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

Amanda Vaill

ISBN 10: 0395652413 / ISBN 13: 9780395652411

Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998

Former library book; Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers G0395652413I5N10

Inhaltsangabe:

"Once upon a time there was a prince and a princess -- that's how the story of the Murphys should begin," said a friend of this golden pair. Handsome, gifted, wealthy Americans with homes in Paris and on the French Riviera, Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the very center of expatriate cultural and social life during the modernist ferment of the 1920s. Gerald Murphy -- witty, urbane, and elusive -- was a giver of magical parties and an acclaimed painter. Sara Murphy, an enigmatic beauty who wore her pearls to the beach, enthralled and inspired Pablo Picasso (he painted her both clothed and nude), Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The models for Nicole and Dick Diver in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night,the Murphys also counted among their friends John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Fernand Leger, Archibald MacLeish, Cole Porter, and a host of others. Far more than mere patrons, they were kindred creative spirits whose sustaining friendship released creative energy. Yet none of the artists who used the Murphys for their models fully captured the real story of their lives: their Edith Wharton childhoods, their unexpected youthful romance, their ten-year secret courtship, their complex and enduring marriage -- and the tragedy that struck them, when the world they had created seemed most perfect, in what Gerald called, "our most vulnerable spot, our children." Certainly Fitzgerald, who once complained that there were no second acts in American lives, could not have envisioned the tenacity with which the Murphys struggled to hold themselves and their charmed circle together through the dark years of the thirties and forties, when death, financial ruin, madness, and war assailed it. Amanda Vaill's account of the Murphys and their friends follows them through the whole arc of their glittering and sometimes tragic lives -- the first such account to do so. Drawing on a hitherto untapped wealth of family diaries, photographs, letters and other papers, as well as on archival research and interviews on two continents, Vaill has documented the pivotal role of the Murphys in the interplay of cultures that gave rise to the Lost Generation. She explores for the first time the sexual undercurrents that ran beneath Gerald's and Sara's relationships with Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald and affected the work of all three men. Most important, she evokes both Murphys, and the geniuses who had the good fortune to be their friends, with a clarity and tenderness that makes them virtually step off the page. "There was a shine to life wherever they were," said the poet Archibald MacLeish -- and this book, which reads as much like a rich and engaging novel as a work of biography, shows why.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.:

Everybody Was So Young

Gerald and Sara Murphy — A Lost Generation Love Story

By Amanda Vaill

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Copyright © 1998 Amanda Vaill Stewart
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-395-65241-1

Contents

Title Page, 
Table of Contents, 
Epigraph, 
Copyright, 
Dedication, 
Prologue, 
"My father, of course, had wanted boys", 
"Gerald's besetting sin is inattention", 
"New clothes, new friends, and lots of parties", 
"Thinking how nice you are", 
"I must ask you endless question", 
"A relationship that so lets loose the imagination!", 
"Don't let's ever separate again", 
"The idea is thrilling to me", 
"An entirely new orbit", 
"A prince and a princess", 
Photos I, 
"There is American elegance", 
"Very serious over trivialities and rather wise about art and life", 
"Our real home", 
"The kind of man to whom men, women, children, and dogs were attracted", 
"How can a wise man have two countries?", 
"A dismantled house where people have once been gay", 
"The invented part, for me, is what has meaning", 
"The geodetic points of our lost topography", 
"We try to be like what you want us to be", 
"Life itself has stepped in now", 
Photos II, 
"Not on the same course, nor for the same port", 
"Enough to make the angels weep", 
"One's very Life seems at stake", 
"Isn't it strange how life goes on?", 
"Back there where they were", 
"Only half a person without you", 
Author's Note and Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 
Text Credits, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

"My father, of course, had wanted boys

"SARA SHERMAN WIBORG MURPHY was a figure of myth long before the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways and MacLeishes met her in France. Her father, Frank Bestow Wiborg, had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1855, the son of Henry Paulinus Wiborg, a Norwegian immigrant who was either a deckhand on a lake steamer (as family legend has it) or "one of the pioneer businessmen of Cleveland" (as the Centennial History of Cincinnati describes him). When Frank was about twelve, his father died; according to the deckhand legend, he contracted pneumonia while saving the victims of a boat accident, and his widow, Susan, remarried a man with whom young Frank could not get along. In the best Horatio Alger tradition, Frank Wiborg then reportedly left home to seek his fortune and found his way to Cincinnati, where he managed to gain admittance to the Chickering Institute, a select college preparatory academy emphasizing the classics and sciences.

He graduated in 1874 — in his family's account, he paid his way by peddling newspapers — and got work as a salesman for a producer of printer's ink, Levi Addison Ault, and so dazzled his employer that a mere four years later Ault offered him a partnership in the company. This was the great period of printmaking, when newspaper lithographs, sheet music, poetry broadsheets, glossy magazines, and posters were the predominant mode of graphic expression, and the new company of Ault and Wiborg, which manufactured and mixed its own dry color to produce high-quality lithographer's ink, found its product in great demand, not only in the United States but worldwide. Toulouse-Lautrec was just one of the artists who used Ault and Wiborg inks for his prints; and the company commissioned him to create an advertising poster, using as a model the beautiful Misia Natanson, patron and muse of Vuillard, Proust, Bonnard, Faure, and Ravel.

The engineer of this dynamic expansion, Frank Wiborg was the very model of the spirit of American enterprise. Young, handsome in a foursquare, mustachioed, Teddy Roosevelt kind of way, restless, dynamic, and smart, he was clearly a man on the way up. And he gave himself an immeasurable boost by marrying, in 1882, the daughter of one of Ohio's most illustrious families.

Adeline Moulton Sherman was willowy, dark-haired, and pretty, the daughter of Major Hoyt Sherman, a lawyer and banker who had served as United States paymaster during the Civil War and accumulated an enormous fortune in Iowa, his adopted state, which he represented as a state legislator for many years. One of his brothers was Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who gave the Sherman Anti-Trust Act its name; another was the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, who memorably marched through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea, burning and pillaging as he went, and remarked (from personal experience, no doubt) that "War is hell." Marrying Adeline transformed Frank Wiborg from up-and-coming to already-there; all that was needed was a son to set the seal on his happiness.

He was destined to be disappointed. The year after their marriage, Addie Wiborg gave birth to a daughter. "After an awful struggle," noted the new father in his diary for November 7, 1883, "at 7:15 [P.M.] a little girl baby arrives. I never experienced such great relief and we are all very happy over it." At the top of the page he wrote, in large round letters: "Sara Sherman Wiborg born." Sara was followed, four years later, by a second daughter, Mary Hoyt, and two years after that by a third, Olga Marie. "My father, of course, had wanted boys," said Sara many years afterward, "but he became resigned to girls later on and was always wonderful to his three daughters."

Certainly, in a material sense, he was. At the time of Sara's birth, Wiborg had already established his household outside of Cincinnati proper, in the country suburb of Clifton; soon he built a mansion for his growing family, complete with stables and a sunken garden, at the intersection of Clifton Avenue and Senator Place — the latter, almost inevitably, was named after another uncle of his wife's, Senator George H. Pendleton. The new house, which one reached by driving over a wooden bridge from Clifton Avenue, was a showplace, positively bristling with imported boiserie and fancy furniture. The lofty ceilings, towering mantels, and winding staircases were embellished with carved birds and garlands; the walls were hung with splendid tapestries; the floors were inlaid with rare woods; and in the large parlor, the drawing room, and the spacious hall, Venetian and French mirrors reflected back the glow of chandeliers. There was a library and music room, and just off the library — as one Cincinnati society reporter breathlessly noted — a little Turkish smoking room, "all the appointments of which were brought from Cairo by the Wiborgs, even to the carved jalousies through which the veiled daughters of the Turkish Beys see and remain unseen."

The Wiborg daughters, veiled or not, were emphatically not unseen. They attended Miss Ely's private school for girls in Cincinnati, to which they were driven each morning in a two-horse barouche. In winter, to protect them from the chill, the carriage was closed, causing what Sara referred to as "squeamish feelings," so that the girls arrived at school "sometimes pale and shaken." At Miss Ely's the girls worked hard: they learned French from a Madame Fredin as well as geography, arithmetic, composition, grammar, history, music, and drawing; but in the afternoons and on holidays they ran decorously wild through the woods and fields of Clifton, riding, "coasting" (sledding), and playing outdoors with the dogs — the Wiborgs kept dachshunds and wolfhounds — or picking wildflowers in the pasture.

Birthdays were celebrated with...

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara ...
Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
Einband: Hardcover
Zustand: Fair
Zustand des Schutzumschlags: No Jacket