Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  All of the Coming’s parties have the air of having been rehearsed. The only thing Zelda says Corning worries about is never having lost his temper: he is afraid it is a defect of temperament. He perfects “his garden, his gadgets, his graces, his retainers, his dependents, his children,” each with the same attention to detail. He misses only one thing according to the narrator, “love.” He is charming and impersonal; the love he says he gives is, in the narrator’s estimation, “parental solicitude.”

  “Corning said, ‘I want all these people to love one another because I love all of them—’…The guests obediently loved him: everything was so good and so new and so well-dramatized; he gave them some more.”

  “Now this was paradise,” begins Zelda’s last chapter, echoing David’s reaction to the Riviera in Save Me the Waltz. “We are now in Paradise—as nearly as we’ll ever get.…” Janno and Jacob are on the Riviera and Zelda tells of the young wife’s romance with a French aviator, Jacques. It is related in greater detail than in Save Me the Waltz. Janno and Jacob have met the son of an advocate “and several young flying officers from the depot at Frejus.… The flying officer who looked like a Greek God was aloof.”

  They meet at a pavilion set back from the sea, facing the ring of bright lights strung in a crescent around the perimeter of the shore. Jacob insists that Janno begin a conversation with the officer, but she is reluctant.

  Janno was vaguely baffled by the pleasurable expectancy which she felt concerning the French lieutenant.… life suddenly offered possibilities to a reckless extravagance which she didn’t like. She had premonitions of wanton adventure.

  Jacob is rather bored; he

  didn’t really like the sitting around in a wet bathing-suit and he hated the taste of sand. He liked expatiating about values and origins and was exhaustive in his way of making the stories of people fit into his impetuous pre-conclusions about them. He kept nagging and asking and third-degreeing his acquaintances till it all made acceptable continuity with what he thought it ought to be dramaticly. He said people had to have friends. She didn’t have to have anything save the baby and him and a pint of wine with meals.

  The setting is permeated with a sense of furtiveness, concealment, and utter confusion. The villa on the Mediterranean becomes a place of seclusion, a “secret house,” hidden by the lushness of the landscape, a “design of escape,” a place “for the heart to the or the world be hid.…”

  When Janno again meets Jacques he immediately invites her to his apartment. “She said she would; she was horrified. She could not possibly not do so.” Apparently Janno’s idea of herself forces her to go to Jacques; she is driven into a tryst not because she is dominated by love, but because she is afraid of it. To succumb to her fear would be a weakness, a violation of her code, and therefore she must confront it. But there is at no point in the chapter a clarification of the romance and only by ominous reactions to it can we feel the author’s point of view.

  Unable to reconcile or resolve the conflicts between her heroine’s feelings, her behavior, and convention, Zelda allows Janno to escape all responsibility for her actions by blaming destiny.

  She could not bring herself to deny her love its right of hearing, of clarification. She could go and see what in this destiny was ultimately inalienable; let issues declare themselves so that they might be faced and mastered. It was confused because she so hardly spoke the language and she was never quite sure about what she was saying.… One night the lights went out in the brine-blown pavillion. She danced with Jacques while the others drank the really good champagne on the porch.… Janno forgot to think. The lightning played about mysteriously and the night swayed black with arbitrary might outside. She kissed Jacques on the neck. It doesn’t matter now. The storm raged; this might be the end of the world. One was afraid; it might be God’s mal-diction. The kiss lasted a long time and there were two of them. She did not mean to do this; and when the dance was over and she joined the others, and put the matter aside. The young French officer treated her preciously and she knew that no matter what it was it would be tragedy and death; ruin is a relative matter.

  If she loved him anyway she could not possibly hurt her husband and her child.… If she loved him, she could not possibly love him and live with another: she wouldn’t be able. If she loved him, there wasn’t any answer.

  The trouble was she should never have kissed him. First, she should never have kissed Jacques; then she shouldn’t have kissed her husband; then after the kissing had become a spiritual vivisection and half-massochistic there should not have been any more. Life in those darkened days behind the blinds with unidentified purposes humming outside and poitesses [?] hanging abeyant and reproachful over the inside, was venemous and poisoned. There wasn’t much in calling the doctor; though she did. He prescribed champagne.

  Janno considers her relationship to Jacques almost exclusively in terms of ruination, and Zelda’s writing is made uncertain by her circling around the situation. Jacob seems completely unaware of what is happening. “Jacob littered his fire-place with duplicates from his files and receipts for his insurance and cigarette-butts and pencil stubs and wine bottles. Then he shoved the screen across the disarray and tipped the maid a little extra and was absolved.” Eventually, Janno asks herself, “How was she going to live if she did run off; if he [Jacob] did acknowledge the situation? What was he supposed to do?” Janno daydreams “that she would come back over the red clay where the sharp pines shed the blood of summer some day and the. This was probably the influence of Byron. It was a sad love affair holding no promise and too impassioned to be dignified.” Then suddenly Jacob acts: “‘I’ll get out of here as soon as I can. In the meantime, you are not to leave these premises—You understand?’

  “Of course she understood, a locked door is not difficult of comprehension. So she told her husband that she loved the French officer and her husband locked her up in the villa.” She reads books and no longer goes to the beach. She desperately wants to see Jacques. But she makes no attempt to; Janno remains essentially passive, both in her love and in her thinking about it. The scene never closes, and the manuscript dwindles away after a discourse on adultery. There are a few more pages, but the life and love that Zelda has been trying to describe, which are beyond Janno’s control, are also beyond hers. Beyond even making an effort toward control. It is that failure that mars the entire novel and gives it its floating, directionless quality.

  The writing of Caesar’s Things occupied the last six years of Zelda’s life, years without Scott, years of quiet balance punctuated by spells of relapse. It is a difficult novel to read and to understand not only because it is fragmentary and at times incoherent, but because of the peculiarity of Zelda’s grammar, her piling of image upon image, her displacement of conventional syntax.

  There are a number of fragments that accompany the novel and there is a characteristic that they share: each hovers on the edge of something about to happen. There is always a portentous ambience, a precarious situation which remains unfulfilled. Nothing is resolved. And a word Zelda uses again and again is exigency. The novel itself seems to be in this state: situations press, but the characters are held immobile. Zelda reveals a confused anguish as she reviews her life. Caesar’s Things ends where it does by no accident, for Zelda is up against a decisive incident from her sane life and she cannot cope with it in conventional terms. She dodges the implications of Janno’s affair with Jacques and its effects upon her marriage to Jacob, just as it seems Zelda had done in her romance with Jozan. The covertness of her setting on the Riviera underlines the mood of the affair itself, and Zelda’s artistry lies in her being able to convey as much as she does. But in the end we blunder against the locks of her own vision, if not of her madness, and she veers from us.

  Among the fragments of fiction left in Zelda’s papers is one entitled “The Big Top.” In this, Zelda again uses the names Janno and Jacob, but it has nothing to do with the novel as it stands. In it Zelda describ
es Janno’s feelings upon the death of her husband.

  He was gone…they had been much in love. He had been gone all summer and all winter for about a hundred years. Everything he did had been important.

  She wasn’t going to have him anymore; not to promise her things nor to comfort her, nor just be there as general compensation.… She was too old to make any more plans—the rest would have to be the best compromise.

  She remembered the ragged edges of his cuffs, and the neatness of his worn possessions, and the pleasure he always had from his pile of sheer linen handkerchiefs. When she had been away, or sick or something, Jacob never forgot the flowers, or big expensive books full of compensatory ideas about life. He never forgot to make life seem useful and promising, or forgot the grace of good friendship, or the use of making an effort.

  This is not Janno, but Zelda, who in remembering Scott has registered his death. She ends by writing about herself.

  Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold.… When one really can’t stand anymore, the limits are transgressed, and one thing has become another; poetry registers itself on the hospital charts, and heart-break has to be taken care of.… But heart-break perishes in public institutions.

  All these were excellent people; personable companions. Morally, they were, perhaps, the last romantics, and it may be that the worst enemy the romantic has to fear is time. Or it may be that, like the earlier Romantics, they did not know enough. But at least they knew their own predicament.

  JOHN PEALE BISHOP

  21

  THROUGHOUT 1943 AND INTO THE beginning of 1944 Scott’s will was in probate. Under California law Zelda received half of Fitzgerald’s estate; she could count on roughly $15,000. Judge Biggs, who was Scott’s literary executor, advised the purchase of an annuity for Zelda, which would yield her about $50 a month for the rest of her life. There was also a small bank account established for her, to be used only in an emergency.

  Zelda and her mother had lived since 1940 in a white frame bungalow at 322 Sayre Street, which was nicknamed “Rabbit Run” because of the compact arrangement of its small rooms. Its tiny front porch was trimmed with green paint, and an array of potted plants and climbing roses gave the exterior of the house a cozy air. The inside of the cottage was simply furnished: the front room contained an old upright piano, a chintz-covered sofa and rockers, and a handsome cherry secretary from the Machen home. A visitor there recalls that the top of the piano as well as the walls and end tables were covered with family mementos and photographs, primarily of Zelda, Scottie, and Scott, and that the general impression of the cottage was one of comfort without much style or flair. Two bedrooms, a kitchen with an outdoor patio behind it, and a dining room made up the rest of the house. Zelda’s eldest sister, Marjorie Brinson, and her family lived next door.

  Sayre Street, which had once been in the most fashionable part of Montgomery, was in a declining neighborhood by the 1940’s. Rooming houses had sprung up on the street during the war, and there was constant noise from children running on the street, taxis honking, screen doors slamming shut. Mrs. Sayre used to say “Bottom Rail’s getting on top!” Zelda took refuge in the quiet of the patio, where she painted.

  In May and again in December of 1942, Zelda’s paintings and sketches were put on exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts and at the Woman’s Club in Montgomery. In both exhibits there were a large number of pencil sketches of flowers. These were executed with exacting attention to detail; Zelda said they were drawn “after the Chinese.” Among the twenty-one water colors and pencil drawings in the December show was a self-portrait and a painting of Scott. The portrait of Fitzgerald has been lost, but the one of Zelda survives. She glares full face out of the painting, her eyes dominating the portrait. Her mouth is pale and tight, her high cheekbones wide and accented by a flush of rose color, which gives the face a curious flatness. The colors are muted and chalky. It is the intensity of the entire face that is jarring and memorable. There is something strained about the face; it has a stiffness, a quality of being visually tense that suffuses much of Zelda’s work. The painting looks rigid on the paper.

  Since Scott’s death a change had slowly come over Zelda’s letters to Scottie. In her earlier letters to her daughter she had often seemed to be straining for an effect of cleverness, an amusing touch, a phrase in French, as if to add sparkle to the monotonous surfaces of her messages. The change of tone must have reflected what Zelda felt her new role to be: she offered advice, somewhat gingerly, and she tried hard to be a conscientious and sensible parent. She worried about her daughter; she wanted Scottie to say her prayers and to pray for her as well.

  I trust that life will use you far less inexorably than it has used me, but should it prove harder to master in later years than at present seems probable—you will be most grateful that your past does not present any profound cause of regret.… If I seem querulous, and severe—such is not the case. I simply must (from desire to communicate from my heart from parental obligation and devotion) offer you whatever my tragic experience has mercifully indicated to be the best way of life.… It isnt just a frustrate inhibited desire to assert myself, but my deepest love that makes me want you to love God and pray.

  In February, 1943, Scottie married Lieutenant (j.g.) Samuel Jackson Lanahan in New York. Lanahan was a Princeton man from Baltimore whom she had begun to date before Fitzgerald’s death while she was at Vassar. It was a quick wartime wedding, with the handsome young groom in his dress blues and Scottie in a long white gown which Mrs. Harold Ober (who had been a sort of foster mother to Scottie for years) bought for her the day before the ceremony. Shortly after their marriage Lanahan left Scottie for overseas duty.

  Zelda did not go to her daughter’s wedding. On February 22 she wrote Harold Ober: “Giving Scottie away must have brought back the excitement of those days twenty-years ago when there was so much of everything adrift on the micaed spring time and so many aspirations afloat on the lethal twilights that one’s greatest concern was which taxi to take and which magazine to sell to.” New York was, she said, “a honey-moon mecca,” a perfect place to begin. To Anne Ober, who made all of the wedding arrangements, Zelda wrote that she was disappointed that she “couldn’t be of any service.” She added that she received the wedding cake and shared it with John Dos Passos, who was passing through Montgomery on his way to Mobile to observe the war construction there.

  Zelda wrote that she wanted Scottie to have whatever was left of her and Scott’s housekeeping equipment. “Do not consider these mine; your life contributed the greatest solace and deepest pleasure of our domestic ventures and I wish that there were more adequate testimony of our happiness to give you—because, despite the brawls and the despairing, we had long periods of a felicity such as one does not often encounter when all we wanted was our family and to be together.” She said that after her mother died (quickly adding that she saw no reason why Mrs. Sayre wouldn’t continue for another decade) she might buy a cottage in North Carolina and just waste away under the pine trees.

  Scottie decided that she would spend her 1943 summer vacation with Zelda in New York. The two-week trip in July was a delight for Zelda and a trial for Scottie, who could not help being edgy about her mother. Andrew Turnbull, who had just become a naval officer remembers going to see Oklahoma! with them both. He felt that Zelda, who extravagantly admired his handsomeness in his fresh white ducks, was “acting the flirtatious jeune fille.” Scottie, sensitive to the warning signals of her mother’s illness, was right to be uneasy about her behavior. In August 1943, Zelda was back at Highland Hospital for the first time since she left in 1940. She wrote Anne Ober: “Asheville is haunted by unhappy, uncharted remembrance for me.”

  A staff member who worked closely with Zelda during her second stay at Highland remarked that when Zelda was ready to go home “she looked almost pretty again, and cheerful. But, you see, it just wasn’t permanent.” Her doctors knew perfectly well that Zelda’s situatio
n with her mother would not last for very long. There was, however, no other place for her to live, and in February, 1944, Zelda returned to Montgomery.

  Lucy Goldthwaite remembers seeing Zelda at a garden party that spring in Montgomery. Miss Goldthwaite had gone to high school with Zelda and had left Montgomery in the twenties for New York, where she eventually became an editor for McCall’s magazine. When she was first in New York people who knew she was from Alabama would come up to her at cocktail parties and ask her if she knew Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. “You must remember how attractive they both were. They were so much of their time. I don’t know if they would be considered beautiful today, but Scott really did look like the man in the Arrow collar ad!” She did not recognize the haggard woman who came up to her in the Southern garden in 1944 and said, “Lucy, I’m Zelda Sayre.” Zelda’s hair was dark and her permanent badly styled; her dress was long and shapeless. While Miss Goldthwaite assured Zelda that she had recognized her, Zelda explained that she had just returned from Asheville, where she had been recuperating from an illness. Looking directly at Lucy for a moment, Zelda said, “We play parlor games from The Ladies Home Journal.” And in Miss Goldthwaite’s startled silence Zelda quickly moved away from her. Later, Miss Goldthwaite remembers that Zelda spoke to her about Scottie, saying that she wanted Lucy to talk to her daughter in New York and tell her about herself when she was young and life was before her.

  Zelda became intensely religious again in 1944 and, evangelical in her zeal, she mimeographed tracts that she wrote to save the souls of her friends. Because her friends included Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, and Carl Van Vechten, her little religious essays were saved. She believed that she was in direct communication with God and she envisioned her friends as hellhound. In February she wrote Wilson: “You should redeem yourself; pray and repent. Believing as I do that no matter what the floral catalogues may designate as rose, the odor remains funereal.” She later said that she did not like to think of his burning. “You are much to be respected and handsome and have a genius for interesting people. You must look to your salvation.”