by Sally Cline
In ‘Babes in the Woods’, written in 1917, Scott’s college freshman courts Isabella, a 16-year-old ‘speed’, grants her the right to destroy him, waits for her high-handed ‘mask to drop off, but at the same time did not question her right to wear it’.51 Scott’s quintessential theme of the gifted man ruined by a selfish woman had begun. The Fitzgerald heroine was the writer’s inspiration so long as she was unattainable.
When Scott finally met Zelda in 1918 he came face to face with the woman of his early fiction.
Scott’s real-life bid for social favours mirrored his fictional seesaw. Each social success at Princeton was followed by an academic catastrophe. He was made a member of Cottage, Princeton’s prestigious eating club,52 joined the Tiger’s editorial board in 1915, his stories appeared in the Nassau Lit and he became Triangle’s secretary for 1915–16, writing the lyrics for Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!, a much vaunted Triangle show. However when he tried to build on this by writing lyrics and offering to play a beautiful showgirl in Bunny Wilson’s production The Evil Eye, which he hoped would lead him to the prize of Triangle President, he failed yet again. His scholastic record was so appalling he was made ineligible for the Triangle show tour, which would have included his solo performance in drag, and for the Presidency.
His Ledger registered the words ‘Drunk’, ‘Passed Out at Dinner’, ‘Drunk’, with tedious regularity. His habit of using alcohol to console himself for failure was one with which Zelda would grow increasingly bored and angry during their romance. She saw it as it was: a sign of terminal weakness.
It was not drunkenness however but a sickness diagnosed as malaria (which he preferred to think of as tuberculosis) which forced Scott to withdraw from Princeton on 3 January 1916. The University tagged his exit with the label ‘withdrawn for scholastic deficiencies’ but Scott successfully nagged the authorities for a letter saying he had left voluntarily on grounds of ill-health. Twenty years later, writing up his miseries for a Crack-Up essay, he said: ‘I had lost every single thing I wanted … and that night was the first time I hunted down the spectre of womanhood’, his classy name for the prostitute he had earlier ignored.53
But there was yet more to lose.
Over Christmas 1914 in St Paul, Scott had attended a party given by Marie Hersey for her friend Ginevra King, a strikingly beautiful sixteen-year-old socialite from Lake Forest, Illinois. Ginevra, as dark and brown-eyed as Zelda was fair, but neither as daring nor as dashing, like Marie was at Westover Girls’ School in Connecticut from where she dated a string of Ivy League conquests. For Scott she had a magical glory, was rich and radiant, became his winter dream, his summer evanescence. She accepted Scott’s usual invitation for a next-day date, after which, utterly in love, he wrote daily, sent telegrams, whizzed her to the Ritz in New York, invited her to Princeton. During a two-year courtship there was ever-growing ardour on his side and ever-growing indifference on hers. Slowly, painfully, he recognized that Ginevra, ‘infinitely rare and to be marvelled at’,54 never asked him to Westover and was courted by men in a far superior social set. At her Lake Forest home in August 1916 he was made aware that poor boys should not think of marrying a girl ‘whose voice is full of money’.55
One of Scott’s oddest ideas – yet one that appealed to Zelda – had been to try and impress Ginevra by his performance as a glamorous showgirl in the tour of The Evil Eye. When he became ineligible to perform, he had to make do with his posed publicity stills, which were carried by newspapers around the country including the New York Times. There he was in blond wig, elegant off-the-shoulder gown, lace picture hat, diaphanous stole, carrying flowers, looking every inch as feminine as Ginevra herself. He received fan letters from men who wanted to date him and an agent offered to book him a vaudeville tour as a female impersonator.
Zelda, who revelled in outrageousness, would probably have posed with him attired in a gentleman’s suit. But not Ginevra.
With his new love waning, Scott significantly mailed his thirteen-year-old sister Annabel, at convent school, a long letter that was in essence a charm course on how to get and keep men. He advised her on conversation, couture and cosmetics, how to sit, move and above all how to listen: ‘Boys like to talk about themselves.’56
He told Annabel that Ginevra was a specialist in how to gaze at a beau effectively: mouth drooping, head hanging slightly, wide-open eyes fixed on the man in question. What he didn’t tell Annabel was that the pathetic appealing look he advocated was the one he had used on his publicity photos!
Scott made even better use of his advice to his sister. He dressed up in women’s clothes, sneaked a powder compact in the top of his blue stocking, accompanied a male friend to a fraternity hop at Minnesota University, danced his way through the evening with several eligible bachelors and was not unmasked until he had to go to the men’s room.
Scott returned to Princeton in September 1916 to repeat his junior year. Though he invited Ginevra to the Yale game that November she had lost interest in him. In January she broke with him, broke his heart, then announced her engagement to the wealthy Ensign William Hamilton Mitchell, and finally entered Scott’s world of fiction as the rich unobtainable heroine. By another fortuitous coincidence Mitchell, a good-looking young aviator, was able to harden up Scott’s most consistent symbol: the aviator risking death.57
Scott kept all Ginevra’s letters and typed and bound them into a book. Ginevra thought his letters were clever, bulky but unimportant. She destroyed them in 1917.
However, the loss of Ginevra and his multitude of failures did wonders for his fiction. It grew up, had a new resonance, hinted at power.
America entered the war, Scott’s friends joined up, he took his exams for the army and received his commission on 26 October 1917. There seemed nothing left in his life except to read more good books and think about writing one. Thus it was in his first Officers’ Training Camp at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he started ‘The Romantic Egotist’, which he sent to Shane Leslie who had offered to show it to his publishers Charles Scribner’s Sons. Leslie corrected the grammar and spelling and sent a covering letter suggesting that Scott was a prose Rupert Brooke. ‘Though Scott Fitzgerald is still alive it has a literary value. Of course when he is killed, it will also have a commercial value.’58
Instead of getting killed Scott met Zelda Sayre in July 1918 while Scribner’s were still considering his manuscript. On 19 August Scribner’s rejected it, overruling the enthusiasm of Max Perkins who would soon become Scott’s editor and most loyal friend. Scott rapidly revised it but in October Perkins sent another rejection. Scott captioned the telegram ‘The end of a dream’ and stuck it in his scrapbook. Meanwhile he had posted Zelda one of the chapters telling her ‘the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four’.59
It was a sharper wooing line than even those Scott had recommended to Annabel. The fact that he cautioned Zelda to secrecy about the chapter appealed to her sense of mystery. She elevated him to her top beau. The myth reports that Zelda and Scott fell in love at first sight. Not at all. On 4 September Ginevra King got married.60 Three days later Scott entered these serious words in his Ledger: ‘Fell in love on the 7th.’ Scott had been unable to offer Ginevra anything she did not have or could not acquire. But Zelda wanted to escape from the claustrophobia of Montgomery gripped by its past. With Scott she saw a chance of a life in New York – though for that she needed the conditions to be right.
Notes
1 ZSF, Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 37.
2 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 2.
3 FSF, This Side of Paradise, Penguin, 1963, p. 156. Rosalind Connage was based on a combination of Zelda Sayre and Beatrice Normandy from H. G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay, 1909.
4 Dorothy Parker to Nancy Milford, interview 26 Aug. 1964, quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 68.
5 Zelda Sayre to FSF, spring 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 3, PUL.
6 FSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, summer 1935.
7 Zelda Sayre to FSF after receiving from Scott a gift of Co
mpton MacKenzie’s book Plashers Mead, which she hated.
8 FSF, Notebooks 938.
9 Completed in an amazing three months’ work at weekends only.
10 FSF, ‘The Romantic Egotist’, unpublished MS, ch. 1, pp. 33–4, CO187, Box 17, PUL.
11 Quoted in Laura Guthrie Hearne, ‘A Summer with F. Scott Fitzgerald’, Esquire 62, Dec. 1964, p. 258.
12 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Feb. or Mar. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 13, PUL.
13 Zelda Sayre to FSF, ibid.
14 Janis L. Magin, ‘Montgomery Recalls High-Living Zelda’, Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution, 6 Nov. 1993. The author was also told this by Eddie Pattillo and Janie Wall Montgomery, 1999.
15 When Scott was ordered to Camp Sheridan he had written to Lawton Campbell, a fellow Princetonian who came from Montgomery, to ask for the names of the prettiest girls in Montgomery. Lawton sent back three. These did not include Zelda because she had grown up after he left. Scott had already dated all three who were busy that night so he went on his own to the dance.
16 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 3.
17 Ibid.
18 Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise, Heinemann, 1969, p. 23.
19 FSF, Notebooks No. 1378.
20 ZSF, Waltz, p. 34.
21 Zelda illustrates this in her story ‘The Original Follies Girl’ when Gay, asked why she had suddenly become serious about taking the veil, retorts ‘Because I’ve never done that’ (ZSF, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, Collected Writings, p. 294).
22 ZSF, Waltz, p. 36. This is similar to Daisy Buchanan’s response in The Great Gatsby (1925) when she too smashes up people then retreats back into her money and her ‘vast carelessness’, FSF, Gatsby, p. 167.
23 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 3.
24 ZSF, Waltz, p. 39.
25 Zelda Sayre to FSF, spring 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 17, PUL.
26 FSF, Paradise, p. 156.
27 ZSF, Caesar, ch. IV, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 5, PUL.
28 FSF, Gatsby, pp. 138–9.
29 FSF, Notebooks Nos. 466 and 765.
30 ZSF, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, p. 293.
31 FSF, Notebooks No. 938.
32 FSF to John O’Hara, 18 July 1933, CO187, Box 51, PUL.
33 Mayfield, Constant Circle, p. 31. Scott Fitzgerald and Francis Scott Key were related as second cousins three times removed: Philip Key, founder of the Maryland family and Francis Scott Key’s great-grandfather, was Scott’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Sphere Books, London, 1991, p. 16.
34 Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 2.
35 He became a benefactor of St Paul’s Catholic church, founder of the McQuillan Block of buildings and streets and owner of an impressive Victorian mansion complete with cupola.
36 Richard Washington to Arthur Mizener, quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 2.
37 FSF, ‘Author’s House’, in Afternoon of an Author, ed. Arthur Mizener, Princeton University Library, 1957, p. 184.
38 Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 5.
39 FSF, ‘The Romantic Egotist’, p. 4, CO187, Box 17, PUL.
40 The American Rattan and Willow Works.
41 The Fitzgeralds moved to Syracuse, New York (Jan. 1901) and back to Buffalo (Sep. 1901).
42 Interview by Michel Mok of the New York Post on 24 Sep. 1936, Scott’s fortieth birthday.
43 Lloyd Hackl to the author, St Paul, July 1999.
44 FSF, ‘A Debt of Honor’, St Paul Academy Now and Then, Mar. 1910.
45 Mizener enlarges on this (Far Side of Paradise, p. 29).
46 Scott would immortalize him as Monsignor Thayer Darcy in This Side of Paradise.
47 FSF, Paradise, p. 46.
48 As editor of the Nassau Lit Wilson published the first of Scott’s contributions.
49 Alfred Kazin, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, World, Cleveland, 1951, p. 47. Scott himself wrote: ‘I discussed books voluminously, books I had read, books I had read about, and books I had never heard of.’ ‘The Romantic Egotist’, ch. V, p. 33, CO187, Box 17, PUL.
50 Edmund Wilson, A Prelude, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1967, p. 148.
51 The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. John Kuehl, Rutgers University Press, 1965, p. 136.
52 He joined Cottage with Sap Donahoe but Alex McKaig, Townsend Martin, Ludlow Fowler and John Peale Bishop all joined the more literary club, Quadrangle.
53 FSF, ‘Handle with Care’, The Crack-Up, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1965, p 47.
54 FSF, Gatsby, p. 103.
55 Ibid., p. 113.
56 FSF to Annabel Fitzgerald, c. 1915, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Touchstone, New York, 1995, p. 7.
57 Mitchell was an instructor at the naval air station in Key West, Florida, as well as an aviator. He may also have been the ‘beautiful Billy Mitchell’ whom Scott met with Ginevra at Lake Forest (Aug. 1916). James R. Mellow, Invented Lives, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1984, p. 53.
58 Shane Leslie to Charles Scribner, 6 May 1918, PUL.
59 FSF to Zelda Sayre, c. 1918, Bruccoli et al., eds., Romantic Egoists, p. 47.
60 Scott saved the wedding invitation and a piece of Ginevra’s handkerchief in his scrapbook with the note: ‘The end of a once poignant story’.
CHAPTER 4
Zelda threw herself into their courtship, playing the Deep South baby doll. Letters using the Southern Belles’ courtly code winged their way to Scott:
‘Nothing means anything except your darling self’ … ‘Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered – I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a button hole boquet’ … ‘Sweetheart I want to always be a help.’1
Those lines offer some evidence that her mother’s training in femininity had at least reached Zelda’s pen if not her intentions, but in case they were insufficient to impress Scott with the strength of her desire, Zelda outdid herself with this line:
‘I’m all I’ll ever be without you – and there’s so much more room for growth – with you – all my mental faculties are paralysed with loving you – and wanting you for mine.’2
Her mental faculties of course were far from paralysed. She ended that letter briskly with a description of a helpless movie heroine who had stimulated her scorn for the way ‘most women regard themselves as helpless’.3
Although in love with Scott, she preserved a wry detachment. ‘Being in love’, she wrote later, ‘… is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure,… another chance in life.’4
The couple held hands in pine groves and discussed poetry and seduction. But in wartime, loving Scott was not Zelda’s only interest. She was preparing a war benefit ballet and according to Sara Haardt they danced all night, then spent every day working for the Red Cross. When Sara and Zelda talked about it later Zelda said: ‘Some of the older girls … thought that because we talked so much we of the younger generation would never get any work done, but we sold more tags5 and folded more bandages than all the rest … It was as if we were possessed with an insatiable vitality.’6
In October 1918 Scott received orders to go North, after which he hoped he would be sent to France. Zelda resisted his attempts to pressure her into commitment before he left. She was cautious of throwing in her lot with an insecure unpublished writer. A Southern Belle’s expectation was rarely love on a budget; but more significantly, Zelda despised weakness. She needed Scott to feel realistically self-confident before she could feel secure about leaving her safe Southern world. Later, Scott rewrote and simplified Zelda’s viewpoint until it became an avaricious girl’s refusal to marry until the beau attained New York success. But at the time he knew Zelda’s stand was consistent with her refusal to compromise on her desires. ‘Here is my heart’ were his last words before leaving.7 Zelda would remembe
r them until her death.
‘Zelda was cagey about throwing in her lot with me before I was a money-maker …’ Scott wrote later. ‘She was young and in a period where any exploiter or middle-man seemed a better risk than a worker in the arts.’8
Rosalind later wrote to Sara Mayfield: ‘I do not believe that Zelda’s hesitancy about marrying Scott was prompted by any mercenary motive … it was rather her uncertainty about the wisdom of leaving her known world for a strange new one that restrained her.’9
Rosalind’s analysis seems accurate. Despite her dashing ways Zelda had a tense uncertain side of which Scott appeared unaware, even though he had criticized her nervous habit of biting the skin on her lips. She needed the rock-solid protection of her family and community in order to rebel.
Zelda had a remarkable understanding of the way in which Scott inextricably linked his attitude to money with his attitude to her.
‘There’s nothing in all the world I want but you – and your precious love‚’ she wrote. ‘All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence – because you’d soon love me – less and less.’ She reassured him that money did not matter, whilst acknowledging that if she was not adorned like a material girl he would think less of her.10
Years later Scott would admit that he had ‘never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from, nor to stop thinking that at some time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl’.11
In Camp Mills, Long Island, as Scott anxiously waited to be posted, the Armistice was signed. Disappointed at not getting overseas he went on a drinking marathon, missing his unit’s sober departure for Montgomery. However when the troop train pulled into Washington, there, sitting on a baggage truck with two girls and a bottle, was Scott. He told Zelda he had commandeered a locomotive on the plea that he was a courier with papers for the White House.12 Zelda listened with amusement as another Fitzgerald fabrication passed into legend.