Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Scott had helped to fictionalize the affair, thereby giving it a heightened meaning and value, which he, having created, could come to share. It was all of a piece with his having married the heroine of his stories and novels; of his feeling, which by this time, dangerously, had become their feeling, that he somehow possessed a right to Zelda’s life as his raw material.

  Hemingway perceptively noticed two kinds of jealousy in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. Zelda was jealous, he said, of Scott’s work while Scott was jealous of Zelda. Zelda tried to keep Scott from writing, and Scott tried to keep Zelda from other people. Instinctively Zelda realized that a part of her attractiveness for Scott lay in her ability to provoke his jealousy, but that in no way mitigated her own. It might, in fact, have created a tension within her to maintain that ability, especially since it was something she could not wholly understand or control.

  Hadley feels that Zelda “was a charming, lovely creature. She lived on what Ernest called the ‘festival conception of life.’ “She believes that Zelda was essentially “a frivolous kind of woman.” There were from the start problems between the two couples. Hadley says: “They were inconvenient friends. They would call on the Hemingways at four o’clock in the morning and we had a baby and didn’t appreciate it very much. When Scott wrote I don’t know.”

  Their writing was what drew the two men into friendship, and Scott eventually succeeded in having Scribner’s take on the as yet largely unknown Hemingway. But it was never Hemingway’s considerable talent alone that attracted Scott to him. There was a purity about Hemingway then, a dedication to his art, a seemingly total lack of affectation that impressed Scott as it had others. And Hemingway, by his own admittance, was curious about Fitzgerald, the best-selling author, the writer of The Great Gatsby.

  Gatsby, which was published in April, 1925, was a critical rather than a financial success. In the first week of its publication Perkins cabled Scott in Marseille that the reviews were superb, but the sales uncertain. When Scott had finished it he had written John Peale Bishop that “my book has something extraordinary about it. I want to be extravagantly admired again.” Fitzgerald had decided that Gatsby must sell seventy-five thousand copies, and he was depressed by Perkins’s wire. He told Perkins: “In all events I have a book of good stories for the fall. Now I shall write some cheap ones until I’ve accumulated enough for my next novel.” If that collection did not succeed, “I’m going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity. Anyhow there’s no point in trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it….” The reviews which he saw irritated him.

  Then Gilbert Seldes reviewed it intelligently and sensitively in The Dial: “Fitzgerald has more than matured, he has mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight, leaving behind him everything dubious and tricky in his earlier work, and leaving even farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his elders.” In May Gertrude Stein wrote Scott: “You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment.” In June Fitzgerald learned that the dramatic rights to Gatsby were being sold and his financial worries were for the moment in abeyance. Although Gatsby sold less than twenty-five thousand copies, the personal letters Scott received about it from people like Wilson and Stein and especially T. S. Eliot made him rightly proud of his achievement. Eliot wrote him, “… it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James….”

  Hemingway and Fitzgerald were then “very thick” and they saw a lot of each other. Neither Zelda nor Hadley was included in their literary discussions, but met on a more purely social level, as the wives of writers. Zelda seemed to Hadley a canny woman, and she recalls Zelda saying with a smile, “‘I notice that in the Hemingway family you do what Ernest wants.’ Ernest didn’t like that much, but it was a perceptive remark. He had a passionate, overwhelming desire to do some of the things that have since been written about, and so I went along with him—with the trips, the adventures. He had such a powerful personality; he could be so enthusiastic that I became caught up in the notions too. It could work in reverse, that persistence. Once he took a dislike to someone you could absolutely never get him back [to them]. If he took exception to anyone, that was it; there was no reasoning with him about it. He eventually turned on almost everyone we knew, all his old friends.”

  In an anecdote which has become a part of the Fitzgerald-Hemingway canon, Ernest upon meeting Zelda for the first time is supposed to have drawn Scott aside and told him that Zelda was crazy. Zelda’s reaction to Hemingway on the other hand was no more complimentary, for she considered him “bogus.” Scott had hoped that Zelda would be as taken with Ernest as he himself was, and he was both puzzled and disappointed in their mutual distrust.

  “At that time,” Gerald Murphy said, “the word [bogus] just didn’t seem to fit; there wasn’t anyone more real and more himself than Ernest. Bogus, Ernest? Of course, who knows how right she may prove to be?”

  Hadley did not remember Ernest saying that Zelda impressed him as crazy, but he may, of course, have told only Scott. She said: “The portrait of Zelda—of both of them—in A Moveable Feast seemed quite brutal. But Ernest could be brutal. Zelda and he didn’t take to each other. He was too assured a male for her. Maybe she caught this and resented it…. He was then the kind of man to whom men, women, children, and dogs were attracted. It was something.”

  In August the Fitzgeralds left Paris for Antibes. They returned to the South of France because, as Scott wrote, “One could get away with more on the summer Riviera, and whatever happened seemed to have something to do with art.” They were to spend only a month there, but it was a month marred by a chilling episode.

  The Fitzgeralds joined the Murphys one evening for dinner at an inn located at St.-Paul-de-Vence in the mountains above Nice. Its dining terrace was built about two hundred feet above the valley and there was a sheer drop from the outer walls of the terrace. Gerald Murphy took a seat with his back to the parapet and a series of ten stone steps. It was perhaps ten o’clock and they had just finished their meal. The only lights other than those that ringed the harbor like a necklace across the Bay of Angels were two candles on their table. At a nearby table sat Isadora Duncan surrounded by three admirers. Gerald Murphy said: “Scott didn’t know who she was, so I told him. He immediately went to her table and sat at her feet. She ran her fingers through his hair and she called him her centurion. But she was, you see, an old lady [she was 46] by this time. Her hair was red, no, purple really—the color of her dress—and she was quite heavy.”

  Zelda was quietly watching Scott and Duncan together and then suddenly, with no word of warning or explanation, she stood up on her chair and leaped across both Gerald and the table into the darkness of the stairwell behind him. “I was sure she was dead. We were all stunned and motionless.” Zelda reappeared within moments, standing perfectly still at the top of the stone stairs. Sara ran to her and wiped the blood from her knees and dress. Gerald said, “I don’t remember what Scott did. The first thing I remember thinking was that it had not been ugly. I said that to myself over and over again. I’ve never been able to forget it.”*

  An incident such as this, so obviously self-destructive and shot through with gratuitous violence, was to blight subsequent meetings between the Murphys and Fitzgeralds. “You see,” Gerald Murphy commented, “they didn’t want ordinary pleasures, they hardly noticed good food or wines, but they did want something to happen.” It was as though the Fitzgeralds were straining for some definite mode of action that they barely understood, or, not needing to understand, acted out. Their code, which was never simply the hedonistic one of the twenties, had begun to make demands upon them.

  In September Scott summarized the year: “Futile, shameful useless but [for] the $30,
000 rewards of 1924 work. Self disgust. Health gone.” It got no better in Paris that winter. Their apartment, which was near the Etoile, had little charm and Zelda took no interest in decorating it or in preparing meals. It was a damp and cheerless place on the rue de Tilsit, a five-flight walk-up with faded gold-and-purple wallpaper. Its air of former elegance accented its current dilapidation and neglect. In January Zelda’s colitis again flared up and they decided to rest at Salies-de-Béarn, a small town in the Pyrénées, where Zelda took the cure. She wrote: “We had a play on Broadway and the movies offered $60,000, but we were china people by then and it didn’t seem to matter particularly.”

  In early March, 1926, they returned to the Riviera, taking less elaborate living quarters in Juan-les-Pins at the Villa Paquita. A reporter for The New Yorker magazine captured something of the aura about Scott and Zelda that spring on the Riviera. He said that the Riviera was quiet until the Fitzgeralds arrived, sunburned from tennis the day before, with everyone waiting for them, talking about them. There were remedies for their burns, as if they were wayward children in need of benevolent advice. “That the Fitzgeralds are the best looking couple in modern literary society doesn’t do them justice…. Scott really looks more as the undergraduate would like to look, than the way he generally does.”

  Then Scott asked if the reporter knew that he was “one of the most notorious drinkers of the younger generation” as though it were an established fact, a feat in which one took pride. The money was pouring in too, Scott admitted, but he complained that they had nothing to show for it—Zelda hadn’t even a pearl necklace.

  In May the Hemingways joined the Fitzgeralds, the Murphys and the MacLeishes on the Riviera. Each family was convinced that it was a perfect place to work and play. The Hemingways were to stay with the Murphys at their Villa America. Gerald and Sara had a small guesthouse, a bastide, at the foot of their property, which would suit them nicely. “Any place that Sara touched became exquisite,” Hadley recalls, and the bastide was hardly primitive. “Ernest, Bumby [their son], and I went to Antibes. Sara and Gerald were impressive friends, you know; they were both very good looking, fine featured and blond. Somehow they matched each other. We grownups would sit on mats in the sand in the sun and Sara and Gerald added their own particular charm to the Mediterranean’s.” There were games which Gerald, the perfect host, carefully organized, festive lunches on the beach brought down by Sara. However, as luck would have it, the Hemingways’ son came down with whooping cough after they had been in Antibes only about a week. Sara, according to Hadley, “was terrified; I really think their children had never had any of the ordinary childhood illnesses like measles and chicken pox. When Bumby became ill she told us that we’d have to go and I understood how difficult a position she was in. Then Scott and Zelda came in from their place, which was further away in Juan-les-Pins. Scott told us they had six weeks or so to go on their villa and offered it to us. It was terribly kind of them and we took the offer. Then we’d sit by ourselves on the beach; we were in quarantine and couldn’t go calling. I’ll never forget yardarm time with the MacLeishes, the Murphys, and the Fitzgeralds. Three cars would pull up outside our place just beyond the iron fence and by the time we left at the end of the summer that fence was covered with glass bottles artfully arranged. It was great fun.”

  Having offered the Hemingways their villa, the Fitzgeralds took another larger place also in Juan-les-Pins called the Villa St. Louis, where they remained until the end of 1926. Scott wrote: “The mistral is raging outside like the end of the world and the idea of writing is anathema to me. We are wonderfully situated in a big house on the shore with a beach and the Casino not 100 yards away and every prospect of a marvelous summer.”

  Zelda was not seen during the day and Mrs. MacLeish says: “I don’t know what she did or where she was. Sometimes we swam together, but I rarely saw her with Scottie at the plage. You’d see Scottie alone with her nanny.” In a film taken during the summer there is a glimpse of Zelda sitting with Scott and several friends around a large circular table with a beach parasol over them. She is wearing a brightly striped French sailor’s jersey, and her short hair is blowing back from her face and looks springy and dark. Nervously she plays with her hands on the table top, and looking up once into the camera, clearly embarrassed, she waves and laughs.

  When Zelda indulged in high jinks that summer there was a quality about the performance that was striking; she seemed unconcerned about the presence of others and that gave her actions an unforgettable touch. One evening the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds were sitting at a table in the Casino at Juan-les-Pins. It was very late and nearly everyone had gone home. Zelda rose from the table and raising her skirts above her waist began to dance. Motionless, Scott sat watching her. When the orchestra caught on it played to her. At first the Murphys were startled, and then, Gerald said, “I remember it was perfect music for her to dance to and soon the Frenchmen who were left gathered about the archways leading to the small dance area near our table gaped at her—they expected to see a show, something spectacular. Well, it was spectacular, but not at all in the way they had expected it to be. She was dancing for herself; she didn’t look left or right, or catch anyone’s eyes. She looked at no one, not once, not even at Scott. I saw a mass of lace ruffles as she whirled—I’ll never forget it. We were frozen. She had this tremendous natural dignity. She was so self-possessed, so absorbed in her dance. Somehow she was incapable of doing anything unladylike.”

  Scott’s impact on people was entirely different from Zelda’s. Mrs. MacLeish remembers: “Oh, you could talk to him. He was such a sunny man. But he’d ask the most personal questions. I remember one night out dancing when he followed two young French boys around the dance floor asking them if they were fairies. I think I was dancing with one of them. He could be terrible. Zelda was nothing like that.” Zelda was aloof and remote; it was not that she did not pay attention to what one was saying, but a strange little smile would suddenly, inexplicably cross her face. She answered questions if they were put to her, but otherwise she remained distant. Mrs. MacLeish remembers Zelda as a night person. “I remember how she’d do these things—dancing on tables and so forth. But there was no mirth. No fun. ‘This is what we do and now I’ll proceed to do it.’ Those were the Fitzgerald Evenings which we learned to avoid like the plague. They seemed intent upon living this lurid life; the ordinary evening wasn’t enough.”

  Gerald Murphy described the way Scott and Zelda seemed to work together that summer—like “a pair of conspirators.” “They would begin together in the evening; you would see some look come over them as though they had been drawn together—and then they were companions. Then they were inseparable. They would stay out all night. It was as though they were waiting for something to happen; they didn’t want entertainment, or exotic food; they seemed to be looking forward to something fantastic. That’s the only way I can put it; something had to happen, something extravagant. It was that they were in search of, and they went for it alone.”

  That June Zelda had her appendix removed at the American hospital in Neuilly outside of Paris. It was not a serious operation and she recovered quickly; they were able to return to the Riviera by the beginning of July. Prior to the operation, however, Zelda had suffered not only from colitis but also from “ovarian troubles.” She and Scott had apparently been trying to have another child with no success. It was after the appendectomy that those ovarian troubles lessened, but she still did not become pregnant.

  Sara Mayfield, who had known Zelda as a girl in Montgomery, was visiting in Paris while Zelda was in the hospital. She was having drinks one afternoon with the son of the Spanish ambassador to the United States and Michael Arlen, whose novel The Green Hat was creating a sensation abroad, when Scott saw her and joined them at their table. He complimented Arlen on his success, and told him that he would probably be his successor as the most popular fiction writer of the day. The compliment was a little backhanded, but Arlen took it debonair
ly. Politely he in turn praised The Great Gatsby. After an amiable half hour or so the two men crossed over their estimation of Ernest Hemingway’s writing. Scott angrily accused Arlen of being “‘a finished second-rater that’s jealous of a coming first-rater.’” It was with difficulty that someone managed to interrupt the train of the conversation and steer Scott off the subject. At last Scott invited Miss Mayfield to join him for a visit to Zelda at the hospital. First, however, they would all have dinner together. They would stop at Harry’s New York Bar and see if Hemingway had returned from Pamplona. At the bar a newspaperman suggested that Scott was promoting Hemingway and a fight was narrowly avoided. They never did get around to visiting Zelda, for Scott passed out in Les Halles and Sara took a taxi back to her hotel without him. More and more Scott’s nights and days were passed in this way: no work done, drinking and talking with friends, passing out and being put into a taxi and sent home alone.

  Miss Mayfield remembers a specific conversation involving the Fitzgeralds’ opposing attitudes toward Hemingway. Zelda had told her that the Hemingways had left the Riviera earlier in the summer because of domestic difficulties but that before they left Hemingway had brought over his novel The Sun Also Rises.

  When I asked what his novel was about, Zelda said, “Bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullsh—”