by Sally Cline
The Fitzgeralds needed a festive Christmas, and Scott had good news to celebrate. The Saturday Evening Post had raised his fees, New York theatrical producer Owen Davis had taken an option on Gatsby for production next February, Scott had a new short story collection, All The Sad Young Men, also coming out in February,84 and his 1925 earnings totalled $18,333, only $2,000 less than 1924. So Zelda and Nanny decorated the tree with silver garlands, birds with spun-glass tails and cardboard houses shiny with snow, the ornaments they always travelled with. Then, smiling at their prosperity, Zelda, Scott and Scottie posed in a chorus line in front of their tree for one of those immortal photographs they sent their friends. They were still doing high kicks, but they were already falling.
Notes
1 EH, ‘Hawks Do Not Share’, Moveable Feast.
2 Zelda herself told Sara that ‘it smelled like a church chancery and was furnished with genuine Louis XV from the Galeries Lafayette’. Mayfield, Exiles, p. 110.
3 Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, p. 291.
4 Ibid.
5 EH to FSF, 1 July, 15 Dec. 1925, EH, Selected Letters, pp. 165, 177.
6 Honoria Murphy Donnelly with Richard N. Billings, Sara and Gerald, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1982, p. 21.
7 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 137; ZSF to MP, 1926, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald, 1921–1944, PUL.
8 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 137, 113.
9 Ibid., p. 141.
10 Mellow, Hemingway, p. 290.
11 Quoted by Richard N. Billings, Donnelly and Billings, Sara and Gerald, p. 21.
12 EH to FSF, 28 May 1934, EH, Selected Letters, p. 408.
13 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 141.
14 Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success, Random House, New York, 1978, p. 22.
15 Honoria Murphy Donnelly to the author, New York, 1998.
16 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 115.
17 Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 220.
18 They even had identical toys: cuddly baby dolls, china tea sets and miniature air rifles.
19 Mellow, Hemingway, p. 104.
20 Ibid., p. 20.
21 Hemingway’s father committed suicide in 1928. In later years Hemingway said ‘I hate her guts and she hates mine. She forced my father to suicide.’ Ibid., p. 565.
22 Ibid., p. 297.
23 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 141, 140.
24 Mellow, Hemingway, p. 294. Later Hemingway claimed that Jinnie had tried to convert Pauline (then his second wife) to the lesbian cause.
25 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 106.
26 This draft was possibly for use in Moveable Feast.
27 Mayfield, Exiles, 107.
28 Ibid., pp. 138–9.
29 Hadley Hemingway (Mrs Paul Scott Mowrer) to Milford, 25 July 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 115.
30 Ibid.
31 Hadley fell from a second storey window and her damaged back required months of bed-rest.
32 Bernice Kert, The Hemingway Women, W. W. Norton, New York, 1983, p. 86.
33 Ibid., pp. 94, 96.
34 Her mother had left her a modest amount and her grandmother had left her a capital account that yielded an income of $2,500 a year.
35 Hadley Hemingway to Milford, 25 July 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 116.
36 Hadley like Hemingway felt this led Zelda into flirtations to attract Scott’s notice.
37 EH, Moveable Feast, pp. 181–3.
38 Hadley Hemingway to Milford, 25 July 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 117.
39 Artist Kitty Cannell, girlfriend of Harold Loeb, who introduced Pauline and Jinnie Pfeiffer to the Hemingways, quoted in Mellow, Hemingway, pp. 295, 296.
40 Noel Murphy’s other reason was that she had formed an attachment to Natalie’s friend Janet Flanner, the New Yorker correspondent. Amanda Vaill, So Young, p. 157.
41 Though Zelda later worked in oils on canvas, much of her surviving artwork is in this smaller medium at which she excelled. One problem was that its fragile nature limited the time those works could be on display, and there existed in the 1920s, and still exists today, an unspoken hierarchy in the art world which privileges paintings on canvas over works on paper. Carolyn Shafer, Introduction, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, 1994.
42 Larionov had been painting in Paris since 1914. He designed the set for The Merchants Garden, 1921, and a sketch for the curtain of Chout, 1921. Shafer is interesting on the connection between his work and Zelda’s in the mid-1920s. ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 23.
43 Shafer expounds this point.
44 Murphy, Razor, 32” × 36”. Exhibited: Salon des Indépendants 1923: Berheim Jeune 1936; Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts 1960, Collection of Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts.
45 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 104–5.
46 Sara Murphy to Mizener, 17 Jan. 1950.
47 In fall 1925 Scott lent Hemingway $400, the following April he sent him $100 in a letter telling Ernest that Hollywood had just purchased the rights to Gatsby for $15,000. Because of Hadley’s modest income the Hemingways were not dependent on Ernest’s income from stories or journalism.
48 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 112.
49 Though Hemingway had many male friends, in almost every case he later broke off those friendships. He resented and never forgave friends like the Murphys and Fitzgerald who had helped him financially. Hadley said: ‘Once he took a dislike to someone you could absolutely never get him back [to them]. If he took exception to anyone, mat was it; there was no reasoning with him about it. He eventually turned on almost everyone we knew, all his old friends.’ Hadley Hemingway to Milford, 25 July 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 116.
50 Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p. 61.
51 It was published in Redbook Magazine Jan., Feb. 1926.
52 FSF to Ludlow Fowler, c. Mar. 1925, CO188, Box 4, Folders 22–3, PUL.
53 FSF, All The Sad Young Men, pp. 1–2.
54 FSF mentions this twice (Ledger, June and July 1925). Among the people they met that summer were Edith Wharton, Theodore Chanler, Robert McAlmon, Sylvia Beach, William L. Shirer, Harold Stearns, James Thurber, Deems Taylor.
55 FSF to ZSF, c. summer 1930, Life in Letters, p. 187.
56 Fanny Myers Brennan to the author, New York, 1998.
57 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 113.
58 Ellen Barry interview, Vaill, So Young, p. 155.
59 Scott even got Gerald to demonstrate how to do handstands then walk the length of a room upside down, a trick he had learned from his father.
60 Sara Murphy to Mizener, 17 Jan. 1950.
61 Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p. 88.
62 Gerald felt that Ernest’s desire to strip away ornamentation in his writing and produce a honed simple language reflected a similar goal in his own paintings.
63 Donnelly and Billings, Sara and Gerald, p. 21.
64 Scott’s discipline broke down however if Scottie did something he approved of. One day he had told her to go to bed as a punishment. When he walked in to check, she was reading: ‘he took the book away and started reading it himself. He decided it was good literature, and gave it back to me to finish.’ Scottie to Honoria Murphy Donnelly; Donnelly to the author, 1997 and 1998.
65 Sara Murphy to Mizener, 17 Jan. 1950.
66 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 118.
67 Sara Murphy to Mizener, 17 Jan. 1950.
68 Ibid.
69 Nathan thought it was a hangover from Scott’s undergraduate days when ‘he sent out questionnaires to prospective feminine dates as to 1) whether they had their hair washed during the day, and 2) how many baths they had taken.’ Nathan, ‘Memories of Fitzgerald, Lewis and Dreiser’, Esquire, Oct. 1958.
70 FSF to MP, 28 Aug. 1925, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 120. In 1924 University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb kidnapped and slew fourteen-year-old Robert Franks. After they confessed they were defended by Clarence Darrow and said in court they had done it for the exhilaration of planning and executi
ng the ‘perfect crime’. Scott admired this as an ‘intellectual murder’.
71 FSF to Bishop, postmarked 21 Sep. 1925, Life in Letters, p. 126.
72 Eleanor Lanahan to the author in conversations 1997, 1998, 1999, Vermont and Asheville, North Carolina.
73 Winzola McLendon, ‘Interview: Frances Scott Fitzgerald to Winzola McLendon’, Ladies Home Journal, New York, Nov. 1974.
74 Eleanor Lanahan to the author in conversations 1997, 1998, 1999.
75 Gerald Murphy to Milford, 26 Apr. 1963, Milford, Zelda, pp. 117–18. Several years later when Zelda wrote about the scene she completely transformed her own part in it. She wrote that she was able to steal two glass automobiles for salt and pepper from the café in St Paul. ‘Nobody was looking because Isadora Duncan was giving one of her last parties at the next table. She had got too old and fat to care whether people accepted her theories of life and art, and she gallantly toasted the world’s obliviousness in lukewarm champagne.’ ZSF, ‘Auction – Model 1934’, Collected Writings, p. 434.
76 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 117.
77 Gerald Murphy to Milford, 26 Apr. 1963, Milford, Zelda, p. 118.
78 Gerald Murphy to FSF, 19 Sep. 1925, CO187, Box 51, Folder 13, PUL.
79 ZSF to Madeleine Boyd, wife of the critic Ernest Boyd, 18 Dec. 1925, CO183, Box 5, Folder 1, PUL.
80 They also attended parties given by Tallulah’s friend the Marchioness of Milford Haven and the Mountbattens.
81 ZSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, 1939, CO183, Box 4, PUL.
82 ZSF to Madeleine Boyd, 18 Dec. 1925, CO183, Box 5, Folder 1, PUL.
83 FSF to EH, 30 Nov. 1925, John F. Kennedy Library.
84 Published 26 Feb.
CHAPTER 12
1926 was a year of change and experiment for several of Zelda’s friends, but a year of sickness and danger for Zelda.
In Paris she discovered that three of her close friends also disapproved of Hemingway. Sara Mayfield, studying at the Sorbonne, frequently saw him strolling through the Luxembourg Gardens, Bumby at his hip and Hadley ‘following him as silently as an Indian squaw’, and told Zelda how much she disliked Ernest’s attitude to Hadley.1 Sara Haardt and H. L. Mencken were also furious with him, though for different reasons. Ernest had called Mencken ‘that shit’ and established him and Sara as permanent enemies.2 Both Zelda and Sara Mayfield assumed this was because the Sage had not initially recognized Hemingway’s talents. Though Mencken thought Hemingway ‘knew how to shock women’s clubs with dirty words’ and produced great dialogue, he saw his stories as melodramatic and obvious. At the time Mencken felt that he was ‘challenging, bellicose and not infrequently absurd’. Even later, Mencken wrote: ‘My view of his work was never exalted.’3
Sara Haardt had recovered sufficiently from ill-health to leave Montgomery and divide her time between Baltimore and New York, where she freelanced for the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Virginia Quarterly Review and Mencken’s American Mercury. Though Mencken still encouraged her, she was now well known in her own right. Her professional independence seemed to increase her deep reserve and Mencken mistakenly felt she did not fully care for him. During 1926 their letters became more distant, and with newspaper gossip linking his name with that of the Hollywood actress Aileen Pringle, their romance temporarily wavered.4
Zelda, beset with colitis, was now in worse health than Sara, which put a great strain on her marriage, already shaken by conflicts over Ernest. She was spared further hostile encounters with Hemingway after her decision in January to take the ‘cure’ at Salies-de-Béarn, a health resort in the Basses Pyrénées. In this drowsy spa town they stayed at the Bellevue, where the boarded-up windows were splashed with bird-droppings and the residents according to Scott were ‘two goats and a paralytic’.5 Scott took a photograph of Zelda while she painted, in one hand a brush, in the other the watercolour self-portrait she had begun in 1925. She scribbled underneath it: ‘Portrait of the artist with portrait of the artist’. Several delightful photos show her and Scottie on banks of flowers and swinging in a play area.
During 1926 Zelda again tried vainly to conceive, for despite the rows between them she and Scott were still keen to have a second child. The idea that having more children might improve an ailing marriage is a popular though not necessarily accurate one, in which it seems the Fitzgeralds concurred. The failure to conceive that year was probably a consequence of previous abortions and her unsuccessful 1924 operation in Rome, but Zelda’s distress became connected in her mind with what she deemed Scott’s sexual inadequacies. Zelda would remain intensely emotionally attached to Scott, but sexually their problems were increasing. Scott had always exhibited a rigid Midwestern puritanism in the face of Zelda’s Southern sexual openness. Wit and charm, but not virility, were his strong suits.6
Scott is reputed to have told Hemingway that Zelda had complained his penis was too small to give her satisfaction, a story that has all the hallmarks of an insecure male author’s vivid invention.7 Scott’s apparent lack of imagination over alternative sexual pleasure, or his worsening alcoholism which may have caused occasional impotence, were more likely causes for Zelda’s frustration.
It is worth looking at Hemingway’s tale of Scott’s complaints of rejection because it impacts cleverly on the impression Hemingway was trying to give of Zelda’s unstable mental state.
Scott it seems first naively confessed to Hemingway: ‘You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.’ Yet in Scott’s account in The Crack-Up he admits that at Princeton in 1917 he slept with prostitutes; and Rosalinde Fuller’s account of his sexual affair with her in 1919 convincingly throws doubt on the assertion that he had never slept with anyone except Zelda. According to Hemingway, Scott continued their conversation by saying: ‘Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make anyone happy and that was what upset her.’ Hemingway’s account records that the two men go off to inspect Scott’s penis in the toilet and are away a long time. At the end of the inspection Hemingway patronizingly reassures his friend: ‘You’re perfectly fine… You are OK. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ In Hemingway’s version Scott then asks pathetically: ‘But why would she say it?’ to which Hemingway responds: ‘To put you out of business … Forget what Zelda said … Zelda is crazy … Zelda just wants to destroy you.’8
There is something curious here. Scott, a man who was extremely wary of intimacies with other men, was unlikely to have exposed and aroused his penis in front of a ‘real man’. Yet without an erection Hemingway’s calculations of penis size, which he terms for posterity ‘A Matter of Measurements’, is meaningless. It is far more likely, then, that the maliciously creative Ernest changed a lunch-table chat into a genital display in the toilets.
This ‘matter’ involves three major ‘measurements’. The first is the magnification of Scott’s confession from a small oral discussion to a mighty washroom performance. The second is the humiliating reduction of the size of Scott’s penis in the minds of readers from what they might have thought of as a usual size (had they thought about it at all) to an image of a tiny childlike member. The third, and by far the most significant, measurement is that of the state of Zelda’s mental health. What Hemingway was indisputably attempting to do was yet again to call Zelda’s emotional stability into question.
In early March 1926, after their return to Paris from Salies-de-Béarn, the Fitzgeralds suddenly decided to go back to the Riviera. They lunched and dined with Hemingway who was returning from New York, where he had successfully – with Scott’s help – negotiated a contract with Maxwell Perkins. He told them he was going to join Hadley and Bumby in Schruns, Austria, for a skiing break, but he did not go directly to see his family. Instead he started an affair in Paris with Sara Murphy’s close friend, Pauline Pfeiffer.9
Pauline, a clever journalist with an original mind, was more intellectually compatible with Ernest than Hadley. After Pauline had praised Ernest’s new book, The Torrents of Spring,10 he decided she was also an excellent literary critic
who fitted into the Fitzgerald-Hemingway circle, which included the Murphys, the MacLeishes and Dos Passos, better than Hadley, who had never felt at ease with them. Pauline also had private means,11 much of which she used to tour and stay with the Hemingways, for Hadley saw Pauline as a good friend.12
Though Pauline, a practising Catholic who believed extra-marital sex was a sin, was terrified by the threat of pregnancy, she could not and did not resist Ernest. When Ernest, guilt-ridden, returned to Hadley in Schruns he did not confess nor did she ask any embarrassing questions. But Hadley and Ernest felt deep relief when Dos Passos and the Murphys arrived for a week’s skiing and broke the tension.13 The Murphys, becoming aware of the strained situation, did not overtly criticize Hemingway. Zelda, however, was incensed by Hemingway’s treatment of Hadley, and told Sara Mayfield later she thought it shameful of Hemingway to plan to rejoin the Catholic Church in order to have his marriage to Hadley annulled so he could marry Pauline.14
The Fitzgeralds had arrived at Juan-les-Pins, where for two months from early March they rented the somewhat damp Villa Paquita. During that spring and summer Sara Murphy remembers Zelda as eternally ‘fearless’ in risk-taking swimming stunts. She felt that Zelda was ‘much better than Scott at these things’.15 At a farewell party in Juan for critic Alexander Woollcott Zelda went further in her display of fearless pranks. After the speeches had been made she said boldly: ‘I have been so touched by all these kind words. But what are words? Nobody has offered our departing heroes any gifts to take with them. I’ll start off.’ Then daringly she stepped out of her black lace panties and threw them at the men.16
While Zelda was taking light-hearted risks, Hadley was going through black moments. In late spring, Pauline and her sister Jinnie invited Hadley to tour the Loire Valley. Pauline, patently uneasy, snapped at her nervously without explaining why. Hadley hesitantly asked Jinnie if Ernest was involved. When Jinnie replied that she thought the two were fond of each other, Hadley, shocked, retreated back to Paris, miserable and, like Bumby, suffering from a ferocious cough. She confronted Ernest who, enraged, indicated she shouldn’t have forced the issue. Then he left for Spain to tour the bullfights.