Everyone at His Best

By Martha Duffy

LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE by Calvin Tomkins. 148 pages. Viking. $6.50.

Just before Tender Is the Night was published in 1934, Scott Fitzgerald mused to his friend Gerald Murphy, who served as one of the models for Dick Diver: "It has magic. It has magic." It was indeed a seductive book, and a nimbus of equally powerful magic surrounded its author. Though Scott squandered his talent and Zelda went mad, legend still holds firmly that they were enchanted people somehow removed from the dailiness of life.

It may be that the legend springs less from the frantic Fitzgeralds than from Gerald and Sara Murphy, the subjects of this immaculate essay. The first hundred pages of Tender Is the Night evoke a world nearly as lyrical as Keats' vision of embalmed darkness and sunburnt mirth, and it was a world palpably created by the Murphys. For nearly a decade, artists of all sorts enjoyed a respite from their messy lives in the company of Gerald and Sara. Picasso, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Cole Porter--all were drawn to the couple before the Fitzgeralds arrived in France.

Both Murphys were from wealthy American merchant families: her father sold ink, his owned the luxury leather store Mark Cross. Neither was quite happy in the usual mold of puritanical work and social aggrandizement. Falling in love was a mutual recognition of aim. "I feel as if we had registered at the office of Civilization a claim to a place in the world and that it had been granted," Gerald wrote his fiancee.

The claim was located in Antibes. The Murphys arrived in France with three toddling children in 1921. Cole Porter introduced them to the Cote d'Azur, then unheard of as a summer resort. Delighted with it, the Murphys purchased a house they named Villa America and cleared a stretch of beach called La Garoupe. Gerald painted huge, careful canvases that are fascinating precursors of Pop art. But both the Murphys were more interested in a life of quality and beauty than in art. "The Divers' day," as Fitzgerald translated it in Tender Is the Night, "was spaced like the day of older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand and give all the transitions their full value."

Sara's flowers and her food were exquisite distillations of the seasonal crops. Gerald's daily attire, bought at a seamen's supply store, became the resort uniform: white duck trousers, striped jersey, the sailor's work cap that Scott called a jockey cap in the novel. What set the Murphys apart was a special, large-minded devotion to each other and to their friends. Dos Passos called the marriage "unshakable--everyone was at his best around the Murphys." Though she was notably candid with them, Sara in particular doted on her friends: "It wasn't parties that made it such a gay time," she said. "There was such affection between everybody. You loved your friends and you wanted to see them every day."

Despite the fact that he knew most of the giants of modern art, Gerald never collected their pictures. He was in some ways very much his merchant father's son. Just as the elder Murphy introduced many appurtenances of upper-class European life to the U.S., Gerald acquainted his friends in France with such American contrivances as jazz records and waffle irons, portable bathhouses and inflatable rubber horses. Fitzgerald was so awed by Murphy's taste that he thought it must apply to everything and consulted him on literary matters. Gerald did not really respond to his friend's work. Indeed, it was only on rereading Tender Is the Night years later that he recognized that pages and pages of detail had been lifted intact from his life.

Crackup. Scott's antics exasperated him, once to the point where he banished him from Villa America for three weeks for tossing gold-flecked Venetian wine glasses over the garden wall at a dinner party. When Scott began ostentatiously "studying" the Murphys for his fiction, Sara wrote him: "If you can't take friends largely, and without suspicion, then they are not friends at all. The ability to know what another person feels in a given situation will make--or ruin--lives." But Gerald loved Scott at his best and "the region where his gift came from--when he'd tell you his real thoughts about people and lose himself in defining them."

For a while it looked as if the Murphys' world was truly charmed, but like so many other worlds, it fell apart in the early '30s. Gerald had to take over Mark Cross, which was a million dollars in debt. The Fitzgeralds' crack-up began in earnest; Hemingway began the drift from wife to wife. Then, in a terrible 18 months, both the Murphys' sons died, one of tuberculosis, the other of meningitis.

Gerald lived until 1964. He would have been delighted by Tomkins' book. A marvel of taste and economy, it manages to convey the originality and grace of the Murphys' life. But one suspects that what Gerald would admire most is the 43-page section of pictures, presented as modestly as a family album--no large format, no color, no glossy paper, every expense spared. The simplicity only enhances the subjects: Picasso preening on La Garoupe; Cole Porter mugging on the Piazza San Marco; Hemingway displaying a day's catch; the Murphys' two small sons, looking the picture of health, gazing at the camera from the protection of their parents' arms.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.