INNOCENTS ABROAD
31
hangover dip at noon; people spent their time in the bar instead dis–
cussing, as Fitzgerald said, each other.
But for a few years, even after others began to follow the Gerald
Murphys and the few friends they had taken there with them as early
as 1923, it was a gay, casual, and informal place. The men wore
French workmen's shirts and striped bathing trunks and jockey caps.
They painted the bath houses with black stripes like French sentry–
boxes; they lived an easy, ostentatiously relaxed life between beach
and villa and the blue-shuttered Hotel du Cap d'Antibes. The whole
feeling of the place is in the opening chapters of
Tender Is the Night,
how remarkably is perhaps clear only when you compare Fitzgerald's
account of it with some other description such as that in Charles
Brackett's
American Colony.
The heart of the original group was the
Murphys, Gerald and Sara, with their charm, their wealth, their great
social skill. Fitzgerald drew on Gerald Murphy almost exclusively for
these characteristics in Dick Diver. Murphy was always inventing
amusing games for everyone, including even the children, for whom
he once arranged a mock wedding between himself and Scottie which
was carried out with perfect gravity. Often the Fitzgeralds were more
than equal to the demands of a society of this kind. Once, for in–
stance, Fitzgerald arranged a party game about the Crusades for the
children; it involved enormously elaborate maneuvres with a famous
set of lead soldiers. Nearly a decade later Robert Benchley wrote
him, after reading
Tender Is the Night:
"Anyone who gets down on
his stomach and crawls
all
afternoon around a yard playing tin–
soldiers with a lot of kids, shouldn't be made unhappy. I cry a little
every time I think of you that afternoon in Antibes." Like
all
skillful
hosts the Murphys exercised their social gifts with a certain tyranny:
people were expected to fall in with their schemes. Their parties
wrre as carefully planned and, in an unobtrusive way, as beautifully
managed as the Divers' party. Occasionally, of course, people failed
to accept the place assigned them. The Fitzgeralds are said to have
got drunk once when they were omitted from a Murphy party, and to
have stood outside the garden where the guests were having their
cocktails and thrown the contents of a garbage can over the wall at
the party.
But with the Fitzgeralds it was something more than rebellion.
They had reached a stage that was socially difficult for everyone and
