Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Those three words were the themes of Zelda’s fiction, and of her life before her breakdown. The missing word was ruin. She understood that a failure of love made meaningless the otherwise potent nouns success and beauty—each of which was liable to impermanence. There is in the story an indictment of the rich as seducers nearly as strong as Hemingway’s was to be in A Moveable Feast. Except that Zelda points out both the responsibility and the foolishness of those who take their attention as anything more than part of an intricate game, in which the rich play as masters with little at stake.

  The story was reviewed in St. Paul by James Gray, who knew the Fitzgeralds. He called it a companion piece to Gatsby, and added that a dual egotism had sustained the main characters—an absorption in each other was the first thing that distinguished them—as it had Scott and Zelda, he might have added.

  That absorption in each other had already left its mark on both their lives, and now that Scott was in Hollywood Zelda felt intensely her need for him, his company, and his reassurance. During the eight weeks that Scott was gone Zelda wrote him thirty-odd letters. In these letters she again and again told him of her dependence upon him. She had sensed Scott’s boredom in Montgomery, feeling bored to some extent herself, but she was more than a little uneasy about his abrupt trip to Hollywood without her.

  Roaming Montgomery during her morning walks, she found the old blind bugler from the Civil War who had sold candy to her and Scott when they were courting, and bought a cream bar from him for remembrance’s sake. She continued working on her short stories and she began to read one of Scott’s stories every night before falling asleep. Once while reading “The Offshore Pirate” she wrote him, “You were younger than anybody in the world once— what fun you must have had in that curious place that’s younger than life.” In full admiration of the excellence of “Absolution” she told him, “I will never be able to Write like that.”

  Rereading his stories was in part a gesture of love made in his absence, but Zelda was also reading them in order to learn how to construct fiction. It was inevitable that she would model her work on his. The social and emotional territory of their work had always been strikingly similar. She now became deeply aware of Scott’s skill as a writer, and her opinion of her own work suffered by comparison. Unfortunately this stimulated one of the symptoms of her illness, competitiveness toward Fitzgerald. For what she was doing now was measuring her abilities as a writer against his—and finding her own lacking.

  In her letters to him she constantly belittled her own attempts and insisted that her writing was not going well: “… my stuff (the last two since you left) has got too thin and spiritless to be worth the effort. With some ruinous facility junk just flows and is utterly worthless.” Still, she finished her stories and continued with others, all the while writing him, “I do not believe I can write.” When she did not hear immediately from Ober she began to think she was writing for herself. No one, or at least neither Scott nor Zelda nor the Sayres, questioned the intense speed at which she was working. The isolation she must have required in order to write did not then strike Fitzgerald as being at all out of hand, nor did it remind him of that period just prior to her breakdown in Paris when she was extremely productive, writing at a tremendous clip, while continuing her ballet.

  Suddenly in early November the Judge grew worse. “Daddy is sinking rapidly the Doctors say. I only go once a day and take Mamma for a long drive, since he is completely unconscious and does not know us or seem to want anybody about.” On the night of November 17 he died. Zelda was notified the following morning. She wired Scott of the Judge’s death and when she had a moment to herself she wrote to him in those abstract terms with which she had learned to describe her father, calling his death “the end of another brave, uncompromising effort to preserve conceptions—.” She added as an afterthought, “I wonder what ironic sequence, what stamina of spirit Daddy has carried over that made him think so little of the world and so much of justice and integrity?”

  At his death the State of Alabama paid him its highest honors. At the capitol the main entrance to the supreme court chamber was draped with black crepe and the flag flew at half staff. Roses were cut from the grounds of the capitol and placed around his casket. A simple burial sermon was read and there were no hymns, for the Judge had requested that manifestations of sentiment be avoided. Zelda bought a blanket of flowers for the Judge’s coffin because, she wrote Scott, no one else in the family had the money to do it and “I knew how you felt towards Daddy and that you would have wanted us to.” She told him the Judge looked “very little in his clothes,” and she said simply, “It’s just the little personal things we care about in people…. Who cares what good or evil dies? And all of us care that we will never hear a certain chuckle again or see the fingers meet a certain way.”

  In an obituary in the Montgomery newspaper, after the Judge had been praised for his excellence and fairness it was noted: “The remarkable thing about his success before the people is that he was in no sense a politician. We doubt if any holder of a State office in the last 20 years has known so few Alabamians personally as Judge Sayre. He did not make speeches, he did not lend his name and time to various public movements, he did not go about over the State much, he was not a joiner.”

  A few days after the funeral, Zelda and her mother went to the capitol and closed the Judge’s office. Zelda told Scott how it had looked, “musty and masculine and cerebral,” with a gorgeous butterfly pinned over a map of the L & N railroad lines, some dusty cotton shirt samples and a copy of Josephus.

  Zelda managed to keep her equilibrium throughout the difficult ordeal of her father’s illness and death, but she began to suffer signs of distress that were all too familiar to her. She wrote to Scott that her eyes were bothering her, that she had been sleepless with asthma* and had recently noticed touches of eczema “which I could not trace since I have done my best to lead as healthy a life as possible so you would find me fresh and cheerful when you got back.” Her father’s death had filled the house with relatives and that climate of bereavement was a great strain on her. It was doubly difficult without Scott. She wrote him, “Life is horrible without you because there’s not another living soul with whom I have the slightest communion.”

  On her mother’s birthday, which was only a few days after the Judge’s death, Zelda invited her family to lunch.

  Anthony’s wife is awfully nice and Tilde is pretty and Marjorie is good and kind and there we were: All Daddy had to leave behind. Mamma sat in that more aristocratic world where she and Daddy have always lived. She is so sweet and foolish and infinitely courageous.

  But even with her family around her she felt isolated and out of place.

  I feel like a person lost in some Gregorian but feminine service here—I have come in on the middle and did not get the beginning and cannot stay for the end but must somehow seize the meaning— It’s awful to think that Daddy isn’t here any more— 1 would like to pick up Mamma and go—

  Her family fatigued her and she felt remote from them, yet obliged to make an attempt to understand them and keep in their company. When Scott wrote back to her about Hollywood Zelda replied that if he again mentioned “Lily Dalmita or Constance I will go off to Florida for a week and spend our money and make you jealous of my legs a la Creole when you get home.”

  Then, as her asthma grew more harassing she did decide to spend a long weekend on the coast of Florida to recuperate. She told Scott that although she had everything in the world in Montgomery, except him, she needed to get away.

  I know I am nervous and too introspective and stale— … just long riding rolling along will give me back the calm and contentment that has temporarily disappeared with my physical well-being. Please understand and do not think that I leave in search of any fictitious pleasure. After the utter solitude of Prangin there have been many people lately and people that I love with whom my relations are more than superficial and I really think I need a day or two by
myself.

  But Scott did not understand and had misgivings about her traveling alone. Zelda in turn was hurt by his lack of confidence in her. “If you feel that I am such an irresponsible person you should have left me in a clinic.” She added that she did not intend to do anything to injure him or herself.

  I wish you could believe that though I may have transitory and un-correlated ideas and impulses which make it difficult to appear as a solid individual, still they are more fleeting always and my actions accord with what I would like to be—as well as I am able.

  Scott did not want to rob her of her self-confidence just when she was doing so well and he relented. Before she left she wrote him:

  Scottie and I have had a long bed-time talk about the Soviets and the Russian idea…. You will be absolutely ravished by her riding trousers and yellow shirt and Scottie rearing back in her saddle like a messenger of victory. Each time she goes she conquers herself and the pony, the sky, the fields and the little black boy who follows on a fast shaven mule. I wish I were a fine sweet person like you two and not somebody who has to go 200 miles because they have a touch of asthma. … I hope you haven’t worked yourself to death. We must reduce our scale of living since we will always be equally extravagant as now. It would be easier to start from a lower base. This is sound economics and what Ernest and most of our friends do.

  She traveled to Florida, and as a compromise took along a trained nurse.

  The day before Thanksgiving Zelda received a recording of Scott’s voice which delighted both her and Scottie. “It made me feel all safe in the center of things again and important.” She played it over and over. She told him she was busy writing, but “Fantastic ex-huberance has deserted me and everything presents itself in psychological terms for novels.” Certainly she had been working very hard on her stories, but as yet none of them had been sold and perhaps a novel would do better. She said she wanted to send her stories to Scott, “but I know you are absorbed in your own so I’ll do the best I can and send it on to Ober. Darling I miss you so not having anyone to trust and talk to intellectually. There’s no use asking anybody else’s opinion because I don’t care what it is.”

  The fact that Zelda did not show Scott her stories for his opinion or approval, while reiterating her deep need for him, is worth notice. The ambivalence that lay behind it would reappear when she completed the manuscript of her novel, with disastrous consequences.

  On Thanksgiving Day after the turkey dinner at her mother’s she wrote Scott again:

  It makes me remember all the times we’ve been to-gether absolutely alone in some supended hour, a holiday from Time prowling about in those quiet place alienated from past and future where there is no sound save listening and vision is an anesthetic…. My story limps homeward, 1,000 words to a gallon of coffee. … 1 have a wonderful plot for a short thing that I will get at as soon as I can. It’s for your Christmas…. It’s fun thinking of Christmas and the night you will get home and how you’ll look as you come out the gate. I will be surprised at your mondanity [?] and very amazed that you are concise and powerful and I will be very happy that you are so handsome and when I see how handsome you are my stomach will fall with many un-pleasant emotions like a cake with too many raisins and I will want to shut you up in a closet like a dress too beautiful to wear.

  It was only with Scott gone that she realized how dependent upon him she had become; it was as if he were a source of energy for her to draw upon. It was not that she hadn’t ideas of her own; it was that she needed him to confirm them and herself. She asked him repeatedly, “Do you love me so very much like I do you?” “Is it possible for a person to be as absolutely perfect as I think you are.” The tone grew to be obsessional.

  Deo, my love, my one, my person, I miss you so terribly. It seems a year since you went and it’s very pale and pathetic just trailing about in the wake of your thoughts. When you are not there everything presents itself only in terms of your impressions and I have no independent self save the one that lives in you—so I’m never thoroughly conscious except when you’re near.

  She left Scott’s hat in the hallway and his cane on their bed, “… and you could not tell that it’s all just a bluff and a make-shift without you.” She kept the light on in his study at night so that she would think he was there when she woke up. And she said her disposition suffered in his absence; maybe it was the result of her asthma attacks. “I am going to dig myself a bear-pit and sit inside thumbing my nose at the people who bring me carrots and then I will be perfectly happy.” Caught up among her own imaginings she told Scott some bears were lovely and pleasant and lived on honey and wildflowers. “But I will be a very dirty bear with burrs in my coat and my nice silky hair all matted with mud and I will growl and move my head about disconsolately.” She said he must never go off without her again.

  These letters suggest that without Scott Zelda’s own existence and estimation of herself were impaired. She may have exaggerated her sense of dependence on him in order to demonstrate to him and to herself how perfectly normal she had become, for part of Forel’s cure had been a somewhat mysterious “re-education” of Zelda in terms of her role as wife to Scott. That may have instilled in Zelda a standard of normality against which she tried to measure herself. That it seems to have been foreign to her individual temperament and personality was not taken into consideration. Certainly it seems strained for Zelda to write, “We are like a lot of minor characters at table waiting for the entrance of the star.” But in 1931 that was her tone.

  In late November Scott wrote Dr. Forel from Hollywood about Zelda. He said that she was well, living cautiously, and drinking no alcohol whatsoever. He said that their relationship had never been better. He also mentioned that Zelda had begun writing. The death of the Judge, which he said they had expected, Zelda had taken in her stride. He had felt no hesitation about leaving her to go to Hollywood.

  Scott mocked Hollywood and he never entirely got over the feeling that there was something demeaning about going there to write. But it intrigued him as a place of false glamour against which a part of him competed for attention. He went to the parties and allowed his real charm to dissolve in alcohol. In early December he must have written Zelda about his dissatisfaction at the studios; for she replied:

  I’m sorry your work isn’t interesting. I had hoped it might present new dramatic facets that would make up for the tediousness of it. If it seems too much drudgery and you are faced with get to-gether and talk-it-over’ technique—come home, Sweet. You will at least have eliminated Hollywood forever. I wouldn’t stay and waste time on what seems an inevitable mediocrity and too hard going.

  Although Zelda never directly told Scott of her anxieties about Hollywood, they once took shape in a nightmare, which clearly revealed her sense of impending panic about Scott and herself.

  Dearest, My Love:

  I had the most horrible dream about you last night. You came home with a great shock of white hair and you said it had turned suddenly from worrying about being unfaithful. You had the big leather carry-all trunk you have always talked about buying and in it were two huge canvasses, landscapes, with the trees stuffed and made of cloth and hanging off like doll’s arms. O Goofo! I love you so and I’ve been mad all day because of that dream.

  She added that she missed him and wanted him near; then, astonishingly, she wrote: “Its wonderful that we have never had a cross word or done bad things to each other. Wouldn’t it be awful if we had?” She said that Scott was all she cared about on earth, “the past discredited and disowned, the future has doubled up on the present; give me the peace of my one certitude—that I love you. It’s the only instance in my life of my intelligence backing up my emotions— That was an awful dream—awful dear. I didn’t want to live and you were only formally sorry.” In the last sentence she said she didn’t mean anything she had written: “I want you to have a good time and take what you can from everywhere and love me if you want to and be kind—” She did not
, of course, mean that at all. She wanted him home with her where she could be sure of him—and of herself.

  Continuing to read his short stories, she wanted to cry over “The Sensible Thing,” a story Scott had written about their abortive courtship and his losing her:

  Reading your stories makes me curious more than ever about you. I don’t suppose I really know you very well—but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.