{"id":78227,"date":"2014-10-20T14:32:04","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T18:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=78227"},"modified":"2014-11-04T16:19:34","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T21:19:34","slug":"being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Discovered: An Interview with Calvin Tomkins"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"tpr-10\"<\/a>

Gerald and Sara Murphy with Cole Porter and the Murphy\u2019s friend Ginny Carpenter, in Venice, summer of 1923. Gerald had come to collaborate with Porter on their ballet Within the Quota<\/i>. \u00a9 Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the late fifties, Calvin Tomkins, a longtime staff writer for <\/em>The New Yorker, moved his family from New York City to a little community on the Hudson River called Sneden\u2019s Landing. \u201cThe houses are built on the side of a hill fairly close together,\u201d Tomkins told me by phone this past summer, \u201cbut in those days there were no real property lines. Everybody knew each other, and the kids wandered all over.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Tomkins\u2019s two daughters, Anne and Susan, eventually found their way to Gerald Murphy, then in his sixties, pruning his rose garden. As kids do, they struck up a conversation with Gerald, and when Tomkins and his wife caught up with them, Sara, Gerald\u2019s wife, emerged from the house, taking orders for ginger ale.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Murphys didn\u2019t talk about the past in those days, and it was some time before I realized they were the people F. Scott Fitzgerald had used as models for Dick and Nicole Diver in <\/em>Tender Is the Night,\u201d Tomkins wrote in 1998. In the twenties and early thirties, the couple, along with their three children, spent part of the year in the south of France, on the Riviera, and the rest of it immersed in the salad days of modernism and surrealism in Paris, where they had befriended, among others, Picasso and his first wife, Olga Khokhlova; Ferdinand L\u00e9ger; Dorothy Parker; Cole Porter; the Fitzgeralds; the Dos Passos; and the Hemingways. It was a fascinating life, though shrouded in mystery and tragedy.
<\/em><\/p>\n

\"tpr-6\"<\/a>

Gerald Murphy with Picasso. \u00a9 Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<\/p><\/div>\n

Tomkins urged Murphy to write a memoir, but Murphy \u201cscoffed at the notion \u2026 he had too much respect for the craft of writing, he said, to attempt something which could only be second-rate.\u201d Tomkins reported the piece instead. It was called \u201cLiving Well Is the Best Revenge,\u201d a reference to\u00a0the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert\u2019s mordant epigram, which Murphy had once jotted down on a piece of paper. The piece ran in <\/em>The New Yorker on July 28, 1962. By the time Tomkins had expanded it into a book, in 1974, \u201cGerald had been dead for ten years, and Sara, who died in 1975, was no longer aware of the world around her.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Fortunately, Tomkins was, and <\/em>Living Well Is the Best Revenge remains one of the most ingeniously reported profiles of the Lost Generation, with the Murphys serving to illuminate the nearly century-old American expat scene that flourished in Europe between the two World Wars. The book had gone out of print until\u00a0MoMA<\/small> reissued it earlier this year in a beautiful flex-cover format<\/a>. I spoke to Tomkins, who\u2019s now eighty-eight, about the Murphys\u2019 past, Gerald\u2019s career as an artist, and his reporting for the book.<\/em><\/p>\n

Before you got to know them, did you know much about Gerald and Sara Murphy? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I had heard about them. The Murphys were legendary because people knew vaguely about their life in Paris in the twenties, but nobody really knew them very well. They had a\u00a0party a year, I think\u2014a garden party with candles in paper bags. More or less the whole community was invited. But otherwise, they kept to themselves. We were all very curious about them. It seemed to us that we had these exotic creatures living in our midst. <\/p>\n

You had read Tender Is the Night\u2014<\/em>Fitzgerald\u2019s fourth novel, published nine years after The Great Gatsby\u2014<\/em>by happenstance before meeting them. At the time, the novel had been all but forgotten. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"TPR<\/a>

The first edition of Tender Is the Night<\/i>, 1934<\/p><\/div>\n

Yes, my wife at the time and I had gone to live in Santa Fe for almost a year. I was writing a novel and we were actually caretakers of a house whose owners had gone with their children to France for the summer. There was a nice library there. One of the books I pulled out to read was Tender Is the Night<\/em>, which I had not read before. I had read Gatsby<\/em> in college and a few Fitzgerald short stories, but I had never read Tender<\/em>. It was one of those reading experiences that you get maybe two or three times in your life, when a book just takes you over. I was deeply immersed in that book and in the world it had conjured up. I still think it\u2019s by far his best work.<\/p>\n

But as you know it was not a success at the time. It came out during the Depression, and it was considered frivolous\u2014a narrative about rich people on the Riviera, with no relevance for the period people were living in. But ever since then it\u2019s been gradually assuming more and more of a place in American literature.<\/p>\n

I was really upset by the book. It made me deeply sad and troubled because I became emotionally involved in the life of those two people, Dick and Nicole Diver. It seemed like such an extraordinary coincidence that a few years later I would move next door to the people who were their models.<\/p>\n

You make a number of interesting observations throughout Living Well<\/em>, most notably that some people, including the Murphys themselves, felt that Tender<\/em> was a disingenuous representation of that period, and of Gerald and Sara in particular. More than fifty years after reporting this story, how do you remember Fitzgerald\u2019s relations to the Murphys? <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"TPR<\/a>Gerald and Sara were not at all happy when they found out that Scott was writing a novel about them. Scott\u2019s way of going about it was extremely annoying. He would ask them intrusive questions, like, How much money do you really have? and How did you get into Skull and Bones at Yale? They felt that many of his questions were quite hostile. He had a somewhat disapproving attitude of them by then. They had met in Paris in 1922 or 1923, and the Fitzgeralds started coming to the south of France largely because the Murphys were there.<\/p>\n

For several summers they were very close. Gerald admired Fitzgerald as a writer. He thought that Gatsby <\/em>was an extraordinary achievement, and that some of the short stories were first-rate, but he didn\u2019t have a great deal of respect for the work that Fitzgerald was doing then. He was writing mainly for the\u00a0Saturday Evening Post<\/em>\u2014short stories. A lot of them seemed to Gerald too commercial, and not up to the standards of his earlier work. Fitzgerald never seemed to Gerald and Sara to be a writer on the same level as Hemingway, who took himself far more seriously. They felt that Hemingway was the important writer, the one who was breaking new ground in prose. I don\u2019t think they had the same feeling about Scott, and as a consequence, the idea that he was writing a novel about them did not fill them with joy.<\/p>\n

\"tpr-8\"<\/a>

Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the south of France, ca. the late twenties. \u00a9 Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<\/p><\/div>\n

Gerald was a painter, and his career seems to have been cut short by the tragedy of his two children passing away. You mention that his art, most of which was produced in the twenties, was, in many ways, proto-pop art. Do you think Murphy fits in with the modern pop of the sixties? Was that something he was interested in? <\/strong><\/p>\n

He became interested. He had not really thought much about art in a long time. He had stopped painting in the early thirties when his younger son contracted tuberculosis, and he devoted his whole life to caring for and trying to save the child. He never took it up again. Apparently he didn\u2019t even want to talk about it. His friends told me he just pushed it aside.<\/p>\n

As I was getting to know him better in the early sixties, he was very interested in some of my artist profiles. We talked about them quite extensively. Partly as a result of that he became interested in Rauschenberg and Tinguely, and a lot of people I was writing about. His interest in art itself was revived. I remember him becoming quite interested in young European artists of that period, as well. It was a big change in his life. It was as though, after all of these years, he was finally able to take an interest in the thing that had utterly consumed his interests in the twenties. His whole life had changed when he got to Paris in 1921 and he saw, for the first time, paintings by Braque and Picasso and Mir\u00f3 in Paris galleries. That was what triggered his interest, and he began to think that this was something that he could do, too.<\/p>\n

Why do you think he produced so little work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t really start painting on his own until 1922. Some of the earliest paintings were extremely large. There was one that was eighteen feet tall by twelve feet wide. He had studied in Paris with Natalia Goncharova, the Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 artist, who introduced him to the principles of abstract art. It took him a long time to finish each one. There were a lot of preliminary sketches and studies and drawings, and he worked very slowly. Each of these paintings took him maybe six or eight months. I think we have to realize that he wasn\u2019t just doing that. He was also leading a very active life in Paris in winter, and in the south of France in summer. He told me he spent no more than three hours in the studio per day. The total of his production in those ten years was fifteen paintings.<\/p>\n

\"95.188\"<\/a>

Gerald Murphy, Cocktail<\/i>, 1927, oil on canvas, 29 1\/16″ x 29 7\/8″. The Whitney Museum. \u00a9 Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"tpr-9-1024x853\"<\/a>

Gerald Murphy, Razor<\/i>, 1924, oil on canvas, 32 1\/2″ x 36 1\/2″. Dallas Museum of Art. \u00a9 Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"IMG_6960\"<\/a>

Gerald Murphy, Villa America<\/i>, 1924, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 14 1\/2″ x 21 1\/2″. Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis. \u00a9 Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<\/p><\/div>\n

Gerald and Sara had known each other since childhood.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Theirs was unlike any other marriage I\u2019m aware of. They were so close that they seemed to complement each other in all sorts of different ways, although they were extremely different in just as many ways, too. As Gerald said, \u201cSara is in love with life and people, and I\u2019m the opposite. I have a mistrust of life. I think life is only worth living when you do things to it. What you do with your mind is what counts.\u201d Sara in a way was much more open, friendly, unguarded. Gerald had a kind of puritanical reserve. There was really that spontaneous, effervescent, unpredictability about Sara, while Gerald\u2019s approach was much more carefully thought out. There was a mating of temperaments.<\/p>\n

Do you think Gerald didn\u2019t want to talk about being a painter because it brought back memories of his son, and not because he thought he was necessarily a failure? <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"tpr-4\"<\/a>

Gerald and Sara, Cap d\u2019Antibes, 1923. \u00a9 Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometimes I think Gerald never realized how good he was, but then at other times I feel he must have. L\u00e9ger and also Picasso were very positive about what he was doing. L\u00e9ger said he was the only American artist in Paris. You can\u2019t hear that sort of thing from people of that caliber without it registering in some way.<\/p>\n

One of the things I\u2019ve often regretted is that I didn\u2019t talk to him more about his painting. I\u2019m afraid at that time I didn\u2019t realize he was a serious artist. It was only later that I began to realize how good he had been. There were two of his paintings in an upstairs bedroom, but I was never encouraged to look at them. Another one was rolled up in the attic. Gerald just didn\u2019t talk about them. What really broke him out of that was an art historian named Douglas Macagy, who had worked once for the Museum of Modern Art. He did a show called \u201cAmerican Genius in Review\u201d about four relatively forgotten artists\u2014Tom Benrimo, John Covert, Morgan Russell, and Gerald Murphy.<\/p>\n

Macagy had heard about Gerald Murphy from one of the other artists. He looked up the work and fell in love with it. He not only put Gerald in the show\u2014which was held in 1960 at the Dallas Museum of Art, where, at the time, he was the director\u2014but he also wrote an article about him for Art in America<\/em>. This article really brought Gerald\u2019s art to the attention of a lot people. All this was just happening at the end of his life\u2014the beginnings of a rediscovery of his work. Gerald joked to me, I\u2019ve been discovered. What does one wear?<\/p>\n

J. C. Gabel is a writer, editor, and publisher living in Los Angeles. He grew up in Chicago.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the late fifties, Calvin Tomkins, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, moved his family from New York City to a little community on the Hudson River called Sneden\u2019s Landing. \u201cThe houses are built on the side of a hill fairly close together,\u201d Tomkins told me by phone this past summer, \u201cbut in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[15708,3287,571,660,865,10829,1132,15709,4919,270,15537,10830,4770,15710,10535,40,15711],"class_list":["post-78227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-calvin-tomkins","tag-cole-porter","tag-ernest-hemingway","tag-f-scott-fitzgerald","tag-france","tag-gerald-murphy","tag-interviews","tag-living-well-is-the-best-revenge","tag-pablo-picasso","tag-paris","tag-reissues","tag-sara-murphy","tag-tender-is-the-night","tag-the-lost-generation","tag-the-museum-of-modern-art","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-the-riviera"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAn Interview with Calvin Tomkins<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The New Yorker staff writer on his relationship with Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cTender Is the Night.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Being Discovered: An Interview with Calvin Tomkins by J. C. Gabel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 20, 2014 \u2013 In the late fifties, Calvin Tomkins, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, moved his family from New York City to a little community on the Hudson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-10-20T18:32:04+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-11-04T21:19:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"650\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"360\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"J. C. Gabel\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"J. C. Gabel\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"J. C. Gabel\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/19e8b50ebee63a57becb0c42e75719f1\"},\"headline\":\"Being Discovered: An Interview with Calvin Tomkins\",\"datePublished\":\"2014-10-20T18:32:04+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-11-04T21:19:34+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/\"},\"wordCount\":2292,\"commentCount\":6,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Calvin Tomkins\",\"Cole Porter\",\"Ernest Hemingway\",\"F. Scott Fitzgerald\",\"France\",\"Gerald Murphy\",\"interviews\",\"Living Well is the Best Revenge\",\"Pablo Picasso\",\"Paris\",\"reissues\",\"Sara Murphy\",\"Tender is the Night\",\"the Lost Generation\",\"The Museum of Modern Art\",\"The New Yorker\",\"the Riviera\"],\"articleSection\":[\"At Work\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/\",\"name\":\"An Interview with Calvin Tomkins\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2014-10-20T18:32:04+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-11-04T21:19:34+00:00\",\"description\":\"The New Yorker staff writer on his relationship with Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cTender Is the Night.\u201d\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Being Discovered: An Interview with Calvin Tomkins\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/19e8b50ebee63a57becb0c42e75719f1\",\"name\":\"J. C. Gabel\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/85d9a4ba9bef3ef9282a321c9edf262ff0e4913558e10fc55ff3183e7c9031b7?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/85d9a4ba9bef3ef9282a321c9edf262ff0e4913558e10fc55ff3183e7c9031b7?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"J. C. Gabel\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/jcgabel\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"An Interview with Calvin Tomkins","description":"The New Yorker staff writer on his relationship with Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cTender Is the Night.\u201d","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Being Discovered: An Interview with Calvin Tomkins by J. C. Gabel","og_description":"October 20, 2014 \u2013 In the late fifties, Calvin Tomkins, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, moved his family from New York City to a little community on the Hudson","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2014-10-20T18:32:04+00:00","article_modified_time":"2014-11-04T21:19:34+00:00","og_image":[{"width":650,"height":360,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"J. C. Gabel","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"J. C. Gabel","Est. reading time":"11 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/"},"author":{"name":"J. C. Gabel","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/19e8b50ebee63a57becb0c42e75719f1"},"headline":"Being Discovered: An Interview with Calvin Tomkins","datePublished":"2014-10-20T18:32:04+00:00","dateModified":"2014-11-04T21:19:34+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/"},"wordCount":2292,"commentCount":6,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg","keywords":["Calvin Tomkins","Cole Porter","Ernest Hemingway","F. Scott Fitzgerald","France","Gerald Murphy","interviews","Living Well is the Best Revenge","Pablo Picasso","Paris","reissues","Sara Murphy","Tender is the Night","the Lost Generation","The Museum of Modern Art","The New Yorker","the Riviera"],"articleSection":["At Work"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/","name":"An Interview with Calvin Tomkins","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg","datePublished":"2014-10-20T18:32:04+00:00","dateModified":"2014-11-04T21:19:34+00:00","description":"The New Yorker staff writer on his relationship with Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cTender Is the Night.\u201d","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/tpr-10.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/being-discovered-an-interview-with-calvin-tomkins\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Being Discovered: An Interview with Calvin Tomkins"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/19e8b50ebee63a57becb0c42e75719f1","name":"J. C. Gabel","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/85d9a4ba9bef3ef9282a321c9edf262ff0e4913558e10fc55ff3183e7c9031b7?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/85d9a4ba9bef3ef9282a321c9edf262ff0e4913558e10fc55ff3183e7c9031b7?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"J. C. Gabel"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/jcgabel\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/753"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78227"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79077,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78227\/revisions\/79077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}