by Marion Meade
She blamed him for drinking.
No, no, he said. It was she who never stopped whining.
After barely eight weeks they decided to call it quits. However, months of first-class hotels—in fact, a failure to economize in any fashion—had depleted their funds. To cover their passages from Liverpool, Scott was obliged to wire his agent, Harold Ober, for a thousand dollars. For most of the trip Zelda had battled fatigue and the queasiness of morning sickness. She was not sorry to sail for home in early July.
. . .
IN THE MIDDLE of July, George Slocombe told Vincent that he could not marry her after all. He could not even continue to see her. The reason, he explained in a letter, was that “I love you too much.” Should they marry, he would inevitably try to dominate her, and, he predicted, she could never be happy living in subjection to a spouse. And then there was his family. Leaving them would be dishonorable.
What must have happened was clear to Vincent: George’s wife finally learned about her. Before the war he had married a Russian woman, the daughter of a prominent attorney who was homme d’affaires of the grand duke Michael. By this time Marie Karlinskaya had grown accustomed to her husband’s philandering—Vincent was not his first mistress—and felt disinclined to step aside for another woman. But, more likely, George himself must have realized that he was about to make an enormous mistake. He needed a wife who would run his household and look after the children while he covered the big public-policy stories and came home whenever he pleased, which was exactly the situation he already had.
As soon as Vincent received George’s letter, she fled Paris by joining some people she knew who were going to the seashore. On the beach in Dieppe she lay in shock and stared at the water full of bathers having a good time. Writing to her sister Kay, she admitted being in bad shape, without saying what had happened to her. She felt knocked out, upside down and inside out, “all shot to pieces.” Despite four-mile walks, she had not managed “a natural movement of the bowels for over six weeks” and now had to depend on laxatives. If she could only get a plain slice of toast, instead of the awful half-baked bread and coffee without cream, she’d be just fine. Unlike other Americans rhapsodizing over fantastic edibles for pennies, the escargot, the gâteau maison drenched with marsala, Vincent turned up her nose at French food. Kay was left with the impression that Vincent’s pain was physical, not emotional.
At Dieppe, in a fog of grief, she recovered by hardening her heart. Hiding away her only picture of George, a passport photo showing him young and clean-shaven, she composed a lamentation for the dead. In “Keen” she drowned her feelings. The words were carefully chosen. An idyll “sweet” for a month, she wrote, would eventually dissolve into a “harsh and slovenly” domestic sewer.
Vincent knew that her mother worried about her. In letters, careful to censor her bad luck, financial as well as romantic, Vincent always seemed to be working like the devil or traveling here and there. That summer, owing to unforeseen disaster, her letters home had been sparse. What she finally did send Cora was a poem, one of the few completed since her arrival in France, with instructions to show it to Kay and Norma.
With its simple Mother Goose rhythms, “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” brought to mind Clement Moore’s “‘Twas the Night before Christmas.” But Vincent’s poem was not about Santa carrying toys down the chimney, nor were there parents in kerchief and nightcap. A son relating the death of his mother remembers crying himself to sleep, cold and hungry, while she weaves golden and scarlet threads on the strings of a harp. On Christmas morning he awakes to find her sitting there frozen, surrounded by piles of clothing fit for a prince. To Cora, the poet’s self-sacrificing mother, who had eked out a living as caretaker for the dying and weaver of hairpieces for the living, the poem was profoundly disturbing.
The ballad depicted not just the outlines of Cora’s struggle—certainly nothing was made explicit—but her ideas, her experiences, the essence of her being. It was piracy so surprising that she was incapable of replying for three months. Kay, always alert to shady motives in her sister, was aghast. “I cried when I got that poem,” she said afterward, thinking Vincent had no right to use such painful family experiences and pass them off as her own. “Years of hard filthy labor on her part—and you get the Pulitzer Prize for such a pretty song you made of it.”
That summer Cora was busy trying to become a professional writer while living in a house Kay rented for her in Morris County, New Jersey. After Vincent left, she used family connections to contact the agency handling her daughter’s plays. She had already published a few verses in Maine Farmer, among the regular verse about Grandpa’s pumpkin patch, but hoped to branch out into fiction for major magazines. Encouraged by the interest of the American Play Company, she was preparing several stories for submission to Pictorial Review. All of Cora’s stories were rejected, however, partly because of her rural subjects and rustic dialect, partly because she was not much of a writer.
Weeks and then months went by before Vincent concluded that “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” had been lost in the mail and sent another copy. At last her mother answered by politely saying that she had passed along the “wonderful” poem to Kay and Non, who had loved it. Kay, in fact, did not love it. Embarrassed, she refused to show the poem to her husband. (Another person who disliked it was Bunny, who thought it belonged in a ladies’ magazine.)
While Vincent took care to conceal her unhappiness from her family, one person knew more than he wanted to. Arthur Davison Ficke was a well-to-do Harvard-educated poet whose verse, like himself, was charming and intelligent but unfocused. At the time “Renascence” was published in 1912, Arthur and his friend Witter “Hal” Bynner wrote an encouraging note assuring Vincent that she had the makings of an exceptional poet. That was the start of a flirtatious correspondence in which she cast Arthur in the role of literary guru and all-purpose confidant.
The first time Vincent met Arthur was in 1918, when she was living in the Village. He, an Iowa friend of her lover Floyd Dell’s, was an Army captain bound for France. “He’s exceedingly handsome,” she reported to Kathleen, “tall and curly-haired with a lovely voice and oh, my lord, everything!” She was “crazy about him, and he’s gone, he’s gone, and there’s no comfort for me on earth.” She began composing passionate sonnets for him. But after that single brief contact in 1918, all further communication took place in letters and verse. Despite her inability to see the man clearly, his deep timidity and insecurity, she never wavered from her initial impression. He would always be the ultimate romantic lover to her, the worshipful muse that no poet could live without.
Now thirty-eight, Arthur lived in Davenport, a family man, a non-practicing attorney in his father’s law firm and living on inherited money. In Midwestern literary circles, he cut a dashing figure with his perfectly barbered hair, Savile Row suits, and cordovan shoes. His work tended to be intellectual and juiceless, and despite several books of verse he had never been anything more than a minor poet.
Desperate after the loss of George, Vincent turned to Arthur. For the rest of the summer she bombarded him with long, incoherent letters. She admitted feeling crushed and broken but did not intend to reveal what exactly was causing her anguish—the reason “didn’t matter.” It was Arthur and Arthur alone she desired. They had spent so little time together, she chided, as if he did not have a life in Davenport with his wife, Evelyn, and nine-year-old son, Stanhope. Why on earth couldn’t he join her?
Judging by Arthur’s replies, maddeningly lighthearted, he wasn’t taking her rebukes a bit seriously. A jaunt to Paris would be impossible, he said, and “I don’t know if I’d come if I could.” He wondered if they could “bear each other for more than one hour and forty minutes talk every fourth year: that’s all we ever had.” Was she really a nice person? “I’m not!” Having been exposed to a tiny dose of the Millay family angst, he must have been secretly petrified by the intensity of Vincent’s emotion, because he had successfully
managed to avoid her for four years.
However, the real reason for Arthur’s reluctance would have surprised Vincent. Only a few weeks after she left for Paris, he began having an affair with a young woman from New York, Gladys Brown. By this time he had taken to writing love poems for his “dirty little Gladys,” signing his letters “Artiemouse” with phallic drawings of fat mice wagging long wiggly tails. Although Vincent remained unaware of the girlfriend, Gladys knew everything about her. The devious Arthur assured Gladys that he and Vincent “never have, and never could, be anything to each other.” Just the same, he intended to keep Gladys’s existence a secret from Vincent.
. . .
DOTTIE’S FAVORITE SPEAKEASY was shielded away on the street floor of a brownstone on West Forty-ninth. Its locked door with the requisite peephole was hidden behind an iron grille; its windows were shuttered against the daylight. Inside Tony Soma’s were checkered tablecloths, heavy white coffee cups, and a bar running the length of one wall. Night or day, the air smelled of fried steak and whiskey. Establishments such as Tony’s remained open until the last customer left—the beauty of being illegal.
One evening in July, the same Saturday that Jack Dempsey knocked out Georges Charpentier in the fourth round in Jersey City, Dottie was sitting in Tony’s with Bob Benchley. Bob disapproved of drinking and, at thirty-two, had never tasted a drink. A “White Ribboner” who had taken the pledge, he had become the worst sort of prig. On this particular night he finally gave in to friends who said he should sample booze before condemning it. He ordered an orange blossom. After a few sips he turned to Dottie.
“This place should be closed down,” he said. He emptied the glass and ordered another.
As the wife of a drinker, Dottie knew all about the domestic hell caused by alcohol. Most mornings Eddie stumbled off to work at Paine Webber, unless he happened to be on a binge, in which case she would call his office and lie for him. Five years earlier he had been fun, but the war left him a sick man. One time she came home, smelled gas, and had to pull his head out of the oven. They rarely shared a meal at home, Dottie insisting that saucepans were a mystery to her. In truth, it had nothing to do with saucepans. Eddie no longer seemed eager to be with her, and so she would seek company across the hall at the studio of Neysa McMein, the fashion-magazine illustrator.
Personally, Dottie disliked the taste of liquor, but everybody was going to speakeasies. People such as Mr. Benchley who had never tasted alcohol were ordering three or four drinks, and those who had been polishing off three were up to six. Dottie’s childhood friend Heywood Broun carried a bar with him, whipping out a silver hip flask of homebrewed gin from a pocket of his rumpled suit. At first she drank Tom Collinses and pink ladies, the cloying cocktails popular with women, then moved on to whiskey sours, sidecars, Manhattans, and eventually martinis. It was funny how much she loathed the taste of gin—and how quickly she had learned to love dry martinis. After sampling most of the bar, she discovered scotch.
Of course, the problem with getting tight was the mornings. Dottie’s hangovers sometimes were not cured until noon. Although she had no office hours to worry about, she did have plenty of magazine assignments. Partly from hangovers, but partly from boredom, she became increasingly unreliable about deadlines and sometimes blamed Eddie. “My husband has had an attack of appendicitis,” she told the Saturday Evening Post. When she submitted a humorous piece on apartment-house living, she warned the publisher that it was “rotten,” in fact “too poisonous.” Accustomed to her excuses, the famed and feared George Horace Lorimer agreed that the piece wasn’t her best work, but “it’s really not so rotten.” And by the way, in future please submit the “short stuff she was selling to Life.
AFTER SEVEN MONTHS away from New York, including a trip to her favorite summer vacation spot in Colorado, Edna was happy to be back. Despite her scorn for writers who lunched, she was curious about the Algonquin Round Table and asked Aleck if she might visit. Afterward she continued to show up occasionally, usually on Saturdays, invariably hatted, veiled, and dressed in a fashionable outfit.
Aleck noticed her tailored suit one day. “Why, Ednaaaa,” he said, “you almost look like a man.”
“So do you,” she replied sweetly.
That fall saw the publication of The Girls, the book that had given her so much grief the previous year. It was her second novel, and the first with her new publisher, Doubleday, Page. The Girls is about three generations of a Chicago family: seventy-four-year-old Charlotte; thirty-two-year-old Lottie, the catalyst; and eighteen-year-old Charley, who studies business at the University of Chicago. All three women—the “girls” of the title—are unmarried. Like their author, by choice, not chance. While eager to distance herself from the organized suffragists, Edna had a lot to say about the subject of woman’s rights. She considered herself a crusader on behalf of women who could take care of themselves, progressive women like herself. What could be more subversive than a story glorifying successful modern women who don’t need men to be happy?
On the other hand, what could be more dreary? Edna’s keen ear for storytelling warned her that the bare-bones plot, with its stereotypical images, might sound boring to readers, so she confronted the problem squarely on the opening page: “A story about old maids! You are right. It is.” But the Thrift “girls” were no reclusive Miss Havishams, abandoned at the altar. Neither were they swans or ugly ducklings, only average women. During the war the straitlaced Lottie travels to France, where she has an affair with an American journalist and becomes pregnant. The lover is killed and, faced with aborting or giving up the newborn, she decides to do neither and comes home cradling a baby girl.
The story of an old maid and a baby out of wedlock may have been the subconscious regrets of an unmarried novelist, but with her next novel, when she again took up the subject of motherhood, Edna had quite a different tale to spin.
Given the novel’s unorthodox ending, serialization of The Girls had proved difficult, and some magazines demanded a new ending. Finally, though, Woman’s Home Companion accepted it as written. Henry Mencken praised the writing as her finest. Frank Adams commended her descriptions of Chicago. Even her mother, usually grudging with compliments, allowed it was so-so. But despite hearty drumbeating from friends, Edna was dismayed at the reactions of the literary establishment, whose opinion she most valued. The Dial, a highbrow magazine, ripped apart The Girls as a “flashily written” novel full of uninteresting details in the lives of three boring women. “Edna Ferber has sold her narrative gift for a mess of mannerisms.” In general, critics deemed The Girls to be well-imagined storytelling, written in a popular style, but certainly not literature.
The problem was obvious. To command respect, a woman novelist had to be an untouchable like Jane Austen or Edith Wharton, whose book The Age of Innocence had just won the Pulitzer Prize. Edna was neither, but she knew what she needed to do: try harder.
She finally agreed to representation by Paul Reynolds, the high-powered agent who had spent the last decade hoping to handle her stories. On the brink of an agreement, she reminded him that they had not discussed his percentage. “I would like to hear from you on it.” His request for a cut of all her earnings made her jump on him. “Ten per cent is, undoubtedly, the commission due you on all business transacted by you,” she replied. She would gladly pay the standard fee on offers he brought to her. But why should she pay him 10 percent for work she had obtained herself? Five percent would be “fair enough,” she said. Within days Edna was bossing Reynolds like a duchess breaking in a new housemaid. A story for Woman’s Home Companion must be attended to immediately: “Whisk it right over to Miss Lane’s office,” she ordered. “This afternoon.” She could not deliver it herself, because, “as usual, I’m broke.” Ferber broke? What about her twenty-four-hundred-dollar story price (twenty-five thousand dollars in today’s money)? Reynolds was not about to argue, however.
FRIENDS OF DOTTIE’S, Ruth Hale and her husband, Heywood Broun
, were hosting their annual New Year’s Eve party. It was the biggest they’d thrown, because they had just purchased their first house, across the street from where Dottie had once lived with her father. “A great party and merry as can be,” Frank Adams reported. Two hundred of the city’s most interesting people packed the brownstone on West Eighty-fifth. Even H. G. Wells showed up. All furniture, except a couple of folding chairs, had been removed for the occasion, and there was no music or food, only a gigantic vat of orange blossoms. Almost lost in the crowd was little Woodie, the pale, thin son of Ruth and Heywood, trained to call his parents by their first names and to conduct himself like an adult.
Of all Dottie’s woman friends, Ruth was the most unusual. Fiercely feminist, she wanted to change the world. Ruth was against traditional marriage and motherhood and housekeeping and deference to the male sex. In short, any custom that chained women to the home. But her anger centered on one particular legal issue: this was 1921, and a woman had to give up her name if she married, and a man didn’t. Since this state of affairs practically went back to biblical Eden, most women took the situation for granted, but not Ruth. She had refused to take Heywood’s name and kept on calling herself Ruth Hale. Continuing her fight, she applied for a passport in her maiden name, but the request was denied. A second application resulted in a document made out to “Mrs. Heywood Broun, otherwise known as Ruth Hale.” A personal note from the Secretary of State explained that granting Ruth’s request would constitute deception and place American consulates abroad in “a most embarrassing position.” Ruth, of course, sent it back.
