Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  There were other things, too, that made Zelda feel left out.

  In Montgomery, the Sayres’ social standing had assured Zelda’s place. In New York, Scott’s overnight fame had given them access to a highly regarded artistic milieu. But in St Paul, though there was a high society, it was created by business executives rather than landowning aristocrats familiar to Zelda. Most of those Northerners found Zelda’s Southernness alien. The first Northern woman Zelda met from that society, and the only one she liked, was Scott’s school-friend Xandra Kalman, now twenty-three, who though a Catholic had in 1917 married the divorced wealthy banker Oscar Kalman, twenty-five years her senior. As soon as the Fitzgeralds arrived at the end of August 1921, the Kalmans found them a rented house5 in Dellwood, a rich resort on White Bear Lake ten miles north-east of St Paul where they spent the summer.

  ‘All the people came who liked to play golf or sail on the lake,’ wrote Zelda, ‘or who had children to shelter from the heat. All the young people came whose parents had given them for wedding presents white bungalows hid in the green – and all the old people who liked the flapping sound of the water.’ When Zelda described those ‘summer people’ she admitted her contradictory feelings of safety and ensnarement. The visitors lived in ‘long, flat cottages … so covered by screened verandas that they made you think of small pieces of cheese under large meat safes.’6

  Like Scott’s sister Annabel, Xandra had attended the Visitation Convent School, in her case from 1906 until 1912, and like Scott himself had joined Professor Baker’s dancing class7 and the Elizabethan dramatic group. The Kalmans frequently invited the Fitzgeralds to their large summer home in Dellwood. Scott, having known the couple for years, did not need to impress them and Xandra’s warmth meant that Zelda unfurled and became less aloof. Zelda called Xandra Sandy; they swam regularly together and played golf. ‘I was one of the few women that Zelda got close to,’ Xandra said. ‘We were together practically every day.’8

  Xandra and Zelda, alike in their frank direct manner, also had similar backgrounds. Xandra came from one of St Paul’s most notable families. Her New Yorker great-grandfather Aaron Goodrich, who had become one of Tennessee’s most prominent lawyers and legislators, was appointed by President Zachary Taylor as Minnesota’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice in 1849. Like her great-grandfather Xandra was clever, energetic, artistic and highly organized. She inherited her wide-ranging knowledge from her grandfather, Canadian Daniel A. Robertson, who in 1850 served as a delegate to the Ohio constitutional convention, was a colonel in the Minnesota State militia, and as a lawyer and scholar served in Minnesota’s legislature before becoming mayor of St Paul in 1860 and three years later its sheriff.9 From her father, William C. Robertson, who was in real estate and finance, she learnt sound business sense. She and Oscar instantly took charge of the Fitzgeralds.

  But when Zelda left the Kalmans and the lake and drove into St Paul, everywhere she looked she saw Scott’s footprints.

  Walking with Scott along prestigious Summit Avenue, whose towering elms, leaded glass windows, stone façades and pillars make it one of America’s best surviving examples of Victorian Boulevard architecture, she knew that Scott, Marie and their circle had played outside 475, Marie’s family house, or near 623, where Scott’s widowed grandmother Louisa McQuillan had lived.10

  In a small triangular park bordering Summit, Scott had played touch football with several boys now active in St Paul’s literary life. Thomas Boyd, a columnist with St Paul Daily News, immediately interviewed the returned celebrity and persuaded him to write book reviews. Other newspapers played up the arrival of his bride. A charming photo headlined ‘Bride On First Visit to St Paul’ shows Zelda’s hawk-like profile looking pensive.

  As Boyd was a partner in the Kilmarnock Book Store at 84 East 4th Street, Scott spent free afternoons with him and his writer wife Peggy Woodward, catching up on literary gossip. Scott, in his role as talent scout, generously encouraged Scribner’s to publish both Boyd and Woodward. Scott was less generous (or consistent) about the phenomenal success of Main Street (1920) by the other local hero, Sinclair Lewis, who lived on Summit and who with visiting novelist Joseph Hergesheimer made up this tight-knit literary circle. Scott’s respectable bestseller This Side of Paradise achieved 49,000 copies in its first year, compared with Main Street’s phenomenal 300,000 copies. Though Scott wrote to Lewis that it was the best American novel so far, to critic Burton Rascoe he wrote, ‘Main Street is rotten.’11 However, now they were all St Paul literary boys together, rivalry was temporarily forgotten.

  Zelda, not one of the boys, was seldom included in their afternoon club. Instead she read widely and hardly drank. Possibly influenced by meeting Galsworthy, she devoured his novels. Max Perkins sent her To Let. ‘[I]t makes our Galsworthy so complete’, Zelda answered immediately, ‘that we’re both quite impressed with the long line of purple books – I don’t do much but read so I’m awfully glad you sent it to me – We are quite popular out here and are enjoying our importance and temperance … but I’m homesick for Fifth Ave.’12

  Meeting Scott’s parents, Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald, and his sister Annabel for the first time did little to reduce her homesickness. All three Fitzgeralds unendingly exhibited ‘Minnesota niceness’.13 Zelda, though appreciative, felt she had nothing in common with them. She told Sara Mayfield they had neither Southern charm nor New York sophistication, that Mollie Fitzgerald was badly dressed and painfully eccentric while Scott’s father with his cane, flowing cravats and Vandyke beard struck her as an ineffectual cardboard figure from a bygone age.

  Annabel, born in 1901 in Syracuse, New York, was like her parents a staunch member of St Paul’s Catholic community, in whose Visitation Convent School Annabel had been enrolled from 1909 to 1913. Zelda saw her as a conventional convent girl who even returned as an adult to the convent for retreats. Annabel tried to be helpful to her sassy new sister-in-law but never saw her as a friend.

  It came as a relief to the family as well as to Zelda when she and Scott settled into the young married circle who attended the White Bear Yacht Club, the University Club, the Town and County Club, and the Minnesota Club which held dances, discussion groups and golf tournaments. Zelda, secure in her friendship with the Kalmans, once again disturbed the peace. She smoked on the back platforms of trolleys, commented out loud at the movies, outraged young men who danced with her by whispering flirtatiously: ‘My hips are going wild; you don’t mind do you?’14 At that time pregnant women were expected to remain discreet if not to hide away. Though 1921 was the first year that American women enjoyed full voting rights, Zelda’s bold behaviour shocked Scott’s community.

  To her horror Scott began to notice and comment on her increasing weight. In his September Ledger he described her as ‘helpless’ because of her extra pounds. In December his Ledger again tartly recorded ‘Zelda’s weight’ alongside a mention of ‘cottillion’ dances and bobsleigh rides which she was now more self-conscious about attending. Without her slim figure Zelda felt like ‘Alabama nobody’.15

  Completely unprepared for the birth, she depended heavily on Xandra, who bought diapers, bassinet, cot, bathtub, booked doctor, nurse, hospital room, even a nanny, and made Zelda laugh at the bizarre baby business. Zelda wanted Xandra, her first woman friend since leaving Montgomery, to be her baby’s godmother, but Fitzgerald family intervention foiled this plan and Annabel was chosen. But neither this nor any subsequent setback disrupted Zelda’s lifelong friendship with the Kalmans, documented by the massive file of letters between them.16

  The Fitzgeralds had rented the Dellwood house for a year, but in October 1921 they were asked to leave because their landlord claimed they had damaged the plumbing. They moved downtown to the Commodore, an apartment hotel near the Kalmans’ lavish residence on Summit, to await the birth.

  On 26 October 1921, in the Miller Hospital, Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald was delivered. It was a hard long labour. Xandra said ‘Scott kept popping in and out of th
e delivery room jotting things down in the little notebook he always carried. When I asked him what he’d hurriedly scrawled during Zelda’s labor, he replied: “‘Help!’ and ‘Jesus Christ!’” When I asked why he wrote it down he said, “I might use it some time!”’17

  Scott, told to wait outside the delivery room, threatened to kill himself if Zelda died. When he discovered suicide was unnecessary he collected his pencil, notebook and wits and, as Zelda emerged faint from the anaesthetic, coldly recorded her first comments: ‘Oh God, goofo, I’m drunk.18 Mark Twain. Isn’t she smart – she has the hiccups. I hope it’s beautiful and a fool – a beautiful little fool.’ Zelda ruefully acknowledged that her own life might have been simpler if she had been less sharp.

  Two years later Scott coolly recycled her remark in The Great Gatsby, when Daisy says about the birth of her daughter: ‘“I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”’19

  Zelda never forgot Scott’s detachment.

  The security Zelda gained from her father’s protection meant she had never acquired necessary protective mechanisms. This had contributed to her belief that those close to her held her best interests. This episode with Scott was the first of several dents in that belief.

  Zelda’s granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan said: ‘The little girl was called Scottie and was no fool. Zelda named her Bonnie in Save Me The Waltz. Scott called her Honoria in “Babylon Revisited”. She arrived in her parents’ lives not only as a baby whose life they scripted, but as an artist’s model with a fictitious persona and a fictitious world they invented as they went along.’20

  Zelda, initially disappointed about the sex of the baby, within days wrote to Ludlow: ‘She is awfully cute, and I am very devoted to her.’21

  Scott telegrammed everyone: ‘LILLIAN GISH IS IN MOURNING CONSTANCE TALMADGE IS A BACK NUMBER AND A SECOND MARY PICKFORD HAS ARRIVED.’22

  Minnie Sayre behaved just like the mother in Zelda’s Save Me The Waltz: ‘“My blue-eyed baby has grown up. We are so proud.”’23 Zelda, now a mother in Minnesota, missed the slow creak of her garden swing. She missed the rusty croaking of the frogs in the cypress swamps. She felt strongly that ‘home’ was still Montgomery.

  Zelda did not lose weight or self-consciousness. ‘Scottie was born and we went to all the Christmas parties and a man asked Sandy “who is your fat friend?”’24

  She closeted herself with the baby, pasting into her scrapbook every ‘devoted mother and baby’ photograph taken by the St Paul newspapers. Meanwhile Scott produced short stories and a winter show for St Paul’s Junior League. When he invited friends home, Zelda would say: ‘You won’t come, will you? The baby wakes up and yells and the place is too small. We don’t want you.’ If Scott overheard he would say: ‘Zelda’s got this silly notion that we can’t have anyone in the place … you’ll come up, won’t you, and help me cure her of this idea.’25 But if they actually arrived, Zelda waved them away.

  The only visitor Zelda consistently welcomed was Xandra, who came regularly for lunch or to play golf. Zelda pasted into her scrapbook a newscutting of them both outside the club house, under the headline ‘Society Women Compete in Golf Tournament’.26 Though Xandra had helped Zelda find a nanny, neither she nor Zelda was prepared for the tyrannical Anna Shirley, who acted like the baby’s warder. It was a dispiriting start to a series of bad relationships between Zelda and Scottie’s nannies.

  In November 1921, again coming to their rescue, Xandra enabled them to lease the Victorian frame house at 626 Goodrich Avenue27 which belonged to Xandra’s parents, on vacation abroad. Zelda’s homesickness increased as she rattled about with only the baby and Nanny for company, because that winter Scott rented a room downtown to work with a stenographer on revisions to The Beautiful and Damned.

  Scott insisted on having the baby baptized a Catholic in the Visitation Convent chapel28 and, never a precise chronologist, dates the baptism as November in his Ledger. But St Paul historical researcher Lloyd Hackl gives the date as 8 December 1921, borne out by the baptismal certificate which gives the baby’s sponsors’ names as Annabelle [sic] Fitzgerald, Scott’s sister, and Joseph Barron, who officiated.29 The baby’s name is listed as Frances Scott Fitzgerald but on the birth certificate it appeared as Scotty.30

  Baptisms generally bring to mind pictures of attentive parents and friends gathered together solemnly. This baptism of Zelda’s only child was as curious as was her only wedding. According to Hackl, Zelda did not attend because Scott’s parents, who considered her eccentric, feared how she might act. Though others were nervous about how much the equally unpredictable father might drink, he did attend.31 More alarming was the fact that Anna Shirley refused to let the godparents hold the baby.32 She allowed only Annabel as godmother to place her hand on baby Scottie.

  Zelda did not publicly reveal her feelings of exclusion, but watched as her husband’s pride in their child became more possessive. It was as if, by being born in St Paul, the baby had become more Scott’s than Zelda’s, with ultimate authority left to Anna Shirley. Xandra recalls how one evening she and Oscar stopped by and found that the baby, whom Zelda was breastfeeding, had hiccups. The angry nanny loudly blamed it on Zelda’s excessive gin consumption the previous night. Zelda, herself breastfed for years by Minnie Sayre, was uncomfortably aware of subtle pressure from both Scott and the nanny to adopt the more distant mothering style of his Northern culture.

  The harsh winter of 1921, when biting cold infiltrated every pore, further dragged down Zelda’s spirits. There is a photo of her smiling bravely on a bone-chilling sleigh-ride over ‘grey and glassy’33 snow, but she wrote Fowler: ‘This damn place is 18 below zero and I go round thanking God that, anatomically + proverbially speaking, I am safe from the awful fate of the monkey … Ludlow, I certainly miss you + Townsend + Alec – in fact I am very lonesome.’34 When in January 1922 novelist Joseph Hergesheimer35 told Zelda he had lived off hominy grits in the wild Appalachians, she responded tartly: ‘But at least you didn’t have to live in St Paul on the edge of the Arctic Circle.’ She also told Hergesheimer that she felt lonely because Scott was immersed in writing his play The Vegetable.36

  Zelda’s reaction to her first Northern winter was curiously anticipated by Scott in his 1920 story ‘The Ice Palace’, where Southern Belle Sally Carrol Happer wants to leave the South to ‘live where things happen on a big scale’. On a January trip to visit her Yankee fiancé, Sally Carrol Happer nearly freezes to death in an ice palace at the Winter Carnival. She gratefully returns to the familiar South, to the spangled dust over which the heat waves rise.37

  Zelda, however, cannot return.

  After the Metropolitan serialization of The Beautiful and Damned, heavy revisions were necessary for the book publication.38 Zelda suggested cutting the serial’s didactic conclusion. Scott cabled Perkins on 23 December 1921: ‘LILDA [Zelda] THINKS BOOK SHOULD END WITH ANTHONY’S LAST SPEECH ON SHIP SHE THINKS NEW ENDING IS A PIECE OF MORALITY.’ Perkins decided Zelda was artistically ‘dead right’.39

  Scott had told his publisher, Charles Scribner II, that his hero was a man with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no creative inspiration who, with his beautiful young wife, is wrecked on the shoals of dissipation.40

  The protagonists, Gloria Gilbert and Anthony Patch, move from their spoiled life as beautiful people to damnation caused by drinking and idle expenditure of unearned wealth. As Anthony’s alcoholism escalates his marriage to Gloria declines, a theme that aptly reflected the problems Scott and Zelda faced daily.

  Zelda, more interested in abstract thought and descriptions than in emotions, found that concepts of beauty, damnation, and moral degeneracy came easily.41 Scott, who needed them in the writing of The Beautiful and Damned, ‘had almost no capacity for abstract ideas or arguments and could enter into other people’s attitudes only when he had known them [emotionally] in his own experience’.42 Scott therefore found this t
alent of Zelda’s very useful, and indeed told Alex McKaig ‘Her ideas largely in this new novel.’43

  The novel’s autobiographical theme was pointed up by W. E. Hill’s recognizable Fitzgerald portraits on the jacket which depicted a fashionable young couple seated side by side but with heads and bodies turned away from each other. They appear bored, lifeless, sulky. Scott wrote a virulent letter to Perkins: ‘The girl is excellent … somewhat like Zelda but the man … is a sort of debauched edition of me.’44

  After listening to Scott’s complaints Zelda painted an alternative book jacket: a witty depiction of a nude with bobbed hair, exactly like herself, splashing in a champagne glass. This was Zelda’s first professional drawing. In bright red, yellow and blue crayon over pencil, it vividly expresses the Roaring Twenties tempo. Crackling flames in the same hectic colours spurt and sizzle round the title. Unlike Hill’s world-weary illustration, Zelda’s ‘The Birth of the Flapper’ offers a dizzy symbol of the prosperous, youthful, insouciant mood.45 Scott loved its vivacity, typical of Zelda’s early sketches, which showed an illustrative skill she never lost. Unfortunately Zelda’s earliest surviving artwork was never used.

  The Beautiful and Damned was published on 4 March 1922, dedicated to three early mentors: Shane Leslie, Maxwell Perkins and George Jean Nathan, to whom Scott had become reconciled despite Nathan’s insistence that baby Scottie looked like Mencken! Scott had written to Charles Scribner: ‘it’s really a most sensational book + I hope won’t disappoint the critics who liked my first one’.46 H. L. Mencken, the critic Scott most admired, wrote: ‘There are a hundred signs in it of serious purpose and unquestionable skill … Fitzgerald ceases to be a Wunderkind, and begins to come into his maturity.’47