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All We Know: Three Lives, by Lisa Cohen
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All We Know is one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012
A revelatory biography of three glamorous, complex modern women
Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write―a painful failure, and yet a kind of achievement.
The quintessential fan, Mercedes de Acosta had intimate friendships with the legendary actresses and dancers of the twentieth century. Her ephemeral legacy is the thousands of objects she collected to preserve the memory of those performers and to document her own feelings.
An icon of haute couture and an editor of British Vogue, Madge Garland held influential views on fashion that drew on her feminism, her ideas about modernity, and her love of women. Existing both vividly and invisibly at the center of culture, she―like Murphy and de Acosta―is now almost completely forgotten.
In All We Know, Lisa Cohen describes these women's glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. At once a series of intimate portraits and a startling investigation into style, celebrity, sexuality, and the genre of biography itself, All We Know explores a hidden history of modernism and pays tribute to three compelling lives.
- Sales Rank: #1146503 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 2013-09-10
- Released on: 2013-09-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.18" h x 1.25" w x 6.24" l, .85 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 448 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“Splendid . . . [A] sophisticated, droll and astute triple biography. [Cohen] had me underlining ideas and facts on the majority of its quick-moving pages . . . The photographs are strikingly integrated with the text, the times and topics are riveting, and Cohen is exceedingly well-matched to her subjects--sly, comfortable with contradiction, confident that these flawed figures were important, not mere accents to the company they kept . . . Part of the joy of All We Know is the sharpness of the subjects; they write wittily of themselves, each other and innumerable compatriots in the cultural centers of Europe and the United States, often in dazzling style.” ―Karen R. Long, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“Enchanting . . . Eloquent . . . Marvelous . . . Grand and thrilling . . . [A] strikingly elegant and assured biographical study of three now almost forgotten lesbian women . . . [All We Know]'s strength lies in the extraordinary, exfoliating, anatomy-like mass of detail [Cohen] has uncovered about her subjects: her tender, erudite, weirdly jubilant, often microscopic work of historical and biographical recovery . . . You are stunned by its depths; and you hope its excellence and pertinence and originality will not lead, doomfully, to its sinking without a trace, as fine things connected with the subject of lesbianism have had a way of doing for so long. It's a major work of scholarship and interpretation.” ―Terry Castle, London Review of Books
“[A] tour de force examination of the intersecting roles of gender, sexuality, class, literature, art, fashion, and modernism . . . Throughout this brilliant and gorgeously written book runs an undercurrent of deep sympathy and an acute eye for revealing details.” ―Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“Provocative and beautifully paced . . . [A] superbly satisfying book . . . By bringing these three footnotes into the spotlight, Ms. Cohen allows us to look deeper into our definitions of failure, identity and modernity, while also reappraising the stature of artfulness as opposed to art.” ―Laura Jacobs, The Wall Street Journal
“[A] magisterial book . . . All We Know is really much more about reflecting on lives (especially in the case of de Acosta) than about chronicling them. Experimental biography, if such a genre can be said to exist, is a high-wire act. Cohen never loses her balance . . . There's no hint of mess in this almost perfect book.” ―Craig Seligman, Bloomberg News
“[A] seductive, brilliant new book . . . Meticulously researched and compulsively readable . . . [Cohen's] treatment of these larger-than-life and, often, destructive figures is coolly appreciative; though unflinching in her analysis of their failings, she is never judgmental . . . Cohen's account of the paradoxes of history and temporality is as notable for its light touch as it is for its subtlety and depth. A monument to great achievement as well as to incompleteness, All We Know does justice to both the distortions and the truths of these three lives . . . To say that All We Know is a biography does not really capture its complexity, surprise, or sheer interest . . . In her attention to the multiple connections between her major figures and to the shaping influence of informal social worlds, Cohen has written something larger and more ambitious [than a biography]: All We Know is the story of a milieu as much as it is an account of individual lives, and a remarkably subtle and thoughtful treatment of sexual desire, identity, and the cruelty of history.” ―Heather Love, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Fascinating . . . Vivid . . . A gossipy yet deeply intellectual account of the first generation of women who considered themselves ‘modern' . . . All We Know is a revolutionary take on the genre of biography, aiming not so much at each of its three subjects but at their generation and how it struggled to invent female personhood for the 20th century.” ―Bethany Schneider, Newsday
“Fascinating . . . a boldface name--stuffed triptych of undeservedly little-known modernists: the intellectual and would-be biographer Esther Murphy, the arts enthusiast Mercedes de Acosta, and the feminist and British Vogue fashion editor Madge Garland, whose observations--‘fashion is both personal and ephemeral, it cannot be preserved'--hint at a fleeting beauty that defined all three.” ―Megan O'Grady, Vogue
“Reading All We Know is like taking to a well-sprung dance floor in the arms of someone who can't put a foot wrong.” ―Hilary Spurling, author of Matisse the Master
“All We Know is a remarkable book about three extraordinary women. These serious and eccentric women have been rescued from oblivion by Lisa Cohen's absorbing book. She turns conventional biography upside down and inside out. This is a deeply researched, skillful, and entertaining trilogy of overlapping stories.” ―Michael Holroyd, author of A Book of Secrets
“[A] remarkable, sui generis study . . . [Cohen is] a brilliant biographer, one who marries scholarship to literature in a totally unprecedented way.” ―Hilton Als, The New Yorker
“In her deeply researched, incisive, and scintillating first book, Cohen presents a triptych of brief lives portraying now forgotten but nonetheless singular women whose intelligence, passion, creativity, daring, and charisma were shaping forces in modern culture . . . Cohen's astute, graceful, and far-reaching profiles not only acquaint us with three extraordinary, innovative, and influential women who rejected gender expectations but also illuminate the essential visions and voices twentieth-century lesbians and gays brought to evolving modernity.” ―Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Woven through the history of modernism are glittering strands of lives that seem certain to fade from the historical record, but without whom the fabric of that great cultural upheaval would lose color and design. In an unfathomable feat of research and storytelling, Lisa Cohen recovers three of those lives and suggests that the ephemeral nature of their legacies is central to their importance in their own time--and in ours.” ―Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter
“An astonishingly original, scholarly, sensitive, and above all beautifully written work.” ―Selina Hastings, author of The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham
“Staggering . . . Astounding . . . Lush . . . Cohen writes with an outstanding amount of research and knowledge . . . Cohen has such a masterful command of information that the story never stops fascinating the reader.” ―Courtney Gillette, Lambda Literary
“Lisa Cohen has written a stunning, sophisticated account of three unconventional lives. Following in the noble tradition of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, David Plante's Difficult Women, and Hilton Als's The Women, Cohen's triumvirate narrative illuminates mysteries of taste, innuendo, fashion, fandom, conversation, and sexuality. Heroically researched and deliciously readable, All We Know is a tender homage to archives, to ephemera, to fruitless quests, and to a spent life's haunting nuances.” ―Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Jackie Under My Skin
“Ambitious . . . Erudite . . . [A] meticulously researched biography.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“This well-researched, gossipy, informative, and entertaining biographical triptych is also a thoughtful, three-part inquiry into the meaning of failure, style, and sexual identity . . . Cohen secures a definitive place for [Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland] in the socio-cultural history of the period.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Lisa Cohen's All We Know is a remarkable achievement. Cohen's sensitivity to the nuances of personality is matched by a keen analytic intelligence. She has a strong narrative gift, a superb way with words, and an appreciation for oddity that expands the horizon. All We Know is an utterly fascinating, brilliantly executed book--a splendid act of historical reclamation.” ―Martin Duberman, author of Stonewall
“In All We Know, Lisa Cohen sets out to resurrect three almost-forgotten women who, especially in the 1920s and '30s, were boldface names in the literary, art, and fashion whirl of London, Paris, and New York. And she succeeds beautifully.” ―Annalyn Swan, author of de Kooning
“Lisa Cohen is a biographer's biographer. In her riveting and highly original All We Know, she tells a vivid tale of the interlocking lives of three women of the past century--a brilliant talker, an intimate of both Garbo and Dietrich, a fashion editor--and of the soigné bisexual world they inhabited.” ―Brad Gooch, author of Flannery
“With an accessible prose style free of academic jargon, Cohen brings deserved attention to these women who lived often in conflict with themselves and their age. Strongly recommended.” ―Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal
About the Author
Lisa Cohen's writing has appeared in Fashion Theory, Bookforum, Ploughshares, The Boston Review, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
All We Know
Three Lives
For five decades, Esther Murphy built a wall of words around herself. A profusely erudite New York intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, she talked and talked, dazzling her listeners with her vast memory, her extravagant verbal style, and her inventive renderings of the past—and driving them to despair with her inability to finish the books she was contracted to write, biographies of remarkable women in history. A privileged insider and awkward outsider, she was a brilliant witness to her own time and both an analyst and an example of “failure” as an animating American conceit.
To the end of her life, Mercedes de Acosta saved a florist’s card that had come with flowers she received from Greta Garbo—a card on which Garbo had written nothing. Seductress and seduced, de Acosta was consumed by her intimacies with some of the most celebrated actresses and dancers of the twentieth century: Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, and Garbo, to name just a few. She amassed a collection—letters, playbills, clothing, photographs, clippings, more—that testifies to these intimacies, as well as to the ephemeral yet enduring relationships between fans and stars, and to the intersections of popular celebrity and high modernism. In the process, she also preserved and prolonged for herself and for us a particular set of emotions: the self-abnegation and self-aggrandizement of the devotee; the irrational, limitless passion of the collector; the socially inopportune ardor of one woman for another.
Madge Garland played a defining role in almost every aspect of the fashion industry in En gland in the interwar and postwar years and she embodied the fleeting world of haute couture with sophistication, steely fragility, and visceral pleasure. Yet she also approached her profession with a wry distance and longed to work in a more respected field of design. At once critical of and enraptured by fashion, she made sense of it by seeing it as allied with her feminism, and by living the connections among fashion, feminism, and modernist art, design, and literature. In old age, she was encouraged by friends to tell her story, but she found it almost impossible to think of her life as worth recording. Well into her eighties and almost blind, she scrawled several barely legible, emotionally veiled, but heated pages about clothing, career, and love—thick pencil on pale blue airmail paper.
Each of these women is now largely forgotten. Yet each was a dazzling figure of her time: independent, accomplished, and conflicted; scintillating and rebarbative; characteristic and exceptional. Esther Murphy played an integral part in literary New York in the 1920s and ’30s; Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker, and Scott Fitzgerald were among her close friends. Mercedes de Acosta made her way in the New York theater world in the teens and twenties, worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1930s, and cherished her rare friendships. As an editor, writer, collaborator, and comrade, Madge Garland was associated with many of the writers and visual artists who have come to stand for the creative work of the interwar years in London and Paris.
All three women knew each other well and were commentators on one another’s lives. Their stories reveal vital, rarely explored networks of friends, colleagues, and lovers. All three married, but were committed primarily to other women; all participated in the close-knit, fractious lesbian networks of New York, London, and Paris. Sexual identity is an anachronistic term for that context and is in any case too static to convey how the feelings and acts it refers to changed for these women throughout their lives. But for all three, sexual freedom, difference, and censure were crucial to their experiences of modernity and to their work as thinkers about modernity. Each in her own way was also shaped by a struggle between fact and fiction, or fantasy—a potent combination for a biographer.
All of which made it logical for me to write about them collectively. But that was not what drove me. It was something more elusive, to do with the challenge each woman posed. Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland inhabited centers of cultural production in En gland, Europe, and the United States, and they worked precariously at the edges. While each one published, each also produced a body of thought that was not and could not be worked out fully on paper. As a result, each has been seen as not quite part of history, when seen at all. Juxtaposing their lives was a way to illuminate work that has not been recognized as such: in Murphy’s case, prolific conversation; in de Acosta’s, the fervent, even shameful acts and feelings associated with being a fan and collector; in Garland’s, a career in the ephemeral, often trivialized world of fashion.
Esther Murphy’s immersion in history, literature, and politics, her uncanny memory, and her obsessive talking; the flotsam and jetsam of Mercedes de Acosta’s fandom; Madge Garland’s brilliantly clothed surfaces and her apparently impersonal writings on fashion—all are forms of evidence, of production, and of autobiography. All are ways of thinking about history. All are archives, formal and intimate.
In one of her essays on biography, “Lives of the Obscure,” Virginia Woolf writes that “one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost . . . waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom.” This romance has its appeal. I have wanted to make these three women visible again, albeit in new ways, and I have spent years tracking them. But none of them thought herself in need of rescue. Each memorialized herself and colluded in her own invisibility; each lived imagining what should, or might, or could never be, saved or jettisoned. Their lives also continually raised such questions about value for their friends and other observers. And so documenting Murphy, de Acosta, and Garland’s lives has meant paying attention to the ways that each was, for the people around her, a storehouse of modern anxieties about what we call failure, irrationality, and triviality.
These are three stories, then, about how history is lived, written, and imagined—three lives in which what it meant to be modern was an urgent question. They are also stories about the meaning and uses of style: rhetorical, sexual, sartorial. “What is style?” the American modernist Marguerite Young has asked. Her own reply: “Style is thinking.” A riddle of unconscious excitements and conscious choices, style is a way to fascinate oneself and others—and to transform oneself and the world. It is an attempt to make the ordinary and the tragic more bearable. Style is a didactic impulse that aspires to banish doubt, a form of certainty about everything elusive and uncertain. Style is at once fleeting and lasting, and it has everything to do with excess—even when its excesses are those of austerity or self-denial. It is too much and it is nothing at all, and it tells all kinds of stories about the seams between public and private life. As a form of pleasure, for oneself and for an audience, and as an expression of the wish to exceed and confound expectations, to be exceptional, style is a response to the terror of invisibility and isolation—a wish for inclusion. Above all, it is a productive act that, although it concerns itself with the creation and experience of brilliant surfaces, is powerful because it unsettles what we think we know about the superficial and the profound.
A Perfect Failure
When you met Esther Murphy she told you about the history of people and things you knew and the history of things you had never considered. Six feet tall, regal in bearing, yet irremediably awkward, she was all energy, compulsion, and excitement about ideas, and she was excited above all about the past. She would command the floor with long monologues about the intricacies of the American presidency and of the Hanseatic League, the courts of Louis XIV and Louis XV, the building you were living in, the ancestors you thought you had forgotten. She would quote François Fénelon, Saint-Simon, Jane Austen, and Henry Adams while smoking two cigarettes at once, drinking nonstop, letting food congeal on her plate, gesticulating grandly, then stubbing her cigarettes out on her lapels. She would pull great swathes of human history out of her memory, exhilarated by its ironies, its neglected crevices, and its meaning in the present, stopping time and prolonging it while she explored its recesses, fascinating her listeners and overwhelming them, drawing them in and keeping them at bay, unaware of what she was doing, aware only of what she was thinking.
At age nine she was already “a nonstop conversationalist.” When she was eleven years old, her father pronounced her “a wonder.” Patrick Murphy, a famous public speaker in the first decades of the twentieth century and the owner of the luxury leather goods company Mark Cross, thought so highly of Esther that he would seat her at his dinner table so she could listen to the conversation of New York politicians, judges, writers, and businessmen. “Never have I seen such a mind,” he crowed to his son Gerald, her elder brother; “everybody who meets her stamps her as a ‘genius.’ ” Preternaturally well-read, Esther seemed able to glance at a book and absorb it all, verbatim. By her teens, her conversation and correspondence were crammed with references to the history, literature, and philosophy she incorporated with such ease. She “utterly demolished” the actor Monty Woolley, a friend of Gerald’s, when she turned to him “with a dissertation on the difference between Dostoevski and Turgenev.” When Gerald submitted a poem of hers “to seve...
Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
Was it the times or their sexual preferences?
By Jill Meyer
Wesleyan University professor Lisa Cohen has written a group biography about three women - now mostly forgotten - who were born late in the 19th-century but influenced the arts in the first half of the 20th century. Two were Americans and the other was born in Australia but lived in England from the age of two. All were lesbians; while not partners, they moved in the same "circles" in New York, London, and Paris.
I finished the book - which is very well-written - asking myself why these three women were chosen as subjects for a book. Esther Murphy, the daughter of Mark Cross owner Patrick Murphy, was in some respects pitiable. Raised in luxury, she was a "searcher" for knowledge, life experience and social acceptance. (She was the younger sister of artist Gerald Murphy and the sister-in-law of Sara Murphy. There have been a couple of excellent biographies of the Murphys which talk about their leaving provincial America after WW1 to find a life of art in Paris and the Riviera in the 20's and 30's. In my opinion, they were far more interesting subjects than sister Esther.) Esther, who was denied the advanced education she badly wanted - as were the other two subjects - was a sort of dilettante. She researched and began a couple of books on French aristocrats that remained unfinished at her death. She had affairs with other women but for social reasons, married a man briefly. Did Esther Murphy accomplish anything in her life? Or was she on the periphery of the artistic circles she longed to belong to; a wanna-be writer who was known more for her "talk" than her "action"?
The second subject - Mercedes de Acosta - was also from a wealthy, stylish family in New York. Also gay, she was known for the affairs she had - or wanted to have - with actresses and other creative women. Her section of the book was the shortest. The longest and most interesting part of the book was devoted to Madge Garland, an early editor of British Vogue and a leading light in the world of fashion in London and Paris from the 1920's through the 1960's. Lisa Cohen really shines when writing about Madge Garland. In fact, the entire book could have easily been devoted to Garland and her life and times and influences. What "influenced" her and what she turned around and "influenced".
All three women were lesbians at a time when being gay was both a curse socially and a hindrance in the job market. All three married for the social cover a married name provided. But all lived their lives fairly openly within their own social group, while being much more circumspect in larger society. Cohen does a pretty good job at choosing the three women's sexual orientation as binding them together as subjects of a joint biography. But, I'd have rather read a book where the first two - Murphy and de Acosta - were less the subject and that most of the biography was devoted to Garland.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Fame Eluded These for Different Reasons
By David Valentino
Fame, somewhat broadly defined as being known for your accomplishments outside your circle, bypassed Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland. It's easy to understand why, after reading Cohen's brief biographies. Of the three, Garland, who worked in and helped define modern concepts of fashion, seems to deserve more recognition than she has received.
These women lived during the early part of the 20th Century. Though in different fields, their paths crossed as they moved in a still sub rosa substrate world of homosexuality, each a lesbian, each with a husband or two to their credit, usually as subterfuge. They also shared the desire for an education denied them, though each was an autodidact.
Esther Murphy, a Mark Cross heir and sister of Gerald Murphy, was an intellectual who had the tendency of framing her observations and arguments in historical terms. She could expound endlessly at parties and get-togethers, pour forth buckets of thoughtful ink, but could not discipline her intellect to produce the tomes that might have won her wider or lasting notice. This from Cohen's book pretty much sums her up in a sentence: Esther Murphy "talked more than anyone, drank more than anyone, was bigger, more brilliant, kinder-- and yet her life seemed to her friends to hang in midair, unfulfilled."
Mercedes de Acosta receives the least attention from Cohen. She, however, is the only one of the three you'll find in the chronicle of the times, Wikipedia. While a writer, though middling, she's best known for her collection of memorabilia, for she hobnobbed, worshipped, and loved some of the most famous of her day, among them Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and others. In cross-referencing her subjects, Cohen quotes Esther Murphy on Acosta, who wrote "that even when she was in her most absurd incarnations ... she was fundamentally an intelligent and subtle woman. But her mind seemed to go in layers like Neapolitan ice, and some of the layers were pretty trashy." Acosta's collections reside in the Rosenbach Museum & Library. She sold them to the Rosenbachs, dedicated collectors themselves, to support herself in her later years. At the conclusion, Cohen observes what Virginia Woolf devoted an entire novelistic spoof to, Orlando: a Biography (Worlds Classics): "Confronting a collection and life like Mercedes de Acosta's ... means being forced to reflect on what we understand to be a biographical fact."
Madge Garland proves to be the most fascinating of the three women and by most people's standards the most accomplished. Yet, like the others, Garland fails to ring a bell with hardly anybody these days. Madge Garland, through her writing, her editing of fashion publications, among them British Vogue, her appearances on radio and early television, by establishing and running London's Royal College of Art fashion program, and by living a life of style, transformed herself into human proselytizer and exemplar of fashion. Perhaps Cohen's most interesting chapter on Garland and in the book is "Notes on Discretion," itself a highly necessary art form given the sexual tenor of the times. As Cohen writes, after delineating Garland's commanding characteristics, "... along with a flamboyant wit she had a profound commitment to discretion, which made her life a complicated dance of concealment and display, honesty and dissimulation. Her professional and personal being was made of her intimacy with and enjoyment of women, and she spoke fearlessly about her appreciation of female beauty ... Yet Madge said little directly about what it meant to work in fashion and to love her own sex." And for many good reasons, as Cohen explains.
All in all, an entertaining and informative trifecta of biography. If these lives intrigue you, explore the life of their British contemporary, author, gardener, wife, mother, and lesbian, Vita Sackville-West. You might begin with Portrait of a Marriage.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
"Each lived imagining what should, or might, or could never be saved or jettisoned."
By Amelia Gremelspacher
Each of these three women have receded in popular memory, and it is exactly this loss of fame which has attracted Lisa Cohen. Esther Murphy lived and conversed with many of the transcendent minds of her time in the first half of the 20th century. She started many a monologue with "all we know" and proceeded to share the extensive research and thought on a particular subject. Her passion was Madame de Maintenant whose biography she never finished. Mercedes de Acosta was the perhaps the prototype fan. She was obsessed with Garbo with whom she had a short affair. But her gift was in the appreciation and promotion of talent as she found it. Finally Madge Garland, a pivotal founder of British Vogue. She was linked with the Bloomsbury group and enmeshed the magazine with their creation as people of fashion and their contributions to the magazine. Huxley once asked her, "Are you dressed like that because you're on Vogue, or are you on Vogue, or are you on Vogue because you're dressed like that?"
This book is one Publisher's Weekly's top 10 books of 2012. In "All We Know", we see a history of modernism as seen by three women who lived at a time that the contributions of women were often considered to be correctly in the unsung category. All three were gay and had their lives judged in that light often to their detriment. All three were touched by alcohol in an era of the great social experiment. Temperance failed to the point that alcohol became key in the lives of public figures. Lisa Cohen has strived to make their lives visible again. This book then, in part, is a philosophical exercise in the examination of the person who left accomplishment rather than fame.
The writing is rich and draws a detailed view of a world of women in the twenties. We can well visualize these women and the people around them. While Cohen has a view to impart, she avoids preaching. We already know much about the world of the famous in which these women moved. It is a gift to learn about the "fifteen minutes" of women who contributed and then were largely forgotten.
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