Liza Klaussmann’s brilliant new novel begins in 1935 with two deaths. In the south of France, the body of an American pilot called Owen Chambers is pulled from the sea; in America, Sara and Gerald Murphy watch in horror as their son Baoth dies in agony of meningitis. Owen Chambers is a fictional creation. The Murphys, as anyone who has ever read a book about F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, will know, were very real indeed.
Gerald Murphy and Sara Wiborg were both born into privileged American families, although Gerald's family's Irishness and Catholicism made him something of an outsider. They married and had three children before finding their ideal home in the south of France. They spent most of the 1920s there living what their friend Calvin Tomkins, in his fascinating New Yorker piece Living Well is the Best Revenge (1962), called "a life of great originality, and considerable beauty".
They were generous, imaginative and creative, and their friends included Hemingway, Cole Porter, Picasso and the Fitzgeralds. Gerald and Sara inspired Dick and Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night, which he dedicated to the couple.
After the brief opening scenes, Villa America bounces back in time, tracing the lives of both the real-life Murphys and the fictional Chambers from childhood through to their imagined meeting in the dazzling 1920s and on to the real tragedies that devastated the Murphy family in the 1930s. The Murphys and Owen meet in France, where Owen, who was a pilot during the Great War and now runs a business flying luxury goods around Europe, is based. Owen is absorbed into the Murphys' elegant world and gradually his relationship with Gerald becomes more intense.
There is no evidence that the real Gerald was ever unfaithful to Sara, but there has long been speculation that he was attracted to men.
Klaussmann builds on this speculation and in her skilful hands what could have been a clichéd love triangle becomes something much more complex, subtle and moving, as Gerald, Owen and Sara each struggle with a situation that will not, or perhaps cannot, ever be openly discussed.
Gerald is drawn to Owen, but his priority is to “keep his love for Sara safe, to keep their life safe . . . most of all from confusion. And to do that he had to scotch some of the defects in himself. As best he could.” Owen loves Gerald, but he cares for Sara too, and he knows how much Gerald loves his family. And Sara, it is gradually made clear, is determined to protect her family “and to do so, she might have to allow for complications. And for love. For love to expand, she supposed. She wasn’t sure if she could do it, but she knew she had to try.”
In theory, I firmly believe a novel should be judged on its own merits, regardless of its source material; in practice, I can't help reading a novel like Villa America the way I watch a film or TV adaptation of a book, considering what has been left out and put in, and observing how certain of the original elements have been interpreted.
What is striking in this case is not just the sensitivity with which Klaussmann writes about the Murphys’ marriage, but how vividly and freshly she renders even the most familiar stories, especially when it comes to the Fitzgeralds. The couple, especially Scott, could clearly be insufferable company, as Klaussmann makes clear, but the Murphys stayed loyal to both of them for the rest of their lives and Klaussmann makes that devotion convincing.
Her Scott and Zelda feel like real people, not jazz age caricatures - funny, tortured, manipulative and, as shown during a memorable children’s party, capable of surprising sweetness.
Villa America is, ultimately, a novel about love in all its forms: the love between husbands, wives and lovers, the love between children and parents (the Murphys' relationship with their children is beautifully and ultimately heartbreakingly drawn) and the love between friends. The strength of the ties that bind this glittering circle is shown in the very touching letters, many of which quote real documents, that the Murphys' friends write when tragedy strikes the couple.
In Living Well is the Best Revenge, Tomkins wrote that "if Fitzgerald had drawn a great many details, conversations and incidents from life [in Tender is The Night], he had somehow managed to leave out most of the elements of the Murphys' experience in Europe that mattered to them - the excitement of the modern movement in Paris, the good friends, the sheer sensuous joy of living at Cap d'Antibes".
Klaussmann's novel has both restored those details and created a deeply moving portrait of a marriage and of a world. Anna Carey's novel Rebecca Is Always Right is published by the O'Brien Press
