Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Zelda found the group’s artistic camaraderie stimulating and their willingness to take her art seriously a change from Scott’s attitude, which vacillated between suggesting she did something for herself and giving her little credit when she did.

  During 1925 she started on a self-portrait which she worked on for a year. She was using watercolour and gouache on paper, a medium which suited her life of travel. It would have been hard to transport and store vast stretchers, bulky canvases and oil paints whereas small gouaches on paper were easily portable.41

  Zelda dated few of her paintings so it is difficult to be precise about which watercolour she worked on during 1925. The most likely is Girl With Orange Dress because it shows influences of Larionov and other Cubists and has some links with Murphy’s paintings.

  Zelda was thoroughly exposed to the work of Mikhail Larionov in 1925, when she viewed his sets, scenes and curtains for the Diaghilev ballet, all in the same intense powerful colours she used in her early paintings.42 Like Larionov, Zelda uses a Cubist perspective to fracture pictorial space without allowing the scene to disintegrate. In Girl With Orange Dress her two main subjects, a girl in billowing skirts and a zany dog, are seen from different viewpoints on different planes. Then to achieve wild vibrations she explodes a bright orange colour on to the picture.43 The girl’s body sways off-centre, her billowing skirt makes the picture move, while the dog leaps about in the right foreground. Zelda’s cockeyed angles and compositional movements force our gaze to move too, with an effect akin to an earthquake. Zelda’s craft, still in its early stages, allowed her partially to restore the painting’s balance by splashing reddish-orange on the fireplace and vase of flowers, to move the viewer’s eye to the right of the composition.

  The first impressions that Zelda’s friends derived from her paintings were like their first impressions of the artist: no one quite knew what was going on in Zelda’s head. Characteristically, Zelda produced ambiguities. It is not clear if the girl dressed in orange is dancing or just swaying like a plant. It is not clear if she is merry or sad.

  Zelda had also seen many of Gerald Murphy’s paintings. Though he was never a direct influence on her there are at this point some similarities in their work. Gerald used shifting perspectives to represent real objects together with abstract forms to achieve a haunting emotional intensity that unsettles viewers, much as Zelda’s paintings do. In 1924 he had painted a remarkable picture, Razor, which influenced the Murphys’ set.44 He crossed a fountain pen and a safety razor like heraldic quarterings against a gigantic matchbox, balanced the matchbox on three other boxes and gave them oddly angled perspectives. When Zelda and other friends looked at it, they saw the matchbox top presented flat as if viewed from above; the part that held the matches receded from their gaze, while the razor was drawn in profile and in section from three viewpoints. What Gerald’s and Zelda’s dissimilar paintings had in common was the odd angles and strange brooding quality which gave them their sense of power. But while Gerald’s work has precision, brevity and control, Zelda’s is untamed.

  Already painting and writing, Zelda now returned after a seven-year gap to her old love, ballet. According to Mayfield, in spring 1925 in Paris both Fitzgeralds met Lubov Egorova, the Princess Troubetskoy, who would become the single most significant artistic influence on Zelda.45 Egorova, formerly a leading ballerina with the Russian Imperial Ballet, had emigrated to Paris and at Diaghilev’s suggestion opened a studio in 1923, where she excelled as a ballet coach. One version of how Zelda and Egorova first met is that Scott, who thought Zelda needed something to do, suggested that Murphy arrange an introduction; more probably Zelda, who knew Egorova was teaching young Honoria Murphy, asked Gerald to arrange dancing lessons for her. Because of the Fitzgeralds’ constant travelling Zelda did not begin her serious dance work until 1927. However, as Mayfield later remarked, the seeds of the Fitzgeralds’ discord over Egorova were sown before Zelda and Scott left Paris to visit the Murphys in Antibes in August 1925.

  Sara Murphy recalled that during that year ‘She [Zelda] worked so hard at her painting and writing and dancing,’ but added, ‘We … only wish she had been happier.’46

  Despite her fruitful activities Zelda was increasingly unhappy about the role of Hemingway in her marriage, while Scott certainly felt torn between his wife and his new friend. But he continued to advance Ernest’s literary progress with great generosity. As self-appointed talent scout for Perkins, Fitzgerald successfully masterminded Ernest’s move to Scribner’s. He even lent money to Hemingway, who exaggerated his poverty.47 Zelda objected to Scott’s constant loans to Ernest. ‘He’s a pain in the neck – talking about me and borrowing money from you while he does it,’ she said angrily to Scott. ‘He’s phony as a rubber check and you know it.’48

  Hemingway accepted but never forgave Scott’s benevolence.49 His manipulative skill shows when after finishing Gatsby he wrote that he was suddenly aware that no matter how badly Scott behaved, he would regard such behaviour merely as sickness. Moreover Ernest would try, as a good friend, to help him. Those lines effectively established Hemingway as Scott’s benefactor when it was largely the other way round.50

  That spring and summer of 1925 Scott, with Hemingway’s encouragement, and an assertive style not unlike Hemingway’s own, completed a significant work, ‘The Rich Boy’.51 Scott wrote to their wealthy friend Ludlow Fowler that it was ‘in large measure the story of your life, toned down here and there and simplified’.52 In one of his most famous literary passages Scott divulges a deep-held belief:

  Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful … they think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.53

  Though Zelda was intermittently ill with gynaecological problems during the summer, for Scott it was a time of ‘1000 parties and no work’.54 He sipped cocktails with the Murphys and got drunk with Hemingway, ‘an equeal and my kind of idealist’.55 His drinking increased so that even their friends’ children became aware of it. Fanny Myers recalls how one lunchtime Scott rang their doorbell, staggered in drunk then fell on her bed. Alice Myers explained to little Fanny that Scott was ‘having a little lie down’. Fanny forgave him because on his recovery he said she was exceptionally pretty, her first ever compliment.56

  Scott’s debauched lifestyle was leaving physical effects. Sara Mayfield reported: ‘His hair was still yellow as a jonquil, but he had lost the fresh-scrubbed look of an Arrow collar advertisement. His hands were stained with nicotine, and he was constantly drumming a tattoo with them or wiping the perspiration from them with a damp handkerchief … his skin had a greenish tinge … he had developed what he called “a pot”.’57

  Zelda still retained her lithe figure and classic beauty but her blue eyes, according to Sara, were often sad. In unguarded moments she nervously twisted her hands together or chewed the corner of her mouth. The Murphys noticed a strange smile occasionally played about Zelda’s lips.

  Scott’s behaviour, even with the Murphys, became unreliable, sometimes tasteless. One evening the Murphys took the Fitzgeralds and Barrys to a new dance restaurant near the Champs-Elysées. Scott, uninterested in food, music or dancing, remained sullen. Ellen Barry recalls that when the Murphys rose to leave Scott sank to his knees on the dance floor, clutched Gerald’s hand and sobbed: ‘Don’t go! Take me with you – don’t leave me here!’ Gerald, furious, pulled away. ‘This is not Princeton, and I’m not your roommate,’ he said curtly.58

  Despite Gerald’s chastisement, Scott continued to ask him for literary advice and pester him with intimate questions.59 Scott was desperate to live inside Gerald’s skin, but though he hero-worshipped Gerald he never understood him. Zelda, watching, empathizing, rarely asking questions, understood Gerald much better. Though Sara chided Scott for his appallin
g behaviour she also acknowledged: ‘He always realized when he had gone too far – & was sorry and mortified – not always, I am sorry to say, till much later … but he did feel badly about it.’60

  Scott had what the biographer Scott Donaldson calls a ‘severe crush’ on Sara as well as Gerald. Gerald believed Scott was ‘sentimentally disturbed’ by Sara.61 But what lay underneath Scott’s idolization of the Murphys was their Eastern establishment privilege, their self-assurance.

  A tricky area for Zelda was Sara Murphy’s adoration for Ernest, which contrasted with her intermittent irritation with Scott. Sara would not hear a disparaging word about Hemingway, even from Zelda. Both Murphys reinforced Gertrude Stein’s boundless admiration for Hemingway’s work.62 After reading an unfinished manuscript of The Sun Also Rises, Gerald wrote to Hadley: ‘We read it the other day and were blown out of the water alive.’ To Ernest himself, Gerald said: ‘Those God-damn stories of yours kept me rooted and goggle-eyed all the way to Germany the other day … My God, but you’ve kept your promise with yourself.’63 The Murphys’ greater respect for Friend Ernest over Friend Scott stemmed from the fact that Hemingway rarely allowed anything to interfere with his promise whilst Scott did so constantly.

  In contrast to his own disreputable antics, Scott kept an orderly eye on Scottie’s, exercised strict overall control and cut Zelda out: a system he maintained throughout Scottie’s youth. Scottie’s least pleasant memory about life in France was Scott’s insistence on catechism class every Sunday. ‘Daddy made me go even though he no longer believed in the Catholic faith, but his family did and he feared that they might be offended if I wasn’t brought up in the Church.’64

  Zelda was offered only the role of creative games inventor or designer of unusual dolls. Her exclusion may have been another underlying cause for their escalating rows. Sara Murphy said it was obvious when quarrels reached a climax, for Zelda’s trunk could be seen in the courtyard. A day later she would heave the trunk back upstairs. Sara emphasized Zelda’s loyalty. She never spoke to the Murphys or other friends about their marital battles. ‘It did upset her to hear Scott scolded or criticized – she flew to his defense & backed him up in everything – If Scott … pretended to make love publicly – or even once drove a taxicab away, leaving the driver behind, she would only chuckle indulgently.’65

  Then matters deteriorated. Zelda told Mayfield that after a few drinks Scott would become truculent. In one drunken rage he struck her and Zelda told Sara she ‘was physically afraid of him in his manic states’. Scott defended himself later by demanding of a group of male friends: ‘Is there any man present who can honestly say he has never hit his wife in anger?’66

  Zelda’s repressed anger appeared to result in a further distancing from people. Sara Murphy said: ‘I don’t believe she liked very many people although her manners to everyone were perfect.’67

  As their lives became more unruly, Zelda clung obsessively to personal cleanliness and order. That year Sara Murphy felt Zelda was even fresher and ‘more exquisite’: ‘She was so beautiful always – glossy dark-gold hair and her delicate “Indian” face, and a fresh little cotton dress every day – cleanliness and order were a sort of fetish with her.’68 Nathan recalls her as ‘resolutely fastidious’ but says it was because ‘Scott would have it no other way’.69

  In August 1925 the Fitzgeralds went to Antibes, where the Murphys had moved into their fourteen-room Villa America high above the beach of La Garoupe. Scott, fascinated by the villa’s Moorish style, admired Gerald’s success in scraping away the seaweed so that visitors could swim. Dinner parties were held on the flagstone terrace shaded by a linden tree. Waxed black tile floors contrasted with sheer white walls and gleaming chrome furniture. Black satin covered the chair seats. Tangerines, lemons and olives crowded the orchard near Sara’s herb garden. The fragrance of eucalyptus and mimosa wafted through cedar trees and palms. The Murphys used a small Provençal farmhouse for guests, Gerald had a painting studio and seven-year-old Honoria entertained her brothers, Scottie and Fanny Myers in her playhouse.

  Scott needed solitude to work on his new novel, then called Our Type, later The Boy Who Killed His Mother, based, he told Perkins, on the Leopold–Loeb murder. But he also confessed to Perkins: ‘it is about Zelda & me & the hysteria of last May and June in Paris. (Confidential).’70

  There was however to be no solitude on the Riviera, as Scott’s name-dropping letter to Bishop illustrates:

  There was no one at Antibes this summer except me, Zelda, the Valentino, the Murphy’s, Mistinguet, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the Mclieshes, Charlie Bracket, Maude Kahn, Esther Murphy, Marguerite Namara, E. Phillips Openhiem, Mannes the violinist, Floyd Dell, Max and Chrystal Eastman, ex-Premier Orlando, Ettienne de Beaumont …71

  Scott’s list (from which only the Hemingways, away in Spain, were missing) depicts the cultural invasion that was about to turn Antibes into an international playground.

  In Antibes Zelda, though frequently ill, provided entertainments for Scottie. When the child said she’d like to get married, Zelda staged a wedding. Little Scottie wore a white dress and veil and carried a bridal bouquet. Scott gave her away and bought her ring. ‘Not a real diamond,’ Scottie complained, ‘it was from the five-and-dime store’. Zelda produced a wedding cake, then sent her on a honeymoon ride along the Mediterranean coast in a car decorated with streamers and fresh flowers.72

  Though Scottie’s childhood was torn with rows, a drunken father and later a sick absent mother, memories like these meant she determinedly recalled it as ‘romantic’.73 Legend says Scottie was ‘untouched by marital conflicts’ but Scottie’s daughter, Eleanor Lanahan, says this was merely Scottie’s defence which she maintained throughout her life.74 Playing these children’s games, Zelda and Scott too lived for a time in a magical world.

  Then one evening in August a disturbing incident occurred. The Fitzgeralds dined with the Murphys at an inn in St Paul de Vence in the mountains above Nice. The dining terrace was built 200 feet above the valley with a sheer drop from the outside walls of the terrace. Gerald sat in front of a flight of ten stone steps. Isadora Duncan, at forty-six somewhat heavy, with dyed red hair, was dining at a nearby table. When Gerald alerted Scott to her presence, he rushed over and knelt at Duncan’s feet while she ran her fingers through his hair and called him her centurion. The Murphys later told Mayfield that when Duncan indicated to Scott he might visit her that night Zelda showed no resentment, but watched them silently for several minutes. Then suddenly she leapt from her chair, sprang across the table, across Gerald and flung herself down the stone steps. ‘I was sure she was dead,’ Gerald said. ‘We were all stunned and motionless.’ In fact Zelda reappeared within moments, standing still at the top of the steps. Sara ran to her and wiped the blood from her knees and dress. Gerald recalls thinking that, strangely, this violent incident had not appeared ugly: yet another example of Zelda’s style which meant no matter what she did, she did it without vulgarity.75 Mayfield’s analysis was that ‘if Zelda’s eyes wandered, Scott’s pride prompted him to attack her and the man to whom she was attracted; but if Zelda’s amour propre was wounded by Scott’s attentions to other women, she wanted only to destroy herself.’76

  Scott’s Ledger entry for August 1925 is laconic. He simply notes the name ‘Eleanor Duncan’, then scrawls out ‘Eleanor’ and replaces it with ‘Isadora’. When Scott noted the Jozan incident he constantly misspelled the man’s name. This time he casually gets the name entirely wrong and just as casually corrects it. In both cases Scott’s use of language serves to minimize or gloss over a dangerous event.

  Self-destructive actions on Zelda’s part began to pepper meetings between the Fitzgeralds and Murphys. Gerald believed neither of the Fitzgeralds wanted ‘ordinary pleasures, they hardly noticed good food or wines, but they did want something to happen’.77

  On the Riviera Zelda and Scott became even closer to the Murphys and the MacLeishes. When the Fitzgeralds left for Paris in S
eptember, Gerald, forgiving Scott all lapses, wrote: ‘There really was a great sound of tearing heard in the land as your train pulled out that day. Sara and I rode back together saying things about you both to each other which only partly expressed what we felt separately … Most people are dull, without distinction and without value, even humanely … you two belong so irrevocably to that rare race of people who are valuable.’78

  This wildly generous letter stands as a witness to the good feelings both Zelda and Scott aroused in others, despite the tensions between them as a couple. Zelda’s verdict on Antibes came in a letter to her friend Madeleine Boyd: ‘We went to Antibes to recuperate but all we recooped was drinking hours. Now, once again, the straight and narrow path goes winding and wobbling before us and Scott is working.’79 But that winter was not all work. The Murphys came to Paris at the end of September and saw the Fitzgeralds daily. In November the Fitzgeralds visited London and saw Tallulah Bankhead as the heroine in Michael Arlen’s hit play The Green Hat.80 Zelda wrote to Scottie: ‘We went to London to see a fog and saw Tallulah Bankhead, which was, perhaps about the same effect.’81 To Madeleine Zelda was as wittily acid about the playwright: ‘just got back from bloody England where the Michael Arlens grow – hardy annuals it says in the seed catalogues’. Zelda told Madeleine that though in Paris she was ‘not so amiable as I was before living in this seat of sin and literary learning’, she was ‘passing the winter agreeably among plagiarists who are always delightful … Civilization is not what it once was even for authors wives.’82

  She did not tell Madeleine that severe stomach illnesses and repressed tensions had brought on a bout of uncontrollable nerves. Scott wrote to Hemingway that Zelda was suffering from ‘a nervous hysteria which is only relieved by a doctor bearing morphine’.83