Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  The sixth story, “A Millionaire’s Girl,” was published by the Saturday Evening Post, and although it was Zelda’s story, Scott’s name alone was signed to it. (A wire from New York assured him that the Post would pay $4,000 if Zelda’s name was omitted, and it was.) Scott later wrote that the story “appeared under my name but actually I had nothing to do with it except for suggesting a theme and working on the proof of the completed manuscript. This same cooperation extends to other material gathered … under our joint names, though often when published in that fashion I had nothing to do with the thing from start to finish except supplying my name.”

  The stories attracted considerable notice at the time. Sometime about July, 1930, Scott in a letter to Perkins told of three more stories that he was sending on to Harold Ober to place. Those stories were not published and were eventually lost. Zelda had written them, Scott said, “in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown. I think you’ll see that apart from the beauty and richness of the writing they have a strange haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new. I think too that there is a certain unity apparent in them—their actual unity is a fact because each of them is the story of her life when things for a while seemed to have brought her to the edge of madness and despair.” The same might have been said of the stories which were published during 1929, for the breakneck speed at which they were written did not impair their effectiveness, and they remain a remarkable expression of Zelda’s considerable talent as an essentially descriptive writer.

  From the titles of the stories one notices that each is the portrait of a girl rather than a woman, although their ages range from sixteen well into the thirties, and although all but one have married (four have children as well). The husbands and children are, however, vague presences, placed in the stories, one suspects, as proof of a certain adequacy—that the girls have passed through a phase of life successfully—rather than as significant figures in themselves. The girls are adventuresses: sleek but restless and lonely women who are always exceptionally pretty. They are ambitious; they wish to distinguish themselves without fully knowing how to do so. And they share an immunity toward the everyday aspects of life by being in the main heiresses or actresses or dancers. There is something disquieting about these figures of allure, for they are imbued with a selfishness that is nearly as total as their attractiveness. What they suffer from is a boredom of spirit. As she says of one of them, “She wanted to get her hands on something tangible, to be able to say, That is real, that is part of my experience, that goes into this or that category, this that happened to me is part of my memories.’”

  But they do not quite succeed in coming to life. Seen always from a distance by a detached and omniscient narrator about whom we know nothing (we are not even sure whether that observer is male or female), the girls do not interact with life. Rather, they are moved through it. Dialogue is almost nonexistent. Zelda states again and again that they are courageous girls, but we do not see that courage tested or at work. What she does is to describe the characters, not develop them.

  If they are not entirely satisfactory as characters, the skill Zelda exercises in describing their situations and their backgrounds is nevertheless impressive. These are the fashionable, “rose-gold,” and formidable girls that the nineteen-twenties cherished and whom Zelda took as her material. They are le beau monde. They live in silver apartments “with mulberry carpets,” surrounded by “pastel restraint.” Their boyishness, their air of being children of the world, their carelessness, we are told, is only a decoy for their total control of social situations. Yet they seem to have no control whatsoever over their lives, through which they float without urgency, and ultimately, for all the author’s insistence to the contrary, they are passive and elusive women.

  In July the editor of College Humor sent Zelda some copy written to accompany one of her stories, “Southern Girl.”

  You know how sweethearts have a song between them, one they have grown to like very much. When they are separated and this song is played, their song, for them it immediately recalls the happiness they shared, and those dusty words, “I love you.”

  Examine very carefully Southern Girl, which the Fitzgeralds have done for this issue. There is not a line of conversation in it, but with very few words they have struck out a soft pattern of beauty and characters which were so real in their own lives that they come alive in your own. … I am so happy to have it because it marks an important milestone in the literary career of Zelda Fitzgerald. I cannot imagine any girl having a richer background than Zelda’s, a life more crowded with interesting people and events. She is a star in her own right.

  This, then, was the public image of the Fitzgeralds, cultivated by the slick magazines and the tabloids. Its variance from their private lives in the summer of 1929 was staggering.

  Later in her life Zelda said she wrote to pay for her dancing lessons; she hated to take Scott’s money for them, because she wanted her dancing to be her exclusive possession. At the time, however, the vehemence of her thoughts on this score were concealed from Scott. He was astonished by her productivity and even resented it in comparison to his own vexing inability to move forward on his novel. The strain of her pace began to show in fatigue, and she began to give way in her outward behavior. She was easily distracted and even the simplest conversations were difficult for her to maintain. She took refuge in an impenetrable and unnerving silence. She and Scott attended few parties together, and when they did Scott was watchful for those first signals of tension that spelled ruinous quarrels if Zelda was not sent home immediately to rest. Zelda for her part had her hands full when Scott drank excessively, and she was frequently humiliated by his conduct. They avoided being alone together in their drab apartment. The tacit motivation for their behavior was more similar than they were able to admit, and as desperately as they needed each other, they blindly strove to disentangle themselves from each other. They became engaged in a contest for personal survival very much like the one between Nicole and Dick Diver, which Scott would write about in Tender Is the Night. He has Dick say,” ‘I can’t do anything for you any more. I’m trying to save myself.’”

  The contest between the Fitzgeralds was no more pretty than that between the Divers; all rules of conduct were void. There were delirious parties that ended at Maxim’s or the Coupole. Zelda wrote, “Nobody knew whose party it was. It had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn’t survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive.” And the Fitzgeralds were seen stepping from taxis, their handsome faces half hidden in the shadows of the night. Those were the evenings, indistinguishable from each other, spent in the company of the lively and exotic Kiki, or with Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece, who had kohl-rimmed eyes and a total lack of discretion. Scott would make her an American girl in a canceled episode in Tender Is the Night and name her Vivian Taube: “To be a tall rich American girl is a form of hereditary achievement…. Nevertheless it was increasingly clear to him that Miss Taube had more immediate concerns—there was a flick of the lip somewhere, a bending of the smile toward some indirection, a momentary lifting and dropping of the curtain over a hidden passage. An hour later he came out of somewhere to a taxi whither they had preceded him and found Wanda limp and drunk in Miss Taube’s arms.” This was later cut from the manuscript, as were most of the other descriptions of homosexuals.

  On the boat to Europe Zelda had mentioned to Scott that she thought a friend from the ballet was a homosexual. Now, desperately uncertain of herself, she accused Scott of a homosexual liaison with Ernest Hemingway. Scott, who had gone without Zelda to have a drink one evening with Hemingway and his wife, had returned home intoxicated and had fallen into a deep sleep. In his sleep he had murmured, “no more baby,” which was taken by Zelda as absolute proof of her suspicions. Fitzgerald was dumfounded. They quarreled violently, each making increasingly wild accusations against the other. Scott did no
t once question Zelda’s sanity.

  If the origin of such an unhappy rupture in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage can be dated, it would be early in 1926. For it was then that Scott worriedly told the wife of a friend of theirs that Zelda complained of his inability to satisfy her. It was also in the winter of 1926-1927 that they had begun trying to have another child, for they very much wanted a son. Several months later Robert McAlmon told Hemingway that Scott was a homosexual. Hemingway must have relayed the accusation to Fitzgerald, for Scott mentioned it in a letter to Maxwell Perkins: “Part of his [McAlmon’s] quarrel with Ernest some years ago was because he assured Ernest that I was a fairy— God knows he shows more creative imagination in his malice than in his work. Next he told Callaghan that Ernest was a fairy. He’s a pretty good person to avoid.” Zelda knew of McAlmon’s canard. By the spring of 1929, the Fitzgeralds’ own physical estrangement all but complete, Zelda turned that charge against Scott. It took surprising effect. For a while at least Scott had begun to believe her.

  Morley Callaghan, in his memoir of this spring in Paris, reports an incident that struck him as peculiar at the time. He and his wife had gone into the St. Sulpice Church, which was near the Fitzgeralds’ apartment. Scott was with them but he refused to enter the church and waited outside. Then they came back out and began to cross the square together. Scott said quietly,” ‘I was going to take your arm, Morley …’

  ” ‘Well, so …’

  ” ‘Remember the night I was in bad shape? I took your arm. Well, I dropped it. It was like holding on to a cold fish. You thought I was a fairy, didn’t you?’

  ” ‘You’re crazy, Scott,’ I said. But I wished I had been more consoling, more demonstrative with him that night.”

  By the time the Fitzgeralds left Paris for the Riviera in July not only their marriage, but their very identities were in peril.

  They stayed at the Villa Fleur des Bois in Cannes that summer. Zelda looked weary and haggard; her complexion, which had always been fresh, was ashen and colorless. Even her speech seemed to have changed. Gerald Murphy remembered her sudden bursts of laughter for no discernible reason, which came more as spasms of reaction than from enjoyment. He said: “The laughter was her own, not like a human voice. Something strange in it, like unhinged delight. It was ecstatic, but there was a suppressed quality about it, a low, intimate sound that took one completely off guard.” And he remembered going to a movie at the local cinema near Antibes that summer with the Fitzgeralds and Sara. It was a documentary about underwater life and had been filmed in an aquarium. “There were all sorts and varieties of strange fish swimming by the camera; there were myriad reeds and seaplants swaying in the water, and then the movie began to show photos of the predatory fish in their natural habitat. Quite nonchalantly an octopus, using his tentacles to propel himself, moved diagonally across the screen. Zelda, who had been sitting on my right, shrieked and threw herself all the way across my lap onto my left shoulder and, burying her head against my neck and chest, screamed, ‘What is it? What is it!’ Now, we had all seen it and it moved very slowly—it was perfectly obvious that it was an octopus—but it had nevertheless frightened her to death. She was hardly a timid woman; I mean, she was really absolutely fearless and she was an expert swimmer. One simply didn’t think she would have been so frightened by what she had seen, unless, of course, she had seen it as a distortion of something horrible.”

  All through that summer Zelda sank more deeply into her private world, becoming increasingly remote from Scott and Scottie. She continued her ballet lessons and danced professionally for the first time at brief engagements in Nice and Cannes. She was encouraged by her success, minor as she knew it was, and hoped that upon her return to Paris she could begin dancing with a major ballet company like Diaghilev’s.

  Scott quarreled with the Murphys that summer too, and the escapades of the Fitzgeralds that had once had such élan now took on a sinister cast of self-destructiveness that was unavoidably clear to their friends. Sara Murphy said, “I don’t think he knew much about women and children.” She once wrote Scott: “You don’t even know what Zelda or Scottie are like—in spite of your love for them. It seemed to us the other night (Gerald too) that all you thought and felt about them was in terms of yourself. … I feel obliged in honesty of a friend to write you that the ability to know what another person feels in a given situation will make—or ruin lives.”

  At the end of the summer, with the accumulation of grievances bearing down hard upon him, Scott wrote Hemingway:

  My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and, with tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda, and often implying current company—after which the current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange palaces. The rest of the time I stay alone working or trying to work or brooding or reading detective stories—and realizing that anyone in my state of mind, who has in addition never been able to hold his tongue, is pretty poor company. But when drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.

  Scott’s pallor had become such that when he slept beneath the striped umbrellas on the plage he looked unearthly. What hopes the Fitzgeralds had invested in the Riviera as a place which would revive their troubled spirits vanished, and they returned to Paris in October. It was on the automobile trip back to Paris along the Grande Corniche through the mountainous and steep roads of the south of France that Zelda grabbed the steering wheel of their car and tried to put them off the cliff. To her it seemed that the car had a will of its own, that it swerved as though by its own volition: “… it seemed to me it was going into oblivion beyond and I had to hold the sides of the car.”

  Hemingway answered Scott’s letter by reassuring him that the summer was a disheartening time of year to work. Death, he said, was not in the air as it was in autumn. In the fall of 1929 Paris was filled with Americans. Zelda wrote, “There were Americans at night, and day Americans, and we all had Americans in the bank to buy things with.” But the dollar was about to collapse, and the gala spree, the ceaseless and unrelenting party, was nearly over for all of them. Zelda said, “We went [to] sophisticated places with charming people but I was grubby and didn’t care.” Her nervousness made Scott edgy, and there were dinners taken together when Zelda held the sides of the table in order to endure sitting through the entire meal. She was nearly fifteen pounds under her normal weight. She continued her dancing lessons as if driven, and indeed she was.

  On September 23, 1929, Zelda was invited to join the ballet school of the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples. She was offered a solo role in Aïda as her debut, with the promise of other solos in other operas during the season. Madame Julia Sedova, who ran the school as well as the ballet company, added in her letter of invitation that living in Naples was inexpensive; one would be able to have a complete pension for thirty-five lire a day. It was Zelda’s chance and it was not such a bad one, but inexplicably she did not take it. Scott never acknowledged that Zelda had come this close to a serious career as a ballerina. As late as 1936 he was writing that Zelda had been hoping to get “bits” in the Diaghilev Ballet and that the only people who came to the studio to watch her “who she thought were emissaries of his and who turned out to be from the Folies Bergeres … thought they might make her into an American shimmy dancer.”

  In what had by now become a pattern with them, they traveled to North Africa in February, 1930, as much to escape as to vacation. “It was a trying winter,” Zelda wrote, “and to forget bad times we went to Algiers.” Since they were fleeing from themselves, they did not find respite. They took a series of snapshots which they carefully saved in one of their scrapbooks, “dated 1929-1931. Scott was tanned and his hair was thinner, but Zelda looked ravaged in the harsh and telling light. It was characteristic of her to appear entirely different in each of her pictures, but in these
the effect was eerie; she is wraithlike, as if haunted. Her shoulders are hunched, deep lines surround her eyes, her mouth is unsmiling always. She looks furtive and distracted.

  One afternoon after the Fitzgeralds’ return from North Africa, the Murphys, who were living in Paris for the spring, went to the Fitzgerald’s apartment on the rue Pergolèse to pick up Zelda, whom they were taking to an art exhibit. As they approached the apartment they saw both Fitzgeralds and John Bishop leaving the building. “We immediately sensed something wrong between them. You know the way one can tell if there has been something embarrassing or upsetting that has happened. Zelda was surprisingly quiet and didn’t say anything to us, which was not her usual form; in fact, she hardly spoke to us. Suddenly she turned to both of them and said, ‘Were you talking about me?’ She was watching them very closely and they were embarrassed. Scott turned away toward me as though to say, ‘You have no idea of what we have been through this afternoon.’ They had all been having luncheon together at the Fitzgeralds’. Can you imagine her suspecting that they were talking about her? I mean, she was sitting right there with them!”

  But such incidents were no longer rare. Undoubtedly as Zelda’s own behavior became more clearly peculiar her friends did reflect something of their discomfort in her company. Zelda’s reaction was to become suspicious of all those people who had formerly been considered their friends—now she thought of them as Scott’s friends.