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3 Gerald Murphy and the New Arts We tend to think of Sara and Gerald Murphy as they have been reconstructed in Tender Is the Night, although the story of their connection to F. Scott Fitzgerald is larger and more complex. Gerald Murphy maintained a lifelong dialogue with Fitzgerald, Hemingway , MacLeish, and other writers on the practice and meaning of writing. He influenced Fitzgerald’s visual perception of objects and scenes. He had an especially important mentorial role in Fitzgerald ’s experience of everyday life—as did Sara Murphy, who interrogated his behavior. There are two enduring conceptions about the Murphys. The first of these has to do with the “art” of living in Antibes in the early 1920s: “The marriage between Gerald—who meticulously planned, intellectualized, and expended great effort in order to make each moment a beautiful event—and Sara—who lived intuitively and impulsively—produced a unique alchemy, by which their daily life became an artistic venture. Together, they created a distinctly modern , elegant style of living that ranged over art, literature, music, theater, fashion, design, gardening, child rearing and entertaining. Virtually no one who shared the pleasure of their company ever forgot the experience.”1 This particular style did have an end in view. Daily life at Villa America included talk about art and ethics that stayed on the minds of Dos Passos, MacLeish, and Fitzgerald for a very long time. However, the subject was private and not 70 Chapter 3 public life. Our national consciousness is civic, utilitarian—and always nervous about exceptions. We know that poetry makes nothing happen, but we never tire of asking it to improve us. Edmund Wilson, who praises modernism in Axel’s Castle, ends by accusing it of being “indifferent” to political action. Yeats, Proust, and Eliot had lost their moral authority—as would anyone shut up “in one’s own private world.”2 Wilson should be given his due, but that is a doubtful line of inquiry. As understood by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, the self is the beginning of awareness : “In what sense are my sensations private?—Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. . . . Other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behaviour,—for I cannot be said to learn of them. I have them.”3 The essential point for Wittgenstein is not that experience remains private—although it may—but that no one else can understand it by making up rules or posing equivalents. Nor can importance simply be assigned. In the 1920s, the same kind of fluidity that applied to all other values necessarily applied to those governing the experience of art. In fact, John Dewey wrote in 1929 that a theory of experiential art is “not without import” for either criticism or philosophy.The following bears on both Murphy and Fitzgerald: The further men go in the concrete the more they are forced to recognize the logical consequences of their controlling assumptions . We owe it to theories of art prevalent to-day in one school of critics that certain implications, long obscured, of the traditional theory of art and nature have been brought to light. Gratitude for this debt should not be stinted because the adherents of the traditional theory . . . [regard] the newer views as capricious heresies, wild aberrations. For these critics , in proclaiming that esthetic qualities in works of fine art are unique, in asserting their separation from not only ev- Gerald Murphy and the New Arts 71 ery thing that is existential in nature but also from all other forms of good, in proclaiming that such arts as music, poetry, painting have characters unshared with any natural things whatsoever—in asserting such things the critics carry to its conclusion the isolation of fine art from the useful.4 Dewey was affected by impressionism, which understood the events of everyday life to be a fit subject for painting. He resists the unnamed censorial power of gentility. And although he had conventional tastes in art he takes the modernist position as to its appropriate subjects.5 Concepts of the art of private life in the 1920s were embedded in public discourse. In the period 1900–1930, James, Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Santayana , and Alfred North Whitehead all worked on the twinned subjects of art and experience.6 While respecting conventional ideas they agreed that art should display scenes of ordinary life. All used the term experience in conjunction with the...

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