Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  The Twins’ Southern courting approach made them disdainful of Scott’s Yankee wooing tactics. Southerners, in theory, put Belles on pedestals. Scott, in practice, certainly did not. One evening he carved his and Zelda’s initials on the pillars of the Country Club, but in a bad error of judgement made his initials large and Zelda’s small. That it rankled with her for years showed in her first novel, written in 1932, when David Knight carves words on the club doorpost. ‘“David”, the legend read, “David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.”’24

  The way Zelda treated her men appalled yet fascinated Scott. He felt she treated men badly. She abused them, broke appointments with them and looked bored – yet they returned to her time after time.

  In an early letter to Scott, Zelda said women should ‘awake to the fact that their excuse and explanation is the necessity for a disturbing element among men – [if they did] they’d be much happier, and the men much more miserable – which is exactly what they need for the improvement of things in general’.25

  Scott, who soon saw ‘borrowing’ Zelda’s words as a neat way to improve his fictional characterizations, lifted her lines for his description of his heroine Rosalind in This Side of Paradise: ‘She once told a roomful of her mother’s friends that the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men.’26

  Scott found Zelda’s behaviour disturbing and erotic. At a dance soon after they met, knowing Scott was observing her, she took her escort into a lighted phone booth and kissed him. Though provoked, he desired her more. Fully aware of this, she took advantage of it. Or perhaps she could not help it. Whatever her motives, the consequence was the same: her behaviour stimulated them both to fictionalize it. Zelda not only understood Scott’s tendency to live a fictional life, she created one for herself.

  Perceptively she wrote later in Caesar’s Things: ‘[He] was proud of the way the boys danced with her and she was so much admired … [It] gave [her] a desirability which became, indeed, indispensable to [him].’27

  Scott had already written something similar in The Great Gatsby with Gatsby’s response to Daisy: ‘It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes.’28

  Twice in his Notebooks Scott explored a deeper reason for the way his erotic drive for Zelda was stimulated by another man’s interest. First he wrote the phrase ‘Proxy in passion’, later he enlarged on it: ‘Feeling of proxy in passion strange encouragement’.29

  That Zelda did not mind his voyeuristic ardour says something about her own alienation from her sexuality. She too had a private sexual vision: she liked watching him watching her with other men.

  Despite her large number of beaux and her seemingly heartless behaviour towards them, Scott began to captivate her. They began to hold intimate conversations which gave her an uncanny feeling of exposure and closeness. No man had ever talked to Zelda quite like that before. In comparison with the sportsmen she was used to, Scott was intellectual, artistic and gentle, and Zelda had a ‘quality which you couldn’t help feeling would betray her sooner or later … the quality that made her like intellectual men’.30

  Though he never fared well with men, Scott knew how to make women respond to him. His most remarkable characteristic – a genuine talent for intimacy born from an unguarded spontaneity – became irresistible to Zelda, as it did to many women, though it could cause confusion or hostility in some men. Zelda discovered that Scott preferred to emulate men rather than empathize with them.

  ‘When I like men’, he wrote, ‘I want to be like them – I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them.’31

  In this dual approach to the two sexes, in his ambitions and insecurities, Scott was undoubtedly influenced by his relationship with his parents.

  He talked to Zelda about them. Told her he identified with the Fitzgeralds who were genteel but impoverished. He did not say much about the McQuillans, on his mother’s side, because he despised them for being wealthy but not well bred. Unlike Zelda, who was socially secure, this ambivalence made Scott feel highly insecure: ‘I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex‚’32 he told his friend John O’Hara later.

  His parents had high ambitions for him, upon which he built. They began just after his birth on 24 September 1896 at 481 Laurel Avenue, St Paul, Minnesota, when they christened him Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald after his relative, the Maryland lawyer Francis Scott Key, who wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Scott loved the name and was quick to inform Zelda and all her friends. A month after Zelda met him, she took him to the Capitol to show him the star on the steps where Davis had taken the oath of office and to meet Sara Mayfield and Sara Haardt. Scott’s introductory line to them was that he was Francis Scott Key’s great-grandson – a somewhat inflated connection as they were merely second cousins three times removed.33 This ploy fits the revealing anecdote that Scott’s first credited word was ‘up’ at a mere ten months old.

  Zelda’s parents did not approve of the fact that Scott was a Roman Catholic Irish Midwesterner, even if as the son of Edward Fitzgerald he could trace his heroic Scott and Key ancestors back to seventeenth-century Maryland. While Zelda was proud of her mother, Scott was always slightly ashamed of his – for Mary (Mollie) McQuillan was the granddaughter of an Irish immigrant carpenter. That Edward Fitzgerald and Mollie married on 12 February 1890 in Washington DC when Mollie, nearly thirty, was already considered a spinster, must be credited to her assertiveness. Dramatic like her son, she got Edward to propose by threatening to throw herself into the Mississippi if he didn’t.34 Scott inherited from his mother a propensity for absurd antics that annoyed his friends but at the start amused Zelda.

  Mollie’s father, Philip F. McQuillan, was a shrewd example of the American Dream to which Scott himself would respond so avidly in his novels. Philip, born in Ireland’s County Fermanagh, moved first to Illinois then to St Paul, Minnesota, also moving up the ladder from impecunious bookkeeper to wealthy renowned wholesale grocer.35 On his death at forty-three from Bright’s Disease complicated by tuberculosis – the spectre of the latter would haunt Scott throughout his life – he left an estate of nearly $300,000 which allowed Scott’s mother (the eldest of five) a sound education and several European trips.

  Scott, attracted by the indisputably beautiful Zelda, confessed that Mollie according to Edward Fitzgerald ‘just missed being beautiful’,36 but according to him missed it by a mile. Mollie was vivacious, bright and eccentric: she frequently wore different coloured shoes, believing it was better to break in one new shoe at a time. She read, in Scott’s opinion, a heap of bad books, and was constantly to be seen holding her umbrella aloft as she hurried to the public library to exchange one bad book for another.

  Zelda and Scott were both spoiled as children, for similar reasons. Having lost two daughters, aged one and three, in an epidemic in 1896 while pregnant with Scott, Mollie, grief-stricken and hysterical, coddled him from birth. After the death of another infant girl in 1900, Mollie did not have a daughter until Annabel was born in July 1901. Scott’s possible guilt about surviving may have led him to hypochondria in his adulthood. Publicly he turned his sisters’ deaths into something mystical and mythic: ‘I don’t know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer.’37 He may have meant he had been born out of suffering and singled out for special talents. His mother, hostile to his literary ambitions, nevertheless recorded every significant event in his childhood. This habit may have encouraged Scott to historicize himself, for from an early age he listed his partners on dancing school programmes, collected and collated his valentines, and at thirteen wrote a private ‘Thoughtbook’, the start of his lifelong list-making compulsion, delineating amours and recording highs and lows on the popularity scale. It was also the first example of the way he recorded every experience. From his schooldays nothing was real to him until he had written about it. Unlike Zelda, Scott was always concerned with his image,
so he analysed what he thought of other people and cared deeply what they thought of him.

  Scott’s brains, vitality and often out-of-place directness of speech came from his mother whose frankness caused much local embarrassment. She once alarmed a woman whose husband was dying by saying: ‘I’m trying to decide how you’ll look in mourning.’38

  Scott disparaged and resented her and turned for moral guidance to his father, whom initially he admired. Edward Fitzgerald loved literature, read poetry aloud to his son and encouraged him to write. A handsome man with Southern manners, he had a gentle ineffectual unambitious nature. The Fitzgeralds were Southern in sympathy. Edward Fitzgerald’s first cousin Mary Surratt was hanged for conspiracy in Lincoln’s assassination. As a boy Edward guided Confederate spies during the Civil War. Scott grew up listening to his father’s tales of the lost South, and ‘acquired an extended and showy, if very superficial, knowledge of the Civil War’ which helped to enhance his reputation in Zelda’s eyes.39

  When Scott was born, Edward, who had attended Georgetown University without graduating, owned a doomed wicker furniture business,40 was drinking too much, which horribly embarrassed Scott, and was already cushioned by his wife’s wealth. By Scott’s second birthday his business had failed, after which he became a salesman with Procter and Gamble in Buffalo, New York. After several more moves which left Scott feeling anxious and dislocated, Edward finally lost his job in July 1908.41 Scott was at home when the phone call came for his mother. The boy knew from the tone of her voice a disaster had occurred. Perhaps unaware of his mother’s money, he prayed: ‘Dear God … please don’t let us go to the poor-house.’ Eleven-year-old Scott knew the worst when his father came home. Edward had been fired. He had left home that morning a confident young man. He had returned that evening a broken old man. He felt a failure the rest of his life.

  That incident coloured all Scott’s relations with those wealthier than himself and, in the case of Zelda’s family, those whose values were less materialistic than his. (The context of Scott’s anecdotes is always as important as the content. Therefore it is significant that Scott first recounted that touching incident to a journalist who saw him as an alcoholic and forgotten writer.42 This touching narrative was also pragmatic and self-serving.)

  His father’s failure fuelled Scott’s determination to succeed, yet his creative mind responded more readily to tales of failure. He would always spin stories from lost causes. From his father Scott also inherited his romantic love of the past, his good looks, his impeccable tailored style and his honour, which even in the worst stages of his marriage to Zelda would never allow him to desert her.

  As a boy Scott had lived with a ‘great dream’ with which now as an adult he tried to captivate Zelda. It was the dream of success as a writer which started in 1908 when his defeated family returned to St Paul, where they lived in the most fashionable Summit Avenue area of the city, but in a series of rented houses or apartments on the edges. This situation bears a remarkable similarity to Zelda’s, for her family too lived on the margins of a silk-hat section. There were so many coincidences in their lives it is as if their conspiratorial natures had a historical precedent.

  Scott’s parents finally settled at the end of the finest street. Scott revelled in the symbolism, which was almost too neat. One biographer felt this made Scott feel an outsider whose sense of difference sharpened his skills as a social observer, but Lloyd Hackl, a St Paul historical researcher, points out, and St Paul residents confirm, that actually his mother’s wealth gave him an entrée to the best in that society.43 It was perhaps his self-consciousness and conceit that initiated and made him cling to his idea of isolation and difference. On entering St Paul Academy in September 1908 he began to realize his literary ambitions but did not achieve equal success in his social life.

  In October 1909 his first published story, ‘The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage’, appeared in St Paul Academy Now and Then; another, concerning the heroic behaviour of a Confederate soldier, was the only juvenilia to interest Zelda.44

  In August 1911 he wrote, directed and starred in his first play for St Paul’s Elizabethan Dramatic Club, The Girl from Lazy J. These early writings, like his conversations, had a joyous childlike quality that he never lost because he never buried the past. His imagination reached out and responded to every experience, a quality Zelda from the first found alluring.

  As a young girl Zelda always won popularity contests, whereas Scott as a young boy was desperately unpopular. Not one invited child turned up to his sixth birthday party, forcing the small soulful Scott indoors where he solemnly consumed the whole birthday cake, including several candles. As an adolescent he fared worse. Though he struggled for recognition, playing football, basketball and enrolling in Professor Baker’s dance class, he was labelled a show-off. He would memorize titles in bookstores then discuss books he had not read; he would observe his classmates’ faults then publicly criticize them, or he would see through them then write about it. He also expected others to be as interested in him as he was. This lifelong narcissism flawed his novels, adversely affected his later friendships and damaged Zelda.

  But during his early years in St Paul he made several lasting women friends, including Marie Hersey, who would help Zelda buy her first New York wardrobe.

  Scott’s grades at St Paul were so poor that he was sent to the Catholic Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, in September 1911 to make a fresh and better start. The gamble failed. At Newman his grades sank lower, he was thought fresh, and on home visits began to be known as ‘a man who drank’.45

  He had a capacity for hero worship, usually for athletic and socially self-assured men. It brought him the friendship of quarterback Charles (Sap) Donahoe, with whom he later roomed in Princeton – but when he ventured out on to the Newman football field himself he was labelled ‘yellow’. After his failure he wrote a poem called ‘Football’, whose success made him feel writing was an adequate substitute for real action.

  Scott’s most important influences were two like-minded men: Father Cyril Sigourney Webster Fay,46 a trustee of Newman, and Fay’s friend, the Catholic convert and Anglo-Irish novelist Shane Leslie. Scott saw Shane, who had sat at Tolstoy’s feet and swum with Rupert Brooke, as a romantic hero.

  Fay, whose friends moved in high places, took Scott under his wing and served for some years as mentor and substitute parent. The thirty-seven-year-old priest and the sixteen-year-old student shared an egotistical absorption in self-analysis. Scott, impressed with Fay’s social class and Catholic elitism, temporarily considered the priesthood. But entering the world of wealth through Fay’s connections, about which he would always feel ambivalent, began to attract him more.

  In his last year at Newman he met a well-heeled younger boy, Stephan Vincent Parrott (nicknamed Peevie), with whom he would vie for the priest’s affections and to whom he would later show Zelda’s private diary, which he considered brilliantly written. Father Fay encouraged Peevie and Scott to see themselves as spiritual brothers, though Fay’s letters to Scott indicate less a fatherly feeling than a homosexual one. If Scott registered this at the time, his affection for Fay would have made him repress that recognition, because his attitude at all times towards male homosexual behaviour was a loud insistent melodramatic repulsion.

  Scott’s self-esteem in his last months at Newman had been somewhat salvaged by producing more plays in St Paul, by trips to the New York theatre, and by inventing ideas for musical comedies. He had discovered a musical score for a show called His Honor the Sultan produced by Princeton’s Triangle Club. In that instant he determined to go to Princeton, the Southerner’s Northern University. Despite flunking all the entrance exams he argued his way to acceptance in September 1913.

  Enthralled by the university’s Gothic architecture, he schemed to become one of the ‘gods of the class’47, but his fastest route was closed by a knee injury at football practice. He decided instead to achieve prominence via the Triangle Club, whose
key members were Bunny Wilson, the shy scholar with the whiplash mind who would become Scott’s literary mentor and ‘intellectual conscience’,48 and poet John Peale Bishop, four years older than Scott. Bishop felt Scott was determined to be a boy genius even if he had to trim his age to look precocious. When their talk turned towards books Bishop, admitting he had not read many, commented that Scott had read even fewer, but ‘those he said he had read … were many, many more’.49

  Scott’s other Princeton friends, all wealthy, were more interested in intellectual and literary excellence than in social aspirations. They included Alexander McKaig, Townsend Martin and Montgomery’s Lawton Campbell, who became frequent visitors of the Fitzgeralds in their early married days, and John Biggs Jnr, who became a lifelong friend of both Fitzgeralds and who occupied a special place later in Zelda’s life.

  Wilson, a virgin, was like Scott painfully shy about sex. Bishop and McKaig were womanizers. One anecdote locates Fitzgerald, Wilson, McKaig and Bishop strolling down Nassau Street when two girls known to McKaig as ‘hookers’ passed them. Instantly he and Bishop rushed after them leaving Scott and Bunny flummoxed. Scott remarked prudishly: ‘That’s one thing Fitzgerald’s never done!’50

  Scott’s fiction during this period is marked by the same caution about sex. His heroes have a puritanical restraint. Girls are lightly kissed by men who see a mere kiss as a commitment to an engagement. Once he uses Zelda as his role model, Scott’s heroines emulate her spirited self-centredness: men are women’s prey. Even in his apprentice work Scott’s female characters illustrate these role reversals. In ‘The Debutante’ (1917) Helen, his selfish protagonist, said that she enjoyed controlling situations though it became tedious being in charge. Helen was stimulated by chasing men but when they responded she enjoyed it less.