All We Know: Three Lives Read online

  But while Esther believed that wasted effort was not a waste, or that such waste forever had meaning, she was not interested in simple acts of reclamation. Seeing her again after a long absence, Edmund Wilson relished her talking “with her usual historical gusto.” History for her was what could not be contained: herself, her volubility, her pleasure in thinking about those who had preceded her, her desire to make herself the vehicle for the chasms and correspondences between now and then, the way the achievements and disasters of the past continually made themselves felt in the present—all of the sparkling facts. History was a dead woman—and a living one to whom she wanted to say something. She “was all about ideas and marvelous sentences, not about research,” said the writer Sybille Bedford, one of those living women.

  “Statistics,” wrote Dawn Powell, after an evening with Esther, “occupy her as if they were rare jewels.” But if the facts were radiant, glamorous, and meaningful to her, so was their absence and fabrication—the missing, forgotten, and invented. And it was equally her habit to see the world in literary terms. Some of her most elaborate discourses on the past turned out to be carefully wrought fictions masquerading as fact. Analyzing public figures and friends, she thought of them as characters from novels and plays as well as actors in history. She loved odd juxtapositions of the actual and invented. “I will now proceed to deliver a few comments on the general world situation,” she wrote to a friend in 1933, then went on to consider the French reaction to FDR’s economic policies by quoting Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. “‘Fits upon fits upon fits, and the loss of her intellects for days at a time,’ is the only adequate description of what the French press and official classes have been going through,” she wrote, citing the histrionics of Richardson’s heroine. Projecting herself and others back in time, compounding the gesture with reference to literature: This was Esther Murphy’s constant practice.

  The genre of biography has itself, for approximately the past eighty years, been said to lie at the intersection of history and literature, of fact and imagination. Esther Murphy did not write a biography. She did leave a record of her attempts to do so: of the archival lacunae that hampered her writing; of the psychological inscrutability of her subjects; of the ebb and flow of her own admiration for, identification with, and disgust at these figures—a pattern that often characterizes biographers’ work. Her brother Gerald has become known for his devotion to “living well,” for the way he harnessed his aesthetics as a painter, as a businessman, and as a creator of perfect moments in the present for his family and friends, for many of whom his taste represented the spirit of the 1920s. Esther responded to and shaped the first part of the twentieth century with ideas rather than objects. She moved through her time fueled by insecurity, alcohol, and relentless intellectual energy, promulgating a vision that made that era new and old at once. Her expert, idiosyncratic engagement with history was as informed by her sense of not quite belonging to her own time as it was by her perceptive understanding of the contemporary scene. She held that anachronism was at least as important as novelty in thinking about modernity, and that modernity was something far more complex than either rupture with the past or reversion to a remote past (the latter being the gestures that Ezra Pound and H.D. made, for example, in their turns to antiquity).

  It is a cliché of American life that we like our brilliance to flare up and die young, we like it to crash and burn. This is not that tale—nor is it the nineteenth-century counternarrative of abdicating ambition: preferring “not to.” This is a story about a life in which past and present, fact and fiction, history and failure, collide. It is a story about someone who made history and politics a literary occasion, whose sense of the politics of literature was acute, and who understood and embodied American success and American failure.

  No Such Word as Fail

  Esther is without a doubt the most widely read and best informed woman in New York,” wrote a friend of hers in 1927, “and her father’s admiration for her and devotion to her is one of the rarest things to behold…Mrs. Murphy, very patrician with beautiful white hair and many jewels, sits back and smokes her cigarettes without interesting herself very much in her husband’s and her daughter’s very brilliant dialogue.”

  Patrick Murphy bullied his sons, Frederic and Gerald, but he was Esther’s champion—“so proud,” in his wife’s words, “that he [could] hardly see straight.” Part of the first group of Irish Catholics to find acceptance in New York society, Murphy raised his children in a muddled combination of privileges deriving from his success and scorn for the fact that they could not repeat his trajectory. Esther, whom he called Tess, was exempt from some of the expectations that haunted her brothers, such as success in business, and she exceeded others, with her scholarly acumen. Still, like her brothers, she grew up steeped in an atmosphere of opportunity and exclusion and in the myth and fact of Patrick Murphy’s professional and social climb.

  She also absorbed or inherited some of her mother’s nervousness and depression. Anna Murphy’s letters to her children often report her bad dreams and anxieties. She took “life and the living of it so tragically,” Gerald wrote in 1915. In the late 1950s, more than a quarter of a century after their parents’ deaths, he wrote to Esther: “Mother was devoted, possessive, ambitious, Calvinistic, superstitious, with a faulty sense of the truth. She was hypercritical and as I recall it, ultimately resigned from most of her friendships.” He remembered their father as a man who “avoid[ed]…close relationships including family ones…a solitary [who] managed, though he had a wife and children, to lead a detached life.” Esther adored her father, but as the girl in the family and the youngest child, she found her place was with her mother and spent long stretches of time alone with Anna Murphy, at home and at the watering holes of the wealthy in Europe and the United States. Every once in a while, Patrick Murphy would appear from Paris or London, where he spent half of every year supervising the Mark Cross factories, procuring the fittings of upper-class European life for American consumption, and maintaining a mistress. “Our father who art in Europe,” Gerald would say.

  Esther posed with a newspaper (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

  Born in Boston in 1855 or ’56, the eldest of thirteen children, Murphy had gone to work for the saddler Mark W. Cross in the mid-1870s, first as a bookkeeper and then as a salesman. He eventually bought the company, relocated it to fashionable Tremont Street, and transformed it into a purveyor of small leather goods, including bags, cigar cases, tea baskets, gloves, and stationery cases. In 1892 he moved his business and family to Manhattan—the former to a shop on Lower Broadway, opposite City Hall and near the Financial District, the latter to a brownstone on lower Fifth Avenue. He had married Anna Ryan in 1884; Fred and Gerald were born in Boston in 1885 and 1888. Esther was born in New York on October 22, 1897. Murphy weathered the financial panics of 1890 and 1892–93, and in 1902 he opened another Mark Cross shop, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. He also had a shop on Regent Street in London and a glove factory in Wiltshire, and he eventually bought the leather factory in central England that produced much of his inventory. Mark Cross still made luggage, equestrian supplies, and writing accessories, but Murphy also brought the thermos, the hot-water bottle, Minton china, English crystal, Scottish golf clubs, the demitasse, the highball glass, and the cocktail set (later subjects of Gerald’s paintings) to market in the United States.

  His political life was at least as important to him as his business. He had served in the Massachusetts Legislature as a Democratic representative of Boston’s Twelfth District in 1878–79; in New York he associated with the reforming wing of Tammany Hall and was a friend of Al Smith, the progressive Irish-Catholic governor and 1928 presidential candidate. By the time Esther was a young child, he had also begun to move toward the circles of ruling-class power in Manhattan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York society “was still a closed circle to which one either did or did not belong,” wrote one
critical insider. Religious, racial, and ethnic prejudice went without saying, as did a rigid “social hierarchy, from which all random elements were rigorously excluded.” The Four Hundred, that group of families identified as “Society,” would also “have fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman.” But by the turn of the twentieth century there was room for an anomaly or two, and Patrick Murphy’s controlled wit made him a celebrated speaker at the enormous banquets that were part of the public life of the city’s elite. He made his debut in 1903 at one of its premier rituals, the National Horse Show Association dinner, held in the old Madison Square Garden, where his audience was composed of Astors, Harrimans, Vanderbilts, Schermerhorns, and Hamiltons. He came “to be regarded as the official orator of the…Association” and was in such demand as an after-dinner speaker, to business groups and private clubs, that he spent most of his evenings out.

  Bald, clean shaven, meticulously tailored, he would hold himself rigid, clasp his hands behind his back, and speak in a “clear fluent monotone.” His talks were a series of epigrammatic utterances, strung together cleverly and recycled frequently, with just a glancing mention of the group he was addressing. He timed himself ruthlessly. His themes were government, business, history, alcohol, and taxation. (The excise tax on business income and the graduated personal income tax were introduced in 1913.) He cited Macaulay, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Greeks. The need to pay tribute to a prominent man of the day, often the guest of honor at such occasions, meant that he spent a certain amount of time musing about success and flattering his audiences. “He who breeds thoroughbreds must be a thoroughbred himself” was “an aphorism that elicited the liveliest applause” at the Horse Show banquet of 1904. He was compared to Mark Twain and other entertaining orators of the previous century. His characteristic rhetorical gesture was an ostensibly serious or paradoxical statement followed by a deflating quip. “The art of speaking is to say nothing—briefly,” he observed, more than once. “But the tragedy of it is the less a man has to say the more difficult he finds it to stop.” Paradox and didacticism were also the style of the advertising copy for his firm, which he wrote. “Buying inferior articles to save money is like stopping the clock to save time,” ran one.

  Esther’s prolix and imaginative verbal style shared little with her father’s disciplined and formulaic method. Even as a child, she performed constantly, testing her own and others’ authority. On a transatlantic voyage with her parents, age eleven, she initiated a trial on behalf of a passenger after she overheard him complain about his wife’s cigarette smoking, appointing herself prosecutor and choosing a jury. “Before we knew it there were a hundred people around her,” her mother wrote from on board the Amerika in June 1909. That summer, at the Beau-Rivage Palace hotel in Lausanne, a pinnacle of prewar leisure, Esther “instigated” a baseball game, corralling the guests into two teams, coaching those who did not know the game, again attracting a crowd. At home in New York, when her elderly nanny took her to Central Park for exercise, Esther would skate off, a gawky girl Pied Piper, pulling a group of children after her and mesmerizing them with terrifying “Edgar Allan Poe–ish” stories.

  But if her style was unlike her father’s, she was shaped by his preoccupations and riveted by his political savvy. “History is simply a record of the failures of government,” Patrick Murphy told one audience. And: “History teaches us one thing only, and that is no statesman has ever learned anything from history.” At the Horse Show in 1907, he addressed the financial crisis of the preceding month. “We have had explosive financial fireworks,” he said of Theodore Roosevelt’s attempts to regulate big business, the collapse of confidence in the banking system, the failure of the trust companies, and J. P. Morgan’s rescue of these institutions after negotiations in Morgan’s home with a consortium of bankers.

  Esther with the actor John Drew (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

  Happily…American difficulties have produced the great Americans. It is not alone in the battlefield that valor is displayed; courage may be shown even in an art library. No sounder pieces of American manhood have been put together than the group of financial statuary that defended American credit…In the lexicons of Morgan’s library there is no such word as fail.

  For Murphy, too, there was no such word. But his success, which stemmed from his accomplishments in business, was seldom attributed to them. He was a well-to-do merchant who catered to wealthy New Yorkers, and he was on the board of directors of at least one bank in the course of his career; yet when his speeches were reported in the newspapers, as they often were, he was not identified as the president of Mark Cross. It was important to him and others that he never “appeared the business man.” In the words of one acquaintance, “He looked like a gentleman and he was a gentleman.” The reporter added: “He always carried a cane and gloves.” Membership in the Manhattan, Pilgrims, and Lambs clubs; a move uptown to West Fifty-seventh Street, then to an enormous apartment at 525 Park Avenue; the purchase of a summer house in Southampton and membership in the Southampton Club (of which Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, was president)—all signaled and facilitated his rise.

  And so, as Esther grew up, a number of the “distinguished and remarkable…American women” she knew were members of New York’s elite families. One, Margaret “Daisy” Chanler—broad-minded, kind, and married into the Astor family—was also a sharp analyst of New York society, and her children became Esther’s friends. The travel and political writer Edith O’Shaughnessy—“a clever and ponderous dowager and a great crony of my Ma’s”—was another fixture of Esther’s childhood. But the heroine of Esther’s youth and young adulthood was Edith Wharton. A voracious scholar, largely self-educated, Wharton was at once a serious artist and a commercial success who had also been a pawn in the marriage market. For a bookish young woman who was studying her own awkward social position, Wharton was an inspiration and a caution, and Esther read her closely. In The House of Mirth, Wharton’s first major novel, her protagonist’s failure is one of reputation—the old story. But Wharton also exposes exactly what Lily Bart’s fall has to do with money—with her carefully calibrated yet blind accountings of expenditure and indebtedness—and she shows how a social system that offers meager alternatives to selling oneself in marriage is itself a failure. Through Margaret Chanler, Wharton’s closest friend, Esther eventually met Wharton, and she continued to encounter and admire her as an adult.

  Patrick Murphy (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

  Despite her father’s delight in her, Esther also grew up with a heightened awareness of her physical and psychological imperfections, just as her brothers had. Fred was diagnosed with mastoiditis and bleeding ulcers as a young man and he had several surgeries when such procedures were extremely dangerous. Gerald suffered from depression, which he called “the Black Service,” and understood himself as having “a defect over which I have only had enough control to scotch it from time to time”—his attraction to men. When he announced his engagement to Sara Wiborg, the daughter of multimillionaire Frank Wiborg, Patrick Murphy castigated him about his poor work ethic and “fail[ure] to grasp the fundamental duty in life, i.e.: self-support,—and financial independence” and told him he “did not deserve to be married.” Esther was an attractive child with long hair and her mother’s wide face, but she did not grow into a beautiful young person; she had no interest in the conventional pastimes of girls of her social class—dancing, clothes, marriage; her enormous height was beyond the pale for a woman at the time; and she had a lazy eye, which heightened the impression of peculiarity. She was conveyed constantly to eye specialists in New York and Europe as a child and had at least one surgery to correct her vision as an adult. It was still ordinary, moreover, for a girl’s scholarship to be seen as freakish and physically destructive. When Esther was eight, a doctor diagnosed her as suffering from “a peculiar form of ‘Hives’” brought on by what he called “intellectual ind
igestion.”

  By her late teens, she had developed an ironically inflated, self-deflating way of speaking about her body: “My appearance is more than usually attractive owing to the gargantuan proportions of one cheek,” she wrote Gerald. “An ulcerated tooth does not add to one’s attractions.” From the Maine resort where she and her mother stayed in the summer of 1915, she asked him to send her a set of golf clubs, the doctor having ordered exercise. She wanted equipment that was “as light in weight as possible, because although my height might impress the casual observer to the contrary, I am not an Amazon.” Her body and her books were in constant conversation: “I assure you I shall probably be fairly apoplectic with physical well being when I leave here,” she wrote. “I brought with me among my books a new and formidable French biography of the reign of Louis XIII, and so far have only read eight chapters…so you see down what alien byways I have wandered.” Later, some would say that Esther looked like Gerald—only less pretty. “All the masculine traits seem to be concentrated in Esther,” wrote Edmund Wilson, quoting John Dos Passos, “and the feminine ones in Gerald.”

  The message about inadequacy was general in the family; it was an upbringing in which one was encouraged to think of oneself both as exceptional and as a failure. Patrick Murphy sent his sons to Yale, expected them to excel, took it for granted that they would then work for Mark Cross, and gave them executive positions when they graduated, but his dissatisfaction with them was constant. “Come, brace up,” he wrote to Gerald during his second year at Yale. “You can’t afford to let this thing [his studies] go now. It means failure.” Although Gerald never resigned his position on the board of directors of Mark Cross, he stopped working for the company for almost twenty years when he enlisted in the army in 1918. His allergy to his father and to the commercialism of American life propelled him to Europe in 1921, where he spent the next decade, partly in the South of France that he and Sara Murphy helped to popularize, painting, living a carefully arranged life of the senses, and trying to be the kind of father he had not had—funded, of course, by his father and father-in-law’s enterprises.