Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Her family neither encouraged the match nor took it seriously. Though there was Southern anti-Catholic feeling, the Episcopalian Sayres had become less opposed to Scott’s Yankee Catholicism than to his lack of money and future prospects. Scott had not graduated, had no real career and drank too much. The Judge, seriously ill for nine months with ‘nervous prostration’, was not at his most tolerant, so when Zelda said Scott was sweet her father curtly replied: ‘He’s never sober.’13

  Scott’s harshest critics were Minnie and Rosalind, who both felt strongly that their Southern Baby needed more protection than Scott offered. Later Rosalind would hold Scott and the Southern uprooting largely responsible for Zelda’s breakdowns.

  For years Scott, ill at ease with the socially skilled Sayres, bitterly resented their judgemental opposition, particularly Minnie’s. He retaliated by accusing Minnie of poor parenting: ‘For a long time I hated her mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit – nothing but “getting by” and conceit.’14

  That Zelda, surrounded by beaux, did seem able to get by made him despair. She swam with boys in icy spring waters, she and Eleanor Browder formed a syndicate to buddy ‘more college boys than Solomon had wives’15 and she irritated Scott by retelling her mother’s tales of penniless young authors turned out on dark stormy nights. Zelda’s lack of faith in him provoked quarrels.

  In December 1918 Scott wrote to a confidante that he was determined not to marry Zelda. But determined though he was he had to acknowledge that Zelda was extraordinary.16

  That is the only evidence that Scott ever seriously tried to give up Zelda. But within two weeks, his resolve weakened. He wrote the bold word ‘Love’ in his Ledger before once more falling into it, this time decisively. ‘The most important year of my life. Every emotion and my life work decided.’17

  They spent romantic hours in restaurants, at vaudeville at the Grand Theatre, anywhere they could be alone and hold hands. Several biographers suggest they went further than holding hands.18

  Scott wrote in retrospect that Christmas 1918 at the Sayres was a time of Zelda’s ‘sexual recklessness’19, though this is questionable. One piece of evidence is a note pinned to Scott’s 1934 ‘Count of Darkness’ Philippe stories: ‘After yielding [she] holds Philippe at bay like Zelda + me in summer 1917’. However Scott and Zelda had not yet met at that point so Scott’s memory appears to be faulty.20

  Stronger evidence points to the date being spring or summer 1919 when Zelda’s letters have a heightened sensual intimacy.21 They may have made love in April 1919 on one of Scott’s three trips to Montgomery from New York where, trying to make sufficient money to marry Zelda, he lived in one room and worked as a copywriter for the Barron Collier advertising agency.22 At this time in a letter to Scott Zelda wrote these subtly passionate lines: ‘Sweetheart, I love you most of all the earth – and I want to be married soon – soon – Lover – Don’t say I’m not enthusiastic – You ought to know.’23

  Whatever date is assigned to their lovemaking, it was a brief sexual experiment after which Zelda again held back.

  On 9 January 1919 Scott had a premonitory seizure of trembling; neither Scott nor Zelda knew why. The following day, Scott learnt that his mentor Monsignor Fay had died. After Fay’s death Scott had no further supernatural experiences though he continued to scatter them through his fiction. His Catholicism also died with Fay. Scott indicates that Zelda replaced the influence of Fay and the Church. ‘Zelda’s the only God I have left now‚’ he wrote on 26 February.24

  During the spring Scott wrote nineteen stories and received 122 rejections with which he papered his walls, hoping that when he became famous biographers would relish and retell that story. Indeed they do.

  Zelda was given the star part of Folly in the April Folly Ball held by Les Mystérieuses, a society of prominent Montgomery girls and matrons. Minnie and Rosalind had written the play which preceded the complex ballet. Zelda sent Scott a photo of herself amongst the roses in Minnie’s backyard, poised on tiptoe in her black and gold costume trimmed with tiny bells. In an auditorium decorated with baskets of sunshine roses entwined with gold and black ribbons that matched her Folly outfit, Zelda expertly performed intricate sequences. Her ethereal beauty haunted the audience long after she stopped dancing.

  Her practice had not been without pain. In March she had written to Scott: ‘Your feet – that you liked so much – are ruined. I’ve been toe-dancing again and nearly broke my right foot … The doctor is trying … but they’ll always look ugly.’25 Curiously, Scott too had a strange view of his naked feet, which since his youth had been a source of erotic shame.

  Zelda and her schoolfriend Livye Hart also performed in the Seague Musical. Irritatingly, she told Scott one actor was so impressed he ‘tried to take me and Livye on the road with him’.26 When dancing, she assured Scott, she felt ‘self-reliant’.27

  Though Livye and Eleanor shared Zelda’s dance life, other friends were taking new directions. Katharine Elsberry, who had initially moved North with her wartime bridegroom, bore a son, and returned to Alabama where Zelda frequently visited her and the baby. With no support beyond her family’s generosity, Katharine became a dental receptionist and the first divorcee of Zelda’s set to do work other than schoolteaching.28

  At Goucher College Sara Haardt was encouraged by her English instructor Harry T. Baker to write short stories that would soon be noticed by the literary critic H. L. Mencken.29 Since October 1914 Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan had been co-editing The Smart Set.30 Both Sara and Scott submitted some early stories. Mencken initially rejected Sara’s stories until he met her in 1923, when he published ‘Joe Moore and Callie Balsingame’, the tale of a Montgomery girl and boy who grew up in the neighbourhood where she and Zelda met their beaux. When Scott revised and submitted his 1917 Nassau Lit story ‘Babes in the Woods’ Mencken published it in 1919. At $30 this became Scott’s first and only commercial sale that year. Immediately he bought himself a pair of white flannels and knowing her love of finery, a luxury for Zelda. One story suggests it was ‘moon-shiny’ pajamas in which Zelda felt ‘like a Vogue cover’ and wished Scott’s pajamas ‘were touching’.31 Another suggests it was a magenta fan with ‘those wonderful, wonderful feathers [that] are the most beautiful things on earth’.32

  Throughout their separation in spring 1919 they wrote constantly. Zelda seldom dated her letters scrawled in her large ‘sun-burned, open-air looking script’.33 Her punctuation was restricted to a series of dashes and a scattering of exclamation marks.

  Zelda pasted Scott’s telegrams into her scrapbook as they held a certain glamour. But (like Ginevra) she did not keep any of Scott’s letters. Zelda wasn’t sentimental.

  Scott, who constantly catalogued, classified and preserved, did keep Zelda’s letters. Every one of them. He wasn’t sentimental either. He knew they would come in useful.

  Take the letter Zelda wrote to him after one of her visits to Oakwood Cemetery.

  I’ve spent today in the grave-yard … trying to unlock a rusty iron vault built in the side of the hill. It’s all washed and covered with weepy, watery blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes sticky to touch with a sickening odor.

  Zelda had been moved by thoughts of long-dead passions.

  Why should graves make people feel in vain? … somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived – All the broken columnes and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances and in an hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue … I hope my grave has an air of many, many years about it – Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves – when they’re exactly like the others, even to the yellowish moss?34

  Zelda’s letters at nineteen were remarkable for their sensitivity to place and her visualization of her emotions. Unlike Scott, she wrote spontaneously without regard for audience or effect. Her letters a
re significant because for two important years before they married we see Zelda, a frivolous, loving, acutely sharp woman, through her own words and eyes rather than through Scott’s.

  To Scott the letters were a gift in more ways than one. He inserted Zelda’s graveyard description into the penultimate page of This Side of Paradise, which he had been rewriting in summer 1919. His editorial acumen assured him there was little need to alter Zelda’s words.

  On an impulse he [Amory Blaine] considered trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a hill, a vault washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy water-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the touch with a sickening odour … He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived. All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels meant romances. He fancied that in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to whether his eyes were brown or blue, and he hoped quite passionately that his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago. It seemed strange that out of a row of Union soldiers two or three made him think of dead loves and dead lovers, when they were exactly like the rest even to the yellowish moss.35

  Zelda never revealed her reaction to this plagiarism. Young, in love with love, riding high on excitement, still professionally uncertain, she was probably more flattered by the attention paid to her words than offended at their appropriation.

  Zelda trusted Scott enough to show him her personal diary.36 He found it so extraordinary that he borrowed it for several months. In an act of betrayal he loaned it to Peevie Parrott, after telling him intimate details of his affair with Zelda. Parrott reported: ‘As you say, it is a very human document, but somehow I cannot altogether understand it … It is hard for me to picture it [love] anywhere but in a book.’ Parrott, like Scott, did picture Zelda’s diary in a book, and thought it worth publishing.

  Parrott, Zelda, Scott and all subsequent biographers agree on that first stage of the diary’s travels. There are however several versions about the next stage.

  Sara Mayfield said that in late 1918 Scott, ‘with the diary in hand’, accompanied by Wilson and Bishop, besieged Mencken’s co-editor, the critic and writer George Jean Nathan, in his Royalton apartment, where Scott, who ‘proposed to turn Zelda’s journal into a novelette called “The Diary of a Popular Girl”, asked Nathan to read it’. Nathan immediately wanted to publish it and meet Zelda. According to Mayfield, Scott seemed keen, until Zelda broke off her engagement to him in June 1919, when, ‘in an embarrassing position in regard to publishing her diary … [he] quietly diverted it to his own purposes in This Side of Paradise.’37

  Curiously, when Mayfield later wrote Zelda’s biography she revised the story. Scott, she says, had agreed to rewrite Zelda’s diary for Nathan as ‘The Journal of a Young Girl’ but withdrew from his verbal contract, realizing he could put the diary to better use.38

  One Fitzgerald biographer suggests that Scott had always intended to use Zelda’s letters and diary in his first novel This Side of Paradise, to ensure his hero Amory Blaine’s affair with Rosalind Connage resembled his own affair with Zelda.39 When Scott later sent his editor, Maxwell Perkins, a segment of his manuscript containing parts of Zelda’s diary, he confessed that much of the dialogue was Zelda’s.40

  Nathan himself recorded the episode quite differently for Esquire thirty-eight years later. His version does not implicate Scott as the instigator of the deal. On a visit to the married Fitzgeralds in Westport in 192041 he wandered down to the cellar and ‘discovered’ Zelda’s diaries. He talks about them in the plural. ‘They interested me so greatly that in my capacity as a magazine editor I later made her an offer for them [author’s emphasis]. When I informed her husband, he said that he could not permit me to publish them since he had gained a lot of inspiration from them and wanted to use parts of them in his own novels and short stories, as for example “The Jelly Bean”.’42

  Evidence suggests there were several diaries, all of which Zelda seemed prepared to give to Scott. Certainly she offered no resistance to Scott’s high-handed refusal of Nathan’s offer. Zelda may not have realized at the time that through her silent acquiescence her literary property became and remained Scott’s.

  What is known is that later Scott used diary extracts in The Beautiful and Damned as well as in ‘The Jelly Bean’.

  What is not validated is the view proposed by some that Scott, fearful of losing Zelda to a prosperous rival, was determined to win her by writing a successful novel in which he would express his love by including her diaries and portraying her character.43 We have Scott’s fictional appropriations but we do not have Zelda’s diary or diaries. Perhaps in the course of the Fitzgeralds’ changing addresses they were accidentally mislaid or removed from public perusal, if not deliberately, at least conveniently.44

  Zelda, aware of the extent to which Scott drew on her writings and ideas, was led to try out some fiction herself. ‘Yesterday I almost wrote a book or a story‚’ she wrote Scott, ‘… but after two pages on my heroine I discovered that I hadn’t even started her, and, since I couldn’t just write forever about a charmingly impossible creature, I began to despair. “Vamping Romeo” was the name, and I guess a man would have had to appear somewhere before the end. But there wasn’t any plot, so I thought I’d ask you to decide what they’re going to do.’ She wished she had sufficient ambition to carry on but was ‘much too lazy to care whether it’s done or not’. At this stage she did not want to be ‘famous and feted’, but preferred to be ‘very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own – to live and be happy’, and (she added with unconscious irony) ‘die in my own way to please myself’.45

  She told Scott she hoped ‘I’ll never get ambitious enough to try anything. It’s so much nicer to be sure I could do it better than other people – and I might not … that, of cource, would break my heart.’46 Already she had an insight into how much ambition could cost her.

  During spring 1919 Scott posted Zelda an engagement ring which had belonged to his mother. ‘Scott Darling, it really is beautiful. Every time I see it on my finger I am rather startled – … but I love to see this shining there so nice and white like our love – and it sorter says “Soon” to me all the time – Just sings it all day long.’47

  Zelda told him she hardly ever took off the ‘darling ring’ except to swim, but the truth was she hardly ever put it on. ‘She soon relegated it to her trophy box‚’ said Sara Mayfield, ‘because … to exhibit it flagrantly would have impeded her conquests.’48

  Zelda’s letters swung Scott this way and that on a seesaw of emotion. She assured him of her love, then confessed to an escapade when she dressed in men’s clothes to have fun in the movies with a gang of boys, followed by a crazy drive ‘with ten boys to liven things up’.49

  Protestations of everlasting passion compete with ‘amusing’ encounters with other beaux. Typically she tells Scott an ‘old flame from the Stone Ages is calling’ but remembers to add: ‘He’ll probably leave in disgust because I just must talk about you.’ By April 1919 Scott’s Ledger registers ‘hysteria’. Zelda stayed cool: ‘Scott, you’re really awfully silly – In the first place, I haven’t kissed anybody goodbye, and in the second place, nobody’s left in the first place – … If I did have an honest – or dishonest – desire to kiss just one or two people, I might – but I couldn’t ever want to – my mouth is yours.’

  Ruthlessly she continued: ‘But s’pose I did – Don’t you know it’d just be absolutely nothing – Why can’t you understand that nothing means anything except your darling self and your love – I wish we’d hurry and I’d be yours so you’d know.’50

  Scott wished he could keep Zelda locked up like a princess in a tower and told her so incessantly.51 Finally in exasperation she responded: ‘I’m so damn tired of being told that you “used to wonder why they kept princesses in towers” – you’ve written t
hat verbatim in your last six letters! … I know you love me, Darling, and I love you more than anything in the world, but if it’s going to be so much longer, we just can’t keep up this frantic writing.’52

  But when, to placate her, he paused, Zelda chastised him: ‘The only thing that carried me through a [trip to Auburn] … was the knowledge that I’d have a note from you when I got home – but I didn’t … I hate being disappointed day after day.’53

  Her view of Scott was piercingly accurate: ‘I know you’ve worried – and enjoyed doing it thoroughly … [but] it’s all right I rather hate to tell you that – I know it’s depriving you of an idea that horrifies and fascinates – you’re so morbidly exaggerative – Your mind dwells on things that don’t make people happy.’54

  What Zelda did not realize was that while besieging her with attention and becoming infuriated at her flirtations, Scott was dating another three women.

  The first was the curly-haired Montgomery Belle May Steiner. May, popular with officers, fitted the pattern of Fitzgerald’s lovers. Scott’s Ledger for 1918 testifies to May’s consistent appearances if not to the correct spelling of her name: July: ‘May Stiener. Zelda … May and I on the porch. Her visiting bows’. August: ‘Zelda and May’. In September there is no entry for May, presumably because he ‘fell in love [with Zelda] on the 7th’. But in October the Ledger again registers: ‘May Steiner. Reunion on 26th … left for North on 26th.’

  Months later, May and Scott were still in contact. Zelda, unaware of Scott’s entanglement, told him in her chatty April 1919 letter that after a severe bout of Spanish ’flu ‘all her [May’s] beautiful hair came out’ so she was going to New York to have it treated and would phone Scott.55 This was the hair admired by Scott, who was secretly aware of May’s impending visit.