Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  La Paix was what was once called a Victorian cottage. It had gables and porches, fifteen or sixteen rooms, and it was full of night sounds, dark, and rather down at the heels. But it was set on the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Bayard Turnbull, and the grounds surrounding it were handsome. Zelda described it in a letter to John Peale Bishop.

  We live in a nice Mozartian hollow disciplined to elegance by imported shrubbery of the kind which looks very out of place anywhere. In this very polite Maryland atmosphere we write things. We have black-gums over the tennis court and pink dogwood trees over the pond and the place looks as if it were constructed to hide bits of Italian marble from the public. Scott likes it better than France and I like it fine…We are more alone than ever before while the psychiatres patch up my nervous system.

  This “they say” is the way you really are—or no, was it the other way round?

  Then they present you with a piece of bric-a-brac of their own forging which falls to the pavement on your way out of the clinic and luckily smashes to bits, and the patient is glad to be rid of their award.

  Don’t ever fall into the hands of brain and nerve specialists unless you are feeling very Faustian.

  Scott reads Marx—I read the Cosmological philosophers. The brightest moments of our day are when we get them mixed up.

  The Turnbulls’ son Andrew, who was eleven then, remembered when Zelda first came to La Paix; he watched a taxi coming out from Phipps with a form in the back seat and someone said, “That’s Mrs. Fitzgerald; she’s sick.” His impression was of someone for whom everything was organized. He remembered her sitting under the oak trees in high laced white shoes, biting her lips, picking at her face. There was something not wholesome about her,” he said. When she went swimming at the quarry she wore a two-piece maroon suit, but her figure seemed peculiar to him. “She was odd; she had to be explained.” Zelda would dance around the living-room table to the tune of her gramophone and her face twisted quirkily. She was a frail and somehow pathetic figure to the little boy. “When things were going well for them [the Fitzgeralds] you sensed it immediately; they possessed a sort of very clean fragrance, as though they were fresh from the bath, and then theirs was a bandbox freshness, a daintiness. She played a better game of tennis than Scott, but as might be expected, hers was an uneven game.”

  She talked very little to anyone, and nothing stuck in the memory of Andrew or his mother. It was Scott who made the more vivid impression on the Turnbulls. Mrs. Turnbull found him a charming man: “He was the only man I’ve ever known who would ask a woman a direct question about herself… He did seem to care and he always told you plain truths about yourself.” She remembers him playing with their children and Scottie, the “marvelous quality of his voice when he recited poetry to the children. How magical that voice was, how it held one—he could have been an excellent actor.” His drinking had bothered her, for the Turnbulls were teetotalers, but a respect for his literary genius eclipsed her memory of that. Mrs. Turnbull remembers, “He was terribly sensitive to criticism— perhaps he was a little guilty about Zelda… he talked a lot about Zelda; she was his invalid. But he only spoke of her charm, her appeal for men, and her brilliance.” She said that he often spoke of Zelda’s great fascination and magnetism—“a true admiration of her judgment.” He seemed sometimes to depend upon her approval. But Mrs. Turnbull could remember no evidence of Zelda’s revealing herself to her. “Oh, she spoke a great deal about trees and used the same words to describe them—repeated herself a good deal. But then we never really spoke to each other. She stayed very much to herself. I used to see her walking like a small shadow along the path by the flower garden. She often walked there, quietly and alone. I thought of her as an invalid. She struck one like a broken clock.”

  A woman who worked as Fitzgerald’s secretary from the time they moved into La Paix until 1938, when she recalls herself “still trying to untangle their bills,” saw Scott and Zelda from a far less romantic point of view than the Turnbulls. When Scott hired her one of his requirements was that the person not be the sort of woman with whom he could possibly fall in love. And vice versa. Scott offered twelve dollars a week for the job and there were lines of women applying for it. This was in the middle of the Depression, and if twelve dollars wasn’t good, if it was steady it wasn’t bad. “It sounded really simple—I didn’t know there would be calls at midnight or four o’clock in the morning! I was a companion, I drove their car, bought canvases and paints for Zelda, played tennis, rode and swam with her.”

  In July Zelda was kept busy correcting proofs of Save Me the Waltz. She was living at home all the time and seeing a psychiatrist at Phipps once a week. By the end of August she had trouble keeping to the schedule set up for her before she left Phipps. Her relationship with both Scott and Scottie grew ominously tense. Frequently she would flare at one of them and then run to her room, locking herself in; on such occasions Scott would try to talk her back downstairs, and if that failed he might slip a note such as this one beneath her door.

  Dearest: I’m writing because I don’t want to start the day with an arguement—though I had thought that what has become controversial was settled before you left the clinic.

  Darling when you shut yourself away for twenty four hours it is not only very bad for you but it casts a pall of gloom and disquiet over the people who love you. To spend any reasonable time in your room has been agreed apon as all right, but this shouldn’t be so exagerated that you can’t manage the social side any further than sitting at table. It would help everything if you could enter a little into Scotty’s life here on the place, and your reluctance to play tennis and swim is a rather reckless withdrawal; for whatever of the normal you subtract from your life will be filled up with brooding and fantasy. If I know that there is exercise scheduled for morning and afternoon and a medical bath in the afternoon & that you have half an hour for us after supper and you stop work at ten, my not very exigent list, insisted upon by Dr. Myers, is complete. When you throw it out of joint I can only sit and wait for the explosion that will follow—a situation not conducive to work or happiness. If this week has been too much it is easy to return to the clinic for three days and it needn’t be done in a spirit of dispair any more than your many returns to Prangins.

  I believe however you are not giving it, giving us, a fair trial here. If I didn’t love you so much your moods wouldn’t affect me so deeply and excitedly. We can’t afford scenes—the best protection is the schedule and then the schedule and again the schedule, and you’ll get strong without knowing it.

  Scott was hospitalized for two weeks that summer. The doctors thought he was ill with typhoid fever; he was not, but he was run down and needed the rest. Maxwell Perkins visited him and described his impressions of their visit in a letter to Hemingway: “Scott and Zelda are living about forty minutes out from Baltimore in a house on a big place that is filled with wonderful old trees. I wanted to walk around and look at the trees, but Scott thought we ought to settle down to gin-rickeys… It was really a fine sort of melancholy place…Scott did not look so well, but he was in fine spirits, and talked a lot.” Scott was drinking hard and at the same time working on Tender Is the Night. He entered in the Ledger, “The novel now plotted and planned, never more to be permanently interrupted.”

  Dr. Thomas Rennie had taken over Zelda’s case at Phipps and Zelda began to feel a far greater rapport with the handsome bachelor than she had with Meyer. The young doctor, who was intensely interested in literature and who had once wanted to become a playwright, was fascinated by both of the Fitzgeralds. He could not, however, help noticing that Zelda’s relations with Scott were growing increasingly difficult, and he tried to check the downward trend.

  Scott’s drinking and daily quarrels with Zelda had reduced their relationship to a constant wrangle. When Zelda was on schedule she wrote in the morning, played tennis before lunch, and painted in the afternoon. In the evening she tried not to have an outburst of temper, but if she did she ret
ired to her own room. She began to plan a new novel, which would deal with madness. The main characters, a man and his wife, were being driven to an asylum by their heartless and selfish daughter. Zelda told Dr. Rennie she wanted to draw a picture of insanity that would be so near the normal that the reader would not discover until the novel’s end that the two characters were already in an asylum. It was a dangerous course she had set out on, because the central theme of Scott’s much revised novel dealt with psychiatry too, and the madness of Nicole Diver, the psychiatrist’s wife. Zelda knew this perfectly well and certainly she realized how distressed Scott had been about Save Me the Waltz, but she again ignored the similarity of their territory.

  On August 29 the Fitzgeralds had a fierce row and Zelda called Rennie, demanding that she be sent to Sheppard-Pratt, a nearby clinic for the treatment of nervous diseases. Rennie explained to her that the goal of therapy was to keep her out of the hospital and help her to function on her own. Both of the Fitzgeralds came to the Phipps clinic late in the afternoon. Scott looked unkempt and clearly had been drinking. Apparently they had argued about Scottie. Rennie set up a rigid schedule for Zelda to follow; she was to try it for a week as a test and see what effects it had on their marriage. She seemed relieved that something definite was expected of her and followed the schedule to the letter—for a while.

  Dr. Rennie saw the Fitzgeralds’ problem in three parts. The first was the struggle between them as creative artists, each jealous of the other. The second was the conflict caused within Zelda by trying to have a career as a writer while at the same time fulfilling the obligations of her home and marriage. The third was their sexual relation to each other. What Rennie had noticed was the growing discrepancy between the Fitzgeralds’ ideas of the roles of husband and wife and the part they were individually prepared (or able) to play. Neither of them was at this point fulfilling his role to the satisfaction of his partner. Scott told Rennie: “In the last analysis, she is a stronger person than I am. I have creative fire, but I am a weak individual. She knows this and really looks upon me as a woman. All our lives, since the days of our engagement, we have spent hunting for some man Zelda considers strong enough to lean upon. I am not. However, I am now so near the breaking point myself that she realizes she has me against the wall and that she can drive me no further. She is a little afraid of me at the present time.” Rennie hoped that the publication of Save Me the Waltz would settle the question of whether or not Zelda was a literary artist of major caliber, and that once that was resolved some of their other problems would fall into place. Events were to prove it a naive expectation.

  Save Me the Waltz was published in October, 1932. Zelda had designed a jacket for the book, but Scribner’s received her work too late to use it. Nevertheless, she wrote Perkins:

  We are delighted with the book. The two figures on the cover are rather reminiscent of some of my own drawings—It’s fine. I only hope it will be as satisfactory to you as it is to me. It certainly is tremendously thick if bulk bulges sales any.

  Scott’s novel is nearing completion. He’s been working like a streak and people who have read it say its wonderful. We wait now till each other’s stuff is copy-righted since I try to more or less absorb his technique and the range of our experience might coincide.

  The novel did not sell well. It is difficult to determine how many copies were printed, but for a first novel in the middle of the Depression the run was probably less than three thousand copies. Zelda wrote Perkins unhappily after publication: “Do you suppose a small add on the ‘dance’ page of the Times or Tribune would help any? Naturally, I am distressed for your sake and mine that the response has been so slight. I had the idea that those special enthusiasts might be interested.”

  Critical reaction to Save Me the Waltz was mixed. Zelda wrote to Perkins, asking him to send for her scrapbook any additional reviews that she might not have seen, and when she received them she thanked him, but said she was sorry she had asked.

  Zelda liked a review written by William McFee for the New York Sun the best; she told Perkins it was “the only intelligible (to me) criticism of the book that I’ve seen so far.” McFee wrote that the novel was obviously autobiographical; he hoped that it would not be denied an audience because the public no longer wanted to be reminded of that era—the period of postwar hoopla among American expatriates on the Riviera and in Paris. He continued:

  …here is a peculiar talent, and connoisseurs of style will have a wonderful time with “Save Me the Waltz.” In this book, with all its crudity of conception, its ruthless purloinings of technical tricks and its pathetic striving after philosophic profundity, there is the promise of a new and vigorous personality in fiction.

  McFee felt that the best scenes were those that dealt with the world of ballet, but that “Alabama’s personality is not sufficiently distinct to sustain interest.”

  In the desperate attempt to be contrary and enigmatic she resembles an insane child. But one has to go on and on to discover what happens to this essentially American marriage. The author occasionally has only the vaguest notion of the meanings of many words she uses, but the effect of the accumulated fantastic metaphors is fascination for all that. Veteran word-mongers will read [it], with envy and a kind of dizzy delight…Passages [like one he had just quoted] give the book an almost alcoholic vitality. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s next novel will be an interesting event.

  Not surprisingly many reviewers noticed that although Zelda covered much of the same ground as Scott she wrote in an entirely different tone. Her work was highly stylized, and the main negative criticism of the novel was its overwriting and lack of careful editing and proofreading. In the book section of the New York Times the reviewer wrote:

  It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader.

  Another reviewer wrote:

  There is a warm, intelligent, undisciplined mind behind Save Me the Waltz. Mrs. Fitzgerald should have had the help she needed to save her book from becoming a laughingstock.

  This was the most strongly expressed criticism of that aspect of the novel, but it came to grips with one of its essential defects. Critics complained of Zelda’s “miasma of a glittering surface smartness” and her reduction of various scenes potentially tragic to a “harlequinade.”

  At about the same time her book was published she was interviewed in Baltimore by a reporter. Zelda told the woman,” ‘Lives aren’t as hard as professions’” (which was a line from Save Me the Waltz). Of the peace-denoting name of La Paix she quipped that she had not named it:” ‘I’d have called it Calvin Coolidge, Jr…because it’s so pleasantly mute.’” She said that a woman must be a goddess to direct her own life (a sentiment she had put in Judge Beggs’ mouth in her novel) and a goddess is one who manages to keep her purposes aloof from a woman’s ordinary lot:” ‘In working hard for a goal… a woman pushes out her own horizons.’” The article continued, quoting Zelda:

  Security, Mrs. Fitzgerald defines as something rather like money in the bank.

  “And whether you make it or some one else does, represents the two kinds of peace in this world—to me, of course. But I don’t mean that happiness or the glorious sense of using what abilities we have has any financial side to it…When I was nineteen… I thought Botticelli was unbeautiful because the women in the Primavera did not look like the girls in the Follies.

  “But now I don’t expect Ann Pennington to hold the same charm for me as a Matisse odalisque.

  “And for me, it’s easier to take than give, since the sense of my own needs has become stronger for me than my sense of other people.”

  Save Me the Waltz sold 1,392 copies. Its poor sales plus the high cost of Zelda’s revisions in both galley and page proofs made the clause about $5,000 from her royalties being used to pay off Scott’s indebtedness to Scribner’s meaningless. Zelda earned $120.73 from her novel and Max
Perkins sent her a check for the full amount on August 2, 1933. Perkins told her:

  Maybe I ought to have warned you about corrections for they came to a great deal. I knew they would, when the proofs began coming back, but I knew you wanted to get the book the way you thought it ought to be. The result won’t be encouraging to you, and I have not liked to ask you whether you were writing any more because of that fact, but I do think the last part of that book in particular, was very fine; and that if we had not been in the depths of a depression, the result would have been quite different. But as it was, nothing got any show unless it were by some writer already noted for earlier successes, or had some very special salience.

  Malcolm Cowley, too, had read Save Me the Waltz, and thought well enough of it to write Fitzgerald:

  It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before. The women who write novels are usually the sort who live spiritually in Beloit, Wisconsin, even when they are getting drunk at the Select. Zelda has a different story to tell.

  Throughout the fall Zelda worked on her new novel, the one that dealt with psychiatric material and her own hospitalization. Scott was beside himself with anger and in a long forceful letter to Dr. Rennie said he thought they had all agreed that he was to finish his novel before Zelda took up any extended piece of fiction, and she was violating that promise. “But in her subconscious there is a deathly terror that I may make something very fine in the use of this material of ‘ours,’ that I may preclude her making something very fine.”