Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  As Harold Acton observed, she was working and playing like a woman possessed: ‘The clock did not exist for her: in town she dashed in and out of taxis, clutching an attaché case crammed with letters manifestoes, estimates, circulars and her latest African bangle … A snack now and then but seldom a regular meal; she looked famished and quenched her hunger with harsh white wine and gutsy talk.’56 She was ricocheting between affairs, the latest of which was with another black piano player called Dan. Richard Aldington thought she was behaving atrociously, even by her standards: ‘She lacks not only elemental common sense but the capacity to love with any purpose, continuity, tenderness.’ Henry, too, was reaching the limits of his patience; increasingly mortified by a sense that people were ‘laughing at me and considering me a fool’, he was threatening to return to America.57

  Yet as hard as Nancy seemed to be pushing Henry away from her, she did not want to let him go. Later she would claim that he was the man she had loved most, his sweetness and humour, his music and physical attraction retained their power however much she abused them. She saw him as both an artist and a noble savage. And by the end of 1929 he had begun to embody something even more necessary, an ideological cause and a political commitment. At first Nancy’s fascination with Henry’s colour had centred on her romance with jazz and African art. She had badgered him to travel with her to Africa to discover his cultural roots, and had been disappointed to discover how little he shared her curiosity. Partly, he’d foreseen the world of trouble that would await a black man and white woman travelling around Africa together, but as he pointed out to Nancy, that aspect of his heritage meant little to him: ‘I ain’t African, I’m American.’58

  It was only gradually that Nancy came round to appreciating what being a black American meant. During the winter that she and Henry spent in Réanville, she began to question him closely about his past, and as he explained to her in detail about segregation, race riots and the re-emergent Ku Klux Klan, she felt a huge and intoxicating anger. It was from this point on that all the vague political sympathies she’d held in the past began to focus on Henry and the injustice meted out to his race.

  She was now alert to every narrowed, hateful glance shot at Henry by the redneck American tourists who seemed to be everywhere in Paris in the late 1920s. She was mortified by the ignorance that even her close friends displayed about what it was like to be black. And by the summer of 1930 she had come up with her own means of restitution. She planned to publish an anthology of black art and history that would not only open the world’s eyes to the richness of black culture, but would chart the terrible centuries of persecution that blacks had suffered.

  Negro became a heroic obsession, eclipsing all of Nancy’s interest in The Hours, which she abandoned in 1931. It absorbed her energy and much of her money as she researched and commissioned the essays, stories, poetry, music and photographs that would fill its eight hundred and fifty pages. When the project took her to New York, the press portrayed her as a depraved English lady with a taste for black flesh; she received hate mail accusing her of being a ‘hoor’ and a ‘nigger fucker’. One threat came with the signature of the Klan, ‘I hope that when you try to free the lousy niggers down in Alabama the white people will lynch you.’59

  Negro also had the effect of alienating Nancy from many of her friends, and it dealt the final, fatal blow to her relationship with Maud. Nancy had, for a while, attempted to keep Henry a secret from her mother, knowing the exhausting and humiliating fuss that would inevitably ensue. However, Maud had finally been forced to confront the gossip circulating about her daughter when her old friend and rival Margot Asquith had enquired loudly after Nancy at a lunch party, ‘What is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?’60

  Margot’s jibe was humiliating, but the timing was even worse: Nancy was about to arrive in London, with Henry in tow. She was trying to organize a private screening of the surrealist film L’Age d’Or, which had been banned in Paris as both blasphemous and obscene. To Maud, the knowledge that her daughter would be walking openly around London with a negro lover was intolerably shaming, and she hired private detectives to shadow the couple and find evidence of anything that might get Henry arrested and deported. Maud also set in motion a campaign of harassment, including anonymous phone calls being made to Rudolf Stulik, who had rented rooms to Nancy and Henry at the Tower, threatening him with jail unless the latter was evicted.

  Nancy was sickened by her mother’s behaviour, and although Henry tried to calm the situation, begging Nancy not to quarrel on his account, she was beyond any possibility of compromise. The febrile energy with which she had been working and partying in Paris now channelled into this single issue, and it was from this moment that she began, obdurately, to see the world solely in terms of those who were with her and those who were not.

  Friends were urged to take sides. After she returned to Paris in January 1931, she wrote an emotional letter to George Moore, begging for his support and demanding to know ‘how YOU feel’. Moore, aged seventy-nine, couldn’t find it in his heart to make a choice between the two women he had loved for so long, and refrained from replying. Nancy’s agitation intensified when she heard intimations that Maud was planning to disinherit her. It would be a disaster, not only curtailing her lifestyle, but making it impossible for her to continue with Negro. In truth, Maud was merely planning to reduce Nancy’s allowance, blaming the recent collapse of the American markets, but Nancy was already consumed by righteous anger. To punish Maud, she wrote two vitriolic essays, both directly aimed at her.

  The first was a short, satirical squib, attacking the stiff-upper-lipped bigotry of the British upper classes, and it concentrated most of its poison in the title, ‘Does Anyone Know Any Negros?’ – a direct quote from Maud.* The second, however, entitled ‘Black Man and White Ladyship’, was a devastating personal attack. Ostensibly this eleven-page pamphlet was a history of institutionalized racism, but Nancy had devoted nearly a third of it to a list of her mother’s perceived sins: her snobbery, her extravagance, her intellectual timidity and her prejudice.

  Nancy’s hatred coursed through the essay, relentlessly mocking ‘her Ladyship’s snobbery’: ‘If a thing is done she will, with a few negligible exceptions, do it’; her extravagance: ‘I have not the faintest idea how much I spend on clothes every year. It may run into thousands’;61 the vapid nature of her social life: ‘She is so alone – between little lunches of sixteen, a few callers at tea and two or three invitations per night’.62 The pamphlet was sent out, not only to her own friends but to all of her mother’s, including, allegedly, the Prince of Wales. It horrified almost everyone who read it. Janet and Solita squirmed, Henry thought it ‘atrocious’ and the general feeling was that Nancy could only be excused by the fact that her health was in such a bad state. Brian Howard, who had holidayed with her and Henry in February that year, had thought she was close to becoming unhinged, even then: ‘She talked so much, seemed unable to stop. The whispery, disjointed voice goes on and on. A kind of sober drunkenness. Drinking is now fatal to her.’ Howard also noted that she was ‘bickering’ constantly with ‘the infinitely patient, stupid Henry’, whose impassivity was almost as intolerable to witness as Nancy’s agitation.63

  In fact, Henry wasn’t so much patient as numbed: ‘My reaction … was an absolute blank,’64 he wrote. He knew now that Nancy was ill, possibly close to a breakdown, and even though he didn’t fully break off their relationship until 1935, he had almost given up believing he could help her. Even Maud understood that Nancy was barely answerable for her actions. With careful restraint she refused to react to the insults her daughter had published, commenting only that ‘one can always forgive anyone who is ill’.65

  Nancy, however, did not want to be forgiven. Publishing ‘Black Man and White Ladyship’ had been a deliberate act of matricide, killing off her relationship with Maud. She never saw her mother again and refused even write to her, putting her away with the rest of her past: the unhappy,
privileged limbo of her childhood, the burnt-out excesses of the war, the flapper frivolity of Charleston lessons and of Parisian café chatter. Thin-skinned and angry, Nancy believed the time for playing was over. Others might have considered her to be the most stylish muse of the 1920s, but she herself was turning her face towards a new decade – and a new life of political activism.

  Chapter Ten

  ZELDA

  When Zelda and Scott came to Paris in May 1924, they were as hopeful for new beginnings as Nancy had been four years earlier. Sunshine filtered through late-blooming horse chestnuts, and lovers drank wine in pavement cafés as if Prohibition had never been invented. With the exchange rate at nineteen francs to the dollar and rising, the Fitzgeralds felt themselves to be rich and free. As they walked together down the Champs-Elysées, Scott flourished a jaunty silver-headed cane and Zelda wore a simple blue frock of her own design. She called it her Jeanne d’Arc dress.

  They had arrived with an introduction to an American couple said to know everybody in Paris. Sara and Gerald Murphy had been among the first wave of artists and intellectuals to flee the aggressive materialism of post-war America: the ‘lurid billboards’ and the ‘automobiles that swarm[ed] everywhere like vermin.’1 During their three years in France they had formed a web of connections that stretched from cultural grandees like Picasso and Stravinsky to young expatriates like Ernest Hemingway. And as soon as Zelda met the Murphys she acknowledged them as fellow thoroughbreds. Sara’s creamy prettiness was edged by a confident, clever chic, yet she was also a woman who seemed to hold her life in enviable balance. She and Gerald had come to Paris to paint, taking lessons with the Russian futurist Natalia Goncharova, yet Sara still had time to be an easy, affectionate mother to her three children, and to maintain an apparently unruffled marriage.

  Sara, and Sara’s Paris, offered a glimpse of how Zelda’s own doubt-strewn life might gain an equivalent shape. But the plan was not to stay in the city, not yet. Scott needed to finish his novel, and they had agreed to give themselves a recuperative period of calm, somewhere inexpensive by the sea. The Murphys suggested the Mediterranean coast, where they themselves would be holidaying. Inspired by the promise of an unspoilt Provençal landscape and a warm turquoise sea, Scott and Zelda took the long train ride south with Scottie, their new British nanny Lillian Maddock, and seventeen trunks packed with their former American life.*

  They ended up in Sainte-Raphaël, a town of whitewashed walls and terracotta roofs, where they found a large villa to rent for just $79 a month. Not only was the Villa Marie cheap by American standards,† it seemed to Zelda and Scott a foothold in paradise. Fragrant with lemon trees and jasmine, and shaded by dark umbrella pines, it was perched high on olive-planted terraces, its blue and white tiled balconies giving wide views of the sea. As soon as they arrived Zelda went shopping for beach umbrellas, espadrilles and bathing suits: she gave herself up to a trance of pleasure, swimming and tanning herself, and, as she later wrote, it seemed that she and Scott had achieved the most lucky of escapes: ‘Oh we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us.’2

  For Scott certainly, this summer felt like a critical last chance. He was desperate to complete the great novel he knew was inside him: ‘A purely creative work,’ he assured his editor Max Perkins, ‘not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and radiant world.’3 In some ways The Great Gatsby was turning into another fictional re-working of the Fitzgeralds’ lives, with Daisy Buchanan a richer, sillier, but still ‘thrilling’ version of Zelda, and Jay Gatsby, a farm boy turned millionaire who lived by Scott’s faith in the necessary magic of illusions: ‘Illusions that give such colour to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false.’4 But if the origins of The Great Gatsby were personal, Scott’s focus was widening, moving towards the portrayal of a larger collective illusion, the American dream.

  Gatsby lived the jazz age with more extravagance than any of Scott’s other heroes. His wealth was an art deco fantasy of elaborate parties, ‘yellow cocktail music’, expensive clothes and cars.5 The nickel and cream opulence of his Rolls-Royce ‘terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns’ was a symbol of the shining absurdity of his life.6 But rather than merely glamorizing that fantasy, Scott presented it as an exquisite bubble, floating on the dirt and corruption of modern American capitalism. As a writer, his vision was maturing. He could see that Gatsby’s desperate wish to reclaim his perfect love with Daisy was part of the bright, precarious dream of his own generation, a dream that confused the ownership of beautiful things with happiness and freedom.*

  Scott knew very well, too, what damage that confusion had wreaked on him and Zelda. And for several weeks at Villa Marie he tried to maintain a simple, sober and productive routine; writing to his editor Max Perkins, that he was determined to recapture the purity of his artistic conscience. He could feel he was writing well, symbolism and description, romance and irony all tightly pitched. Yet for Zelda, Scott’s artistic conscience soon began to feel like very dull company. ‘What’ll we do … with ourselves,’ she complained, as one heat-hazed day blurred into the next.7 Servants took care of the villa, Nanny Maddock took care of Scottie and, although Zelda tried to occupy herself, improving her French by reading a Raymond Radiguet novel, she grew very bored.

  She also missed having an audience, and her tone was only half ironic when she wrote to Edmund Wilson that ‘everything would be perfect if there was somebody here who would be sure to spread the tale of our idyllic existence around New York’.8 Although the Murphys had recently arrived in the area, they were staying further along the coast at Antibes. By the time Zelda struck up a friendship with some French aviators stationed at a nearby air base in Fréjus, she had become desperate not only for company, but for the admiring gaze of men.

  The aviators were around almost every day, and Zelda and Scott fell into a routine of standing them dinner at a local restaurant, then drinking and gambling along the seafront bars and casino. Scott enjoyed their conversation, while for Zelda it felt like a return to the old Montgomery days, when she’d been so pleasantly surrounded by handsome young men in uniforms, all competing for her attention.

  Her favourite was Edouard Jozan. Scott rarely danced anymore, but Edouard partnered her with an easy, athlete’s grace; during the day he took her for drives along the winding mountain roads or lazed with her on the beach, telling her the local gossip in his attractively slanted English. In contrast to Scott, with his book deadlines and bothers about money, Edouard’s company was delightfully relaxing. And in the heat and intimacy of their long hours together, Zelda began to find him very attractive.

  Years later, when she incorporated memories of Edouard into her fiction, she wrote about him with the erotic recall of a lover: his dark olive skin ‘smelling of the sun and the sea … the blades of his bones carving her own’,9 and it’s very probable that in real life, too, the friendship became sexual. Scott’s own suspicions may have been aroused when Edouard, in a gallant tribute to Zelda, flew aerial stunts in his plane high above the Villa Marie. He could not have known what memories he was stirring of Scott’s former rivals in Montgomery, but they precipitated the ugliest fight so far in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. On 16 July Scott wrote grimly in his ledger, ‘Big Crisis,’ and from that point on Zelda and Edouard never met up with each other again.

  Edouard himself would always maintain that his friendship with Zelda was innocent, but he seems to have been protecting either her reputation or his own. Zelda herself would refer to their relationship explicitly as a ‘love affair’,10 and cite it as one of the profound emotional experiences of her life. Scott would claim that she had gone as far as to ask him for a divorce, and that he had felt such murderous anger that he had locked Zelda in her room at the Villa Marie, taunting her to wait there until Edouard came to claim her like a man.

  But if there are conflicting accounts of the affair, the truth remained t
hat Zelda and Scott had long reached the point where their marriage depended on these quarrels for cathartic release. By August Scott was able to write in his ledger, ‘Zelda and I close together.’ Yet in comparison to their previous rows, this crisis was not so easily contained. With Edouard, Zelda had threatened more of a betrayal than with any of her other flirtations, while Scott had said things that lodged more deeply than any of his former accusations. Later he acknowledged that his optimism had been premature: ‘I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.’11

  Zelda, although outwardly calm for the rest of the summer, manifested odd, disturbing tics of emotion. Gilbert and Amanda Seldes came to stay at Villa Marie for a few days and were unnerved by the way that, during the drive to the beach, she always asked Scott for a cigarette at the exact point where the road curved into a dangerously precipitous bend, as though she were deliberately distracting Scott in order to court danger.

  When Sara and Gerald Murphy met up with the Fitzgeralds they sensed a ‘spooky’ reserve of feeling in Zelda’s eyes. Or they thought they did, given what happened in early September when they were woken up in the night by Scott, ‘green faced, holding a candle, trembling’, and afraid that Zelda had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. When they got to Zelda, she was not yet unconscious but she was in a frighteningly altered state. As Sara fed her sips of olive oil, trying to get her to vomit up the pills, Zelda mumbled incoherent protests, ‘Don’t make me take that, please. If you drink too much oil you turn into a Jew.’12

  It’s possible that the Murphys’ chronology was a year out, as some evidence suggests that this episode occurred the following year.* It’s also very unlikely that Zelda took a fatal dose, as she had a history of scaring both Scott and herself with melodramatic gestures. But there is no doubt that that summer marked a miserable falling away of the bright resolve with which Zelda and Scott had first arrived in Europe.