by Marion Meade
Actually, Dottie’s impatience to leave New York involved more than just literature. For many struggling writers, like Ernest, Europe offered the opportunity to live cheaply but relatively well. Dottie, however, didn’t have to live on her small advance from Liveright; indeed, for once she wasn’t counting pennies at all. That was because she had a new man, an eligible bachelor of twenty-six (six years her junior), funny and lovable and eager to please. Soon after latching on to her at a downtown club, where she was partying with her sister, Seward Collins developed a terrific crush. In the space of a few days Sewie, bless his heart, endeared himself with a diamond-studded watch from Cartier’s. This presented Dottie with a moral dilemma: Sewie clearly had considerable means, but this was never an attractive quality to anyone suspicious of nearly all rich people on principle. Still, the watch was too divine. In short, she had no choice but to accept.
Heir to a national chain of tobacco shops, the young prince was an earnest romantic who considered poetry to be “the only thing in life.” A Princetonian and a friend of Bunny’s, he was fairly well known in publishing circles, but not for literary achievements. He happened to be a passionate collector, reputedly a world-class collector, of pornography. Whenever he purchased a new piece of erotica, guests were invited to his book-lined apartment on Fifty-seventh Street or to his New Canaan estate, where he formally exhibited his acquisition just as if it were an old master. Aside from collecting pornography, Sewie aspired to publish a literary magazine and to write a biography of the English psychologist Havelock Ellis.
From the start Sewie was eager to advance Dottie’s career. Pigeonholed by some of his friends as a severely bored dilettante who “leaped around like a flea from one intellectual fad to another,” he fluttered in midair before landing on Dottie’s case and treating her like the full-time office job he had never held. Before she knew it, she had acquired a manager with an organizational chart for her life who was willing to engage in endless analysis of the special blocks that prevented her from doing a novel like everybody else. (Sewie had been psychoanalyzed.) If she wasn’t managing her professional life correctly, he had the solutions.
Six weeks after leaving New York, she and Sewie were in Barcelona watching a bullfight from the expensive shady seats. As the horns of a charging bull disappeared into the belly of a picador’s horse, intestines began spurting into the sand. Dottie jumped out of her seat and ran for the exit, with Sewie at her heels. What was the matter? he kept asking. Wasn’t she having a good time?
Didn’t he remember anything she had said about mistreatment of defenseless animals?
Of course, but he didn’t think it applied to horses or bulls. Wasn’t she being “extremely sensitive”? Besides, those poor bulls sometimes killed the matadors.
She hoped to God they did!
ZELDA READ the manuscript of Ernest’s novel, rewritten, cut, and shipped home to Max Perkins. It was unbelievable, she thought. There could be little doubt about who wrote The Sun Also Rises, because the author sounded exactly like a man obsessed with hunting and fishing—and killing bulls. Ernest’s tough-guy act was a fake, in her opinion, because nobody could be “as male as all that.”
In Juan-les-Pins, the town next to Antibes, she and Scott were living in Villa St. Louis, a beachfront house not a hundred yards from the casino. A friend of hers from Montgomery was visiting that summer.
What is the Hemingway novel about? Sara Mayfield asked.
“Bullfighting, bullslinging, and bull——
“Zelda!” Scott chimed in. “Don’t say things like that.” He hated hearing her talk dirty.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Say anything you please, but lay off Ernest.”
“Try and make me!” she said. Ernest borrowed money from them and gossiped about her behind her back. “He’s phony as a rubber check and you know it.” Since Scott considered Ernest his best friend, any criticism was bound to annoy, especially when she called him “a pansy with hair on his chest.”
Once she discovered Ernest to be a humorless lug, she took pleasure in pulling his leg at every opportunity. A few weeks earlier, attending a champagne-and-caviar party at the casino, she leaned into his ear as if to share an important secret.
“Ernest,” she whispered, “don’t you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?” Ernest didn’t seem to understand she was baiting him.
Scott was doing precious little writing. The wind knocked out of him, he continued to talk about giving up fiction. For months and months he had fed on the fantasy of a life transformed by Jay Gatsby, dreaming of bestseller lists in moldy villas and fleabag flats. But one year after publication The Great Gatsby had sold a total of thirty thousand copies, causing his happy ending to recede like the green light on Daisy’s dock. Fortunately, Harold Ober had finally succeeded in selling both dramatic and movie rights, which netted Scott about twenty thousand dollars. If not for this subsidiary money, their financial situation that year would have been dire, because Scott earned only six thousand dollars from magazine sales and book royalties.
They decided to rent a villa near Antibes to be close to Sara and Gerald Murphy, who the previous summer had offered them an intimate, almost homey retreat. This summer, however, was anything but private. Villa America saw a constant flow of visitors: Archibald MacLeish (the former lawyer turned full-time poet) and his wife, Ada; the newly married Don Stewart and his Santa Barbara debutante; the whole Hemingway family; and John Dos Passos, now the critics’ first pick for literary use of collage and Cubism in his experimental novel, Manhattan Transfer.
For all these typewriter jockeys Gerald happily transformed his kingdom into an artists’ colony offering practical services such as loans, doctors, apartments, matrimonial Band-Aids, and limitless advice and comfort. But mostly he gave the writers a creative haven and sweet memories. For the rest of his life John Dos Passos would get emotional about Villa America, where to his mind the air smelled purer than elsewhere, the food tasted more sublime. In the vegetable garden just below the terrace, Sara’s Italian gardener had planted sweet corn, which turned up in some of her favorite dishes. Sara did not just toss corn into boiling water. When she served poached eggs, they were sprinkled with paprika and reposing on a bed of golden-bantam corn. On the side she served the finest tomatoes sautéed in garlic and olive oil. Zelda, observing Sara and her husband with a cooler eye than Dos’s, continued to marvel at how they could totally ignore “the great unhappiness of the world.” Even though “a dread of implacable doom” hung over the Murphys, they successfully hid their fears under a smoke screen of trivialities—the real estate, the sloops, the domestic gadgets, all the trappings of the well-heeled.
In the early part of the summer Zelda returned briefly to Paris, where she underwent surgery at the American Hospital after inflammation of her right ovary caused near peritonitis. (Doctors wound up removing her appendix instead of the ovary.) Also absent were Sara and Gerald, who took a holiday in Spain with Ernest and Hadley and one of Hadley’s girlfriends. It was after they returned from the bullfighting festival in Pamplona that the summer turned into comic opera. Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy woman from St. Louis, was Hadley’s friend but became Ernest’s mistress when Hadley’s back was turned. She had a boyish figure—flat front, sharp hipbones—and dressed smartly, as befitted an assistant to the editor of French Vogue. Since the winter she and Ernest had been sleeping together, but Pauline was not content with sex alone. As Ernest later complained, she was a conniving predator who led him by the nose into adultery by using “the oldest trick” in the book—befriending a married woman in order to steal her husband. In August, Ernest let it be known that he was planning to leave Hadley and marry Pauline. Switching women was made easier when Gerald, who encouraged him to leave Hadley for Pauline, a woman more to his taste, loaned him four hundred dollars and his Paris studio on rue Froidevaux.
In her own marriage, Zelda felt quite as abandoned as poor bewildered Hadley. Villa St. Louis was always full
of guests, people in a stupor whom she didn’t know or didn’t care about, people she would find sleeping off their hangovers when she came downstairs in the morning. But Scott chose to spend his time elsewhere whenever possible. Clearly his drinking was getting out of hand. Hooking up with rowdy Americans like Charlie MacArthur, he scribbled obscene words on the walls of an opera singer’s villa and kicked over the tray of a woman selling trinkets outside the casino. Zelda, still recuperating from her operation, went to the beach with Scottie at Juan-les-Pins. When she asked Scott to join them, he usually said no, he had to go over to La Garoupe and see Sara and Gerald and Archie and Ada. Zelda was beginning to feel practically invisible.
Her unhappiness was obvious and led to several odd incidents during that summer. Late one night at the Juan-les-Pins casino, Gerald noticed with some surprise that Zelda had stepped onto the dance floor alone. Suddenly he froze when he noticed her whirling by, almost in a trance, with her dress lifted above her waist to reveal lace ruffles. Another time, she was lunching with Sara when a man came up to their table and introduced himself. With her fine Southern manners, Zelda shook his hand warmly. Then Sara heard her murmur under her breath, “I hope you die in the marble ring.” (The reference to a schoolyard marbles game was not really appropriate for a social occasion.)
One evening Zelda and Scott got together with the Murphys to visit a restaurant up in the hills above Antibes, in a tiny village of steep streets named Saint-Paul-de-Vence. La Colombe d’Or, Gerald said, was frequented by artists such as Picasso because of its fine cuisine. On the stone terrace they were just finishing dinner when Gerald called their attention to a fat middle-aged woman in a purple dress seated at the next table. Did they know who that was? None other than Isadora Duncan. At once Scott bounded over to introduce himself. Duncan, amused when he dropped to his knees, ran her fingers through his hair and called him her centurion, which led to toasts with lukewarm champagne. Throughout the horseplay Zelda sat in silence. With all eyes on Scott and Duncan, she got to her feet and jumped over the parapet wall into the darkness. After a minute or two she reappeared with bloody knees and dress. As they were leaving La Colombe d’Or, she signed the guest book. In her purse was a pair of salt and pepper shakers, glass automobiles, that she had pocketed when nobody was looking.
AFTER LUNCH Vincent wrote her sister a letter, even though she had nothing to say. “July 21, 1926. Dearest Kathleen: It is 92 degrees in the shade.” She was sitting on the lawn under a maple, she reported. Mother was typing in her room; Gene was haying with Stanley, the hired man; Norma was hoeing beans—bush beans, pole beans, lima beans—in the kitchen garden. Once she had exhausted the subject of beans, she moved along to her peas (“including the little French ones”), then to her corn, potatoes, cabbage, beets, lettuce, endive, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, pumpkins, cucumbers, turnips, celery, peppers, and tomatoes. After running out of vegetables, Vincent shifted gears and began to list the contents of her flower garden, and then gave a detailed description of Norma’s gardening clothes and Cora’s special pink lemonade with wild strawberries.
The rest of the letter offered an account of their social life: they’d invited a bunch of weekend guests from the city, and, what with the electricity from their own little power house, it was “a very gay time.” Vincent certainly did not wish to give Kay the impression that she and Gene, with their brussels sprouts and such, had turned into fuddy-duddies. However, Norma, that very same week, pictured Steepletop to Kay as a place where “everyone gets up from the dining table with a yawn and after looking over the headlines of the paper mounts the stairs to bed.”
Vincent’s midsummer letter was an elegy on country living, designed to beguile and inform. But she neglected an important event: Kay’s first novel, a story loosely based on their mother’s life, was being published in the fall. After her own failure with Hardigut—the five hundred dollars she never returned to Boni & Liveright—discussing the particulars of her sister’s fiction debut failed to interest Vincent.
Finally, having somehow managed to cover five sheets of paper, Vincent ran out of light conversation. “Ugin is going to the post office,” she ended the letter. “So I’ll send this just as is. Lots of love to you & Howard. Vincent.”
Five years earlier, when Vincent was living in Europe, there was an unfortunate incident involving the loss of one of Kay’s watercolors. Vincent honestly had no idea why her sister got upset. But Kay had kept telling people that Vincent purposely discarded the art and ruined her career as a painter. That was not true, actually. Throwing away the package was an accident (“terribly sorry … I do hope it was something … which can be replaced”). It was quite sad—but hardly her fault—that she was important and Kay was not. Was she to blame that Kay married a deadbeat? A lot of things in life were not fair.
HOW COULD Dottie complain? She was living in a ritzy hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés with a prince of a man who treated her like a Fabergé egg. He was always telling her how wonderful she was, how madly he loved his little Dottie, and how much he wanted to take care of her.
At the Hôtel Lutetia there were no worries. Sewie, a portable piggy bank, was turning out to be a double godsend. He couldn’t have been sweeter in handling her correspondence with Boni & Liveright as its editors searched in a half-dozen places for poems that she had never bothered to keep copies of. Whenever Tom Smith ran into problems, he consulted Sewie. “I hate to bother you about these matters but—” While Smith was tracking down her missing work, Dottie reread what she did have. Much of it displeased her, and so she began writing substitutes.
Shortly before leaving home, she gave Frank Adams a poem called “Résumé,” a cheerful field guide for aspiring suicides and a list of reminders why she herself might as well live:
Razors: sharp
Rivers: wet
Acid: messy
Drugs: stomach cramps
Firearms: illegal
Nooses: unreliable
Gas: smelly
At the Hôtel Lutetia, using a typewriter borrowed from Ernest Hemingway before buying her own, she continued in a similar vein to “Résumé,” striving for verses that were cynical, biting, sometimes vulgar, always self-deprecating. Death and dying, neither of them laughing matters, remained her favorite subjects, but a fresh literary theme—1920s mating—began to emerge, one that would become a staple of her verse and fiction. Dottie took fiendish pleasure in boring into picture-perfect relationships to show how they were actually rotting from within. When a woman and a man swear their passion to be undying, she wrote in “Unfortunate Coincidence,” the woman should keep in mind that “one of you is lying.” In “Indian Summer” she admitted that she used to break her neck to please men, but now it was take it or leave it. “To hell, my love, with you!”
In the end, the collection was uneven. There was a lot of A. E. Housman and a little of Edna St. Vincent Millay. But the verses were fun to read and perfectly suited to the mood of 1926. As a civic watchdog on behalf of her own sex, a Twenties everywoman, she was concerned in particular about encouraging her sisters to give men the finger whenever possible. Among the verses she decided to republish was, for example, a nine-word epigram that had originally appeared in the Conning Tower. It merely pointed out the obvious: the typical male could seldom manage to get aroused over the sight of a woman wearing glasses. She tossed in “News Item” as an afterthought, never imagining that it would become her most famous poem. (This was probably the greatest indignity of her life.)
Dottie wanted to title her book Enough Rope, a reference to the colloquial expression “enough rope to hang yourself.” But her editor at Boni & Liveright hated it.
“Tell her not to be crazy,” Tom Smith wrote Sewie. It was a “very bad” title for a volume of poetry. “What was the one she gave me with the word sesame in it? Let us have that one.” Two months later he caved in. “Everyone seems to be against me.”
While Dottie was busy working, Sewie tended to his own affairs.
He was obsessed with Havelock Ellis, from whom he’d sought permission to write an authorized biography. Earlier he had slyly extended a carrot to Ellis by inviting him to be his guest on the Riviera. Ellis, too smart to fall for that ploy, replied that he never accepted hospitality from friends, to which Sewie replied that he was not really a friend, to which Ellis replied he’d already selected a biographer. Undeterred, Sewie went on courting him, but he also kept busy with his hobby of collecting erotica.
For once, Dottie enjoyed boundless energy. In addition to writing the new verses, she did in fairly short order three stories for The New Yorker and a bunch of articles for Life. There was also time for play, and Sewie took her on holiday to the south of France. At Monte Carlo the casino objected to her bare legs and refused to admit her, “so I went and found my stockings and then came back and lost my shirt.” Actually, it was Sewie’s shirt, but an exchange rate of thirty-six francs to the dollar made it seem like play money anyway.
Any number of times, Sewie promised to give her whatever she wanted. At one point he bought her a Scottish terrier, named Daisy by her previous owner. While Daisy was not the name Dottie would have chosen, she realized that Daisy would not bother answering no matter what anybody called her. Never mind, she was still the smartest dog in the world. “Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa.” Daisy could sit up and beg, “and she can give her paw—I don’t say she will, but she can.” With a dog to baby, Dottie felt as if she and Sewie had practically become a family.
The rest of the summer passed pleasantly. On August 22, she turned thirty-three, a scary number that made her feel as old as the hills (“Time doth flit. / Oh, shit!”). But living with Sewie and Daisy, drinking moderately, working productively, even gaining a few pounds, all that made her feel like a normal person. “My Sewie,” she called him, and “dearest,” and “the loveliest” person in the world. For the first time since separating from Eddie, she considered getting a divorce, a subject that had never come up, because neither of them had plans to remarry. Now it was different, and she wrote to suggest that Eddie file for divorce in Connecticut.