Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  One afternoon at the Deux Magots café Sara listened to the Fitzgeralds arguing about Hemingway. Scott reprimanded Zelda for insulting Hemingway. Zelda retorted: ‘“I didn’t insult him. I just said he was a phony.”’

  Sara, as amazed by the word ‘phony’ as Gerald had been at the word ‘bogus’, repeated incredulously to Zelda: ‘“A phony? What makes you say that?”

  ‘“She’s jealous,” Scott said.’9

  If Zelda was jealous, Hemingway was certainly vindictive.

  In his later published version of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway carefully contrives to rewrite that first lunch scene in the purple-and-gold wallpapered apartment to put both Zelda and Scottie in a very bad light. Three-year-old Scottie is portrayed with a strong Cockney accent acquired from an English nanny. Zelda is hung over with a drawn face, tired eyes, suffering a poor permanent wave which has ruined her ‘beautiful dark blond hair’. Hemingway focuses on how Zelda encourages Scott to drink, calls him ‘kill-joy’ and ‘spoilsport’ when he demurs and smiles smugly as he drinks so much he will be unable to write later.10

  Neither account – the version portraying Zelda as dissipated and manipulative, nor the version in which she is erotic and dreamworthy – is entirely to be trusted. But the rewriting to Zelda’s detri ment in that late account in A Moveable Feast after her death was the last in a long series of attacks which continued throughout her life.

  Hemingway fired off the first of his charges in 1925.

  Zelda was too independent. She was jealous of Scott’s work. She didn’t put Scott and his writing first. She encouraged Scott’s drinking to further destroy his talents. Her greed was behind Scott’s decision to devote more time to best-selling stories, less to literature. As for their luxuriant lifestyle (for which Hemingway held her responsible), it was shamefully brash compared with his and Hadley’s. Hemingway paused. Breathed. Took aim again. This time he spotted signs of a lesbian orientation, well if not that, or not that quite yet, Zelda certainly mixed with women who mixed with women. Worst of all, Hemingway noticed definite signs of instability.

  Legend suggests that on first meeting Zelda, Hemingway drew Scott aside and said brutally: ‘She’s crazy,’ shocking Scott deeply.11 Hadley, when questioned, had no memory of Ernest saying this though it is possible that Ernest spoke out of her hearing. Hemingway still insisted in conversations with Scott as late as 1934 that he had known in 1925 that Zelda was unstable. ‘I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course, you’re a rummy.’12

  During 1925, Hemingway ensured Zelda heard his tales of her supposed craziness. Zelda said angrily to Scott in front of Sara Mayfield: ‘He [Hemingway] thinks I’m crazy and says so. Why shouldn’t I say anything I choose to about him?’ To which Scott replied that if she said scandalous things about his big new friend she was crazy.13

  The following year on the Riviera, when Zelda said ironically: ‘Ernest, don’t you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?’, Hemingway saw this as confirmation of Zelda’s insanity.14 Neither Hemingway nor his biographers recognized Zelda’s remark as typically idiosyncratic. In this case she repeated it: Gerald Murphy also recalls her saying, ‘Don’t you think that Al Jolson is just like Christ?’ Gerald did not push Zelda further as other people were present, but he said such startling remarks ‘gave her conversation a freshness and a certain edge that was part of her charm’. Honoria Murphy said that Gerald considered neither Hemingway nor Scott ever fathomed Zelda’s complexity: ‘her mind operated in a different way from other friends, she quite simply made different connections.’15

  Sara Murphy thought that though Zelda’s ‘wit was sometimes barbed, it derived from the surprise of incongruity and from searching, humorous observation’.16

  Many of the Fitzgeralds’ friends did not believe Hemingway’s canards. They told Arthur Mizener, Scott’s first biographer, that Zelda saw more sanely than Scott how seriously their lives were getting out of hand. During 1925–6 Zelda had more stability than Scott and a greater strength of character to resist dissipation. Mizener suggested: ‘A good deal of injustice has certainly been done to the Zelda of the twenties because she later went insane and it is difficult not to let the knowledge that she did so affect one’s view of what she was like before 1930.’17

  Some of the reasons for Hemingway’s focus on these particular ‘flaws’ in Zelda can be seen in his childhood, early manhood and in his choice of marriage partner and style of marriage.

  Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, on 21 July 1899, the second of six children. Like Scott he had a dominant mother and a father given to depression, who was passive with his wife but strict with his children, all of whom were regularly spanked. Dr Clarence Hemingway was an outdoor person who taught his children to hunt and fish. Strong-willed Grace Hall, Ernest’s mother, was an indoor person, musical, artistic, determined to remain independent. A good soprano, she worked with a famous voice coach, auditioned for the Met and when married continued to give singing lessons, earning ten times more than her husband earned as a doctor. Grace treated her two first-born, daughter Marcelline and son Ernest, in an unusual manner that had a lasting effect on Ernest – and on his relationship to Zelda. Grace dressed them like female twins, in gingham dresses or fluffy lace tucked frocks with picture hats. She had their hair cut similarly in a Dutch dolly style with bangs across the forehead hanging prettily below the ears. Ernest wore dresses until he entered kindergarten, twice as long as any contemporary boy might have been attired in female garb. Moreover no boys in that period had girls’ haircuts as well as girls’ clothes.18

  Both Ernest and Marcelline felt scarred by their father’s mental illness and their mother’s intimate companionship with Ruth Arnold, Grace’s former favourite pupil, who was only three years older than Marcelline and had long lodged with the family. As she and Clarence became estranged, Grace decided to use an inheritance to build a cottage a mile away from the family summer residence. Ruth visited there constantly after Dr Hemingway forbade her to enter his family home. Dr Hemingway began to act ‘insane on the subject’ of Ruth, just as Ernest would begin to act insane on the subject of Zelda.19 Ernest consistently depicted his mother as a villain in fiction and letters, but it seems Grace’s greatest crimes were her artistic independence and her unapologetic unwillingness to become an ordinary housewife.20 In this she was very like Zelda.

  During the 1920s Ernest’s hatred of his mother had intensified. He felt she had emasculated his father and later felt she drove him to his suicide in 1928, after which young Ruth moved in to live with Grace.21 Incensed, Ernest would then forbid his sons to visit his mother on the grounds that she was ‘androgynous’.

  So by the time Zelda encountered Hemingway his hostility to domineering women, his anxieties about mental instability and his aggression towards lesbianism were strongly formed. All he needed was a target.

  Towards male homosexuals he was less aggressive than intensely curious, as Scott was. Gerald Murphy noticed Hemingway would frequently say: ‘I don’t mind a fairy like so and so, do you? … He was extremely sensitive to the question of who was one and who wasn’t.’22 The teasing homoerotic letters Ernest and Scott wrote each other showed their shared attitude of antipathy yet attraction towards ‘fairies’ which escalated into crude banter when they drank.

  But of course neither of them wished the outside world to view them as ‘fairies’, and Scott in particular was protective of Ernest’s manly reputation. Zelda however had no such reservations. When Scott accused her of being jealous of Hemingway she shrieked: “‘Of what? A rugged adventurer, big-game hunter, sportsman, and professional he man, a pansy with hair on his chest?”’

  Scott’s face went scarlet and his eyes bulged as he shouted.

  “‘Zelda! Don’t ever say that again … it’s slanderous.”’

  Zelda, calmer than Scott, pointed out that if calling Hemingway a pansy was slander, then Scott should sue
the homosexual American writer Robert McAlmon, who was currently spreading the rumour that Scott and Ernest were homosexuals. Zelda told Sara that Scott and Ernest both fell out with McAlmon because of these – in their terms – unsavoury accusations.23 Scott, deeply distressed, began to question his masculinity, which in turn had negative implications for his marriage.

  Perhaps in retaliation for these rumours, Hemingway charged Zelda with seeking out lesbian company in Paris salons as a method of impeding Scott’s work. He believed Scott was frightened that spring that Zelda would get so drunk that she would lose control. Hemingway admitted that Zelda did not encourage those who pursued her but the pursuers amused her and also made Scott so jealous he insisted on accompanying Zelda everywhere. That meant he could not work.

  As Hemingway recalled and wrote about the incident many years later, several of Scott’s biographers think he misremembered the date and that Zelda entered Natalie Barney’s lesbian artistic set in 1929, a date which is substantially documented. However, if we consider the women Zelda mixed with in 1925–6 it is plausible that Hemingway was correct. Through the Hemingways and Murphys, Zelda met Pauline Pfeiffer, a Vogue journalist from Arkansas, rumoured to be on a husband-hunting expedition in Paris, who had become attracted to Ernest, and her small exotic sister Jinnie, who, by taking more interest in women suitors than in men, may have introduced other artistic lesbians into Zelda’s circle.24 However, during 1925 and 1926 Zelda would almost certainly have been drawn to these women because they were artists. Although her marriage was suffering sexually, both through her own lingering illnesses and through Scott’s by now addictive alcoholism, she was not in search of specific sexual adventures with women. She was, however, angry with Hemingway who, she felt, ruthlessly encouraged Scott’s drinking.

  Hemingway seemed able to drink all day, half the night and still work well the next morning, whereas after three cocktails Scott was ‘off on a spree that left him shot for a week’.25 Ironically, in 1925, when Scott’s writing began to suffer more severely from his alcoholism, Hemingway blamed Zelda, and later hand-wrote a sketch to show her again in a bad light.26 In the sketch Fitzgerald frequently turns up drunk at the Hemingways’. Ernest’s son Bumby asks his father whether M. Fitzgerald is ill. Ernest replies that Scott’s sickness derives from too much alcohol and therefore too little work. Young Bumby wonders whether Scott still respects his own art. Caustically Ernest points out that it is Zelda who does not respect Scott’s art and may well be jealous of it. Bumby the true son of Ernest suggests Scott should chastise Zelda

  This was exactly what Ernest thought Scott should do. He thought Zelda should play out a traditional role like his wife Hadley. Despite a private income, Hadley did the cooking and cleaning whilst Ernest fixed bottles for baby Bumby and dramatized their reduced circumstances. Zelda of course always employed nannies and wherever she and Scott lived they lived extravagantly, while Hadley and Ernest lived frugally in a sparsely furnished apartment over a sawmill off the Latin Quarter at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Zelda’s clothes came from Patou or Chanel, Hadley’s from Au Bon Marché. Hemingway minded that more than did either Zelda or Hadley.

  The Fitzgeralds took cocktails at the Ritz or the George V while the Hemingways drank at zinc bars in the Latin Quarter. The Fitzgeralds regularly dined on pressed duck at the Tour d’Argent or sampled pâté aux truffes at Maxim’s, while Ernest and Hadley had been known to borrow money from their friend Sylvia Beach, who owned the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore, to eat at the local brasserie. As the Hemingways possessed no evening clothes, if the Fitzgeralds met them after dinner outings had to be tempered to the Hemingways’ tastes. These were primarily dancing at bals musettes, attending boxing matches or touring decadent and homosexual bars in the rue de Lappe.27 Hemingway’s fondness for these lends a certain irony to his accusation that year that Zelda was consorting with lesbians. Zelda in fact preferred to accompany the Murphys to a Diaghilev première, or one of Etienne de Beaumont’s ‘Soirées de Paris’, than to haunt bars with the Hemingways. Zelda confided in Sara Mayfield that she hated the friends Scott had picked up at the Dingo Bar. ‘All they talk about is sex – sex plain, striped, mixed, and fancy. Nice life, sitting in a café all day and a bal musette all night. You have to drink yourself blotto to keep from being bored to death.’28

  The couples’ friendship was largely based on Scott and Ernest’s shared interest in writing. Hadley and Zelda were merely writers’ wives who did not particularly get on. Hadley found the Fitzgeralds ‘inconvenient friends’, as they called on the Hemingways at four in the morning: ‘We had a baby and didn’t appreciate it very much. When Scott wrote I don’t know.’29

  Temperament and marital goals were more serious differences between the two women. Hadley felt Zelda was fundamentally frivolous, though ‘a charming, lovely creature … [who] lived on what Ernest called the “festival conception of life”’.30 Hadley admired Zelda’s beauty and style but recognized they had little in common. Zelda was bold and free spirited, Hadley shy and still insecure.

  Born Hadley Richardson in 1891 in St Louis, the youngest of four, she was delicately reared and overprotected because of a childhood injury.31 When she was twelve her beloved father committed suicide, as Ernest’s father would do later. It was a cheerless household for a timorous adolescent. Musically talented like her domineering mother, she retreated into her music until she entered Bryn Mawr, but was forced to leave college because of illness. Her life became still grimmer when her oldest sister died giving birth to a stillborn child; then her mother contracted Bright’s Disease, so Hadley nursed her until she died in 1921. At twenty-nine Hadley saw herself as a spinster. On a visit to Chicago an excitable twenty-one-year-old, ‘hulky, bulky, something masculine’,32 noticed her diffidently playing the piano at a party. This hulky creature was Ernest Hemingway, unproven writer. Her shyness dissolved. Within three weeks Hemingway talked of marriage. Hadley adored the fact Ernest was devoted to his art. Ernest adored her red hair, sense of fun and her appreciation of him, his adventures, his writing. Before they married she wrote Ernest letters similar to those Zelda had written to Scott: ‘I love your ambitions. Don’t think I am ambitious except to be a balanced, happy, intelligent lady, making the man happy.’ But Hadley, who understood Ernest’s fears (which paralleled Scott’s), assured him that though she had had a girlhood friendship with a lesbian he ‘needn’t fear on that side’.33 Hadley’s nurturing instinct suited Ernest. Hadley’s trust fund suited him more.34 Hadley decided she would use her fund to back Ernest’s career. They married on 3 September 1921, after which Ernest saw himself as a teacher with Hadley as his brightest pupil, who would never be allowed to dominate him as his mother had dominated his father. Zelda, aware of Hemingway’s determination, worried that he would further influence Scott in that direction.

  Observantly she said to Hadley: ‘I notice that in the Hemingway family you do what Ernest wants.’ Hadley was honest enough to admit that although ‘Ernest didn’t like that much … it was a perceptive remark. He had a passionate, overwhelming desire to do some of the things that have since been written about, and so I went along with him – with the trips, the adventures. He had such a powerful personality; he could be so enthusiastic that I became caught up in the notions too.’35

  Hadley did not tell Zelda that what she observed in the Fitzgerald marriage was two kinds of jealousy: Scott’s jealousy of Zelda and Zelda’s jealousy of Scott’s work.36 The fact that Hadley’s ambitions were to service Ernest’s skewed her view of Zelda so that she loyally echoed Hemingway’s view that Zelda ‘was more jealous of his [Scott’s] work than anything’.37 Zelda’s letters and fiction show clearly that at this time she was not jealous of Scott’s achievements, but was growing resentful that her part in Scott’s success was neither credited nor paid for; her attempts at independent writing were subsumed under Scott’s name, while her painting was seen as frivolous.

  When Hadley noticed that Zelda was not swept along by
Ernest’s charisma, she suggested: ‘He was too assured a male for her. Maybe she … resented it … He was then the kind of man to whom men, women, children and dogs were attracted.’38 Hadley was right about men liking him. Unlike Scott, who found male friendships difficult because he made heroes of his male friends, Hemingway inspired male companionship. But not all women liked him. One woman friend said he was ‘in every way a man’s man. I think he disliked women heartily; and in most cases they disliked him – excluding sex, of course.’39

  Zelda was now painting steadily. What is more, she had a direct entry to Natalie Barney’s rue Jacob art enclave, for she had already met Barney’s lover, the painter Romaine Brooks. Now, through Esther Murphy and Esther’s sister-in-law Noel, Barney’s friend, Zelda met other female artists and writers. Gerald Murphy, irritated by the group’s openly homosexual antics, distanced himself from his sister, particularly when Esther was fictionalized as Bounding Bess by novelist Djuna Barnes in her lesbian satire Ladies Almanack. Noel, married to Gerald’s brother Frederick, found Gerald’s attitude inexcusable, partly because she accurately suspected that Gerald was being dishonest about his own submerged homosexual feelings.40