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Feb. 11th, 2024 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Amanda Vaill's Everybody Was So Young: A Lost Generation Love Story was a rec from
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.
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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.
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Date: 2024-02-12 02:51 am (UTC)What.
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Date: 2024-02-12 02:55 am (UTC)(I mean, everyone seems to have known and understood that the couple in the book was half Gerald-and-Sara and half Scott-and-Zelda, but STILL.)
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Date: 2024-02-12 04:05 am (UTC)J.B. at least makes sense in the context of suffering horrible tragedies; it's a retelling of the Job story. I wouldn't know what to do if I got a roman à half-a-clef in the mail from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not invite him to the Riviera for a little while?
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Date: 2024-02-12 04:37 am (UTC)the Murphys: um. hm. no I don't think we are actually --
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Date: 2024-02-12 04:38 am (UTC)My God, I'm amazed they stayed friends. I don't have a more boggled icon to use.
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Date: 2024-02-12 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 04:08 am (UTC)I understand how that happens and it is true that I feel more sympathetically toward that kind of catastrophic blurring of boundaries if it comes out of crisis rather than complacency and I am glad it worked for them.
[edit] I should be clear that I am not dunking on the Fitzgeralds alone; if I had lost two out of three children in sudden tragedy, I would feel very weird about turning up in my friend's play as Job. I discovered J.B. in college and I have a perfectly nice mid-century copy and it never occured to me that it would have any real-life basis as opposed to being an ordinary Brechtian retelling of the story.
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Date: 2024-02-14 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 03:15 am (UTC)This is both truly an incredible thing to try and imagine, and also very evocatively worded. Does the book mention if they said encouraging and enthusiastic things about all these sort-of tributes?
This does sound very interesting and I look forward to your write up of it!
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Date: 2024-02-12 03:45 am (UTC)They generally speaking do not seem to have been pleased about the tributes, lol, with polite acknowledgment of the technical skill involved -- friendships temporarily cooled over them but did not end. (Sara on Tender is the Night: "Mr. Fitzgerald does not know much about people. And absolutely nothing about Gerald and myself;" Gerald on A Moveable Feast: "What a strange kind of bitterness -- or rather accusitoriness ... how well-written, of course.")
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Date: 2024-02-13 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 04:00 am (UTC)This reminds me of fiction that tells a story that's more unhappy/bleak that the historical stuff it's based on (which always kinda annoys me).
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Date: 2024-02-12 04:08 am (UTC)Every now and then I think about watching My Policeman (2022) because the older versions of the main characters are played by Linus Roache, Rupert Everett, and Gina McKee, all of whom I really like, and then I remember that the real-life relationship from which the novel and the succeeding film were fictionalized was a forty-year functional poly arrangement and not a tragic jealous closeted love triangle and even for Gina McKee, I can't.
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Date: 2024-02-12 05:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 05:06 am (UTC)Exactly! Why would you waste material that good when real life just handed it to you?
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Date: 2024-02-12 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 04:10 am (UTC)also thank you for reminding me about vaill’s passionate digression about all the reasons why sara murphy wouldn’t have fucked picasso. which was very charming and very funny
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Date: 2024-02-12 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 04:41 am (UTC)IT WAS SO CUTE. yes he drew her nude no you should not read into it!
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Date: 2024-02-12 04:21 pm (UTC)S E R I O U S L Y
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Date: 2024-02-12 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-14 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 05:43 am (UTC)I don't know, in the abstract this sounds so funny. I would totally sign up to keep finding books in the mail by people who I thought were my friends about Myself But Worse.
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Date: 2024-02-13 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-02-12 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 12:23 pm (UTC)wow. also it probably says something not very flattering about me that my first thought was to wonder if they were really that nice...
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Date: 2024-02-12 04:58 pm (UTC)Of course, it could just be that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were just that unpleasant. I fancy Hemingway thought his manhood was impugned by having to accept help in any form.
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Date: 2024-02-12 09:39 pm (UTC)I wonder whether that was it -- gratitude can be a tiresome emotion to sustain. In a way it's easier to resent the people you owe. Especially if they seem happier and definitely are wealthier than you!
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Date: 2024-02-13 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-14 11:45 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-02-12 01:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 04:19 pm (UTC)Honestly, that sounds like great fun!
*adds this to my to-read list*
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Date: 2024-02-13 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 05:03 pm (UTC)Like all of your commenters I am shaken by this idea! But having thought about it I ended up thinking about Le Guin and Omelas:
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Is this it? After loving them for what they were, their friends then feel obscurely treasonous if they put them as they are into their books, because that would not be art; but they have to put them in, because they loved them.
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Date: 2024-02-13 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 01:01 pm (UTC)Ohhh! How tragic, and poignant.
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.
...Wow. What????
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Date: 2024-02-19 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 02:10 pm (UTC)In theory I can sort of understand the conflict between wanting to write about friends so implausibly blessed and beautiful and glamorous and yet also having to SOMEHOW make things worse in order for there to be A Story.
But to then show your friends the results with no qualms or explanations is amazing, like guys, how DID you expect them to feel about the fact that you Made Them Worse? Did you not want to be invited to more parties? AMAZING.
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Date: 2024-02-19 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-19 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-25 08:54 am (UTC)they keep writing you into things and making you worse
In Nancy Cunard's case there was something similar going on - I recently read the not entirely satisfactory de Courcy book - but there misogyny and the pains of rejection presumably played a big part, though also the traditional thing of removing from the woman all the really interesting things she did (see also, what Meredith did to Caroline Norton in Diana of the Crossways, i.e. removed a lot of the tragedy and the political activism) when turning her into a fictional character.