Alabama does have her work to do, but David makes a distinction between what she can hope to accomplish in hers and what he has done in his. “‘You’re so thin,’ said David patronizingly. ‘There’s no use killing yourself. I hope that you realize that the biggest difference in the world is between the amateur and the professional in the arts.’
“‘You might mean yourself and me—’ she said thoughtfully.” Moments later Alabama reflects that “David’s success was his own— he had earned his right to be critical—Alabama felt she had nothing to give to the world and no way to dispose of what she took away.” David’s success had deeply impressed her and she badly wants her own. Zelda reveals in her fiction the story of her own frustrated desire for accomplishments that would match Scott’s. But the collapse of Alabama’s dreams is as total as Zelda’s had been. In Alabama’s case a physical accident, the infection of her foot, destroys any chance she has to become a ballerina, as in Zelda’s life her mental breakdown destroyed hers.
One of the levels on which Save Me the Waltz moved at its opening was that of the fairy tale—Alabama as princess to her Knight. Zelda seems to have dropped the implications of her fairy tale only to pick up the threads again in Chapter 4 when Alabama is in Italy without David and Bonnie. Bonnie, at David’s suggestion, comes to visit her, but the timing of her visit is unfortunate. Alabama is preparing to dance in Le Lac des Cygnes; she gets permission to miss a rehearsal and meets Bonnie and Mademoiselle at the train. When Alabama sees her daughter she notices: “The bones had begun to come up in her nose; her hands were forming. She was going to have those wide-ended fingers of a Spanish primitive like David. She was very like her father.” But Bonnie is disappointed to find out that her mother has none of the conveniences she is used to in her father’s company. There is no car, but “a flea-bitten horse-cab”; the boardinghouse in which Alabama has been living in Naples smells of “damp and urine.” Both Mademoiselle and Bonnie are clearly disappointed, and it seems to Alabama that her child has become a snob. Bonnie gets a rash from the food; Alabama plans a party for Bonnie at which the child is bitten by a monkey. To make her feel better Alabama takes her on her lap before the other children and begins to tell her a story; it is about Greek temples, but when Alabama finally gets everyone’s attention, she cannot think of a story to tell. Bonnie gets sick from the monkey bite, or maybe the climate, and Alabama goes back to her rehearsals. Bonnie and Mademoiselle leave Italy to return to David.
“We should have taken the train-de-luxe,” said Bonnie. “I am in rather a hurry to get to Paris.”
“This is the train-de-luxe, snob!”
Bonnie gazed at her mother in impassive skepticism.
“There are many things in the world you don’t know, Mummy.”
“It’s just barely possible.”
When Bonnie arrives in Switzerland (the reference to Paris above must be an error), David wants to know if she had a good time. As Bonnie looks about her she notices “Ladies in lace with parasols, ladies in linen with white shoes….” And as she turns to look at her father she sees that he is “Dressed in a catalogue of summer…his clothes were a little amazing, suggesting a studied sartorial selection. He was dressed in pearly gray and he looked as if he had stepped down inside his angora sweater and flannel pants with such precision that he had hardly deranged their independent decorative purpose.” He is handsome and Bonnie is proud of him. She tells him that Alabama “was dancing.” Then as they enter the hotel, Zelda makes her point: “‘The rooms, Prince,’ said the sad, suave hotel man…. The valet carried their luggage to a white-and-gold encrusted suite…. ‘How would the royal visitor like her bath?’ said David.”
The separate worlds of David and Alabama Knight have changed. David has become, in his success and fame and handsomeness, a prince, and Bonnie a princess. Together, daughter and father move into the world of fairy tale without Alabama. And it seems to be a brighter, richer world than Alabama’s had ever been.
Riding home through the flickering night, the country passed in visions of twinkling villages and cottage gardens obstructing their passage with high sunflower stalks. The children, wrapped in the bright armor of Bonnie’s father’s car, dozed against the felt cushions. Safe in the glittering car they rode: the car-at-your-disposal, the mystery-car, the Rajah’s-car, the death-car, the first-prize, puffing the power of money out on the summer air like a seigneur distributing largesse. Where the night sky reflected the lake they rode like a rising bubble through the bowl of the mercurial, welded globe. They drove through the black impenetrable shadows clouding the road like fumes from an alchemist’s laboratory and sped across the gleam of the open mountain top.
At the end of the novel Alabama returns with David and Bonnie to the small Southern town of her girlhood for her father’s final illness and death. Alabama confronts her past in the person of her dying father. At each step of the way from the railway station to her father’s bedside she is overcome by remembering things that had formed her. She recalls the infallibility of her father and her own delight when something went wrong for him; it was a small reminder of his humanity, and thereby brought him closer to her. When at last she is alone with him her tenderness toward him overwhelms her. When she speaks to him it is again for guidance, for some measure of direction from him for her own life, and she disguises her feeling in abstract questions.
“Oh, my father, there are so many things I want to ask you.”
“Baby,” the old man patted her hand. His wrists were no bigger than a bird’s. How had he fed them all?
“I never thought you’d known till now.”
She smoothed the gray hair, even Confederate gray.
“I’ve got to go to sleep, baby.”
“Sleep,” she said, “sleep.”
She sat there a long time. She hated the way the nurse moved about the room as if her father were a child. Her father knew everything. Her heart was sobbing, and sobbing.
The old man opened his eyes proudly, as was his wont.
“Did you say you wanted to ask me something?”
“I thought you could tell me if our bodies are given to us as counter-irritants to the soul. I thought you’d know why when our bodies ought to bring surcease from our tortured minds, they fail and collapse; and why, when we are tormented in our bodies, does our soul desert us as a refuge?”
The old man lay silent.
“Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace? Why, Daddy?”
“Ask me something easy,” the old man answered very weak and far away.
In what is the first admission of the deep love she feels for her father, Alabama is nevertheless unable to the end to reach him, unable to elicit from him any answers to her questions about life itself. Zelda tries to parallel Alabama’s feelings toward the Judge with those of Alabama’s mother to her father, and of Bonnie toward David. It is as if generations of fathers passing before her imagination give some mute testament of life to their daughters, some comfort. “Her father!” she had written before Alabama left Europe for home. “Without her father the world would be without its last resource.
“‘But,’ she remembered with a sudden sobering shock, ‘it will be me who is the last resource when my father is dead.’”
After her father’s death Alabama searches for some token of direction left behind by him, but she finds nothing. “‘He must have forgot,’ Alabama said, ‘to leave the message.’ “She tries to remember things he has said, but can bring little to mind other than his last words that his illness was expensive. “Once he had said, ‘If you want to choose, you must be a goddess.’ That was when she had wanted her own way about things.” She says that she is heir to “‘many doubts.’”
As the Knights make ready to leave the South they give a farewell party, and the people attending the party compliment them and tell them they are lucky, that they “‘have an easy time.’ “Alabama
says: “‘We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.’ “But no matter what her protests people insist that the Knights are “happy.” As the party guests leave “the pleasant place” Zelda undercuts the well wishing of their departures by repeated use of the words “death” and “dead” until it becomes death in the first person:
“We’ve talked you to death.”
“You must be dead with packing.”
“It’s death to a party to stay till digestion sets in.”
“I’m dead, my dear. It’s been wonderful.”
Alabama says they will come back to visit her family, and then, to herself, thinks, “Always… we will have to seek some perspective on ourselves, some link between ourselves and all the values more permanent than us of which we have felt the existence by placing ourselves in our father’s setting.” The party over, Alabama begins to empty ashtrays. She tells David it is “very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labelled ‘the past,’ and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.’”
The Knights will continue as they have been, the novel points to no fresh departures for they believe in none, and it gives little hope of a brighter future for them. They sit together, staring at each other among the silver debris of glasses and trays of their last party and watch the twilight come in upon the living room and themselves.
*R. D. Laing in his book The Divided Self uses an astonishingly similar description of schizophrenics: “His whole life has been torn between his desire to reveal himself and his desire to conceal himself…. the person whom we call ‘schizoid’ feels both more exposed, more vulnerable to others than we do, and more isolated. Thus a schizophrenic may say that he is made of glass, of such transparency and fragility that a look directed at him splinters him to bits and penetrates straight through him. We may suppose that precisely as such he experiences himself.
*Scott, however, took Save Me the Waltz as proof of Zelda’s love affair with Jozan. He wrote one of Zelda’s doctors: “As soon as she could feel I was safe at home she immediately betrayed me. She did it by her own confession. You only have to read her book. And I was doing the best work in my life.” (He was writing The Great Gatsby.)
O Darling! My poor dear—watching everything in your life destroyed one by one except your name. Your entire life will soon be accounted for by the toils we have so assiduously woven—your leisure is eaten up by habits of leisure, your money by habitual extravagance, your hope by cynicism and mine by frustration, your ambition by too much compromise.
Zelda, in an undated letter to Scott
15
DURING ZELDA’S FIRST MONTH (FEBruary, 1932) at Phipps her conversations with the psychiatrists had been evasive and unproductive. They were no closer to understanding her than when she arrived, for she treated their calls on her as social visits. But after Save Me the Waltz was written the doctors changed their tactics; instead of only talking with her, they asked her to write out what she thought had happened to her. The result was a strangely distorted autobiographical sketch, studded with expressions of distrust and recrimination—a semi-fantasy of her life with Scott. It confirmed some of the things Scott had mentioned, and it gave her doctors Zelda’s perspective toward those things. Portions of this document are puzzling, for some of the biographical references are inaccessible, lost in the tangle of Zelda’s mind. But once again she demonstrated her uncanny ability to express the undercurrent drifts of her feelings. She began writing at the remove of the third-person narrator, as if this were a story, but as the intensity of her revelations gained momentum, the game of story writing fell away and she wrote as I.
The eyes of the psychiatrist moved back and forth under the heavy lashes, like the shuttle of a loom weaving a story from the dark heavy thread.
“So write the story with no embellishments,” said the voice. There was that excitement about the voice of waiting un-committed; the excitement of the inveterate gambler with many systems, who yet takes his money haphazard; the excitement of inveterate superstition.
“Very well,” began the sick one patiently, “but it is the story of a fathomless solitude, of a black detachment of nothing. A vacuum can only exist, I imagine, by the things which enclose it.”
A pretense that the invalid made sense fluttered over the fine face. The face had nothing to do with the psychiatry. She inspected it like an interloper she might have found in her room, returned to the patient and said, “Go on.”
“We lived in a big house by the river [Ellerslie in Wilmington]. The rooms were high and full of the immensity of beautiful proportions. The house was so perfect that the doors grew smaller at the top like the columns of a Greek temple. A circular stair-well plumbed its depth. There were trees outside the windows that rose like rockets and spread in sprays at their ultimate point across the wide panes. A gaunt barn with a burnt sienna roof and walls that had faded to a gangrenous sheet of bilious green, rested on thin posts like the niches of a cathedral. Violets grew in the abandoned traces of an ante-bellum garden and yellow roses like crumpled bits of tissue paper climbed the fence. Outside the stark luxuriance of the yard, cinders stretched for miles and miles, to a government buoy station whose red roofs lay like a canopy over the sandbars and to a boiler factory bound by a white rose hedge.
“There were many things to brood about. There was Marie, a wonderful negro maid, high and gawky, who laughed and danced barefoot about the Christmas tree on the broken balls, and there was Phillipe, a Paris taxi-driver who wanted to run the house like a cab at night, who was stupid and insubordinate, and boxed with his master and worked too hard in his official capacity as butler. He had an air of being always startled, perhaps in his uncertainty of his present role. We called him from the kitchen with a French auto-horn attached to the dining room chair. There was Ella who sang spirituals in the kitchen and sat like a dark ejection of the storm in the candle-light of the dining room when thunder blew up the Maryland lightning belt at night and whipped and cracked over the river. And there was Mademoiselle, nervous and reeking of sachet, whose great brown eyes followed a person about like a mop and who cried and wept and grew hysterical about Phillipe…
“The first company came: a young actress like a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life since she had no definite characteristics of her own save a slight ebullient hysteria about romance. She walked in the moon by the river. Her hair was tight about her head and she was lush and like a milkmaid. Carl [Van Vechten] came. Carl is divine; he spent six months in prison rather than pay his wife alimony. He is an experimentalist and a connoisseur. He brought suppressed nigger records and a cock-tail shaker and saved my letters and collects first editions in friends whom he vivisects with rapt interest. He’s a dramatist at heart. Our relations were very impersonal but Carl was a fine friend.
“Teddy [Theodore Chanler] came. Teddy is an instrument of our lost republic. He could understand why an amusement park is the best place to be amorous—it’s something about the whitewashed trees and the smell of peanuts and the jogging of the infernal machines for riding….
“Dick [Richard Knight] came. I do not know why he is attractive. He flung a pot of mustard at the dining room door, his head is too big for his body, he is a lawyer. One lost afternoon in a black lace dress we drank cocktails in a New York apartment and sat afterwards a long time on the stairway, oblivious with a kind of happy desperation…We would have made scenes but there was trouble… I forgot him during rehersals for the Opera Ballet. I was too tired to care and too full of brooding except when something external drove me to him: the night Scott came home drunk from Princeton and smashed my nose about some conflict of his own and my sister left the house and never forgave him, poor man. I telephoned Dick. He has the most magnetic voice I’ve ever known. Dick had to go;… I don’t
think though Scott had a world of his own which made no provision for our lives together except to kick about rehersals because once I got drunk in an Italian restaurant with some girls from the ballet after I’d finished a story in the Phila. library during the afternoon, and he was angry. He left me so much alone that I was very ashamed of wanting him once…He was thinking of the actress: he said so. I said I wanted to leave him but he wouldn’t let me go. We fought.
“My dancing teacher was a protege of Nijinsky. I ate lunch with him at Rubens and went with him to his apartment. There was nothing in the commercial flat except the white spitz of his mistress and a beautiful collection of Leon Bakst. It was a cold afternoon. He asked me if I wanted him to kill me and said I would cry and [he?] left me there. I ran to my lesson through the cold streets. I always wore white…
“I do not know what Scott was doing during that year. He went to New York: I didn’t want to go. He worked a little, we lived in the cinders and the wind from the river and sometimes, rarely, we did things together.
“On the boat he had friends and I was very unimaginative about a dark man who thought it was nice that he had a brown jacket and I had a blue one…They all came down and we drank champagne. I think I wanted him to see a new nightgown I had.
“In Genoa, Scott and I slept together.
“In Nice, I worked at a studio which I did not like, with Nevalskaya. Scott and I were happy in the bright, incisive sun, watching the frog swallower on the promenade and the awful comedies at the Casino. He was mad because I wouldn’t go to a French version of Broadway and liked me when I told him why the Place Gallieni was charming: about the faded Baroque painted houses and the one-dimensional quality of that sun-sterile stone. He hated the child’s nurse. We drank aperitifs at a blue cafe in front of the Jetée and I loved walking to the hotel from my dancing. The sapphire twilight was deep and mysterious and I hummed the songs that the old man played; mostly Strauss waltzes…The studio piano was out of tune. The hotel bedroom was red plush and the bed was brass and the rooms were on the sea and I loved him very much.
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