Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Baltimore born, two years older than Nathan, with a squat face and hair plastered back and parted down the middle, Mencken could hardly be termed handsome. Yet in 1920 he had become one of America’s most eligible bachelors, well-known for such cynical remarks as ‘any man who marries after 30 is a damn fool’.58 This light side, labelled The Bad Boy of Baltimore, contrasted with his serious side, tagged The Sage of Baltimore, which reflected his position as America’s most respected critic, journalist and editor. As the writer Sherwood Anderson said, receiving a letter from Henry Mencken felt ‘like being knighted by a king’.59 Mencken at the time was the only person in the USA for whom Fitzgerald had complete admiration.

  Though Mencken’s comments were feared by authors, remembering his own first rejections the Sage treated writers with courtesy. Zelda’s friend Sara Haardt who, after graduating from Goucher College, was now back in Montgomery teaching history at the Margaret Booth school, had already submitted several stories to the Smart Set and had received several of Mencken’s gentle rejections. As Sara’s fiction focused on Southern culture she was not well disposed towards the Sage, who had recently labelled Alabama ‘The Sahara of the Bozart’, his teasing term for Beaux Arts.

  Scott, being Northern, was better disposed than Sara to Mencken. He had already, in his own phrase, ‘bootlicked’ the great man, who would soon become one of his intellectual mentors, by sending him a flatteringly inscribed copy of This Side of Paradise and by adopting some of Mencken’s positive views on Dreiser and Conrad.

  Flappers and Philosophers, Scott’s first volume of stories, which included ‘Benediction’ and ‘Dalyrimple’ already published by Mencken, came out on 10 September 1920, dedicated to Zelda.60 He nervously awaited Mencken’s review.61 Although it was a commercial success,62 Mencken now publicly called attention to the split in Fitzgerald’s work between serious fiction and entertainment.63 The Sage felt Scott had great talent but a suspect lifestyle, possibly influenced by Zelda’s extravagant tastes. Privately, he noticed Zelda’s enjoyment of money and Scott’s preoccupation with it: ‘His wife talks too much about money. His danger lies in trying to get it too rapidly.’64

  Scott wished to be a serious artist but he was drawn to money. He had been thrilled when in May 1920 Metropolitan Magazine had taken an option on his stories at $900 each while the Saturday Evening Post paid only $500.65 High-paying popular magazines, however, wanted bland optimistic tales, while Scott’s real interest was in astringent satire or pessimistic fiction. Zelda, who could not see the profound difference between popular and literary fiction, was proud of him for making money from magazine stories. Whether this severe misjudgement was rooted in her lack of literary training or in her father’s disapproval of writers who could not pay their way, so that she assumed high fees were a sound criterion, is not clear.

  Despite earning almost $20,000 that year, Scott owed $600 in outstanding bills and a further $650 to the Reynolds Agency.66 In desperation he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, who also blamed Zelda for Scott’s financial crisis, for a loan. ‘She wanted everything,’ he complained.67 Certainly, when Scott had been reduced to drawing steadily against future royalties for This Side of Paradise,68 Zelda’s request for a fur coat had not helped. Scott’s generosity meant they rapidly ran out of funds. His scheme of borrowing ahead from his publisher and agent had already established an insecure life pattern.

  Though Zelda spent money easily, she had none of her own, and no bank account. Sara Mayfield felt Scott needed the power he gained from Zelda’s dependency but Zelda resented it. There is curious conflicting evidence. One anecdote suggests Zelda felt comfortable with the situation: she took Rosalind to lunch at the Plaza, pulled out a roll of banknotes the size of a baseball and said: ‘Scott gave it to me as I went out the door, so what else could I do with it but bring it along.’69 But sometimes ‘money vanished mysteriously’.70 In July 1920 Scott notes: ‘Zelda hides $500’, followed in November by: ‘Zelda hides $100 from Dorothy Parker.’71 This suggests that Zelda was resentful both about her lack of independent finance and perhaps about Parker.

  Their dire finances left Zelda in a quandary about Scott’s Christmas present. With habitual ingenuity she wrote to James Branch Cabell, enclosing her photo, saying that when trying to steal Nathan’s first edition of Jurgens as a Christmas present for her husband ‘under pretence of intoxication’, she had been foisted off with a fencing foil which she would gladly exchange for a copy of the book.72 Cabell, highly amused, sent her an autographed copy.

  As Scott attempted to complete The Beautiful and Damned his irritation with Zelda, who wanted to party, increased. The beady-eyed McKaig reported she was ‘increasingly restless – says frankly she simply wants to be amused and is only good for useless pleasure-giving pursuits; great problem – what is she to do? Fitz has his writing of course – God knows where the two of them are going to end up … If she’s there Fitz can’t work – she bothers him – if she’s not there he can’t work – worried what she might do.’73

  Scott’s writer friends who encouraged Zelda nevertheless believed that women should be helpmates not distractions. McKaig reported Zelda’s next visit to New York:

  September 16: Zelda came in & woke me sleeping on couch at 7.15 for no reason. She has no sense of decencies of living … Fitz picture and an article to go in Vanity Fair. Autobiographical note about him in Metropolitan this month – got $900 for it … His vogue is tremendous.

  September 27: John [Bishop] spent weekend at Fitz – new novel sounds awful – no seriousness of approach. Zelda interrupts him all the time – diverts in both senses …

  McKaig also kept up a running report on the affairs of Wilson, Bishop and Edna St Vincent Millay:

  September 17: Bunny Wilson and Edna Millet in intolerable situation. He wants her to marry him. She tempted because of great poverty and the financial security he offers … However … she is making eyes at another man. It nearly kills her but she can’t help it.

  September 20: Bunnie has repeated to Edna … things John [Bishop] said about her … John is very distressed.

  But when John poured out his woes to Alex, McKaig remarked that Bishop was damn stupid, interested only in himself, poetry and women. Bishop, like Scott, was presumably insufficiently interested in McKaig’s attempts to leave advertising.

  During the summer of 1920 Scott, overlooking these undercurrents, had written three stories: ‘The Jelly Bean’ (sold to Metropolitan), ‘The Lees of Happiness’ (Chicago Sunday Tribune) and an unsold story, ‘IOU’, focused on marital relationships.

  Scott drew on Zelda’s Southern world, ‘a grotesquely pictorial country’, for the backdrop.74 ‘The Jelly Bean’, he told Ober, was ‘the first story to really recreate the modern southern belle’,75 Nancy Lamar, inspired of course by Zelda. Reckless Nancy meets and kisses Southern pool-hall loafer Jim Powell at a country club dance. In love, Jim decides to reform. But the following day, learning that Nancy got drunk and married her date from Savannah, he returns to loafing.

  In ‘The Lees of Happiness’ writer Jeffrey Curtain, happily married for one year to former chorus girl Roxanne Milbank, suffers a stroke, lives like a vegetable for eleven years and is tended devotedly till death by Roxanne.76

  A later story, ‘The Adjuster’, carries forward this miserable marital theme. Luella and Charles Hemple are drifting towards divorce when Charles suddenly has a nervous breakdown and Luella is forced to assume domestic responsibility. In The Beautiful and Damned too, Gloria’s husband Anthony is seized by ‘a sort of madness’ and ends up a ruined man being pushed along in a wheelchair.77

  Though Scott professed himself content with their ‘revelry and marriage’ in his 1920 Ledger,78 his fictional treatment of marriage at this time is curiously ominous.79

  By October 1920 the Fitzgeralds felt fall in Westport would be dreary, so they moved into an apartment at 38 West 59th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, conveniently near the Plaza Hotel from which they could order meals. Cam
pbell and McKaig, as frequent visitors, were again made painfully aware of Zelda’s lack of housekeeping skills.

  Campbell spent his one-hour lunch break there:

  When I entered the room was bedlam. Breakfast dishes were all about, the bed unmade, books and papers scattered … trays filled with cigarette butts, liquor glasses from the night before … Scott was dressing and Zelda was luxuriating in the bath-tub. With the door partly open, she carried on a steady flow of conversation. ‘Scott,’ she called out, ‘tell Lawton ‘bout … tell Lawton what I said … tell Lawton what I did …80

  Lawton’s lunch hour was over before Zelda was dressed. Her egotistic interruptions from the bathroom have a demented note as she fights for recognition.

  That fall the Fitzgeralds smoked on their beds or those of their friends, ordered sandwiches from nearby delicatessens and entertained in their luxury slum. In October McKaig’s waspish diary records: ‘Went to Fitzgeralds. Usual problem there. What shall Zelda do? I think she might do a little housework – apartment looks like a pig sty.’81

  As a man addicted to constant changes of shirts Scott grew irritable with his Southern Belle’s inability even to organize the laundry.82 His testiness may have increased because so many friends witnessed the increasing disorder.

  Later, Zelda regretted how little she knew about marital responsibilities or Scott’s Northern expectations of Minnesota wives. ‘People really ought to be taught about marriage in the schools: what they expect as its rewards and which of the responsibilities they are willing to carry. Then they would be able to choose which pattern in which to pursue their destinies.’83

  Fitzgerald alternated wild parties with bursts of energetic work. In November he wrote Perkins he had ‘done 15,000 words in last three days which is very fast writing even for me who write very fast’.84 Scott’s hard work meant that Part I of The Beautiful and Damned was finished by January 1921, a month later he gave Part II to Wilson to criticize. He completed it just before they sailed for Europe at the beginning of May.

  McKaig, hitherto cynical towards Zelda, suddenly fell in love with her.85 On 27 November he told his diary: ‘I spent the evening shaving Zelda’s neck to make her bobbed hair look better … She is lovely – wonderful hair – eyes and mouth.’ But he would not betray Scott. On 4 December he recorded: ‘Lunch at Gotham. T. [probably Townsend Martin] Zelda, Scott and I. Then took Zelda to cocktail party … and then tea in Biltmore. In taxi Zelda asked me to kiss her but I couldn’t. I couldn’t forget Scott – he’s so damn pitiful.’86

  During that winter of dissipation there were two more bathroom incidents. When McKaig arrived home after that taxi ride with Zelda on 4 December he found a telephone message from Scott: the most awful thing had happened, would he go to their apartment immediately, it would be a test of friendship.

  ‘I rushed up expecting to find a death or serious accident,’ McKaig reported. ‘When I got there … he said hello casually and went on talking … I asked him in Christs [sic] name what the matter was – it seemed they had a quarrel. Zelda went into the bathroom, turned on the water to hide noise of footsteps & walked out the door. Instead of trying to find her himself he … telephoned all his friends. Finally Zelda called & I went for her.’87

  McKaig’s account is curious. It seems odd that the Fitzgeralds’ row should have occurred immediately after McKaig rejected Zelda’s advance, if indeed he had done so. It seems odd that Scott should have phoned McKaig instead of looking for Zelda himself. It seems odd that it was McKaig rather than Scott who finally went to fetch her. It is possible that McKaig’s diary offers an incomplete record for reasons of discretion. Or had Scott become suspicious of McKaig and phoned him at his home in case Zelda was there?

  Certainly, during another quarrel that tense winter Scott broke down the bathroom door. In Zelda’s version he ‘hurt’ her eye; in Scott’s Ledger he notes the bathroom door incident and ‘the black eye’, but he puts a January rather than December date which, if accurate, may imply two fierce bathroom rows.88 Scott became so sensitive to the way Zelda always fled to a bathroom when distressed that later he picked the bathroom for a suicide attempt by Nicole Diver (partially based on Zelda) in Tender Is The Night.

  On 11 December McKaig joined Scott in arguing with Zelda about the ‘notoriety they are getting through being so publicly and spectacularly drunk. Zelda wants to live the life of an “extravagant”. No thought of what world will think or of future … I told them they were headed for catastrophe if they kept up at present rate.’89

  A few days later Bishop and McKaig decided cynically the Fitzgeralds’ drunken performances were possibly all contrived to ‘hand down [the] Fitzgerald legend’.90

  That honeymoon year amply fed their increasing notoriety. Zelda later described the life they led as a ‘rickety world of aftermath … a rackety world of brow-beating the heart’. In her second novel she fictionalizes Scott’s friends as men who all knew what kind of cold cream she used, who confessed their preferences in women to her and who ‘slumbered over the grill-stairs and left their hats all over town and spent hours putting more acceptable interpretations on things … sensitive the while [to] a precariousness of the whole arrangement’. Precarious was an accurate word for that first year of marriage. In Caesar’s Things Zelda later reflected on what it had meant to be a star’s wife: ‘He owned her, bundled her up and set her in taxis beside him … showed her off to an inclusive set of college friends and made a big success of being impresario.’91 The star’s wife was expected to be compliant, courageous and ingratiating. Being seen as her husband’s glamorous possession after years of stardom as a Southern Belle was painful yet not unusual for a married woman.

  Zelda had little time, however, to dwell on any discontent with her present role before she was thrust into a very different one. In February 1921 she discovered she was pregnant, and immediately went back to Montgomery where Scott joined her in March. For Zelda the transition from a lifetime of being her family’s ‘baby’ to thinking of herself as a baby’s mother was thorny. Still wishing to be considered a belle rather than a mother-to-be, she was delighted when asked to dance at the annual Les Mystérieuses Masked Ball, which that year was a Hawaiian pageant. Lawton Campbell, visiting his family in Montgomery, attended the ball:

  one masker was doing her dance more daring than the others … Finally the dance … turned her back on the audience, lifted her grass skirt over her head for a quick view of her pantied posterior and gave it an extra wiggle for good measure … Everybody was whispering ‘That’s Zelda!’. It was Zelda and no mistake! She wanted it known … and she was happy with the recognition.92

  Back in New York in April, Zelda’s bewilderment about motherhood increased. She felt incompetent and recognized that Scott and their bachelor friends were hardly more knowledgeable. Most of the ex-Princeton set knew where to find the blank verse in Cabell or how to get seats for the Yale game but knew nothing about having a baby.93

  When Zelda was two months pregnant the Fitzgeralds decided to pack their incompetence and ignorance into a suitcase and take their first trip to Europe, returning before the birth.

  They sailed for Europe on the Cunard liner Aquitania on 3 May 1921. From May to July 1921 they scanned life and culture in England, France and Italy. In London, after checking into the Cecil Hotel, Zelda’s greatest thrill came when Shane Leslie, Scott’s early mentor and Winston Churchill’s first cousin, took them on a night walk through Dockland along the waterfronts of Stepney, Limehouse, Wapping and on to the haunts once taken by Jack the Ripper. Zelda, dressed in men’s clothes, added the remarkable twilights along the Thames to her collection which she would paint later. It was an area with no taxis, no police, more appealing to Zelda’s sense of adventure than the staid lunch hosted by Lady Randolph Churchill, the famous Jenny Jerome, Winston’s mother. Though Zelda talked at length to Winston, what she recalled were dessert strawberries ‘as big as tomatoes’.94 The Fitzgeralds met Jack, the younger Churchill son, who t
ook them to a cricket match which bored them; they left early. Tallulah Bankhead, then the toast of London, introduced them to the Marchioness of Milford Haven who Scott said indignantly was as near to royalty as they came.95

  Zelda, an avid reader since childhood, was excited that Maxwell Perkins had arranged for them to meet John Galsworthy, who invited them to dinner in Hampstead96 with the Irish playwright Lennox Robinson and St John Ervine, the novelist and dramatist. Scott said sycophantically: ‘Mr Galsworthy, you are one of the three living writers that I admire most in the world,’ but told Wilson later Galsworthy hadn’t approved. ‘He knew he wasn’t that good.’97

  They moved on to Paris, arriving on 17 May. Disappointed at not seeing Anatole France, another of Scott’s heroes, after waiting for an hour outside his house, they tried the Folies, Versailles and Malmaison, then decided sightseeing bored them.

  Wilson, also on a European tour, reaching Paris on 20 June after the Fitzgeralds had drifted to Venice, felt the Fitzgeralds lived as tourists in France, as they had in New York. Zelda certainly did not feel at home in France until she had learnt French for her second trip. Scott’s view of France summed up their attitude to Europe: ‘France is a bore and a disappointment,’ he wrote to Shane Leslie, ‘chiefly, I imagine, because we know no one here.’98