Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  The Buck in the Snow’s negative reviews distressed Vincent. As for Gene, he was outraged by criticism of his wife’s work and suspected Harper’s was to blame. When, in later years, he suggested the publisher recruit “friendly people” to write reviews, Saxton replied that publications customarily select their own writers. Efforts to influence critics usually backfire, he added firmly.

  By this time Vincent had come to believe she had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she was a poet, as well as a household name. Not only did she care fiercely about her writing, but her work had been honored with a Pulitzer, and her popularity among the reading public verged on the mythic, which made the criticism all the more puzzling. Despite poor reviews, advance sales pointed to a commercial triumph. In early November, as Vincent prepared to set out for Chicago on the first leg of a reading tour, The Buck in the Snow was doing extremely well and by Christmas had sold forty thousand copies.

  MADAME EGOROVA and the Olympia Music Hall had become a lost world. In their place was Ellerslie, with a new cast of characters and a makeshift household that Zelda felt no part of. Neither she nor Scott, not even Scottie, really liked Mlle Delplangue, a nervous woman who smelled of too much sachet. If she was a mistake, the insolent Philippe was a bigger one, because the governess fell in love with him. Philippe, however, did not reciprocate and spent more time catting around the neighborhood than chauffeuring. The household was in a state of constant upheaval. Through it all, Scottie played by herself. As lonely and woebegone as her weeping governess, she knocked a croquet ball around the house and cried because her Du Pont and Wanamaker playmates had more money.

  In Philadelphia, Zelda found a new ballet teacher, a Russian who had trained at the Imperial School of Ballet and danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in prewar Paris (Les Sylphides). Alexandre Gavrilov had also understudied Nijinsky and liked to describe himself as a protégé of the great artist. Although Gavrilov made a favorable impression, he could be intimidating. One afternoon after lunching together, he invited Zelda to his apartment on Chestnut Street. Looking around, she noticed that the place was practically empty of furnishings, stark and cold except for a white spitz dog and a stunning collection of ballet sketches by Léon Bakst. It soon became clear that Gavrilov had more on his mind than displaying his artworks. As soon as possible, she excused herself and ran terrified through the streets. Still, she could not say the months with Gavrilov were wasted. He was a capable instructor, and she worked diligently, both in class and at home. The result was steady, unmistakable growth as a dancer.

  Sometimes Zelda went out to eat with other students, socializing that made Scott furious. Mostly he paid little attention to her activities, but when he did, it could precipitate a crisis. While Zelda’s sister and brother-in-law were visiting earlier that year, Scott came home unexpectedly from a trip to Princeton and immediately flew into a rage. In front of Rosalind and Newman Smith, he accused Zelda of breaking into his liquor closet. Then he became angry because he thought she called his father an Irish cop.

  She said no such thing, she replied, but trying to reason with Scott when he had been drinking was a waste of time. The next thing she knew he hurled her favorite blue vase into the fireplace.

  Go to bed, he ordered.

  When she refused, he punched her in the nose. (“You had a nosebleed,” he said later. Besides, she was behaving badly, throwing herself into her brother-in-law’s arms, “making dives and he was pretending to catch you.”)

  Scott’s behavior outraged Rosalind. She would never permit a man to strike her, not that Newman ever would, but the idea was unthinkable.

  “No matter what a woman does,” Newman warned Scott, “you ought never to lose your temper with her.”

  Zelda should divorce Scott, Rosalind urged. From the beginning, Scott made the Sayre family uneasy. Judge Sayre spotted the Yankee soldier for a lush at once, and Rosalind could never stand him.

  No, she was not going to leave Scott, Zelda told her sister. And do what? Be Zelda Sayre, in a three-cornered bedroom on Pleasant Avenue, sitting on the porch swing with Mama? How could she go back to Montgomery? Besides, she really did love Scott. Of course he was a fright, but he didn’t drink all the time.

  Rosalind and Newman slipped away from Ellerslie in the middle of the night.

  In the fall, right after the election in which Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith, Ernest and Pauline Hemingway visited Ellerslie. Zelda’s feelings about Ernest had not changed, and his dislike of her had intensified. A few weeks before the reunion, responding to a remark of Max Perkins’s about Zelda’s sharp mind (“so able and intelligent”), he hurried to set the editor straight. The person responsible for Scott’s failures as a novelist, he replied, was Zelda. Married to another woman, the poor guy would have been the “best writer” around.

  After two years of not seeing Ernest, who now lived in Key West, Florida, Scott was excited at the prospect of entertaining his old friend. They arranged to meet in Princeton for the Yale game before returning to Ellerslie for the rest of the weekend. The trip was a treat for Zelda, who had pleasant memories of the campus, with its worn parade grounds and old brick buildings. In high spirits after undefeated Princeton’s 12–2 victory, the two couples and Scott’s college friend Mike Strater boarded the Pennsy at Princeton Junction late that afternoon. Tippling from his flask, Scott roamed up and down the aisle annoying woman passengers. Even though the train was packed with celebrating football fans none too sober themselves, Scott’s misbehavior went too far, and Ernest and Mike tried to make him return to his seat. He whipped a medical book out of a passenger’s hands. “I’ve found a clap doctor,” he announced to the entire car. “You are a clap doctor, aren’t you?” The man did not reply. “Physician, heal thyself.” Like a lepidopterist spotting an endangered species, he began chanting, “A clap doctor, a clap doctor.”

  At dinner Scott was lavish with the wine, uncorking six bottles of Burgundy exclusively for Ernest while he served the others Moselle. Around the table everybody was chatting happily until Scott began yelling at the maid.

  “Aren’t you the best piece of tail I ever had?” he said. “Tell Mr. Hemingway.” Whenever Marie bustled past him with a dish—by which time everybody was sitting stiff as boards—Scott started up once more. “Tell him what a grand piece of pussy you are.” (“He must have said it to her ten times,” Hemingway recalled.) Suddenly all business again, Scott forgot the maid and took off on the subject of Gertrude Stein.

  Sunday morning, in white flannels and blue blazer, Scott tried to organize a game of croquet, but the Hemingways were impatient to make their getaway. They arrived at the station long before the train was due, anything to avoid spending another minute at Ellerslie. (Mike Strater, who left first thing, thought both Scott and Ernest were “really awful” and hoped never to see either of them again.) From the train Ernest wrote, “We had a grand time.” Ellerslie was the “most cock-eyed beautiful” place he had ever seen, and Pauline sent her love.

  With one successful novel and the first draft of his second completed, Ernest felt superior to Scott, who was obviously washed up, thanks to a sabotaging wife and the debasement of his talent by chronic whoring, his compulsion to “poop himself away on those lousy Post stories.” Only Zelda’s death or the loss of his liver would make a writer of him again, Ernest believed.

  Shortly before Ernest’s visit, Scott managed to mail two chapters of his novel to Scribner’s. It was about eighteen thousand words, he told Max Perkins, an estimated quarter of the book, and the remaining chapters would be coming in batches. They were “excellent,” Max replied, some of the best writing he had ever done. Could they get the book out in the spring?

  His trouble with the novel could be traced to the summer of 1925, which he spent complaining about book reviewers and hoping for a quick movie sale. Still, there was no cause for worry, he believed, because his next book, inspired by the recent Leopold-Loeb murder case, was already worked out in his head. It was go
ing to be about a Hollywood film technician named Francis (Scott’s own first name) Melarky, a nice, unspoiled lad who falls in with a bad crowd of Americans on the Riviera and ends by killing his mother in a fit of rage.

  Periodically Scott would dispatch reports to Max: “The novel has begun. I’d rather tell you nothing about it quite yet.” “My book is wonderful.” “The novel goes fine. I think it’s quite wonderful.” But after three years of starting and stopping, exaggerating and lying, changing the story, characters, and titles (Our Type, The World’s Fair, The Melarky Case, and one suggested by Zelda, The Boy Who Killed His Mother), he was stuck. There was nothing workable down on paper.

  That winter at Ellerslie, Scott fell into a routine. For a week or two he would stop drinking hard liquor and confine himself to wine and black coffee until he had completed a story. During the periods of semi-abstinence he felt rotten and complained of listlessness and dark circles under his eyes. Mostly he was asleep at the wheel.

  At Christmas their maid, Marie, danced barefoot around the tree on broken ornaments. Scottie wrote to Santa and asked for a set of Lionel trains and a doctor’s kit, but if she wasn’t “nice enough to have both,” she chose the train. Scott read Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. And Zelda dreamed of spring, when their two-year lease on Ellerslie would end and they could go back to Paris.

  THE BOY showed up at the reading and stood over Vincent, bending down to shake hands and say his name was George Dillon and he would be doing her introduction. Twenty-one, he looked much like the scores of students waiting to hear her perform that Friday night in November. He was sweet, she thought, reluctant to release his hand.

  Vincent was backstage at the school auditorium of the University of Chicago, her first stop on a tour that promised to be difficult even with Gene’s company. The reading was being sponsored by Poetry, the magazine that was founded in Chicago before the war by a socially connected aspiring poet and was among the first to publish Vincent’s earliest work. Now seventy, Harriet Monroe relied more and more on younger staff to help run Poetry, among them the terribly nice boy George Dillon.

  Vincent’s reading was followed by the usual reception organized to honor visiting poets, the type of social event that she always found unpleasant, loud, and crowded with people she had no desire to meet. It was Gene’s job to brush off long-winded admirers before hustling her away as soon as possible by pleading exhaustion on her behalf. This time, however, she did not want to be rescued. As George Dillon rose to declaim some of his own poems, Vincent kept her eyes on him. Such adorable lips he had, the kind of bee-stung mouth that would have looked good on a girl. His black hair was probably much too wavy to be fashionably slicked back.

  Wasn’t George gifted? someone said.

  She agreed.

  Wasn’t his work remarkable for someone so young?

  Remarkable for anyone, she said.

  A Southerner, an only child born in Florida, George had recently graduated from the university. Known as something of a prodigy, he had published his first book of verse while still an undergraduate and found himself taken under the wing of Harriet Monroe. Nevertheless, he remained a baby chick, barely out of the nest. He was working at his first job, copywriter for an advertising agency, and lived at home with his parents in an apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. The love of his life, the person for whom he wrote poems, was his mother.

  Unable to pull her eyes away, Vincent felt hypnotized by an “enchanted sickness.” All she could think of was that she must see him again. Before leaving the reception, she slipped him a note, inviting him to lunch the next day. In her hotel room she used a pencil and the back of a telegram to quickly compose a sonnet in which she confessed her hunger (“this love, this longing”) and her inability to think straight. That she was seized by feelings more animal than human must have been obvious to everyone at the party, she feared. The sonnet’s message was frank: she wanted to sleep with him. Probably she was “two fools,” not only wanting him so badly but also telling him about it. Had she doubted his response, she might have hesitated, but the expression on his face told her he was dying to be seduced.

  The next day at lunch she handed him the scribbled poem.

  NO SOONER HAD Vincent and Gene left Chicago on November 9 than she began writing letters to her young man. She could think of nothing else but him, she said. She was going to love him “always.” If George doubted her, she simply would not be able to bear it. And he mustn’t worry about the future either, because she would “never let you go out of my life.”

  For the next five weeks, like a traveling carnival, she slogged her way back east, from Chicago to wintry Syracuse to Boston and finally to New York, where she would do her last booking before returning to Steepletop for Christmas. In a dressing room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, while changing into a trailing silk gown the texture of heavy cream, she overheard people outside the door talking about Elinor Wylie. Wasn’t it awful? Such a shock. What a way to get word of Elinor’s stroke. Feeling shaky, Vincent walked onstage and came down to the front, where she began speaking directly to the audience. She was devastated, she said. A greater poet than she had just died, not only a finer writer but her beloved friend, and she didn’t see how she could read in the circumstances. Instead, she was going to recite, from memory, the poems of her friend Elinor Wylie.

  When she arrived the next morning at the Benét apartment in the Village, the house was packed with mourners, and Elinor was laid out in a coffin wearing her favorite silver Poiret gown. Placing a sprig of laurel in Elinor’s hands, Vincent recited a poem that Elinor had written for her (“Musa of the Sea-Blue Eyes”).

  Despite Elinor’s death, Christmas was particularly festive that year. Art Ficke’s improved health had permitted him to leave Santa Fe and return east. To be close to the Boissevains, the Fickes purchased property in nearby Hillsdale and built a house they called Hardhack (another name for the steepletop flowers). To entertain the Boissevains, they planned a special two-day gala with period costumes. Gladdie painted an elaborate invitation: “Lord and Lady of Hardhack require the honorable company of Lord and Lady of Steepletop at Christmas revels.” The program promised a chess tournament, prizes for best costume, and “light liquid refreshments in the Bar Room every two hours!”

  . . .

  “TELL HIM it is a matter of life and death,” Vincent urged George. “Him” was George’s boss at the advertising agency. In January she was going to Europe, and she had to see George before she left. He must come to Steepletop for the weekend of January 4 to 7, or the whole week if he wished. If he left Chicago on Friday, he would arrive Saturday in Albany, where they would meet his train, and if he really had to return quickly, they could motor him back to Albany on Sunday evening.

  George answered immediately. He couldn’t.

  Of course he could, she replied.

  Did she want him to lose his job? he said.

  Naturally she would not want him to “mess things up for yourself.” But what was the matter with that company of his? Surely it could be reasonable, under the circumstances. He ought to know that her mind was made up. She was going to see him. Next, Gene tried to convince George. Listen, he said, just pack your gayest tie, some evening clothes, and a clean shirt, and hop on the train. They would “drink wine and laugh together.”

  In Vincent’s next letter she was losing patience. Why wouldn’t George do what she asked? All she wanted was to kiss him, to sit on the edge of his bed and be “incredibly happy, be like children.” She was not going to leave the country until she saw him, and that was final.

  GEORGE DILLOn did not come to Steepletop. Gene canceled their steamship passage for January 19 and booked a March 11 sailing on the Rotterdam. It made no difference. Vincent’s lover still failed to show.

  By this time Gene had become aware of the whole business, because concealing such a state of affairs would have been impossible. If he felt troubled by the intrusion of a boy young enough to be his
son, he chose not to show it. When Vincent needed George at Steepletop, he, too, had penned encouraging notes. “I’m going to make you love me,” he wrote cheerfully, “and you must make me love you,” an idea that may have struck young George as a bit peculiar.

  From the first, Vincent spelled out the geography of the relationship to George. Three of them were involved, she warned. In the sonnet she slipped to him under the table at their first lunch, she cautioned that any intimacy was sure to act as a knife between her and “my troubled lord.” To make absolutely sure he understood, she said pointedly, “I am devoted to my husband.” And while it was true that her “lovely thing” occupied her thoughts “all day and half the night,” that in no way changed her affection for Gene.

  Wives torturing husbands ran in Vincent’s family. Cora’s mother was married to a man named Eben Buzzell, but she didn’t give a damn about abandoning him for another man, regardless of six children. For Cora, caring for the dying and weaving hairpieces were better than putting up with Henry. Eben Buzzell and Henry Millay met similar fates. But Vincent never deluded herself: she intended to stick with Gene.

  In January, Vincent spent a considerable amount of her time writing George long letters ranging in mood from the childish to the ecstatic. Something about the youth brought back her own childhood, baby-talking with her sisters, calling herself Sniggybus, playing dress-up in Mumbles’s curtains. But while she always meant to treat kindly her adorable “Scramdoodle,” she could turn on a dime too, and then her moods became possessive.

  How come George stayed in Chicago when she needed him?

  Were they never to be together?

  Did he have a girlfriend? she demanded.

  Did he hate her?

  “Perhaps I wanted to hurt you,” she said, realizing how wounding she must sound. “I don’t know.”

  In the meantime, the snow had come, and plenty of days Steepletop was half-buried, which meant they could usually get out but never felt confident of getting back up the hill. After a path to her shed was shoveled and a blazing fire stoked in the stove, Vincent lit a cigarette and hunkered down to write sonnets. Just hours after meeting George, she had written one that began “This beast that rends me in the sight of all,” and now she went on struggling to put desire into fourteen lines. Usually the speaker was herself, but in a sonnet that began “Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave,” she reprised the myth of the goddess Selene and the youthful Endymion.