by Sally Cline
Zelda said she wrote these stories to pay for her dancing so that she would not be financially dependent on Scott. The money was good. But the deal organized by Scott on Zelda’s behalf was not. Harold Ober recorded the transaction Scott made with College Humor for Zelda’s stories. ‘SF said that Z would do six articles for College Humor, that he would go over them … and that the articles would be signed with both their names.’62
Although College Humor had already bought two of Zelda’s articles and considered her talented in her own right, five of the six stories were published with joint by-lines. Scott’s justification for joint credits was not only that they would reap a higher fee, but that even if he didn’t actually write the stories he might have done so at any moment! He assured Ober that most of the stories were ‘pretty strong draughts on Zelda’s and my common store of material. This [the heroine of ‘The Girl With Talent’] is Mary Hay for instance + the “Girl The Prince Liked” was Josephine Ordway – both of whom I had in my notebook to use.’63 He probably did. However, he did not in fact take Mary or Josephine out of his notebook and turn them into fiction, whereas Zelda took two role models out of her notebook and did turn them into stories.
‘The Original Follies Girl’ was sold in March 1929 to College Humor for $400. Published in July 1929, it was credited to Scott and Zelda. Scott had made no revisions. It was the cause of a fight between them. Zelda had finished it in the Philadelphia library, after which she celebrated with some women from the dance school, got drunk in an Italian restaurant and returned home to find Scott furious. Scott delivered it to Ober instead of a Basil story that was due. ‘This is a poor substitute,’ Scott wrote, ‘tho it is a beautifully written thing.’64 That story and the next four were highly praised by Swanson, the editor.
‘Poor Working Girl’ was sold to College Humor via Ober in April 1929 for $500. Published in January 1931, it was credited to Scott and Zelda, but written entirely by Zelda.
‘Southern Girl’ followed in June, was sold to College Humor for $500, published in October 1929, credited to Scott and Zelda but written entirely by Zelda.
‘The Girl the Prince Liked’ was sold to College Humor in September 1929 for $500, published in February 1930, credited to both Fitzgeralds but written entirely by Zelda. Scott asked Ober: ‘Don’t you think that Zelda’s Girl-the-Prince-liked thing is good?’65
‘The Girl With Talent’ was sold to College Humor October 1929 for $800, published April 1930, credited to both Fitzgeralds but written by Zelda.
The credit surrounding ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’ was even more contentious. Both Ober and Scott behaved in a shockingly high-handed manner. It was sold to the Saturday Evening Post in March 1930 for $4,000, and published on 17 May. Though it was entirely written by Zelda, the name under the story was F. Scott Fitzgerald alone. Scott’s reason was that the Post had offered to pay $4,000 if Zelda’s name was omitted. Ober later said that when he had received it he believed it to be one of Scott’s and sent it off to the Post, which accepted it On 5 March 1930 Ober wrote to Scott: ‘Dear Scott, A Millionaires Girl has just come in and I have just finished reading it. I like it a lot and some of your lines about California are very amusing, indeed.’
As soon as the error was discovered Ober cabled Scott that the Post would only pay that amount if Zelda’s name was dropped.66 Scott agreed. Ober managed an apologetic line: ‘I really felt a little guilty about dropping Zelda’s name from that story … but I think she understood that using two names would have tied the story up with the College Humor stories and might have got us into trouble.’ Ober insisted it was so good that it ‘would have been recognized as your [Scott’s] story no matter under what name it was published’. Attempting to placate Zelda, who might not have understood the Ober–Scott view that what mattered was the highest possible fee, Ober asked Scott to tell Zelda that it was ‘a mighty good piece of work’.67 By publication in mid-May 1930 Zelda was terribly ill, so Scott on her behalf told Ober: ‘Zelda was delighted with your compliments about the Millionaires Girl!’68
Later, Scott confessed that the story ‘appeared under my name but actually I had nothing to do with it except for suggesting a theme and working on the proof of the completed manuscript’. He also admitted to taking over the other material published ‘under our joint names’. He said: ‘I had nothing to do with the thing from start to finish except supplying my name.’69
One view of these events is that Scott lent his name to Zelda’s work in order to help her, to reap more money for them as a couple, that Zelda did not mind, indeed was proud to be the recipient of such a famous name on her work, and that Scott had no hidden malevolent agenda. This is the view taken by most of Scott’s male biographers.
The opposing view is that Scott ruthlessly took fraudulent credit for Zelda’s work, partly instigated by his own insecurities due to his own procrastination over his novel Tender Is The Night. The events are seen as entirely selfish literary poaching.
There is a third view, to which this biographer subscribes. That Zelda was not surprised at the deal that had been struck, for when you live intimately with a famous artist you become accustomed to a life in the shadows. The only experience Zelda had to set against this prevalent attitude was that of her fellow writers Sara Haardt and H. L. Mencken. Though Mencken was better known than Sara he never at any point took credit for Sara’s work and attempted constantly to get Sara a place in the sun. Zelda, perhaps because of this awareness, was resentful and frustrated. The original manuscripts of all six stories show her vigorous black handwriting scrawling out Scott’s name on every by-line. Words like ‘No!’ and ‘Me’ are inserted where appropriate.
In this third view Scott did not act malevolently, because he had no need to. His actions fell within the gender expectations and conventions of the period, which gave full rein to his need to control their literary endeavours (and his wife) while allowing Zelda’s reasonable resentments no outlet. That Scott acted with a strong self-focus is not in question. That he could not afford to act generously towards this fellow writer struggling to maintain her professional identity is interesting in view of his acknowledged generosity towards many other writers, including Sara Haardt whose work he praised. But Zelda was his wife, she was straying on to his territory, albeit often with his own muddled encouragement, and must be contained. The feminist framework that would have given Zelda the strength to resist was not in place in her circle, nor was it sufficiently acknowledged publicly in 1929 to give her a context for resistance.
By the time ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’ was published under Scott’s name, Zelda was in hospital. But previous biographies have made no link between the damage to Zelda’s professional ambitions and her sudden breakdown. One lone literary voice in the years between 1928 and today has been that of Alice Hall Petry, who pointed out that Zelda’s was a constant story of ‘frustration and denial of thwarted ambitions and usurped achievements’.70 In 1929 that story, that struggle to acquire both a coherent sense of her personal identity and to maintain a sense of her professional identity, was only just beginning and would be forced to continue inside a series of asylums.
There was another crucial incident before Zelda’s collapse which she said helped to trigger it. Zelda and Scott’s sexual problems had steadily worsened. Scott, jealous of Zelda’s attentions to Egorova, saw the dance teacher and himself in a contest to dominate his wife. ‘I’ve seen that everytime Zelda sees Egrova and me in contact, Egrova becomes gross to her. Apart, the opposite happens.’71
Zelda had become increasingly jealous of Scott’s attentions towards Hemingway despite the sour note that had entered the men’s relationship. Zelda’s own sexual fears, as well as her disgust at the idea of her husband being homosexual, made McAlmon’s taunts about the two men being ‘fairies’ more disturbing to her than she admitted.
The climax had occurred in Paris one night in June 1929 when Scott and Ernest had been out drinking without Zelda. Scott stumbled home drunk, crawled into
bed, passed out, then in his sleep he muttered: ‘No more baby’. Zelda took this as complete vindication of her suspicions that Scott and Ernest were having an affair.72 Later she listed this event as among the causes of her breakdown. ‘We came back to the rue Palatine and you, in a drunken stupor told me a lot of things that I only half-understood: but I understood the dinner we had at Ernests’. Only I didn’t understand that it matterred.’73
Scott was shocked, perhaps terrified. She had forced him to wonder if there was any truth in her words. Later he admitted: ‘The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you thot I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine.’74
It is plausible that Scott and Ernest at some level had sexual feelings about each other, but Ernest’s hostility to his mother’s lesbianism, and Scott’s awareness of how other men found his appearance camp, would have been enough to make them back off. The McAlmon accusations had so disturbed Scott that when Morley Callaghan in Paris had offered his arm to Scott to cross a street Scott, believing that Morley had slightly resisted, drew back and said: ‘You thought I was a fairy, didn’t you?’75 Scott and Ernest came from a generation hypersensitive about homosexuality to the point of paranoia. Gerald Murphy’s lifelong fears about his own ambivalent nature, and the way that Fitzgerald, MacLeish and Hemingway talked about certain men as fairies, meant they all saw sexuality in absolute terms: either men were ‘queer’ or they were not.76 If they were, it was a hideous matter.
In Scott’s Notebooks, referring to Hemingway, he wrote wistfully: ‘I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have spoiled all that.’77 But though McAlmon, in Scott’s view Chief Fairy, asserted the two writers were homosexuals, he never made the leap from that to suggesting they were lovers. Zelda, who made that leap, continued to taunt Scott while he continued to neglect her. On two occasions Scott left her bed saying ‘I can’t. Don’t you understand?’78 But she didn’t. During the summer he came into her room only once. But blindly involved with her dance teacher, she no longer minded. She knew if she looked around in Paris she could find actual or potential lovers. There were at least three other ‘solutions’ as well as ‘the whole studio’ who were all women.79 ‘In Paris again I saw a great deal of Nemchinova after classes, and my friend at the Opera.’80 These women helped to stabilize her. As Scott recognized this he recalled the number of incidents relating to her women friends which had happened during 1929 leading up to their present point of hostility, then he began to throw Zelda’s accusations of homosexuality back at her.
Notes
1 MP to EH, 2 Oct. 1928, The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Max Perkins Correspondence 1925–1947, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1996, p. 81.
2 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 142. Mayfield was referring especially to quarrels that year and the following year.
3 Strater, an early Princeton hero of Scott’s, is the role model for Burne Holiday, the campus radical, in This Side of Paradise. Strater and Father Fay had been very impressed with each other when Fitzgerald introduced them.
4 Robert Taylor, ‘A Strater Retrospective: No Faces of Fame’, Boston Globe Magazine, 6 Aug. 1981, pp. 22–4.
5 A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, Random House, New York, 1966, p. 121.
6 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 133. There is another version: on 6 Dec. 1928 Hemingway was suddenly informed his father had died. He wired Scott and also Perkins for money so that he could go West. Most reports say Scott delivered the money in person in December. Scott’s Ledger says he delivered it in January.
7 ‘The Sun Also Rises’: EH to FSF, c. 24 Nov. 1926, EH, Selected Letters, p. 231; ‘This tough talk’: FSF to EH, Dec. 1927, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 302–3.
8 Quoted in Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p. 122.
9 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 354.
10 The Daisy novel would be published by Scribner’s the following year.
11 Wilson entered the sanatorium in 1929. On leaving he went to live on Cape Cod for the summer; there he became involved with Margaret Canby, who had been the lover of Ted Paramore in the early Twenties when Wilson and Paramore had shared a flat on Lexington Avenue, New York, and Wilson had courted Edna St Vincent Millay. Mellow, Invented Lives, pp. 100, 372.
12 MP to FSF, 13 Nov. 1928, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 154.
13 Together with co-judges Cornelius Vanderbilt Jnr and John Barrymore.
14 Scott took out the policy in Feb. 1929.
15 Gavrilov had graduated from the Maryinsky School in 1911 and left the Imperial Ballet that year to join Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where he understudied Nijinsky and alternated several roles with him.
16 Zelda ate with him at Reuben’s lunch bar then returned to the apartment he shared with his mistress at 5–20 Chestnut Street.
17 ZSF, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, 16 Mar. 1932, Johns Hopkins Hospital records. In Zelda’s address book (CO183, Box 6, Folder 1, PUL) there is a listing for Gavrilov at the Cortissoz studios in Philadelphia.
18 Carolyn Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 45, and author’s correspondence with Shafer, 2001.
19 Giles Neret, The Arts of the Twenties, Rizzoli, New York, 1986, p. 14.
20 Interview between ZSF and Henry Dan Piper, 1947. See also Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 96.
21 Degas admitted that he had painted dance classes without ever having attended one. Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 98.
22 Alice Hall Petry makes a fascinating case along these lines in her article ‘Women’s Work: The Case of Zelda Fitzgerald’, Literature-Interpretation-Theory, vol. 1, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers S.A., USA, 1989, pp. 69–83.
23 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall, 1930, Life in Letters, p. 193.
24 Diary of Geneva Porter, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.
25 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall, 1930, Life in Letters, p. 193.
26 ZSF, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, Collected Writings, p. 294.
27 Ibid., pp. 294, 296.
28 It was however the last to be published (Jan. 1931).
29 ZSF, ‘Poor Working Girl’, Collected Writings, p. 342.
30 ZSF, ‘Southern Girl’, Collected Writings, pp. 305, 304, 301, 307.
31 Ibid., p. 299.
32 It was published in March 1929, four months before Zelda’s story.
33 FSF to Ober, c. Aug. 1929, As Ever, Scott Fitz–, ed. Bruccoli with Jennifer McCabe Atkinson, p. 142.
34 Sara had been in Hollywood in 1927. On her return she began work as Joseph Hergesheimer’s researcher on his Southern novel Swords and Roses.
35 Rodgers, Mencken and Sara, and Carl Bode, Mencken, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1969, both discuss this in detail.
36 FSF to Haardt, 6 Nov. 1928, PUL, copy lent to the author by Vincent Fitzpatrick, Curator, H. L. Mencken Collection, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore.
37 Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (1928), Dalkey Archive Press, Illinois, 1992.
38 Barney called Esther a ‘brilliant, didactic’ woman. Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde, Virago, London, 2000, pp. 158, 353.
39 ZSF, Autobiographical Sketch, 16 Mar. 1932, Johns Hopkins Hospital Records.
40 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 337.
41 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 194.
42 FSF, Ledger, June 1929.
43 Scott felt snubbed that Hemingway did not show it to him before it was in galley proofs ready for serialization in Scribner’s Magazine.
44 FSF to EH, June 1929, John F. Kennedy Library.
45 Ibid. More than 20 years later Hemingway was still angry. In 1951 he told Scott’s biographer Arthur Mizener that Scott’s letter was ‘one of the worst damned documents I have ever read and I would give it to no one’ (EH to Mizener, 11 Jan. 1951).
46 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 138.
47 Ibid., p. 139.
48 Ibid., p. 140. McAlmon was
married to British heiress Winifred Ellerman who wrote under the name Bryher. It was a marriage of convenience, as Bryher was bisexual and wanted freedom from her upper-class family and McAlmon was homosexual. McAlmon used his father-in-law’s wealth to set up Contact Editions, a vanguard publishing company in Paris, which published among others Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams and Nathaniel West.
49 FSF to MP, c. 15 Nov. 1929, Dear Scott/Dear Max, pp. 158–9. Though McAlmon had published Hemingway’s first book Three Stories and Ten Poems, its author agreed with Scott that McAlmon was a poisonous piece of body fungus.
50 Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris, Coward-McCann, New York, 1963, pp. 152, 160–3.
51 ZSF, ‘The Girl The Prince Liked’, Collected Writings, pp. 309–10.
52 FSF, Ledger, July 1929.
53 Gerald Murphy to Milford, 26 Apr. 1963, Milford, Zelda, p. 155.
54 Julie Sedowa, Naples, to ZSF, 13 Sep. 1929, CO183, Box 5, Folder 22, PUL.
55 Rosalind Smith, unpublished documentation on ZSF, Mayfield Collection, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
56 ZSF, ‘The Girl With Talent’, Collected Writings, pp. 324, 325.
57 Quoted in Petry, ‘Women’s Work: The Case of Zelda Fitzgerald’, p. 82.
58 Milford, Zelda, p. 156.
59 Some of Scott’s biographers considered ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’ a story that approached Fitzgerald’s standard. Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 340.
60 ZSF, ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’, Collected Writings, pp. 328, 336.
61 Ibid., p. 329.
62 Ober’s notes on Scott’s deal with College Humor stated that ‘as he remembered, they paid $200 for one article that Zelda did and $250 for another. He said we had better leave the price until they did the first article … I should think they ought to pay $500 for them, if they are 4 or 5 thousand words in length.’ 14 Feb. 1929, As Ever, p. 127. (Ober often uses the term ‘article’ both for features and for stories.)
63 FSF to Ober, received 8 Oct. 1929, As Ever, pp. 146–7.