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| photo: Leta Warner | |
Liza Klaussmann is the author of Tigers in Red Weather, an international bestseller for which she won a British National Book Award, the Elle Grand Prix for Fiction and was named Amazon UK's Rising Star of the Year in 2012. A former journalist, Klaussmann was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and spent 10 years living in Paris. She currently lives in North London.
The dedication in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night--"To Gerald and Sara, Many Fêtes"--led you to read biographies about the Murphys. How did you go from there to writing a fictionalized account of their lives? What did you want to convey through a novel that couldn't be done in nonfiction?
I've always been attracted to the idea of gangs of people, and Sara and Gerald Murphy sat at the heart of one of the most influential gangs of the 20th century: the artists and writers of the Lost Generation. They were muses for the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, John Dos Passos and so forth.
When I first came upon them and discovered that they had inspired all these iconic artists and writers, I became intrigued. It begged the question: What was so special about these people? So I began to research their lives, and a picture emerged--through biographies, through diaries, and letters and interviews--of this rather enchanted couple whose originality, whose flair for the curious, the unusual, made them kind of forerunners to the idea of life as performance art. And it wasn't just their sense of art or the way they curated their homes or took pleasure in introducing people they thought would amuse each other that seemed to beguile; it appeared that people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were also attracted to the intensity of the Murphys' marriage, to the unwavering loyalty they showed one another.
So, the more I learned about them, the more their story took shape as a novel in my head: here was a tragic tale of love and loss, studded with beautiful, warring, complicated people and great art, standing as the perfect metaphor for the lost gilded age.
But here's where things got tricky, for a couple of reasons. First, I felt--and still do feel--very conflicted about using the lives of real people for my own ends. It felt perhaps parasitic.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I personally believe that if you're going to use the lives of real people in fiction, then the fiction has to illuminate something that a straight biography couldn't. First, it has to tell a truth that hasn't been told before. And a specific kind: not one that's based solely on a forensic examination of life, but on something more elusive--the things that go on in the secret parts of our minds and our hearts that we don't articulate out loud. What Eudora Welty called the private addresses where fiction lives, which are only accessible through the imagination.
And through more intense research I found it, albeit at an unexpected address. Where I thought I was going to tell the tale of a passionate affair between Sara and Gerald--perhaps something closer to Tender Is the Night--I found instead a solid, loving, intimate marriage, but also one where the husband clearly struggled with his sexuality.
This discovery changed everything and gave the Murphys' story a more epic dimension for me. It took it out of the realm of Jazz Age fable and into one of an heroic struggle to discover the true nature of love. And it also gave me a reason for writing it--to call forth something that had yet only been hinted at in the biographies.
Sara and Gerald unwittingly served as inspiration for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. Why was Sara so outraged and upset by Fitzgerald's novel?
I think Sara's outrage was two-fold. First, she felt that often Scott was examining her and Gerald, prying into their lives in order to use them for his work, rather than just purely enjoying their friendship. I think this made her feel used.
Secondly, after using her, she felt that he had instead grafted his and Zelda's personalities onto the Murphys' life at Villa America, and then insinuated that they were one and the same. Sara and Gerald were temperamental opposites of the fragile, unstable characters described in Tender Is the Night--so what the Murphys had created at Villa America, in some ways, was undermined by that portrayal.
Nonetheless, there is definitely something of the Murphy magic in Fitzgerald's novel. A great example is that famous description of a dinner party at the Divers' Cap d'Antibes villa, where Fitzgerald describes a sort of magic that overtakes everyone. He writes: "The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights... the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with politeness, for anything they might still miss from that country well left behind...."
That scene has so much of how the Murphys' friends described their experience of Sara and Gerald's hospitality and their generosity.
Unlike the many real-life figures that appear in Villa America, pilot Owen Chambers is a character you created. Where did the idea for Owen originate?
In the novel that I wanted to write, there had to be an Owen Chambers or someone like him. Gerald Murphy's desire had to be made flesh and blood in order to dramatize his sexual struggle. So I knew going in that I had to invent a male lover for him.
A character can't just be a foil, however, and the particularity of this character, of Owen Chambers, was inspired by a small detail I found in a description of a caviar and champagne party that Sara and Gerald held for Ernest Hemingway in a casino in Juan-les-Pins. You couldn't find caviar on the Riviera in the summertime in the 1920s because it would have to come by train from the Baltic regions, and it would spoil in the heat. So Sara, to overcome this hurdle, decided to have it flown in, which was an incredibly extravagant thing to do; there were no commercial airlines at the time.
This detail piqued my curiosity. Where did she find this pilot? And then I thought: maybe this mysterious pilot is my character.
Of course, then Owen had to have a past. So I worked my way backward, first to World War I, during which many Americans flew for France, then further back to an early sexual scandal, and finally all the way back to the Wright Brothers and a childhood on a farm.
Why did you decide to open the novel with the foreshadowing of two tragedies, Owen's death and that of the Murphy's teenage son Baoth?
One of the things I've always found disappointing about some biographical novels and biopics is that the narrative arc invariably heads downwards. It will always begin well, or at least full of hope, but it hardly ever ends well. I wanted the arc in Villa America to be slightly different--I wanted to start off with the worst and end with what had been best. So that while that type of narrative structure strips the story of hope, it also amplifies what is good, what is beautiful, what is positive in a life, because it is ephemeral.
The secondary cast of characters in Villa America includes Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso and other recognizable names. Which of these famous personalities were your favorite ones to write about?
I really loved most of them. I felt very sympathetic towards Scott Fitzgerald's neediness (which is repellent to most), and I also felt protective of Zelda's fragile genius. But ultimately, my favorite secondary character was the poet Archibald MacLeish, who turned out to be such an empathetic human being, and a beautiful writer, and the one with the least ego and show-off-ness.
When the Murphys' youngest son, Patrick, is so ill and all alone in the hospital, Archie MacLeish writes him a beautiful letter describing a sick baby flying squirrel that he found on a walk in the woods, and talks about the softness of the fur and its smallness. I found that gentleness, that equation he is making with what the child is experiencing, so moving. And I fell in love with him for it. --Shannon McKenna Schmidt