All We Know: Three Lives (5 page)

Although it is not the case that Esther “gave up everything” for any of her biographical subjects, the ways that she was exceptional had everything to do with a similar readerly devotion. And her life and work, like Wharton’s story and the genre of biography itself, continually beg the question of reputation. Djuna Barnes’s barb notwithstanding, it was not “great Women in History” who caught Esther’s imagination but women whose reputations were not at all secure. Or perhaps it makes more sense to say that in Esther’s lifetime a biography of a “great woman” who was not a religious figure was necessarily a book about a woman whose reputation was not secure. Esther’s first subject, Lady Blessington, rose from an impoverished Irish girlhood to a series of dubious liaisons with powerful Englishmen, socially advantageous marriage, and friendship with Lord Byron. She spent much of her life in a threesome with her husband and another man; weathered scandal and was shunned by society, but patronized by writers; wrote a book about Byron; and was the hostess of the most intellectual literary salon of mid-Victorian England. Although Esther referred to her in a 1922 letter to Wilson as “a dull enough person, I think. Really, a thoroughgoing mediocrity, save for her extraordinary personal beauty,” she must have become intrigued, because in April 1928 the publisher Payson and Clarke announced “‘The Life of Lady Blessington,’ by Esther Murphy” as “scheduled for future publication.” Reading and writing about Madame de Pompadour and then about Madame de Maintenon, as Esther did for the second half of her life, she was focused on women whose status at the French court was uncertain, who were maligned by contemporaries and historians, and for whom judgments about their sexual conduct had long been part of even the scholarly work on their lives.

In “The Angel at the Grave,” failure is overdetermined. There is Orestes Anson’s early failure and the failure of perception about that work (“the specialists of the day jeered at him”). Paulina’s biographical failure is steeped in a “sense of wasted labor” and “fruitless toil.” Her inability to reconcile the two parts of Anson’s career (“after a hurried perusal she had averted her thoughts from the [scientific] episode as from a revelation of failure”), Wharton suggests, was one reason her biography failed. Her guardianship was a success, however, because she kept the evidence of that episode from the flames. Her aunts had “said it was of no use,” she tells the young man, “—that he’d always meant to destroy the whole edition and that I ought to respect his wishes. But…I wanted him to feel that I was always here, ready to listen, even when others hadn’t thought it worth while.” In this romantic view of biography, keeping vigil by a corpse is hardly “of no use.” “Don’t you see that it’s your love that has kept him alive?” says the researcher.

Wharton is also thinking about the temporality of failure in this story—about what it means to make the right judgment at the wrong time, about the chasms in our ability to understand the present. She is thinking about discontinuity and anachronism, about misapprehension and missed opportunities, about occupying the wrong time in history, and about the possibility of rectifying the mistakes of the past—about how history itself fails and might yet be retrieved and revised. Everything that precedes the story’s happy ending suggests that the final rescue, too, is provisional; that while Paulina may be restored in some way, assessments of Anson’s work could change again; that there is no triumph over failure.

There was no way to know in 1922 that Esther Murphy, like Orestes Anson and Margaret Fuller—one of whose twentieth-century biographers described her as having been “demoted from a position of importance in her own right to one in which her only importance was in the company she kept”—would become known after her death chiefly as adjunct to others: the sister of Gerald Murphy, the friend of Edmund Wilson and Scott Fitzgerald. Nor was it possible to know then that Esther would spend her life steeped in someone else’s, becoming prominent as the chief authority on Madame de Maintenon. When she read the biographies of contemporaries whom she outlived, Esther was interested in the problems of reappraisal, and of proximity or distance, temporal and personal, that marked such work, its writers, and its readers. She believed that some biographies could be written and read only at certain times, not because of censorship or some progress toward openness, but because of what it was possible to understand when. When critical interest in Fitzgerald resumed in 1951—ten years after his death and following a longer period of neglect and scorn—with the publication of Arthur Mizener’s biography,
The Far Side of Paradise
, she wrote to Wilson, “I did not care for the biography of Scott but I think the author did the best he could and tried to avoid being either sensational or vulgar. But it seems to me that writing a life of Scott at this time would be incredibly difficult. What a strange creature he was and Zelda too, for that matter, to anyone who knew them the book could never be convincing or satisfactory.” Esther’s interest in biography was not in making the forgotten or the trivialized great, but in making them live again, fail again. Visiting the past was not a bid to turn disaster into success, but a gesture of transmission. Her point was that history—stuff, story, memory, metaphor—links the elusive past to the equally elusive present. Lost and found and lost again, too far away and too close, groping its way forward to causes and backward to effects.

The relentless party of the 1920s, in which Esther and Scott Fitzgerald were both strange creatures, ubiquitous and unavoidable, was inseparable from the great failure of social control that was Prohibition. When Prohibition became law, in January  1920, alcohol went underground—there were between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand speakeasies in New York City by 1925—and consumption increased dramatically. Drinking to excess was now indissoluble from social life, and the high cost of liquor made access to it a status symbol.

For a long time, Esther did not seem to suffer from hard drinking. In Europe on their own in 1921, away from all prohibitions, she and Margaret Hutchins had “decided to be daring enough to order liquor,” but thought it “more decent and ladylike to confine themselves to Cointreau, of which they drank a whole bottle.” At a house party for Fitzgerald’s birthday several years later—Gilbert and Amanda Seldes were also there—“preliminary drinks” were followed by “pre-dinner drinks,” and dinner, Edmund Wilson wrote, meant “floating divinely on good wine and gay conversation.” Although “the aftermath of a Fitzgerald evening was notoriously a painful experience,” Esther was the only person (other than Thornton Wilder, who was not drinking) not affected by the rigorous and desperate festivities. Decades of heavy drinking, however, were ruinous to her health and that of her friends: Wilson, Fitzgerald, John Peale Bishop, Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, to mention only a few. It is hard to think of an American writer of the first half of the century, iconic or less known, whose life was not bound up with alcohol.

Esther spent Christmas 1923 with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald on Long Island, along with the Seldeses, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson. (A few months later, when the Fitzgeralds sailed for France, Esther gave them an introduction to Gerald and Sara Murphy. The complicated relationship between the couples has been well documented.) She was in the midst of all that literary machismo, not one of the wives, on the verge of being one of the writers. Their expectations for what she—for what they all—would accomplish were high, but the party never stopped. She was also in an element in which she was finally appreciated, one of many extravagant human oddities, men and women, observing and performing for one another, attracting and repelling others, as she did at one party at which the hostess “would occasionally bring up a strange gentleman or a beautiful blonde and present them, but they would soon disappear, frightened away by the incomparable but intolerant onslaught of Esther Murphy’s eloquence.” At an all-night party in her honor she “moved absent-mindedly about in a white dress trimmed with sequins,” then went out to breakfast at dawn. In costume for the Beaux Arts Ball, she was “magnificent as the Abbess of a convent.” She was often at the Algonquin hotel, where there was a waiter who said that he had learned to speak English by listening to her. She might stay home one evening, but only because she had been out every night the week before until five in the morning.

She was also part of the perpetual revels at the two town houses on East Nineteenth Street that the painter and muralist Robert Chanler had combined and named the House of Fantasy. Chanler’s work was shown at the Julien Levy Gallery, the Armory Show of 1913, and the Hermitage; he painted Mercedes de Acosta, Carl Van Vechten, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Lunt, and others, and two portraits of Esther. A big man and a huge personality, he was emotional, generous, and violent. He would pound his fists on the table and bellow at his guests, and his parties went on for days, until he threw people out. One night, when he was Esther’s guest, he “stormed and raged…while the Murphy servants looked on frightened to death.” Esther called him that “indomitable, impetuous intransigent being” and she loved him deeply. “His friendship meant so much to me,” she wrote when he died, in 1930. Two decades later she wrote, “Next to Muriel he was the most amazing human being I have ever known.”

Muriel was Muriel Draper, another character of great kindness and eccentricity. Salonnière, supporter of young talent, “possessed of an almost cosmic gift of enthusiasm,” she was Esther’s most intimate friend from the mid-1920s through the ’30s. She came from an old Massachusetts family, had married the singer Paul Draper, and in the first years of the century lived in Florence and London, where she presided over a salon that attracted Arthur Rubinstein, Pablo Casals, John Singer Sargent, and Henry James. She returned to the United States in 1915, divorced the alcoholic and gambling Draper, and supported herself and their two sons by working as an interior decorator, lecturer, and writer. With Carl Van Vechten, she was one of the white promoters of the Harlem Renaissance, and she was famous for orgiastic parties where anything went and for her “outrageous remarks and outrageous hats.” “It was an imitation French salon, indiscriminate, but the nearest thing we had to that,” recalled the photographer Walker Evans, who described Draper as “the great mother of all artists.” In the 1920s, she was enmeshed with the guru Gurdjieff; by the mid-1930s, her enthusiasm had shifted to Soviet communism, where it remained for the rest of her life. (“Muriel Draper Dies; Organizer of Red Groups,” ran the headline of an obituary in 1952, at the height of anticommunist hysteria.) For Esther, Draper’s support was indispensable; she responded to Draper’s excesses with her own effusiveness. “You were superb and magnificent last night as indeed you always are,” Esther wrote early in their friendship; “what a particular and fortunate dispensation I think it is that I happen to be your contemporary.”

Esther’s own entertaining was also relentless. She had a string of soirées at home—the huge Park Avenue apartment—with guests to dinner every night, in the spring of 1927. Her father was in Bermuda; Anna Murphy sat by and watched it all. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the composer and music critic Teddy Chanler (Margaret Chanler’s son and Robert Chanler’s nephew), and the young musician and writer Max Ewing, another protégé of Draper’s, came to dinner, after which they all adjourned to Robert Chanler’s and then to Teddy’s. A big crowd came to tea one Sunday afternoon, and Robert Chanler “stood up & looked them all over & cried ‘What a gang! What a gang!’” There was a dinner for the writer and translator Lewis Galantière; the journalist Louise Bryant, author of
Six Red Months in Russia
and formerly married to John Reed; and the diplomat William Bullitt, Bryant’s husband (he had been Woodrow Wilson’s envoy to the Paris Peace Conference and later was FDR’s ambassador to Russia and to France). Esther also entertained at Ewing’s apartment, using it to help her friend Emily Vanderbilt celebrate her divorce. Dozens attended (all of the women dressed in black or white, except for one “in pink spangles, and Mercedes de Acosta who wore red velvet trimmed with gold flowers”), stayed till 4:00 a.m., then went up to Harlem to dance.

Muriel Draper, “possessed of an almost cosmic gift of enthusiasm,” photographed by Carl Van Vechten, n.d. (Muriel Draper Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, courtesy Estate of Carl Van Vechten)

Sometime in the mid-1920s, Esther and Teddy Chanler became engaged, or flirted seriously with the idea. He was several years younger than she, wealthy, committed to his music. He saw her “wonderful vitality and unceasing activity of mind,” but worried that she was “a rather tormented dynamic sort of person, who doesn’t expect to live to be more than forty.” He also watched her struggle to focus her energy and saw how she met intimacy with scholarly abstraction and quotation. At one point in their pas de deux, he wrote:

“My boy friend had to postpone his visit,” Esther wrote to Muriel Draper. “I am at once keenly disappointed and obscurely but genuinely relieved to have any climax in our relations averted for a little while longer.—So you see even our most sincere desires are paradoxical.” The paradox of their desires was not only that Esther lived at a pitch that Chanler could not, and that he, like those who followed him in her life, believed powerfully in her, but feared that her intense but undisciplined work ethic might hurt his own. It was also that both of them more or less preferred their own sex. Perhaps this is what he was referring to when he wrote, “I have really tried to be honest with you…and it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever done that with anyone without feeling betrayed afterwards…It’s very difficult.” They eventually disengaged themselves amicably—not “a very usual occurrence,” he observed.

Esther had lived her whole life knowing that she was different, but there is no record of when her desire for other women became clear to her. By the mid-1920s, however, she was a visible presence in sapphic New York and Paris. Her close friends included the young journalists Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, who had settled in Paris in 1922; Katharine Cornell, an old friend of Noel Murphy’s and a rising star on Broadway; Peggy Fears, a Ziegfeld Follies girl turned theater producer (and later Fire Island entrepreneur); the artist and future gallery owner Betty Parsons; and the heiress Alice De Lamar, whom Esther had known since they were children and who was now one of the richest women in the world. The socialite Hope Williams, a Brearley School friend who was beginning her career on Broadway, and Mercedes de Acosta, with whom Williams had an affair, were also part of this network of friends and lovers. In New York, after an evening of dissipated tourism in Harlem nightclubs, Esther would pass out at the home of Olivia Wyndham and her girlfriend, the actress Edna Thomas. Wyndham was the rebellious daughter of an upper-class English family. One of the Bright Young Things in London earlier in the decade, she had also worked as a photographer. She had fallen in love with Edna Thomas when the latter performed in London with the Blackbirds, the African American revue, then moved to New York to live with her.

Many of these women traveled regularly between New York, London, and Paris. Esther herself was perpetually sailing to France during the 1920s, and there was always an added flurry of parties on her departure and return. On “the long-roofed steamship piers,” Fitzgerald writes in
Tender Is the Night
, “one is in a country that is no longer here and not yet there…One hurries through, even though there’s time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship.” For Esther, as for many Americans, France and the future also meant sexual freedom. She often stayed at Alice De Lamar’s Paris apartment (which Gerald and Sara had rented but were no longer occupying, having relocated to the South of France), and she spent time with Flanner and Solano, with Noel, and with other expatriates, including Gertrude Stein—for whom she had “long felt” a “profound admiration”—and Alice B. Toklas. But for several years much of the draw of Paris was Natalie Barney, the lesbian poet and salonnière.

Patrick Murphy may have been aware of this part of Esther’s life, but there is no evidence that he ever tried to impose his will on her. Gerald, however, “upbraid[ed]” her for being one of the “unattached young women who hob-nob with Natalie Barney.” He had been her “outlet for sensibility” in her teens, but as she moved into the world on her own, her behavior became incompatible with his ideas about refined living, his need to protect himself solidified, and their long estrangement began. Gerald and Sara continued to distance themselves from Esther as the years went on, and she went virtually unmentioned in their family. Edmund Wilson observed that she “could not be accommodated to the little opalescent sphere in which they maintained themselves.” Early on Gerald saw himself as her protector, especially after Fred’s death and given their father’s frequent absences. But worrying about Esther’s association with Natalie Barney, he was also protecting himself. “Her behavior was a rebuke,” observes his biographer, to a man who described his life as “a process of concealment of the personal realities.”

When Natalie Barney was fifteen years old, she seduced her governess—or so Esther told friends. She and the governess were then sent to Paris by her father, an Ohio railroad magnate, to get them out of the way of scandal. Instead, France allowed Barney’s sexual and literary ambitions to flourish. When she printed a book of poems celebrating lesbian love, her father attempted to buy up every copy, but on his death she still inherited the equivalent of a billion dollars, which left her free to do what she pleased for the rest of her long life. She became known for her devotion to her libido, for her romantic ideas about literature, and for the salon she presided over on Friday afternoons at her home on the rue Jacob in the Sixth Arrondissement. Her guests constituted a roll call of early-twentieth-century American and European cultural accomplishment. The painter Romaine Brooks, a longtime lover, mostly absented herself from the talk, readings, and music in the house and garden, but Colette, Stein and Toklas, Virgil Thomson, Ford Madox Ford, French academician Remy de Goncourt, and many others patronized these happenings. Ezra Pound was “full of homage.” He brought William Carlos Williams, who called Barney “extremely gracious and no fool to be sure.” Noel Murphy was another regular guest.