Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  On September 28, 1940, Scott wrote to Zelda: “Autumn comes—I am forty-four—nothing changes.” He noted that Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls had been taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club and asked Zelda if she remembered “how superior he used to be about mere sales?” He told her about a tea that was being given at Dorothy Parker’s to which he thought he’d go. Zelda had forgotten his birthday and when she remembered she wired him immediately saying she was sorry, but she had lost her sense of time “due to being segregated from life and its problems,” and added a note of hurt at his no longer being with her. He had, she wrote, her “deepest impersonal gratitude for the many happy times we spent together—though it was long ago.”

  In his next weekly letter Scott told her he’d felt “passé” at the tea party among a younger generation, and decided to buy himself a new suit. He still complained of a fever and cough, but was improving; “the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race.” He told her he’d really try to come East at Christmas. He said his room looked like the study at La Paix, covered with notes and charts for his new novel. It was going to be shorter than Tender, more like Gatsby, closely patterned and tight. He aimed at completion the middle of December. “I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy.” Other man working on it, he did little but listen to the Princeton football games on the radio and follow the war reports from Europe.

  In the nostalgic mood which now often imbued Zelda’s letters she wrote: “Mamma’s little house is so sunshine-y and so full of grace; the moated mornings remind me of twenty-five years ago when life was as full of promise as it now is of memory. There were wars then, and now…but the race had more gallantry at that time and the more romantic terms in which we took life helped us through.”

  Scott’s life with Sheilah Graham was a quiet one; she remembers him working in a faded blue dressing gown with lots of pencils around, one always behind his ear, a tuft of hair sticking up corkscrew-like, for he pulled at it as he wrote. But when he prepared to go out he dressed very carefully in an old Brooks jacket and pink shirt. He liked bow ties and he often wore sweaters. Buff Cobb used to say he looked like a cross between Lucius Beebe and Baudelaire. He was entirely unathletic and fretted about his health. Miss Graham remembers with amusement how he would order the swimming pool on an estate where they had rented a cottage filled for her, and then stand on the shady side of the pool giving her instructions. “The only thing we did together that was at all athletic was to play ping pong. We always had a ping pong table set up. Scott would be very funny, cross his eyes when he served, do pirouettes, that sort of thing and it was just killing. He was a very gay man when he felt well and it was an infectious gaiety—he would literally choke with laughter. Strange words amused him. We used to go to a delicatessen, a Jewish delicatessen, and he would ask the names of things. I think ‘knish’ just floored him. He would ask again and again for it just to hear it pronounced.”

  Sometimes they talked about Zelda, with Scott showing Miss Graham some of her letters. She said he told her so much about the South that she could taste it—about the heat and the girls putting their make-up on first and then getting in the bath to cool off until their dates arrived, and then dressing. He said he had once fought a duel for Zelda’s honor with her French aviator and that he had never loved her as well as when he had to fight for her. The duel, he said, was exactly as he had written it in Tender Is the Night.

  On a gray Thursday afternoon in late November, 1940, Scott left Sheilah Graham for twenty minutes to get a pack of cigarettes at Schwab’s drugstore. He returned ashen and shaky. He told her he had almost fainted at the drugstore. The following morning he went to the doctor for a check-up and found that he had experienced a cardiac spasm. On December 6, 1940, he wrote Zelda that he was lucky he had not suffered a major heart attack and if he was careful not to overtire himself he would recover. He told her Scottie planned to visit her at Christmas and he envied their being together. “Everything is my novel now—it has become of absorbing interest.” But he realized that it would take him until February to complete. One week later he was writing her that another cardiogram showed that slowly his heart was repairing itself. “It is odd that the heart is one of the organs that does repair itself.”

  In order to avoid the strain of climbing stairs he moved into Sheilah Graham’s apartment on the first floor; his had been on the third. He made her promise not to discuss his case with the doctor when he was not present, and she did not. They set up a writing board which could be moved into place over his bed or arm chair. He was completely engrossed in his book. He canceled a doctor’s appointment on Friday, December 20, in order to work out a problem in his writing. That night, having solved the quandary, he and Sheilah decided to celebrate and go to a press preview at the Pant-ages Theatre of This Thing Called Love. Standing before a mirror as he dressed to leave, he gave a last straightening touch to his bow tie and told her teasingly that he’d always wanted to be a dandy.

  When the movie was over and they began to leave the theatre, Scott suddenly lurched forward, grabbing the armrest of his seat to steady himself. As Sheilah came to his side he told her he felt everything begin to go as it had that earlier afternoon at Schwab’s. But the air outside made him feel better and they went home. The next morning Scott, dressed in slacks, shirt, and a pullover, dictated a letter to Scottie. He talked a lot about his daughter that morning, about how pleased he was with her and how well she was doing at school. He said the one thing he wanted was to see her finish Vassar. After lunch while waiting for the doctor to arrive, he settled into an armchair before the fireplace and began making notes in the Princeton Alumni Weekly on an article about the football team. He was eating a chocolate bar. Suddenly he stood up, reached for the mantel and then collapsed to the floor. In a moment he was dead.

  Harold Ober called Zelda and told her of Scott’s death. At first she could not believe it. On Christmas Day she wrote Ober:

  In retrospect it seems as if he was always planning happinesses for Scottie and for me. Books to read—places to go. Life seemed so promisory always when he was around: and I always believed that he could take care of anything.

  It seems so useless and purposeless that I won’t be able to tell him about all this. Although we were not close anymore, Scott was the best friend a person could have been to me.…

  Zelda was not able to attend Scott’s funeral in Rockville, Maryland, on December 27 and asked her brother-in-law, Newman Smith, to go in her stead. It was a raw wintry day and only a handful of Scott’s friends were there: Judge Biggs, Gerald and Sara Murphy, the Perkinses and Obers, Ludlow Fowler, the Turnbulls and Scottie with some of her friends. The Protestant service was simple and brief. Scott was denied the Catholic burial he had wanted because he had not died within the church. His books were proscribed. Therefore, he was not buried in the old tiny Catholic cemetery among the Scotts, the Keys, and the Fitzgeralds, but close by in the Rockville Union Cemetery. Afterward Scottie went to Montgomery to spend a few days with Zelda.

  On the day of Scott’s funeral Edmund Wilson wrote Zelda from his home in Stamford, Connecticut:

  I have been so terribly shocked by Scott’s death. I had had two letters from him lately, in which he had sounded as if he were getting along well with his book.— Though I hadn’t seen much of him of recent years, we had a sort of permanent relationship, due to our having known one another at college & having started in writing at the same time. It has brought so many things back—the days when you & he arrived in New York together—& I have been thinking about you a lot these last few days. I know how you must feel, because I feel myself as if I had been suddenly robbed of some part of my own personality—since there must have been some aspect of myself that had been developed in relation to him.

  Zelda was touched by his letter and told him of her grief. She had known Scott was ill, but she could not believe that he would never come East again fo
r her. Never again “with his pockets full of promise and his heart full of new refurbished hopes.” She mentioned to Wilson that Maxwell Perkins told her he wanted to publish the manuscript Scott left. She very much wanted this done, “as I have always felt that a genius has a right to live as long as the scene which evoked him (or he evoked). I thought that the bitter haunted stories in Esquire were very compelling and might warrant publication—

  “Posthumous works seem to gain favor of late.”

  In a letter to Rosalind she expressed herself more personally. She said Scott would be remembered, for he had “kept too many midnight vigils for others,” younger or less fortunate writers than he, not to be. “I am proud of his literary achievements, and of his faithful courage. All the long months he spent by my side in Switzerland, and the reams of hospital bills and diagnoses he bore so uncomplainingly are more poignant in retrospect than they were adequately appreciated at the time.” There was a certain pride in these statements to her sister, for they emphasized her unity with Scott, rather than their hard times. She told her sister she knew Scott was quick-tempered, but she balanced that by talking about his good looks, his talent, and his considerable charm, which won them friends wherever they went. “I miss him—that he isn’t somewhere, pursuing the policies that sustained him… is going to be a grievous loss.”

  Zelda was more alone now than she had ever been. It was true that she had not seen Scott for over a year and a half, but he had written her every week. On Fitzgerald’s part these letters were to his invalid, but there was something more of himself invested in them than that word suggests. She was the person who had shared his life when it was most worth sharing. Only to her could he admit how forgotten he had become, because only Zelda knew fully how well known he had been. Their shared pasts did not give them grounds for the future, both had admitted that, but it gave them an intimacy that was immune to further alteration. With Scott gone Zelda retreated more and more deeply into their past, where things had been the best she’d known. Young men would now and then come to her as Scott’s widow and she was kind to them, talking about Paris and writing and Hemingway and Scott, telling them things they were eager to hear, and then making them promise before they left never to smoke or drink.

  She had her mother and she had Scottie. But certainly she could not hope to share Scottie’s life in any real sense of that word. For years now she had been forced to accept reduced circumstances, not only in the sense of diminished finances, but of diminished relations with people. With Scott dead her life would become largely a matter of recollecting, and when it was not, of a courageous effort to face her recurring illness and live with it.

  Maxwell Perkins showed Edmund Wilson the manuscript of The Last Tycoon, asking him if he thought it was worth publishing. Wilson said that it was and agreed to edit it for nothing, Perkins’s terms. Scott’s death had been unsettling to Wilson and going through his notes for the novel must have been even more so, for in the process of editing The Last Tycoon, Wilson came to realize Scott’s splendid literary gifts with greater intensity and admiration than ever before. When he was finished he placed Fitzgerald among the best of his generation.

  Among the copious notes for the novel that Scott had been making since at least 1937 was a working title, The Love of the Last Tycoon, subtitled “A Western.” It was published in October, 1941, in a volume with The Great Gatsby, “May Day,” “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz,” “The Rich Boy,” “Absolution,” and “Crazy Sunday.” Shortly after its publication (which was ten months after Fitzgerald’s death), Stephen Vincent Benét reviewed the novel. In the review he struck a note that has reverberated through nearly three decades: “…the evidence is in. You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and, seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.” He would have agreed with a note Scott made to himself while working on The Last Tycoon: “I’m the last of the novelists for a long time now.”

  After Zelda read the novel she wrote Wilson her own assessment of Scott’s reputation: “Surely when future generations look for an indicative measure of the tragic and ominous imperatives which have been life to this one, Scott’s work will have become a source.…” She thought that there was an American temperament grounded in belief in oneself and “will-to-survive” that Scott’s contemporaries had relinquished. Scott, she insisted, had not. His work possessed a vitality and stamina because of his indefatigable faith in himself.

  She did not like the heroine, and in the same letter to Wilson she told him Kathleen was “undesirable: the sort of person who knows how to turn the ice-man’s advances to profitable account.” A week later she wrote Mrs. Turnbull in the same vein except that her jealousy of the heroine was more transparent. She may not have known of the specific existence of Sheilah Graham before Scott’s death, but she certainly sensed and resented the intrusion of another feminine model in Fitzgerald’s prose: “I confess that I don’t like the heroine, she seems the sort of person who knows too well how to capitalize the unwelcome advances of the ice-man and who smells a little of the rubber-shields in her dress. However, I see how Stahr might have found her redolent of the intimacies of forgotten homely glamours, and his imagination have endowed her with the magical properties of his early authorities.”

  “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.…”

  FITZCERALD, The Great Gatsby

  20

  AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF The Last Tycoon, probably in 1942, Zelda began writing a novel called Caesar’s Things. She never finished the book, but she worked on it throughout the rest of her life. When she died she left a typed manuscript of 135 pages which were divided into seven chapters (the last in rough draft), as well as several fragments involving the same cast of characters, which were presumably to be worked into the novel.

  As early as 1940, in a letter to Scott about a short story she was sending to him, Zelda stated an attitude that had begun to mark all her writing. “Although you may not like it, and may find it moralistic, it conveys a message that I would be most grateful to put across: that the story of life is of far deeper implication in religious terms.” By the summer of 1942 she was writing Mrs. Turnbull: “I am trying to write a novel with the thematic intent of inducting the Biblical pattern of life into its everyday manifestations.” Taken together these two statements suggest a possible key to Caesar’s Things. The problem is that Zelda’s religious fervor seems to have been closely linked to the most delusional aspects of her illness, and therefore what might have been the central thematic device of the novel is instead the most forced and peculiar portion of her book. Its subject was once again the story of Zelda’s life. Only this time the reader confronts the rigidity of Zelda’s psychosis head on, and the novel moves at a strained pace, swinging in and out of fantasies whose meanings are known only to the author. It is a sort of collage of autobiographical writing, fantasy, and religiosity. There is no sum of the parts of this novel, but only the parts themselves, truncated and wildly incoherent.

  The novel seems to have originally been written in the first person, but haphazardly throughout the manuscript the J was changed to she, or Janno, the narrator’s name. (All of the main characters’ names begin with the letter J: Janno’s husband’s name is Jacob, her French aviator’s name is Jacques, as it was in Save Me the Waltz. There is a confusion of names for Jacob. He is introduced as “Harold,” but that name is dropped almost immediately to be replaced by either “Jacob” or “Jacques”; most often he is “Jacob.” Fitzgerald had used a number of names beginning with J, Jay Gatsby, Judy Jones, and Jordan Baker among them, but whatever Zelda’s intentions may have been on this score they remain impene
trable.)

  More than half of the book, the first four chapters, deals with Janno’s youth in a small town in the South, and although the town is not named, it is Montgomery. Chapters Five and Six and the incomplete Chapter Seven are about Janno’s marriage to Jacob (who is a painter as David was in Save Me the Waltz) and the gradual dissolution of their marriage as they move from New York to Paris and the Riviera.

  Janno is the youngest girl in a large family. Her father is a judge. She has an older brother whom she adores and follows. He is called “Monsieur,” which was one of Zelda’s nicknames for Scott. (Within the Sayre family, “Mister” had been Anthony Sayre’s nickname.) One day the family moves into a small house across from which a hospital is being built. The Judge warns Janno and her brother to stay away from the building site. He gives them no reason, but he suggests that trouble is expected there that afternoon. (Later in the manuscript the Judge says a new wing is being added for “psychiatrists to practice in.”) Both children are intrigued by the building and the brother, disobeying his father and leaving Janno behind, runs off to play there. Janno walks down to the end of her street and begins to tell herself a story; she wants to follow her brother, but is uneasy about his disobedience.

  Suddenly Janno starts to run toward the hospital. She falls. “The child was dead from strain, and effort, and excitement. She clung across the dried grass with the stubble sticking into her mouth, ‘if you will only let me get there—let me get there lest such obscenity should be—’ “Janno picks herself up and begins to run again. She hears the sound of violent whacking “and cries of a spectral ball-game reverberated through the lone air.” Perhaps her brother is playing ball, perhaps not; she wants to make sure. She is terrified as she approaches the spot where she thinks her brother is playing. She sees him astride something that looks like a scarecrow; the ground around him is in considerable disorder. Janno yells at him to stop whatever he is doing. The language of the little girl becomes stilted and oddly formal as if, within a scene that is becoming increasingly violent and surreal, Janno’s is the voice of balance, reason, and justice. She makes moralistic pronouncements on the action.