence had dominated her youth. Other friends like Zelda Fitzgerald were skeptical of Hemingway’s machismo—“nobody is as male as all that,” she said—but Sara didn’t care.
Although they were careful not to express it, or even to admit it, neither she nor Gerald felt the same way about Hadley Hemingway. She was “a nice, plain girl,” said Sara years later, “very handsome. But a bit unrealistic, and not very bright.” Gerald elaborated: “There was a kind of vagueness about her that worried you, because you felt that Ernest was having a hard time. They had very little money, and we were a little concerned to learn that he hadn’t allowed her to know how poor they were; you somehow felt that she should have known, and been the one who helped to carry the burden.”
Hemingway returned the Murphys’ affection—they were “swell,” he told Scott Fitzgerald—and he seemed to make some effort to share with them some of his own private passions. One of these was horse racing—he and Hadley used to spend the day at Longchamp or St.-Cloud or Auteuil whenever they felt flush enough—and shortly after the Murphys met him Gerald made the following entry in his art notebook: “Picture:—Finish of horserace—horses head, profiled an inch apart in repetition, jockeys’ heads, striped shirts, whips backward in air <45°, legs, boots, heels. Structure of Judges stand as backing (+fencing, heads of onlookers).” In “My Old Man” Hemingway would describe the beginning of the race like this: “that big green infield and the . . . starter with his big whip and the jocks fiddling them around and then the barrier snapping up and that bell going off and them all getting off in a bunch and then commencing to string out.” Where the picture ends and the story begins is hard to say.
Soon the Murphys and the Hemingways were planning a winter adventure together. They would go to Munich with John Dos Passos and charter a private plane loaded “with rich food, wine and condiments” and piloted by a World War I ace; then they would fly to the Silvretta glacier, high in the Austrian alps above Schruns, and ski down—the first time anyone had ever tried it. The Murphys were always thinking of intriguing and unexpected excursions that would interest their friends; they had toyed with the idea of going to North Africa with the Fitzgeralds in January, but Zelda had been in poor health and Scott was taking her to a spa in the Pyrenees for a cure instead. This new plan was even better, though: for Sara, it offered a thrill equivalent to sailing in a hurricane; for Gerald, a chance to revisit the kind of winter sport he had enjoyed as a young man in the Adirondacks, and to test himself against Ernest’s skill. And for Ernest it was a glamorous, novel, and expensive adventure he now happily boasted about to his friends and family, and one which the Murphys were paying for.
Hemingway accepted their interest in his work with the same eagerness with which he fell in with their excursion plans. Certainly he didn’t get the same support from his parents, whose disapproval of his louche subject matter and vulgar language were expressed in a cold ritual of passive aggression: they returned to him, unread, the copies of in our time that he had sent to them at home in Oak Park. Instead of writing them off as expendable philistines, though, Hemingway kept attempting to win their approval, his father’s particularly. “You see,” he wrote to Dr. Hemingway: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life. . . . You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. . . . So when you see anything of mine that you don’t like remember that I’m sincere in doing it and that I’m working toward something.” With Gerald and Sara, such entreaties were superfluous. “Those God-damn stories of yours kept me rooted and goggle-eyed all the way to Germany the other day,” wrote Gerald. “My God, but you’ve kept your promise to yourself.”
Soon Ernest was trying out other new work on them. The collection in our time had been taken on by the New York firm of Boni and Liveright (which would add capital letters to the title); the publishers had an option on Hemingway’s next three books, one of which had to be a novel, but if they rejected whatever book he next offered them, the option would be broken and he would be free to submit his work elsewhere. He had, in fact, begun a novel about his previous summer’s sojourn in Pamplona; but he’d started to feel dissatisfied by Boni and Liveright’s efforts on behalf of the stories. And a number of other publishers (including Scribner’s, to whom Scott Fitzgerald had been sending feverish scouting reports) were curious about this new writer’s work.
It was at this point that he showed up on Gerald and Sara’s doorstep with a new manuscript in hand. It was late, and the Murphys had been on their way to bed when he arrived; but they stifled their yawns and listened as Ernest read them The Torrents of Spring, a satirical treatment of “literary” life in the American boondocks, which he had thrown together in the past few weeks. The book was little more than a rather heavy-handed parody of Boni and Liveright’s bestselling author (and Hemingway’s own onetime mentor) Sherwood Anderson, peppered with jocular potshots at other Hemingway boosters like Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald; but Hemingway seemed determined that it be taken seriously. He had already regaled friends—like Fitzgerald and Dos Passos and a pretty Vogue editor named Pauline Pfeiffer, who was a crony of Hadley’s—with bits of the manuscript; now he proceeded to read the whole thing to Gerald and Sara in a single evening.
Sara dozed off during the reading (though her ramrod posture gave no clue), and Gerald was put off by the viciousness and pointlessness of the satire; but both he and Sara applauded its author. Whether they were party to the plan he now evolved, however, isn’t clear. “I have known all along,” Hemingway admitted, “that [Boni and Liveright] could not and would not be able to publish it as it makes a bum out of their present ace and best seller Anderson. Now in 10th printing.” Because their refusal would free him
to take the Pamplona novel elsewhere, he mailed the manuscript to Horace Liveright in December. At New Year’s, Liveright rejected The Torrents of Spring by cable. “I’m loose,” wrote Hemingway to Fitzgerald, and set off for New York (leaving Hadley and Bumby at Schruns) to formally extricate himself from Liveright and find a new publisher for both books. Before he left he discussed his plans with Gerald and Sara, promising to wire them about any developments and left a manuscript copy of his Pamplona novel with them to read. He seemed hungry for their continued approval.
“Gosh, what news of Transatlantic Charlie!” wrote Gerald to Hadley when he heard that Ernest had landed a contract with Scribner’s for The Torrents of Spring and for the Pamplona novel, which was now entitled The Sun Also Rises. “It certainly broke prettily for him. . . . It is a great title ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ Some day he’ll write ‘Yet the sea is not full’—or its equivalent. We read it the other day & were blown out of the water afresh.”
The rest of the letter contained a disappointment: Dos Passos had had to cancel plans for their glacier flight—a play of his was in rehearsal in New York, he said; or he was going to, or coming back from, North Africa—and when he scrubbed, Gerald and Sara had had second thoughts. Neither of them had any real skiing experience, and the trip down from the two-thousand-meter-high Silvretta would be grueling, and possibly dangerous, for novices. So now they, too, bowed out—although they “felt like skunks about” it. In the end, though, they couldn’t disappoint Ernest entirely; in late March, accompanied by Dos Passos (who had miraculously materialized) they went to Schruns for a short ski holiday.
