Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Zelda had said she wanted him to come South again; he replied that he still preferred to make the trip in May. He arranged to come for a few days and they had fun together, but he returned to New York with nothing settled; he promised her he’d come again in three weeks. Feeling more and more disheartened by his dreary lack of fortune in New York, Scott began to take it out on his friends there. He threatened to jump from the window of his club and the rest of the young men, weary of his moping, encouraged him; abashedly he climbed back down. There was one piece of luck. His story “Babes in the Woods” (which he had written while at Princeton) was bought by The Smart Set for $30. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning. With the money he bought himself a pair of smart white flannels and sent Zelda a sweater. She wrote that it was “perfectly delicious—and I’m going to save it till you come in June so you can tell me how nice I look— It’s funny, but I like being ‘pink and helpless’— When I know I seem that way, I feel terribly competent—and superior.” Adding, with that touch of self-perception she summoned for Scott alone: “I keep thinking, ‘Now those men think I’m purely decorative, and they’re just fools for not knowing better‘— and I love being rather unfathomable. You are the only person on earth, Lover, who has ever known and loved all of me. Men love me cause I’m pretty—and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness—and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness— One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of cource, I was acting.”

  Zelda told him she was just beginning to realize the seriousness of their attachment, just beginning to believe in a future that would hold them together. “I can’t think of anything but nights with you — I want them warm and silvery—when we can be to-gether all our lives—… I don’t want you to see me growing old and ugly. I know you’ll be a beautiful old man—romantic and dreamy—and I’ll probably be most prosaic and wrinkled. We will just have to die when we’re thirty. I wish your name were Paul, or Jacquelyn. I’m going to name all our children that—and Peter—yours and mine— because we love each other—” That letter must have calmed him considerably.

  But by the end of May the dances and parties at the colleges had begun in earnest and Zelda did not languish at home. She would soon be nineteen; her sisters were married; Clothilde and Rosalind were already in New York. Zelda was alone at home with her parents, and definitely not eager to stay there for long.

  After one particularly gay weekend away from Montgomery she wrote Scott: “… I’ll never feel grown. I absolutely despair of it …. And still I’m so mighty happy—It’s just sort of a ‘thankful’ feeling—that I’m alive and that people are glad I am.” Her letters to him, however, had begun to be less frequent; she said he’d been sweet about writing “—but I’m so damned tired of being told that you ‘used to wonder why they kept princesses in towers’—you’ve written that, verbatim, in your last six letters! It’s dreadfully hard to write so very much—and so many of your letters sound forced— I know you love me, Darling, and I love you more than anything in the world, but if its going to be so much longer, we just can’t keep up this frantic writing. It’s like the last week we were to-gether—” Evasively, she said she wanted to feel that he knew she was thinking of him always. “I hate writing when I haven’t time, and I just have to scribble a few lines— I’m saying all this so you’ll understand—Hectic affairs of any kind are rather trying, so please let’s write calmly and whenever you feel like it.”

  She had a nervous habit of biting the skin on her lips, which irritated Scott and which she had tried hard to break. But it began again, she said, as she “relapsed into a nervous stupor. It feels like going crazy knowing everything you do and being utterly powerless not to do it—” She wrote that she felt like screaming. With what must have been a painful and supreme exercise of will power, he did not write to her for one week. When at last he did, Zelda said she appreciated his letter: “It must have been a desperate struggle to write it, but your efforts were not wasted on an unreceptive audience.” Then, in a typical aboutface, she chided him: “Just the same, the only thing that carried me through a muddy, rainy, boring Auburn Commencement was the knowledge that I’d have a note, at least, from you when I got home—but I didn’t …. Not that letters make so much difference, and if you don’t want to write we’ll stop, but I love you so—and I hate being disappointed day after day.”

  Scott’s next letter must have sounded hysterical, for that was a word he was using fairly frequently in his Ledger to describe these months. Zelda’s reply was hardly soothing.

  There’s nothing to say—you know everything about me, and that’s mostly what I think about. I seem always curiously interested in myself, and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me—

  But this:

  I know you’ve worried—and enjoyed doing it thoroughly, and I didn’t want you to because something always makes things the way they ought to be—even this time—AND ITS ALL RIGHT— Somehow, I rather hate to tell you that— I know its depriving you of an idea that horrifies and fascinates—you’re so morbidly exaggerative— Your mind dwells on things that don’t make people happy—I can’t explain, but its rather kin to the way kids 13 feel when everybody goes off and leaves them at home—if they aren’t scary, of cource. Sort of deliberately experimental and wiggly—

  Two of his letters were not delivered because he had forgotten to put stamps on them. Zelda said it looked to her “like wild nights and headachy mornings,” and told Scott that because she had not heard from him she had sought consolation with a young man from Georgia Tech who was in Montgomery for the golf tournament at the country club. “I’ll be in Atlanta till Wednesday, and I hope—I want you to so much—you’ll come down soon as I get back.” But she was definitely set on going to Georgia Tech. She had said she was going to try her hand in new fields and she did. The society columns and rotogravure sections in both Atlanta and Montgomery newspapers burst with pictures and stories of her exploits in their Sunday sections: “Pretty Montgomery Girl Creates Stir Among Atlanta Youths”; they called her “One of Montgomery’s most popular girls, and bewitchingly pretty….”

  Zelda left Montgomery wearing a fluffy light dress, and her Leghorn hat with streamers down the back. When she arrived in Atlanta there were four young men waiting to meet her at the train station. Each thought he was her date, for she had separately agreed to be the date of each of the gentlemen. This was just the beginning of the stir she raised in Georgia that weekend. At one point it was rumored that she was going to swim in the nude at a private pool, but it was simply her flesh-colored bathing suit again. One of the young ladies who was with Zelda that weekend remembered coming back late one night to the fraternity house where they were both guests to find Zelda and her date, drunk as lords, playfully smashing Victrola records over each other’s heads—an event that was not reported in the newspapers. When Zelda returned to Montgomery she was pinned to the young golfer she had met during the golf tournament.

  Once home and sober, Zelda thought better about being pinned while being engaged to Scott and returned the Georgian’s fraternity pin with a sentimental note. Carelessly—for she was to insist that it was an accident—Zelda put the letter intended for the young golfer into an envelope that she sent to Scott. Furious, he asked her never to write to him again. Nevertheless, Zelda did try to explain, but it was an awkward situation for which there really was no explanation.

  Scott wired her desperately that he would be in Montgomery on the next train. The precarious balance of their affair had tipped downward; neither of them could bear the strain of the past few months any longer. Edgy and fatigued, knowing full well, as he was to write, “I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it,” Scott decided that Zelda had to marry him immediately. They sat together in the familiar front room of the Sayres’ house and Scott asked her to marry him now. Zelda refused. Both cried, and Scott stormed and tried to force her into marrying him with wi
ld kisses and frantic arguments. He began to beseech Zelda, which was not at all the right tactic, for it demeaned him in her eyes, and she more resolutely than ever shied from accepting his proposal. He became self-pitying and would not leave the house.

  Scott had expected her to be certain of him when he was most uncertain of himself. When everything in New York had failed him, his career and his writing, he turned to Zelda with a proposal of immediate marriage made as much out of desperation as of love. It was an effort on Scott’s part to redeem at least a fraction of his dreams for success and happiness, but Zelda must have felt it to be founded in failure and she could not accept marriage on that basis. Scott said that he had to have her with him in order to succeed, but perhaps Zelda sensed that if she did marry him and he was still unsuccessful the onus of his failure would rest squarely on her shoulders. For Zelda marriage was the only means of altering the scope of her life. Scott would never forget her refusal; he would in time explain it away by saying that she was afraid to risk a life with him until he was a moneymaker. But that was unfair; it was only as his own faith in himself waned that hers became increasingly unsure. Finally Zelda told him to leave. He boarded the next train for New York, with his mother’s ring in his pocket, certain that he had lost his girl forever. But even as he left a part of him admired Zelda’s unwillingness to give up the bright and irrevocable dreams that possessed her. He believed, as he would soon write, “the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.”

  *Scott had written to Mrs. Sayre telling her he loved Zelda, something she undoubtedly already knew.

  5

  HOWEVER SHAKEN ZELDA WAS BY her broken engagement, she did not confide her feelings to any of her friends, nor did she give her family a word of explanation. If there was a sense of relief from the strain of their affair, that too she kept to herself. With Scott gone, that summer in Montgomery drifted by as every one before it had for Zelda; the heat and the inertia caused by it slowed the tempo of the city into its usual lull. There were dances and swimming parties. On one particular summer afternoon Zelda went swimming with a group of girls at a pool which was built behind the local chemical plant to be used in case of fire. It had a diving board and Zelda eagerly climbed the ladder and got into position for a swan dive. As she moved her arms forward the straps on her swimming suit caught uncomfortably across her arms, and swiftly she released the straps and stepped out of the suit. She stood poised for an instant like a water nymph, rose upon her toes and leaped from the board. The others were held spellbound by her audacity and beauty; they were also terrified that she would be seen or that their mothers would hear about it.

  In a story Zelda wrote later, she said there existed in Montgomery then “a time and quality that appertains to nowhere else. It began about half past six on an early summer night, with the flicker and sputter of the corner street lights going on, and it lasted until the great incandescent globes were black inside with moths and beetles and the children were called in to bed from the dusty streets.” Lawns were drenched with arcs of water thrown from hoses, and everything, even time, seemed to stand still before the onslaught of the heat. “The drug stores are bright at night with the organdie balloons of girls’ dresses under the big electric fans. Automobiles stand along the curbs in front of open frame houses at dusk, and sounds of supper being prepared drift through the soft splotches of darkness to the young world that moves every evening out of doors. Telephones ring, and the lacy blackness under the trees disgorges young girls in white and pink, leaping over the squares of warm light toward the tinkling sound with an expectancy that people have only in places where any event is a pleasant one. Nothing seems ever to happen ….”

  Scott had returned to New York just long enough to quit his job and indulge in a spectacular bender that lasted until Prohibition closed the bars three weeks later. On Independence Day, with Hugh Walpole’s novel Fortitude under his arm, he took the train home to St. Paul. He had decided to rewrite his novel; it was, he wrote, “my ace in the hole.” If it was good enough he could recoup all his losses, and if it wasn’t he was no worse off than when he began. For the rest of July and all of August he worked on the novel, which he had decided to call either The Education of a Personage, The Romantic Egotist, or This Side of Paradise. He wrote Edmund Wilson in August that since he had last seen him “I’ve tried to get married and then tried to drink myself to death but foiled, as have been so many good men, by the sex and the state I have returned to literature.” By September his novel was again at Scribner’s in the hands of Maxwell Perkins, who had read his earlier drafts. Within two weeks Scott was sent a contract for the publication of This Side of Paradise. As soon as he received word of its acceptance he wrote Perkins pressing for immediate publication. “I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl—not that I expect it to make me a fortune but it will have a psychological effect on me and all my surroundings ….” Zelda could not then have known anything about it, for Scott had not corresponded with her since their break in June. It was Fitzgerald, and not she, who connected the success of This Side of Paradise with a willingness on her part to marry him. But so far its only success was that Scribner’s was going to publish it.

  In a section of the novel called “The Débutante,” Scott had come to terms with his loss of Zelda. He called her Rosalind and used portions of Zelda’s letters and diary to help create the atmosphere of her charm. (“The Débutante” had been written while Scott was at Princeton and still under the spell of Ginevra King, on whom he modeled the character of Helen. But in rewriting this section for his novel Helen became Rosalind, just as his impressions of Ginevra melded into those of Zelda.) “Rosalind,” he wrote, “is—utterly Rosalind. She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.” That was taken almost word for word from a letter Zelda had written him in the spring. Several paragraphs later he added: “She danced exceptionally well, drew cleverly but hastily, and had a startling facility with words, which she used only in love-letters …. She was perhaps the delicious, inexpressible, once-in-a-century blend.”

  Scott had not been able to put Zelda out of his mind and in October he wrote to her, telling of his success and asking whether he might come South to see her once again. She replied:

  I’m mighty glad you’re coming—I’ve been wanting to see you (which you probably knew) but I couldn’t ask you—… It’s fine, and I’m tickled to death.

  And another thing:

  I’m just recovering from a wholesome amour with Auburn’s “startling quarter-back” so my disposition is excellent as well as my heath [health]. Mentally, you’ll find me dreadfully detiorated—but you never seemed to know when I was stupid and when I wasn’t, anyway—

  Please bring me a quart of gin—I haven’t had a drink all summer, and you’re already ruined along alcoholic lines with Mrs. Sayre—After you left, every corner… was occupied by a bottle (or bottles) ….

  ’S funny, Scott, I don’t feel a bit shaky and “do-don’t”ish like I used to when you came— I really want to see you—that’s all—

  After he heard from Zelda, he wrote to Ludlow Fowler, in whom he had confided about his affair: “Hope you’ve guarded well the great secret. God! Lud I’ll never get over it as long as I live. There’s still a faint chance. Thank fortune.” It was less than five months since he and Zelda had last seen each other, and Scott went to Montgomery that November in 1919 to see if he wanted her as badly as he once had. Before he left he again wrote Fowler: “… not even the family knows I’m going to Montgomery so keep it dark…. God knows tho’, Lud, I may be a wreck by the time I see you. I’m going to try to settle it definitely one way or the other.”

  Certainly Scott was returning to Zelda triumphantly, but as they sat in the front room of the Sayres’ hous
e everything looked smaller than he remembered it. In a story called “The Sensible Thing” Scott described how he felt that afternoon as he realized that for himself the first fresh exhilaration of love was a perishable sensation: “Well, let it pass, he thought …. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.” He had fought for his rare girl; his novel, he could now tell her, would be published; but he wanted to force the scene of their reconciliation into a greater intensity than it could yield. He had had five months in which to let his imagination play over this meeting and the reality of it could not match his expectations. Nonetheless, before he left her for New York they had renewed their engagement; they decided to marry as soon as his book was published.

  Zelda understood him better than he thought, for after he left Montgomery she wrote to him that if he felt he had lost his feeling for her, if he’d be happier without their marrying, she would release him from whatever promises had once been made. And she added: “Somehow ‘When love has turned to kindliness’ doesn’t horrify me like it used to— It has such a peaceful sound—like something to come back to and rest—and sometimes I’m glad we’re not exactly like we used to be—and I can’t help feeling that it would all come again.”

  Whether the timing of their marriage date was Zelda’s or Scott’s idea is unknown. What is certain is that Zelda could not possibly have agreed to marry him, as he later thought, on the basis of his having made money. He had made very little by November, 1919. But what she did see quite clearly was that Fitzgerald was no longer unsure of himself or the direction of his career. The cheeky young man who wrote (to a girl he knew in St. Paul),