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Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story - Softcover

Vaill, Amanda

 
9780767903707: Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767903706 ISBN 13: 9780767903707
Verlag: Crown, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

A dazzling biography for readers of The Great Gatsby and other Lost Generation authors

Gifted artist Gerald Murphy and his elegant wife, Sara, were icons of the most enchanting period of our time; handsome, talented, and wealthy expatriate Americans, they were at the very center of the literary scene in Paris in the 1920s. In Everybody Was So Young Amanda Vaill brilliantly portrays both the times in which the Murphys lived and the fascinating friends who flocked around them. Whether summering with Picasso on the French Riviera or watching bullfights with Hemingway in Pamplona, Gerald and Sara inspired kindred creative spirits like Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald even modeled his main characters in Tender is the Night after the couple. Their story is both glittering and tragic, and in this sweeping and richly anecdotal portrait of a marriage and an era, Amanda Vaill "has brought them to life as never before" (Chicago Tribune).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amanda Vaill is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in numerous national publications. This is her first book. She lives in New York City.

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Gifted artist Gerald Murphy and his elegant wife, Sara, were icons of the most enchanting period of our time; handsome, talented, and wealthy expatriate Americans, they were at the very center of the literary scene in Paris in the 1920s. In Everybody Was So Young--one of the best reviewed books of 1995--Amanda Vaill brilliantly portrays both the times in which the Murphys lived and the fascinating friends who flocked around them. Whether summering with Picasso on the French Riviera or watching bullfights with Hemingway in Pamplona, Gerald and Sara inspired kindred creative spirits like Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night were modeled after the Murphys). Their story is both glittering and tragic, and in this sweeping and richly anecdotal portrait of a marriage and an era, Amanda Vaill "has brought them to life as never before" ("Chicago Tribune).

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Prologue: Antibes, May 28, 1926

It was their friend Scott Fitzgerald who described the Murphys best, on the beach at Antibes in the south of France, in the summer sun of the 1920s. There is Sara, her face "hard and lovely and pitiful," her bathing suit "pulled off her shoulders" and her brown back gleaming under her rope of pearls, "making out a list of things from a book open in the sand." And there is Gerald, her husband, tall and lean in his striped maillot and a knitted cap, gravely raking the seaweed from the beach as if performing "some esoteric burlesque," to the delight of the little audience of friends they have gathered around them. On the "bright tan prayer rug of the beach," they and their friends swim, sunbathe, drink sherry and nibble crackers, trade jokes about the people with strange names listed in the "News of Americans" in the Paris Herald: "Mrs. Evelyn Oyster" and "Mr. S. Flesh." Their very presence is "an act of creation"; to be included in their world is, Fitzgerald says, "a remarkable experience."

Fitzgerald wasn't literally portraying the Murphys, of course; he was writing a novel, called Tender Is the Night, about a psychiatrist named Dick Diver and his wife, Nicole. In the novel, the woman with the pearls is recovering from a psychotic break brought on by incest, and the man with the rake ends up losing his wife, his position, everything he most cares about. These things are not known to have happened to Gerald and Sara Murphy. So when Fitzgerald insisted to Sara, after the publication of Tender Is the Night in 1934, that "I "used you again and again in Tender," Sara's reaction was denial and distaste. "I hated the book when I first read it," she told her neighbor, the writer Calvin Tomkins. "I reject categorically any resemblance to ourselves or anyone we know--at any time." But Gerald made the connection at once. "I know . . . that what you said in 'Tender is the Night' is true," he wrote Fitzgerald in 1935. "Only the invented part of our life--the unreal part--has had any scheme any beauty."

By that time the life the Murphys had invented at their Villa America in Antibes, and in Paris during the 19205, may indeed have seemed unreal. In the intervening years tragedy had famished the Murphys' lives: the death of one child, the mortal illness of another, Gerald's forfeiture of his career as a painter; a whole litany of loss. But on May 28, 1926, those events are in the future, and the invented part of the Murphys' lives is as real, as palpable, as the hot sand under their feet or the throbbing of cicadas or the color of the sea-- an improbable turquoise in the shallows, and a deep, purplish blue, the color of blueberries, farther out.

The beach, La Garoupe, is literally Gerald's invention: Until a year or so ago, it was covered in seaweed and stones, and deserted except for the fishermen who pull up their little boats there. But Gerald saw its possibilities when the Murphys first stayed in Antibes in the summer of 1922 with Cole Porter and his wife, Linda. Gerald and Cole raked the debris from a comer of the sand, and in the years since Gerald has cleared the entire plage almost single-handed. Now what began as a private Murphy passion has caught on --not, it should be noted, with the local inhabitants, who cannot understand why anyone would want to go out in the midday heat and actually lie in the sun--but with fashionable Parisians and increasing numbers of visiting Americans and English from the huge fin de siècle hotel at the end of the Antibes peninsula, which has only recently extended its season into the summer months.

In fact, the beach has been rather crowded today: Anita Loos, the smart young American screenwriter and author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is there; the playwright Charles MacArthur; Ada MacLeish, the soprano, with her two children, Mimi and Ken (Ada's husband, the poet Archibald MacLeish, is still in Persia with the League of Nations' Opium Commission); and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who have made a rare sortie from their villa at Juan-les-Pins on the other side of the peninsula, Scott nursing a hangover and Zelda not speaking to him. Absent today, although they are often here, are Comte Etienne de Beaumont, the long-faced French aristocrat who was the model for the eponymous hero of Raymond Radiguet's scandalous roman a clef; Le bal du Comte d'Orgel, and his wife, Édith (who, it's whispered, has an opium habit). As is their custom, the Murphys arrived with their three children and their nanny late in the morning, after Gerald has completed the day's work on one of the precise and unsettling paintings for which he has become famous, and they have been holding a kind of impromptu party ever since, with cold sherry and little biscuits called sablés at noon. Now they are leaving--it is lunchtime. And they have arranged to take Hadley Hemingway, wife of the young American writer Ernest Hemingway, to pick up her husband at the Antibes railway station after lunch.

By rights, Hadley should be in Madrid with Ernest, who went there to work on a new novel, and the Hemingways' one-year-old son, John, nicknamed Bumby, should have been staying with the Murphys. But before Hadley could get away, Bumby was diagnosed with whooping cough, and Sara, who swathes the railway compartments that she and her family travel in with sheets washed in Lysol to protect her children from germs, thought it best that the little boy and his mother be quarantined until the disease has run its course. Luckily, the Fitzgeralds were able to lend Hadley their rented house in Juan-les-Pins, the Villa Paquita, which they have vacated in favor of a much grander property nearby. And Gerald and Sara, insisting that Hadley and Bumby are their guests, have been paying Bumby's doctor bills and Hadley's other expenses.

When Ernest steps off the train at the Antibes station this aftemoon he is met by four people: Hadley's friend Pauline Pfeiffer, as small and dark and slender as Hadley is fair and large-boned, is also standing on the platform. Pauline is an editor at Vogue in Paris, and because she has already had whooping cough it holds no terrors for her. She has been staying with Hadley during this quarantine and has become a great favorite with the Murphys, who admire her stylishness and quick wit. She is a great favorite with Ernest, too--in fact, the two of them have been having a secret affair that began last winter. But the Murphys don't know this and Hadley only suspects it; and if the greeting Ernest gives his wife seems a little awkward, everyone puts it down to his exhaustion (he has had to change trains three times on the joumey from Madrid), Hadley's own weariness after weeks of tending a sick child, and the lack of privacy.

In the evening Gerald and Sara stage a more formal welcome for Ernest: a caviar-and-champagne party at the little casino in Juan-les-Pins which the owner, Edouard Baudoin, has recently renovated in the hopes of turning Juan into a French Miami. Fresh caviar has never been a summer dish--it spoils too readily on the long train journey from the Caspian Sea--but some enterprising importer has recently begun flying it in, and Gerald wants to be the first to take advantage of this development. As with so many things, the Murphys are setting a fashion.

Sara is wearing a long, floating dress with vaguely semiclassical lines, nothing like the beaded chemises beloved by flapper fashion victims; her dark gold hair, recently bobbed into soft waves, frames what Scott Fitzgerald will describe as her "Viking madonna" face; her rope of pearls is wound once around her neck. Gerald, in an impeccable...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767903706
ISBN 13 
9780767903707
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
470
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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