Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  In November, 1927, Scott wrote Ernest Hemingway that although he had wasted the summer insofar as his writing was concerned, he had accomplished a lot during the fall. He hoped, he said, to complete his novel by the first of December. Zelda was dancing three times a week in Philadelphia, as well as painting. “Have got nervous as hell lately—purely physical but scared me somewhat—to the point of putting me on the wagon and smoking denicotinized cigarettes.” The purpose of the letter was to congratulate Hemingway on the recent publication of his collection of stories Men Without Women. Scott wrote: “The book is fine. I like it quite as well as The Sun, which doesn’t begin to express my enthusiasm. In spite of all its geographical and emotional rambling, it’s a unit, as much as Conrad’s books of Contes were.” Zelda liked it a lot, he said, and thought his best story was “Hills Like White Elephants.” But, for all Scott’s genuine admiration, there was a defensiveness about his letter, the first sign of the professional competitiveness that was to mar his friendship with Hemingway. He let Hemingway know, for instance, that “The Post pays me $3500—this detail so you’ll be sure who’s writing this letter.”

  In fact, Fitzgerald had done little writing of any sort in 1927. He had been working since the summer of 1925 on his novel and he now very much exaggerated his progress to Hemingway, for he was making almost none. The book had gone through various drafts and would go through more before its publication as Tender Is the Night in 1934. It was going to be a sensational novel about American expatriate life on the Riviera, and its hero, Francis Melarky, a film technician, would be driven to murder his mother. Fitzgerald had been stimulated by both the Ellingson and Leopold-Loeb* cases as sources for his novel. The novel went through a number of titles, Our Type, The World’s Fair, and somewhat later The Melarky Case and The Boy Who Killed His Mother, which was apparently Zelda’s suggested title.

  Zelda’s sister and brother-in-law Rosalind and Newman Smith spent a weekend with the Fitzgeralds in February, 1928. The visit was, Scott noted in his Ledger, a catastrophe. He had been invited to Princeton to speak at Cottage Club. There was an enormous amount of drinking and when he returned home late that night he was on a weeping jag. During the course of an argument Scott threw a favorite blue vase of Zelda’s into the fireplace. When Zelda cuttingly referred to his father as an Irish policeman, Fitzgerald retaliated by slapping Zelda hard across the face. As a result her nose bled and her sister, outraged by what she had seen, left the house the following morning. She was convinced that Scott was behaving basely toward her sister and felt that Zelda should leave him. Zelda, however, ignored her sister’s pleas and told her that she and Scott chose to live the way they did and she would tolerate no interference from her family.

  Fed up with Wilmington and with themselves they decided upon another trip to Europe that spring. “They were on their way to Paris,” Zelda wrote. “They hadn’t much faith in travel nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.”

  They took an apartment in the rue Vaugirard opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, so that Scottie could have a place to play. Zelda wrote Eleanor Browder, who had recently married, that they had left New York in too much of a mess to send her a present for her wedding; “we are vaguely floating about on the surface of a fancy French apartment. It looks like a setting for one of Mme Tausand’s gloomier figures but we have got moved in…. It looks as if we’ll never stay anywhere long enough to see how we like it….”

  Gerald Murphy introduced Zelda to Madame Lubov Egorova, who was the head of the ballet school for the Diaghilev troupe, the same woman who had been Catherine Littlefield’s teacher. Madame Egorova had a great gift for instruction, according to Murphy, and although she had once been a leading ballerina with the Ballet Russe, the most exciting group performing in the world at that time, it was as a coach that she excelled, for she was a superb technician. Murphy said, “I had the feeling that unless one went through with it [arranging Zelda’s introduction] something awful would happen. I suppose that was why I helped her to begin with. There are limits to what a woman of Zelda’s age can do and it was obvious that she had taken up the dance too late.” Nevertheless, Zelda worked feverishly under Egorova’s demanding supervision, practicing eight or more hours a day. What had begun as a defiant response to Scott’s praise of Lois Moran’s ambition and energy had become Zelda’s sole preoccupation. She was determined to become a superb ballerina.

  Scott later said that it was at Ellerslie in 1928 that he first began to use liquor as a stimulant for his work. Until then he had drunk only when he was not working; now he drank in order to be able to work. In 1927 and again in 1928 he was making more money from his writing, nearly $30,000, than he ever had before. But his drinking was a serious problem for both Fitzgeralds; Zelda was unable to stop him and felt that he was growing indifferent to her because he preferred the company of his drinking companions. Scott felt that Zelda’s dancing was executed in a spirit of vengeance against him and needled her about her commitment to it. But it was not simply vengeance that motivated Zelda; it was a desire to find something of her own that might give her release from her life with Scott.

  Zelda described in Save Me the Waltz what she sought from her dancing: “It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her—that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self—that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly….”

  “Zelda wanted immediate success. She wanted to dance for the world,” Gerald Murphy said. One day she invited the Murphys to the studio to watch her dance. They went with trepidation. “The stage of the training room was built on an incline, it was perhaps two feet higher at one end than at the opposite. The effect was that one looked up at her the entire time she danced. The view was not a flattering one, for it made her seem taller, more awkward than she was. There was something dreadfully grotesque in her intensity— one could see the muscles individually stretch and pull; her legs looked muscular and ugly. It was really terrible. One held one’s breath until it was over. Thank God, she couldn’t see what she looked like. When I watched Zelda that afternoon in Paris, I thought to myself, she’s going to try to hold on to her youth. You know, there’s nothing worse; it ruins a woman.”

  The Murphys felt close to Zelda, which sometimes upset Scott; he would ask them if they liked Zelda better than they liked him. Or, if he felt they were giving her too much attention, he would say, “Sara, look at me!” Zelda didn’t like everybody, as Sara was well aware; “she was choosy, she didn’t take to many people.” Sara remembered being with Zelda once while they were introduced to several people at a luncheon. “Each time someone was brought to be introduced, she would smile at them sweetly and as she took their hands say under her breath, ‘I hope you die in the marble ring.’ Of course no one suspected that she was saying anything but the usual pleasantries; I heard her because I was standing right next to her. She was so charming and polite as she said it—must have been one of her childhood taunts.” But it was not; it was an utterance from the interior.

  None of them realized that Zelda was poised on the edge of a vast and troubling doubt about herself, and if she and Scott quarreled less, it was only because they had become silent and watchful toward each other. Zelda later recalled “long conversations about the ballet over sauerkraut in Lipp’s, and blank recuperative hours over books and prints in the dank Allée-Bonaparte. Now the trips away had begun to be less fun.”

  Scott’s description of the summer was no less somber. His entry for July in the Ledger read: “Drinking and general unpleasantness.” In August the situation had not improved, “General aimlessness and boredom.”

  When they returned to America in September of 1928 he wrote that they were “back again in [a] blaze
of work and liquor.” And on the occasion of his thirty-second birthday he summarized the year as “Ominous [underlining it three times]. No Real Progress in any way and wrecked myself with dozens of people.” It was unfortunately not an exaggeration.

  Back at Ellerslie, where they had a few more months to go on their two-year lease, Zelda began her dancing lessons in Philadelphia with renewed vigor. But at home she kept entirely to herself, brooding and silent. She practiced in front of the great ornate mirror, sweating profusely, stopping only for water, which she kept beside the Victrola, and ignoring Scott’s remarks as he watched her leap and bend. He hated the glass, which he called their “Whorehouse Mirror.”

  Scott had brought back to the United States with them a Paris taxi driver and ex-boxer, Philippe, to be their chauffeur and his drinking companion. Zelda thoroughly disliked him; she said he was insubordinate to her and stupid. She hated it when he and Scott boxed together. Even John Biggs got a little tired of calls at three or four in the morning to pull Scott and Philippe out of the scrapes they always managed to get into. The household situation was further complicated by the presence of Mademoiselle, Scottie’s French governess, whom Zelda also disliked. Zelda’s relationship with Scottie had deteriorated to the point where they seemed to friends to be two children playing together. Zelda was obliquely describing how she felt about Scottie when she wrote:

  And there was the lone and lovely child knocking a croquet ball through the arches of summer under the horse-chestnut trees and singing alone in her bed at night. She was a beautiful child who loved her mother. At first there had been Nanny but Nanny and I quarrelled and we sent her back to France and the baby had only its mother after that, and a series of people who straightened its shoes. I worried. The child was unhappy and thought of little besides how rich people were and little touching, childish things. The money obsession was because of the big house and going to play with the Wanamakers and the DuPont children. The house was too immense for a child and too dignified.

  Their return to Wilmington brought them no more satisfaction than their period of departure had and the endless litany of their discontent continued. When the lease on Ellerslie ran out, with Scott’s novel still uncompleted, they again left America. In the brittle spring chill of 1929, nearly a decade since the beginning of the Jazz Age, the Fitzgeralds, with their blue-bound leather copies of Scott’s books and their scrapbooks, Scottie and her dolls, and Zelda in her old fur coat, boarded the ship for Genoa. Scott wrote Maxwell Perkins: “I am sneaking away like a thief without leaving the chapters… I haven’t been able to do it. I’ll do it on the boat and send it from Genoa. A thousand thanks for your patience—just trust me a few months longer, Max—it’s been a discouraging time for me too but I will never forget your kindness and the fact that you’ve never reproached me.”

  *Dorothy Ellingson, who was a sixteen-year-old girl, murdered her mother in January of 1925 during a quarrel about the girl’s wild living. Both this case and the Leopold-Loeb sensational murder in 1924 fascinated Fitzgerald and he followed the newspapers’ reporting with great interest. Later, according to Matthew Bruccoli, in his study The Composition of Tender Is the Night, he mentioned them as sources for the novel to both Harold Ober and Hemingway.

  THREE

  Breaking Down

  A rout of dancers then came in: Dancers

  who were young in dances that were dead.

  JOHN PEALE BISHOP

  10

  FROM THE PORT OF GENOA, WHERE their boat docked, the Fitzgeralds traveled along the Mediterranean coast toward Nice. They stopped there briefly as if to gather strength and refreshment from the Riviera and then continued up to Paris. Zelda immediately arranged with Egorova for her dancing lessons to begin: class lessons in the morning with a private afternoon lesson. Painful as it was for Scott, he impotently stood by while Zelda’s entire world was once again consumed by those exhausting lessons. Zelda said: “I worked constantly and was terribly superstitious and moody about my work; full of presentiments. … I lived in a quiet, ghostly, hypersensitized world of my own. Scott drank.” When she returned home from the ballet Scott was rarely there, and if he was, a barrier of indifference held them apart. It was impossible for him to share her conviction that she would one day become a dancer of the first rank. He did not object to the lessons, but they were an irritant between them. Daily Zelda sent her teacher armfuls of fresh flowers. She saw Egorova in her poverty and dedication as an ideal figure whom she wished to emulate. One evening Scott and Zelda took Egorova to dinner at a splendid restaurant, George V; during the dinner Scott flirted mildly with the older woman and to Zelda’s surprise Egorova was pleased and rather charmed. Scott enjoyed the situation, and chided Zelda about her reaction, which was first one of shock and then of annoyance. He thought it was ridiculous of her to insist on regarding Egorova as an exemplar of dedication to the dance and impatiently he told her so.

  Although Ernest Hemingway was living in Paris that spring the Fitzgeralds saw very little of him. A certain coolness had developed in their friendship, which Scott could not at first fathom. Hemingway seemed more irritable and avoided many of those drinking companions and cronies he had chummed around with the year before at the Closerie des Lilas and Lipp’s. He had recently remarried and Scott knew he was working to complete his new novel, A Farewell to Arms, for Hemingway had allowed him to read it in manuscript. Scott had not done the amount of work on his own novel that he had hoped to do and felt guilty before Hemingway’s progress. There was also an increasing tension between Zelda and Hemingway. They were polite to each other, but Scott was well aware of their mutual dislike. Therefore, when the men saw each other they were usually alone together. Morley Callaghan, a young Canadian writer who had known Hemingway in Toronto, was visiting Paris for the first time that spring; he was surprised to find that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not on closer terms. Perkins, who was his editor as well as theirs, had told him that they were good friends. Callaghan, too, noticed the change in Hemingway. He suspected Hemingway of testing him, of wanting to engage in bouts where he would come off the victor, whether it was boxing or drinking. When the Callaghans met the Fitzgeralds they were impressed by their handsomeness, their air of superb confidence. But they were surprised when Zelda, whom they had expected to be gay and madcap, sat silent, studying them.

  At their first meeting, Callaghan reports, Scott read him portions of A Farewell to Arms from the manuscript copy he had. When he had finished he asked if it wasn’t beautiful. Callaghan wasn’t sure, maybe it was, but as his reluctance became clear, Scott seemed a little injured. Zelda, however, was pleased by Callaghan’s reaction and said Hemingway’s prose sounded “pretty damned Biblical” to her. With that Scott put the manuscript away. Then, after some talk on Zelda’s part about writing in general, Scott, who seemed to them to be watching her closely, letting her talk while saying little himself, abruptly told her she was tired and should go to bed. He explained to the Callaghans about her ballet lessons, said that she had to be up early, and hoped they would understand. They didn’t quite, but all the same Zelda left them.

  The next time they met, Callaghan remembers, Zelda suddenly began to talk about her own writing; she was at pains to insist that she too wrote, and wrote well. He was taken aback by her assertion, not so much because he thought she did not write well, but because of her intense insistence. The two couples had been having dinner together, and when they were finished, “Zelda laughed out loud, looking around. She had the restless air, the little sway of a woman seeking some new exhilaration, a woman in Paris who knew the night should be just beginning. She kept saying, ‘What’ll we do? Let’s do something,’” and then she suggested that they go roller-skating together. The Callaghans had agreed, when to their surprise Scott, who had been politely demurring, grabbed Zelda by the wrist and told her it was time for her to go home to bed. He put her into a taxi, and as he did so they noticed that Zelda’s entire manner changed; Callaghan wrote: “… it was as
if she knew he had command over her; she agreed meekly…. And suddenly she had said good night like a small girl and was whisked away from us—and Scott dismissed the little scene almost brusquely.” Again he explained about the strain of her ballet lessons, and when Callaghan asked him why Zelda wanted to dance, he told him it was quite simple, she “wanted to have something for herself, be something herself.”

  In the winter of 1928-1929 Zelda began writing the first in a series of short stories that dealt with the lives of six young women. Harold Ober made a note to himself in February about the Fitzgeralds’ arrangement with College Humor. “SF said that Z would do six articles for College Humor, that he would go over them and fix them up and that the articles would be signed with both their names. He said that as he remembered, they paid $200 for one article that Zelda did, and $250 for another. He said we had better leave the price until they did the first article. They are to be articles about different types of girls. I should think they ought to pay $500 for them, if they are 4 or 5 thousand words in length.”

  Each story was written in an astonishing but hazardous burst of energy, for Zelda was at the same time continuing her ballet lessons and her strength, although seemingly boundless, was taxed to the breaking point. By June, 1929, Zelda’s fourth sketch had been sent to Ober. Five of these stories were to be published in College Humor, which had taken two of her articles in 1928 and considered her talented in her own right. Nevertheless, without exception the stories were published under both Fitzgeralds’ names. Later Scott wrote Ober asking for 51,000 for the best of the stories. He said that if College Humor could only pay $500, Zelda’s name should stand alone. Most of the stories, he told Ober, “have been pretty strong draughts on Zelda’s and my common store of material. This is M——for instance [probably in reference to the last story in the series, published by College Humor, “The Girl with Talent,” for which they received $800] and the ‘Girl the Prince Liked’ was J—— both of whom I had in my notebook to use.”