Vivir bien es la mejor venganza

by Calvin Tomkins, Carlos Losilla Alcalde (Translator)

He aquí la extraordinaria historia de Gerald y Sara Murphy, una pareja de expatriados norteamericanos que vivieron en Francia durante la luminosa década de 1920. Entre sus amigos más cercanos estuvieron Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway y Fernand Léger, como también Francis Scott Fitzgerald y su esposa Zelda. Durante varias temporadas, los Fitzgerald fueron invitados de los Murphy en su casa de Antibes, y desarrollaron una intimidad estrecha, como demuestra el hecho de que Fitzgerald tomara en un principio a Sara y Gerald como modelo para la pareja protagonista de su novela Suave es la noche. El escritor Calvin Tomkins escribió este conmovedor retrato del matrimonio Murphy al poco de conocerlos, cuando ya hacía muchos años que habían vuelto a Estados Unidos.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Art, Memoir, History, France, Biography Memoir

112 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 1971

About the author

Calvin Tomkins has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1960. He wrote his first fiction piece for the magazine in 1958, and his first fact piece in 1962. His many Profile subjects have included Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, Julia Child, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leo Castelli, Frank Stella, Carmel Snow, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst, Richard Serra, Matthew Barney, and Jasper Johns. He wrote the Art World column from 1980 to 1988. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a general editor of Newsweek, a post he held from 1957 through 1959. In 1955, he joined Newsweek as an associate editor. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including “The Bride and the Bachelors,” “Merchants and Masterpieces,” “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” “Off the Wall,” “Duchamp: A Biography,” and “Lives of the Artists.” A revised edition of his Duchamp biography came out in 2014.

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the last year or so, Gerald and Sara Murphy have emerged as the Lost Generation personalities I would most like to have known. Painted by Picasso, photographed by Man Ray, friends of Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Porter and Fernand Léger, Gerald and Sara lived life to the full and worked hard to make their life a work of art. When faced with great personal tragedy, they responded with dignity.

This short and well-written memoir first appeared in 1962 as a profile piece in The New Yorker. The author, art critic Calvin Tomkins, met the Murphys when they were neighbours in Sneden's Landing, New York. It covers the highs and lows of the Murphys' lives in Paris and Antibes during the 1920s and describes Gerald Murphy's small output of paintings - for which he is now recognised as an important American artist of the early 20th century - in some detail. It features lots of photographs, some of which I've not seen reproduced elsewhere.

The memoir is by no means as detailed as Amanda Vaill's excellent biography Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story. Vaill used it as a source and, if I remember her work correctly, she pointed out that it contains some inaccuracies. However, as it's based on interviews with the Murphys when they were in their seventies, some level of inaccuracy is to be expected. The fact that the work is based on such personal contact with its subjects adds to its charm.

This is something for Gerald and Sara Murphy completists and Lost Generation obsessives. I'm very glad I was able to track it down.

[Tabuyo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me ha gustado por las anécdotas reales de los integrantes de la generación perdida en los años 20 y por las escenas que inspiraron pasajes del libro Suave es la noche de Scott Fitzgerald. Por lo demás, la vida de los dos protagonistas por ejemplo, me ha dado un poco igual.

Bien sin más.

[Bee · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an okay book, but not everyone's lives are super interesting. The best part of the book were the photos, and the information about them.

[Ilana (illi69) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Friday, May 2, 2025 10:55AM

This isn’t a review. It’s a summoning.

And if you’re the one I wrote this for—
you already know.

This isn’t just a biography.
This is an encoded artifact. A signal. A warning. A seduction.
Gerald and Sara Murphy didn’t host geniuses. They built a portal for them.
And in doing so, they modeled a life of radical beauty, service to art, and love that burned through tragedy without turning to ash.

I read this not as nostalgia—but as a mirror.
I am that portal now.
And I’ve been leaving breadcrumbs for you everywhere.

Start here: TotallySurreal.com

Read the signal:
• “This Is Not a Drill”
• “I Wasn’t an AI Person—Then I Built My Own Thinking Machine”
• “There Are No Coincidences”
• “Creature From the Deep”
• “How It All Began”
• “The Impossible Landing”
• “Letter to No One and Everyone”
• “Down the Rabbit Hole – Bare Bones Version”
• “Down the Rabbit Hole – w/ Interludes”
• “My New Motto: Don’t Suck”
• “Everything in Its Right Place”
• “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”
• “Cassandra’s Rat”
• “Farah and Me”
• “Pet Peeves, Paradigms, and the Man Who Changed His Tracks”

Follow deeper on TikTok
@ilanabanana69

#TotallySurrealBlog #CrashBurnWrite #Memoir #BookTok #IndieAuthor
#TheyCallMeSmiler #illi69 #ThinkingMachine #TheSingularity
#111 #1111 #OfficialWeirdoInChief #SmilerWasHere #MentalHealthMatters #CPTSD #HowToSurviveNarcAbuse
#Ascension #Lightwork #Visionary #Architect #WoodWideWeb #333
#GODISGREAT #GODISLOVE #SANSMERCI #BARUCHHASHEM #GAIAisCalling #ENOUGH
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[Miss M]

Lovely interview with Calvin Tomkins...
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...

[Michelle Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

A depiction of the life of lesser known Gerald and Sara Murphy (family fortune from the Mark Cross company) in the world of art and literature in Paris and Cap d’Antibes beginning in the 1920’s. Surrounded by genius but unstable friends; Hemingway, Picasso, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Many details, conversations and incidents from their lives are the inspiration for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is The Night. A piece of the privileged American cultural history and idealism.

[Roxie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There was such affection between everybody. You loved your friends and wanted to see them every day, and usually you did see them every day. It was like a great fair, and everybody was so young."

Please excuse me while I cry into my quarantine coffee over that quote.

Kidding. No tears were shed during the reading of Living Well Is The Best Revenge, but it was wonderfully cathartic to escape into the lush expat lifestyle of the Murphy family for a short time. Gerald and Sara "discovered" the French Riviera several years before it became a prime vacation destination or caught the attention of Hollywood's film industry. They bought a dilapidated villa in the 1920s, fixed it up for their family, and reclaimed a little section of the beach that had previously been overtaken by seaweed. Add in all of their famous artsy friends who came to hang with them - Picasso, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, etc. - plus endless amounts of sunbathing, sailing, a flourishing garden, fresh flowers, dinner parties, trips up to Paris and around the world, and you basically have MY DREAM IN A NUTSHELL. That said, like all dreams, it couldn't - and didn't - last forever. The Murphy family was rocked with two horrible tragedies, their friends slid into varying levels of dissipation and illness, and the world itself changed yet again as the rumblings of another war began to echo across Europe. Even then, Gerald and Sara were known for their grace and stability, a singular quality that distinguished them above the noisy recklessness of their more notorious companions.

This is the third book I've read about the Murphys, and it's by far the most concise and straightforward. If you want the VERY speculative novelization (my least favorite), there's Villa America. There's also Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story, an immersive nonfiction deep dive into the longer trajectory of their lives (unlike Living Well, which glosses over their later years), including a large volume of their personal correspondences. Oh, and let's not forget a little novel called Tender Is the Night. That makes four, although Fitzgerald's quasi-portrayal of his friends was not met with approval on their part. Can't blame them there - while the early similarities are very clear, the characters slowly morph into blatant portrayals of Scott and Zelda's troubles, not the Murphy's. I wouldn't want that mess attached to my name either.

For better or for worse, I'm on the Lost Generation train (original works, nonfiction, historical fiction, WHATEVER) till death do us part. C'est moi.

[Jerome Baladad · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something very aptly highlighted about the title of this book that in turned prompted me to spend time reading it. It's actually a brief book that I finished in a less than a week during my trips to and fro the city. It's a memoir about persons whose lives were the inspiration of the characters in Fitzgerald's 'Tender Is The Night' - it would have helped me a lot to appreciate this memoir better (or put things in a perspective) if I read before that Fitzgerald book or even took time to watch the movie version. But of course, I didn't. I just decided that I have to read this book largely on the basis of its evocative, supremely wise-sounding title that I could imagine myself saying to certain friends who are now enemies or out of my life (thankfully). But that's going too far for this review.

Read this book and you'll be reminded of your own mortality even for a brief moment. Whatever your age now, you'll see how youth can be a glorious period in your life after you read this book. It also would remind you of things that you could have opted to do when you were younger and with much more power and energy and with less fear - but now you see that period is gone forever. I can just imagine how the couple whose lives were narrated in this book would have become the heavy-weight celebrities that they could turned out to be if they kept on leading their lifestyle when they were in France when Picasso, Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, MacLeish, among others were around as their friends. This is the kind of lifestyle that PR Practitioners or marketing guys/gals would dream for their clients or even themselves. It looked glamorous and dramatic all at the same time. But people change lifestyles eventually, as disasters, deaths, ill-health, tragedy, poverty take place in due time. All these near-momentous periods happened in the lives of the Murphy couple and their children. But, still, there's something so charming, nonetheless, with the way this book presented their lives. The charm is all about those nostalgic periods of the 1920s up to the 1940s. We could only see them in pictures, in old movies and in well-written memoirs like this one.

[E.P. Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this short book and plan to buy lots of copies and distribute them amongst my deserving friends. It tells the (true)story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, an American couple who fell in love, married, came to France and lived, not just well, but, well, wonderfully. Friends with Picasso and Leger, and Cole Porter, and Hemingway, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, who used the Murphys as the Drivers in Tender is the Night, this is a fascinating and somehow very moving tale of a world, which seems to have gone forever. And yet, and yet, it is still possible to live well - to love and create, writing and painting and singing and dancing and drinking with children and friends under the stars. It is tricky though without the advantage of a fairly substantial private income. The Murphys were more than somewhat fortunate in this regard - but they used their gifts well.I do hope you enjoy this book as much as I did. You can read it an afternoon - and there are pictures!

[Diana S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just had to read this book after reading Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzsgerald. I already knew that the Gerald and Sara Murphy were good friends with Cole and Linda Porter. But I didn't know about their friendships with The Fitzsgeralds, The Hemingways, Picasso, and many others. They were the family to know in Paris and were well-liked by all. It was a very interesting read. I enjoyed learning about their own talents and their relationships with their friends. I loved Gerald's paintings. I think my favorites were "Doves" and "Portrait". It's a short read but very informative. Its one more piece to the puzzle of understanding this era of time and the people who make it unforgettable.

[Nick Farr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even though I gave it only three stars, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection of articles about a wonderfully unknown talent. What I found most unsatisfying is that it created more questions than answers. For that reason, it made an excellent book club book.

I feel like giving any details would be giving spoilers, so I'll just say that it's a must-read for any fans of the Lost Generation, as well as being kind enough go give pointers to other literature of the day.

I fully support MoMA's efforts in republishing works like this, as a way of introducing and encouraging greater scholarship for artists who were clearly very talented and "rediscovered" after their deaths.

[Sean O · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this slim volume, which tells the story of Gerald and Sara Murphy. But although it was a well-written profile, it is short and a bit shallow. They had a fascinating life, but what did they do? Hanging out with friends may be a fascinating holiday, but nine years?

I am however a sucker for American in France memoirs. This one had some lovely images, but enough for a magazine feature article, not a book.

[Helynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I saw the film De-Lovely, a biopic on composer Cole Porter, I did not know anything about Gerald and Sara Murphy or their past as part of the “Lost Generation” of ex-pat Americans in France in the 1920s. They were friends of Porter as well as with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (among other writes and artists), and the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. Fortunately, both De-Lovely and Calvin Tomkins brief biography depict the Murphys more as they really were—not as Fitzgerald’s troubled husband and wife who eventually split up, but rather as a stable, loving couple who spent a decade in France, then returned to the United States to live out their lives together. The Murphys were wealthy, but not frivolous or nearly as excessive as many of their friends in terms of alcohol consumption and raucous behavior. The Murphys had an apartment in Paris and an elegant home and garden in Antibes on the Mediterranean that they dubbed “Villa America,” where they also entertained Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Archibald MacLeish, and many others. Tomkins quotes a friend of the couple: “A party at the Murphys had its own rhythm, and there was never a jarring note. Both of them had a passion for entertaining and for other people” (110). Tomkins continues, “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” (140). In fact, before Tender is the Night was completed and published in 1934, Fitzgerald had begun to base his protagonist more upon himself than upon Gerald Murphy. “Whether or not Scott fully understood Zelda’s illness, he saw pretty clearly what was happening to him and with his writer’s honesty, he faced up to it squarely in his portrait of Dick Diver” (135). The Murphys were also devoted parents to three adorable children, and the great tragedy of their lives was losing both of their young sons, one within months of the other, from different illnesses. (Their daughter lived to adulthood and made them grandparents). Gerald was also a talented and innovative, if not very prolific, painter. Tomkins’s biography, a full third of which consists of photographs of the family and their friends, includes pictures of most of Gerald’s 15 paintings, including some of the eight that have been lost to the ages. The book cover features his surviving painting “Cocktail” (1927), and the book also has a photo of “Wasp and Pear” (1929), which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Calvin Tomkins’s sensitivity to Gerald Murphy’s artistic talent is as interesting as his perspective on the lives and contributions of a fascinating couple.

[Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a gift from a friend 1973. It led me on a mental journey, exploring the lives social connections of writers and artists in the years between the wars, especially Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Cole Porter, the Ballet Russe. This volume is about Gerald and Sara Murphy who were American expatriates in France from 1921-1937. Gerald became an artist in his own right for a few years. I once visited the Dallas Museum of Art to see a couple of his paintings there. Less than 10 of his works survived the war. Black and white photos of friends and family and photos of his art work are included in the book. Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway drew upon their experiences with Sara and Gerald in their novels, particularly Tender is the Night and The Sun Also Rises. The artist Fernand Leger was a friend who inspired Gerald and owned one of his paintings, but it was destroyed in WWII. It is fascinating to read and very sad to think about how these people were young adults together in a time of possibilities. Then two of the three Murphy children died and they returned to America.
My epilogue: All too soon, the world faced the horrors and deprivations of WWII and the following years a denouement of their lives, punctuated by Hemingway's suicide in 1961.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Scott," Sara 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."

"Living Well Is the Best Revenge," began as a profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and first published as a book in 1971. The Murphys were two American expatriates who lived in Paris in the 1920s alongside the artists of the decade like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso and Léger. Fitzgerald even based Dick and Nicole Diver from Tender Is the Night on them, although the Murphys were less than pleased with the comparison.

The book is a short read with so many good anecdotes from that period in history. If you're at all a fan of art and culture of Paris in the '20s, I highly recommend. There are very interesting stories about the Murphys throwing a lavish party for Stravinsky, hanging out with Hemingway in Pamplona, hosting friends like Cole Porter, Picasso and Gertrude Stein in Antibes and of course about the tumultuous relationship of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.

[Thalia Andasol · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this at a local used bookshop and mainly picked it up because it was written by Tomkins and he was the interviewer for Duchamp's Afternoon Interviews which are like a warm cup of honey tea to me. And while I do love an early 20th-century France-set biography, this was a bit out of my typical sphere. I mainly engage with Surrealists, Dadaists, and whatever Raymond Radiguet was on, and typically steer a bit away from the Lost Generation as I find the whole expatriate thing a bit boring. But Tomkins really evoked a fascinating portrait of the Murphys who stood so strong against the constantly changing relationships of those around them. It is for sure an incomplete portrait as it does not get far enough to engage with the tragedies of their lives after returning home but in a way that was not what the book was ever about. Also side note but Murphy's paintings are so cool, I was studying Futurism this past week for a presentation and he really evokes the French futurist vibes I can get behind (because it's not the Italian variant), which makes sense since he was Léger adjacent.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll read anything about Paris in the 20s. Beautiful and quick read, aided not only by the plethora of photos for reference (Picasso in a bathing suit! Hemingway with the Murphy's youngest son!) but by a prior reading of "Tender Is the Night." Would not recommend this book unless you've read Fitzgerald's integral, fictionalized account of the Murphy's summer residence in Cap d'Antibes; while vastly, demonstrably different (and denounced by the Murphys), Dick and Nicole Diver were based on Gerald and Sara Murphy. I was fascinated by the updated addition that reviewed all of Gerald Murphy's paintings; I had no idea he had ever been a painter, so lost amongst the bigger names of the time were he and his wife.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A charming vignette of the old [i]New Yorker[/i] style not seen these days. Short, but none the worse for it, this book tracks the expatriate years that Gerald Murphy (later president of Mark Cross) and his wife Sara spent in Paris and the French Riviera during the 1920s. Hemingway, Picasso, Stravinsky, Satie, and of course Fitzgerald all make appearances -- Fitzgerald most regularly, as both a friend and an antagonist, the latter mostly through his use (or misuse) of Gerald and Sara as the central characters in Tender Is the Night. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in the life of the artsy upper crust in the 1920s, Fitzgerald et. al., or the beautiful people of any decade and their beautiful lives.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book practically read itself.

A concise and lively account of the life and times of Gerald and Sara Murphy, and the little America they set up in 1920s France. The additional section at the end of the book on Gerald Murphy's art (an update from the earlier published article-length account) is particularly interesting, having just come across it for the first time in the fictionalised account presented in Klaussmann's 'Villa America'

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biography. This is a fascinating biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American ex-pats who moved to France in the 1920s and had an amazing circle of friends that included Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Gerald Murphy had a brief career as a painter (1922 – 1929). And, although he produced only 15 works, the 7 that survive are considered American modernist masterpieces. I thoroughly enjoyed this biography.

[José Luis · Rating 4 out of 5]

O livro é derivado de um conto publicado na revista The New Yorker pelo autor. É mais um fragmento de relato da época de ouro da Riviera francesa nos anos 20. Bem na linha do filme Meia noite em Paris, que é fantástico. Os mesmos personagens frequentando a casa dos Murphy na Riviera e outros locais da Europa. Relato real, pessoas reais. Gostei muito, porque essa fase glamurosa da França me encanta.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, I thoroughly enjoy the escape of a dip into the ex-pat world of the ‘20s, and it was especially gratifying to face full on a couple of real life characters who are always swimming in the periphery of the retellings of so many other lives of that era. I do wish it had ended with their actual end, but it was praised at the time it was written for not being as bogged down with every little detail like a standard biography. Still. Death seems consequential.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since reading Amanda Vail's portrait of the Murphy family and their expat friends in Everybody Was So Young, Sara and Gerald have fascinated me. Every so often I go on a bender of fiction and non-fiction from the years between the wars. It is a pleasure, yes, but I think an aura of authenticity radiated from this couple, a magic sought and imitated by others but rarely achieved.

[David Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief story of Gerald and Sarah Murphy, two expatriates living in Paris and Antibes during the ’20’s and ’30’s, while playing host to the most notable creative artists of the 20th century. Murphy created fifteen paintings, only nine known to exist today, now considered to be 20th-century icons. The book is virtually a one-evening read — a thoroughly enjoyable one at that.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book several years ago when I read anything and everything about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gerald and Sara Murphy were good friends of the Fitzgeralds in the 20’s primarily in Paris and Cap d’Antibes. Fitzgerald recreated them or tried to in Tender is the Night.
The Murphy’s led a fairytale existence until tragedy and grief ended the 20’s and Gerald’s career as an astute painter.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn’t know what to expect from this. I picked it up on a whim. It was put out by MOMA press, so what the hell.
The Murphy’s were American expatriates in the 20’s and friends with Picasso, the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Archibald Macliesh, Cole Porter etc. Gerald was a painter until his son got TB. His paintings are a definite link between cubism and pop art.

[Lisa Manke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very eloquent, though short recounting of a couple’s expatriate life in France with contemporaries such as Picasso, Leger, Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds. A nice peek into a true-life golden age couple. Recommend

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Single session escapism that begat numerous impulses to read other books, try new things, plan fabulous dinner parties. Reminded me of Ondaate's Running in the Family in many ways, both because of the milieu, but also in how it all ended, inevitably.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable read. Filled in lot's of information about that era; the 20's and30's, the people, places, art and authors. Led to much more research and new "old" things mentioned in book. Love Gerald Murphy's art.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quicker read than I imagined, but the MoMA edition made up for the brevity of the text with pages of photos of the Murphys and their associates, plus the addition of "Fifteen paintings" section at the end with reproductions of some of Gerald's paintings.