Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  “We’re going this spring, in fact.”

  “Lovely! So now, when you phoned, you said you paint a little; tell me about your art.”

  “Well, I do oils, mostly, but I tried watercolor once—it’s too risky, if you ask me. One mistake and that’s it, you have to start all over.”

  “Who are your influences?”

  “I was afraid you were going to ask me that. I’ll tell you what I told Gerald. Where I grew up, pretty much all the art depicts the Glorious Confederacy. I like nature, so I guess you could say that was my influence, so far.”

  “You had lessons?”

  “Sorta. Years ago, in the States, I took a class from a crusty old man who thought Michelangelo was modern.”

  “Well then, you must study with someone here. And in the meantime, we will expand your knowledge of what the art world has to offer. Tell me where you’ve traveled so far, and I’ll tell you what you’ve seen.”

  * * *

  The next week, Natalie took me to meet a painter friend of hers named Romaine Brooks. Romaine’s studio was a vivid white square of a building hanging on to a cliff, nothing but the sea outside its windows. The natural light inside was incredible. Even more incredible was what I saw in the corner of the studio, what Romaine, who was a whippet-like woman with a serious brow and short, dark hair, had created while existing in that light: a portrait of a woman of such austere beauty that you wanted to pull up a chair and start a conversation with her, find out what was behind those knowing eyes.

  I said as much, and Romaine replied, “Ah, yes; well, perhaps if I’d known the answers myself, she would not have left me.”

  Natalie nodded toward the portrait. “This was one of her lovers. They’ve just split up.”

  The woman in the painting had been Romaine’s lover? Had I actually heard this right? Trying to mask my surprise at hearing her speak so plainly about something Montgomery folks wouldn’t dare even whisper about, I said, “Oh. Gosh. I’m real sorry.”

  I didn’t mask it well; the women looked at each other, and then Romaine changed the subject with “Why don’t you describe the painting you’ve done. What subject matter do you like?”

  * * *

  When I repeated the story to Scott in bed that night, he said, “Mackenzie’s got the strangest group of friends, too, I have to say. Fellows dressing in white linen pants and pastel-colored sweaters and talking about … about pillows—about fabrics and silk braid and bric-a-brac. And they’re so clean, you know? Not a shadow of whiskers … sideburns so precise, back of their necks freshly shaved…” He rubbed his own fuzzy one. “In a way, they made me think of Cole—the mannerisms, that is. Except that these couple of guys, well, they just about said outright that they’re fairies.”

  “Mackenzie’s married, though, right?”

  “He is. In fact, his wife, Faith, was just telling me that she’s related to the Fowlers through some common distant cousin or something. I’ll bet half the people on this island know the Fowlers. Imagine being heir to millions of dollars—and they don’t appreciate what they’ve got, most of them. Wealth is wasted on the rich boys—”

  He reached for his notebook and pencil, then repeated the phrase while writing it down. After he put the notebook back on the bedside table, he said, “The rich live an entirely different life from the rest of us, you know. That entitlement—it colors everything. If I didn’t like Ludlow so well, I’d hate the bastard.”

  Scott spent the next several days drafting a story he called “The Rich Boy,” then set it aside and returned to his routine of having cocktails with those very same types.

  Staying in Capri that winter offered more than mild weather and exposure to people whose money or sexuality puzzled and, to be honest, intrigued us; it brought me Nicola Matthews, a petite, graying, tremendously knowledgeable artist who had the time, interest, and patience to teach me all about form, composition, technique, style—and all about life as she understood it.

  In her tiny studio in the hills above the harbor, as I practiced sketching, brushstrokes, paint-mixing, Nicola spoke of a kind of feminism that was about developing women’s natural tendencies to exist in groups with other women and with children, rather than in traditional marriages. Men would be used primarily for procreative sex, but weren’t otherwise needed. She talked about Sappho, and Lesbos, and sexual attraction being variable for some people while inflexible for others.

  “Women are formed for love, yes, but also for purpose, and the highest state for a woman—for all humans, in fact—comes when one discovers and then achieves one’s ultimate purpose.”

  “Interesting,” I said, thinking what a nice intellectual exercise it all was. I was twenty-four years old, I was still just beginning to find my way; ultimate purpose wasn’t something that concerned me in the least.

  28

  We got acquainted with Hemingway the writer before we met Hemingway the man. Bob McAlmon, a scrappy writer and publisher we’d first met when we were in London and saw again in Capri, had done a small printing of Hemingway’s work the year before and mentioned him to Scott. McAlmon said Hemingway was a true talent, “though he’s having a damnably hard time getting the attention of the Post.”

  “Is that so?” Scott said. “I’ll have to read him, maybe put in a word. I’ve got a little pull there.”

  While we were in Rome again, on our way to Paris from Capri, Scott tracked down copies of two Hemingway collections, with a mind to bring another fledgling under his wing. On an afternoon when Lillian was visiting home and I was entertaining Scottie with an art lesson and then a manicure, he lounged on a settee in our hotel suite and read the first of the books, Three Stories and Ten Poems, a slim, paperbound volume that, honestly, looked like something that had been assembled by a junior high poetry club.

  When he finished a short time later, he stood and stretched and then dropped the volume onto the table near me, saying only, “Tell me if you think he’s an up-and-comer.”

  Scottie, her fingernails now a glorious bright pink, said, “What’s a nuppincomer?”

  “A nuppincomer is a person your papa thinks has talent, but will never be as talented as he is.” I winked at Scott, and he grinned.

  I read Hemingway’s in our time, along with McAlmon’s edition of Three Stories and Ten Poems, at Scottie’s bedside a couple of nights later; my girl, being in between homes, wouldn’t go to sleep unless I was in the room with her.

  “‘Mitraigliatrice,’” I said, reading the first poem’s title. “That’s a word? Am I going to need a dictionary to get through this?” Scottie blinked at me sleepily, then nodded off while I read the short poem.

  Its last line ended with another mouthful word, mitrailleuse, which I supposed was French. Not knowing its meaning, though, meant the poem’s message was lost on me—and a lot of other people, too, I guessed. “Why would you do that?” I muttered, annoyed. “Show-off.”

  I went to find Scott, who was sitting on the bedroom floor with magazine pages spread neatly around him—copies of all the stories he’d published since The Beautiful and Damned, from which he was trying to choose ten for a new collection. He saw me and said, “If I can finish ‘The Rich Boy’ and place it quickly, I think it’ll do a lot for the book’s chances.”

  “Well, I’ve finished these Ernest Hemingway bits,” I said, setting the books on the bed.

  “And?”

  “He sounds a lot like your pal Sherwood, except without the warmth. That prose, it’s clean and precise, sure, but it distracts you just like a cobra does with its dance before it strikes its victim. It’s a sham. There’s no substance there, no heart.”

  Scott shook his head. “It’s spare, true. But I think you’re simply not seeing the substance, the character of it—maybe it takes a poet to spot it.”

  “Oh, please. The two of you are no more genuine poets than I am. You—and I’ll venture every third writer in Europe nowadays—fancies himself a poet, when all you’re doing is building little towers o
f words set prettily on a page. His poems aren’t awful, they’re just not profound or impressive. He’s sure not Robert Frost, or Coleridge, or even Blake.”

  “Darling … don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not really the best judge of what makes a skillful or profound poem. You may read a lot, and, yes, you’ve written a little, and you’re a great help with my stories—but you aren’t serious about literature.”

  “What, just because I don’t spend my every free minute reading or talking about that book or this author or the context and import and relevance and representational pulchritude of this image in that poem or story?”

  Scott burst into laughter. “Okay, fine, you win, if only because you’re so gorgeous when you’re impassioned.” Scott filed the books in his satchel. “This Hemingway fellow’s prose has force, though. You can’t argue with that.”

  I said, “Hammers have force, too, but they’re pretty limited in what they’re good for.”

  * * *

  April 10, The Great Gatsby’s publication day, arrived, and we celebrated by having lunch with friends at a café in Rome’s Centro Storico. Scottie amused herself in the gravel beneath the table; she pretended to be a dog, and we all fed her tidbits. I tried not to think about what Mama would say if she saw such a thing.

  Our being in transit, abroad, meant we were in the dark about the book’s reception back home. It would be a good two weeks before the day’s papers could catch up to us—and who knew which papers would review for certain, let alone when any one review might run? Maybe three days had passed when Scott said, “I can’t stand it. I’m going to cable Max.”

  We were out with Scottie at the Trevi Fountain, letting her toss bits of apple into the water to “feed” the carved horses. “It’s too early to know anything, Deo.”

  “No, it isn’t, there’s a pattern to these things.”

  My stomach had begun to cramp a bit; I shifted Scottie to my other hip in hopes that would help ease the pain. “Not when it’s only been a few days. You’d get just as good information by having some mystic over by the Vatican read your tea leaves.”

  “You don’t understand, Zelda, and you never will because your life is nothing but a series of low-risk amusements. Shopping and hair appointments and painting lessons and parties. I seek information about my very existence, my fate, not out of some idle curiosity but because our future depends on this book’s performance. Do you think your surgery was free?”

  Scottie threaded the fingers of one hand into my hair and put her head on my shoulder, her thumb in her mouth.

  If Scott hadn’t been in such a state, I might’ve debated his view of my life. And I sure would have defended myself against his suggestion that I’d developed a life-threatening condition by choice. He was in a state, though, and that meant nothing would get through to him. So I said, “I’m sorry, I know you’re anxious. Fine, go cable him, we’ll meet you back at the hotel.”

  Scott waited ten days for Max’s reply, which would find us in Marseille. In the meantime he ate little and slept less. Every hour was a battle in the warring factions of confidence, hope, and fear. Was he right? Had he synthesized all the past criticism and learned from it and produced an undeniably excellent and satisfying novel? Gatsby was short—around fifty thousand words—but in that brevity was a lot of nuance. He expected the critics to be smart enough to recognize all the subtleties they’d claimed were missing in his previous books. And when they did, their glowing responses would ensure that the public—who could not be so trusted, he said, but who needn’t bother with what was highbrow about it anyway—would flock to the stores with as much enthusiasm as they’d shown for This Side of Paradise.

  Scott’s hands were like a palsied old man’s when he opened Max’s telegram. Over his shoulder I read,

  SALES SITUATION DOUBTFUL. EXCELLENT REVIEWS

  Scott crumpled the telegram and dropped it onto the floor.

  Max was truthful on the first count, but he’d overstated the second: when the first packet of reviews from the clippings bureau found us in Lyon, there was praise, but it was mild and, most often, in the nature of “Fitzgerald shows he’s not quite as awful as we feared and may have even grown a bit.”

  Even Scott’s hero Henry Mencken, who had privately written Scott a praise-filled letter, in public made the book out to be “a glorified anecdote.” Scott read that review in full silence, and even before I knew the actual substance of it, I saw in Scott’s open mouth, furrowed brow, and wounded eyes a kind of confusion mixed with horrified disbelief. It wasn’t so much what Mencken said, but what he didn’t say, which was anything that amounted to “You must read this book!”

  I didn’t speak. After a moment Scott appeared to recover somewhat. Handing me the review, he said, “Scribner’s will be lucky to move even the twenty thousand they’ve printed.”

  His outlook would improve a little over the next week, when Max’s and Harold’s letters included two very positive reviews. As we moved on from Lyon to Paris, Scott would write lists and letters that analyzed and strategized and summarized his thoughts on what he’d done wrong and what might yet be done to help the situation.

  This was Scott. This is Scott, always looking back to try to figure out how to go forward, where happiness and prosperity must surely await.

  PART III

  Always be drunk.

  That’s it! The great imperative!

  In order not to feel Time’s horrible burden weighting your shoulders,

  grinding you into the earth,

  Get drunk and stay that way.

  On what?

  On wine, poetry, virtue, as you please.

  But get drunk.

  And if you sometimes happen to awake on the steps of a palace,

  in the green grass of a ditch,

  in the dismal loneliness of your own room,

  with your drunkenness gone or disappearing,

  ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock,

  ask everything that flees, everything that groans, or rolls, or sings, everything that speaks—

  ask what time it is;

  and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will answer you:

  “Time to get drunk!

  If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time,

  Get drunk! Stay drunk!

  On wine, poetry, or virtue, as you please.”

  —Charles Baudelaire

  29

  Paris in 1925 was filling up with American writers and artists and dancers and singers and musicians of all stripes. And in the same way that high school students congregate in cliques and clubs and groups, so were the expatriates sorting themselves into like-minded collections, each with its favored gathering spot in town. Some chose restaurants and cafés on the Right Bank, where the establishments tended to be American in flavor, while others preferred the grittier and truer Paris of the Left Bank’s cabarets and cafés and bars.

  Though Scott would prove to be a Right Banker in his heart, we’d spend a great deal of time on the Left, too, depending on which circus train we’d either hitched our wagon to or started pulling ourselves. The streets, the bridges, the glowing pink streetlights, all of it blurred so easily during a night of trailing from one place to another, our excursions an ever-movable cocktail party in search of the best people or the best drink or the best singer or songs.

  Our apartment was on the Right Bank in the stately, elegant limestone building 14 rue de Tilsitt, right off the Champs-Élysées. We were on the fifth floor, surrounded by an assortment of wallpaper and furnishings that were “circa Grandmama,” as I told Scott when we saw the place.

  If the décor was antiquated and as heavy to the senses as a plateful of friands foie gras, it was at least spacious, with rooms for Scottie and Lillian and a cook, plus a small suite for Scott and me. Most important, it had indoor plumbing, a feature for which I was willing to pay a great deal even under regular circumstances but which would prove a blessing when new health
problems began to plague me in the months ahead. That we had a view of the Arc de Triomphe from the corner window impressed my sisters to no end.

  Paris was the most remarkable place, even to a girl who’d spent a good deal of time enjoying everything fine and fun about New York City. Amid those cobblestone streets, the smells of roasting nuts and burning coal, the sculpted and carved stone façades that had witnessed Napoléon’s march, the 1870 Siege, the Great War’s miracle on the Marne, you felt that you were part of something, someplace much greater than yourself. While I’d felt something similar in Rome, it seemed more personal in Paris. You didn’t just see the antiquity, the history; you felt it was ongoing. You inhabited it and it inhabited you.

  Shortly upon our return, we spent an evening at Gerald and Sara’s Saint-Cloud house. Sara and I enlisted the children to help bake a belated “book-day cake” for Scott, which they smeared with blue icing in more or less the color of Gatsby’s wrapper. Scottie declared that she had to lay the buttercups around the base of the cake, saying, “It’s my daddy’s book-day,” while the Murphy offspring, Honoria and Patrick and Baoth, watched her with the fascination of children who’ve never had the opportunity to be selfish.

  We took our cake and tea in the parlor. Now when I gazed at the art hung on the walls here, I understood that Sara admired Renoir’s work for its vivid and delicate humanity. Gerald’s choices—Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Juan Gris—expressed his modern taste and vision. I recognized the deliberation that had gone into each artist’s choices for the work. What was the focus? Where was the light source? How much black in the mix for that little girl’s hair? How much yellow in that sky?