by Marion Meade
Zelda found Saint-Raphaël enchanting. For hours and hours she sat at the beach attempting to learn the language by reading French novels with the aid of a dictionary. In enthusiastic letters home she praised the incomparable scenery and urged everybody to hop the next boat. They were going to be very happy in Saint-Raphaël, she reported to Bunny. Never could she have guessed that “incompetency”—whose she left unsaid—could triumph against all odds and transport her to this idyllic setting. What she most craved was order, which finally seemed, on the bright shores of the Mediterranean, to be within her grasp.
Before arriving at the Côte d’Azur, during a stopover in Paris, they hired a nursemaid. Compared with Great Neck help who charged the outrageous sum of ninety dollars a month, Lillian Maddock seemed to be a bargain at twenty-six dollars, or under a dollar a day. The middle-aged Englishwoman was a professional with decent references and an upper-class accent that they expected Scottie would surely emulate. By the time they reached the Riviera, however, they had begun to feel less pleased because the “wonderful” Lillian Maddock was turning out to be a shameless snob, not above boasting about her previous employers, invariably families of the better class. She made clear that the Fitzgeralds were not up to her usual standards. Judgmental and condescending, she sized up Zelda as incompetent and easily pushed around. She repeatedly lectured her on deadly sun exposure and the dangers of permanent skin damage.
The novel that Scott started in Great Neck in the summer of 1923—partly discarded, partly revamped, partly cannibalized for “Absolution”—was moving forward again. As always he discussed his writing with Zelda, seeking her opinion on titles and endings, because her instincts were sound. When he had trouble visualizing the physical details of a character, she would sometimes sketch a picture for him. Soon “the book,” as Scott called it, completely took over their lives. James Gatz, like Scott himself a poor boy from the Midwest, believes that nothing is impossible if you want it badly enough. Inventing a new self at the age of seventeen, he rejects his parents, mediocrities whom in his imagination he “had never really accepted,” and begins his metamorphosis into the legendary millionaire Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island.
Scott’s trouble was in separating himself from his fictional characters, who had become more real to him than his own family. He found Scottie’s presence particularly distracting, and after ten minutes Miss Maddock would be summoned to take her away. Drifting over his story was the motionless presence of Scott himself, not just writing autobiographically about Scott Fitzgerald of Minnesota but also narrating the events in the form of a memoir. His stand-in, greatly modified to be sure, is a trustworthy but otherwise unexceptional young man, Nick Carraway. Another transplanted Midwesterner, Nick makes his living as a Wall Street bond salesman and rents a house in Great Neck, where he gets mixed up in the grand notions of the millionaire next door. Jay Gatsby, whose affectation is to call men “old sport,” is an odd character. His obsession turns out to be Daisy, Nicks rich, beautiful second cousin once removed. As Nick eventually learns, Jay is actually a white-collar criminal whose wealth probably comes from bootleg liquor and stolen securities, although Scott never makes clear the source of his money.
Drinking moderately, carefully husbanding his time, Scott got into the routine of sequestering himself all day. Mornings he wrote, and when he took a break, he’d read André Maurois’s new biography of Shelley or chuckle over French magazines with their brothel ads and homosexual personals offering seashore sex weekends. Typically he kept to himself until the late afternoons, when he would drift down to the beach for a quick dip. At night he felt drained and rather monastic, which meant he and Zelda rarely had sex. He was completely absorbed in his book, which he could not resist bragging about, in a letter to Max Perkins, as “the best American novel ever written.”
. . .
sAINT-RAPHAËL in the off-season, Zelda wrote Bunny, was crowded with so many British consumptives and Sunday afternoon watercolorists that she felt “quite alone.” All this changed after a week or two, however, when she was befriended by a group of gregarious naval fliers from the local air base. Swimming and sunbathing every morning with Scottie and Nanny, she would leave them with the sand buckets and stroll up to one of the beach cafés. While sipping a glass of port on the terrace one day, she struck up a conversation with the Frenchmen, cocky young flyboys in crisp white duck uniforms who were immediately attracted to a flirtatious American blonde. Since the men were no more fluent in English than she was in French, conversation sometimes had to be conducted in sign language. But all of them hit it off, and soon Zelda invited them to the villa to meet her husband, who also enjoyed their company. They reminded Zelda of Montgomery during the war, when pilots from Taylor Field used to buzz their flying machines over her house.
The one Zelda liked best was Lieutenant Edouard Jozan, the youngest of seven children from a Provençal family of modest means, who had enlisted in the Navy and graduated from flying school after the war. Stationed at the Fréjus airfield, he was a chase pilot whose duties, mainly providing escort and support for other aircraft, must have been a humdrum assignment for an impatient twenty-four-year-old. In Zelda’s autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz, Edouard Jozan (Lieutenant Jacques Chèvre-Feuille) is built like a god, “bronze and smelled of the sand and sun.” Irresistibly slim and muscular, he apparently wore no undershirt, because her heroine thrills to the touch of his back muscles rippling “naked under the starched linen.” Zelda began meeting Edouard so regularly that people who noticed them whispering at the beach or pressed together on the dance floor of the smoky casino began to form conclusions.
At Villa Marie, Scott ceased to pay close attention to anything except the life of his fictional bootlegger. While not completely oblivious of Edouard, he found nothing really objectionable about his attentions to Zelda because all of them had become friends. It never occurred to him that the youth three years his junior might have the bad manners to overstep the boundaries of gentlemanly behavior when nobody was looking. Zelda, throughout their marriage, had enjoyed being the center of attention among Scott’s college gang. Knowing that his friends, even the randy George Jean Nathan, found her desirable brought him a great deal of pleasure. With the frolicking safely under his control, he knew, as John Dos Passos remarked, that nobody dared to “make a pass at Scott’s girl.” No matter how coquettish Zelda might appear, the idea that she could be tempted into adultery was unthinkable.
Despite a passionate emotional bond, sex between Zelda and Scott had never been good. He was prudish in bed, never as eager to do it as she was. What’s more, it had to suit his schedule, something she strongly resented. If he thought she was going to “sit around on my ass” until he had finished writing, or “lie on the bed waiting,” he was very much mistaken, she would tell him.
“Wasn’t sex satisfactory?” he was to ask her in later years. Zelda did not mince words.
“No,” she said sharply.
Primarily she blamed their mediocre sex life on the size of his penis—too small to give any woman pleasure, she said. Atop his list of complaints was the suspicion that she was not a virgin the first time they slept together. She was acting, but happened to be a poor actress. Owing to her mother’s negligence, the son of a rich cotton broker had seduced her at the age of fifteen. (Zelda refused to confirm or deny any of it.) Eventually Scott became so upset about the size of his penis that a friend took him into the toilet of a Parisian brasserie for an inspection. He was average, the friend told him. Scott had been examining himself from above, when he should have turned sideways and looked in a mirror. Even so, Scott never felt reassured.
It was the middle of July when Scott noticed Zelda’s cozy behavior with Edouard. His suspicions were aroused, and one Sunday, around her birthday, he took her to task for unbecoming behavior. Unintimidated, she said that he could think whatever he liked. Increasingly angry, he resorted to threats and orders, which she ignored. (She never said she had sex with Edo
uard; she never said she didn’t.) It would serve her right, he yelled, if he went back home and left her. Fair enough, but she loved Edouard. In fact, she wanted a divorce. In future she would run her own life.
Scott did not believe her for a minute. He certainly didn’t suppose that Edouard wanted to run away with her. That was ridiculous. Let the boyfriend say all that to his face, he blustered. The two of them would fight it out like men. In the meantime, she was not to meet Edouard again.
“I was locked in my villa for one month,” she said later, to prevent her from seeing Edouard. Although such a jail sentence would have been hard to enforce in a busy household with a child and several servants, the villa, figuratively, must have felt like a jail cell.
Trouble, when it came, was not easily blown away. Zelda refused to apologize, and although later she granted, reluctantly, that Scott’s anger was justified, she failed to show a scrap of repentance. Her silence ensured that he would never be completely certain whether he was cuckolded, hence the lingering bile over her betrayal. In his ledger, where the Edouard incident was labeled “Big Crisis,” he predicted that the damage to their marriage could never be repaired. For years afterward he punished her by mocking her feelings for the French flier in front of others, using her intimate experiences as the basis for misty cocktail-party talk, embellishing the details as he saw fit, milking her passion for pathos. In both the short and the long term, Edouard Jozan left footprints all over their marriage.
In a cheerful letter to John Bishop at this time, Scott pretended to be satisfied with his marriage. He and Zelda (like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in his novel) were soul mates, he insisted. Quarreling constantly did not mean any lessening of their affection, because they were the only completely happy couple he knew. It was a lie, of course. What he really felt was complete and utter isolation. He lived in a household with “no one I liked.”
Eventually life swung back to normal, at least on the surface. Although Zelda sensed herself under house arrest, she continued to swim every day. In his ledger Scott noted that she was “getting brown.” In the presence of visitors from home, they behaved as if nothing extraordinary had happened. John Dos Passos and Ring and Ellis Lardner noticed no particular tension; neither did Gilbert Seldes and his wife, Amanda, who apparently failed to connect a certain unnerving experience to marital discord the day all four of them drove down to the beach from Villa Marie. As the Renault approached a treacherous hairpin turn, Zelda said, “Give me a cigarette, Goofo.” Struggling to keep the steering wheel steady, Scott pulled a cigarette out of a pack. While Zelda calmly lit up, the Seldeses huddled terrified in the backseat.
By this time Edouard had disappeared from Zelda’s life, although not from Saint-Raphaël. As a naval officer, he lacked the freedom to come and go at will and would remain stationed at the local airfield for another two years, until September 1926, when he was transferred to sea duty aboard the aircraft carrier Béarn. For a man in his position, an aviator earning military wages, a summer beach fling with an attractive married woman, no matter how good the sex, was never meant to be serious. Despite indiscreet behavior, he had no intention of interfering in the Fitzgerald marriage, still less of assuming financial responsibility for a foreigner with a child. (Decades later he chivalrously declined to acknowledge any sexual relations had taken place.)
Although Zelda never saw Edouard again, she would relive the erotic details of their relationship in two novels, thus endowing the romance with more substance than it might have had. Her vivid descriptions were the results of the intense visual memory she brought to all her writing—and of the fact that this was the first and only occasion in her life that she experienced swooning sex.
With the lease on Villa Marie about to expire, Scott mailed off his typescript to Scribner’s. In October they loaded up the sagging Renault with Scottie, their seventeen suitcases, the blabby Miss Maddock, and what Zelda called “germs of bitterness” and went to spend the winter in Italy. For the first time in her life Zelda suffered from serious illnesses. An attack of colitis, which is an inflammation of the colon caused by a virus or an abnormal immune response (but may also be psychosomatic), was followed by inflammation of the right ovary. The ovarian infection made her so “horribly sick” that she spent five weeks bedridden with abdominal pain, fever, and vaginal discharge. Over the next year or two her gynecological problems persisted.
Nineteen twenty-four, in Scott’s ledger, was recorded as “the year of Zelda’s sickness and resulting depression.” Actually, it was the other way around. But whichever one came first, she was beaten, and they both knew it. As she would write later, in an attempt to convert pain into philosophy, “You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.”
EDNA HAD NEVER been so happy. Writing a novel was work, filthy work, like “plodding along a dirt road ankle deep in mud.” By contrast, writing a play made her feel as if she were strolling “down a country lane on a sunshiny day in early May.” Despite her miserable experience with $1200 a Year four years earlier, she found everything about the theater pleasurable. After returning from Europe in August, she boycotted her typewriter and began spending her time at Minick rehearsals. The producer, Winthrop Ames, was a Boston Brahmin millionaire who used his family’s hand-tool fortune to back Broadway shows. Edna knew of no classier person in show business than Ames, who talked business on the top floor of a theater he owned on West Forty-fourth, in an apartment decorated with priceless tapestries where a butler in white coat served cocktails and canapés on silver trays. Rehearsals were conducted with equal style. Every day at one, Ames’s chauffeur and butler marched through the stage door bearing picnic baskets full of the most delicious salads, gourmet sandwiches, fruit, and hot coffee. When it came time for the company to depart on road tryouts, Edna decided to go along.
In Connecticut, Minick first opened in New Haven and Hartford, before moving to an old Shubert Theater in New London, the historic harbor town of the tall ships. On opening night the dimming of the houselights was a cue for bats roosting in the chandeliers to dive and dart into the orchestra. Shrieking, the audience used programs as umbrellas and ran toward the exits like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Onstage the actors were laughing hysterically, while Edna, sitting in a box, helplessly watched the bat ballet through opera glasses. The evening was a disaster.
Afterward the cast assembled for highballs and sandwiches in Winthrop Ames’s hotel room. Edna, depressed, slumped against a cushion on the floor. To cheer up his cast, Ames remarked that the traditional system of out-of-town tryouts had become useless. It made more sense to charter a showboat and drift down some river, playing towns without ever getting off the boat.
Edna bolted upright. “What’s a showboat?” she said.
AT THE END of August, Scott told Max Perkins that he had time for reading once more. Could Max recommend any good novels? No bestsellers, nothing like Joseph Hergesheimer’s latest, which he could tell must be “vile.”
Heading the list of Max’s picks was So Big, “the most popular, and one of the best,” and second was E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which he had not yet finished, because of his hay fever.
Contrary to the predictions of some critics, So Big did not sink like a stone. Through the summer, sales kept creeping upward, and by Christmas the novel had galloped to number one on the bestseller list. During its first year the book would sell 318,000 copies, exceeding Main Street.
Despite Max’s enthusiasm, Scott refused to read So Big. Ferber’s books, he told Max, were beyond bad; they were “inferior” and “cheap,” a lesser version of Willa Cather. He took the position that stories about “flip Jewish saleswomen” and an “earthy carrot grower” must be trash. Ferber and Fannie Hurst, pulp writers in his opinion, were “the Yiddish descendants of O. Henry.”
Edna, however, had an equally unflattering view of Scott. She thought his novels were larky smarty-pants cartoons about silly flappers, his characters soft, anemic types
. Clever young writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald were, she predicted, the type to “peter out.”
BY THE EARLY 1920S Frank Nelson Doubleday had transformed his company into one of the country’s leading publishing houses. Under the stewardship of his son Nelson, the family business would go on evolving into an even more successful operation, but for the time being the sixty-two-year-old patriarch still dominated Doubleday, Page. “Effendi,” as he was known in the trade, liked to boast that he didn’t read books. He sold them. Since Effendi’s list sparkled with superstars—Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, O. Henry—literary honors were nothing new. Evidently, it never occurred to Effendi that So Big might also qualify as a contender for the Pulitzer Prize; at least the book was never submitted to the board.
Serving as one of the Pulitzer fiction jurors that year was Edna’s dear friend William Allen White. The minute Bill saw the list of entries, he noticed the absence of So Big and began cracking the whip. Dear Frank, he wrote to Effendi. What about So Big? Why hadn’t it been submitted? Never mind sending him a copy. He knew the book so well that he could practically “sing it.”
A few days later Bill got in touch with the Pulitzer administrator. Dear Mr. Fackenthall, he said, Doubleday evidently neglected to enter So Big in the fiction contest. Surely it deserved a place among the top candidates, in his opinion qualifying as one of the final three shortlisted books. White’s annoyance continued. Bad enough he was forced to remind Effendi about So Big, but then Doubleday, disorganized, sent a chintzy single copy to the Pulitzer board when it should have issued books to all three judges. In the end, he had to take care of buying and mailing the copies.
In a textbook case of von Clausewitz strategy, White commenced to spread his own fog of war, or at least a heavy mist, as he angled to steer his fellow judges toward So Big by a steady barrage of mail. Dear Dr. Fletcher. My dear Mr. Firkins. Dear Mr. Fackenthall. Everybody got letters. White, candid, made it clear that So Big was his first choice. On the other hand, he didn’t feel so strongly that he would object to certain other titles. But then again, So Big was “outstanding.” Figuring out precisely where he stood must have been almost impossible. (He failed to reveal an important conflict of interest: his twelve-year relationship with the woman he called “Angel Child.”)