Everybody Was So Young

by Amanda Vaill

  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.

  Thus I have learned to dread (and avoid) the responsibilities of friendship (as being one of the realities of life), believing, as I do, that I was incapable of a full one. I have become unworthy of one.

  I have never been able to feel sure that anyone was fond of me, because it would seem too much to claim, knowing what I did about myself. I have been demoralized by coming under the banner of what Sara gives to people and what she demands of them in the way of affection. This seems to have deceived even you and Ada. It is she who has floated our friendships on the flood of her very deep and very real feelings. You know that you have always known that Sara has given you what she was and is. You have never known that I have given you what I was not,—am not. You have felt it. That I know.

  . . .

  Have I made myself clear enough to have you see why I could come to America and dread the possibility of seeing you and Ada, and risk disfiguring one of the few phantom realities of my life, my friendship with you both? I preferred to skulk it and take the consequences. . . . It was rude, unkind and selfish of me. Please pardon it, if you can.

  So this is what was at the root of “those damn schoolgirl quarrels of Gerald’s,” and behind the smoke screen of his phrasemaking and the disguises, from the bespoke suits to the sailors’ jerseys and apache trousers: a sense of profound unease, of unreality, about who he was. It went beyond a fear that he was incapable of affection, although that, too, was part of the problem. As a young man he had been haunted by feelings of otherness, of difference, either social, or sexual, or personal; but his very real love for Sara, which she had so frankly returned, had overwhelmed them. She had encouraged his decision to live where he would not constantly be held to standards by which he would be found wanting; and for nearly ten years the two of them, and their marriage, had flourished creatively. For a time it seemed as if he had beaten back the demons. But all that was over now. His creations—his paintings, his marriage, the children who embodied his and Sara’s fondest hopes, the “loaded and fragrant” way of life they had invented together—had all been corrupted.

  What he was left with was his own uncertain nature—a nature he had never been taught to value, and which he feared would revolt the people he most cherished if it were ever revealed to them. “I hope,” he added in a poignant postscript to Archie, “this letter does not offend your taste,—or whatever that thing is that gets offended—and you can never feel the same about the person afterwards. I know I could have told you this without offending you.”

  It was during this trip to America, apparently, that Gerald sat for a strange photographic portrait—a multiple exposure in which five Gerald Murphys, in the same overcoat, starched white collar, and elegantly tilted homburg, stare at one another across a table. It is as if Gerald’s many selves were playing poker together, none willing to let on to another how strong a hand he holds.

  Returning to Switzerland that winter, Gerald tried desperately to regain his emotional equilibrium: and as he increasingly did in times of crisis he quite simply withdrew. Honori
a remembers his taking “a long hike to a monastery where he stayed overnight.” The monastery kept rescue dogs, one of whom (Gerald claimed) had recently turned on a lost traveler and killed him. Whether this was truth or invention—he was, after all, telling the story to his children—it was a fitting metaphor for what had happened to Gerald Murphy. The monastery was probably the famous hospice of St. Bernard, on the main ridge of the Alps at nearly ten thousand feet, which had been a refuge since medieval times for travelers who had lost their way, as Gerald arguably had in the middle of his life’s journey. According to Hester Pickman, “he’d had a kind of breakdown. He retired to think all by himself. He painted that clock while he was there”—a puzzling reference, because there is no record that Gerald painted anything while he was in Switzerland. In fact, after Patrick was diagnosed with tuberculosis, Gerald rolled up most of his canvases and never, so far as anyone knew, picked up a paintbrush again.

  A long time afterward he told the playwright Lillian Hellman that he had stopped painting “because I never believed I was any good.” But coming from the man who in the year before he stopped said he felt confident of producing “one picture that’s hitched up to the universe,” this sounds like a case of protesting too much. His career, despite the meticulous snail’s pace with which he had pursued it, was on an upward trajectory. L’Intransigeant, in its review of his Bernheim show the previous January, had praised his paintings’ “authenticity,” their “objectivity, precision, and absolute clarity of execution,” the “perfect order of their composition.” Gerald Murphy, L’Intransigeant proclaimed, “gives a future consciousness to American art, and gives us a new perspective on its prospects.” Gerald had high standards, and may not always have felt himself capable of satisfying them. But when he put away his brushes and pigments he wasn’t abandoning a faltering career as a painter. He was relinquishing a bright one.

  From the first he had painted “real objects which I admired,” and which often had personal resonance for him, in a way that abstracted their specific emotional content; he had tried to impose his own order and discipline on a world he distrusted. But when he couldn’t hold that world at bay with his brush, he exacted from himself the penance of giving up the one thing that had ever made him completely happy.

  Sometime during the fall of 1930, in circumstances of extreme secrecy, Gerald went to Basle to consult a Jungian analyst, Dr. Schmid-Guisan, who (Gerald said) “specialized in Anglo-Saxons. You went and lived in a hotel in Basle, completely unidentified, and went out by trolley to Schmid-Guisan’s villa every day at a fixed time, and waited in the garden so that you never saw anyone else coming out.” He left no record of what he discussed with Dr. Schmid-Guisan; but he did talk about his analytic sessions with Scott Fitzgerald, whom he continued to see frequently, and a clue to their substance may lie in alterations that Fitzgerald made to his current manuscript.

  Gerald later recalled that in one of these conversations he’d told Fitzgerald: “for me only the invented part of life is satisfying, the unrealistic part. Things happened to you—sickness, birth, Zelda in Lausanne, Patrick in the sanatorium, Father Wiborg’s death—these things were realistic, and you couldn’t do anything about them. Do you mean you don’t accept these things? Scott asked. I replied that of course [I] accepted them, but I didn’t feel they were the important things really. . . . The invented part, for me, is what has meaning.” It was the corollary to what he had told Archie MacLeish—and for perhaps the first time, Gerald seemed to feel that Scott understood what he was trying to say. “He talked thoughtfully and with a kind of tenderness of all of us,” he told Sara. “I had the sense of coming on undiscovered gold.”

  Gerald was less happy when Fitzgerald chose to play go-between for him at Harry’s Bar with a young South American named Eduardo Velasquez. Fitzgerald had met Velasquez in Lausanne, where the young man had been undergoing psychoanalysis in an effort to “cure” his homosexuality; and for some reason Scott told him to go to one of the weekend dances at Harry’s and introduce himself to Gerald.

  Gerald, probably remembering Scott’s homophobic antics in Antibes, later told a friend he suspected Fitzgerald of playing some kind of practical joke. But Scott’s gesture seems more like one of his gauche and misguided attempts at empathic behavior, as when he told Edith Wharton a racy story in a disastrous effort to establish a rapport with her. Whatever signal he was trying to send Gerald, however, it was garbled, and the encounter was “very painful.” The young South American insisted on giving Gerald a cross that had belonged to his mother, perhaps as a talisman for Patrick. Then he left, and if he ever saw Gerald again there’s no record of it. But he made a telling reappearance in the novel ultimately entitled Tender Is the Night, as Francisco, “the Queen of Chili,” who makes it possible for the novel’s hero to understand “the courageous grace” and “charm” of someone he would previously have dismissed as “pathological.”

  Fitzgerald had been stalled on his manuscript all through the autumn, but around this time he made a crucial change in it. The book had gone through a number of false starts already, and would metamorphose even further before he finally completed it. The title had been, variously, World’s Fair (the allusion to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was intentional), The Boy Who Killed His Mother, and Our Type. Originally Fitzgerald had intended to tell the story of a young man, a film technician named Francis Melarkey, who is hopelessly under the thumb of his domineering mother (a familiar theme to both Scott and Gerald) and comes to the south of France hoping to find work in the nascent Nice movie industry. There he meets an American couple, Seth and Dinah Roreback (or Seth and Dinah Piper, depending on the version of the novel); he is enthralled by them both, but falls in love with Dinah, with whom he has a brief affair.

  Francis, who shares Fitzgerald’s given name, was also his alter ego. The Roreback/Pipers, who until recently, another character tells Francis, “were the only other Americans on the whole Riviera,” were clearly modeled on the Murphys. There were details that came straight from the Villa America to the page, such as the description of Seth and Dinah singing for their guests “things from a bundle just over from America. Seth played and sang the air in his clear, arresting voice, and Dinah standing beside him, sang a soft, huskily accurate contralto.” There were observations from Fitzgerald’s notebook, like “Gerald’s Irishness: face moving first,” which made it into the manuscript as “Seth is quite amusing—but so Irish—his face begins to move before he says anything in that Irish way.” And there were other things.

  At one point Dinah—the name has been written in here, above the typed, crossed-out “Sarah”—meets Francis in Paris. The two of them kiss in a taxi and go to her apartment, a top-floor walk-up like the Murphys’ flat on the quai, for more amorous byplay. Afterward, as Francis is walking away, he sees Seth—“Gerald” in earlier pages—returning home. The description is Gerald Murphy to the life: “[A] taxi drove up and Seth got out and went into the house. His step was quick and alert as if he had just come from some great doings and was hurrying on toward others. Organizer of gaiety, master of a richly incrusted [SIC] esoteric happiness. His hat was a grand hat and he carried a heavy stick and thin yellow gloves. Francis thought what a good time everyone would have who was with him.”

  It seems highly unlikely that Fitzgerald was portraying, in fictional terms, an affair, or even a two-way flirtation, with Sara Murphy. Although Sara admitted that “he’d try to kiss you in taxis and things like that,” she had never encouraged his infatuation. Mostly she managed to deflect it, possibly by saying, as Dinah does elsewhere to Francis:

  “I don’t kiss people. I’m just before that generation. We’ll find you a nice young girl you can kiss.”

  “There aren’t any nice young girls—you’re the only one I like.”

  “I’m not nice. I’m a hard woman.”

  That sounds like Sara. The scene at the Pipers’ apartment sounds like wish fulfillment. But although wish fulfillment isn’t inconsistent with
successful fiction, the novel as Fitzgerald had been trying to write it was unsuccessful. One reason was that he had planned for the plot to turn on Francis’s murder of his mother. The matricidal theme—which Fitzgerald abandoned in 1930—was clearly a dead end. But there was something else in the plot that was a dead end as well, something Fitzgerald carefully altered as he reworked his manuscript. In the published version of Tender Is the Night, he gave the love scene at the apartment to the young actress, Rosemary Hoyt, and Gerald/Seth’s avatar, the psychiatrist Dick Diver, not to Francis and Sara/Dinah.

  Fitzgerald belonged to a generation that was sensitive about sexual orientation in a way that bordered on paranoia. His and Hemingway’s and MacLeish’s comments about “fairies” revealed a kind of sexual absolutism—either you were or you weren’t—that precluded any kind of attraction to someone of the same sex. Drunkenly crossing the street in Paris the year before Zelda’s breakdown, Fitzgerald had resisted taking the offered arm of a friend, the journalist Morley Callaghan, because, he told Callaghan, “You thought I was a fairy, didn’t you?” Such feelings made authenticity impossible. The story he had been trying to tell in his stalled novel was the romance between himself and Sara Murphy, a story he could not tell because it led nowhere. The story he was afraid to tell was the story of his own romantic—not sexual, but romantic—attraction for Gerald Murphy, a story he was only able to tell by transforming himself into Rosemary Hoyt.