Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Zelda understood Gerald’s quicksilver disposition, sometimes unabashedly friendly, other times withdrawing into a black Celtic mood, for it mirrored her own.

  Whereas Zelda’s friendship with Xandra Kalman had been based on shared sports and her reliance on Xandra for practical help, her friendship with Sara was rooted in a mutual interest in painting, ballet and literature. Sara was one of the first people to take seriously Zelda’s creative potential.

  Through the Murphys Zelda became conversant with the experimental Parisian art scene. In 1944 she wrote to Scottie recalling her exposure to the theories of the art world’s most provocative figures, who included Miró, Gris, Matisse, Léon Bakst and Picasso:

  We knew Picasso (a dear friend of Gerald Murphy) … Léger – whom we met at the Murphys in Austria – and other modern geniuses whom we met at Gertrude Stein’s left-bank salon. They were interesting and sympathetic and indeed I have never known a painter whose intuitive responsivity was not acute and immediate & I liked them very much. We also knew Brancusi & have visited his studio in the rue Monsieur with great wonderment and awe.33

  This constant exposure constituted Zelda’s earliest if most informal training. Without Gerald’s artistic influence, it is less likely that she would have taken her first formal painting lessons a few months later.34

  That spring the Riviera was on everybody’s mind. Cole Porter drew Gerald’s attention to the lushness of the Riviera off-season, so the Murphys planned to return that summer to Antibes, a few kilometres away from Ellen and Philip Barry’s new house along the Corniche in Cannes. They knew the beaches would please Zelda while its remote tranquillity would attract Scott, so the two families decided to meet there. Gerald planned to clear away the seaweed on the small beach, Plage de la Garoupe, that ‘bright tan prayer rug’ which would become one of the most famous beaches in American literature.35 During the summer the Murphys bought a plot on which stood a tumbledown villa with a spectacular garden. They used 350,000 francs, a quarter of Sara’s annual income, and hired two Ohio architects to remodel the house into what would become the Villa America, immortalized in Fitzgerald literature.36

  At the end of May the Fitzgeralds left for the Riviera, pausing at Grimms Park Hotel, Hyères. From there Zelda wrote to Perkins that Scott was showing ‘the most romantic proclivities’ and they hoped to find a villa next week. Hyères had ‘a forced atmosphere of picturesqueness and beauty for English sketchers’. Zelda’s own artistic preference was for the vivid, even vulgar: ‘I always suspect any place that isn’t blatant – Venice, to me, is perfect.’37

  They moved on to the Ruhl in Nice, where Zelda wrote that during dinner on the terrace stars fell in their plates; then the Hôtel de Paris, Monte Carlo, ‘like a palace in a detective story’;38 then lingered at the Continental in St Raphaël to be near the Murphys at the Hôtel du Cap at Cap d’Antibes, awaiting renovations on Villa America. Finally the Fitzgeralds stopped whirling and settled in Villa Marie in Valescure, 2.5 kilometres above St Raphaël.

  High above the sun-drenched beach the villa stood like a Moorish fortress with terraced gardens of palm, lemon and olive trees, protected from the sun by groves of eucalyptus and parasol pines. Zelda recalled: ‘Keeps crumbled on the grey hillsides and sowed the dust of their battlements beneath the olives and cactus. Ancient moats slept bound in tangled honeysuckle; fragile poppies bled the causeways.’39

  Unlike New York where most of their friends were single, on the Riviera most were married. Among their frequent companions were Philip and Ellen Barry, Dick and Alice Lee Myers, and later that summer, Gilbert and Amanda Seldes. The Myers’ daughter Fanny became the third in Scottie and Honoria’s triumvirate. Alice, ex-nurse and Chicago graduate, had married Dick in 1921. Humorous, bear-like Dick had studied piano with Nadia Boulanger and composed songs while working for American Express in Paris. Zelda had an easy intimacy with the Myers who felt parental towards Scottie. One time Scott flirtatiously gave Alice an enlarged edition of Marie Stopes’ Contraception wittily inscribed: ‘I felt you should have this. So that Dick should never have an awful surprise – he is too nice a fellow. Yours in Sin, but, I hope, sincere sin. F. Scott Fitzgerald.’40

  The Fitzgeralds, lacking French, lived like tourists who neither took part in the community nor visited churches or museums; but during the summer Zelda bought a French dictionary and a copy of Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel to learn the language by painstakingly reading the novel. During the long hours when Scott was rewriting Gatsby, Zelda read Henry James, and Van Vechten’s latest book, The Tattooed Countess. When her eyes bothered her again she reverted to swimming, becoming as deeply tanned as in her Southern girlhood. She also became restless. The servants managed the villa (while padding the grocery bills), so she had no domestic chores.

  Scottie remembers Nanny Maddock, who instilled in her discipline and manners. She was made to observe bedtimes and eat up everything on her plate.41 Zelda’s relationship with Maddock, as with Anna Shirley, made her feel increasingly incompetent at motherhood. When Scott locked himself away to write Zelda felt in need of company.

  Stationed nearby at Fréjus air base were a group of young Frenchmen with whom the Fitzgeralds drank and danced in the beach casino. Several make it into Scott’s Ledger and Zelda’s novels. Aviators Paulette, Montague, ‘fat and greasy Bellandeau’ get passing mentions. René Silvy (Zelda’s ‘artistic son of a Provençal avocat’, Scott’s Silve42) and Bobbé (Zelda’s fictionalized Bobbie, Scott’s Bobby Croirier43) are described with luscious camp undertones by Zelda as ‘very nice boys’ who ‘protruded insistently from their white beach clothes and talked in undertones of Arthur Rimbaud … [René’s] eyes were … consumed by the cold fire of a Tintoretto boy.’44

  One man makes it into the Fitzgeralds’ lives. Edouard Jozan, ‘the flying officer who looked like a Greek god’,45 becomes the catalyst for a major crisis in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage.

  Zelda, flattered when, like the aviators of Taylor Field, he swoops low over their villa as a tribute to her, casually lazes on the beach with him. There are occasional cocktails and dinners. Jozan found Scott and Zelda ‘brimming over with life. Rich and free, they brought into our little provincial circle brilliance, imagination and familiarity with a Parisian and international world to which we had no access.’46 At first Scott admired Jozan, who as an athletic assured aviator had all the qualities he most envied.

  Zelda glamorizes Jozan in Save Me The Waltz as Jacques Chevre-Feuille (honeysuckle), but curiously in Caesar’s Things, though he features as Jacques, occasionally she misnames him as Jacob, her Scott figure. Is there some indissoluble link between the two men? Certainly Alabama in Save Me The Waltz sees Jacques as a coin (the lieutenant with ‘the head of the gold of a Christmas coin’) and David as its reverse side. She tells David that Jacques looks ‘like you – except he is full of sun, whereas you are a moon person’. Jacques ‘moved his sparse body with the tempestuous spontaneity of a leader’.47

  According to Sara Mayfield Jozan was a born leader coming from a tradition of bravery, honour and nobility. 48 Born at Nîmes, a year and two days older than Zelda, the son of a French army officer, a graduate from Brest’s naval college, when he met Zelda he was about to embark on a distinguished career.

  Jozan saw Scott as a proud domineering man, sometimes tender, sometimes cruel, who appeared more concerned with commercial than artistic success, despite talent and imagination.49 Scott’s focus on social status and the power and burden of money clashed with Jozan’s ideal of human bravery and knowledge unsullied by commercial profit.50

  About Zelda he had few reservations. He found her vivacious, witty, lovely, someone who said and did unexpected things. But he insisted he never saw signs of craziness. Those who had ‘wild ideas’ about her were themselves ‘raving mad’.51 He saw her ‘shining beauty’, a woman who ‘overflowed with activity, radiant with desire to take from life every chance her charm, youth and intelligence provided so abundantly’. Jo
zan thought Zelda liked simple pleasures, ‘the relaxed life on beaches … trips by car, informal dinners’.52 The pair began to enjoy those pleasures away from the crowd.

  Immersed in writing, Scott did not at first observe his wife and Jozan53 drifting closer. Others did. The Murphys, in Valescure from Antibes for the day, noticed the romance, but did not think it serious. Sara felt from her talks with Zelda that she resented having ‘to chase around after Scott’. Jozan became ‘someone for her to talk to … everyone knew about it but Scott’. Gerald said: ‘I don’t know how far it really went, I suspect it wasn’t much, but it did upset Scott a good deal. I wonder whether it wasn’t partly his fault?’54

  Then suddenly Jozan and Zelda were no longer seen together. Their friends were not told why. When Zelda returned to the beach she swam alone.55 According to Fitzgerald’s Ledger there was ‘The Big Crisis – 13th of July’, less than six weeks since they had met the French group. Those are the only facts we have. But so much speculation and fiction are woven into the legend that it is difficult to tell how serious their relationship became.

  That Zelda was increasingly attracted to him is clear in both her novels. In Save Me The Waltz, when Jacques and Alabama dance he ‘smelled of sand and sun; she felt him naked beneath the starched linen. She didn’t think of David. She hoped he hadn’t seen; she didn’t care.’ Jacques invites her to his apartment. Alabama hesitates. David sulkily watches them swim together ‘wet and smooth as two cats’.56 He insists that Alabama stops seeing Jacques. Alabama asks a friend to tell Jacques she cannot meet him. She doesn’t see him again. An aviator’s wife gives her a picture from Jacques and a letter in French. Unable to read it, ‘she tore it in a hundred little pieces … Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture … What was the use of keeping it? Jacques Chevre-Feuille had gone to China. There wasn’t a way to hold on to the summer … Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him … You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.’57

  In Caesar’s Things, sixteen years later, she goes further fictionally. Janno kisses Jacques, then one evening ‘they kissed again – a long time before his friends … Janno loved him so that she never questioned his good faith.’ Another night after dancing with him ‘she kissed Jacques on the neck … the kiss lasted a long time … she did not mean to do this’. The young officer ‘treated her preciously and she knew that no matter what it was it would be tragedy and death: ruin is a relative matter’. Janno recognizes ‘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 spiritual vivisection and half-masochistic there should not have been any more.’58

  Whatever happened between his wife and Jozan, after recording the ‘Big Crisis’ in July Scott makes light of it. He runs to ‘a sad trip to Monte Carlo’ but otherwise there are merely routine notes that Zelda was ‘swimming every day. Getting brown’; that they went to Antibes, there was ‘good work on novel’, followed by ‘Zelda and I close together’. The only unpleasant things listed are ‘rows with Miss Maddox [sic]’.59

  In August 1924 when their friend Gilbert Seldes and his bride Amanda arrived on their honeymoon they noticed no marital discord, observing only that Scott was sad over the death of his hero Conrad. Then they noticed Zelda had a frightening new habit. When Scott drove them all to the beach, at exactly the point where the road narrowed and curved dangerously on a hairpin bend, Zelda turned to Scott and asked for a cigarette. Scott took one hand off the steering wheel, rummaged in his pocket, found one, straightened out the Renault and just kept it from plunging over the roadside. Zelda, filled with repressed anger, may have been cruelly testing Scott’s courage.

  The Murphys witnessed other dangerous exploits. The Fitzgeralds would leave parties and go to Eden Roc at the tip of Cap d’Antibes, where Zelda would strip off her evening frock and dive from 35-foot rocks. Sara told Zelda it was dangerous. Zelda fixed her friend with what Gerald called her ‘unflinching gaze like an Indian’s’60 and said, ‘But Say-ra, didn’t you know? We don’t believe in conservation.’61 On those evenings Sara persuaded Zelda and Scott not to drive back to Valescure, but to stay over at the Hôtel du Cap.

  Whatever had taken place between Jozan and the Fitzgeralds now diminished. Scott wrote ‘trouble clearing away’ in September, and in October with gratitude, ‘Last sight of Josanne’. Yet the maze of fantasy around this episode has resulted in several wild versions.

  According to one, years later Scott told a relative that Zelda had asked him for a divorce in July, saying she loved Jozan. Scott furiously insisted on a face-to-face showdown with Jozan. When Jozan refused, Scott locked Zelda in the villa. Jozan, faced with this version of events, insisted that no such confrontation took place, nor did he know of any such punishment.62

  There is no mention of Zelda’s imprisonment in her Save Me The Waltz, but we cannot draw a firm inference from its apparent omission since Scott insisted on heavy revisions and deletions of autobiographical material which might have cast him in a bad light. However, in 1930 Zelda told her doctor she was locked in her room. It is of course possible that by the 1930s Zelda had come to believe Scott’s invention.

  Certainly, in Caesar’s Things, she validates Scott’s version: Janno ‘told her husband that she loved the French officer and her husband locked her up in the villa’. Jacob tells her not to leave the premises and Janno replies wearily, ‘a locked door is not difficult of comprehension’.63

  When Scott later described the incident to his mistress Sheilah Graham, he said he had challenged Jozan to a duel. Each had fired a shot but remained uninjured. Graham felt that the story sounded like material from a book, which indeed it was. Scott rewrote the episode for an illicit love affair and duel in Tender Is The Night.64

  Jozan himself went even further than denying the divorce confrontation: he emphatically denied having an affair with Zelda. He told Sara Mayfield firmly that Zelda had merely flirted with him to make Scott jealous, and that Zelda’s account of their romance in Save Me The Waltz was an almost exact report of what happened in St Raphaël – a mere summer flirtation, romantic, decorous and slightly comic.65

  He also told Nancy Milford that he was at no time involved in any scenes between the Fitzgeralds. He was unaware that Zelda was being forced to make choices, if indeed she was. He left the Riviera without knowing what had passed between Zelda and Scott. He never saw either of them again. ‘They both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination.’66

  This seems the most accurate analysis. The forgotten tale of the fallen Montgomery aviator who had died for love of Zelda was revived once more with a Riviera setting. It provided both Fitzgeralds with fictional material, heightening their anecdotal performances.

  Hemingway recalls Scott telling several versions. The first version Hemingway recalled was a genuinely moving story of Zelda falling in love with a French aviator. The later versions, according to Hemingway, were less sad and seemed to be created as useful fictional material. Hemingway’s first wife Hadley, a more unbiased source with reference to Zelda, recalls their duo-performance: ‘It was one of their acts. I remember Zelda’s beautiful face becoming very, very solemn, and she would say how he had loved her and how hopeless it had been and then how he had committed suicide. Scott would stand next to her looking very pale and distressed and sharing every minute of it.’67

  Sara Mayfield described this alleged suicide as ‘an absurd invention’. The tragic hero stood before her in the flesh, explaining that far from dying, he had held a long distinguished career in the French Navy; served in Indochina in his youth; commanded a flotilla at Dunkirk after the outbreak of World War Two; subsequently had been captured and interned by the Germans. On release he had returned to service, in 1952 becoming Vice Admiral of the French fleet in command of France’s Far East naval forces. Far from coll
apsing into suicidal depression due to his failed romance he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Grand Croix du Mérite de l’Ordre de Malte, the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, and had retired in 1960 as full Admiral to live splendidly in Paris, where he read the Fitzgeralds’ fabrications about his lost youth.68

  The reason why Scott fictionalized and heightened the romance to include these fabrications was that he was then able to share it, thus once more take over an important piece of Zelda’s life. That she allowed him to do so illustrates her intense emotional dependency on him. As she says later: ‘Then Janno grew indomitably loyal and devoted to Jacob … Jacob somehow was the center of the whole business.’69

  Though Scott recovered from the blow to his ego and Zelda from the blow to her heart by using the incident as material, neither of them ever recovered completely. The Murphys recalled, albeit forty years later, an alleged suicide attempt of Zelda’s. Gerald said that around three or four o’clock one morning Scott banged at their door having driven miles. He was trembling, green and carrying a candle. He said Zelda had taken an overdose. They returned with him and Sara walked Zelda backwards and forwards to keep her awake.70

  If this suicide attempt did happen that year it would have taken place at the point Scott wrote ‘Zelda and I close together’, and therefore would challenge the idea of reconciliation and reinterpret how deeply Zelda was affected. But whether it did take place in 1924 is open to question. Mayfield debunked as ‘equally incredible’ the idea that Scott had driven the 52 kilometres from St Raphaël before dawn to get help from the Murphys.71 Amanda Vaill, the Murphys’ biographer, tries to make sense of it by suggesting that the incident might have occurred on a night when the Fitzgeralds were actually staying at the hotel.72 However, set against all such speculations is the fact that Scott himself does not mention Zelda taking an overdose that year in his Ledger. This biographer believes the Murphys may have misremembered the date, for it is the following August (1925) that Scott’s Ledger entry says ‘Zelda drugged’. Honoria Murphy in an interview with this author said it was not impossible that her father Gerald had got the year wrong because so many Fitzgerald anecdotes had been overlaid with newer versions and memories.73