“What right have you to stop me?” The boy was angry at his rights being contested. He had found the thing. It was his—or more his than hers anyway.
Maybe she didn’t have a right.
“There are lots of other more felicitous things to do—a little further on in the pare,” she proffered fairly.
“Don’t you want to see me make a poppa?” This unidentified operation held possibilities of interest; her curiosity wavered.
“What’s that?” It had an interesting sound anyway, like the decapping of a bottle of soda-watter.
Mysterious voices begin to advise Janno to stop her brother, but she is afraid to.
Before she could say anything, her brother had his thumb in the eye-sockets and the child died of horror as the eye-ball came out in a film of white plasm. It was a pale blue eye; and that was the first indication that the thing he was playing with was a corpse.
Janno screams in horror as her brother tries to remove the remaining eye. “That God would let this happen had broken her heart forever and that was the way she would live.” She runs from the scene “because she didn’t want to cause any trouble” and lies down beneath a big oak tree. While lying there Janno is visited by God in a splendor of piercing white light: “The light was Charity, the Justice of Cause and Effect and INFINITE MAJESTY.”
The action of the novel continues as if it were a natural order of events. Two men, apparently interns from the hospital, carry Janno home; she has a fever and is about to the. (“Janno was dead, and dying.…”) Her brother is already at home when they bring her in and is lying on a couch with his face to the wall. Janno tries to apologize to him, but he only snarls at her. Her father’s voice reaches her as if from far away. Abruptly the novel has again shifted gears and the reader realizes that they are no longer in the home, but in a hospital where Janno has been taken for the night. The Judge is saying, “‘You’ve ruined her, now you can keep her.’” Shortly thereafter the story line totally disintegrates. Then the author steps in to provide another strangely formal commentary:
A successful life is able to summon to memory few episodes of the past save the contributing factors to success, but a soul fallen into the hands of psychiatrists find the seeds of nervous disorder and even abberation scattered plentifully over the past.… She forgot all about this year of her life until she was grown, and married and tragedy had revivified its traces—as she then saw, carved from the beginning.
Zelda’s implication is that there was a biographical equivalent in her own life for the action that has taken place in Janno’s. If there was, it is unrecorded. All we can know is that Janno’s fantasy (never admitted as fantasy within the text), alive with images of mutilation and death, seems to be grounded on the simplest level in the fear of the consequences of disobeying her father’s authority. No one from her family comes to her rescue or assistance, and uncertain even whether she is alive, dying, or dead, Janno is completely at the mercy of those in the hospital (which need not be taken literally as a hospital at all, but could stand for any sort of institution—family, marriage, school). By the end of this scene Janno is totally rejected by her father, as well as by her brother. And, in a pattern that becomes central to the novel, there are revelations, a vision of God, strange and provocative “voices” which warn and direct Janno, which do nothing to alleviate the terror of the child, and lead her instead only deeper into the nightmare of her existence. Her voices become part of the natural order of the novel. She is moved by them; she is defenseless against them.
The third chapter begins with the death of Janno’s grandmother and the throwing away of her things. Janno is sent to school for the first time, but she doesn’t like it and runs away. It is decided that she may remain at home another year (as Zelda had in Montgomery). Janno wanders down to the springhouse where butter and fresh milk were kept; in an adjacent trough of water Negresses wash clothes. Janno decides to wash her doll’s clothes. A voice speaks to her from the well, telling her that she’s washing in an “antiquated method.” Janno ignores the advice. Then there are more voices and they turn grim; they suggest that Janno jump into the well, and their “authority was dark and ominous.” They offer her a golden kingdom which has been awaiting her. But she doesn’t want to jump; she’s afraid she won’t be able to get back out. The voices promise her food; she can become a Lorelei. The well goes through to China, the voices tell her, to a “golden kingdom asleep—a fat old China king and rich courts, sleeping forever, forever counting his money.” Still Janno refuses to leap in and goes home.
Another day she returns to the well. Its voices question her: has she learned Latin, can she play the piano? She regrets that she has neither of these accomplishments. Suddenly the well and the countryside around it begin to change before her eyes. It becomes a theatre curtain, the curtain “melts” and in its place “was the green room, and oak-panelled corridor and people in heated argument.” They are talking light-heartedly about scenes of violence: “seduction, theft, kid-napping and murder.” Janno wants to know what happened. She says it doesn’t make sense; the voices reply, “Far more sense than you do.” She says she tries to make sense and leaves the room. There is blood in the hallway; Janno waits and the scene changes again.
Two men and a woman sit at a long table, large enough for twelve. One of the men is in uniform, “at least a colonel”; he carries a sword “which rested in challenge with its tip on the floor.” The other man is pale, “chestnut-haired and fragile; he seemed to be on some other than the conventional relationship with the woman.” The military man says he does not accuse the pale man, but he cannot accept treason, and he intends to defend the honor of the house. The woman is wan. The men accuse her of looking “dissolute, but she was tired from self-abnegatory spiritual effort: the keeping of many rigorous and more materialistic obligations than a person was able.” A “Nubian” pours her something to drink from a gold cup. She realizes that it will kill her if she drinks; she can see a powder dissolving to “mucus” in the cup; “she leaned back in tragic defiance.”
Janno, who is not part of the scene, but only observing it, knows that if the woman does not drink from the cup her head will be cut off by the Nubian; Janno is, however, too exhausted to worry about how it comes out. The scene is summarized: “The weak dark man who seemed to have other things on his mind was evaluating. He acknowledged to no relationship with the woman other than as a good friend of the husband. After [a] while, when the colonel had challenged him and withdrawn, the pale man said, ‘I wanted the jewels as much as the woman. The pearls were my family heritage.’ “
Suppose that the uniformed colonel, the “weak dark man” is Jozan. He challenges “the pale man,” who may or may not be the woman’s husband, i.e., Scott. But whatever the colonel’s relationship to the woman has been, he now abandons her and withdraws from the scene. The pale man is no more interested in the woman than he is in “the jewels…The pearls,” and in essence both men have abandoned her. They turn on her and accuse her of being debauched. Her reply is similar to the language Zelda uses when discussing her mental illness, and seems to have nothing to do with the situation at hand. But nothing can be taken literally. What is the cup, and why is it gold? Why mucus? What jewels? The scene could be a distorted mirroring of Zelda’s self at various stages of life. The little girl, Janno-Zelda, views the young woman, who may represent an older Zelda, as foredoomed in her dilemma, and is incapable of doing anything to change the course of her life. But like symbols in a dream, or in a poem, there is no one meaning.
Following this scene is a series of fragmented fantasies which are completely impenetrable. At one point Janno is sitting on a throne in a bright light and doctors are conferring about “the case and they decided that in case of death they would proceed with the regular medical routine.” It is this sense of being handled or manipulated, of being a “case,” of being unable to alter or control what is happening to her, even of being moved helplessly toward her death, while being a
witness of it, that gives the novel its terrifying air of nightmare.
In an abrupt time switch Janno begins to grow out of childhood; Zelda stresses her faulty upbringing, which makes her unsure of herself. She worries about her popularity with boys, and even more about her own standards of behavior. “Janno…wished that her mother had told her not to go like that with the boys; she wished that there had been rules and prescriptions for right. But there wasn’t.” In a passage punctuated by strange warnings about Christ’s right and the ways of the Lord, Zelda writes about Janno’s feelings of social inferiority.
Then something happened: they had better clothes than she did, and better manners, and she had better accept their standards of conduct. It was clearly a threat.… Then the boys assumed the air of authorized committee “You won’t have any friends—nobody else will come to see you. That I promise you.”…They went up to the haunted school-yard so deep in shadows and creaking with felicities of murder to the splintery old swing and she was so miserable and trusting that her heart broke and for many years after she didn’t want to live.…
Whatever happened to Janno in the schoolyard is suggested but left unsaid. Later in the manuscript Zelda writes that what happened to Janno was “the kind of thing one forgets.… until years later.… [when] this sort of thing looms up in a different light. It is then no longer a departure from an habitual rectitude, but a presage of the disasters which finally came; a monstrous weakness pervading life until finally it has prevailed, and declared that to corrupt and to degrade had always been its intent.” The manuscript is immersed in this sense of doom. Nothing is what it seems. The past holds only the seeds of future decay and corruption.
Janno’s romance with Jacob begins on a different footing. To her he is from the first a romantic figure and she imagines him living in a world totally different from her own. She makes up stories about him. “In some of the dreams he lived in a dark mahogany-haunted house with ferns and red-coated ancestors and sometimes he lived at various Country-clubs.” He is a young lieutenant stationed in Janno’s Southern town during World War I; he comes in with the army and he leaves with Janno. She has been equivocal about marrying him for a while, but she thinks (as Zelda had) that you can marry or you can be a stenographer, and “life was gayer and the things of marriage were more familiar to a young girl than the disciplines of offices.” In passages clotted with images of violence and destruction the author establishes what will become the dominant tone of the marriage. She forecasts disaster and moves toward it relentlessly.
“So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.” Zelda uses the word “desperate” in its most literal sense, thereby extending the slang phrase into a darker area of meaning. Janno and Jacob drink, shoot good golf, and (as Zelda becomes apocalyptic again) survive on the “possibility, and hope, of sin.” Zelda calls this phase of Janno’s life “Nemesis incubating,” adding that she tried to adopt Jacob’s taste, failing miserably.
And Janno, who is not content to become Jacob’s “evocateur” (“to him women were agents—evocateurs of his own grace”), begins to examine Jacob’s relationship with other women in his life. She concentrates on the women in his family, for it was toward them (or in reaction against them) that she believes his attitudes were formed.
He hated his sister.… largely because he never could find out what it was about her that he so heartily resented. He hated his mother because…he blamed her for the failure of his life. He hated Janno for the same reason but this did not come to light until many years later when it really had become difficult to make money and some of his portraits were—O well, over the garage in case they were ever wanted again.
The same cool, even cold, observation is given to Jacob’s person and mannerisms.
Jacob went on doing whatever it was that Jacob did; he was always doing something with pencils or pieces of string or note-books or things which he found in his wallet; this made him absent-minded and preoccupied and also gave savour of material purpose. He was more important than Janno; she always felt as if she should be helpful about his tinkerings; they were intricate enough to need an assistant.
Their marriage begins to fall apart: Jacob drinks too much, but when Janno asks him to stop he tells her to mind her own business. Janno is not able to cope with Jacob’s increasing success as a portrait painter. She envies New York, where they are living; its “wondrous chic…the nail-polish and orchids, the hushed florescence of the gilded restaurants, the subdued arrogance of people who really had much to lose, the disciplined pomp of winter hotels, the swish of leisure” intimidate her.
Jacob has a flirtation with a nineteen-year-old girl he has been commissioned to paint. Janno thinks the girl “vulgar” and feels strangled by her own inability to do anything other than watch. Suddenly Jacob decides to go to Europe; Janno does not want to go, but her husband “never tolerated any policies of inertia.” And then the about-face. Tacked on this description of the early days of their marriage is Janno’s comment that Jacob is really a “sweet man,” sweet because he gives her presents on holidays. “She was grateful and devoted; promising gratitude and devotion to God for having sent him. She was a lucky girl.…”
At the opening of the sixth chapter, entitled “Over here, over there…Flight,” they arrive in Paris and once again enter the world of sophisticated wisecracking and general discontent. Janno is busy “redecorating the gilded cage.” Their time is spent at the Ritz bar, to which they are described as superior. But the entire opening is weighted with bitterness and irony. They run into chic people to whom Janno is “socially deferential.” She must pretend to admire them, all the while abhorring their taste and pretentiousness. “Everybody liked them as standard millionaires the same way a good hotel or a crack train is appreciated. They were able.”
At the parties among the rich Janno feels the restlessness, she and Jacob and the others must move on to other parties, driven by the idea “that somewhere else might be nearer the center.” Jacob’s flirtatiousness makes her unhappy.
Janno had always been jealous. Situations which had to be faced with dishonesty and endured for the sake of a code to which she did not subscribe made her sick. She couldn’t say to Jacob, “I don’t want you to go, you’re obligated to me. Anyway she’s not as nice as I am.” She sat being tragically poignantly courageous and saying to herself that after all, such was all in the game. This sophistry disoriented her momentarily and by the time she had organized an adequate humility to meet the humiliation the two people had got away and the table settled to another rhythm. The party went somewhere else and rattled negligibly along where the night was padded in red leather cushions.
“Now listen,” the baron kept saying, “you ought to be making something out of a promising girl like you.”
It was gratifying to feel that one might be a financial asset. However, she was making something of herself: the best she was able, under the circumstances. All these bedraggled wan spectres seemingly so immersed in the pattern of tragic futility were very much engaged in turning accident into memoir. They imagined things about themselves, then forgot the thread of the current romance and disintegrated through the fumes of the night in search of the story of their lives.
Couples begin to pair off, but Janno is excluded; she does not want to be left out, but she cannot participate in affairs such as those taking place right under her nose. “During the first shock of infidelities the realization that the ties in which one has invested are nevertheless perishable gives poignancy.” Janno realizes that she can’t force Jacob “to feel fidelity,” therefore she “trooped her colours and accepted this, the custom of the country, with tragedy, regret and compensation.”
Eventually, however, Janno leaves one of the parties with a Mr. Fish, and they drive out to St. Cloud, kissing and drinking wine until the morning. At the end of the scene in St. Cloud Janno makes a moral pronouncement, “This is wrong,” and she and Fish leave.
Jacob disapproves of Janno’s staying out all night, but he is in no position to protest. Finally he decides to forget it and presents her with a golden necktie. Janno calls it “a gala emblem.” Jacob replies, “I’ll let you wear it sometime—next time you want to hang yourself for instance.’ And the conversation is left at that, as if it were a clever bon mot.
Janno and Jacob meet the Comings, a rich couple who own a house in St. Cloud set in a magnificent pebbled garden. The description of the couple and their house, with its black glass tables and gilded ceilings, recalls the Murphys; what is unexpected is the undertone of irony and dislike in Zelda’s description of them: “He and Charity put much effort into human relationships; having friends made such a difference.” Their house is filled with hundreds of dollars’ worth of the most recent magazines from America. Corning insists upon two Bacardi cocktails before meals; it is only one of the minor details in his plan for a correct evening. The Comings give wonderful dinners “to the stars and to migratory Americans and to French people of consequence; not on the same evening.” But there is a tradition, Zelda writes, “amongst the rich and famous that they have earned the right to know the people they want.…”
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