SARA AND GERALD: Villa America and After

by Honoria Murphy with Richard Billings Donnelly ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 20, 1982

Calvin Tomkins' Living Well Is the Best Revenge (1971) presented the legendary Murphys of Antibes, Fitzgerald's partial models for Tender Is the Night, as superb practitioners of the arts of friendship, good taste, true style, and general decency. Here, in an oddly organized book, chiefly made up of memoirs by daughter Honoria and excerpts from the vast Murphy correspondence, that picture isn't really changed at all--though Donnelly and Billings do stress the less glamorous side of the Murphys' life. Their only strongly involving sequence, in fact, which follows an ineffectual grab-bag introduction, centers on the early 1930s--when both of the teenage Murphy sons died tragically (one suddenly, one after years of tuberculosis): the devastation and courage of all concerned come across powerfully--despite, or because of, the unshapely presentation. Then, however, the book moves backward in time to the WW I-era courtship of Gerald and Sara--an only mildly engaging letter-montage. Next: a survey of those famous friendships--with, above all, the Fitzgeralds, MacLeish, Dos Passes, and Hemingway; Donnelly recalls, for instance, the ""lack of congeniality"" between Gerald and Ernest (""Dow-Dow [Gerald] was unable to go along with the 'tough-guy' lingo, as Archie MacLeish and John Dos Passes did""); she also confirms that Sara, despite all, was an old-fashioned, faithful wife. And finally there are views of the Murphys in later years-dealing with business/money problems (Gerald inherited the Mark Cross Co.), sparring in court with Sara's loathsome sister, trying ""to restore the beauty of their life,"" and settling in as celebrities/grandparents. Throughout, there are references to Gerald's depressions, to his abandoned career as a painter. And the 1930s tragedies are often invoked to shadow other events. Yet the uneven Donnelly/Billings narrative never becomes a firm-focused, dramatically developed study of Gerald and Sara; nor does it have the consistent viewpoint or shape of a growing-up-amid-the-famous memoir. (Donnelly herself maintains a modest low-profile.) So there's only sporadic appeal here for veterans of the extensive expatriates-and-artists literature--in an occasionally touching, mixed-media portrait that expands on, but doesn't really alter, the Tomkins version.

Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1982

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Times Books

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1982

Categories: NONFICTION