All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

northwest of Paris. (Margaret Hutchins Bishop and John Peale Bishop lived in Orgeval for a time, too, and Esther saw them as well.) In the summers of their childhood, Esther and Noel had told other children ghost stories in the Southampton cemetery. During the war, Esther had read her Fred’s eloquent letters from the front. Now Noel was rusticating in a country house she had bought after Fred’s death, but often hosting visitors from Paris (including Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas) and from New York. John Strachey did accompany Esther to France occasionally, and even to Barney’s salon, but it was his duty to be available to his constituency in Birmingham on the weekends, and it was customary for an MP’s wife to provide support on these trips, not flee to France. Their struggles included the question of children: He wanted a family—although her drinking eventually made him reconsider; she did not. When she became pregnant, she felt her whole body revolt against it, or so she said later. She eventually had the miscarriage she hoped for.
    The cultural collision was part of the problem. She was close to one of her husband’s colleagues, Aneurin Bevan, who had worked his way up to a parliamentary career from a mining community in South Wales, and she spent time with the novelists Richard Hughes and Elizabeth Bowen. But most of Strachey’s friends were baffled by what they saw as his choice of an unattractive oddity for a wife. They could not fathom Esther’s intelligence, could not stand her volubility, and considered American history a laughably trivial subject. They also felt that Esther dominated Strachey. She talked so much that he appeared to be in “second place,” said George Strauss, a Labour colleague, who described Esther as a “female policeman.” Strachey’s childhood friend Robert Boothby, a Tory MP, found her “hideous.” Boothby recalled a gathering at Mosley’s country home during which “Esther was going on about” various senators, and “Strachey said: ‘if you go on about that any more, I can’t stand it.’ Esther left the room in tears.” When Strachey first brought her to Mosley’s country house, his biographer notes, “there were many talkative Englishmen to lunch, and Esther, after being silent a long time, wept. Strachey later told Mosley ‘that was because, in America, everyone listens to her .’” These accounts, meant to show Esther as self-absorbed and presumptuous, make the misogyny and insularity of the atmosphere she was moving in vivid.
    Strachey’s politics at this time were increasingly radical, but as he wrote to Boothby: “Remember, every upper class socialist is a neurotic, on edge, ‘up against it’ and so guilty.” Esther’s first taste of this conflict, and of the differences between American and English versions of elite populism, had been during the election celebrations, when a working-class man had approached Strachey and said, “Congratulations, John!” clapping him on the shoulder. Strachey had recoiled and replied, “I’m Mr. Strachey to you.” Stunned by his sense of affront, Esther later said that this was the moment when her trust in him evaporated. While they were driving through France in the summer of 1929—they stayed for a time with Gerald and Sara Murphy in Antibes—their car broke down, and so did the marriage. As they waited for the repairs, Strachey wrote to Yvette Fouque:
    It is not going well. I am still too young and foolish to have undertaken this…She is so spoilt —how could she be anything else? It is not her fault, of course, it is money, America, everything. But that doesn’t make it any better for me. Isn’t it awful , the poor people are the only possible ones—and they are, well, poor!…They [wealthy Americans] cannot even show enough decency, calmness, niceness to get over the tiny contretemps which the pursuit of their pleasure bring them. And yet we, the poor, are helpless, impotent, cringing before them.