Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  One 1920 honeymoon sky stayed with her for years. In her short story ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’, written in 1929, she recalled: ‘Twilights were wonderful just after the war. They hung above New York like indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices and limp gusts of air exhaled from closing windows, to hang above the streets with all the mystery of white fog rising off a swamp.’16

  In 1932 she rewrote this for her first novel17 for, like Scott, Zelda was never averse to recycling a witty phrase – though usually she repeated her own, while Scott often repeated hers. Maybe in those twirling twilight Twenties they both saw her words as hanging in a communal closet. Maybe it was only later that Zelda wanted separate wardrobes.

  Scott, spellbound by New York as a child, drew his symbolic New York landscape from three glimpses of New York prior to his arrival there in 1920.18 Scott’s first reported glimpse was when as a ten-year-old he saw a ferry boat at dawn moving slowly from the Jersey shore towards Manhattan. His second occurred when as a fifteen-year-old Newman schoolboy he saw two New York theatrical shows starring Gertrude Bryan and Ina Claire, who ‘blurred into one lovely entity, the girl. She was my second symbol of New York. The ferry boat stood for triumph, the girl for romance.’19 Scott found his third symbol as an adult when he saw his Princeton intellectual mentor, Bunny Wilson, striding confidently along a New York street, drawing strength from the city pavements and from a force Scott called ‘that new thing – the Metropolitan spirit’,20 a dynamic movement like a ‘tall man’s quick-step’.21

  Scott links these three symbols through the idea of a romantic quickened pace, which parallels Zelda’s notion of romantic dusks hovering over a city constantly in motion. The Fitzgeralds shared the insider’s excitement mixed with the outsider’s awe. Zelda also shared, at one level, Scott’s frontier viewpoint of New York. She acted as a glamorous model for his Western tourist image of New Yorkers which he presented so skilfully in This Side of Paradise.22

  In Scott’s words: ‘It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.’23 At this level, Zelda was as amazed as Scott that overnight he was hailed not merely as the chronicler of an age he saw as the greatest, gaudiest spree in history, but also as the city’s laureate. Through his work and their joint escapades, they now embodied the spirit of a particular New York which bore little resemblance to Theodore Dreiser’s poor person’s New York or to Edith Wharton’s aristocratic New York. Changed by the building boom, it was a postwar luxurious metropolitan place, peopled by a new generation who arrived with ambition and riches from all over the States. Minnesota’s apprentice writer had become the ‘arch type’ of what New York wanted.24 ‘I, who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in the Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of that same moment.’25

  Although enjoying her role as a famous Fitzgerald, at a deeper level Zelda saw through it. Intelligently she pointed out that New York, speakeasy city of metallic urgency, was more full of reflections than of itself, that the only concrete things in town were the abstractions.26

  There was nothing concrete about their domestic life during their first months. Zelda told Sara Mayfield it was fortunate her parents had decided not to accompany her to New York as they would have been shocked at Scott’s ‘monumental spree’ in the Biltmore Hotel, where he called up bellboys to bathe him and left taps running till they flooded the hotel.27 Before the management moved them on, several of Scott’s college chums came to visit them.

  In 1919 Edmund Wilson had gone to New York to work for Vanity Fair, and as managing editor there he hired his Princeton friend John Bishop. By the time of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage Bishop was often staying at the opulent apartment of another Princetonian, Townsend Martin, a suavely dressed globe-trotting screenwriter. Unlike his uncle, the wealthy philanthropist Frederick Townsend Martin, young Martin, a womanizer, had no intention of becoming a reformer.

  Wilson and Bishop were the first to meet Fitzgerald’s bride in room 2109. Zelda offered the bachelors Orange Blossom cocktails spiked with bootleg gin, then spread herself elegantly on a sofa. Wilson saw her initially as ‘very pretty and languid’, but soon decided she had a forceful interesting personality accompanied by wit, beauty, recklessness, unpredictability and Southern exoticism.28 Bishop saw her as a ‘barbarian princess’.29 Only later (when married himself to a wealthy efficient woman who encouraged his career) did he blame Zelda for encouraging Scott to drink and waste his talent.

  Since their wedding both Fitzgeralds had begun drinking heavily. In their first few months together they often fell asleep when drunk, so they might arrive at a party and immediately take a nap. Zelda, who had annoyed her parents by rebellious drinking in Montgomery, now drank more because there were no parental checks. Scott drank because he was an incipient alcoholic. Scott admitted that when he first became rich he discovered that after a few drinks he was able to hold forth and please his audience. So he began to drink more heavily to attract a bigger audience.

  Though this is not Scott speaking but one of his characters in ‘A New Leaf’ (1931), it aptly sums up his attitude in the early Twenties, when his desperate need to please people ran alongside his increasingly unpredictable drinking behaviour.

  Zelda had mixed memories of her honeymoon, some glamorous, some rueful. Too much alcohol soaked the moonlight and roses. ‘People in the [hotel] corridors complained; there was a tart smell of gin over everything; for years the smell of her trousseau haunted [her] … corsages died in the ice-water tray and cigarettes disintegrated in the spittoon.’30

  Among regular Princetonian visitors to the Fitzgeralds’ hotel suite was John Biggs Jnr, Scott’s former room-mate, ex-editor of the Princeton Tiger and Triangle Club collaborator, now an aspiring writer who would publish two novels with Scribner’s in the 1920s before settling firmly into his law career. He was often accompanied by Lawton Campbell, a writer and business executive, and Alex McKaig, who worked in advertising.

  A former editor of the Daily Princetonian, Alex had a pudgy baby face with curly hair parted in the centre, and still lived with his mother. He had a waspish nature which came from envying his more gifted friends. He kept a constant diary of the Fitzgeralds’ movements which provides valuable glimpses of their first few weeks. His first entry, nine days after their marriage, is unflattering to Zelda and offers poor prospects for their marriage. ‘Called on Scott Fitz and his bride,’ he recorded, ‘latter temperamental small-town Southern belle. Chews gum – shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big – then die in a garret at thirty-two.’31 McKaig’s and Wilson’s views of Zelda as a hick Southerner out of place in a big city say as much for their Northern stereotyped attitudes about the Deep South as they do about Zelda.

  Lawton Campbell, a tall blond Southerner who had been in Princeton’s Triangle Club with Scott, felt great affection for Zelda. His aunt Margaret Booth ran the school of that name in Montgomery, and linked by their Alabama connections he and Zelda remained friends for years. She felt close enough to him later to give him one of her paintings, which he treasured and refused to sell after her death. In 1920 he was a wealthy executive with General Foods and author of two successful plays, Solid South and Immoral Isabella. He told Sara Mayfield that ‘Of all the people who ever came out of Alabama … Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and Tallulah Bankhead [were] the most fascinating.’32

  Several of their circle noticed Zelda’s curious speech patterns filled, according to Bunny Wilson, with ‘felicitous phrases and unexpected fancies’.33 Wilson observed: ‘She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit – almost exactly in the way she wrote – that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of a “free association” of ideas and one could never follow
up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly; she had no readymade phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other.’34 Although ‘it was difficult to talk to her consecutively about anything,’ said Wilson, ‘you were not led … to suspect any mental unsoundness’.35

  Years later, Campbell also recollected Zelda’s singular speech. ‘She would stretch out on the long sofa in my living room … and recount some fabulous experience of the night before … If her remarks were occasionally non sequitur one didn’t notice it at the time. She passed very quickly from one topic to another and you didn’t question her. It wouldn’t occur to you to stop and ask what she meant.’36

  It is important to recognize that Campbell’s delineation of Zelda’s speech patterns as ‘non sequitur’ or disordered, and Wilson’s determination to include (even if then to deny) hints of mental unsoundness, occurred not merely forty years after conversations with Zelda but after her many years of being publicly labelled as a schizophrenic whose medical diagnosis had used her ordinary speech patterns to indicate the disintegration of her thinking processes. It would have been hard for Campbell or Wilson so many years later to recall Zelda’s speech without that mental illness framework.

  Lacking female friends, Zelda relied particularly on Ludlow Fowler, Scott’s best man, for company. Ludlow, wealthy and generous, spent time with Zelda and Scott at the theatre and the Follies. On the weekend of 24 April 1920 several friends, including Ludlow, who had been active in the Triangle Club with Scott, accompanied the Fitzgeralds to the Cottage Club, one of Princeton’s most prestigious eating clubs, to which Scott had belonged. On arrival Zelda somersaulted down sacrosanct Prospect Avenue then, on reaching the Cottage Club, insisted on having her breakfast omelette flamed in brandy with applejack which she provided.37 In order to shock the academic community Scott introduced her as his mistress, got drunk, started a fight and wound up with two black eyes. ‘We were there three days, Zelda and five men in Harvey Firestone’s car, and not one of us drew a sober breath,’ he confided later to Marie Hersey, adding it was ‘the damnedest party ever held in Princeton’.38 That Scott still had good women friends as confidantes whereas she suddenly had none was another blow to Zelda.

  When the Biltmore evicted the Fitzgeralds they moved to the Commodore Hotel, two blocks down 42nd Street, and celebrated their arrival by whizzing round the revolving doors for half an hour. In mid-May they were forced to leave there too because of rowdy behaviour.

  They filled their first weeks with antics, and the newspapers filled their pages with the Fitzgeralds. Scott undressed at George White’s Scandals, Zelda dived fully dressed into the Washington Square fountain.39 The media watched as the Fitzgeralds lived life on the wing. What could be better for headlines than a couple who did not go in for self-preservation? Journalists turned their bizarre behaviour into myth, which in turn encouraged the Fitzgeralds to invent further unseemly exploits. They were caught in a vicious circle which left them confused and alienated. Zelda wrote that in New York they needed ‘to absolve themselves in the waters of each other’s unrest’.40 Scott wrote retrospectively that within a few months of arriving in New York he and Zelda no longer knew who they were or what they were expected to do.

  As enfants terribles they did provoke people, but they were never vulgar and often funny, so they got away with it. One writer friend said: ‘I couldn’t get mad at him and particularly not at Zelda; there was a golden innocence about them and they were both so hopelessly goodlooking.’41 Scott’s appeal lay in his charm and intuitiveness. This allowed people initially to look kindly on his clowning before he botched up their approval with even worse behaviour. His desire to impress people led him into some conspicuous acts. Take the afternoon in the Scribner Building when Scott, knowing Edith Wharton was in Charles Scribner’s office, rushed in and fell at Wharton’s feet in a parody of homage. Legend has it that despite Wharton’s stiff formality she took it well.

  Their whirlwind antics of those first few months meant Scott accomplished very little new writing. But he reaped benefits from stories written earlier which together with sketches, plays and features appeared every month in the Saturday Evening Post, Metropolitan, Vanity Fair, the Nassau Lit, Scribner’s Magazine. The Smart Set in July published his brilliant naturalistic story ‘May Day’, whose core was the 1919 May Day Riots and the suicide of sensitive Gordon Sterrett, an artistic failure.

  He did very little work on his second novel either, but despite this by June 1920 Metropolitan had advanced Scott $7,000 for serial rights for the as yet unwritten book The Flight of the Rocket, which became The Beautiful and Damned. Scott, under the literary influences of Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain and especially Theodore Dreiser’s deterministic realism, intended his new novel to emphasize, as ‘May Day’ had done, the idea that human behaviour is determined by forces beyond the characters’ control.

  During 1920 his price for short fiction rose from $400 to $900 and eleven stories earned him $4,650. He was paid $7,425 from the movies for three stories (‘Head and Shoulders’, ‘Myra Meets His Family’ and ‘The Offshore Pirate’) and he was offered an option on future stories. That year, his first full year as a professional writer, he earned $18,850.42 He and Zelda were incapable of covering their expenses with his earnings; thus he began his lifelong habit of borrowing from Harold Ober and Scribner’s.

  Both Fitzgeralds enjoyed thinking up new ways to burn money. Scott used five-dollar bills to light his cigarettes and folded five-hundred ones to show the figures when he wore them in his vest pockets. Though Zelda’s father had brought her up to see money as unimportant, suddenly exhilarated by the sheer amount they appeared to have, she consumed it eagerly on Manhattan-style expensive clothes.43 Neither of them knew how to manage finances.

  Though Scott remained obsessed with and critical of the rich he was never averse to consorting with them, so he enjoyed their visits to Ludlow Fowler’s family’s rich New York mansion. Zelda was particularly intrigued by the elevator, having never seen one inside an ordinary house before.44

  For Scott this was a time of storing up images, characters and situations which he would use after August when he started writing again. Zelda’s role was primarily as Scott’s muse, subsequently as his editorial eye. Scott’s literary friends were aware that he leant on her for invention and literary direction. McKaig, who assessed Zelda’s mind as undisciplined yet intuitive, asserted that she supplied Scott with all his copy for female characters. He also felt Scott was too absorbed in Zelda’s personality, indisputably the stronger of the two.45 This image, popular with Scott’s friends, was not entirely accurate. Zelda kept hidden those areas of dependence on Scott – her need for friendship and emotional support.

  Scott based his protagonists almost entirely on Zelda and himself. As McKaig recorded in his diary, Scott ‘made another true remark about himself … cannot depict how any one thinks except himself & possibly Zelda. Find that after he has written about a character for a while it becomes just himself again.’46

  Campbell, like McKaig, believed Zelda was the dominant influence on Scott’s writing. ‘I have always thought that Zelda did more for Scott than Scott did for Zelda. I have seen him many times write down the things she said on scraps of paper or the backs of envelopes.’47

  Being a muse is not much of a job for a bright young woman and Zelda, isolated from her kin, grew bored. An outdoor person, never happier than when swimming, she was now living an entirely city life. One of Scott’s worries was the extent to which his male friends found her physically exciting. John Peale Bishop flirted openly with her in front of Scott who, voyeuristically, at first found it sexually stimulating.48 Zelda told John: ‘I like you better than anybody in the world; I never feel safe with you! – I only like men who kiss as a means to an end. I never know how to treat the other kind.’49

  Scott’s short stories had achieved a certain notoriety for their lushly described passionate kisses, so Zelda�
�s remark might have been a specific marital goad; more likely, she was exhibiting her Southern role of a woman who erotically disturbed men. Certainly she also flirted with McKaig, who had entirely changed his negative impression of Zelda and now declared her the most brilliant, beautiful young woman he had ever known.

  Wilson, formerly as sexually reticent as Scott himself, did not flirt with Zelda. He already coveted the poet Elinor Hoyt Wylie, while also in an impossible three-cornered romance with a second poet, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Bishop, his fellow editor at Vanity Fair.50 However, he did fall under Zelda’s mesmeric influence and was intrigued when she told him that hotel bedrooms erotically excited her.51 At this point Wilson gauged Fitzgerald to be ‘neurotically jealous’ of Zelda.52

  Zelda flirted more seriously with screenwriter Townsend Martin, whose good looks and globe-trotting tales she admired. At first on the grounds that Townsend and John Bishop, who shared an apartment, had missed out on wedding kisses, Zelda playfully kissed both men whilst Scott remarked tolerantly: ‘Oh, yes, they really have kisses coming to them, because they weren’t at the wedding, and everybody at a wedding always gets a kiss.’53 Then, going further, Zelda captured Townsend in the bathroom where she asked him to give her a bath, and walked into John’s bedroom suggesting she crawl into bed with him – though only to sleep, she reassured everyone. Wilson reported that Scott’s tolerance faded and he became worried and huffy.54

  Scott’s jealousy about Townsend Martin increased that summer when Zelda became, as she later admitted in a letter to Scott, ‘romanticly attached’.55 Scott’s Ledger for June 1920 thankfully records ‘Townsend goes abroad’ but it also discreetly mentions the ‘Jean Bankhead fuss’. Possibly in retaliation, Scott had gone further than Zelda and had a brief affair with Gene (Eugenia) Bankhead, who was engaged to the alcoholic Morton Hoyt, a drinking buddy of Scott’s and a Vanity Fair writer. This affair was close to home, as Gene of course was the elder sister of Zelda’s friend Tallulah, and Morton the brother of Wilson’s ‘poetic romance’, Elinor Hoyt Wylie.56