The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Preliminary notes from overhead that he’ll delve into as he descends: everyone knows that Fitzgerald’s irreal but true tragic heroes Nicole and Dick Diver were inspired by the real couple Gerald and Sara Murphy. Two wealthy expats in the south of France who invited Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Picasso and so many others to come have a good time all on their dime. The handsome Gerald (an almost casual painter to whom many attribute anticipating the mechanics and hypotheses of Pop Art, and whom others credit with setting the trend of the striped sailor sweater long before Picasso adopted it as the uniform that’s now commercialized in every Picasso Museum of the world) and the beautiful Sara and their lovely children represented, to Fitzgerald, perfect examples when it came to writing about the “differences” of the rich. So, it was to them that he dedicated Tender Is the Night, in which the Divers start off resembling the Murphys, but inevitably end up identical to the Fitzgeralds. In other words: they end badly.

  † The Murphys—for whom things were going so well—ended up living the tragedy of the deaths of two children and returning to the United States to take over family businesses. And to get very bored. The party was over, Sara never forgave Fitzgerald for what he did to them in his writing, and the self-mythologizing Hemingway wrote to his far superior but also far more insecure colleague, in one of the many absurd letters/reproaches he used to try to destroy him: “A writer cannot start with real people and change them into other people.”

  But it was Gerald who, reading the novel years later, sent to Fitzgerald (whom he considered “my social conscience”) his blessing and gratitude with: “Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty.”

  † And if there’s something that really interests him as material for a novel in the real story of the Murphys, it’s how they were faithful and truthful and very objective witnesses of their time, who lived surrounded by a pack of rabid mythomaniacs and inventors of their own legends. People who never stopped plotting and inventing their own lives until the final period. His own parents included, he thinks.

  † It’s so easy for him to superimpose (should he maybe apologize to the young woman whose disorientation regarding the photo of the Murphys reoriented him?) the many photos of the compulsively photogenic Sara and Gerald over the photos of his parents. The ones and the others, beautiful animals.

  † The photos of the Murphys, naked (nudists whenever possible) on decks of sailboats with names like Melancholic Tunes (Gerald hanging upside down from the masts), dancing on a beach in East Hampton (one of his favorite photos), or doing callisthenic exercises or yoga (western pioneers of that, too) alongside their blonde and perfect but sickly children in La Garoupe. The Murphys dressed up as automobiles or wandering bohemians or as Apaches or Chinese or hunters on safari or as mariachis or as gondoliers. Or dressed formally for grand society balls, covered with wrinkles in Swan Cove, near the end, after too many obligatory and automatic and reflexive parties where really there was nothing to celebrate anymore. If photos steal your soul, then photos taken of you at parties steal your soul and, with the accumulation of clicks and flashes, also give you a beating and leave you with a broken body—blurry, out of focus, soulless.

  † The photos of his parents: golden models in the golden age of advertising in his country (the novel will explore various anecdotes and personas and characters of that world: advertising directors, jingle composers, slogan writers who dream of writing the Great Novel of their time). And one day his parents have a great idea. To sell an international whiskey company the never-ending campaign of a young and beautiful couple, adventurers traversing the world aboard a sailboat, docking in all the most glamorous ports, and (minimal costs) starring in and filming and assembling the footage themselves, which they’d mail in to be shown on TV screens and in movie theaters. Their proposal is accepted and not only does the adventure win a bunch of national and international awards, but it (being propagandized without dialogue, just background music, and transmitted all over the world) turns his parents into two, if not famous, then at least well-known, personas. Not long ago he discovered an allusion to them in an episode of Mad Men. And photos of his parents in Andy Warhol’s The Factory. Or with Stanley Kubrick. Or in the door to the Abbey Road studios (he didn’t believe them when they told him about it with such a wealth of detail, because his parents were the kind of liars who made themselves believe their own lies down to the smallest detail before recounting them perfectly, as if they were inerasable memories) during the recording of “A Day in the Life” by The Beatles. But years later, when the documentary The Beatles Anthology included scenes from that psychedelic party, there they were, his parents, spinning, “I read the news today, oh, boy . . .” And every so often their ghosts appear again on a plasma screen: in those programs dedicated to compiling anthologies of ad spots or in some documentary featuring people who are no longer with us, people who disappeared, as if the worst magician in history asked you to close your eyes and not to open them until he said so. And years go by. Eyes closed. Waiting.

  And he closes his eyes whenever the two of them, his parents, appear here or there.

  † And, of course, the photo where all four of them appear together, in La Garoupe of 1961 that’s no longer La Garoupe of before and, much less, La Garoupe of today, overrun with beach umbrellas. The original Golden Couple (soon to return to being laterally and secondarily famous, to the resigned disappointment of Gerald and Sara, courtesy of a long profile that Calvin Tompkins, with the title “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” will devote to them the next year in the pages of The New Yorker), and Swinging Sixties version Golden Couple (soon to cease existing). The four of them. Two and two. With their eyes wide open and making their own magic. Smiling. Never imagining that they’re going to disappear or be cut in two never to be reunited.

  † And what’s the point of all of this? Bringing the Murphys and his parents together—who had already been together—in a book? Think of a book—a kind of chronicle-novel-treatise—that’s a kind of manual not for parents but of parents. A bestiary that might be useful to children and help them, quickly and efficiently, locate the model they’ve ended up with. And then they can take whatever steps they deem appropriate.

  The Murphys and his parents, also, as clear models of parents as bon vivant figures. Parents as personas. Parents who will end up being cleaned up and edited by their children after being pre-washed in public not like rags, but like dirty designer clothes.

  Parents like the melody that children can’t stop hearing until they become parents themselves and learn to play the instrument that’s been played to them. Parents who start out as gods and end up as myths and who, between the one extreme and the other, assume human forms that tend to be catastrophic for their children. Or something like that. And the story continues. And he thinks about this—he, who doesn’t have children, but who did have someone he lost—and feels something like a vertigo of runaway music impossible to catch and tie up again.

  He was never any good at tying knots.

  His thing was always untying them.

  Whistling.

  † Biji musical interlude: note, for his possible biographers (ha, ha, ha?) indicating that he’s writing this part, the part about his parents and the Murphys, while listening, over and over again, to one of his favorite songs: “Big Sky” by The Kinks, included on the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968). An album that was released, with the lack of opportunistic sense that always characterized the band, the same day that The Beatles released The Beatles. It doesn’t matter: it’s a great song composed by Ray Davies at sunrise or sunset (Davies offered both versions and timetables in different interviews) on the balcony of his room at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, not far from La Garoupe. A song dedicated to a kind of indifferent and immense divine entity far above all the miseries of this world. A song that, Davies pointed out, he would’ve liked to have Burt Lancaster sing, to have recorded it with Burt Lancaster’s voi
ce. At the time, Davies—the most Fitzgeraldian of rockers, success at dawn and failure at midday and rough is the night—is disillusioned and on the brink and the rails of a psychotic break with no help or need for drugs. His is pure and real. A perfect malaise. A disillusionment more Victorian than psychedelic. Davies doesn’t know whether to go on or to stop or to jump. He doesn’t know whether “Big Sky” (2 minutes, 53 seconds, an eternity worthy of being heard or contained by a museum) is a song by The Kinks or a song that’s his alone, for his first solo album. He doesn’t know if he wants to go or to stay or to throw himself off that hotel balcony. He doesn’t know if it is, in the end, a song about God or, merely, as he’ll tell a journalist later on, about a “big sky.” He doesn’t know whether Big Sky is an all-powerful entity or the messianic representation of his immense impotence. One thing is certain: “Big Sky” is a great song that seems to encompass everything and to be above everyone, looking down at them, without compromise and without compromising itself while it observes, ominous and indolent, its creation. And, of course, The Kinks were never great musicians; but on “Big Sky” they sound better than ever, they sound like a humble chamber music version, without George Martin to help them, of the orchestral crescendo of “A Day in the Life.” A long time after Ray Davies looked up and composed “Big Sky,” he had arranged to get Ray Davies to invite him to come hear him sing it. He thought that what Ray Davies—without doubt: after submitting him to a kind of telephonic test to prove that he was a true fan and not, merely, a devoted trend follower—did for him was the gesture of a great imperial gentleman. British indifference and all of that, and would he have acted the same way with one of his fans, with someone, on the other end of the line, reciting monologues syllable for syllable from his books? Un-doubt-ed-ly—and—ab-so-lu-tely—not. Out of laziness and bad manners and because fans of writers were much more dangerous and annoying than fans of songwriters, with the exception of Mark David Chapman, of course.

  For the section of the novel that’ll focus less on the Murphys and more on Francis Scott Fitzgerald, he decides that the best soundtrack would be the short but oh so sincere song “Good Old Desk,” written by another damned alcoholic, the excellent songwriter par excellence Harry Nilsson. And, yes, another song about the art of creation as a humble and domestic occupation barely concealing (the initials of the song’s title forming the word “GOD”) a messianic presence, ready to condemn or forgive, to save or abandon, depending on what side of the bed the author woke up on that day.

  And, yes, to one side but up front: Bob Dylan—who, like Fitzgerald, is a son of Minnesota (and who already accused someone of putting on airs for having read all F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books in his “Ballad of a Thin Man”) so many years later—on “Summer Days.” In that song, Bob Dylan, taking and almost bellowing the words of the penultimate magnate Jay Gatsby, as if he were singing atop a barroom table, assuring everyone everywhere that of course the past can be repeated. Because the past is so much closer than you think.

  † Gerald and Sara Murphy singing negro spirituals to their guests, glasses of champagne in hand, under the blue light of the stars.

  † Gerald Murphy, who fancies himself a painter, is dazzled by what he sees one morning in a window at the art gallery of Paul Rosenberg, in Paris. A painting by Picasso (who’ll end up painting Sara Murphy three times and sculpting her once) is for him the gateway and the control tower for the sensation of being launched “into an entirely new orbit . . . If that’s painting, that’s the kind of painting I would like to do.” After that, his own work, always in the shadow of that brilliance. Broken canvases, assorted misadventures, irregular discipline, never complete devotion: mention and describe set designs for the ballet Les Noces (“The Murphys were among the first Americans I ever met, and they gave me the most agreeable impression of the United States,” Stravinsky said) and Cole Porter’s musical satire Within the Quota (and, ah, he’s always really liked Cole Porter’s exceedingly clever songs composed of lists, so enumerative, so numbered, so names-dates-places). And, above all, there are only seven of Gerald Murphy’s (then considered only a “Sunday painter” but, with perspective, a great modernist tagged in his moment by Leger as “the only American painter in Paris”) colossal paintings that survive, where pupils stare and watches are disassembled, electric razors are readied, newspapers’ front pages are blown up, libraries are organized, and the banner of the happily-expatriated and immensely-small kingdom of Villa America is raised. A cubist decomposition of the rectangular American flag. Half gold star, flanked by five smaller white stars with white and red stripes emanating from them.

  Eyes forward, head raised, hand over heart, little homeland, and, perhaps, great hell with long-suffering internal procession. But all of it so fine, so polite, so smiling, the perfect host—mi casa es su casa.

  † Gerald Murphy stops painting after eight paintings (the best of which is lost and all that’s left are photographs: the transatlantic and monumental chimneys of Boatdeck) and seven years in front of canvases. He’s convinced that he’s “not going to be first rate” and “the world is filled with second-rate painting” (for the record: Gerald Murphy is an infinitely better painter than Zelda Fitzgerald, who will focus on self-portraits in which she appears as if emerging from the depths of the sea, like a siren driven mad by her own song). Critics and specialists and psychoanalysts might say, on the other hand, that Gerald Murphy cleans his paintbrushes never to dirty them again because he discovers that his canvases do nothing but betray a “defect,” something he doesn’t want anyone to see, and certainly not something he wants to frame and sign and exhibit.

  In Tender Is the Night, on more than one occasion, the possibility is alluded to that Dick Diver could’ve been the greatest psychologist of all time (in his notes for the novel Fitzgerald calls him a “superman in possibilities”), if you ignore a decisive failure in his structure: paralysis when it comes to judging himself and daring to fully look at himself; which leads him, time and again, to act in a way contradictory to everyone else and contrary to his own wellbeing. So, Diver is like a ghost of himself: a living dead man, the most alive of all the dead men, with the capacity to see in others what he doesn’t want to see in himself and so he lives with his eyes shut.

  † Should he delve or not into the hypothesis that Gerald Murphy was a closeted homosexual? Should he research the handsome young Chilean Eduardo Velásquez (expelled from England due to an inopportune episode with a member of the royal family), whom Fitzgerald introduces to Gerald Murphy? Velásquez gives Gerald Murphy a crucifix in a mildly uncomfortable scene. And Fitzgerald will rewrite the whole episode in Tender Is the Night, starring a certain “Queen of Chili,” the son of a South American tycoon, submitted to violent psychological treatments in an attempt to change his “nature.” Or focus on Richard Cowan’s full-time gardener? Or look for information about the Canadian historian Alan Jarvis? Sara doesn’t seem to have any problem with all of Gerald’s close friendships (except every so often, when she shares her misgivings with the wrong people, like Hemingway, who subsequently starts firing off his masculine advice) provided there are “no feathers,” she says.

  † “Their marriage was unshakable.”—John Dos Passos.

  † During a dinner with the Murphys, in Antibes, Fitzgerald tries to embarrass a waiter by asking him in front of everyone if he’s homosexual. “Yes,” the man responds breezily, as he continues to clear the plates. And Fitzgerald blushes and stands up and, heading for the bathroom, falls headlong down a flight of stairs that’s nothing but the continuation of the stairs he fell down in the Paris metro and, previously, the stairs he fell down in a clandestine Manhattan bar.

  † Anyway, at the time, everyone seems to be closeted homosexuals (Fitzgerald, Hemingway) and everyone also seems to be alcoholics, right? Including Sara’s annoying and problematic sister: Hoytie, pathological snob and emptier of bottles of spirits, once an ambulance driver on World War One battlefields and now a feared and insatiabl
e lipstick lesbian. The typical flapper who starts dancing at the least excuse. Leave her out too. There isn’t much space, something tells him he doesn’t have much time.

  † Brief interruption, personal biji, black noise: he’s fifty years old and he’s known various writers who died when they were fifty and has read many who died or killed themselves around the same age. Maybe writers die faster because they live more lives, all at the same time. Their own lives, those of their characters, those of the characters in other writers’ books, their public lives as “writers” in front of their readers. Fifty years old—already dead and looking at the menu, choosing what to order and whom to order it from—as the age of no return. Because the forties might be duplicable; but making it to one hundred won’t be easy. So the fifties and 50 as the roundest of numbers. A roundness ringed with barbed wire that doesn’t let you out or in. The temporal equivalent of an airplane flying into a building. Chronological terrorism. A pure after that you can only access as a dead passenger or a surviving office worker. Times when the horizon starts bearing down on us even though we choose to stand still. Times when the past takes on new meaning. A logic, a plot, and a narrative, that it never had before, until now, until right ahorititita. After about a half-century on Earth, you’re always up in the air or on the top floor of a building and—the date doesn’t matter—it’s always September 11th of 2001. Later, years later, it goes away. A little. Or you get used to it. Then, resigned and always knocking on wood, you live an eternal September 12th or 13th or 14th or 15th of 2001; always on guard and waiting for the next inevitable catastrophe (especially if you are alone and you live alone; because then, having nobody nearby, all the bad things can happen to you), aware that, from now on, everything matters. You’ve breathed in the virus of the suspension of disbelief and anything is possible and all bad news will be horrible but, at the same time, so good for being communicated and dpread around by second and third parties who aren’t yet fifty years old, but here they come, there they go.