Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  33 FSF, Ledger, summary of year Sep. 1927–Sep. 1928.

  34 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 193.

  CHAPTER 15

  On their return to Ellerslie in September 1928, their lives in a mess, Scott took to drink … as was to be expected. Zelda took to her paintbrush and ballet bar … what else? Hemingway meanwhile took to blaming Zelda. Everyone was being predictable.

  Hemingway wrote to Perkins that every stupid action Scott had taken had been influenced by Zelda. Scott might have been the world’s best writer had he been married to someone else. Zelda was to blame for everything.

  Perkins held a higher opinion of Zelda. ‘[She] is so able and intelligent,’ he replied, ‘and isn’t she also quite a strong person? … I’m surprised she doesn’t face the situation better, and show some sense about spending money.’1 But Hemingway’s critical attitude to Zelda had by now become obsessive. He was not prepared to recognize any evidence to the contrary, no matter which of their friends produced it.

  Unaware equally of Hemingway’s diatribe or Perkins’ praise, Zelda mixed her paints thicker and thicker, and danced on the carpet, wearing it thinner and thinner, as if she could paint over or stamp out her turbulent thoughts. Scott may have shared some of his uneasy reflections with his new drinking companion, Philippe, a former French taxi-driver and boxer whom Scott had brought back to Ellerslie as a chauffeur/butler. Zelda, who found him stupid and insubordinate, despised him, Mademoiselle fell for him and Scott’s tolerant lawyer friend John Biggs frequently bailed him and Scott out of jail.

  Zelda, who had not seen Hemingway for two years, had not missed him, but Scott felt his friend’s absence keenly and was delighted they were meeting in November. Pauline had given birth to baby Patrick, who according to Ernest was built like a brick shithouse, slept through the night and laughed constantly. Hemingway informed the Fitzgeralds he was available for hire as a sire of perfect children: a remark calculated to make Zelda and Scott feel inadequate. Though their sexual relationship was fast deteriorating and Zelda repeatedly told Scott he was a poor lover, both were still anxious to give Scottie a sibling. Hemingway, aware of the Fitzgeralds’ marital problems, would have known his remark had a bitter edge. If Mayfield overstated the view that the terrible troubles that would crack the Fitzgeralds apart had their roots in quarrels with and over Hemingway, nevertheless Hemingway’s methods of baiting and bad-mouthing Zelda, and undercutting Scott while still keeping him on a faithful string, accelerated the Fitzgeralds’ vulnerability towards Hemingway and each other.2

  The Fitzgerald–Hemingway reunion occurred on the 17th, the weekend of the Princeton–Yale game. Scott and Zelda were already ensconced at the Cottage Club when Ernest, Pauline and a painter friend, Henry Mike Strater,3 arrived. Princeton won the game, Ernest was polite, Pauline friendly, and Zelda engaged the artist in conversation. Strater found Zelda ‘a lovely person, a lovely, lovely person’ who was having a tough time dealing with Scott’s drinking, which in his view ‘was out of control’.4

  Zelda’s easy relaxation with Strater was ruthlessly interrupted when trouble started on the post-game journey from Princeton to Philadelphia. Scott raced up and down the train asking vulgar questions of total strangers. To Zelda’s embarrassment he accosted a passenger reading a medical book by shouting: ‘Ernest I have found a clap doctor!’ At Philadelphia they were met by Philippe, whom Scott forced to drive his overheating Buick without stopping for oil or water. As the Buick steamed so did Zelda. She and Scott rowed all the way to Ellerslie where they paused in their recriminations to offer Pauline and Ernest six bottles of excellent burgundy over dinner. Unfortunately Scott soon started a stream of insults aimed at their friendly black maid. ‘Aren’t you the best piece of tail I ever had?’ he asked her repeatedly. ‘Tell Mr Hemingway.’5

  Another version of this dreadful Ellerslie weekend was given by Zelda to Sara Mayfield who later reported:

  To add to Zelda’s troubles, the Hemingways arrived for a visit. Ernest was immensely pleased by his title for his new book, Men Without Women, because he thought it would sell well to the ‘gay’ boys and the old Vassar girls. His jokes with Scott about pederasty, anal eroticism, and other forms of perversion annoyed and frightened Zelda … to judge from Ernest’s unpublished letters to Scott, she had reason to be alarmed. Fitzgerald and Hemingway went on a bender, got in a fight … landed in jail. Zelda was further outraged when she learnt that Ernest had borrowed a hundred dollars from Scott before he left.6

  The subsequent publication of those letters indicates their indisputable vulgarity. Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s favourite banter was about their book titles. One Hemingway riposte, ‘The Sun Also Rises (like your cock if you have one)’, provoked Fitzgerald’s crude rejoinder: ‘This tough talk is not really characteristic of me – it’s the influence of All The Sad Young Men Without Women In Love … “Now I Lay Me” was a fine story – you ought to write a companion piece, “Now I Lay Her”. Excuse my bawdiness but I’m oversexed.’7 Scott’s established reputation for the reverse suggests his puerile jokes were a defence.

  When those two overgrown schoolboys continued their raunchy behaviour that weekend, Zelda, reared on Southern gentlemen’s verbal courtesy, would have been shocked or disturbed. Her awareness of her growing emotions towards Egorova would have increased her sense of being threatened by Scott’s and Ernest’s lewd intimacy with each other.

  Mike Strater, who felt that after the weekend he never wanted to see Fitzgerald or Hemingway again, spoke for all the guests. ‘A bullfight is sedative in comparison … Those two … brought out the worst in each other.’8

  Though Strater was referring to Ernest and Scott, the remark was equally apt in reference to Zelda and Scott. The Fitzgeralds still remembered the best in each other, but in 1928 they had lost the way to find it.

  Bunny Wilson was also having marital problems. Admitting ‘I had found it impossible to be married to an actress,’9 he had separated from Mary Blair and was now subject to severe bouts of depression, though he still managed to start a book of essays, Axel’s Castle, and a novel, I Thought of Daisy.10 Wilson soon afterwards entered Clifton Springs Sanitarium for three months’ treatment for a nervous breakdown, which made him highly sympathetic towards Zelda’s depression. He was given hydrotherapy, electric shock and an addictive amount of paraldehyde.11

  In November 1928 Scott had sent the first two chapters of his novel to Perkins, who enthusiastically replied that the first was ‘excellent’, the second contained ‘some of the best writing you have ever done’. He eagerly awaited more.12 He waited in vain. Scott stalled again, returning instead to his ‘lousy Post stories’ about Basil Duke Lee. He supplemented his income in other ways, too. During 1928 and 1929 he garnered $1,500 by lending his name to a soap beauty contest.13 He also took out a life insurance policy for $60,000 which he found hard to maintain, but ultimately it constituted the majority of his estate.14

  At Ellerslie, Christmas 1928 was cold in every sense. Scott’s Ledger reported: ‘Xmas night with family & Mlle & Phillipe. Coldness Amy. Car freezing. Mother there Xmas.’ Even Amy Thomas, who had warmly tolerated Scott’s drinking, had a chill air matched sadly by that of her host and hostess.

  Zelda resumed both her painting and dance lessons in Philadelphia. She had a new dance instructor, thirty-six-year-old Alexandre Gavrilov, former dancer with Diaghilev’s ballet, stand-in for Nijinsky and leader of New York’s Ballet Moderne.15 Again she threw herself into ballet with Gavrilov as she had with Egorova. Perhaps he was less protective of her (or of himself), for she once found herself in a potentially dangerous situation with him.16 ‘My dancing teacher was a protégé of Nijinsky. I ate lunch with him and went with him to his apartment. There was nothing in the commercial flat except the white spitz of his mistress and a beautiful collection of Léon Bakst. It was a cold afternoon. He asked me if I wanted him to kill me and said I would cry and [he] left me there. I ran to my lesson through the cold stree
ts.’17 Gavrilov and Zelda spoke French together so it is possible that the phrase ‘if I wanted him to kill me’ might refer to the French expression ‘the little death’, meaning orgasm.

  Her description evokes a surreal film echoed in several paintings. At this stage she protested that her art was too personal to be shown in public but over the next three years, though her paintings continued blatantly autobiographical, she became as keen to exhibit as she was to publish.18

  Using thick, turgid brush strokes she attempted highly emotional canvases, repetitiously returning to ballet themes. Her aim was to blast the viewer into an appreciation of the ballerina’s physical-emotional reality, irrespective of its ugliness; so many canvases displayed hardworking ballerinas caught in a ‘frozen movement’ which became her particular trademark. This concept is also found consistently in modernist images. As the art critic Giles Neret pointed out: ‘Artists transformed the notion of speed – particular to the decade – into a stereotype of “frozen movement”.’19 That element was frequently used by Léon Bakst, a painter Zelda met through the Murphys, who may have influenced her dance figures. Later Zelda told Henry Dan Piper: ‘What I do is paint the basic, fundamental principle so that everyone will be forced to realize and experience it – I want to paint a ballet step so all will know what it is – to get the fundamental essence into the painting.’20 This was highly significant because it was a huge departure from the way most male artists of that period, influenced by Degas, portrayed the same subject. Their ballerinas hardly seemed to work and were largely objects of exquisite femininity.21

  As Zelda’s dancers collapsed on the canvas, so she too began to collapse as she held the brush hour after hour. She lost 15 lb in weight, and her nerves stretched like elastic. Snapping point never seemed far off. But despite her exhaustion from dancing and painting, that winter of 1928–9 she returned ferociously to writing, beginning a series of six stories about the lives of six young American women. Initially all six were commissioned by H. N. Swanson of College Humor magazine who bought five, though the sixth was ultimately sold to the Saturday Evening Post.

  These stories were accompanied by new sketches and new ballet routines. What is most striking about Zelda’s three arts is that they first come to fruition within a period of five years from 1929 to 1934 and these, the years of her most single-minded discipline, coincided with the start of her mental breakdown and her initial hospitalization. It was as if she was living only through creative work and everything else in her life was either on hold or dead. That included her husband and daughter. Her relationship with seven-year-old Scottie became even more distant, as though she was loving her through a veil of muslin. Often Scottie was left in the charge of her governess whom both her parents disliked. But though Scott’s November 1928 Ledger recorded ‘Delplangue gets on our nerves’, the governess in fact lasted until the following April. This left Zelda free to work on her six stories, which were united by a common theme: women’s failure to achieve a balance between work and marriage.

  Collectively, Zelda’s fiction at that point makes a public statement about women’s need to work professionally if they are to survive.22 Privately, the stories may have conveyed to Scott the strength of her aspirations and her anger over her frustrations.

  The six tales concern a poor working girl, a girl liked by a prince, a millionaire’s girl, and three near to Zelda’s heart: an original Follies girl, a girl with talent as a dancer and a Southern girl.

  Zelda began the first, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, that winter, finishing it by March 1929, the month their lease expired on Ellerslie. By now the Fitzgeralds’ restlessness had an almost pathological quality and they were determined to set off with Scottie again for Europe. This time the reason they offered friends was that Zelda could continue ballet with Egorova and fit her writing and painting in between classes. Their plan was to see Genoa first, then move on to Nice before going to Paris in April.

  They sailed on the Conte Biancamano where, Zelda recalled, Scott ‘paid absolutely no attention of any kind to me’.23 Scott did pay attention to other women and embarrassed Zelda by asking a woman passenger if women liked men’s penises small or big. Zelda interrupted: ‘Shut up, Scott, you fool,’24 but her humiliating experiences were not over. In Genoa, perhaps fired by fears of his own impotence, he attempted sodomy. Zelda was disgusted and not a little afraid. ‘I think the most humiliating and bestial thing that ever happened to me in my life is a scene that you probably don’t remember even in Genoa … You were constantly drunk.’25

  Scott himself, depressed at his inability to finish his novel, had written to Perkins before leaving that he was sneaking away just like a thief, failing yet again to give Perkins further chapters. He swore he would write them on the boat and he begged Max to trust him a little longer. Neither Max nor Scott could foresee that this trust would be forced to endure for several more years.

  Despite Scott’s novel-writing block he managed to produce seven short stories for the Post in 1929, dealing, inevitably, with marriage problems. They included three fine fictions: ‘The Rough Crossing’, ‘The Swimmers’ and ‘Two Wrongs’. He did mail Perkins ‘The Rough Crossing’ in March from the Hôtel Beau Rivage, Nice. Almost certainly based on the Fitzgeralds’ recent crossing on the Conte Biancamano, it involves a young couple, Eva and Adrian Smith, whose marriage disintegrates as they cross the Atlantic. Both playwright Adrian and his jealous wife have foolish affairs with people they despise whom they ditch by the end of the voyage. The woeful conclusion is that the Smiths agree to deny that anything sordid took place by pretending the affairs happened to two other Smiths. Unchanged by events, they are as ill at ease with each other as Zelda and Scott had been at the end of their voyage.

  In Nice Zelda began ballet classes with the Russian dancer Nevalskaya, ballet coach at the Nice Opera, while Scott drank and gambled at the casino. Her productivity must have fired Scott with resentment, but they did not discuss the issue. It surfaces, though, in Zelda’s newly-completed story ‘The Original Follies Girl’ with its focus on achievement.

  Zelda’s sad heroine, ironically named Gay, who receives $5,000 a year alimony from an ex-husband ‘with a gift of fantasy’,26 has little need to work or marry, a state Zelda judges harshly. Without those two anchors that can lend women purpose or order, Gay drifts abroad as a New York showgirl, dreaming she can become a London theatre actress yet never settling to serious work. Instead she falls into aimless alcoholism and dies in childbirth. There is a sense of sin in Gay’s highly decorated dilettantism and Zelda’s heroine, like the style in which she is depicted, is evasive, elliptical and polished.

  This story, like the others, is written in Zelda’s characteristic associative ‘spoken’ language. There is a guarded singular tone predicated on alienation from the familiar. There is a sense in which all six heroines wear masks, as Zelda does. Never sufficiently plot-driven and rather impressionistic, the stories are distinguished by trademarks similar to those in her paintings: an overload of visual metaphors, fragmentation, descriptive non sequiturs, caustic observation and bubbling non-linear ideas. They leave the reader with more questions than they answer. Zelda’s sensuous descriptions allow readers to smell the flowers in her writings, just as viewers can feel the texture of flesh in her paintings. Zelda never labelled herself a Southern writer in the way that she felt she was a Southern painter, yet in both arts her intensely Southern temperament focused on the dissolution of form into colour and the representation of emotion through colour.

  There was already a startling congruence between Zelda’s untamed paintings and her tumultuous ballet life. Then came her sudden determination to extend this verbally in stories with the same focus on appearances. In her six ‘Girl’ stories, as in her painting, she looked at people’s souls through their appearance. ‘The Original Follies Girl’ is suffused with sounds, scents and scenery. Gay, a ‘very kaleidoscopic’ girl, who ‘made the rest of the chorus look like bologna sausages’, lived in a
‘silver apartment with mulberry carpets and lots of billowing old-blue taffeta’, which allowed the narrator and readers to ‘see how bored she must have been with her Louis XVI tea service and her grand piano, the huge silver vase that must have calla lilies in it and the white bearskin rug’. When the narrator last glimpsed Gay before she died tragically, leaving a small baby and an empty blue velvet trunk plastered with hotel labels that symbolized the activity of isolation, ‘she looked like a daffodil. She was taking a yellow linen sports thing for an airing and she reeked of a lemony perfume and Bacardi cocktails.’27

  If the financial security in which Gay was embedded was one impediment to fulfilling work, Zelda saw poverty as another. In ‘Poor Working Girl’, the second story to be written between winter 1928 and April 1929,28 twenty-year-old Eloise lives in a newly industrialized community with which she is as out of touch as she is with solid rural values. The possessor of a downstate college education, a talent for the ukulele, a fumbling grasp of shorthand and a flawless skin, she yearns for a Broadway career.

  As Zelda is consistently ironic throughout all six stories about acting careers, which she proposes as the goal only of shallow young women, it is hard not to view the irony in ‘Poor Working Girl’ as a barbed attack on Lois Moran.

  Eloise works as a babysitter while saving up for drama school in New York but never earns enough for the financial independence she needs (and Zelda herself craves). Inevitably she gives up the job, fails to achieve stardom, and we leave her working as a ‘pretty girl in the local power plant … [who] couldn’t really imagine achieving anything’.29

  In a third story, ‘Southern Girl’, Harriet, Zelda’s heroine from Jeffersonville (modelled on Montgomery), is unique among Zelda’s aspiring heroines in that she holds two authentic remunerative jobs: one as a schoolteacher, the other supervising her family’s lodging house. Though single, she also has a more realistic appraisal of the compromises needed for marriage. Engaged to Dan, a laughing Northerner, she gives him up when she realizes, like Sally Carrol Happer in Scott’s ‘Ice Palace’, that she can never fit into Northern society or live up to a life of ‘leagues and organizations and societies for the prevention of things’ stipulated by Dan’s mother, a woman as formal and black and white as a printed page. But Zelda sees Harriet’s return to her patchwork of mundane responsibilities in the vine-clad smouldering deep South as ultimately unfulfilling, because her determination about ‘sticking to things’ meant she never attempted to ‘turn them into one bigger unit of a job’. When later Harriet meets Charles, a replica of Dan, she agrees to the compromise of a life ‘working for leagues and societies’ alongside Charles’s black-taffeta-clad widowed mother.30