Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  When the Fitzgeralds arrived, Stein and Toklas were about to leave Paris for their annual vacation. Stein always demanded the undivided attention of gentlemen guests while females were handed over to Alice. One suspects strong-minded Zelda found this situation irritating. However, as Stein had become a pioneering collector of the modernist art of her vanguard painter-friends, Zelda was able to retreat from Toklas’s chit-chat to examine the paintings of Picasso, Matisse and Juan Gris adorning the walls.

  Zelda, now regularly accompanying the Murphys to ballet, poetry recitals and avant-garde art shows, was fascinated by the Cubist still lifes and Picasso’s massive glowing Rose Period nudes.63 Though Zelda later wrote to Scott that Picasso’s art was more about ideas than painting, at the time she decided that of all Stein’s works the Picassos were ‘the only ones worth having’.64

  Scott presented Stein with an inscribed copy of Gatsby and on 22 May she replied warmly that she liked the ‘melody’ of his dedication ‘Once Again To Zelda’. It showed he had a background of ‘beauty and tenderness’. He wrote ‘naturally in sentences’, she said. ‘You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment.’65 It wasn’t.

  Scott wrote back unctuously: ‘My wife and I think you a very handsome, very gallant and very kind lady.’66 If Zelda did think any such thing she kept it to herself. Out loud she told Sara Mayfield that Stein’s conversation was ‘sententious gibberish’.67

  Three-year-old Scottie did not take to Stein either. The child, highly disciplined by her British nannies, recalled: ‘[When] Gertrude Stein came to call I made my appearance, curtsied as I’d been taught to do, and left the minute I was excused. I found her terrifying.’68

  Zelda’s friend Carl Van Vechten had become Stein’s American agent for her complex experimental plays and poems which were hard to understand and harder to place. But it was not Carl who introduced the Fitzgeralds to Stein and Toklas. It was Ernest Hemingway, the man who would become Zelda’s enemy.

  Hemingway and his first wife Hadley had paid their first call on Stein in March 1922 when Gertrude discussed writing with Ernest, ‘a delightful fellow’,69 and Alice had taken Hadley aside to chat about domestic matters. Such a close bond was forged between the couples that Alice and Gertrude became godparents to Bumby, the Hemingways’ son. Since that first meeting, to confirm his literary standing, Hemingway had already brought to Stein’s studio Ada and Archibald MacLeish, Dos Passos and Ogden Stewart. When Zelda first visited Stein, Hemingway was Stein’s favourite writer.

  Hemingway had previewed the Fitzgeralds’ visit by writing to Stein and Toklas a very favourable report. He told them Zelda was ‘worth seeing’ and he planned to bring the Fitzgeralds to meet Gertrude and Alice the following Friday.70 At that point Hemingway glowed with praise for Zelda – usually about her physical attributes, indicating that he thought of her in terms of a possible conquest. When she dealt a severe blow to his ego he rancorously rewrote his initial view of her.

  Scott, who like Zelda had already met Hemingway in the Dingo bar in Montparnasse, had been immediately captivated. Hemingway, three years younger, considerably taller and more athletic, had a reputation as a war hero and acted the tough guy. Scott’s impression of Hemingway was entirely favourable. He had already read his two slim volumes, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and the incisive vignette collection in our time (1924), and was as impressed by Hemingway’s dedication to writing, apparent openness and lack of affectation as he was by his undoubted talent.71 Hemingway was highly conscious of Scott’s well-established commercial celebrity but felt superior and virtuous about seeking artistic accomplishment irrespective of financial rewards. Scott, aware of the younger writer’s patronizing attitude, was still ready to make a hero out of Hemingway.

  Thirty-two years after their first meeting Hemingway wrote an unreliable report which describes Scott as effeminate, with a long-lipped mouth that ‘on a girl would have been the mouth of a beauty … the mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more’. He portrays him as a nuisance, a fool and a pathetic drunk.72 It seems Scott had overpraised Hemingway’s work, embarrassed him with personal questions (‘Did you sleep with your wife before you were married?’), then passed out.73

  In May 1925 Scott invited Hemingway to go to Lyons with him to pick up the Renault he and Zelda had abandoned. This trip has given rise to competing versions. At the time Hemingway wrote to Max Perkins a very positive account: ‘We had a great trip together … I’ve read his Great Gatsby and think it is an absolutely first rate book.’74 In A Moveable Feast, not written until Scott had been dead nearly twenty years and Hemingway was on the edge of dementia that would end in suicide, Hemingway created a malicious semifactual account of Scott’s annoying behaviour during the drive. He reveals Fitzgerald as self-pitying, hypochondriac, unreliable, spendthrift, artistically flawed, sexually inexperienced, emasculated by Zelda and consistently drunk. He himself remains mature, manly and sober. Scott’s behaviour could well have made that trip tedious, but this later scathing report of Hemingway’s bears no resemblance to his earlier one. Similarly, at the time Hemingway told Ezra Pound that both he and Fitzgerald enjoyed an enormous consumption of wine.75 But in his vitriolic A Moveable Feast he records only Scott’s drunkenness.

  If there were bitter undercurrents at the time, Scott ignored them. Instead he wrote to Gertrude Stein: ‘Hemminway and I went to Lyons … to get my car and had a slick drive … He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first rate.’76

  Scott had already told Perkins six months before he met Hemingway that this peachy fellow had ‘a brilliant future … He’s the real thing.’77 Zelda, after meeting Hemingway, told Gerald, who asked what she had against Hemingway: ‘He’s bogus.’78 ‘At the time,’ Gerald said later, ‘the word just didn’t seem to fit; there wasn’t anyone more real and more himself than Ernest. Bogus, Ernest? Of course, who knows how right she may prove to be?’79

  For Zelda there appeared to be proof in every action Ernest took, every word he spoke. From the moment she met Hemingway, she disliked him with an unwavering unrelenting force equalled only by his own for her. The stage was set for the battle between Zelda and Hemingway for Scott’s allegiance. None of the weapons they used were pleasant.

  Notes

  1 ZSF ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number –’, Collected Writings, p. 422.

  2 ZSF to MP, undated fragment, c. fall/winter 1924, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald, 1921–1944, PUL.

  3 ZSF to MP, 11 Nov. 1924, ibid.

  4 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 192.

  5 Honoria Murphy Donnelly to the author, series of telephone conversations and interviews, New York, 1998. Mayfield, Exiles, consistently confirms this.

  6 ZSF, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number –’, p. 422.

  7 Ibid.

  8 MP to FSF, 20 Nov. 1924, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 83. In October Scott had sent the novel to Perkins who responded (18 Nov.): ‘I think the novel is a wonder … it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality … as for sheer writing it’s astonishing.’

  9 FSF to MP, c. 1 Dec. 1924, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 85.

  10 FSF to MP, c. 20 Dec. 1924, ibid., p. 89.

  11 FSF to MP, c. 1 Dec. 1924, ibid., p. 85.

  12 FSF to MP, c. 20 Dec. 1924, ibid., p. 88.

  13 ‘The Adjuster’, Redbook Magazine, Sep. 1925; ‘Not In The Guidebook’, Woman’s Home Companion, Nov. 1925.

  14 ‘The Adjuster’, All The Sad Young Men, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926, pp. 189–90.

  15 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 298.

  16 Scottie in later years looked back on all her Christmases as decorative occasions and times of excitement.

  17 Scott drew on the discarded Gatsby section for his romantically disposed hero, Rudolph Miller. Miller’s background was initially intended to represent Gatsby’
s early life.

  18 Sara Mayfield had looked after her during 1923.

  19 It was published 24 July 1924. Fifteen years later, after Sara’s early death, Mencken confessed ‘to my shame’ that he had failed to recognize its ‘solid maturity’ (Ann Henley, Introduction, Southern Souvenirs, p. 9).

  20 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 126. The conversation took place in 1928.

  21 FSF, Ledger, Feb. 1925.

  22 FSF to John Peale Bishop, c. Apr. 1925, Life in Letters, p. 104.

  23 ZSF, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number –’, p. 422.

  24 Aunt Annabel had travelled to Rome for the Holy Year observances.

  25 Wilson, quoting Fitzgerald, to Arthur Mizener, 10 Nov. 1949, Letters on Literature and Politics, pp. 562–3; Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 229.

  26 Through Mackenzie the Fitzgeralds also met Francis Brett Young, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Axel Munthe, who was working on what would become his bestselling The Story of San Michele.

  27 His biographer James Mellow pointed out that though Scott was always edgy and boorish in the company of ‘fairies’, as he disparagingly called them, he developed an ever-increasing curiosity about their habits. Scott’s contorted complex relationship to this sexual issue was yet another of his remarkable resemblances to Zelda.

  28 FSF to MP, 31 Mar. 1925, Tumbull, Letters, p. 197.

  29 James Mellow is interesting on this matter. Invented Lives, p. 229.

  30 FSF to Wilson, 7 Oct. 1924.

  31 FSF to Wilson, 10 Jan. 1918; Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 229.

  32 Kendall Taylor, Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom. Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage, Ballantine Books, New York, 2001, p. 143.

  33 Art critic Carolyn Shafer to the author, Feb./Mar. 2001.

  34 Documentation of Zelda’s artistic work in Europe is particularly lacking. Shafer holds the view that as Europe was where Zelda first began to paint, she may have taken art lessons on more than one occasion in more than one European city. She may also have had exhibitions during her frequent visits to Europe of which both Shafer and this biographer are unaware.

  35 The painting is both unfinished and painted over.

  36 Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration: The Art of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’, unpublished MA thesis, University of South Carolina, 1994, pp. 28, 19.

  37 Jane S. Livingston is one critic who takes this view.

  38 Shafer believes Picasso had a substantial influence on Zelda. Other critics disagree.

  39 Sara Murphy to Mizener, 17 Jan. 1950; letter lent to this author by Honoria Murphy Donnelly.

  40 Winzola McLendon, ‘Interview: Frances Scott Fitzgerald to Winzola McLendon’, Ladies Home Journal, Nov. 1974. Nasturtiums were always on the table set for the lunches en famille Zelda organized during that period.

  41 Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, pp. 101,102.

  42 Eddie Pattillo to the author, Feb./Mar. 2001 and in discussions with the author, Montgomery, 1999, 2000.

  43 Shafer to the author, Feb./Mar. 2001.

  44 Calvin Tomkins, Living Well, p. 42.

  45 Memories of Ginevra’s wedding provided Scott with details for Daisy’s marriage to Tom Buchanan.

  46 FSF, Gatsby, Abacus, p. 124.

  47 Whereas in ‘The Sensible Thing’ George O’Kelly accepts love’s mutability: “There are all kinds of love in the world but never the same love twice’, Gatsby believes that one can recapture the past. ‘Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!’: FSF, ‘The Sensible Thing’, All The Sad Young Men, pp. 237–8; The Great Gatsby, p. 104.

  48 Baker may also have been based on a champion golfer called Jordan, a classmate of Ginevra, the other woman Scott considered ‘disloyal’. However Scott told Perkins that Jordan was Edith Cummings, another golfing schoolfriend of Ginevra’s. FSF to MP, c. 20 Dec. 1924, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 90.

  49 FSF to Annabel Fitzgerald, c. 1915, Life in Letters, p. 9.

  50 Taylor, Sometimes Madness, p. 145.

  51 Ruth Hale, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, reproduced in Romantic Egoists, p. 125.

  52 F. Scott Fitzgerald In His Own Time, p. 345.

  53 Ibid., p. 347.

  54 Lardner to FSF, Mar. 1925, CO187, Box 50, PUL.

  55 Wilson to FSF, 11 Apr. 1925, Wilson, Letters, p. 121.

  56 Mencken to FSF, 16 Apr. 1925, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 158.

  57 Seldes, ‘Spring Flight’, The Dial, Aug. 1925, p. 162.

  58 T. S. Eliot to FSF, 31 Dec. 1925, Romantic Egoists, p. 135.

  59 FSF quoted in Scott Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship, John Murray, London, 2000, p. 60.

  60 On the 102nd anniversary of Scott’s birth, novelist Allan Gurganus called Gatsby a ‘work of pure protein genius, the most disciplined and prophetic novel of its decade’. Gurganus, ‘Sacrificial Couples, the Splendor of our Failures and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’, paper commissioned by the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, delivered at the Fitzgeralds’ 1930s haunt, Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina, 24 Sep. 1998. Lent to the author by Gurganus.

  61 Scott learned this in June 1925.

  62 This would after many name changes become Tender Is The Night.

  63 These were raw studies for his masterpiece the Demoiselles d’Avignon.

  64 ZSF to FSF, undated, CO187, Box 44, Folder 15, PUL.

  65 Gertrude Stein to FSF, 22 May 1925, Crack-Up, New Directions, 1945, p. 308.

  66 FSF to Stein, June 1925, The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, ed. Donald Gallup, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1953, p. 174; Life in Letters, p. 115.

  67 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 220.

  68 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir.

  69 As Stein reported to Sherwood Anderson, who had introduced Hemingway to her. Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p. 62.

  70 James R. Mellow points out that Hemingway’s meeting with Zelda seems to have taken place before, not after, his trip to Lyons with Scott in May. It is clear from a letter to Van Vechten that Stein and Toklas left for Belley on 18 May 1925; the date of this letter to them from Hemingway should therefore be mid-May. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, Hodder & Stoughton, London, Sydney, Auckland, 1992, p. 290.

  71 He had been alerted by Edmund Wilson to Hemingway’s writings in the Transatlantic Review.

  72 EH, Moveable Feast, p. 147.

  73 It is worth noting that Moveable Feast warns: ‘If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.’ Hemingway’s statements about the Fitzgeralds are often unreliable. In Moveable Feast he says Fitzgerald came to the Dingo with Princetonian Duncan Chaplin, thus providing another witness to Scott’s bad behaviour, but Chaplin was not in Europe in 1925.

  74 EH to MP, 9 June 1925, EH, Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1981, pp. 162–3.

  75 Scott Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p. 61.

  76 FSF to Stein, June 1925, Flowers of Friendship, p. 174; Life in Letters, p. 115.

  77 FSF to MP, c. 10 Oct. 1924, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 78.

  78 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 136–7.

  79 Gerald Murphy to Milford, 26 Apr 1963, Milford, Zelda, p. 117. Scribner’s did not publish Hemingway’s savage attack on both the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys in Moveable Feast until 1964, the year Murphy died. Nearly forty years later additional research on Hemingway as the ‘real thing’ has shown just how much insight Zelda had about Hemingway and how intelligent Murphy was to remain cautious.

  CHAPTER 11

  At the first sight of Zelda, Hemingway behaved no differently from many of Scott’s male friends. He found Mrs Fitzgerald, the woman ‘worth seeing’, intensely physically attractive.

  During the first lunch Ernest and Hadley Hemingway shared with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway displayed his attraction to Zelda.1 It was a gloomy lunch party which took place soon after Scott and
Hemingway’s first meeting, supposedly at the Fitzgeralds’ ornate, badly furnished apartment, according to Sara Mayfield a ‘depressing flat over a brasserie … a fifth-floor walk-up, with strange purple-and-gold wallpaper’.2 In fact, documentation shows the famous lunch took place not at the Fitzgeralds’ curious apartment but at the Hemingways’ humble flat.3 Perhaps it was its humble location that made the inventive Ernest change it to the Fitzgeralds’ superior one!

  Zelda remembers an ornamental turtle on the lunch table brimming with white violets. Ernest remembers Zelda. But exactly what he remembers depends on which of his versions you read.

  In his earliest manuscript version of that lunch he gives this picture of Zelda: ‘very beautiful and … tanned a lovely gold color and her hair was a beautiful dark gold and she was very friendly. Her hawk’s eyes were clear and calm.’ Her skin is smooth and tawny, her legs light and long as ‘nigger legs’, she is not drunk nor is she jealous of Scott’s work. Though Hemingway sees her as spoilt and as saying curious things he admits to an erotic dream about her the following night. ‘The next time I saw her I told her that and she was pleased. That was the first and last time we ever had anything in common.’4

  Maybe. Or maybe not. There is counter-evidence which shows that at the start of the two couples’ friendship, when Hemingway writes to Scott he regularly sends affectionate greetings to Zelda: ‘And how is Zelda?’, ‘Best love to Zelda’ and similarly pleasant if perfunctory remarks.5 When Zelda was sick, Hemingway demonstrated concern. He wrote to Scott that he understood how hard pain was and what a shame it was for Zelda to be ill.

  Hemingway during this short early period was confident that Zelda as well as Scott would be fascinated by him. But Zelda, who often responded flirtatiously to male interest, did not respond to Hemingway.

  Far from it. Cynical about Hemingway’s display of aggressive manliness, she thought Scott’s romantic admiration for his hard-boiled manner demeaning. Attracted to deferential, civilized, more polished men, Zelda felt menaced by Hemingway’s brutish behaviour. Seeing his influence as a threat to her marriage, she shrewdly queried Ernest’s sexual prowess. First she remarked to Gerald: ‘Nobody is as male as all that!’ Then she taunted Hemingway to his face: ‘No one is as masculine as you pretend to be.’6 She told Sara Mayfield and wrote to Perkins that Ernest was ‘a sort of materialist mystic’,7 rather than a gentleman in their Southern sense. Indeed Hemingway was not a gentleman in any sense. Mayfield remembers Ernest derided polite conversation between men as ‘damn women’s talk’. His method of commending one male friend to another was to announce: ‘You’ll like him – he’s tough.’ Zelda told Sara this was suspicious camouflage, that beneath Hemingway’s integrity as a writer there was base metal in the man that never rang true. She felt that under Ernest’s well-publicized ‘healthy’ interest in sports, tippling and war, there was ‘a morbid preoccupation with offbeat sex and the sadism and necrophilia that go with it’ which she found ‘repugnant’.8