Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Zelda later expressed her complex feelings in Caesar’s Things: ‘Janno had always been jealous. Situations which had to be faced with dishonesty and endured for the sake of a code to which she did not subscribe made her sick. She couldn’t say to Jacob, “I don’t want you to go, you’re obligated to me. Anyway, she’s not as nice as I am.” She sat being … courageous … saying to herself … such was all in the game.’57

  The game intensified when Zelda’s suspicions were accurately aroused about Scott’s affair with another Montgomery Belle, actress Miriam Hopkins. That this ‘game’ appeared part of a life of freedom confused her. In both her novels Zelda’s heroines, Alabama and Janno, equate lack of restrictions with lack of security. On her wedding night Alabama lies awake, thinking that ‘no power on earth could make her do anything, she thought frightened, any more except herself’.58 Janno says, ‘fright makes one realize [one’s] dependence on the formulas’.59 Initially a lifestyle where she was no longer tied down by tradition or taboos was what Zelda thought she wanted. But a life without limits brings its own fears.

  Zelda flirted heavily with Scott’s friends partly from habit, but also partly because attracting men seemed the only familiar talent left to her. As well as lacking girlfriends with whom to share confidences, she had no mother to spoil her, no father to rebel against. Zelda’s role as a Flapper for Scott’s writing was exhausting, but she had not yet found an alternative. Without a solid base she settled for male admiration. She had regarded flirting as harmless so long as Scott remained loyal. But when his explorations led to sexual relationships her world rocked. Having no other support she had to suppress any anger and lean on Scott.

  Already in their first few months of marriage the Fitzgeralds were encountering problems which would intensify. But they still had one constant bond: precious talks and dreams. This intimacy allowed them to guard against intruders and remained the one safeguard they never entirely lost. Scott recalled that the lengthy conversations he and Zelda had at bedtime which sometimes lasted until dawn were crucial to their relationship. During the daytime he felt they never achieved that same intimacy.60

  After their heavy city socializing Scott felt a rural retreat would enable him to finish his second novel, promised to Perkins for September. In May 1920 Zelda’s Montgomery friend Leon Ruth, one of Scott’s early rivals, now studying at Columbia, helped them buy a second-hand Marmon sports coupé. They hoped a car would enable them to search for a house near water because, as Scott wrote to a friend, ‘If Zelda can’t swim, she’s miserable.’61

  Zelda played havoc with the car but managed to find a suitable house near Long Island Sound in Westport, Connecticut, fifty miles from New York, in 1920 still country not suburbia. When Westport was constructed in 1835 as a new town along the Sangatuk river with pieces from neighbouring towns Fairfield, Norwalk and Weston, river and seafront took on a new significance as wharves, warehouses, mills, factories and, later, luxurious country estates, inns and restaurants sprang up. By the time the Fitzgeralds moved there, summer visitors and New York commuters swarmed the beaches. Their house, built in 1758, was originally the home of Wakeman Couch, an early farmer who grew onions on the surrounding acres. ‘Burritt Wakeman’s place’ was a two-storey grey shingled farm cottage on Compo Road which took its name from the old Compo Tide Mill building.62 The year before Zelda arrived, a wooden bathing pavilion opened at Compo beach, and wooden bath-houses lining the boardwalk could be rented by the hour, but Zelda ignored those facilities as their house had its own garden and stretch of beach. From a photograph taken in May 1920 we can see the house, its imposing veranda supported by elegant pillars, was set in a spacious garden surrounded by trees. It was a house of many windows, all with an attractive rural aspect. Another photo dated July 1920 shows Zelda in a black one-piece swimsuit stepping off their landing stage into the water.

  They rented Wakeman Cottage from May through to September 1920. Domestic life there was no more orderly than it had been in Manhattan hotels. Dirty laundry piled up in closets. Neither Zelda nor Scott cooked. A servant was desperately needed. Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler that as soon as they acquired a servant and ‘some sheets from Mama’ he would be very welcome. ‘We have a house with a room for you and a ruined automobile because I drove it over a fire-plug and completely de-intestined it.’ This incident may have been partly caused by Zelda’s poor eyesight. The Montgomery family doctor had suggested that the retina of her right eye was missing.

  Believing that she was pregnant, she added anxiously: ‘Only by the time you do come I’ll probably have grown so fat like this [drawing of fat stick woman] that you wont be able to recognize me … I’ll have to wear a [measure of music with words ‘Red, red rose’ beneath] to disclose my identity – or condition … But it’s a deep secret and you must keep very quiet and not laugh too hard and be very sympathetic.’63 In the event she was not pregnant.

  They hired a houseboy, Tana, from the Japanese Reliable Employment Agency, but having a houseboy did not materially improve their domestic situation. In late June or early July Wilson visited Westport, told that ‘Zelda had decided to change her style and behave like a conventional lady, paying and receiving calls and making polite acknowledgments’.64 Wilson wrote that Zelda’s reform was shortlived as revels restarted in their rustic retreat. The Fitzgeralds and their friends were ‘revelling nude in the orgies of Westport’.65 Zelda’s later recollection bears this out: ‘The beach and dozens of men’.66

  At one party given by theatrical producer John Williams, their Westport neighbour, Nathan, who accompanied them, flirtatiously played several choruses of ‘Cuddle Up A Little Closer’ for Zelda on the piano.

  During another party in this quiet place they upset the authorities when they reported a false fire alarm. Legend has it that when the firemen asked where the fire was, Zelda pointed dramatically to her breast and said ‘Here!’

  These alcoholic weekends often ended in rows. On 13 June 1920 McKaig noted: ‘Visit Fitz at Westport … terrible party. Fitz and Zelda fighting like mad. Say themselves marriage can’t succeed’.

  In Westport Scott began on a new plot for The Flight of the Rocket (eventually The Beautiful and Damned), in which Westport served as the model for Marietta, New York. The Fitzgeralds’ grey shingled house becomes the model for Gloria and Anthony Patch’s rented grey honeymoon cottage, which was established at a time when any woman who kept a cat was thought to be a witch.

  Zelda told Sara Mayfield she found Westport depressing and began to persuade Scott to attend parties in Gotham to break the monotony.67 Zelda as a restless woman did not fit easily into either of the two conflicting images prevalent during 1920 of her and Scott. One was the public image sponsored by the media of the golden couple glowing with success, happy in each other’s company. The other was the private image held by McKaig and other friends that their rows were so frequent and so embittered that their marriage seemed to be breaking up.

  Scott and Zelda half-believed and lived out both images. Meanwhile Zelda, homesick for Montgomery, told Scott she hankered for Alabama peaches and biscuits for breakfast. Underneath, she wondered if her parents missed her as much as she missed them.

  She hoped a return South would not only allow her to show off her new marital style and clothes, but also give her some stability and improve the elements that had unexpectedly started to go wrong. Scott suggested a trip to Montgomery in the car they had rechristened The Rolling Junk. They set off on 15 July 1920. Typically, they had not informed the Sayres of their plans.

  Notes

  1 ZSF, Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 49.

  2 Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 118.

  3 ZSF, ‘Auction – Model 1934’, Collected Writings, p. 436. First appeared in Esquire, July 1934, published as by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald but credited to Zelda in Scott’s Ledger.

  4 John Dos Passos, The Best Times. An Informal Memoir, The New American Library, 1966, p. 128.

  5 ZSF, ‘A Millionaire�
��s Girl’, Collected Writings, p. 327. First appeared in Saturday Evening Post, 7 May 1930. Published as by Scott but written by Zelda.

  6 Ibid. In 1932 she still hadn’t forgotten the experience and revamped her impressions for her first novel (see Save Me The Waltz, p. 47).

  7 ZSF, ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’, p. 327.

  8 Winzola McLendon, ‘Interview: Frances Scott Fitzgerald to Winzola McLendon’, Ladies Home Journal Nov. 1974, pp. 59–60, 62.

  9 Best descriptions in ZSF, ‘Miss Ella’, Collected Writings, pp. 343–9.

  10 ZSF, Waltz, p. 41.

  11 ZSF, ‘The Changing Beauty of Park Avenue’, Collected Writings, p. 403.

  12 ZSF, Waltz, p. 48.

  13 Ibid., p. 49.

  14 ZSF, ‘Southern Girl’, Collected Writings, p. 301. First appeared in College Humor, July 1929 published as by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald but written solely by Zelda.

  15 Later still she decorated wooden bowls with oils of the same scenes. Fiction 1930s, paintings early 1940s, wooden bowls late 1940s. ZSF’s Album of Slides and Art, CO183, Box 8, PUL.

  16 ZSF, ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’, p. 327.

  17 ‘Vincent Youmans wrote the music for those twilights just after the war. They were wonderful. They hung above the city like an indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices and limp gusts of air exhaled from closing windows. They lay above the streets like a white fog off a swamp.’ ZSF, Waltz, p. 47.

  18 James Mellow directed me to this idea.

  19 Curiously, during Zelda and Scott’s first year in New York Ina Claire was appearing at the Lyceum in the comedy The Gold Diggers.

  20 Mellow, Invented Lives, pp. 91, 506. In the PUL MS (CO187, Box 17) of ‘The Romantic Egotist’, ch. 2, Fitzgerald describes the ferry ride as occurring when he was thirteen on a journey from Manhattan to boarding school. See also The Crack-Up, with Other Uncollected Pieces, Note-Books and Unpublished Letters, ed. Edmund Wilson, New York, New Directions, paperback, 1945, 1956, pp. 23, 24.

  21 FSF, Notebooks No. 158.

  22 Biographer Henry Dan Piper pointed out this image had only just begun to emerge as the symbol of the most sophisticated cosmopolitan aspects of the national culture. Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bodley Head, London, 1965, pp. 61, 62.

  23 FSF, Crack-Up, p. 14.

  24 Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 62. Also FSF, Crack-Up, pp. 26–7.

  25 FSF, Crack-Up, pp. 26–7.

  26 ZSF, Waltz, p. 49.

  27 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 55.

  28 Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From the Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. with introduction by Leon Edel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1975, p. 53; Jeffrey Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1995, p. 109.

  29 Milford, Zelda, p. 47.

  30 ZSF, Caesar, ch. IV, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 5, PUL.

  31 Alexander McKaig, Diary, 12 Apr. 1920.

  32 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 62.

  33 Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, p. 478.

  34 Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 109; The Portable Edmund Wilson, ed. Lewis M. Dabney, Viking Press, New York, 1983, p. 191.

  35 Wilson, Letters, p. 478.

  36 Lawton Campbell to Milford, 19 Sep. 1965, quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 78.

  37 Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delta, New York, 1983, pp. 28, 29.

  38 FSF to Marie Hersey, May 1920, CO188, Box 4, Folder 25, PUL. The occasion was 25 Apr. 1920. The following week without Zelda to witness his renewed humiliation Scott drove back to Princeton with Bishop and Wilson for a banquet for former Nassau Lit editors. Attired in a foolish costume of halo and wings and carrying a lyre, Scott was ejected from a rear window and told he was suspended from the Cottage Club.

  39 The New York press reported their infamous acts just the way the Montgomery Advertiser had reported Zelda’s youthful exploits.

  40 ZSF, Waltz, p. 51.

  41 Dos Passos, Best Times, p. 128. He was describing his time with Zelda and Scott in 1922.

  42 On this he paid $1,444.25 federal tax.

  43 Zelda said later that her two highly autobiographical novels accurately reflected her feelings about their time in New York in the early Twenties. In Save Me The Waltz David wakes up in the Biltmore groaning over their fame in the newspapers. Alabama says it is nice. David shouts ‘Nice! But it says we’re in a sanitarium for wickedness. What’ll our parents think …?’ Alabama, still ‘glad we’re famous anyway’, dances riotously and thinks up ways to spend money. Save Me The Waltz, p. 45.

  44 Fowler’s affluence so deeply affected Scott that five years later he based Anson Hunter on Ludlow in ‘The Rich Boy’.

  45 McKaig, Diary, 15 Sep. 1920.

  46 Ibid., 13 Oct. 1920.

  47 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 62. Wilson, who also recognized Zelda’s usefulness to Scott in the early Twenties, was the first of Scott’s friends to respect Zelda’s independent artistic talent as the decade wore on. Years later, when corresponding with Scott’s biographer, Wilson urged him to ‘make clear that even when her mind was going, the writing and painting she did had her curious personal quality of imaginative iridescence and showed something of real talent’ (Meyers, Edmund Wilson, pp. 109–10).

  48 Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 72.

  49 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 55.

  50 Wilson wished to marry Millay, who had already gone through eighteen love affairs. McKaig called her ‘a modern Sappho’.

  51 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 214.

  52 Wilson to Arthur Mizener, 27 Jan. 1950, Yale University.

  53 Ibid.

  54 Later Wilson wrote to Scottie about these incidents that it was smart in the Twenties for attractive young married women to hold levees in their bathrooms. Wilson reassured Scottie that though Zelda did do this she always did it casually and only with good friends of Scott’s.

  55 ZSF to FSF, c. late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 190.

  56 Eugenia and Morton married in August possibly during her affair with Scott, and were to divorce and remarry three times. On one stormy ocean crossing with Eugenia the depressed Morton jumped overboard in an attempt to kill himself. Scott, always on the lookout for material, used that aborted death leap in several early versions of Tender Is The Night, and even after finally expunging it, he retained the name Hoyt for young Rosemary who poses the threat to Nicole and Dick Diver’s marriage.

  57 ZSF, Caesar, ‘She Had A Right To It’ (ch. VI in author’s new edited structure), CO183, Box 2A, Folder 6, PUL.

  58 ZSF, Waltz, p. 44.

  59 ZSF, Caesar, ch. VI, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 6, PUL.

  60 According to Scott, those healing conversations continued until their trip to Europe in the late Twenties.

  61 FSF to Ruth Sturtevant, 14 May 1920.

  62 The mill’s speciality was grinding kiln-dried corn for shipment to the West Indies. The house was later known as the Switch House because it was where the trolleys switched tracks to go on to Compo beach. Eve Potts, Westport – A Special Place, Westport Historical Society, 1985, p. 113.

  63 ZSF to Ludlow Fowler, 9 May 1920, CO183, Box 5, Folder 4, PUL.

  64 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 59.

  65 Wilson to H. L. Mencken, 12 May 1922, Letters, p. 82.

  66 ZSF to FSF, c. late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 190.

  67 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 57. Gotham is a nickname for New York City.

  CHAPTER 6

  Zelda was a reckless driver with few automotive skills and defective vision. Scott was equally incompetent. During the July 1920 trip their broken axles, flat tyres, speeding fines and high garage bills1 gave Scott sufficient material for ‘The Cruise of The Rolling Junk’, a witty travel series. Zelda told Ludlow Fowler their inability to read maps meant Connecticut to Montgomery (1,000 miles as the crow flies) ‘took us a week … The joys of motoring are more or less fictitious.’2

  In Virginia their matching white knickerbo
cker suits were considered so shocking that a good hotel initially refused them entry. By Greensboro, North Carolina, Zelda felt obliged to pull on a skirt over her knickerbockers.3

  As they finally neared Montgomery, the floral Southern scents and the sight of young belles in organdie dresses filled Zelda with nostalgia. Scott understood: ‘Suddenly Zelda was crying, crying because things were the same and yet were not the same. It was for her faithlessness that she wept and for the faithlessness of time.’4

  Predictably, they were locked out of the Sayres’ house as Zelda’s parents were away. Swiftly they drove to Livye Hart’s, where Peyton Mathis gawped at Zelda’s knickerbockers. ‘What’s happened to you?’ he asked. ‘You went away in long skirts and you’ve come back in short pants.’5

  Though displaced in the North, Zelda found, like Thomas Wolfe who also left the South for New York City, that on returning there is a deep sense in which you can’t go home again.

  In the Sayres’ temporary absence they stayed initially at the Country Club before moving on to Katharine Elsberry’s in prestigious Felder Avenue. Zelda wandered through Katharine’s garden amongst familiar camellias, magnolias and roses before characteristically monopolizing Katharine’s bathroom. Before breakfast Katharine heard Zelda call out: ‘Scott, what did you do with the toothbrush?’ Later Katharine told Zelda’s granddaughter: ‘Didn’t have but one. I thought that was the sweetest, most romantic thing I had ever heard of.’6

  Sharing a toothbrush was strangely untypical of Zelda, who was obsessive about cleanliness. ‘Zelda … looked like she’d always just had a bath,’ said one Montgomery friend.7 Bathrooms for Zelda were often a context to romance. Before she saw Katharine, she had already held court publicly from her own bath and preferred to have Scott nearby when she was bathing.8