Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Needlessly I may add that the chapter and the sending of it are events for your knowledge alone….. Show it not to man woman or child.

  I am frightfully bored today—

  Desirously,

  F Scott Fit—

  If his attitude of amorous nonchalance seemed a little stilted, nevertheless his note with its delicious secrecy intrigued Zelda and she carefully kept it with her mementos. Scott had appealed to something in Zelda which no one before him had perceived: a romantic sense of self-importance which was kindred to his own.

  Whenever he was free Scott came into Montgomery on the great rattletrap bus that brought all the soldiers into town, and from there he took a taxi to 6 Pleasant Avenue. He telephoned every day, and when he couldn’t come he called twice. As the lazy summer passed, he too lost his insignia to Zelda’s little glove box. But Scott was not the only man who courted her; a mustached aviator amused her for a while, until he proposed and she flatly turned him down. Astonished at having been refused, he asked her why she had kissed him, and she replied that she’d never kissed a man with a mustache before.

  Her honor was fought over so frequently behind the Baptist Church that it became known as a sort of personal battlefield. The aviation officers used to perform fancy stunts in their airplanes over the Sayre house until the gallant exhibitions were forbidden by the commanding officer of Taylor Field. But not before two officers had crashed on the nearby Speedway, one of them a desperate beau of Zelda’s—the mustached gentleman whom she had enjoyed kissing. In a spirit of rivalry, an inspired young infantry officer performed the manual of arms for the infantry before her door.

  Scott never forgot his first invitation to dinner at the Sayres’ late that summer. Zelda teased her father into such a rage that, grabbing up the carving knife, he chased her around the dining table. Everyone else ignored them and after a few moments they both sat down. It was never mentioned again to Scott, but it was a harrowing introduction to the Sayre family.

  They began to see more and more of each other. Scott carved their names in the doorpost of the country club to commemorate their first meeting, and it irritated her a little when he told her again and again how famous he would be, for he neglected to include Zelda in his enthusiastic prevision, or to compliment her on her own considerable local fame. Describing her attraction to him, she wrote: “Dancing with [him], he smelled like new goods. Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales.” When she saw him leave with another girl she was suddenly jealous, not only of the girl but of him; of the aloofness which he could summon and which held him apart from her. She wanted it to be herself alone with whom he shared that pale detachment. With the summer nearly gone Scott carefully noted in his Ledger that on September 7 he had fallen in love with Zelda.* He had many competitors, and she encouraged them, but that provoked his desire for her even further. Shrewdly, she understood that quite clearly. Many years later she wrote: “He was almost certainly falling in love which was acceptable to him. He had planned his life for story anyway. [She] told him about how poor she was and how he wouldn’t have wanted her had he seen her somewhere else. This displeased [him]; he could weave his own romance and was well able to do so with what there was at hand: [she] was wonderful despite, and partly because of, her rhapsodic disavowals of any appropriateness whatsoever …. [He] was proud of the way the boys danced with her and she was so much admired. The glamour of public premium… gave [her] a desirability which became, indeed, indispensable to [him].”

  They spent afternoons together talking about poetry, sitting in the swing on the Sayres’ front porch and sipping long drinks filled with fruit and crushed ice. Playfully Scott told her that according to both Browning and Keats he should marry her. They discussed love and seduction while they walked in the pine groves and fields at the edge of town. She teased him and said he was an “educational feature; an overture to romance which no young lady should be without.” When she treated him casually, or made fun of him, he was hurt and sulky, and, certain that he was to be sent overseas at any moment, he tried to press her for a commitment. But she was apparently wary of limiting herself to him alone. It was not only Scott himself, but the uncertainty of his future in those months prior to the end of the war, which were behind her reluctance. It did nothing to help his cause that the Judge disapproved of him because he drank too much. Surrounded by so many young men, she was impervious to Scott’s pleas.

  In October, Fitzgerald at last received his orders to go North and from there presumably to France; he left Montgomery on the 26th. Once in New York, however, his orders were altered and he was sent to Camp Mills on Long Island. While he was waiting there, the Armistice ending the war was signed. In Montgomery it was celebrated with flowers and confetti dropped from the airplanes of the aviators stationed at Taylor Field. Fitzgerald returned to Montgomery to await discharge from the army. Once back, he and Zelda quarreled bitterly. He wrote a letter to an old friend in whom he had confided when he was East: “My affair still drifts— But my mind is firmly made up that I will not, shall not, can not, should not, must not marry— Still, she is remarkable— I’m trying desperately exire armis—” There is only this one piece of evidence that he ever seriously intended to break off with Zelda, and by December, after he had been back in Montgomery less than two weeks, he entered the single word “Love” in his Ledger. He had not tried very hard to disentangle himself from Zelda and it was during this interim period of his life that he again fell deeply and entirely in love with her. He was to call it “The most important year of my life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and exstatic but a great success.”

  Soon they were alone together whenever he could borrow a car; they drank gin and kissed in the back rows of the Grand Theatre during the vaudeville shows: and Zelda showed him a diary she kept which Scott found so extraordinary that he was to use portions of it in his fiction, in This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and “The Jelly Bean.” They spent Christmas together happily before, the fire at the Sayre home, and they began to move, enchanted by each other, into a more passionate attachment. This time Zelda was more willing to commit herself. Cautious as she had been in the late autumn about pledging herself to Scott, her behavior was now incautious enough to earn his description of it, although he wrote it many years later, as “sexual recklessness,” for Zelda shared none of Scott’s Irish Catholic contrition.

  Bewilderingly, she continued to go out with other men. She may have done so as a challenge to him, or to keep intact her private vision of herself as a belle; or she may have used her dates as a front for Montgomery. Whatever her motives, she felt her behavior did nothing to diminish her love for Scott, while it drove him into a frenzy of jealousy. It was at the very least a sign of her inability to place herself in his position, a sign of her refusal to feel the hurt she was capable of inflicting on Scott. Zelda did, as she always had in the past, as she pleased, and Scott, who admired her fearlessness in their affair to the point of awe, was unable to make her his alone. They quarreled when she went out, Scott drank in retaliation, but she managed to soothe his feelings and continued to see other men when she wanted to. He took pride in the fact that she was invited to the inaugural ball of the Governor of Alabama that January, 1919, and later in their lives he would tell people they had met there. All of the dances on Zelda’s card were taken, but Scott’s name was not on it.

  From Zelda’s point of view Scott was a new breed of man. Un-athletic, imaginative, and sensitive, he represented a world she did not know and could not hope to enter, much less possess, without him. Beguiled by his palaver and sharing with him the view that anything done moderately was better left undone, she decided that she loved him. They were both eager to conquer New York, and their entire future rested upon Scott’s success there. He decided to try journalism to
support himself until his stories began to sell. He was not willing to have Zelda come North until he could show her the style of life he so wholeheartedly wanted them to share. Zelda was both astonished and delighted by the fervor of Scott’s dreams for glory, and there is no doubt she shared them. “She, she told herself, would move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire ….”

  On February 14, 1919, Scott’s discharge from the army came through and on the 18th he left Montgomery for the East. In a gesture of consummate confidence he wired Zelda from New York that the world was a game: “… WHILE I FEEL SURE OF YOUR LOVE EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE I AM IN THE LAND OF AMBITION AND SUCCESS AND MY ONLY HOPE AND FAITH IS THAT MY DARLING HEART WILL BE WITH ME SOON.”

  *The spelling and punctuation used by both Fitzgeralds has been reproduced exactly; no error, no matter how glaring, has been corrected. What they wrote stands as they wrote it whenever the original sources were available to me. I do not use the pedantic sic.

  *This Ledger contains, among other records, his “Outline Chart of My Life,” an astonishingly accurate personal monthly account of his life, which he began in 1922 and continued into the middle of the 1930’s.

  4

  THROUGHOUT THE SPRING OF 1919 their letters crossed, written in that first flush of romance and absence keenly felt. Eagerly each awaited the other’s reply, and the letters were in turn amorous and promising, filled with the news of what they did, wanted to do, and might yet accomplish. Unfortunately, Scott’s letters have not survived, except for several wires, which Zelda pasted in her scrapbook, and his calling card sent with a special present. But Scott did keep Zelda’s, and just as he had carefully noted in his Ledger when he had fallen in love, because there was “something in his mind that catalogued and classified,” so it was his instinct to preserve her love letters to him. She wrote in pencil usually, quickly and carelessly, not bothering to date her letters, nor to punctuate them, except for the characteristic school-girlish dash that separated each thought, or the occasional word underlined for emphasis. Her hand was large and round and upright; she called it her “sun-burned, open-air looking script.”

  These letters form the only record we have of her side of the affair. In them are the clues, in her own words rather than through Scott’s interpretation, of what she was at eighteen. The only other written record that Zelda had kept up to this point in her life was her diary. And that apparently was lost or destroyed a long time ago. Scott had taken it with him to New York and showed it to at least one friend of his that spring, who said that it was “a very human document, but somehow I cannot altogether understand it.”

  Zelda’s letters provide a key to her side of their romance. She had a striking ability with words that had nothing to do with formal education; her thoughts drifted, swerved, and tumbled in peculiarly swift transitions all her own; they teetered sometimes on the edge of that special guile she could wield toward Scott. But in these letters she could also be utterly open with him; they are like conversations held in the dark between lovers when they chart the small maneuvers and upheavals of their love.

  Once in New York, Scott told his parents about his love for Zelda and asked his mother to write a letter of welcome. At the end of February Zelda told him: “I s’pose you knew your Mother’s anxiously anticipated epistle at last arrived— I really am so glad she wrote— Just a nice little note—untranslatable, but she called me ‘Zelda’—”

  Scott knew that a few days after he left for New York Zelda was invited to Auburn for the week of February 22. Her date was Auburn’s football hero Francis Stubbs, one of the most skillful and attractive players the champions of the Southern League possessed. No two men could have differed more than Stubbs and Fitzgerald and no man could have seemed a more formidable suitor in Scott’s eyes than the dashing and superbly confident Stubbs. For her scrapbook, Zelda clipped a photograph of him standing indolently with the great letter A upon his jersey, his soft leather helmet hanging loosely from his hand. At the bottom of his invitation to Auburn he had written: “Have a date with you Saturday P.M. Look out.” Today he remembers Zelda as “a very popular and beautiful young lady and she was not what is known as wild… but she was very much full of life and pep.” He had not fallen in love with her, but his roommate had and kept a life-size photograph of her in his room and “thought he was going to marry her right up to the time she married Scott Fitzgerald.” In Zelda’s honor a special society was formed at Auburn, known waggishly as Zeta Sigma; its initiation rites included pilgrimages to 6 Pleasant Avenue in Montgomery, and its members, five football players, were, according to a newspaper clipping in her scrapbook, “noted for their almost rabid devotion to the principles of their fraternity.”

  Understandably, Scott was worried. But Zelda rather blithely reassured him: “Sweetheart, please don’t worry about me— I want to always be a help—You know I am all yours and love you with all my heart.”

  Still, her trip had disconcerted him, for while he was trying to break into journalism in New York his girl was not exactly cooling her heels at home. He had arrived in the city and presented his calling card “to the office boys of seven city editors asking to be taken on as a reporter. I had just turned twenty-two, the war was over, and I was going to trail murderers by day and do short stories by night. But the newspapers didn’t need me.” So he settled on writing advertising copy for ninety dollars a month and was not happy with his compromise. (He came up with only one snappy jingle, for a steam laundry in Iowa.) He wrote during every bit of spare time that he had and began a collection of rejection slips, which he carefully pinned on the walls of his rented room in the cheap and unfashionable Upper West Side. Zelda had promised to write every day.

  Darling, I’ve nearly sat it off in the Strand to-day and all because W. E. Lawrence of the Movies is your physical counter-part. So I was informed by half a dozen girls before I could slam on a hat and see for myself— He made me so homesick— I thought at first waiting must grow easier later—but every day I want you more… I am acquiring myriad wrinkles pondering over a reply to your Mother’s note— I’m so dreadfully afraid of appearing fresh or presuming or casual— Most of my correspondents have always been boys, so I am at a loss—now in my hour of need— I really believe this is my first letter to a lady—… An old flame from the Stone Ages is calling to-night— He’ll probably leave in disgust because I just must talk about you— I love you so, and I’m so lonesome—

  Her sister Clothilde was leaving for New York the following day to rejoin her husband, who had returned from service. The whole Sayre family got up before dawn to see Clothilde off.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen early morning in a terribly long time— The sun all yellow and red, like a huge luminous peach hanging on a black shadow-tree—just visible thru the mist—and the family all sleepy-eyed and sad. Cold toes and tangled hair—I don’t think I’ll forget this morning. It’s so much nicer to wake up early— I’ve felt so clean and wholesome all day because I saw the sun rise—

  She took her first swim in the icy spring waters, and she reminded Scott:

  Remember last summer how hard we tried to get a swim to-gether? Tilde [Clothilde’s nickname] informed me that I’d certainly do all my swimming in a bath-tub in New York—So please have a huge one, big enough for us both—

  Darling, your love is so wonderful—I even believe you do as much as I do—Cource I will come—as soon as you’re ready for me— There’s nothing on earth I want like you—and you know I am yours—forever—

  Then she told him about a prize fight she’d gone to, her first, and how exciting she found it, and about the loan a boy had made her of his motorcycle:

  … it’s most exhilirating—and I love flying thru the sand on the road where we walked once—and fussed about the woods—

  March came and Scott sent her a glorious pair of pajamas, which she said made her feel like a Vogue cover: “… I feel sure I’ll never be able to keep off the street in ’em”; and
he told her he adored short hair.

  You really mustn’t say short hair thrills you— Just after I’ve lived in Vaseline, thereby turning mine dark, to make it long like you wanted it— But anyway, it didn’t grow, so I really am glad you’re becoming reconciled to the ways of convenience— I still think how nice the back of my neck would feel—

  More seriously she told him:

  Darling, I guess—I know—Mamma knows that we are going to be married some day— But she keeps leaving stories of young authors, turned out on a dark and stormy night, on my pillow— I wonder if you hadn’t better write to my Daddy—just before I leave— I wish I were detached—sorter without relatives. I’m not exactly scared of ’em, but they could be so unpleasant about what I’m going to do—

  adding a little cryptically:

  But you know we will, my Sweetheart—when you’re ready—… I don’t see how you can-carry around as much love as I’ve given you—

  But Scott’s life in New York was not going as smoothly as he had expected; his work bored and irritated him and, although there were parties and pleasant suppers in the evening with old friends from Princeton, he was no closer to having Zelda with him than when he left Montgomery. He was melancholy over his lack of funds and his inability to sell any of his stories, and his letters to Zelda reflected his unhappiness. Was she willing to wait for him and for how long could he count on her? Weren’t her letters less frequent than before? Zelda tried to reassure him, and if she too was worried by his uneasiness, she concealed it as best she could.

  Sweetheart,

  Please, please don’t be so depressed— We’ll be married soon, and then these lonesome nights will be over forever—and until we are, I am loving, loving every tiny minute of the day and night— Maybe you won’t understand this, but sometimes when I miss you most, it’s hardest to write—and you always know when I make myself— Just the ache of it all—and I CAN’T tell you. If we were together, you’d feel how strong it is—you’re so sweet when you’re melancholy. I love your sad tenderness—when I’ve hurt you—That’s one of the reasons I could never be sorry for our quarrels—and they bothered you so— Those dear, dear little fusses, when I always tried so hard to make you kiss and forget—