Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  In many ways the climate of Provence was like that of Alabama. There were delirious heat and acid sunlight, a similar extravagance of greenery. But it was a far more dramatic setting than the American South, with the immediacy of the sea, the exotic food, and the foreignness of the French themselves. That summer the air of the Riviera was perfumed by the aroma of burning eucalyptus from a series of fires behind the beaches. Zelda loved the Riviera from the first. She wrote, “Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn’t quite because we were too smart for them!” They bought beach umbrellas and bright-colored cotton bathing suits and espadrilles from the sailors’ quarter in Cannes and settled in for the summer.

  It began well, with Scott writing every day. There was a nanny to look after Scottie and there was plenty of household help to run the spacious Villa Marie. They met a group of French aviators stationed nearby at Fréjus, with whom they drank and danced at night in the casino behind the plage. Zelda swam and baked in the sun; she tried very hard to keep out of Scott’s hair during the day while he wrote; she read a little, but her eyes bothered her and she preferred being active to the immobility of reading. She was left alone with little to do. “After all, Scott had his writing. Zelda had Scott— and she didn’t have very much of him while he was working,” Gerald Murphy remarked. So she swam strenuously, as though it were necessary for her to have some form of physical release, and soon she was as deeply tanned as she had been in her girlhood. Yet the days were monotonous for her and when she recalled them in Save Me the Waltz Zelda had the heroine ask her husband, “‘What’ll we do… with ourselves?’ “He replies that “she couldn’t always be a child and have things provided for her to do.”

  Zelda wrote Edmund Wilson: “… everything would be perfect if there was somebody here who would be sure to spread the tale of our idyllic existence around New York….” She felt, she said, “picturesque,” adding, “It’s fine to be away from the continual necessity of revolt of New York.” She had, however, begun a private revolt of her own.

  Casually at first, Zelda and one of the young aviators, Edouard Jozan, began to meet in the afternoons to swim together. They were seen lying on the wide canvas beach mats in the sun, sunburned and laughing together while they “invented new cocktails.” No one paid much attention to them and they seemed content to be in each other’s company without joining the other bathers. Scott was pleased that Zelda had at last found someone to help her pass the time. Jozan was handsome, his hair dark and curling, his body even more deeply tanned than Zelda’s. He was, in contrast to Scott, tall and slender and athletic. It was astonishing how closely he resembled the dashing young officers from Montgomery who had adored Zelda and to whom she had been attracted before her marriage to Scott. Obviously infatuated with her, he stunted his airplane above their villa, dipping dangerously close to its red-tiled roof, as if emulating those Montgomery flyers who had paid her similar homage. His black hair gleamed from beneath its net in the bright sunlight.

  It was June, 1924, Zelda was not quite twenty-four, and Jozan was a year and two days older than she. Edouard Jozan cannot remember any longer how he first met the Fitzgeralds, but a small group of young officers and friends—himself, Bellando, René Silvy (who was a civilian, the son of an attorney in Cannes)—all bachelors, would come down to the beach whenever they could to swim and have picnics. And because of their youth, he says, it was not necessary to have formal introductions. They just met. All the young men fell a little in love with Zelda, who was, Jozan remembers, “a shining beauty”; and they all admired Scott’s intelligence and quick conversation. Soon there were excursions taken together, dancing in the cabarets along the coast, and endless conversations about art and literature. Jozan recalls: “Zelda and Scott were brimming over with life. Rich and free, they brought into our little provincial circle brilliance, imagination and familiarity with a Parisian and international world to which we had no access.”

  Scott seemed to Jozan very intellectual—“I would even say ‘intellectualist’”—and from a far more sophisticated world than any Jozan had known. Fitzgerald was looking for an explanation of a world which had not yet stabilized itself after the upheaval of World War I. “But in his search for new trends Scott paid great attention to the resources of society: social position, the effectiveness and the force of money, of which, being a good American, he knew both the power and the burden. ‘Ford,’ he said, ‘runs modern society and not the politicians who are only screens or hostages.’ “And their discussions together were often heated and passionate, for they did not share the same point of view. It was human bravery, the sort of courage he had seen displayed in the war, that turned Jozan toward an entirely different life. He wanted to earn honor and glory; he had a taste for risk, for knowledge without commercial profit. “In short, we were young romantics arguing with a man better versed in the practicalities of life.

  “Zelda was a creature who overflowed with activity, radiant with desire to take from life every chance her charm, youth, and intelligence provided so abundantly.” And she did not seem like a complicated woman to him; her pleasures were simple ones: “the relaxed life on beaches gilded by the sun, trips by car, informal dinners.” The little group took her as their center and would come and go according to the demands of their missions. Then, suddenly, “One day the Fitzgeralds left and their friends scattered, each to his own destiny.”

  Jozan went on to a distinguished military career, holding one of the highest ranks of the French navy. In 1940 he commanded a naval flotilla at Dunkirk; in 1952 he became Vice-Admiral of the French navy; and two years later he commanded the French maritime forces in the Far East. Among his numerous decorations were the Grand-Croix de la Légion d’honneur, the Croix de guerre 1939-45, and the Grand-Croix au Mérite de l’Ordre de Malte.

  Even in the summer of 1924, as a young officer, he showed that quality of leadership that was to distinguish him during his long military career. There was an air of assurance about him, a quality of natural leadership that Zelda respected and responded to. Leadership, athletic prowess, a smart military air were precisely those qualities Scott Fitzgerald lacked. It was as if Jozan and Fitzgerald were opposite sides of a coin, each admiring the other’s abilities, gifts, and talents, but the difference in the equipment they brought to bear on life was clear. When Zelda described him in Save Me the Waltz, she caught it: “Jacques moved his sparse body with the tempestuous spontaneity of a leader.”

  Zelda called her young officer Jacques Chevre-Feuille in Save Me the Waltz: “The head of the gold of a Christmas coin… broad bronze hands…. The convex shoulders were slim and strong….” And when she described the progress of their romance that summer it was in explicitly sensual terms. “He drew her body against him till she felt the blades of his bones carving her own. He was bronze and smelled of the sand and sun; she felt him naked underneath the starched linen. She didn’t think of David. She hoped he hadn’t seen; she didn’t care. She felt as if she would like to be kissing Jacques Chevre-Feuille on the top of the Arc de Triomphe.”

  Scott was used to young men falling in love with his wife, and it amused, perhaps even flattered, rather than irritated him. He was not, however, prepared to find Zelda seriously reciprocating the attention. Sara Murphy thought that Zelda “always had to chase around after Scott, follow up after him,” and that she hadn’t liked to. Sara wondered whether “Jozan wasn’t someone for her to talk to; I must say everyone knew about it but Scott.” The Murphys had seen Zelda and the young officer on the beach together and dancing at the casino; they said it was impossible not to notice what was happening. Gerald Murphy said: “I don’t know how far it really went, I suspect it wasn’t much, but it did upset Scott a good deal. I wonder whether it wasn’t partly his own fault?”

  Then, abruptly, Zelda and Jozan were no longer seen on the beach together. When Zelda reappeared she swam alone. No one knew exactly what had happened. Scott wrote in his Ledger: “The Big Crisi
s—13th of July…. Zelda swimming everyday.” At that point not more than six weeks had passed since Zelda first met Jozan. At the beginning of August Gilbert Seldes and his bride arrived at St. Raphaël to spend a few days of their honeymoon with the Fitzgeralds at the Villa Marie. There was not a hint of discord between Scott and Zelda apparent to either Seldes or his wife during their entire visit. They talked a good deal about the novel that Scott was working on; Seldes could recall only a few incidents from their time together.

  One occurred the morning after their arrival. Seldes, upon opening the shutters of the window to his room, looked up and saw Scott standing on the balcony of his bedroom, which faced the sea. He was motionless as he gazed out, and then, sensing Seldes’s presence, he quietly said, “Conrad is dead.” Joseph Conrad had died in England on August 3 and Scott, who was a great admirer of his writing, would one day write in his introduction to The Great Gatsby (the novel he was working on that summer) that “never before did one try to keep his artistic conscience as pure as during the ten months put into doing it…. I had just reread Conrad’s preface to The Nigger, and I had recently been kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.”

  Seldes also remembers the trips he and his new wife made with the Fitzgeralds down to the beach together. “The road from their villa had been built for carriage traffic and there was one point at which it dangerously narrowed and curved. Every time, just at this point, Zelda would turn to Scott, who was driving, and say, ‘Give me a cigarette, Goofo.’ “In the moments of terrified silence that followed, Scott always managed both to give Zelda her cigarette and to straighten out the Renault along the narrow turn, but it was harrowing and the Seldeses both thought it peculiar of Zelda to make her request repeatedly at just that hazardous point in the road.

  It would appear that the “Big Crisis” Fitzgerald referred to in mid-July had not particularly disrupted their lives. Certainly they presented a united front to the Seldeses. In August Scott wrote in his Ledger, “Zelda and I close together.” But between the time the Seldeses left the Fitzgeralds’ villa and the beginning of September there was another crisis which went unrecorded in Scott’s Ledger.

  The Murphys were still living in their temporary quarters at the Hôtel du Cap, awaiting the completion of the Villa America. At about three or four one morning Scott knocked at the Murphys’ door. “He was green faced, holding a candle, trembling—Zelda had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. We went with him, and Sara walked her up and down, up and down, to keep her from going to sleep. We tried to make her drink olive oil, but Zelda said, ‘Sara,… don’t make me take that, please. If you drink too much oil you turn into a Jew.’ “This attempted suicide occurred at approximately that period when Scott had written, “Zelda and I close together.” It throws into question not only their reconciliation but Scott’s understanding of how deeply Zelda had been affected by her romance with Jozan.

  There were no explanations offered to the Murphys as to why Zelda had taken the pills, and the incident was never referred to again between the couples. From the Murphys’ point of view Zelda’s suicide attempt was inexplicable, but in retrospect they were certain it had some connection with Jozan. In Fitzgerald’s eyes she had broken the trust between them in their marriage, as indeed she had, but why she had, what had compelled her toward Jozan, he neither understood nor sought to understand. It was not until much later in his life that he would write, “That September 1924 I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.” But at the time even that “something” went unnamed and unadmitted. Refusing to acknowledge Zelda’s desperate unhappiness, her uneasiness at being locked out of his world as he wrote, her dependence upon him, his entries in his Ledger continued optimistically. In September he wrote, “Trouble clearing away,” and in October, “Last sight of Josanne.”

  Years later Scott told a relative that Zelda had come to him that July, telling him that she loved Jozan and asking for a divorce. Furious, Scott insisted upon a showdown among the three of them. He told Zelda that Jozan had to face him in Zelda’s presence and ask for her himself. Then, in a burst of anger, he locked her in her rooms at the villa. The confrontation did not take place; Zelda apparently accepted Scott’s ultimatum passively and the subject of divorce was dropped. Jozan says that he was not involved in the scenes which took place between the Fitzgeralds, and it is altogether possible that he was unaware of Zelda’s predicament. He insists that Zelda’s infidelity was imaginary. “But they both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination.” He left the Riviera without knowledge of what had passed between Scott and Zelda, and he never saw either of the Fitzgeralds again. In Save Me the Waltz, Alabama says: “Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him…. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.”

  The sea turned the color of gunmetal and the cold winds of the mistral blew down from the Alps Estérel. The Fitzgeralds remained on the Riviera while Scott tried to clear everything from his mind but the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, which he had nearly completed. He told Maxwell Perkins that it would not reach him before October 1 “as Zelda and I are contemplating a careful revision after a week’s complete rest.” He said the summer had been a fair one. “I’ve been unhappy but my work hasn’t suffered from it. I am grown at last.” That was the only clue he gave to any of his friends at that time of the blow that had been struck at their marriage. At the end of October Gatsby was sent to Scribner’s and the Fitzgeralds decided to follow what little sun there was to Italy. Zelda was reading Roderick Hudson and suggested to Scott that they winter in Rome. In November Scott entered in his Ledger: “… ill feeling with Zelda,” but there were no explanatory notes to accompany his comment.

  Rome was an unfortunate choice for both of them. It was damp and cold and they were ill intermittently throughout the dreary winter months. Scott disliked the Italians, got in scrapes with the police, and began to drink heavily. Yet, when the proofs of Gatsby began to arrive from New York, he worked soberly and in full control as he revised them. He worried about the title of the novel. Should it have been Trimalchio in West Egg, the title he’d put on the book; simply Trimalchio, or Gatsby? He had two alternative titles which he rejected for their lightness: Gold-hatted Gatsby and The High-bouncing Lover. But Zelda preferred The Great Gatsby and he trusted her instinct.

  She read aloud to him from a novel by Will James about cowboys, in order, he said, to spare his mind, and when he had difficulty visualizing Gatsby, she drew pictures until her fingers ached, attempting to capture his image for Scott. The result was, he wrote Perkins, “I know Gatsby better than I know my own child.”

  By the first of the new year they set off for Capri to recuperate. Zelda became ill with colitis and her attacks were painful. They were to come and go fitfully during the entire year and made them both anxious over her health. The ailment came on the heels of her failed love affair and there was probably a connection between the two. It was in Capri that Zelda first began to paint; it was to become a lifelong pursuit. Scott wrote, “… me drinking,” while he assured John Peale Bishop: “Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four-day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.”

  In April they traveled back to southern France in their Renault; its top had been damaged and was removed at Zelda’s insistence, for she preferred open cars. When the car broke down in Lyon they abandoned it and continued on to Paris by train. That spring in Paris was composed for them of “1000 parties and no work,” but they did meet Ernest Hemingway.

  The previous fall, Fitzgerald, upon reading something of Hemingway’s in the transatlantic review, predicted to Perkins that he had “a brilliant future
…. He’s the real thing.” Meeting him in Paris, Scott took to Hemingway immediately; he liked his tough-guy charm, his engaging lopsided grin. Ernest Hemingway was three years younger than Scott and a half foot taller. There was an athletic swagger to his walk; he wore a mustache and swore in cliché French. “Parbleu!” and “Yes, we have no bananas!” were his favorite expressions. Soon Hemingway was calling Scott his best friend and a guy he liked to talk to most of the time.

  Shortly after they met, Scott invited Hemingway to join him in a trip to Lyon to pick up the Fitzgeralds’ abandoned Renault. It was on the two-day trip that Scott first told Hemingway about Zelda’s romance with Jozan. Less than ten months had passed since the crisis in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. According to Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast, on their return from Lyon Scott tried to put a call through to Zelda in Paris. While waiting for the call he and Hemingway had several drinks and Scott began to talk about his life with Zelda. It was then that he revealed what Hemingway said “was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story.” He was later in the same book to remark that during the course of his friendship with Scott the story of Zelda’s romance was told several times, and altered with each retelling. Hemingway said he heard about it so often that he could picture the tragic romance (it became increasingly tragic as Scott repeated it) in his mind’s eye. But this first time Scott was at pains to tell Hemingway everything about it—how it had disturbed him, and exactly what had happened.

  Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, to whom he was married when he met the Fitzgeralds in 1925, remembers the Fitzgeralds’ joint recital of Zelda’s romance. She says: “It was one of their acts together. I remember Zelda’s beautiful face becoming very, very solemn, and she would say how he had loved her and how hopeless it had been and then how he had committed suicide.” That last detail was only one of the dramatic embellishments added to give the affair tragic significance. Hadley continued: “Scott would stand next to her looking very pale and distressed and sharing every minute of it. Somehow it struck me as something that gave her status. I can still see both of them standing together telling me about the suicide of Zelda’s lover. It created a peculiar effect.”