Good for you, Clive, as in James, on your television criticism for the Telegraph. Not many people nowadays know how good a painter Gerald Murphy was. Richard E. Grant pointed this out in his programme The Riviera: A History in Pictures, and Clive praised him for it. Clive James is weak on health but very strong on intellect, and it’s good to read him and his pithy remarks in a paper of value.
Gerald Murphy was the model for Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. He was the owner of Mark Cross, a luxury goods store on 5th Avenue, back when luxury goods were beautiful and owned by people with good taste. Gerald and Sara Murphy invented the summer Riviera of the Twenties. Their villa America near Antibes was the social centre for expatriate American writers, musicians and artists. Sara was blonde and beautiful and supposedly had an affair with Picasso. I think it was just gossip by those who couldn’t get her into their beds. No matter how much she might have admired Picasso’s crappy art, upper-class American ladies did not sleep with dirty Spanish painters back then. Not even now, although there is no more upper class left in America, alas. The new plutocrat poseurs-billionaires pretend to be old money, but they’re crude and still have to think for a split second before picking up their forks and knives.
The Murphys were tragic heroes. They lost both their beautiful sons to sickness, and slowly saw their fortune disappear. Gerald Murphy lived in genteel poverty in Easthampton until his late seventies, I believe, uncomplaining and a gentleman to the last. Sara died 11 years later. Gerald burned most of his wonderful paintings, although I think four survived. His was a definite talent, but he never reached the heights of many of his guests because he didn’t really need to. Like the famous Wilde quip, Gerald put his genius into his life, and only his talent into his art. He owned a beautiful sailing boat and villa America was a dream of a Provençal house filled to the brim with friends. Neither he nor Sara put up with Fitzgerald’s hysterical drunken antics — such as when he hit a poor juggler with a fig in Juan les Pins — but they always forgave him and remained the tragic writer’s loyal friends until the bitter end.
It’s hard to imagine that, as Grant and James point out, the French Riviera was terra incognita 100 years ago. It is now a shithole around the coast, and only begins to resemble what it once was, an artist’s colony, as one goes up into the surrounding verdant hills, into Braque and Matisse country. The Italians ruined their side first with unrestricted construction by greedy developers, who, incidentally, are an international disease, and a lethal one at that. The French followed after the war. I was lucky to see the old Riviera when 15 and extremely impressionable. I watched it gradually turn ugly, and gave it up as my summer resort for good in 1977. Actually, during the peak months it is unlivable in, unless one is up above and ventures sporadically into places like Nice and Cannes after dark in order to get into trouble. For the past ten years I’ve been on my boat, and even then peace is hard to come by because of the jet skis and super powerboats that clog up the bays.
Oh well, the horrors of unemployment and leisure! Perhaps I should apply for benefits. But back to Clive James. He once told me that if I weren’t as lazy as I am I could have been a contender on television. He based this on a programme he had me appear in about Greek soap operas. A Greek ship owner rings another and asks him if he can borrow his chopper because one of his children has misplaced his while out shopping. This was close to 30 years ago and Greek soap operas were rather unsophisticated so they made things up.
Little did they know that one day reality would imitate soap. Back at a Geneva studio where I was about to be filmed, the engineers assured me that Clive back in London could see me only from the waist up as I babbled on about Greek TV. But although a polymath and a poet, Clive James is no fool. He knew that I would try to cheat and had spread crib sheets all around me so I could quote them at will. He bluffed me by asking me to get rid of them, and like a fool I fell for his bluff. He nevertheless coached me well and I did an OK job. End of my brilliant television career. I have always admired James for his knowledge and for the fact he likes the fair sex almost as much as I do, and for not taking himself as seriously as many who know far less than he does do.
And, as I am on polymaths, I learned more about Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and finally Petrarch’s sonnets by reading the short history of the Renaissance by my old buddy Paul Johnson, a book he knocked off for the Modern Library Chronicles 13 years ago. Paul writes clearly in prose one can understand. I had read two books on Dante before that, both by academics, and hadn’t learned a thing and had understood even less. One short history by Paul and I’m almost an expert.
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