All We Know: Three Lives (8 page)

But in New York in 1932, as she waited for him to come to a decision about whether to divorce, she was miserable. She faced and avoided her own failings, writing to him about eighteenth-century French history, not about their marriage, telling friends that it had not worked out because she belonged in New York, not London. She lived in a hotel and depended on Amanda and Gilbert Seldes. On Christmas Eve at their home, she pulled off her wedding ring and gave it to their young daughter, Marian. She had no real financial independence, because Patrick Murphy had made a “dotty…eccentric will” that appointed Gerald her trustee until she was fifty-five, meaning that she did not actually own the shares of Mark Cross her father had left her. Even if she had been capable of steady work, it would have been hard to find. Across the country, more than thirteen million people were unemployed. In New York, along Broadway and Fifth Avenue, shops were closed or empty, breadlines threaded through Times Square, and food was scarce and of poor quality even if one had money or a job. In June, Esther listened to the suspenseful Democratic convention with Draper, Max Ewing, the actress Kay Francis, and the lesbian nightclub singer Spivy LeVoe. She and Draper outlasted everyone, glued to the radio. Finally the maneuvering for delegates ended, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated. Esther was relieved, but skeptical when he was elected by a huge majority, and the Democrats won both houses of Congress, on November 8, 1932. She saw in the new year at Draper’s annual party, then returned to London to wait for her divorce. From Paris in the spring of 1933, she wrote to Draper:

The year before, Strachey had written to Joseph Brewer, “I feel the frightful tragedy of our marriage as a heavy, heavy weight which I shall carry all the rest of my life. And I am more than willing to take all the blame…[T]he thought of Esther, and of her inestimable goodness, of the startling, beautiful and so overwhelmingly moving core of purest gold that lies beneath all surface irrelevancies haunts me.”

One July 4 in the early 1920s, the drama critic Alec Woollcott had visited Esther in Southampton and watched as she responded to her father’s drunkenness and mother’s paranoia by reciting a litany about the English royal family, “saying, ‘The Duke of York had three sons and two daughters,’ etc., etc.,” and gesticulating anxiously. In 1938, introducing an essay of hers on FDR, the editors of the progressive journal
Common Sens
e described her as “celebrated for her mastery of American history.” Dawn Powell, after seeing her at Gerald and Sara’s in 1945, portrayed her as

Powell’s brilliant portrait is, like Esther herself, at once precise, exaggerated, and inadequate. If Esther piled up facts and handled them like jewels—work that takes discipline and a delicate touch—she also played with facts and distorted them. She understood the present, including herself and her friends, as historical because she saw history as the medium in which we all live, the thing we are always making. Reading history, Esther wrote to Janet Flanner in April 1938, “or at any rate the tiny little bit of recorded history that has any semblance of authenticity, one realizes that the human race has survived in the last analysis not because of any of its qualities of virtue or intellect, but on account of that slavish pliant adaptability which has enabled it to survive even the mischief which it plots for its own self-destruction.”

“To focus” Esther’s “attention on [something] outside divorce and death” in the summer of 1932, Muriel Draper invited her to give a series of public lectures at her apartment. In the first talk, for which “quite a crowd for a hot night turned out to hear her,” Esther compared the previous postwar period—the years following the Civil War—with their own moment in the wake of World War I. Two years later, she published an essay on Ulysses S. Grant and Reconstruction in H. L. Mencken’s
American Mercury
, “Godfather to American Corruption,” covering some of the same ground. “At the close of Grant’s administration,” she wrote,

The statesmen and party bosses of President Grant’s time “were actually more materialistic in their fundamental philosophy than most Marxians,” she wrote in a review of a Marxist history several years later. The comparison was only partly tongue in cheek: Their “political talents [were]…great if ruthless,” she argued, describing these politicians as “something more than the puppets” this writer “makes them out to be.” “They discovered the necessity for unqualified party orthodoxy and the efficacy of the ‘party purge’ long before Moscow did. And they were all avowed believers in the dictum that all power is a permanent conspiracy.” Esther’s thinking about postbellum America was probably shaped by her reading of the historian Charles Beard, who argued in his
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
that the framers were driven by financial interest. She was certainly influenced by the historian Henry Adams, a witness to Grant’s administration, whom she described as incapable of understanding “Grant’s particular kind of stupidity.” Adams was “primarily concerned in attempting to discover a meaning or a logic in history” and she admired his “devastating” portrait of his “class and…caste in one of their most triumphant periods in America.”

Esther was herself primarily concerned not with finding history’s logic but with making it vivid and visible in the present. It was second nature to her to think about the crises and characters of her own time in terms of the European and American past—and anachronism and incongruity were as productive a way of thinking about that relationship as continuity. The Spanish Civil War, she told Flanner in 1938, was “like the religious wars in sixteenth century France and the Thirty Year War in Germany.” She added: “Though I never idealized the Spanish government and disagreed with many of its policies, I think Franco’s victory will be an unmitigated disaster both for Spain and for Europe.” Writing to John Strachey that same year, she evoked both Roman decadence and the French Revolution and the Terror: “I have just been spending a few days in Santa Barbara, that Pompeii without a volcano.” She added: “All the California millionaires and the Eastern plutocrats who inhabit the marble palaces in its hills are in a very strange state of mind…[and] are behaving as though they already heard the rumble of the tumbrels coming for them.” “Well,” she wrote to Amabel Williams-Ellis as the world careened toward war, “it is strange to live in a dissolving world…‘Toute la boutique s’en va au diable,’ as Madame Pompadour observed to Louis XV on another occasion, which also turned out to have serious historical consequences.” She planned to write a play about Louis Napoleon, because she saw that president turned emperor as “the great prototype of the present fascist leaders, since he was the first modern dictator.” To her potential collaborator she noted, “It won’t be easy to write as it is the sort of thing that has to come off absolutely or else be a complete failure.”

At the same time, she articulated the European past in colloquial American terms. Years later, describing her frustration at trying to capture Madame de Maintenon’s character, she announced that she had decided to think of her as “The Slippery Sam of French History.” And she constantly traveled the border between history and fiction, peopling her world not only with the living (“the uncertified lunatics amongst whom we live,” as she wrote to Draper) and the Great Dead but also with figures from literature and of her own invention. It was a fluid vision. She had set pieces that could be requested—or averted, since “when she got onto one of these stories, it would take two or three hours to tell,” as Sybille Bedford observed. One of these stories was about the Hanseatic League, a complex patch of Northern European history that Esther would declare she was one of the few to understand—and would now explain. “I used to say you had to steer her, like the
Queen Mary
,” recalled James Douglas, a friend of her later years, referring to the inexorability of these long discourses. There were other personages and events that Esther related as if they were true, and were believed to be by many of her listeners, but were her own creation. One of these was “The Reverend Mother,” the corrupt abbess of a convent in Louisiana who had the dirt on so many cardinals that she had successfully thwarted the efforts of the Church hierarchy to expel her. Esther retailed this woman’s deeds as a report on the outrageous state of the Catholic Church in the American South, but “the R.M.,” as she also called her, was largely or wholly a fiction, a long-running joke, and both a particular character and a malevolent force whom she would pretend to blame for all manner of disasters, personal and global.

Blending past and present, European and American, high and low, Esther imagined contemporary politicians as literary characters, saw figures from literature as her friends, and posited her friends as players in historical intrigues. She called FDR someone out of a Philip Barry play—suave, upper-class, and too removed from most Americans’ experience of the Depression. She used
Pride and Prejudice
to describe the way her old friend Peggy Fears “flirted with me and threw me many a lewd glance” at a gathering in 1950: “like Sir William Lucas at Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s party.” In 1958, at the height of the French atrocities in Algeria and with the end of the Fourth Republic imminent, she wrote to Gerald that the previous six months had “resembled nothing so much as the Queen’s Croquet Party in Alice in Wonderland—but which nearly came to a denouement that would have been tragic and bloody.” It was “eerie,” she said, “to see the streets [of Paris] patrolled by the special police carrying machine guns.” She had a theory about one longtime friend—a difficult woman who had fallen out with Noel Murphy but to whom Esther remained loyal—“that she traveled all over the world looking for the Boston Tea Party” (excitement, opposition, conflict). Edmund Wilson recalled that Esther’s train of thought had to do with the fact that this mutual friend’s “great-uncle (I think) was a renegade to the Republic in the War of 1812—he was an admiral who made an attempt to betray Boston Harbor to the British.” When Wilson related Esther’s idea to Janet Flanner, he “said something about Esther’s theory not necessarily being reliable.—‘But,’ said Janet, ‘I’m sure it’s brilliantly illuminating.’” Esther’s “talking, her devouring of history, is of course a release of energy,” Wilson observed, “and the things she makes up, imagines, show that she has had partly to live in a fantasy not too close to reality.” But as Flanner saw, Esther also transposed her friends and acquaintances to other centuries and locations and reinvented them as fictional characters to comment on their personalities in the present. History itself was about large political and social shifts, but it was also about character, in both the ethical and the fictional senses. And the constant literary allusions helped her to talk about the human repercussions of policy.

Esther and the news, February 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van Vechten (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, courtesy Estate of Carl Van Vechten)

In another of Esther’s stories about Natalie Barney, which she also sent to Muriel Draper around 1926, she cast Barney as the oversexed abbess of a convent in thirteenth-century Italy. The hapless Alice Robinson appeared again, this time as a novice whom Barney hoped to deflower. Isabel Pell, another lesbian rake of their circle, haunted the convent, Esther wrote, taking the form of a dog to enter the cloister and debauch young nuns. “The Barney or ‘Clotilde’ as she was then called, but to avoid confusion we will speak of her under the name which she bears now,” Esther wrote,

The story was the fervid creation of someone not included in Barney’s seductions, but it was also far more than clever sniping. As Djuna Barnes did in
Ladies Almanack
and Virginia Woolf did in
Orlando
, Esther used literary history to make excited and critical claims about anachronism and modernity; to link local and larger historical details; to suggest a relationship between lesbian sexuality and historical consciousness; and to argue that literary characters are themselves part of history, as are one’s friends. Esther signed herself as the narrator and putative author of the seventeenth-century French novel the
Lettres Portugaises
, or
Letters of a Portuguese Nun
. Ostensibly and long believed to be five missives from a cloistered Franciscan nun to her lover, the text is now recognized as the fiction of a seventeenth-century Frenchman, the Comte de Guilleragues, and as one of the important precursors of the novel. The other text she refers to,
De Tribus Impostoribus
(
The Three Imposters
), one of the early manifestos of atheism (the “imposters” are Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed), is attributed variously to Frederick II, Boccaccio, Hobbes, and Spinoza; one version from the 1750s was published with the fictive date of 1598.