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 Côte 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."