the last book I ever read (Washington: The Indispensable Man by James Thomas Flexner, excerpt two)

from Washington: The Indispensable Man by James Thomas Flexner:

His most extensive adventure grew out of his personal efforts as a lobbyist. He secured confirmation of a confused promise of land made by Dinwiddie to those who had early enlisted in the Virginia Regiment. The area involved was so large it could only be found in the outer wilderness. Washington traveled in the autumn of 1770 again to the Forks of the Ohio—where he had previously seen emptiness there was now a settlement of some twenty cabins called Pittsburgh—and then drifted down the river for eleven days. His objective was the confluence of the Ohio with the Great Kanawha, where he had heard that the land was fine. This journey deep into the almost unexplored wilderness was in some ways a replay of the embassy northward which had opened his public career. There was danger—reports of Indian hostilities and ticklish meetings with braves in war or perhaps hunting dress; there was hardship—snow fell—but this time the impediments were not truly lethal. They added spice to lyricism.

Keeping notes of the appearance of the shores along which they passed, Washington saw an identity of beauty and utility: the taller the trees and the fairer the meadows, the more fertile the land. Deer, buffalo, and wild turkeys abounded. Eventually Washington found and marked out a paradise of rich meadows, towering vegetation, mill sites, vast reaches, boundless skies, where he eventually secured title to thirty thousand acres, most of the tracts “beautifully bordered” by the rivers.

the last book I ever read (Washington: The Indispensable Man by James Thomas Flexner, excerpt one)

from Washington: The Indispensable Man by James Thomas Flexner:

Yet the Fairfax connection boasted a physical giant who, even if he had never crossed the Alleghenies, had surveyed in the semi-wild Shenandoah Valley. Furthermore, although only twenty-one, George Washington carried the manifest air of one born to command. He was assigned two interpreters: a Dutchman, Jacob van Braam, whose knowledge of French was testified to by the badness of his English; and a fur trader, Christopher Gist, who was to prove less conversant with Indian tongues than he should have been. Add four backwoodsmen of low degree who acted as “servitors,” some riding horses, and a flock of pack horses, and you had the expedition which in October, 1753, already fighting through heavy snow, descended from the mountains into the wild Ohio Valley. The French wilderness masters, so numerous and so familiar with Indian trails and embassies, would have regarded this tiny, amateur force as comic. Yet the tenderfoot who led it was no ordinary man.

Washington soon dashed ahead of his party to where the Monongahela joined the Allegheny to form the lordly Ohio. Although “the Forks of the Ohio” (now Pittsburgh) was the strategic position that controlled thousands of miles of wilderness, he found there no signs of humanity except empty trails. For two days he explored by himself through the tangled forest, seeking, despite his military ignorance, the best location for a fort. His judgment was confirmed by both the French and the English, who were in succession to erect major works at the spot he chose.

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt thirteen)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and there’s no way, absolutely no way, that Bagger and Arno enter this hornet’s nest and aren’t pulled like pork, and so, by silent accord, they enter anyway, no weapons to speak of but the ferocity of their cries, Bagger’s the fermata of the final hymn echoing through his father’s church, Arno’s the high-pitched yap of apelings as they sling themselves through jungle eaves, élan, boys, élan,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt twelve)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and she peeks at Bagger, and though he’s never sired a child, not to his knowledge anyhow, he knows what he’s feeling is what any father feels when the mother, holding her baby for the first time, locks eyes with him over the child’s head, that boil of pride and fear, but also melancholy, it’s a farewell of sorts when a father meets the child who, as of this moment, will begin to replace him,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt eleven)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and when Bagger hears war screaming louder than before, he knows the earth above them has finished falling, and how about that, they didn’t get buried after all, he shakes soil off his back, the dugout behind him now a dirt hill topped with that most routine of Great War accessories, the dead horse,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt ten)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and he bellows, top of his lungs, can’t hear it over the barraging drums of a new round of Jerry’s shells but sure the fuck feels it, larynx shredding in the force of his war cry, holy shit, Cyril Bagger’s got a war cry, same as the other boys, it expels from his guts with the same skyward explosion as the missiled earth, he’s bloodthirsty, he’ll do anything he needs to protect she who needs protecting,

and a piece of him, a tiny, Arno-sized splinter, knows there’s something awry with all this, something awry with him as he fuses into the bloodlust funnel, the precise act he’s always avoided, individuality swapped for the exhilarating namelessness of being a ball bearing inside a mechanism, he’s succumbed, but lord, don’t it feel good, ain’t it the easiest way to bash past regret and shame, feels so much better to lose himself to a mass, to dilute into a flood of fury,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt nine)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and the monster cocks its head in apparent interest at Bagger’s latest physical change, and there’s a pause during which Bagger believes the circular orifice of its trunk distorts into a smile, before the monster brings a malformed hand to its face, pinches its own baggy cheek, and copies Bagger again by tearing its own face off,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt eight)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and he manages, “You bury him?,” and Veck licks lips glossed with pigeon fat, as if debating whether Bagger is capable of understanding, before shaking his head, to which Bagger hastens to nod, he wants Veck to know he doesn’t blame him, no Yank out here has buried more men than Bagger, and he knows it’s pointless theater, one day when the Argonne grows back, it’ll grow back through doughboy skeletons as capably as from them,

and Bagger realizes Veck has quit shuddering, absolutely quit, he’s as steady as, well, the only steady thing out here, which is the dead, either something’s cured Veck’s shell shock or the opposite, something has pushed him to a place where madness has burned into vacancy,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt seven)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and Veck licks cracked lips and says, “She’s granting wishes,” and Bagger flips the bird, thinking of those porterhouse steaks she didn’t deliver, but Veck says, “You’re telling me you didn’t wish to be saved when that minnie dropped, you and the boy?,” to which Bagger only stares because he can’t remember, and Veck says, “And Goodspeed. She took care of Goodspeed, right? You saying none of us didn’t wish Goodspeed gone?,” and Bagger keeps staring, for as little as he cares about unity, it still feels dicey to admit you wished a fellow soldier dead,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt six)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and the dream is punctured by Popkin, “What are we supposed to do with her?,” Bagger’s back to the distasteful present, where he’s unable to cloak his hatred for Popkin, forget French, conflict’s the only language the lummox ever mastered, but Popkin answers his own question, “Reis said take care of her,” and the rain goes twice as cold as Bagger feels the need for a long, heavy axe to plant in the bastard’s face, he could warm his palms in the hot, spurting blood,

and before he can find an axe-like object, Veck drops to his knees, the P3 slugging noisily on his back, a pose of prayer, and whispers, “You all know what this is,” audible despite the shrill of German arms, and Bagger feels that he does know, yet still wants to be told, and Veck grimaces, pained by their ignorance, and says, “Hasn’t any of you heard of the Angel of Mons?,”

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt five)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and it’s a household he didn’t need anymore, after the Lusitania came the best part of Private Bagger Goes to War, all obligations to his father released, allowing him to barnstorm the Mississippi with impunity, imbibing wine, check, women, check, and song, check, and once President Wilson, reelected on the slogan of He Kept Us Out of the War, declared war, Bagger made paper airplanes of the loyalty leaflets that littered the streets, and enjoyed many a hearty guffaw at the suckers who rushed to enlist,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt four)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and her eyes are brown, no surprise, because he knows her, and while he’s transfixed, the whole pile of wire rollicks, it’s Arno blundering into the thorny mesh, wire cutters abandoned, and the kid grabs the woman’s ankles, the light from her skin so intense it functions like Röntgen’s X-ray machine, Arno’s hand flesh bright pink, each finger bone defined,

and the kid’s weeping, which makes Bagger realize his eyes are leaking, too, and it’s not like getting gassed or getting soot in his eyes, it’s like the tears of the devout he used to see at his father’s church, moved by some vision incomprehensible yet gorgeous,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt three)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and Popkin, fully roused from Bagger’s spell, points a finger at him and says, “No straws. Not with him. He cheats,” and Bagger laughs, “How do you cheat at straws?,” even though he knows exactly how to cheat at straws, but Veck interjects, “Something you can’t fake. Flip a coin,” and Bagger’s gut tightens, rigging coin flips takes goddamn time, so he bluffs, “No one’s got any coins,” and it’s Arno who fucks him over again, gesturing at Goodspeed and saying, “He does,”

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt two)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and you get one guess which soldier Arno chose to confess his shame of illiteracy, fuck the luck, and before long the kid was begging Bagger to read him The Prisoner of Zenda, and though Bagger initially told the kid to scram, war is a slog even when you’re not warring, and at last came the day Bagger was too pooped to resist the kid’s begging and ripped the book from Arno’s hand and began reading aloud with plans to insert passages of sickening violence and shocking pornography, only to find himself engaged by the plot,

and it’s bar none the biggest mistake Bagger’s made in the Army, and worse still, he keeps making it, King Solomon’s Mines, The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, and now The Son of Tarzan, a tale in which, so far anyway, Tarzan barely appears, the stage ceded to the ape-man’s civilized son, who follows his daddy’s footsteps to become Korak the Killer, an idiotic coincidence, but diverting enough as Bagger, of course, inserts explicit content, Tarzan revised to be a randy sodomite and Lady Greystoke a nudist cannibal, to which Arno only nods along, suggesting there’s no atrocity Bagger can concoct the Great War hasn’t reduced to believability,

the last book I ever read (Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus, excerpt one)

from Angel Down: A Novel by Daniel Kraus:

and what impresses him about Lewis Arno, from a con man’s perspective, is that the kid’s not easily bluffed, Arno points at him and says, “You got face on your face,” a statement that, at any other time and place would be gibberish, but there’s only one interpretation here, a real unfortunate one, and Bagger gingerly touches his own face, cracking the blood glaze into fragile plates, and Arno grimaces, and Bagger traces the grimace to his own right jaw, where something dangles, slight and flexible like a human ear,

and Bagger peels it off his face and holds it before him, and that’s exactly what it is, a human ear, clotted with clay and matted with a tuft of blond hair,

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt eight)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

“Was he open to being recorded?”

“You’re not understanding. I’d already plugged my phone charger into the outlet near the table, one of those wireless chargers where you just lay your phone against the plate. I pressed record on my voice memo app and set it down on the charger. It was obscured from his view by the lamp—not that he would have paid much attention to it anyway. Except I did hear in my own voice that tiny alteration, that trace of self-consciousness, that always occurs in the presence of some recording technology. Just as your face is always different in the presence of a camera. And I did wonder, despite myself, if he somehow could pick this up, if he would discover what I was doing—but surely that was just childish guilt or a regressive belief in the omniscience of the father or something. No, I didn’t tell him that I was recording, I have no real reason to think he suspected anything, and I just lobbed some questions at him about his past—‘ I can’t remember who cooked in your house growing up, was it only your mother?’—and then let him hold forth. And I did in fact feel strangely stabilized, comforted, by the presence of the device.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt seven)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

“It must be said that he absolutely adored Emmie, and he was great with Emmie in his way; their connection was deep. My dad spoke to children like they were miniature adults and somehow it worked, especially with her, maybe because she is, as everyone has always said, an ‘old soul.’ If anything he was more formal, more of an old-world European gentleman, with kids: he would rise when they entered the room, at least if they were girls. ‘Good evening,’ shake hands, note how the color of somebody’s shorts complemented the rubber bands on their braces or the color of their eyes. Adelle thought it was sweet, hilarious; I’m sure I would have found it hilarious if I hadn’t grown up with it. He had zero interest in Emmie when she was a baby—if you handed him an infant, he’d hold its body as far away from himself as possible, failing to support the head—but as soon as she could really speak, he was smitten. She would sit on his knee on Governor Street and he would tell her long stories in German that must have been utterly incomprehensible to her, and yet she was rapt, her green eyes staring into his. And he would read to her endlessly; she would fall asleep and he’d go on reading, as if following her into her dreams. When she was old enough, they would have these long sessions over the phone—he’d be in his office or traveling and she’d be in bed with my iPhone on speaker; we could hear him from the hall. It was like a radio play. ‘Emmie, before we return to the adventures of this redheaded young woman, I will play for you a passage of music by a man named Debussy that I believe will resonate with our text.’ And then she would slowly read The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking to this cultural giant who was following along; he’d make little exclamations or comments here and there, help her sound out words; somehow his presence, the quality of his attention, would fill the house. They loved each other. Emmie used to sleep with one of his scarves; I’d be startled by the very faint smell when I’d come in to check on her: traces of the eau de toilette and sandalwood aftershave I remembered from when he used to kiss me good night, which he did for a year or two after my mom died. For the last thirty-five years, we only shook hands.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt six)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

“We found Emmie an individual therapist we all liked, and Adelle and I started consulting with everyone with a claim to expertise. Emmie had long outgrown FTT, and soon we had a new acronym, ARFID—avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. You go in with a problem—‘ My daughter won’t eat’—they ask you some questions, then they give you a diagnosis that repeats what you said with more technical-sounding language, as if this process of translation constitutes a gain in knowledge. And then there is a second translation, an epistemological sleight of hand, the magical contraction of the diagnosis into an acronym. ‘My daughter won’t eat’ becomes ARFID. The acronym is like a code, moves the alpha toward the numerical; numbers are objective, right, suddenly it’s science! No matter that ARFID denotes the same mystery, is just an envelope for ignorance; ARFID just means: we have no physiological explanation but it doesn’t yet seem to involve the body-image issues we associate with anorexia or bulimia. Why couldn’t they think of an acronym that doesn’t basically begin with ‘barf’?”

“And that isn’t so close to ‘afraid.’”

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt five)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

“A German fairy tale.”

“Set in L.A. Because how could real parents preside over such a home? While we still made normal meals, of course, and insisted Emmie sit with us at the table, we were not to try to make her eat; following Dr. Saro’s advice, we’d apply no pressure; we wouldn’t negotiate, no ‘just one more bite of chicken, love.’ She could have whatever she wanted, whenever, wherever: take a box of Oreos to the bath, Twizzlers to bed. So we were suddenly living in a gingerbread house. Or it was like Willy Wonka. I was Wonka, establishing a bizarro kingdom of corn syrup and dyes, but a confused, desperate Wonka—Wonka remade by Bergman. (My dad was kind of a cross between Wonka and Bergman, if you think about it.) Or maybe I was more like Faust, a pact with fructose.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt four)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

The restaurant was called Moratín. It was a short walk from the hotel, but I set out early, wandered up and down the Paseo del Prado, then sat and watched some kids play in the little parque infantil. Near the red slide, a man, a young father, was swinging his son around by his arms, the boy screaming and laughing. When Eva was four, I’d dislocated her elbow that way. Now I watched as the boy gained terrible speed, his body at moments parallel to the ground. Or was I seeing it wrong, was my anxiety accelerating what I perceived? I sat and watched and waited for the shrieks of pleasure to turn to pain when a radius slipped out of place.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt three)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

I’d heard voices before. When I had my breakdown in college, I reported two kinds of auditory hallucinations, although the doctors reassured me that it was a good sign my “reality testing” was intact—that I knew I wasn’t hearing what I heard. (Sanity often requires the disavowal of the senses.) The first voice was my own, if a little deeper than when I actually spoke: on more than one occasion, my thoughts escaped from my head into audibility, into space, usually seeming to come from a few feet away, always to my right. There was nothing unusual about the internal monologue itself—the thoughts might even be encouraging, “Here’s what you do: take four deep, deliberate breaths,” etc.—but the externalization, the leakage, was horrifying. It happened only a handful of times, but I will always worry that too strong, too loud, a thought might break out of its silent casing into sound.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt two)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

Thomas had said to let myself in, but I knocked loudly and waited for a while before I opened the door. (Whenever anyone told me to let myself in, I half expected to discover their body.) On the landing—to my right the stairs descended into a dark basement—I stomped several times, as if there were snow on my boots, although it had been a winter without snow, then I opened the interior door and entered the hall and called out hello.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt one)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

But as I made my way up College Street, past the war memorials and the court buildings, the reality of Eva receded from me, or I thought of her as safe, singing along to “Anti-Hero” in an adjacent world. I was surprised to feel less upset about my phone as I walked, confident as I was that I’d have a new one in the morning. I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless. If I had a working phone, I thought, I could take a picture of the front of the Providence Athenaeum on Benefit Street, where Poe courted Sarah Whitman, and send it to the forty-four-year-old Mia, but since I didn’t, I half expected to see the twenty-year old version of her leaning against one of the columns, fishing the blue American Spirits out of her messenger bag, her black hair—not yet streaked with silver—wrapped up with a yellow cloth.

As I continued up College, the ghosts gained flesh: that kid with the hooded sweatshirt who just passed me head down—had he looked up, he might well have been Arjun a few years before he fell from the window in St. Petersburg; the older woman in the long down coat leaving the List Art Center as I passed became Caroline Sharpe, a professor who told our class, after someone complimented her necklace, that she kept a cyanide capsule in its opal locket for use in case of nuclear war, a practice she and her friends had started in the late sixties, when they were students, and which had led me to half suspect that any pendant concealed poison. But it wasn’t just people: the light arriving from the stars was younger, too, the birds dreaming in the tree cavities were the birds of the past, growth rings had vanished from the trees in which they slept—and this time travel depended on my being prevented from checking on Eva or Googling “songbird life expectancy” or “Caroline Sharpe” as I walked uphill.

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt ten)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

There is a mordant epigram by the seventeenth century English poet George Herbert which Gerald Murphy once noted down: “Living well is the best revenge.” In the years after they left Europe, the Murphys continued to live as well as their somewhat reduced circumstances allowed, first in Manhattan and then in a pre-Revolutionary stone house, which they restored, in the small Rockland County community of Snedens Landing, overlooking the Hudson River. They kept in touch with their old friends—the Dos Passoses, the MacLeishes, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter. When a mutual acquaintance delivered their affectionate regards to Picasso in 1962, Picasso replied, “Tell Sara and Gerald that I am well, but that I’m a millionaire and I’m all alone.” In later years they drew considerable solace from the family that Honoria and her husband, William Donnelly, were raising in Washington, D.C.: two grandsons, John and Sherman; and a granddaughter, Laura.

Gerald followed closely the new movements in art, music, and literature. Curiously, having never particularly cared to own paintings, they never bought any of the work of the modern masters who were their friends. In their summer cottage at East Hampton, though, there was one magnificent Léger, which they acquired by what Murphy considered a small miracle. Léger made his first trip to the United States in 1931 as the Murphys’ guest (he was seasick the whole way across). The Murphys saw to it that he met all the right people, and they commissioned him to do two paintings, which they donated immediately to the Museum of Modern Art. Three years later, at the vernissage of a large Léger retrospective exhibition at this museum, the artist came up to Gerald and Sara and said that there was one picture in the show he wanted them to have and that he would present it to them as a gift if they could pick it out. There were more than two hundred canvases on view, and Gerald quickly despaired of fixing on the right one. But as he and Sara descended a flight of stairs she pointed to a picture on the wall at the foot of the stairway and said, “I think I see it.” The colors, mostly muted browns and reds, were unlike anything they had ever known him to use before. While they were looking at it, Léger came up behind them and said, “I see you’ve found it.” He turned the painting around and showed them, written on the frame, “Pour Sara et Gerald.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt nine)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

By the time Tender Is the Night came out, in 1934, the era, the places, and the emotions that the book evoked seemed fairly remote to the Murphys. Dick Diver did not seem to have much to do with Gerald, and if Fitzgerald had drawn a great many details, conversations, and incidents from life, he had somehow managed to leave out most of the elements of the Murphys’ experience in Europe that mattered most to them: the excitement of the modern movement in Paris, the good friends, the sensuous joy of living at Cap d’Antibes. And yet, in a letter written from the depths of his grief in August, 1935, Gerald told Scott, “I know now what you said in Tender is the Night is true. Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty. Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroy.” Baoth, the Murphys’ older son, a strapping and indefatigable boy who had scarcely been sick a day in his life, had caught measles that spring at the boarding school he was attending, and without warning it had developed into spinal meningitis, he died almost immediately, before Sara and Gerald could get there. “In my heart I dreaded the moment when our youth and invention would be attacked in our only vulnerable spot, the children,” Gerald wrote to Scott. “How ugly and blasting it can be, and how idly ruthless.” A year and a half later, in January, 1937, the long fight to save Patrick’s young life ended in a hospital in Saranac Lake.

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt eight)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

The following summer, back at the Villa America, was one of the happiest the Murphys had spent, full of gaiety and good friends. The Benchleys came down to visit with their two boys, and so did Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ellen and Philip Barry, and several others. Honoria Murphy, then twelve, remembers looking down at the terrace from her bedroom window, seeing the flowers and the lovely food and the ladies in their beaded dresses, and thinking “how it all blended in, and how you just wanted it to last forever.” The Fitzgeralds were back again, too, like ghosts at the banquet. Torn and hounded by their personal furies, they would have been difficult company under any circumstances. But now another strain had been put on their relationship with the Murphys. Scott had decided to use Sara and Gerald as the central characters in his novel, and he was “studying” them openly. His methods were anything but subtle. “He questioned us constantly in a really intrusive and irritating way,” Murphy said. “He kept asking things like what our income really was, and how I had got into Skull and Bones, and whether Sara and I had lived together before we were married. I just couldn't take seriously the idea that he was going to write about us—somehow I couldn’t believe that anything would come of questions like that. But I certainly recall his peering at me with a sort of thin-lipped, supercilious scrutiny, as though he were trying to decide what made me tick. His questions irritated Sara a good deal. Usually, she would give him some ridiculous answer just to shut him up, but eventually the whole business became intolerable. In the middle of a dinner party one night, Sara had all she could take. ‘Scott,’ she said, ‘you think if you just ask enough questions you’ll get to know what people are like, but you won’t. You don’t really know anything at all about people.’ Scott practically turned green. He got up from the table and pointed his finger at her and said that nobody had ever dared say that to him, whereupon Sara asked if he would like her to repeat it, and she did.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt seven)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

That July, the Hemingways visited the Murphys at Antibes, and from there the four of them went down to Pamplona for the July fiesta, accompanied by Hadley Hemingway’s friend Pauline Pfeiffer, a Vogue editor who would shortly become the second Mrs. Hemingway. They stayed in the Quintana Hotel, right across the corridor from the matadors Villalta and Niño de la Palma. Hemingway was well known from his previous visits to Pamplona, and because of that, and also because they were the only Americans in town, they found themselves a constant center of friendly attention. “We drank the very dry sherry and ate roasted almonds,” Murphy said, “and every time we sat down anywhere we would be surrounded by Spaniards who shot wine into Ernest’s mouth from their wineskins. One evening a whole crowd of people suddenly began pointing at Sara and me and shouting, ‘Dansa Charles-ton! Dansa Charles-ton!’ Ernest had put them up to it. The Charleston was all the rage in America then, but it hadn’t really spread to Europe as yet; Sara and I had just learned it that summer, from a traveling dance team that appeared at the casino in Juan-les-Pins—we invited them for lunch, and they taught the steps to the children and to us. And so right there in the middle of the square in Pamplona, with a little brass band playing some sort of imitation jazz and the crowd just going wild, we got up and demonstrated.”

Hemingway also obliged Gerald to make an appearance in the bull ring. “When you were with Ernest, and he suggested that you try something, you didn’t refuse,” Gerald recalled dryly. “He suggested that I test my nerve in the ring with the yearlings. I took along my raincoat and shook it about, and all of a sudden this animal—it was just a yearling and the horns were padded, but it looked about the size of a locomotive to me—came right for me, at top speed. Evidently, I was so terrified that I just stood there holding the coat in front of me. Ernest, who had been watching very carefully to see that I didn’t get into trouble, yelled, ‘Hold it to the side!’ And miraculously, at the last moment, I moved the coat to my left and the bull veered toward it and went by me. Ernest was delighted. He said I’d made a veronica. Ernest himself, meanwhile, was waiting for some of the larger bulls, and a lot of people were watching him. Finally he caught the attention of the bull he wanted, and it came toward him. He had absolutely nothing in his hands. Just as the bull reached him, he threw himself over the horns and landed on the animal’s back, and stayed there, facing the tail. The bull staggered on a few steps and then collapsed under Ernest’s great weight. After that, to my great relief, we went back to our seats.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt six)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

The Fitzgeralds and the Murphys had seen a great deal of one another in Paris in the winter of 1925-26, during which time Sara and Gerald had assumed, more or less unwittingly, the role of friendly guardians. A decade older than the Fitzgeralds, they looked upon Scott and Zelda’s baroque exploits with a mixture of tolerant amusement and genuine concern, and the Fitzgeralds, for their part, often went out of their way to try to shock the Murphys. Scott could not bear to be ignored. If he felt that Sara was not paying enough attention to him, he would do something to upset her. One afternoon in Paris, while riding in a taxi with Sara and Zelda, he pulled out some filthy hundred-franc notes and began putting them in his mouth and chewing them. Sara, whose fear of germs was so intense that she always draped the railway compartments her family traveled in with her own clean sheets, was predictably horrified.

Even in the early days it was an unusual friendship. The two couples had almost nothing in common except their great affection for each other. Neither Scott nor Zelda seemed to have the slightest interest in the art, the music, the ballet, or even the literature of the period; Scott knew the American writers in Paris, and spent a large part of his time that winter getting Hemingway recognized, but he met few Europeans, and he never learned to speak more than a few words of French, which he made not the slightest effort to pronounce correctly. The simpler aspects of the Murphys’ life at Antibes—their cultivation of the life of the senses—never appealed to Fitzgerald at all. He scarcely noticed what he was eating or drinking. He stayed out of the sun as much as possible, and his skin never lost its dead-white pallor. When the others on the beach went in swimming, Scott would get up, take a flat running dive into the shallow water, and come right out again. He never showed any curiosity about Murphy’s painting, which he appeared to consider a mere diversion. Gerald, for his part, was not particularly impressed with Fitzgerald as a writer. He had not cared much for The Great Gatsby (Sara had), and neither of them read the Fitzgerald stories that were appearing—infrequently, just then—in the Saturday Evening Post. “The one we took seriously was Ernest, not Scott,” Murphy said. “I suppose it was because Ernest’s work seemed contemporary and new, and Scott’s didn’t.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt five)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

In the early twenties Antibes was still a sleepy provincial village. The telephone service shut down for two hours at noon and ceased altogether at seven p.m. The local movie house operated only once a week, and had a piano player who performed with a cigarette dangling from his lip; Léger loved the place, which he said “smelled of feet.” There was a new little casino in Juan-les-Pins, where the Murphys and their friends sometimes went in the evenings. The long, quiet days centered on the beach, the garden, and the port, where from 1925 on the Murphys kept a boat. They loved to cruise and had a succession of boats, beginning with a small sloop, the Picaflor, progressing through a somewhat larger one, named for Honoria, and culminating in the hundred-foot schooner Weatherbird, which was signed and built by a member of the Diaghilev ballet troupe, Vladimir Orloff, who had attached himself to the Murphy family in Paris and had come down to live in Antibes when they built the Villa America. Orloff, the son of a Russian nobleman who managed the private bank account of the Tsarina, had seen his father murdered by the Bolsheviks soon after the October Revolution; escaping from Russia, he had made his way to France, where, like so many of the young White Russian émigrés, he gravitated to Diaghilev. He worked for Diaghilev as a set designer, but his real métier, born of a childhood spent on his grandfather’s yachts on the Black Sea, was naval architecture. He designed the Weatherbird along the lines of the American clipper ships, which he considered the most beautiful vessels ever launched. The Weatherbird took its name from a Louis Armstrong record with that title, which the Murphys had sealed in its keel.

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt four)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

Later on, in August, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald arrived. The Murphys had met the Fitzgeralds in Paris that spring. Scott and Zelda had announced that they were fleeing the hectic social life on Long Island, and in June they settled in St.-Raphaël, where they planned to live on “practically nothing a year.” When they came over to visit the Murphys at the Hôtel du Cap, it was evident that the quiet life had so far eluded them. Zelda had fallen in love with a French aviator. Although Scott had found out about it and the affair had been broken off, both of them were on edge. One night, after everyone had gone to bed, the Murphys were awakened by Scott, who stood outside their door with a candle in his violently trembling hand. “Zelda’s sick,” he said; he added in a tense voice, as they hurried down the hall, “I don’t think she did it on purpose.” She had swallowed a large, but not fatal, quantity of sleeping pills, and they had to spend the rest of the night walking her up and down to keep her awake. For the Murphys, it was the first of many experiences with the Fitzgeralds’ urge toward self-destruction. Later in their stay, when Sara remonstrated them for their dangerous habit of coming back late from parties and then, on Zelda’s initiative, diving into the sea from thirty-five-foot rocks, Zelda turned her wide, penetrating eyes on her and said innocently, “But, Sara”—she pronounced it “Say-ra”—“didn’t you know? We don’t believe in conservation.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt three)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

The Murphy’s regular companions that summer were Picasso and his first wife, Olga; their young son, Paolo; and Picasso’s elderly mother, Señora Maria Ruiz. They had come down to visit the Murphys at the Hôtel du Cap and had liked the region so much that they took a villa in nearby Antilles. Olga had been a deuxième ballerina in the Diaghilev company. She was a pretty girl with a button mouth and a thin nose, who agreed with everything prosaic—qualities that Picasso appeared to relish at the time. (Later, when he had left her, she followed him around Paris for three days with a revolver; eventually she went mad.) Señora Ruiz spoke no French at all, only Spanish, but the Murphys got on splendidly with her.

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt two)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

Murphy loved to describe his first meeting with Cole Porter: “There was this barbaric custom of going around to the rooms of the sophomores, and talking with them to see which ones would be proper material for the fraternities. I remember going around with Gordon Hamilton, the handsomest and most sophisticated boy in our class, and seeing, two night running, a sign on one sophomore’s door saying, ‘Back at 10 p.m. Gone to football song practice.’ Hamilton was enormously irritated that anyone would have the gall to be out of his room on visiting night, and he decided not to call again on this particular sophomore. But one night as I was passing his room I saw a light and went in. I can still see that room—there was a single electric light bulb in the ceiling, and a piano with a box of caramels on it, and wicker furniture, which was considered a bad sign at Yale in 1911. And sitting at the piano was a little boy from Peru, Indiana, in a checked suit and a salmon tie, with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down, looking just like a Westerner all dressed up for the East. We had a long talk, about music, and composers—we were both crazy about Gilbert and Sullivan—and I found out that he lived on an enormous apple farm and that he had a cousin named Desdemona. He also told me that the song he had submitted for the football song competition had just been accepted. It was called ‘Bulldog,’ and of course it made him famous.

Famous, but not entirely accepted at Yale. Although he received the second largest personal allowance of any boy in his class (the largest was Leonard Hanna’s), Cole Porter did not fit easily into the social mold of a Yale man. At Murphy’s insistence, however, he was elected to DKE that year, and soon afterward Murphy persuaded the glee club, of which he was manager, to take Porter in as a sophomore—something that was never done—so that he could sing a new song he had written on the glee club’s tour that spring. The song was the hit of the show. It was a satire on the joys of owning an automobile, and Porter came out in front of the curtain to sing it in the next-to-closing spot, with his hands folded behind him, while the seniors and juniors behind him on the stage went “zoom, zoom, zoom.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt one)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

By the time she was sixteen Sara Sherman Wiborg (she was named for General William Tecumseh Sherman, her mother’s favorite uncle) had learned to speak fluent French, German, and Italian. She was not in the slightest degree impressed by fashionable society, however, and she said just what she thought to everyone. “I love Sara,” Lady Diana said to Mrs. Wiborg. “She’s a cat who goes her own way.” Sara became a great favorite of her mother’s friend Stella Campbell (Mrs. Patrick Campbell), who used to insist that Sara accompany her when she went to buy clothes for one of her theatrical roles. “Sara, darling,” she would say, in her deep, Italianate voice, “does the dress walk? Or does it make me look just like a cigar?” Gerald Murphy said once that although he had known Sara for eleven years before they were married and could hardly relate an incident in his life in which she did not play a part, she had remained so essentially and naively original that “to this day I have no idea what she will do, say, or propose.”

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt eleven)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

We were discussing if Charlton Heston became a saint. “You idealize these people, Storey,” said Hobby. “They’re not so great. Just read the lives of the saints. You’ve find out they’re not so saintly.”

“But maybe they are so saintly.”

He looked at me sideways, askance, with those blue eyes. “You worry me. Look. Nine out of every ten people are crumbs.”

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt ten)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

Nuts call up on the sports radio channel and they say, “Chris, I’ve had it. But I’m in the Rotisserie League, and I’ve made a trade—Strawberry, McReynolds, and Darling for Tim Raines.” Then the announcer says, dead serious, “Really? How’s it working out for you?” etc. etc. and they get in long conversations about it.

So what is going on in my Rotisserie League? Well, I’ll tell you. My team is the New York team, with the listless manager. In my team, he was not fired. Listless, but stalwart, elegant, not a coward, can do the job. Then, a player from last year who agonized over his retirement because he was aging, thirty-six, and then was traded away, who had been known as the heart of the team, who was dashing and glamorous and dark, with a mustache, came back as the first-base coach—we are grooming him to be the manager. The players are elated about it. Strawberry talked to him for hours. As they chain-smoked in the dugout. My dugout is vice-ridden but I like it that way. And I’m the owner, see? Everyone chain-smokes, they play cards, they drink bourbon, they’re allowed to, it’s fun, my manager doesn’t enforce discipline, he doesn't have to, because the players respect him, like a father, and he may be listless, but he is stalwart, and gets the job done.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt nine)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

Actually they did have baseball in New Orleans once. It was about fifty years ago. They were the Pelicans, a minor-league team. Hobby’s father used to go to the games as a boy. His uncle would take him. Hobby’s father was shocked because in the box next to theirs was a priest who smoked cigars, drank beer, and cursed. Mostly, he cursed.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt eight)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

Some people say it is a more antiquated, droll or quaint sport than football, say, being more representative of a sort of bygone era. Football for its violence is more beloved in the South, where they don’t have baseball. Whereas I would think that baseball would suit the South, being rather courtly. But it is more mental or cerebral, than football, say, and that does not suit the South. But even if baseball is more cerebral, everyone is certainly an emotional wreck by the end of the season, agonizing over it all.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt seven)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

New Orleans is very beautiful and very painful. New York is not that beautiful and not that painful. It is just a normal American town. Whereas New Orleans has a caliber of beauty among the massive oaks, at times a vision of paradise, but there is an unvarnished truth about it, and there are your memories and those held dear. I miss the society of my beloved father. I am pursued by my memories. I might be on the midnight train from Penn Station populated by wino lunatics on my way to Orient through the summer crowds, but in my mind’s eye I must set my sights on that white white house beside the palm tree in New Orleans, with its sweet gaiety. I must find my way back.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt six)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

Hobby and I had left the office late, to go out that night to the ball park, which had been named, oddly enough, for a pitcher from Louisiana, Sportsman’s Paradise. It was a glamorous night in New York. The temperature was ninety degrees. I take a perverse satisfaction in the heat because the Northerners can’t stand it, they’re not used to it, whereas the Southerners are. Also it was humid and the sky was a thick cobalt blue as night fell.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt five)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

He was telling me about a pitcher who thought it was his day off and took LSD. He happened to hear on the radio that his team was playing that night in Chicago—which he had forgotten. So he hopped on a plane to Chicago tripping on LSD and pitched a no-hitter.

Later he was on trial and told the judge that when you’re on LSD in a ball game, it makes the ball look like a grapefruit when it’s coming at you so it’s easier to hit.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt four)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

Friday evening after work, the young men go to the baseball games, in their suits and ties and sunglasses, having plain American fun. It touches my heart, because they don’t have plain American fun where I come from, it is too exotic and remote for that, it is the dark side. They don’t have baseball in New Orleans. It’s not normal enough to have baseball.

In New York I learned quite a bit about baseball as to many a Northerner it is his great love. But what interested me about it was not perhaps the same thing that interested them. I like how all the ball players have marital problems and personality problems and need sports psychiatrists, and especially in baseball where you don’t have to be that athletic or it’s not as strenuous in a way the players are all dissipated wrecks with drug problems, chain-smoking. That would maybe work in New Orleans. Baseball would maybe work in New Orleans because all the players are dissipated wrecks with troubled relationships with their fathers, chain-smoking. But they are tough guys. Except for when they retire, then they cry. The whole thing is an emotional roller coaster, at least for me, trying to keep up with their problems. That’s what I like about it.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt three)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

There were ancient unpainted houses crumbling on the Gulf beside huge palms, and plaques on the houses designating their old age with French heraldry—it being a French town, near to Mobile. Mardi Gras was begun there one midnight by some drunk young men who later brought it to New Orleans.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt two)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

It was hurricane season. There was the ceaseless news of hurricanes coming up from the Gulf Coast. Born-again Christians raved on the radio. There was a hint of disaster. The palm trees were slightly awry in the storm, leaning dangerously toward the old hotel, in the black night.

But the news of the hurricanes only made it more exciting, adding a certain dark gaiety, while the storm lashed against the palms.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt one)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

“Guess what?” he said shyly. “There’s a continent called Nuttin and they make nuts there.”

“Oh really? Well, there’s a certain continent I know of called Europe, with a certain country called France, and a certain person that I know of forgot the whole entire thing.”

“Do you like cole slaw?” Al said urgently. “I don’t.”

Conversation with a three-year-old involves wide leaps among a disparate variety of subjects.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt sixteen)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

When the light of day had faded and he could no longer see the paper to write, Gauguin would get up to sit at his harmonium, playing into the dark. Ky Dong was sad to see his friend Gauguin depressed, spending long days peering through his spectacles to write down obsessive thoughts and seeming to have given up on making pictures. Ky Dong was no artist, but one day he took up a position at the easel and started, or pretended to start, to make a portrait of Gauguin.

This had the desired provocative effect of launching him from his bed to grab the brush from Ky Dong, take up a mirror and finish the portrait himself. It was his last self-portrait. Innovative as ever, Self-Portrait, 1903 looks forward, as well as back. Forward to his own death, back to the Graeco-Roman mummy portraits from Roman Egypt that he had seen decades ago in the Louvre, and that now he was referencing while he forged another link in the chain. He portrayed himself to the funerary formula: full face, limited colour palette, short Roman haircut, antique tunic, exaggerated highlights on forehead, cheek and throat. His temples are grizzled; his eyes behind the wire-rimmed spectacles are thoughtful and calm, as though fixed on another world. He gave the picture to Ky Dong.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt fifteen)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

Nothing gave Gauguin greater pleasure than de Monfreid’s report of a running duel in the salesroom between Degas and the collector Stanislas-Henri Rouart bidding against each other for Gauguin’s pictures. De Monfreid further reported that Degas had requested to be alerted in good time when shipments of Gauguin’s paintings were expected in Paris. ‘Write to him,’ said Gauguin. ‘I have always been afraid to do so, and with good cause. He would only think I was doing it for a purpose, and I know him. If he can, and wants to help me, he will do it more easily and more gladly of his own volition than if I were to ask him.’

Gauguin was starting to feel secure that a market in his paintings, though small, was steady. So it came as a shock when, in 1899, after receiving 1,000 francs from de Monfreid in January (half of which came from the sale of Nevermore to the composer Frederick Delius, a great devotee of Edgar Allan Poe), no money arrived throughout the rest of the year. By June, he was getting desperate.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt thirteen)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

But his heart had not killed him. He must take matters into his own hands.

‘I went into the mountains where my body would be devoured by ants. I had no revolver, but I had arsenic which I had saved up while I was so ill with eczema. Whether the dose was too strong or whether the vomiting counteracted the action of the poison, I don’t know; but after a night of terrible suffering, I returned home.’

It was the ultimate failure: he could not even manage to kill himself. Before the suicide attempt, when he had been lying in bed writing his religious testament, he had not had the strength or the will to paint, but now he felt an urgent need. Words were not enough to leave behind; he would paint his spiritual creed and confession. He gave it the title: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt twelve)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

For the first time in his life, he owned the land he lived on. It was a significant moment. This time, he would not build himself a draughty birdcage. He’d had enough of drenching rain driving in between the bamboos, enough of living beneath a plaited roof that blew away at a gust of wind when you needed it most. He commissioned a wooden house, or, rather, two houses. One for living and one for working. Consciously or not, he laid it out to resemble Rue Vercingétorix. The main house, the dwelling house, measured about nineteen metres by eight. It was raised up on metre-high piles to keep it clear of rodents and other marauding creatures, and to lift it above the waters when they rose in the rainy season. It was connected to the studio by a veranda commanding the sunset view. The walls and floor were constructed of sawn wooden planks. Wood was a very expensive material in Tahiti because most of it had to be imported from America. He had already paid 700 francs to purchase the plot. The cost of construction was so high that he had to put off paying the workmen in full.