Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  51 ZSF to FSF, c. Feb. 1932, CO187, Box 44, Folder 15, PUL. She referred specifically to Van Gogh who had long been a favourite.

  52 ZSF to FSF, c. end Feb./beginning Mar 1932.

  53 FSF, Ledger, Feb., Mar. 1932.

  54 ZSF to MP, postmarked 12 Mar. 1932, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald 1921–1944, PUL.

  CHAPTER 20

  Scott felt that this time Zelda had gone too far. Zelda felt that this time she had gone some way in asserting herself.

  Scott believed she had ‘poached’ what he admitted were their joint life experiences for her now completed novel which he had intended to use for his work-in-progress. Although today it would seem at the very least problematic, Scott was able to justify his term ‘poaching’ because of his entrenched belief that his wife was expected to be ‘a complementary intelligence’ concerned exclusively with his interests and ambitions.1 Zelda’s life he saw as his raw material. Zelda’s writings he saw as his literary property.

  Despite suffering self-doubt, diminished self-respect and loss of identity through Scott’s treatment of her, Zelda still felt that she had a perfect right to use her experiences for own literary source material. But the fact that she furtively sent the manuscript to Perkins indicated she knew how much Scott would resent it.

  Neither Fitzgerald spoke directly to the other. A dialogue of blame, resentment, anger and defence was passed to Dr Squires, who diplomatically mediated. On 14 March a furious Fitzgerald told Mildred Squires that after four years’ work on his novel, from spring 1930 he had ‘been unable to proceed because of the necessity of keeping Zelda in sanitariums’. His letters reveal how much it rankled that her book was finished so swiftly while his was still being developed: ‘about fifty thousand words exist and this Zelda has heard and literally one whole section of her novel is an imitation of it, of its rhythm materials even statements and speeches’. He acknowledged Squires might think ‘the experiences which two people have undergone in common is common property – one transmutes the same scene through different temperments and it “comes out different”’. He emphasized ‘there are only two episodes, both of which she has reduced to anecdotes but upon which whole sections of my book turn, that I have asked her to cut’. As for Zelda’s dancing, her love for Jozan, her observations about Americans in Paris, ‘the fine passages about the death of her father’, his criticisms, he said, would be impersonal and professional. But he would not tolerate Zelda naming her central character Amory Blaine, the name of his autobiographical hero in This Side of Paradise.

  Do you think that his turning up in a novel signed by my wife as a somewhat anemic portrait painter with a few ideas lifted from Clive Bell, Leger, ect. could pass unnoticed? … it puts me in an absurd and Zelda in a rediculous position … this mixture of fact and fiction is simply calculated to ruin us both or what is left of us and I can’t let it stand. Using the name of a character I invented to put intimate facts in the hands of [our] friends and enemies … My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention … is to make me a non-entity.2

  The technique of mixing fact and fiction which so incensed him was, of course, one he himself used extensively. He was disturbed that her public portrayal of him did not coincide with the way he wished to be seen. Not only had she betrayed him, she had also exploited him by writing in time he paid for through selling stories that took him away from his novel. He overlooked his plundering of Zelda’s diaries, letters and ideas in order to offer up her character for public inspection.

  On 16 March he wired Perkins: ‘PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE OR IF NOT ALREADY DONE EVEN CONSIDER ZELDAS BOOK UNTIL YOU GET REVISED VERSION LETTER FOLLOWS.’3 To pacify Scott, Zelda wrote:

  Dr Squires tells me that you are hurt that I did not send my book to you before I mailed it to Max. Purposely I didn’t – knowing that you were working … honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a serious opinion … I was in my usual rush to get it off my hands – You know how I hate brooding over things once they are finished: so I mailed it post haste, hoping to have yours + Scribner’s criticisms to use for revising.

  Scott scrawled red pencil marks over her first paragraph and angrily noted in the margin, ‘This is an evasion. All this reasoning is specious.’

  Zelda tried placation: ‘Scott, I love you more than anything on earth and if you were offended I am miserable. We have always shared everything but it seems to me I no longer have the right to inflict every desire and necessity of mine on you.’ She skirted round the most crucial point: ‘I was also afraid we might have touched on the same material.’ Then a retreat into humility: ‘feeling it to be a dubious production due to my own instability I did not want a scathing criticism such as you have mercilessly – if for my own good given my last stories, poor things … So, Dear, my own, please realize that it was not from any sense of not turning first to you – but just time and other ill-regulated elements that made me so bombastic about Max.

  ‘Goofo, please love me – life is very confusing – but I love you.’4

  Scott was not buying her version of events. Enraged at Zelda’s temerity, he determined to use every available culturally constructed tool to impose and to justify his literary restrictions upon his wife. The first restriction was to insist that Scribner’s should cut hefty sections of her novel, cuts to be decided by him, before he would countenance publication. The second was to insist that if Scribner’s published it they should not praise it to Zelda, as it might damage her mental health or give rise to what he termed her incipient egomania. His third restriction was to insist on a contractual clause stipulating that one half of the royalties earned by Zelda would be retained by Scribner’s, to be credited against his debts to them until a total of $5,000 had been repaid.

  Scott’s letter to Zelda demanding specific cuts, like so many other Fitzgerald materials, has ‘gone missing’. Retained is Zelda’s initial submissive response: ‘Of cource, I glad[ly] submit to anything you want about the book or anything else. I felt myself the thing was too crammed with material upon which I had not time to dwell. Shall I wire Max to send it back? … The Pershing incident which you accuse me of stealing occupies just one line and will not be missed. I willingly relinquish it.’5

  Reluctantly on 27 March Zelda cabled Max: ‘ACTING ON SCOTTS ADVICE WILL YOU RETURN MANUSCRIPT PHIPPS CLINIC JOHNS HOPKINS WITH MANY THANKS REGRETS AND REGARDS VELDA [sic] FITZGERALD.’6

  Max cabled back: he had ‘READ ABOUT 60 PAGES WITH GREAT INTEREST STOP VERY LIVE AND MOVING STOP HOPE YOU WILL RETURN IT STOP AFFECTIONATE REGARDS.’7

  Zelda, wishing to return it, refused to give in to all Scott’s demands.

  I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which I will elect is nevertheless legitimate stuff which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write … With dearest love, I am your irritated Zelda.8

  She was more than irritated. She was fuming. A nurse at Phipps overheard her saying to herself: ‘I have always done whatever I wanted to do, whenever I could possibly manage it. My book is none of my husband’s Goddamned business.’9

  She held back her fury while explaining to Scott how lonely and friendless she felt: ‘all our associates have always taken me for granted, sought your stimulus and fame, eaten my dinners and invited “The Fitzgeralds” place[s].’ She reminded him he had always been the one person with whom she had felt the need to communicate intimately.10

  Scott was unmoved by her plea. He felt as misused as she had felt in the past. His telegrams to Perkins spoke of mood changes and irrationality. One said Zelda’s novel needed only small but necessary changes. Another said it was a fine novel. A new cable insisted the hero’s name and the book title be changed. Scott’s next telegram screamed that the whole middle section must be drastically redrafted. Fin
ally, at the end of March he went to Baltimore to work with Zelda on revisions. Yet again the original manuscript and Zelda’s first draft revisions have been ‘mislaid’. We are left with a printer’s copy of the typed manuscript, two consecutive sets of much-revised galley proofs and a set of pristine page proofs.11 This means we cannot know what deletions Scott insisted on that first time. We know Scott was satisfied at the extensive changes because he wrote to Perkins, ‘Zelda’s novel is now good, improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and-our-trip-to-Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it. It should reach you in ten days. I am too close to judge it but it may be even better than I think.’ However, he again begged Perkins not to praise Zelda or imply she might achieve money or success.12 Two weeks later Scott sent the manuscript to Perkins: it was ‘a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel’. He likened it to Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, was sure it would interest the many thousand dance enthusiasts, felt it was ‘absolutely new, and should sell’. He forbade Perkins to mention the novel to Hemingway, whose new book was to be published that same season, not because of ‘conflict between the books’ but because of the hostility between Hemingway and Zelda. And he finally gave Perkins permission to write directly to Zelda about her book.13

  Perkins sent Zelda the same gracious telegram one assumes he would have sent without such a cavalier instruction, ‘HAD A GRAND SUNDAY READING YOUR NOVEL STOP THINK IT VERY UNUSUAL AND AT TIMES DEEPLY MOVING PARTICULARLY DANCING PART STOP DELIGHTED TO PUBLISH STOP WRITING STOP MAXWELL PERKINS.’14 His written comments suggested that the New York and Westport parts were not as good as the Alabama state sections, which were ‘very good indeed’. The ‘best part’ was when her heroine Alabama takes up dancing.15

  On 19 May Zelda, overjoyed, replied: ‘To catalogue my various excitements and satisfactions that you liked my book would be an old story to you – It seems so amazing that you are going to actually publish it … My God! Maybe the ink will fade, maybe you’ll discover that it doesn’t make sense! It couldn’t be possible that I was an author!

  ‘Of cource, I will gladly change the questionable parts. I, too, felt the New York part was weak, though I liked the Paris party.’ Then with her characteristic thoughtfulness which has been little remarked on, she asked after his sick daughter. ‘Scott told me your daughter had been ill. I am beginning to feel qualified to make suggestion about the Invalid Racket: John’s-Hopkin’s is an awfully good place with very competent nurses and entirely lacking the general air of negligence that pervades most places where people are going to be sick a long time. We were dreadfully distressed – and I hope she will soon be well again. I know how worried you and Louise must be. Those nervous maladies are always alarming … it’s worse always on the people who care than on the person who’s ill.’16

  She had complied with Scott’s request to change the novel’s title and hero’s name. Zelda found Save Me The Waltz from a Victor record catalogue. A superficial sweetness is implied in the old-fashioned dance request, but the bitterness of its frequent shortening to ‘Save Me’ blasts the sweetness apart.

  If the irony of using Amory Blaine, Scott’s fictional hero’s name, for her own portrait of Scott did not appeal to her husband, the greater irony of substituting the name David Knight displeased him almost as much. Her hero’s new first name was probably taken from Van Vechten’s novel Parties, where Scott appears as the volatile, jealous David Westlake. Using the name of Scott’s enemy Dick Knight for her hero’s surname might be a neat revenge for the way Scott was dealing with her writing.17 Zelda had already mentioned Scott’s dislike of Knight to her doctors at Phipps. Later that year Scott displayed his jealousy when, after an unpleasant meeting at which he had called Knight a fairy, he tetchily apologized: ‘I have never in my wildest imaginings supposed you were a fairy … It is a lousy word to anyone not a member of the species.’ Scott did acknowledge how Knight’s encouragement of Zelda’s achievements had helped her. ‘That was swell praise you gave Zelda and needless to say delighted her and set her up enormously. She revised the book so much that she lost contact with it and yours is the first word that gives it public existence.’ But Scott couldn’t leave it at that. He acknowledged: ‘the sincerity of your feeling toward her shouldn’t offend anybody except the most stupid and churlish of husbands … [but] … [w]hen you city fellows come down you can’t put ideas in the heads of our farm girls, without expecting resistance.’18

  Though Scott sharply scrutinized Zelda’s novel for features which might damage his public image, he allowed it to be printed without decreasing the convoluted metaphors or correcting the grammatical errors, typographical mistakes and misspellings which litter the text. Scott, a notoriously bad speller, may not have recognized these flaws but that Perkins allowed the book to be published in this woeful state did Zelda ill-service.

  Save Me The Waltz is a searing portrayal of a woman’s search for identity within a tangled marriage, both a particular woman and any woman. Because of its deeply autobiographical links, it is often read as a companion piece to Tender Is The Night. The critic Dan Piper suggested that ‘together, these two chronicles of the same marriage seen from the wife’s and husband’s viewpoints, form one of the most unusual pairs of novels in recent literary history’.19 But in its own terms, this moving novel has the hallmarks of Zelda’s best and worst stylistic points. There are her characteristic wit, her skill in making unexpected connections between ideas, and her idiosyncratic metaphoric descriptions with their sensual illumination of small details. Inanimate objects spring into life with a menacing air. Severed parts of the body abound: ears, eyes, limbs. When Alabama Beggs, her autobiographical heroine, falls in love with blond lieutenant David Knight, Alabama focuses on David’s ear:

  She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.

  She crawled into the friendly cave of his ear. The area inside was gray and ghostly classic as she stared about the deep trenches of the cerebellum … she set out following the creases. Before long she was lost. Like a mystic maze, the folds and ridges rose in desolation; there was nothing to indicate one way from another. She stumbled on … Vast tortuous indentations led her round and round. Hysterically, she began to run. David, distracted by a tickling sensation at the head of his spine, lifted his lips from hers.

  ‘I’ll see your father,’ he said, ‘about when we can be married.’20

  An ear is a mundane object. But this is a fantastic journey into and out of it. Zelda is not writing an ordinary romantic description. For Alabama and David’s relationship will be no ordinary romance. She has piled up, like cars hurtling into each other behind one that has crashed, a series of crazy dissimilar elements in order to achieve an an unforgettable richness. It works here because she stops the surrealistic method in time and brings readers down to earth with David’s sudden decision to marry the girl.

  Throughout the book Zelda offers the material of myth, where many of the narrative connections are deliberately cut. Diametrically opposed to Scott’s shaped orderliness, some sections have the nightmare quality of Angela Carter’s fiction. Others, lush and associative, reach into the unconscious, and read like a distinctly Modernist novel. When David asks Alabama to say she loves him and Alabama replies: ‘I never say anything to anybody. Don’t talk’,21 Zelda points to her stylistic intention: to express what cannot be expressed.

  Where Zelda’s work is flawed is where she fails to heed her own red light. She overloads the prose and it races out of control. Take this: ‘A shooting star, ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebulous hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality.’22 The reader is stranded amongst muddy lines encrusted with too many images.

  The plot, in four sections, has overwhelming similarities to Zelda’s life.23 It faithfully captures, in the first section, Alabama’s Southern family home, pinpointing the influential author
ity of Alabama’s father Judge Beggs, the devotion of her mother Millie, the affection of her older sisters, Dixie (who resembles Rosalind and like her is society editor of the town newspaper) and Joan, blessed with ‘an unattainable hue of beauty’.24 We watch Alabama’s rebellious girlhood, and her marriage to David Knight (a painter not a writer) whom she met during World War One.

  The second section follows David’s early celebrity in New York, the birth of Bonnie/Scottie, their Riviera trip, Alabama’s infatuation25 for French naval aviator Jacques Chevre-Feuille, who discourages her from leaving David, their move to Paris where David has a retaliatory romance with movie actress Gabrielle Gibbs of the blancmange breasts and blue veins. ‘David opened and closed his personality over Miss Gibbs like the tentacles of a carnivorous maritime plant.’26 After this revelation Alabama determines on a ballet career to bring order into her chaotic lonely existence.

  The third section recreates the Paris ballet years, where Madame usurps the central place in Alabama’s life. In the final section Alabama accepts the role with the San Carlos Opera Ballet Company, Naples, which Zelda had turned down, and briefly and successfully lives in Italy without her husband and daughter, which Zelda never managed to do. But Alabama too is forced to give up her dance career. Blood poisoning from an infected foot necessitates an operation that will sever her tendons and make dancing impossible. David, with renewed devotion, comes to the hospital. Together they return to the Deep South, where she sees her father die. She is left with David, dumping ashtrays, as their guests depart. When David scolds her for starting her chores before the guests have vanished, she says: ‘It’s very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled “the past,” and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.’27