Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  I was sitting one evening at a table with three friends, when I spied Scott at the door of the bar. He was obviously under the influence and rather uncertain on his feet. I noticed that he was having words with the bouncer. Apparently the bouncer thought Scott had more than his share and would not permit him to go back into the bar. Fearing a scrap, I immediately went up to Scott and persuaded him to join me. He acquiesced and mumbled something about the bouncer, which was far from complimentary. In a few minutes, Zelda appeared at the door of the bar, looking around for Scott. I went over to her and escorted her to our table but she refused to sit down, because as she said, Scott had walked out on her. I told her that Scott had had a slight altercation with the bouncer and tried to divert her with a dance. No, thank you, she was going back to the bar and Scott was coming with her. She took Scott by the arm and demanded that he accompany her on grounds of desertion and said to us at the table

  “No so-and-so bouncer can prevent Scott from going anywhere he pleases.”

  Despite my entreaties, Scott and Zelda with heads high and with the grim determination of young Davids, went to the door of the bar. The bouncer let Zelda by but refused admittance to Scott. Zelda turned in the doorway and spoke to Scott wherewith he took a feeble punch at his opponent, which missed its mark. A few other phantom attempts were made and finally the bouncer lost his patience and gave Scott a shove that sent him half-way across the room, crashing into a table.

  I ran over to Scott, lifted him to his feet and finally persuaded him to leave with me and my friends. As we were leaving, I looked around for Zelda but she had disappeared. I decided to get Scott down to a taxi and come back for Zelda. Downstairs we collected our coats and found a cab. Just as Scott was getting into the cab, Zelda dashed onto the sidewalk, hatless and wrapless and yelled

  “Scott, you’re not going to let that so and so get away with that.”

  She pulled him out of the taxi and led him unsteady as he was back into the Jungle Club.

  The incident ended predictably with Scott being badly beaten by the bouncer. Zelda had not only egged Scott on, she had witnessed his defeat and could not understand it. She fully expected him to perform manfully in a situation where he was placed against considerable odds. Still, Scott understood Zelda’s reaction far better than anyone else could have and was willing to be manipulated by her. He had written in the manuscript of his new novel: “Herself almost completely without physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of what she felt to be his fear’s redeeming feature, which was that though he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain—when his imagination was given play—he had yet a sort of dashing recklessness that moved her on its brief occasions almost to admiration, and a pride that usually steadied him when he thought he was observed.”

  They sailed for Europe on May 3, and on arrival in England went first to London. Maxwell Perkins had arranged an introduction to John Galsworthy, who invited them to dine with St. John Ervine, the dramatist and novelist, and Lennox Robinson, the Irish playwright. They saw Lady Randolph Spencer Churchill and her son Winston, who was reportedly charmed by an hour’s dinner conversation with Zelda. But the most exciting event of their visit was a walking tour with Shane Leslie around the waterfronts of London. Scott, Shane Leslie later wrote, “wanted to see the real Dockland Stepney Lime-house Wapping where there was no taxis no police—We wore tweed caps and slacks. We had to be ready to carry Zelda—but she was light and enjoyed the adventure.” With Zelda dressed in men’s clothes and with no money or jewelry, they prowled the haunts of Jack the Ripper. From London they traveled to Windsor and Cambridge and Grantchester, where they took snapshots of each other: Scott standing in a garden path in three-piece suit, soft Knox hat, and silver-headed cane. Zelda wrote beneath Scott’s picture a line from Rupert Brooke, “The men observe the rules of thought,” and beneath her own, “And is there honey yet for tea?” Back to London, then, off to Paris for a few disappointing days—an evening at the Folies, a day at Versailles and Malmaison—and on to Italy. Venice. Florence. Rome and back to England. By July they had returned to the United States. Scott wrote Edmund Wilson, who had been telling them of the glories of the continent: “God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest…. You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money and all the refinements of aestheticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now.”

  After much discussion about where their baby should be born they settled on Montgomery; “—it seemed inappropriate to bring a baby into all that glamor and loneliness,” Scott wrote, explaining why they had rejected staying in New York. But Montgomery proved to be a poor choice. It was hot and Zelda, who at six months looked as if she might be having twins, donned a tank suit and went swimming at one of the local pools. In 1921 women in Montgomery were still only rarely seen on the streets when they were in her condition, and she was asked to leave the pool. At the end of August, after only a month in Montgomery, they “played safe and went home to St. Paul.”

  Zelda gained a great deal of weight during the final term of her pregnancy and did nothing to hide the fact when she wore a red jersey maternity dress to greet Scott’s friends. She did not make a good impression and made only one friend among the women, Xandra Kalman, who not only found the Fitzgeralds a summer house on White Bear Lake but also purchased all of the baby things the Fitzgeralds would soon require. Zelda seemed unaware of what would be needed and left the decisions up to Mrs. Kalman.

  In his Ledger Scott described the year as a bad one. “No work. Slow deteriorating repression with outbreak around the corner.” In September he recorded that Zelda was all but helpless because of her weight. Zelda wrote: “In the fail we got to the Commodore in St. Paul, and while leaves blew up the streets we waited for our child to be born.” Finally on October 26, 1921, their baby was born. Zelda’s labor was long and difficult. Scott, as nervous as a cat, was not too unnerved by the waiting to miss recording Zelda’s groggy comment as she came out from under the anesthesia: “Oh, God, goofo I’m drunk. Mark Twain. Isn’t she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope its beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool.” She would never quite forgive him his detachment. He would later use the experience in describing Daisy Buchanan’s reaction to the birth of her daughter in The Great Gatsby.

  They named their daughter Patricia, and then changed it almost immediately to Frances Scott Fitzgerald (although as late as 1926 Zelda would refer to her as “Pat”). Scottie, as she was nicknamed, was baptized a Catholic. As soon as Zelda was on her feet again she regained enough of her sass to write Ludlow Fowler: “We are both simply mad to get back to New York. This damn place is 18 below zero and I go around thanking God that, anatomically + proverbially speaking, I am safe from the awful fate of the monkey.” Adding later in the same letter, “Anyway, you are an excellent person to write me about my baby. She is AWFULLY cute and I am very devoted to her but quite disappointed over the sex—”

  “We had run through a lot, though we

  had retained an almost theatrical innocence

  by preferring the role of the observed

  to that of the observer.”

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, “My Lost City”

  7

  BECOMING A MOTHER DID NOT HAVE a noticeably quieting effect on Zelda. Scottie’s care was left primarily to her nurse while Zelda fretted about being overweight. When the first photographs were taken of mother and baby for the society section of the St. Paul papers Zelda clipped them for her scrapbook and carefully shaded her nose, cheeks, and chin with a pencil in an effort to slim her face. As the winter season came into full swing Scott and Zelda moved from their hotel into a house in the middle of town. In January, on Friday the 13th, a Bad Luck Ball was given at the University Club, which was swathed in black crepe and decorated with un
dertakers’ advertisements. During the course of the evening a newspaper called The Daily Dirge was distributed, to be sold for the price of a “sweet kiss.” The Fitzgeralds were behind the spoof and together they wrote a gossip column as well as advertisements for themselves: “Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald had always wanted eyelashes. She had used every preparation, including stove-polish and blackberry wine with no result. She went into a store and bought a set of Pigman’s Portable Eyelashes and now she is not ashamed to go anywhere.”

  There were weekly hops at the clubs, where the toddle was not yet passé and where rye flowed as though it were an elixir. The Fitzgeralds began to give parties; Zelda was a conspicuously uneager hostess, for she said the noise woke the baby and made her cry.

  During the day, when Scott was not working at the office he had rented downtown, he and Zelda discussed last-minute changes in The Beautiful and Damned. He was not satisfied with the serialized version which was running in the Metropolitan Magazine prior to the book’s publication in March, 1922, by Scribner’s. But the changes he did make were not substantial ones and the novel remained seriously flawed; in December he was writing Perkins: “… I am almost, but not quite, satisfied with the book.” Then, with his usual burst of confidence he added: “I prophesy that it will go about 60,000 copies the first year—that is, assuming that Paradise went about 40,000 the first year. Thank God I’m thru with it.” The jacket sketch irritated him because he thought the drawing of the man on the cover was “a sort of debauched edition of me,” and Zelda drew her own version. It was a nude kneeling in a champagne goblet, her blond bobbed hair flying, her apricot coloring remarkably similar to Zelda’s—a childlike mermaid sloshing happily in a cocktail. But it was not used.

  At the end of January Scott wrote Edmund Wilson that he was bored with St. Paul, and said he and Zelda would probably come East in March. “The baby is well—we dazzle her exquisite eyes with gold pieces in the hopes that she’ll marry a millionaire.” By February Scott noted in his Ledger that they had been sick and were drinking heavily. They longed for a change; Scott was restless and Zelda loathed the harshness of winter in Minnesota. A snapshot taken of her that winter shows her sitting on a sleigh surrounded by drifts of snow; she is clutching her sides with mittened hands and there are snowflakes on her hat and shoulders. When Scott’s novel was published on March 3 it gave them the excuse they were looking for to take a trip East. The New York holiday turned out to be a continual round of parties, with neither of them drawing a sober breath until they returned exhausted and irritable to St. Paul two weeks later.

  There was something else which made them edgy. In late January (or early February) Zelda discovered that she was again pregnant. They apparently decided that they did not want another child so soon after the birth of Scottie. In Scott’s Ledger during March he cryptically entered “Zelda & her abortionist,” and it is not clear whether the abortion was performed in New York or in St. Paul.

  In a section of his manuscript of The Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald used a similar episode between Anthony and Gloria. In the first draft Gloria is with child and finds the situation intolerable. Anthony asks her if she can’t “‘talk to some woman and find out what’s best to be done. Most of them fix it some way.’” Gloria asks if he wants her to have the child and he says he is indifferent, but he does want her to be a sport about it and not go to pieces. The situation is resolved almost offhandedly a few pages later when the reader finds out that Gloria is not pregnant. This ending was kept in the published version, but there were significant alterations in the material leading up to it. In rewriting the scene Scott reduced the pregnancy to only a probability, but, believing herself pregnant, Gloria’s role in the episode is essentially the same. It is Anthony’s that undergoes change. His comments about “fixing it” are cut and the decision to abort (although, delicately, the word is never used) the imagined baby is entirely Gloria’s.

  As Scott weakened the scene the emphasis changed subtly and Gloria became unremittingly self-centered; a baby would ruin her figure and distort her idea of herself. Since Zelda’s second pregnancy and abortion occurred just before the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, it could not have provided the raw material for this scene. But the Fitzgeralds had thought that Zelda was pregnant on an earlier occasion; the letter Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler hinting at this (although it turned out to be a false alarm) was written at the time Scott was working on the first draft of his manuscript.

  Gloria mirrored something of Scott’s understanding of Zelda. In January, Scott had written Edmund Wilson a letter concerning the important influences upon his life and writing, for Wilson was writing what Scott considered to be one of the first important critical essays on his fiction; it would be published in the Bookman. In it Wilson underlined what he thought were three significant influences upon Scott. These were the Midwest (specifically the society of St. Paul and country clubs), his Irishness, and liquor. At Scott’s request mention of the last influence was cut from the article. Even then Scott commented: “… your catalogue is not complete… the most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.”

  While the Fitzgeralds were in New York at the Plaza, Burton Rascoe wrote to Zelda asking her to review The Beautiful and Damned. He had just begun a book department for the New York Tribune and wanted to include pieces that would add sparkle to his new venture. “I think if you could view it, or pretend to view it, objectively and get in a rub here and there it would cause a great deal of comment.” It would also help the sales of the book, he thought. Zelda accepted his challenge and wrote the review under her maiden name. It was her first published piece since high school.

  The tone of the review was self-conscious as Zelda indulged in light mockery: she asked the reader to buy Scott’s book for a number of “aesthetic” reasons, which included her own desire for a dress in cloth of gold and a platinum ring. She humorously evoked a vision of herself as the author’s greedy and self-centered wife, and she saw the book as a manual of contemporary etiquette, an indispensable guide to interior decorating—and in Gloria’s adventures an example of how not to behave. About Anthony she said nothing at all; it was Gloria who dominated her attention. Zelda did not try to conceal the parallels between Gloria and herself:

  It also seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

  We cannot know to what extent Scott used Zelda’s diary but we have her word for it (as well as George Jean Nathan’s) that he did. One such portion from the novel, called “The Diary,” reads:

  April 24th—I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often “husbands” and I must marry a lover….

  What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages’ Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting—it’s going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s unwanted children. What a fate—to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love….

  Scott’s portrayal of Gloria was hardly a flattering one, and by the close of Zelda’s review she had dropped her bantering tone:

  I think the heroine is most amusing. I have an intense distaste for the melancholy aroused in the masculine mind by such characters as Jenny Gerhardt, Antonia and Tess (of the D’Urbervilles). Their tragedies, redolent of the soil, leave me unmoved. If they were capable of dramatizing themselves they would no longer be symbolic, and if they weren’t—and they aren’t—they would be dull, stupid and boring,
as they inevitably are in life.

  It becomes evident in the review that Zelda was defending that part of herself within the portrait of Gloria. Zelda had been wounded by the characterization, but she did not express that directly and instead tried to cover herself by flippancy—as in the opening of the review. Gloria, it would seem, though not entirely Zelda, was representative of something Zelda felt it necessary to stand up for.

  John Peale Bishop was keenly aware of the connection between Fitzgerald’s fiction and his life. Bishop wrote that The Beautiful and Damned

  concerns the disintegration of a young man who, at the age of twenty-six, has put away all illusions but one; this last illusion is a Fitzgerald flapper of the now famous type—hair honey-colored and bobbed, mouth rose-colored and profane.

  He continued pointedly:

  But, as with This Side of Paradise, the most interesting thing about Mr. Fitzgerald’s book is Mr. Fitzgerald. He has already created about himself a legend…. The true stories about Fitzgerald are always published under his own name. He has the rare faculty of being able to experience romantic and ingenuous emotions and a half hour later regard them with satiric detachment. He has an amazing grasp of the superficialities of the men and women about him, but he has not yet a profound understanding of their motives, either intellectual or passionate.

  Bishop cheated a little in his review; he knew very well, for Scott had admitted it to him in McKaig’s presence, that drawing on himself and Zelda was a problem in his writing. Bishop’s review included a sentence that Zelda clipped for her scrapbook, placing it beneath a photograph of herself.

  Even with his famous flapper, he has as yet failed to show that hard intelligence, that intricate emotional equipment upon which her charm depends, so that Gloria, the beautiful and damned lady of his imaginings, remains a little inexplicable, a pretty, vulgar shadow of her prototype.