by Marion Meade
Never in her life could she remember working so hard. “Night and day I concentrated,” she remembered. The sonnets never seemed to leave her mind, not when she was working outside or talking to people, not when she woke in the middle of the night and found herself “writing in bed furiously until dawn.” At her bedside she kept a notebook and a pencil. To her poet friend Stephen Vincent Benét, whom she’d known in France, she called herself “a non-union” poet who was slaving twenty-two hours a day “on her own stuff,” although she offered no information about the subject. The presence of a lover—her muse—was known only to her husband.
As the weeks passed, the sheer physical effort aggravated her headaches, ever present even on good days. It had been four years—she never imagined they would last—and creative work, without fail, worsened the pain. Owing to the extreme concentration that went into each of her poems, the act of writing generated “a nervous intensity” that ended predictably in exhaustion and agony. By and by, the pitiless throbbing in her head had become part of her life, an “occupational disease,” she called it. In an attempt to forget, she made light of the “ungracious guest” who didn’t know when to say good night. “And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you,” she wrote sardonically. In the back of her mind lay the awful suspicion that the only escape would be death.
IN JANUARY, Gene brought home a parcel from the Austerlitz post office. It was the manuscript of Bunny’s first novel, I Thought of Daisy, which had been accepted by Max Perkins at Scribner’s. He wanted Vincent’s opinion, Bunny said, adding that he certainly hoped she would not be offended.
It did not take long to figure out the reason for his nervousness. The story took place in New York, when the city was still battered from the dislocations of the Great War. The protagonist, a writer living in downtown bohemia, is torn between the traditional and the modern, high art versus down-and-dirty popular culture. He also can’t decide between two women: Daisy, the vivacious but somewhat vulgar chorus girl, and Rita, the suffering artist embracing a life of hardship for the sake of truth and beauty. A bohemian prone to reckless behavior, Rita Cavanagh values independence above husband, children, even simple friendships, “all the natural bonds and understandings which make up the greater part of human life.” “Well, don’t you think that my life makes me bitter?” she says. (Rita dramatizes just about every impulse.) “Don’t you think I hate the way I’ve been living?” Not at all, because poetry is her religion. Proud of her choices, she regards adversity with fatalistic acceptance as the path a genuine artist must be prepared to walk. It is the oafish narrator, the Bunny character, who fails to appreciate the superior sensibilities of an artistic person such as herself.
On two points Vincent felt quite certain: the Rita Cavanagh character was based on herself—certainly Rita’s attitude toward art was more or less her own—and the novel was badly written. Obviously Bunny was expecting her reaction, but it was a delicate situation. She began scribbling notes for revisions, some of them general suggestions for polishing, others commentary on various characters. Gearing up to full throttle, she then proceeded to rewrite all the Rita Cavanagh speeches.
No, she finally wrote Bunny, she was not offended. But honestly the book was not ready. While she liked much of it, the rest was “very uneven.” Publication would do nothing to enhance his reputation. “It really isn’t good enough, yet, Bunny, I swear it.” Hearing this would probably make him “mad as hell,” but she couldn’t help it.
At the end of the week she posted her revisions. She would be in town for a few days, to take in shows and attend parties, she wrote. There was a batch of new sonnets to show him, and of course she was keen to talk about his manuscript. She promised a bottle of the best red wine he ever tasted, made by her own French chef, Pierre. Was he free for dinner on Tuesday? He should call the Vanderbilt that afternoon before five and leave a message.
At the hotel waited no word from Bunny, rather oddly. No phone call, no reply to her letters, which was not like him at all. “Whamming” his book, she thought, was harsh, and maybe she should have minded her own business, but what she said was for his own good.
Some time later, her letters turned up at the Austerlitz post office stamped “Return to Sender”: no such person as Edmund Wilson lived at the address, nor at the forwarding address either. Evidently it was the sort of mix-up that happened all the time in New York. She wondered about it for a while, and then she and Gene went abroad. By the time they returned in May, she had forgotten.
ELIZABETH, Rahway, Perth Amboy, South Amboy, Matawan, the coast train rattled down the ragged rim of the North Jersey shore. Almost every week it was Bunny’s routine to leave the city and dutifully visit his daughter, Rosalind. At the rail station in Red Bank, met by his mother’s car and chauffeur, he would be driven to her house in Vista Place, where he had a comfortable book-filled room of his own. On his way to Red Bank that particular weekend in January, however, he got no farther than the backseat of a taxi in the West Village, when he began to tremble uncontrollably. Knowing he was not himself, “I could not go down to my mother’s.” Alarmed, he hurried to consult a doctor and learned there was nothing to worry about. He’d simply been drinking too much, that was all. Admitted to a hospital and put to sleep with a shot of morphine, he was relieved to see the agitation clear up.
Since returning from the Coast at Christmas, Bunny had been living opposite a taxi garage on West Thirteenth Street, not far from his job at The New Republic. It was “a narrow, stale-smelling little hole,” without a toilet, which meant he had to walk down one flight to a scabby-looking communal bathroom. In these boom times, when everybody seemed to have money to spare, he had little beyond his salary from the magazine. Still, he figured the squalor of the room could easily be ignored because it was cheap and he was never there on the weekends.
Bunny knew he drank too much. Difficulties concentrating had already interfered with a work he was calling Axel’s Castle, a critical study tracing the influence of the French symbolists on modern writers such as Joyce and Eliot. Then one night after seeing the new Noël Coward revue, he lapsed into a musical delirium in which fragments of tunes circled persistently in his head. Shortly afterward the shaking and shuddering started.
Several days after his discharge from the hospital, the shivers returned. Now he wondered if he might be going crazy. Two or three times a week he began visiting “sort of a nerve doctor” about feeling overwhelmed by panic attacks that descended without warning and left him flattened. He described a fantasy in which a pencil seemed to be “writing for him all by itself.” He also sensed that he was being followed. Bunny felt especially vulnerable because insanity seemed to run in his family: his favorite cousin was confined in a state mental hospital after a schizophrenic breakdown, and his father, too, had suffered serious psychological problems. In addition to anxiety, Bunny thought of suicide. Yet whenever he mentioned these violent feelings, his doctor turned Pollyannaish and kept correcting him. Certainly he felt like killing himself, the doctor agreed, but the impulse was bound to pass. Think of it as a bad headache. And besides, he was still holding down a job, wasn’t he?
Eventually the psychiatrist acknowledged his fears and arranged admission to a private mental hospital in upstate New York. Clifton Springs Sanatorium and Clinic offered a full menu of psychiatric services: electrical stimulation, cold sheet packs, massages, medications, everything its clientele could want, except alcohol. Bunny sweet-talked an attendant into giving him a double dose of paraldehyde, a drug to which he eventually became addicted.
For all the complaints of boredom, his concentration began to return. On good days he was able to rewrite the opening of Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930. The title referred to a drama by Philippe-Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, whose Count Axel of Auersburg is the lord of an ancient castle in the depths of the Black Forest. Axel, convinced that life is vulgar and futile, withdraws from the wretchedness of the world and its
“dens of loathsome creatures” by shutting himself away in his citadel, the private realm of his imagination. In addition to working on Axel’s Castle, Bunny reviewed the proofs of I Thought of Daisy. To his disappointment Vincent never acknowledged receipt of the manuscript. He guessed she must be furious at this portrait of her younger self, before she became a prosperous married woman.
In between massages and shock treatments, Bunny kept busy writing lengthy letters, whose tone suggested a happy-go-lucky person away on holiday. He wrote Seward Collins that he was “enjoying a brief nervous breakdown up here” but planned to see him shortly. After three weeks at Clifton Springs, whose attendants “couldn’t quite make it in a Turkish bath,” he was convinced that the sanatorium was a racket.
The publication of I Thought of Daisy that fall elicited no comment from Vincent. The book got bad reviews and sold poorly.
BACK IN PARIS, Zelda became absorbed in her ballet studies again. She was determined to succeed if it killed her. Nobody, neither Scott nor anyone else, could make her “put out her light till she got good and ready,” she thought. It was her turn now.
In the mornings she would arrive at Lubov Egorova’s unheated studio and eat a pretzel (the dancers’ regular breakfast) before warming up for her first class. By noon the dressing room had begun to smell of wet wool and glue from the toe shoes and to thrum with the laughter, gossip, and endless jealous bickering of the women. Zelda was reluctant to leave at the end of the day. She clung to her classmates, drinking coffee, gobbling soggy Russian rolls bursting with poppy seeds, and comparing stories of bleeding feet and infected corns. Often she brought Madame gardenias, or a champagne glass full of daisies, or cold lemonade, because she loved her “more than anything else in the world.” It saddened her that a great artist should be reduced to wearing cheap dresses and carrying her lunch—cheese, apple, thermos of cold tea—in a small suitcase. To reciprocate, Madame once invited her and Scott for supper, a humiliating experience because he flirted in the most disrespectful way. (Worse still, she appeared to enjoy it.) After dinner he passed out.
On this trip Zelda and Scott were living near Saint-Sulpice in a handsome, old stone building. Their apartment had a panoramic view of the cathedral dome and drawing-room furniture upholstered in yellow brocade. It was clean and bright and would have been their nicest Paris flat if not for the bells that seemed to be constantly tolling for services or funerals. The few weeks of sweetness when they first arrived had ended abruptly when Scott was arrested for disturbing the peace, a reminder that nothing had changed. Zelda’s complaints about his drinking brought sly taunts. Look who was talking, he said, because she, too, was drugged—drunk on dance. Evenings when they went out together, Zelda would sit silently without even trying to keep up her end of conversations. None of their friends exhibited interest in her work, except to express curiosity about her motives, or acknowledged her abilities. (“Dreadfully grotesque,” thought Gerald Murphy after seeing her dance. “Her legs looked muscular and ugly. It was really terrible.”) Frankly, Scott told her, she had turned into a bore. “She no longer read or thought, or knew anything or liked anyone except dancers and their cheap satellites.” Often he announced it was her bedtime and sent her home in a taxi.
One day, without warning, Scott walked into the dance school and said he wanted to watch a class. He immediately lit up a cigarette, a complete taboo. Zelda angrily reprimanded the dancer who had admitted him. To make matters worse, he brought with him friends who were as naive as he was about dance training and who failed to understand that ballet is as strenuous as any sport. The sight of sweating bodies laboring like plow horses, the spittle trickling from the dancers’ mouths, made them snicker. (Zelda’s “extraordinary sweating” was repulsive, Scott thought.)
As the months passed since her first lessons with Catherine Little-field, physical misery almost ceased to bother Zelda. All dancers suffered. Pain, a constant companion, was as much a part of dancing as the music. Sometimes, depleted, she felt like “a gored horse in the bull ring, dragging its entrails.” Groans of fatigue evoked no sympathy from Madame Egorova, who believed that Americans sleep too much. Four hours was enough. Sore feet and lost toenails? Grow harder ones. While Madame withheld compliments—seldom, in fact, said much of anything—she did occasionally remark that Zelda was doing good work. Even if Zelda herself was never satisfied, there was no question she had done wonders in only a few years.
The dance company Zelda admired above all others was the Ballets Russes, with its daring ballets (Le Spectre de la rose), its sublime dancers (Nijinksy and Massine) and composers (Stravinsky) and choreographers (Balanchine and Fokine). One day people supposedly from the Diaghilev troupe came to Egorova’s studio to observe her work. But later she learned they were Folies Bergère scouts wondering if she could be transformed into another American act like Josephine Baker and her popular banana dance. Hearing this made Scott laugh. Her training was not totally useless after all, he said. Apparently she was qualified for a music hall.
ONE NIGHT as Zelda and Scott were returning home from the theater, a man and a woman waited in the doorway of their building. “I’m Morley Callaghan,” the man said, “and this is Loretto.” Max Perkins said it would be safe to look them up without phoning first. A Canadian writer who had published his first novel with Scribner’s, Morley was carrying with him some new writing, on which he wanted Scott’s opinion. Such visitors were a pain in the neck. It was hard to know what to say, except that they were tired and please leave the manuscript. After that, however, the two couples met occasionally for dinner. They were at a restaurant in Montparnasse, a place favored by James Joyce, when Zelda told Morley that she, too, was a writer.
Was that so? The idea appeared to startle him.
His voice was stiff with disbelief. He imagined she was, he finally replied. (“The boldness of her insistence that she too be regarded as a talent … was surprising,” he thought.)
Despite all-consuming classes, Zelda had just completed four short stories in as many months. The editor at College Humor proposed a series of sketches focusing on different types of women—debutante, club girl, movie actress, Southern belle—an insider’s look at the world inhabited by the fast set. No philosophical discussions, he cautioned, because the stories had to go down like a glass of champagne. Each woman should have a name, and the narrative should describe her personality and behavior. Depending on length, he would pay four or five hundred dollars.
At that particular time Zelda had utterly no literary ambitions. What she did have was the need for money to pay for her lessons. Before leaving Ellerslie, she had already begun working on these “girl” stories. She approached each of her heroines economically, from the viewpoint of a nameless observer, a sort of female Nick Carraway. All the young women were beautiful and worldly but, despite their intelligence and ambition, corseted by straitjackets, powerless to achieve happiness, or a professional career, that was independent of a man. (Unlike Zelda, no character had a husband who continually belittled her artistic ambitions.) The sympathetic portraits were essentially vignettes—she had not yet learned the mechanics of dialogue or character development—but with plenty of atmosphere.
In “The Original Follies Girl” a blond clotheshorse, owner of the only French telephone in New York, is so “sick with spiritual boredom” that she packs her trunk with three thousand dollars’ worth of “georgette crepe cobwebs” and goes to live in Paris, where she eventually dies in childbirth. Both Helena (“The Girl the Prince Liked”) and Lou (“The Girl with Talent”), one the mistress of presumably the Prince of Wales, the other a cabaret performer, abandon husband and children in their struggle to be somebody. The best of the series was “A Millionaire’s Girl,” in which Zelda’s gift for creating mood resulted in a collage of New York and Hollywood and their fashionable beauties just after the war. “In front of the Lorraine and the St. Regis, and swarming about the mad-hatter doorman under the warm orange lights of the Biltmore façade, we
re hundreds of girls with marcel waves, with colored shoes and orchids, girls with pretty faces, dangling powder boxes and bracelets and lank young men from their wrists—all on their way to tea.” Her protagonist is pretty, ambitious, and extravagant, but can a gold digger affix herself to the Social Register and live happily ever after? If she’s smart, she can, Zelda decided.
Each of the College Humor stories contains clues that point to her mature style in Save Me the Waltz—a style that would have the feel of an opium dream exploding with color, smell, and texture. Her work was already moving in that direction, but she still felt insecure about using too theatrical a form for a lowbrow magazine such as College Humor.
Zelda wrote in longhand, using a pencil and editing herself as she went along, because she had never learned to type. Although Scott helped her to work out the construction of the stories, he took no part in the actual composition. Generally, his only contribution was a superficial polish before adding a title and byline, “By F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,” and giving it to a typist. He naturally put his own name first. There was nothing to gain by making a fuss, she knew. A Zelda Fitzgerald story would bring $250, the double byline $500 or more.
In Scott’s opinion, the six girl sketches (he refused to call them fiction) had a nice satiric point of view. Someday, he thought, they might be published in a book. Otherwise, he was dismissive of Zelda’s skills and told her she could write “in the sense that all non-professionals who have a gift for words, can write.” Her nonfiction might not be first-rate, although it was good enough for magazines such as The New Yorker. The fiction was another matter, because her descriptive powers could be virtuosic—“an extraordinary talent for metaphor and simile,” he had to admit. (Max Perkins praised her “astonishing power of expression.”) Still, fiction wasn’t a potluck supper of metaphors and similes, as any fool knew. Beyond experiences to report, she basically had nothing to say.