By October, the heat had gone out of the sun and the Fitzgeralds prepared to travel down to Rome, where the lira was even cheaper than the franc. Despite their best economizing intentions, the summer had been bewilderingly expensive: the servants had fiddled the accounts (taking advantage of their poor grasp of French); the cheap price of alcohol along the seafront bars had spurred Scott to reckless generosity, standing drinks for everyone when the mood took him. He was shocked by his continuing inability to budget, and a few months later he admitted the depth of his panic to Max Perkins: ‘I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity.’13 If Gatsby turned out to be a failure, Scott swore he would have to abandon serious fiction for a scriptwriting career in Hollywood.
Rome would, of course, be another change of scene, holding out the promise of yet another fresh start. But while Zelda spent her first few days as a contented tourist, taking herself off on solitary walks around the city, enjoying the romantic pleasure of getting ‘lost between centuries in the Roman dusk’, an unusually difficult winter lay ahead.14 She had begun to suffer from recurrent pelvic infections, telling her doctors that she had got sick ‘from trying to have more children’, which suggests she may have had a miscarriage, and she was anxious about her chances of having another viable pregnancy. Even before coming to Europe she and Scott had talked about giving Scottie a brother or sister. Although Zelda had been exhausted and depressed by early motherhood, Scottie had grown into a charming toddler. The two or three hours a day that Zelda spent alone with her were now a delight to her, a shared world of simple pleasures: telling stories, drawing pictures and inventing games of make-believe.
She was ready to try for another baby, but when she was admitted to hospital for investigative surgery, the findings were bad. The infections had damaged one of her ovaries and Zelda’s chances of conceiving again were significantly reduced. In the past her body had rarely failed her, and this setback not only distressed her but made her feel physically insecure. Scott was not in much of a mood to comfort her either: their hotel room in Rome was damp, a bout of flu had left him with a persistent cough, and he was fretting over the proofs of his novel. Zelda found some distraction in an American journalist attached to the film crew shooting Roman scenes for Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur, but it was only a reflex flirtation. When Scott retaliated with the actress Carmel Myers, the quarrels that ensued were tedious, spiritless affairs that did little to disperse the tension.
They were still irritable and unwell in February the following year, when they packed up to move further south to the island of Capri. But the island’s vertiginous rocky landscape and its improbable wealth of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers acted as a tonic: Zelda felt the dank claustrophobia of the Roman winter lift. She also encountered Romaine Brooks, the friend and former lover of Natalie Barney, who was wintering on Capri among a group of female artists. Zelda was interested to see this group of women, all creatively absorbed in a life without men, and as she began to spend time with them, she accepted their encouragement to start painting herself. It was a novel experience for her, losing hours each day in the study of shifting light and sea, of rock formations and flowers, but also detaching herself Scott and the complications of their marriage.
Scott, however, hated Capri. He felt sidelined by Zelda’s new hobby and her new friends; he grumbled hatefully to Max Perkins that the island, historically a haven for male, as well as female homosexuals, was ‘full of fairies’.*15 But the foulness of his mood was primarily due to writer’s nerves. He genuinely believed that Gatsby was his best novel yet: ‘My book has something extraordinary about it,’ he wrote to John Peal Bishop. ‘I want to be extravagantly admired again.’16 Yet until it was published and the reviews came out, Scott’s head buzzed with a white noise of worry and self-doubt.
Later he would recall that period on Capri as a time when ‘there seemed to be nothing left of happiness in the world anywhere I looked’. In April, however, just as he and Zelda were preparing to return to Paris, he assured Bishop that the two of them were ‘enormously in love’.17 There were still days, even weeks, when they could believe in the uniqueness of their bond, when Scott, for Zelda, was the one person who could give words to her deepest feelings, and when Zelda, for Scott, was the core not only of his life but of his writing.
Even Max Perkins, his staunch and sympathetic editor, did not understand his work as Zelda did. In Rome, when Scott had been working on the final edit of Gatsby, it had been her memories on which he drew to finesse descriptions of the landscape, and inhabitants of Great Neck, and to sift the emotional truth of his dialogue. When Max Perkins commented that he could not fully ‘see’ Jay Gatsby yet, it was Zelda who prompted Scott’s imagination by drawing sketch after sketch of Gatsby until she had caught the exact cast of his features and expression. It was Zelda, too, who helped decide on the title, rejecting Scott’s wordier and far more clumsy alternatives, like The High Bouncing Lover. His dedication – ‘Once again to Zelda’ – was more than a sentimental tribute.
The first reactions to Gatsby were disappointing, however, with poor sales that Perkins blamed on its brevity. But then came the ‘extravagant’ admiration. T.S. Eliot praised the novel as ‘the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James’; Gilbert Seldes’s review in The Dial argued that Scott’s talent had ‘gone soaring in beautiful flight’ leaving behind ‘everything dubious and tricky in his early work’.18 In June the stage rights were sold, and although Scott made a point of being modest in public, in private he was jubilant, allowing himself to believe that he had become ‘the biggest man in the profession’.19
This was the mood in which Zelda loved him best, optimistic, buoyant and lucky. It was also the mood in which the gears of their public image clicked back into beautiful efficiency. To Sara and Gerald Murphy they seemed ‘flawless’ on their return to Paris. Zelda, thinner from her recent illness, looked lovely in the new season’s sheer dresses. She wore them in ‘her own personal style’, recalled Sara, favouring reds and hot pinks that set off her dark blonde hair. But essentially Zelda’s beauty was ‘all in her eyes’, Gerald thought; ‘she had an outstanding gaze, one doesn’t find it often in women, perfectly level and head on. If she looked like anything it was an American Indian’.20
Gerald thought Scott almost as rare: his ‘head was so fine, really unbelievably handsome’.21 And, along with the aura of their beauty, the Fitzgeralds set out to impress Paris with the perfection of their marriage. On a shared instinct they had rewritten their recent troubled past, recasting Edouard as a tragic suicide whose love for Zelda had been so passionate, yet so unrequited that he had killed himself. Of course he had not. But to those who listened to the Fitzgeralds, the only apparent flaw in their story was the frequency and intensity with which they seemed to need to tell it.
One couple who heard it several times were Ernest and Hadley Hemingway. When they first met Scott and Zelda, the Hemingways had seen no reason to probe beyond their surface image – Scott the successful novelist and Zelda the exceptional beauty. Ernest admitted that Zelda’s ‘dark gold hair … hawk’s eyes … clear and calm … and light … long “nigger legs”’ had aroused him to an erotic dream.22 But he and Hadley soon began to sense something strangely theatrical in the way the Fitzgeralds kept returning to Edouard’s story, Zelda looking ‘beautiful’ and ‘solemn’, Scott ‘pale and distressed’. ‘It was one of their acts together,’ Hadley recalled. ‘Somehow it struck me as something that gave her status.’23
But to others, the Fitzgeralds seemed to be celebrating their arrival in Paris, and Scott’s success with Gatsby, in high careless style. They jazzed in Montmartre, taking Charleston lessons from Bricktop; they drank at the Dingo, the all-night American bar on rue Delambre whose bartender Jimmy Charter claimed to mix every known cocktail, a smile spread like butter over his broad boxer’s face. It was said you could always be certain of meeting someone you knew at Dingo’s, either on their way to a party
or on their way back home. To Sara Murphy the whole city ‘was like a great fair … you loved your friends and you wanted to see them every day’,24 and that was how it seemed to the Fitzgeralds, too. As Scott recorded, 1924 was the ‘summer of 1000 parties’.
Through Ernest Hemingway, they were introduced to the key Left Bank institution, Getrude Stein’s salon at rue de Fleurus. Scott revelled in the occasion: Stein praised Gatsby and was almost coquettish in her attentiveness. Zelda, however, hated it. Just like Tamara, she was shooed off briskly to sit in the wives’ corner and drink tea with Alice Toklas, while Stein talked serious art with the men. This kind of sexual apartheid was unknown to Zelda (unless she herself was enforcing it) and she took profound offence. Ignoring the proffered tea, she stalked off to study the paintings that hung on Stein’s walls and afterwards scoffed to Scott that what she’d overheard of their hostess’s famous literary conversation had been ‘sententious gibberish’.*25
Zelda sought alternative cultural experiences with Sara, who took her shopping for clothes, exploring the maze of little Left Bank art galleries, and to performances of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. With Sara, too, she was taken to Nathalie Barney’s salon, where she discovered that women were far more prized than men. When Zelda had been growing up in Montgomery, she had only ever been aware of women holding power in the home or on the dance floor. At rue Jacob, however, the female writers, painters and actors were all apparently successful, all apparently supportive of one another. Partly on their inspiration Zelda enrolled for a second course of painting lessons. Although there was no room for her to put up an easel or create a mess of oil paints in their over-furnished rented apartment, she bought gouache and watercolours and commandeered the dining-room table to begin a series of studies for her own self-portrait.
Zelda was genuinely interested in carving out an independent space for herself, outside of her marriage and apart from Scott’s writing. Yet even as she drew closer to Sara and her new painter friends, and even as she became genuinely absorbed in her art studies, she was motivated, in part, by resentment towards Scott and his new best friend. Ernest Hemingway was a man who lived up to his nicknames, Hem, Hemmy, the Champ. He was built like a sportsman, square across the jaw and shoulders, with a warm flush to his skin and a boyishly crooked smile. He boxed, he hunted, and the slight limp in his walk bore witness to the shrapnel wounds he’d suffered during war service in Italy. Even as an author he was a man’s man: his stories of travel and bullfighting written at wine-stained tables in bars (unlike Scott, who preferred his own desk); his prose style stripped to the bare essentials of dialogue and action.
Scott always yearned for close male friendship, and he listened with a sense of fascinated privilege to Hemingway’s stories of women and war. Despite his natural preference for cocktail lounges, Scott willingly accompanied his new friend on tours of the ‘real’ Paris, of working men’s bars and neighbourhood bals musettes, where music from cracked accordions drifted from windows and the air smelled of sour wine. Everything Scott admired, however, Zelda reacted against. She felt crowded by Hemingway’s physical swagger, she scorned his affectation of working-class tastes and she particularly resented the coarse way he spoke about women.
‘All they talk about is sex,’ she complained to Sara, ‘sex plain, striped, mixed and fancy.’26 While others were starting to regard Hemingway with awe, a tough, authentic literary voice, Zelda was convinced he was bogus. ‘No one is as masculine as you pretend to be,’ she later taunted him, and she dismissed his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, as a fake parade of ‘bull fighting bull slinging and bullsh[it] …’27 Zelda hated that Scott was unable to see through Hemingway’s machismo, and unable to see how bad an effect this new friendship was having on them both.* Ernest was famous for an ability to hold his alcohol, but after the long nights he and Scott spent at Dingo’s – nights for which Scott almost always paid – Scott would wake up belligerent and frowsty. After a few weeks in Paris his face was acquiring the puffiness and greenish tinge that always signalled he was drinking beyond his limits. More upsettingly, he was beginning to parrot Ernest’s views about wives, women and marriage.
Hemingway had decisive opinions on all three. Like the surrealist comrades who baulked at Nancy’s relationship with Aragon, he believed that a woman’s essential role was to support the struggles of her husband. His own wife, Hadley, was exemplary in that regard. Intelligent and musically gifted, she was still happy to devote herself to the care of Ernest and their new baby, and to the diligent managing of their tiny income. But while Hadley rarely interrupted Ernest with complaints about the lack of hot water or electricity in their apartment, and while she was happy to dress in plain, sturdy clothes, Zelda appeared to be her greedy, flighty oppostie. Hemingway blamed her extravagance for the money worries that niggled at Scott, her volatile moods for his lack of concentration. And ignoring his own role in Scott’s almost daily hangovers he believed that it was Zelda, resentful of her husband’s superior talent, who deliberately provoked the drinking jags that kept him from his desk.
Later, in print, Hemingway would make the implacable judgement that Zelda had represented the ‘terrible odds’ against which Scott was forced to write.28 In Paris, he arrived at that verdict more slowly, but his disapproval became apparent as, over the next eighteen months, he began to level criticisms at Zelda, especially at the company she kept. Hemingway detested Natalie Barney, partly because she was rich and partly because she was a lesbian. He had a visceral aversion to homosexuality, both male and female, and aside from Stein, whom he admired, he regarded the cultural influence of American sapphists as especially pernicious. For a complex variety of reasons he began intimating to Scott that it was dangerous for Zelda to spend so much time at rue Jacob. It might provoke gossip that she was a lesbian herself; it might even draw out tendencies of which she was unconscious. And both, he suggested, could do serious damage to Scott’s reputation.
It’s hard to know how much credence even Hemingway gave to this nonsense, but sex was becoming a sensitive issue between the Fitzgeralds, and Scott was susceptible to any suggestion that Zelda and he were not compatible. Over the last year alcohol and ill health had resulted in them making love less frequently, and while Hemingway drip-fed suggestions to Scott that Zelda might prefer women, Scott was also wounded by gossip that was circulating about his friendship with Hemingway. It was probably the poet Robert McAlmon (a friend of Nancy Cunard) who started the rumour that the two men were gay, and it might have been only a simple act of malice, but it took hold. Tamara de Lempicka was one of many who believed it; she claimed that Hemingway had always protested his masculinity too much, bracketing him with Gertrude Stein as two ‘boring people who wanted to be what they were not – he wanted to be a woman and she wanted to be a man’.29 When Zelda taunted Scott with the same rumour – ‘Ernest is just a pansy with hair on his chest’30 – he was violently angry, telling her she must never repeat such ‘slanderous things’.
* * *
These were all slow-festering issues. But as Zelda later acknowledged, Paris was ‘the perfect breeding ground for the germs of bitterness’ between her and Scott.31 It was an unnatural life they were leading, at home neither in the elegant, unreadable world of the native Parisians nor in the gossipy competitive expatriate community. As Zelda wrote in Save Me the Waltz, the two of them were unable ‘to sense the beat of any other pulse half so exactly’32 as the world they had left behind. Scott certainly never came to love Paris. Unable to speak good French or find much poetry in a city afflicted by bad plumbing and eccentric cooking, a part of him remained stubbornly homesick. Zelda, too, had flashes of feeling at a disadvantage. Her French was better than Scott’s, but not fluent, and at times she felt excluded from the chatter about art, books and ideas that dominated every bar or party. Sara thought that Zelda could be extraordinarily intuitive in her perceptions, but that she had ‘no intellectual talk’ and could speak ‘only of things that came into her mind at the time’
.33
Already sensitive to her ‘lack of accomplishment’, Zelda’s confidence was further undermined by a flare-up of the pelvic infection from which she had previously suffered.34 By the time the summer heat began to bear down on the city, she was hugely relieved to leave Paris and head down to Antibes, where the Murphys were overseeing the extensive re-modelling of their new holiday villa. The sea was a restorative, as always, and she spent happy days lazing in the sun with the Murphys, Gerald slender and charming in his elegant knitted sun cap, Sara laughingly stylish in her bathing suit and string of pearls, which she wore looped in a style she copied from the Duchess of Rutland on a visit to England before the war. Scott, who had just embarked on a new novel about expatriate life on the Riviera, was writing optimistically and well, and Zelda was finding contented occupation in the games of make-believe she invented for Scottie and the three Murphy children.
The nights, however, were more volatile. The Riviera was crowded that summer as fashionable Parisians took advantage of Le Train Bleu, the luxury express that ferried them south to the Mediterranean.* Staying close to the Murphys were Etienne de Beaumont, the cabaret singer Mistinguett, Jean Cocteau, Marie Laurencin, and the Picassos (the Fitzgeralds and the Picassos met several times but didn’t much take to each other – Picasso found Zelda too strange). There were also American friends of the Murphys, such as Archie McLeish and his wife, and every evening a party inevitably began. Zelda was only half joking when she wrote to a friend back home, ‘We went to Antibes to recuperate, but all we recooped [sic] was drinking hours. Now once again the straight and narrow path goes winding and wobbling before us.’35
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 34