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Feb. 11th, 2024 08:26 pmAmanda Vaill's Everybody Was So Young: A Lost Generation Love Story was a rec from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
portico that genarti got out of the library and then I stole from her; it's a joint biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, whom I had actually not previously heard of but who were central to the Fitzgerald/Hemingway/Dos Passos/etc. 1920s expatriate set, both as artists (Gerald was a painter, Sara did some theatrical set design & costume work) and as extended-artistic-friend-network social glue.
The thing that is interesting about the Murphys -- well I mean there is a lot that is interesting about the Murphys, but specifically their vibe is like ... they were a maritally and financially stable upper-class married couple with three kids, nearly a decade older than most of the hip young artists and writers they were hanging out with, and appear to have just kind of decided to become the Lost Generation's collective mom and dad friends. (Gerald Murphy was known as "Dow-Dow" to his kids AND ALSO all their friends.) They threw very classy parties, and said enthusiastic and encouraging things about everyone's work, and floated everyone money, until tragedy intruded upon their endless Riviera summer [two of their three kids died in their teens, one of a long drawn-out illness and one of a short surprise illness]. And even then they kept saying enthusiastic and encouraging things about everyone's work and floating everyone money, and maintaining those friendships as well and as long as they could.
Vaill is one of those biographers who is very thorough and thoughtful and also really very extremely in love with her subjects. She is very interested in their gift for friendship and their beautiful artistic sensibilities and how they decorated all their houses. (I do not say this judgmentally, the ways in which they decorated their houses ARE relevant and interesting.) She is delicately interested in the question of whether Gerald may have been gay or queer (seems likely, and the book does imo do a great job of balancing this with its definite stance that Gerald and Sara's marriage was a genuine love story) and whether Sara had affairs with any of the famous artists and authors clamoring for her attention (Vaill is charmingly convinced that Picasso, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were all in love with her at one point or another and also very charmingly convinced that it would be out of character for Sara to have done anything untoward about it).
She is absolutely not at all interested in examining any of the inherited wealth or general privilege around Gerald and Sara even a little bit critically; we are told they had servants, we get the names of each of those servants perhaps, and they are not mentioned again. It's an interesting cross-read with the Mitchison memoir I'm reading now, You May Well Ask, which I'll write up in more detail when I'm done, but focuses on around the same time period and is extremely frank and forthright about the ways in which all these beautiful social creative lives were made possible by somebody else's labor. The tragedy that eventually hit the Murphys is incredibly brutal, but for their first golden decade on the Riviera they do seem to have lived as happy a life as anyone at any period of history ever could: kids and friends and art and culture and literature and creativity and constant magical excursions and environments, with no competing demands on one's time, and always someone else to do the dishes.
And the twist is that half of their best friends went on to write books about people loosely based on them who were absolutely miserable. They show up most famously as the model for the leads in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, about the dissolution of a marriage; Archibald MacLeish used them as his models for modern-day Job and Job's Wife in his play J.B.; they appear for a brief but fairly scathing moment in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I just keep thinking about this; I keep trying to imagine having such a powerful draw on the imaginations of all your friends that they keep writing you into things and making you worse.
portico that genarti got out of the library and then I stole from her; it's a joint biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, whom I had actually not previously heard of but who were central to the Fitzgerald/Hemingway/Dos Passos/etc. 1920s expatriate set, both as artists (Gerald was a painter, Sara did some theatrical set design & costume work) and as extended-artistic-friend-network social glue. The thing that is interesting about the Murphys -- well I mean there is a lot that is interesting about the Murphys, but specifically their vibe is like ... they were a maritally and financially stable upper-class married couple with three kids, nearly a decade older than most of the hip young artists and writers they were hanging out with, and appear to have just kind of decided to become the Lost Generation's collective mom and dad friends. (Gerald Murphy was known as "Dow-Dow" to his kids AND ALSO all their friends.) They threw very classy parties, and said enthusiastic and encouraging things about everyone's work, and floated everyone money, until tragedy intruded upon their endless Riviera summer [two of their three kids died in their teens, one of a long drawn-out illness and one of a short surprise illness]. And even then they kept saying enthusiastic and encouraging things about everyone's work and floating everyone money, and maintaining those friendships as well and as long as they could.
Vaill is one of those biographers who is very thorough and thoughtful and also really very extremely in love with her subjects. She is very interested in their gift for friendship and their beautiful artistic sensibilities and how they decorated all their houses. (I do not say this judgmentally, the ways in which they decorated their houses ARE relevant and interesting.) She is delicately interested in the question of whether Gerald may have been gay or queer (seems likely, and the book does imo do a great job of balancing this with its definite stance that Gerald and Sara's marriage was a genuine love story) and whether Sara had affairs with any of the famous artists and authors clamoring for her attention (Vaill is charmingly convinced that Picasso, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were all in love with her at one point or another and also very charmingly convinced that it would be out of character for Sara to have done anything untoward about it).
She is absolutely not at all interested in examining any of the inherited wealth or general privilege around Gerald and Sara even a little bit critically; we are told they had servants, we get the names of each of those servants perhaps, and they are not mentioned again. It's an interesting cross-read with the Mitchison memoir I'm reading now, You May Well Ask, which I'll write up in more detail when I'm done, but focuses on around the same time period and is extremely frank and forthright about the ways in which all these beautiful social creative lives were made possible by somebody else's labor. The tragedy that eventually hit the Murphys is incredibly brutal, but for their first golden decade on the Riviera they do seem to have lived as happy a life as anyone at any period of history ever could: kids and friends and art and culture and literature and creativity and constant magical excursions and environments, with no competing demands on one's time, and always someone else to do the dishes.
And the twist is that half of their best friends went on to write books about people loosely based on them who were absolutely miserable. They show up most famously as the model for the leads in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, about the dissolution of a marriage; Archibald MacLeish used them as his models for modern-day Job and Job's Wife in his play J.B.; they appear for a brief but fairly scathing moment in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I just keep thinking about this; I keep trying to imagine having such a powerful draw on the imaginations of all your friends that they keep writing you into things and making you worse.
