From this moment on, Egorova’s bare, unheated studio over the Olympia Music Hall in rue Caumartin became the sacred centre of Zelda’s world. She believed she was undergoing a spiritual transformation in Egorova’s class, finally able to ‘drive the devils’ that had controlled her in the past,46 and to discipline herself into a pure conduit for her art. Later she tried to explain to Scott, ‘I wanted to dance well so that [Egorova] would be proud of me and have another instrument for the symbols of beauty that passed in her head.’47
Yet the higher Zelda aspired, the more frustrated she became with her own limitations. She hated her body for its gross physical resistance, its stupidity, its age: her ‘legs felt like dangling hams’, her breasts ‘hung like old English dugs’. Revulsion spurred her to work harder, and her body acquired a flayed, bruised look as she lost weight and accumulated small injuries. Even at night she continued to battle with her body, sleeping with her feet wedged through the bars of the bedstead, her toes ‘glued outwards’ in order to improve her classical turnout.48
Her friends grew afraid of the unreal expectations she was setting herself. That summer Gerald and Sara went to watch Zelda in class, and were as upset by her performance as Scott had been in Philadelphia. The Murphys understood something of ballet – they had spent a great deal of time among Diaghilev’s dancers – and they saw how disproportionate Zelda’s efforts were to her talent. ‘There was something dreadfully grotesque in her intensity,’ Gerald recalled. ‘One could see the muscles individually stretch and pull … It was really terrible. One held one’s breath until it was over.’49 Yet it was impossible to reason with her, for she said simply that she was no longer able to function without her ‘work’. At home she seemed to have become a phantom presence, uninterested in either her family or the world outside ballet. Even Zelda herself acknowledged the extent of her withdrawal into ‘a quiet, ghostly, hypersensitised world of my own’.50
Scott and Zelda’s quarrels, when they had the energy for them, no longer had the power to shift the stalemate of their marriage. Sara Mayfield, Zelda and Tallulah’s friend from Montgomery, was in Paris at this time, enrolled on a course at the Sorbonne, and she was one of the few people to whom Zelda confessed how things stood. After one fight Scott and she hadn’t spoken to each other for days: ‘When we meet in the hall, we walk around each other like a pair of stiff-legged terriers, spoiling for a fight.’51 Each felt betrayed by the other. Zelda was hurt by Scott’s refusal to take her dancing seriously; Scott felt he had been deserted. He had recently exulted over an invitation to meet his literary hero James Joyce at dinner; but although Zelda had compliantly accompanied him, she had participated little in the evening – her thoughts drifting back to the ballet studio. Scott barely recognized her as the woman he had married: ‘She no longer read or thought or knew anything or liked anyone except dancers and their cheap satellites. People respected her … because of a certain complete fearlessness and honesty that she has never lost, but she was becoming more and more an egotist and a bore.’52
That autumn they returned to Ellerslie, where the lease on the house still had six months to run. If Scott hoped that detaching Zelda from Egorova would diminish her obsession, however, she had no intention of giving up her studies. She simply transferred to the studio of Alexander Gavrilov, another former Diaghilev dancer, now based in Philadelphia. She was painting again, too, experimental oils in which she attempted to express in thick urgent brush strokes the sensations of ecstasy and exhaustion she experienced in the ballet studio.
Within the calm of Ellerslie, she also resumed her writing. The magazine College Humor, which had already published two of her articles, had approached her with a commission for half a dozen short stories, about ‘girls’ of the modern type. The fictions that Zelda began to write were in some ways variations of her own story: in each she portrayed a different woman whose attempt to fulfil herself was blocked by some essential failure of nerve, or by the constraint of her husband. But while she found character and dialogue difficult to master, her descriptions of place and atmosphere were a rich sensual swarm of words, evocations of velvety nights and organdie-dressed girls in ‘Southern Girl’ and of a vibrating New York in ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’.
Scott was generous in his appreciation. It was one of his more lovable traits that even when he despaired over his own gifts, he was able to recognize and nurture those of others. The following year he told Max Perkins that he thought Zelda’s style had ‘a strange haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new’. Later, he would even go so far as to admit that she was ‘a great original, her flame at its most intense burned higher than mine’.53 But having two writers at work in Ellerslie proved difficult. At one level Scott welcomed the feeling that their marriage was, once again, a shared project. He willingly involved himself in the practicalities of her commission, using his own agent, Ober, to write her contract. He gave Zelda advice in the shaping and focusing of her prose. But to see her writing so easily was a rebuke to his own struggles. While he was turning out his own short stories with profitable facility, his new novel continued to slip away from him ‘like a dream’.54
And if Scott couldn’t but be competitive with Zelda, she felt a comparable rivalry with him. Her editor, H.N. Swanson, was insistent that Scott’s name should appear as co-author. Part of her acceded to the financial logic, as it doubled, even trebled, the fee for each story, and at this point she required the money to pay for her ballet lessons. Even though Scott gave her a generous allowance, she wanted her dancing career to be hers alone, not something gifted to her by Scott. Yet another part of Zelda was furiously diminished by the sharing of her byline. On the original manuscripts of her stories she crossed out Scott’s name, writing in angry black pen, ‘No! Me.’ And when the last of the stories was sold to the Saturday Post in March 1930 and appeared under Scott’s name alone, it was a bitter blow. Scott’s agent argued that the Post had wanted to distinguish it from the stories published by College Humor, and had paid well for the privilege, but Zelda felt only the betrayal.
Trust and communication were fragile threads in their marriage now, hard to forge and easy to break. That autumn, when Hemingway came to stay at Ellerslie, it took very little time for him to inflict a great deal of casual destruction. He was no longer married to Hadley – somewhat counter to his own principles, he’d fallen in love with a lively, stylish American journalist, Pauline Pfeiffer, with whom he had recently had a son. To Zelda, his visit was an all-too-predictable violation as Ernest and Scott got drunk together and Scott lent Ernest money they could ill afford. But even more stressful was the presence of Patrick, Hemingway’s sunny, robust little boy.
The sight of this baby, and of Pauline’s maternal pleasure in him, was a painful reminder that she herself had failed to conceive again. It was months since she and Scott had made love, and often they were simply too exhausted and preoccupied to care. But when Ernest boasted about Patrick’s adorable temperament, and joked that he was always available to sire the perfect child, the issue became a treacherous one. They began to argue, dangerously, about sex. Zelda baited Scott by saying that he was unimaginative in bed and that his penis was too small,* and in retaliation he said she could not possibly be satisfied by him or any other man because she was in love with Egorova and with half the women at rue Jacob.
These were wincingly sensitive areas, but by the time the two of them were headed back to Europe the following March, they had passed beyond all bounds of reticence. During one argument on board ship, Scott accosted a female passenger to ask if women preferred men’s penises ‘to be large or small’. Zelda furiously rounded on him, calling him a pathetic embarrassment, and he punished her shortly afterwards by forcing anal intercourse on her. It was the lowest point in their marriage, she later told him, ‘the most humiliating and bestial thing that ever happened to me’.55 And as she recoiled from Scott, Zelda also began, half consciously, to fulfil his fears.
Once they had arrived in Paris
, in the spring of 1929, she found herself turning to women for the sympathy and understanding that she had formerly got from her husband; she felt their ‘eyes had gathered their softness … from things I understood’.56 At the ballet studio she grew very friendly with two or three of the other students, and at rue Jacob her new receptiveness to women suggested to some that she might be ready for an affair. Nancy Hoyt – sister of the poet Elinor Wylie and of Eugenia Bankhead’s husband Morton – began paying her marked attention, and so, too, did Dolly Wilde. Zelda was particularly flattered by Dolly, whose extravagant gold lamé scarves and pungent wit marked her out as the true niece of Oscar Wilde. Even Scott admired her as a genuine original. But while she enjoyed this nuanced, feminine flirtation Zelda was afraid. Growing up in Alabama her sexuality had been predicated on the clear-cut definitions of Southern beaux and Southern belles. Deep down, the idea that she might be a lesbian repelled her.
Despite the decade’s new, theoretical openness about sexual identity, few individuals were as bold as Tamara or as clear-minded as Natalie in acknowledging their desires. A survey conducted among 2,200 middle-class American women in the late 1920s revealed that many had experienced lesbian impulses: nearly half of those interviewed said they’d experienced a close emotional relationship with another woman, while a quarter admitted to those relationships being sexual. In a generation that had suffered the loss of millions of young men, many women had turned to their own sex for physical contact. Yet this contact was still rarely displayed in public. Within most communities, the taboo against lesbians remained rigidly in place and even Tallulah, who’d flaunted her own early relationships with women, would find herself in situations where she felt the need to pretend she’d never been anything but heterosexual.
Zelda’s own confusion was brought to a crisis when Scott accompanied her to Barney’s salon and caught Dolly making a very obvious pass at her. Possibly it was mischief on Dolly’s part, but he saw it as a challenge to his marriage and his masculinity. It led to another round of sexual accusations and recriminations: Scott accusing Zelda of being attracted to a ‘hysterical rotten lesbian’; she accusing him of being a fairy. Zelda, however, was desperate for Scott’s help, wanting his guidance to untangle the muddle of her feelings. She felt that Dolly was pressuring her into taking a step for which she was ‘morally and practically unfitted’,57 but when she begged him to talk to her rationally he was too bewildered and antagonistic to respond. Zelda found a packet of condoms among his things, and when she accused him of being unfaithful, he said that he’d wanted to have sex with a Parisian whore in order to prove to her that he was a man.
By the time they went south for the summer, they had inflicted all the damage they were capable of. Both were convalescent, exhausted and guilty. Scott described himself to Hemingway as ‘leaking’ tears and gin.58 The Murphys worried about both of them: Scott’s pallor was frightening and Zelda looked haggard, her complexion pale and papery, with little spasms of emotion twitching at the corners of her mouth. Gerald noticed that her laughter had a new random quality, a sound of ‘unhinged delight’ with little humour in it. She was retreating further inside herself and it was in this precarious state that she was faced with an opportunity that might redefine her life.
They were staying in Cannes and Zelda was taking classes with a ballet master at the Nice Opera. Through him she was given one or two very minor roles to perform with the opera chorus. And while the work was technically undemanding it placed Zelda on the first rung of a potential career. It might well have prompted the invitation that came to her in late September from Julie Sedova, a former St Petersburg ballerina who was now directing the ballet ensemble at the San Carlo Opera in Naples. Sedova wrote to say that she was short of a dancer for the company’s autumn production of Aida, and to ask if Zelda was interested.
Again, the work would not be taxing. Ballets in opera productions were little more than divertissements, short and usually formulaic in their choreography, but Sedova’s invitation was still significant. Not only was she offering Zelda a solo role in the Aida ballet; she was also suggesting that Zelda remain in Naples for the rest of the season, picking some more minor roles and gaining some invaluable stage experience. After just two years of study Zelda was being given the chance to turn her aspirations into a professional reality, yet she simply didn’t know how to respond.
Training with Egorova she had focused only on the daily detail of her practice, and had never had to face the potential limits of her talent. She’d been able to cling to her fantasy of a ballerina career, imagining that soon she would be invited to dance with a company like Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Such was her naive absorption in that fantasy that when a man had come to see her dance at Egorova’s studio a few months earlier Zelda had imagined he was a talent scout for Diaghilev.* Her disappointment had been crushing when she discovered the man had been sent by the Folies Bergère to see if Scott Fitzgerald’s wife might be useful as a ‘shimmy dancer’. Now Zelda feared that if she accepted Sedova’s offer to perform with a mere opera company, it would be tantamount to giving up on her dreams of ballerina greatness: an acceptance that she could never, ever attain the level of Egorova, Pavlova and the other idols she had erected for herself.
Even if she did take her chances with Sedova, Zelda agonized over her ability to survive in Naples on her own. She had wistfully confided to Sara Mayfield of her longing to start her life over and recoup her wasted years. But at the age of twenty-nine she had no practical experience of life – Scott had always dealt with money, travel and houses. Perhaps if he had agreed to come to Naples with Zelda, she might have attempted the move, but by now he had accumulated such a history of grudges against Zelda’s dancing that he couldn’t make such an offer. He also genuinely believed it was dangerous to encourage her. Later, when she was ill, Zelda pressed Scott to ask Egorova for an objective assessment of her talent, and he flinched from letting her see it. As Scott had always believed, Egorova wrote that Zelda was naturally gifted but had made far too late a start to become a serious ballerina. At best she could have worked with a Broadway ballet ensemble, such as the one that Léonide Massine was directing at the Roxy Theatre in New York.
Later Zelda would rejig in her mind the way this episode had gone. The Naples offer had been ‘the great opportunity’ of her life – an invitation to become a ‘premier dancer with an important company’ – and she claimed that Scott had forbidden her to accept. But the short story she wrote soon afterwards, ‘The Girl who had Some Talent’, suggested a greater self-awareness. Her heroine, a dancer from New York, is offered an equivalent, career-changing opportunity, but at the moment of decision she ducks away from it and goes with her lover to China.
When the summer crowds departed and the time came for her and Scott to return to Paris, Zelda could feel none of her former excitement at being reunited with Egorova and her studio. She was still too conflicted by the implications of Sedova’s letter. Driving home along the steep mountainous road with Scott, she suddenly grabbed the steering wheel, almost sending the car in a violent swerve over the cliff. Afterwards she shrugged the incident off – the car ‘had acted wildly’ she said – but Scott believed she had wanted them both to die. Back in Paris her mood was still jangled. She returned to her ballet classes, but was also socializing again, ricocheting from lunches to dinners to parties at Maxim’s. ‘Nobody knew whose party it was,’ she wrote, ‘it had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn’t survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive.’59
Sometimes in the middle of the frenzy she would experience a feeling of such weightlessness and detachment that she had to hold onto the table where she was sitting to anchor herself in place. The city itself seemed alien to her now. It had filled up with Americans during the summer, tourists who were aggressively bullish with their strong dollars and market capital; in October, as the US stock market went haywire, P
aris was also infected by manic uncertainty. Scott, deeply interested in the systems of money, was haunted by the spiritual as well as the financial implications of the see-sawing market, and was convinced that it heralded the end of the American dream and, very specificially, the end of his own dream with Zelda.
The entry in his ledger at the end of that year was stark: ‘Crash. Wall Street. Zelda.’ Certainly Zelda’s mental state was now deteriorating badly, her behaviour was erratic and she seemed to have trouble connecting to people and events around her. Early in 1930 Scott took her on holiday to North Africa in the hope that new surroundings would restore her natural curiosity. But the moments of slippage, when Zelda seemed frighteningly disengaged from the world, became longer and more intense. She spent much of her time in Algiers feeling herself ‘on the other side of a black gauze’.60
At times Zelda experienced her detachment as exalted and extraordinary: ‘Colours were infinite, part of the air and not restricted by the lines that encompassed them.’ She could sense her body filling up with music, beating behind her forehead, welling up through her stomach. But at other times she felt trapped inside a nightmare. She heard voices, flowers talked at her, the bodies of the people around her swelled and shrank, their faces seemed to be concealed by masks. After she and Scott returned to Paris, Michael Arlen came to their flat, and when Zelda came upon the two men in conversation she became violently agitated. Although they smiled and greeted her warmly she was convinced they hated her and were plotting to get rid of her.
The only place that she felt safe was Egorova’s studio, and her need to be there grew more and more intense. Once, Egorova had to practically force Zelda to her feet after she dropped to her knees in front of her teacher, as if she would never move from the spot. Scott was terrified. Much of the time he could get little sense out of Zelda, who was either mumbling unintelligibly to herself or locked in silence. He knew she was ill, but he now wondered if she was mad. Arlen, having witnessed her fraught behaviour, advised that she should take a rest cure in a clinic just outside Paris. Zelda agreed to have herself admitted on 23 April, but after just ten days she signed herself out again, insisting she had to see Egorova, who was like ‘the rays of the sun’ to her ‘shining on a piece of crystal’.61
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 36
