Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Zelda believed that women who bathed constantly were morally pure, a symbolism borrowed by Scott for the novel he was writing about marriage.9 His heroine Gloria Gilbert cries: ‘I loathe women … They never seem clean to me – never – never.’10 When Gloria’s fiancé Anthony Patch asks why she is prepared to marry him, Gloria, modelled on Zelda, replies: ‘Well, because you’re so clean. You’re sort of blowy clean, like I am. There’s two sorts … one’s … clean like polished pans. You and I are clean like streams and winds. I can tell whenever I see a person whether he is clean, and if so, which kind of clean he is.’11 In 1920 Zelda felt most men were more likely than women to be ‘blowy clean’, which might be why she felt able to share Scott’s toothbrush.

  On the Sayres’ return Zelda re-settled into her baby role, noticing Scott’s coolness towards her parents. Scott felt Zelda’s home town no longer appreciated him, while her parents still saw him as unreliable. Feeling ill at ease in Montgomery, after only two weeks they sold the broken-down Marmon and departed by train. Zelda, sad to leave her parents, persuaded them to visit Westport later.

  Scott returned North determined to work seriously on his novel, for which he had already signed a contract with Metropolitan Magazine for serialization. He told Harold Ober he would deliver the manuscript by October.

  In mid-August Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler: ‘Scott’s hot in the midst of a new novel and Westport is unendurably dull but you and I might be able to amuse ourselves – and both of us want to see you dreadfully.’12

  Though Zelda told Ludlow how glad she was to see her parents when they visited that month, they were less happy. Collected from New York by Zelda and Scott, they discovered two drunken friends of Scott’s asleep in the hammock who arose and danced drunkenly at the dinner table. Zelda was forced to borrow $20 from her mother to send them to a roadhouse. To her dismay they returned at 3 a.m. whereupon Scott began drinking gin and tomato juice with them. When Zelda appeared the kitchen was in a shambles; she tried to remove the gin bottle from Scott, he fended her off and her face caught in the swinging door. Her nose bled and her eyes swelled up. At breakfast when her parents saw her the Judge was stony with disapproval.

  Matters worsened when the Sayres, having expected Zelda and Clothilde – who lived nearby in Tarrytown – to visit each other regularly, discovered Zelda had not seen her sister since Clothilde had borrowed Zelda’s new pigskin suitcase to carry away her baby’s wet diapers.13 Zelda, who even as a child had never wanted to share her toys with her siblings, was disproportionately annoyed. But there were also underlying reasons for the sisters’ estrangement: Clothilde was still seething over Scott’s treatment of the Sayres at the wedding, while the Fitzgeralds were angry that she had subsequently reprimanded them for overspending.

  When the Sayres left in late August, a week earlier than planned, to visit their ‘good’ daughter, Zelda realized ‘she hadn’t been absolutely sure of how to go about anything since her marriage had precluded the Judge’s resented direction’.14 But despite the Judge’s disapproval, Zelda told Sara Mayfield she was ‘desolate’ at their departure.15

  Scott renewed serious work on his novel in the Wakeman cottage while Zelda instigated a whirlwind social life in New York. First they saw Bunny Wilson and John Peale Bishop, who both still coveted the poet Edna St Vincent Millay. Edna was a brilliant, beautiful woman around whom clever men flocked but who, unlike Zelda, had learnt to escape from romantic messes by using her intellect. Whilst being courted by Wilson and Bishop, she carefully ensured they printed her poems in Vanity Fair. The two men were not above giving public displays of three-cornered heavy petting with Millay, who complained that her two ‘choir boys of Hell’ managed to maintain their joint affair with her without splitting up their own friendship. Sober observers noted that when petting on a couch Wilson, despite his Puritan rearing, ‘was assigned the lower regions of the poet, while Bishop was entrusted with the top half’.16

  Edna and Zelda shared the quality of elusiveness, forceful personalities and serious natures beneath their wild frivolity. But when they met in 1920 Edna, already focused on her writing, drew male professional admiration, a possible obstacle to friendship with Zelda.

  Though Bishop was attracted to the volcanic Millay, as a Southern aristocrat it was Zelda rather than Edna whom he understood. Bishop’s Southern background ensured he was never entirely at home in New York, but merely masked his insecurities by witty discourse, as did Zelda.17

  In St Paul in 1919 Scott had read his work aloud to Donald Ogden Stewart, who, newly arrived in Manhattan, engaged Zelda with his wit. Scott introduced him to Wilson at Vanity Fair, where Stewart was subsequently offered work.18 Scott’s introduction of one friend to another who might prove useful professionally was characteristically generous.19

  That season in New York Zelda and Scott met most of the established literati: popular novelist Edna Ferber (who later numbered Fitzgerald amongst her ‘Ten Dullest Authors’ in a Vanity Fair article);20 critic Burton Rascoe, who had given This Side of Paradise an excellent review in the Chicago Daily Tribune; James Branch Cabell, author of Jurgens and in 1920 among the most famous of living American novelists, with whom Scott entered into a correspondence. They also met 44-year-old Sherwood Anderson, who like Scott had moved from advertising to acclaimed fiction which exposed the damaging passions that underlay outwardly ordinary Americans.21

  A friend of Anderson’s, Theodore Dreiser, eminent author of Sister Carrie, was giving a quiet publication party for a recent novel.22 Though Dreiser was another of Scott’s heroes, Anderson couldn’t procure him an invitation so the Fitzgeralds gatecrashed the party at St Luke’s Place. Scott, tipsy, waving a bottle of champagne, sang out: ‘Mr Dreiser, my name is Fitzgerald. I have always got a great kick out of your works.’ Dreiser curtly put the bottle and his disorderly guest on ice.23

  Scott and Zelda kept up this constant round of party-going even though Scott told a journalist: ‘Parties are a form of suicide. I love them but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves’.24 They met members of the Round Table, known as the Vicious Circle, the infamous weekday lunch club for irreverent humorists including Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, dramatic critic of The World. The Fitzgeralds frequented their gatherings at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street.25 Sherwood and Kaufman were writing a string of successful musical comedies, and Tallulah Bankhead was one actress associated with the group.

  When Parker got fired from Vanity Fair for a contentious dramatic review her colleagues Benchley and Sherwood had resigned in protest. The vacancy was filled by Edmund Wilson, the solitary son of a moody melancholic lawyer father and deaf mother, who had turned to books for comfort from his oppressive background. Wilson saw the group as shallow and incestuous because they had all read the same children’s books and ‘all came from the suburbs and “provinces’”26, which of course enabled them successfully to promote each other’s literary reputations. Their caustic queen, Dorothy Parker, exemplified their tone of debunking bitchy wit which mocked their own or other people’s provincial upbringings.

  Parker’s first glimpse of the Fitzgeralds was the now legendary one of Zelda riding on the hood of a taxi while Scott hung on to the roof. Parker, seven years older than Zelda, was a talented satirist whose barbed aphorisms delighted New York journalists. A short-story writer, playwright and essayist, her lasting work has been her light verse which cleverly mocked at failure, loneliness and despair, themes currently engaging Fitzgerald’s imagination. Parker said that after glimpsing the zany honeymoon pair she was introduced to them by Robert Sherwood. But Wilson claimed that he was the first to arrange a meeting because Parker, who had already met Scott briefly in 1919,27 ‘was beglamoured by the idea of Scott Fitzgerald’.28 Wilson said he arranged dinner at the Algonquin where they all ‘sat at one of those Algonquin tables, too narrow to have anyone across from you, so that one sat on a bench with one’s back to the wall’, and Pa
rker quipped: ‘This looks like a road company of the Last Supper.’29

  Wilson found Dorothy ‘fairly pretty’ but with a vulgarity which came from using too much perfume,30 less to his taste than Zelda, whom no one ever considered vulgar. Scott however was flattered by Parker, three years his senior. He did not mind her lethal drama reviews in Vanity Fair or her habit of warmly greeting presumed friends then later making acid comments about them. He did, however, record a joke about someone asking whether Parker had injured anyone that day. The answer was: ‘No, but don’t remind her. Maybe she hasn’t done her bad deed for the day.’31

  Though Parker was later kind to Zelda, in general she had no use for dependent women. ‘Her view of Zelda,’ said Parker’s biographer Marion Meade, ‘formed in 1920 … was negative – and I don’t believe she ever changed her mind … She was also put off by Zelda’s foreign [Southern] accent which to a rabid Manhattan chauvinist meant the person must be a hillbilly.’32

  Parker also disliked Zelda’s looks: ‘I never thought she was beautiful … candy box face and a little bow mouth … something petulant about her. If she didn’t like something she sulked.’33

  Parker’s poisonous wit caught only part of Zelda’s personality. Momentarily Zelda would sulk, as she did when she noticed the fulsome attention Parker paid to Scott, but then with a strange shift of direction she would lose interest in what had gripped her and a remote evasiveness would subsume the petulance.

  After the summer Scott wished to write seriously for the theatre, so the Fitzgeralds began to see more of playwrights Lillian Hellman and Charles MacArthur (a former journalist), film and stage actresses Lillian Gish (a year older than Zelda) and Helen Hayes (Zelda’s age), and screenwriter Anita Loos (born 1893), who in 1925 would write Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Gish, more positive than Parker about Zelda, said: ‘They were both so beautiful, so blond, so clean and clear – And drinking strait whiskey out of tall tumblers … Zelda could do outlandish things – say anything. It was never offensive when Zelda did it, as you felt she couldn’t help it, and was not doing it for effect.’34

  Zelda’s particular friend was rough-haired Carl Van Vechten, then in his forties, a hulking, highly successful novelist, critic and photographer. The writer Djuna Barnes told Edmund Wilson she thought Carl was a ‘prissy’ literary name-dropper,35 but Zelda found Carl a ‘divine’ party host. Despite his devoted marriage to Russian actress Fania Marinoff, Carl had several well-established homosexual relationships, which possibly accounted for Zelda’s lasting non-flirtatious friendship with him. ‘Our relations were very impersonal,’ she said years later, ‘but Carl was a fine friend.’36

  Early in their friendship, Van Vechten noticed Scott’s inability to hold alcohol. ‘He could take two or three drinks at most and be completely drunk … he was nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man.’ What he noticed about Zelda was her uniqueness. ‘She was an original … she tore up the pavements with sly remarks … She didn’t actually write them down, Scott did, but she said them.’37

  Van Vechten summed up how friends saw the Fitzgeralds in his novel Parties, where David and Rilda Westlake, modelled on the Fitzgeralds, ‘love each other desperately, passionately. They [cling] to each other like barnacles cling to rocks, but they want to hurt each other all the time.’38 Rilda influences most of David’s behaviour: he acts only to aggravate or to please her. One complaint of Rilda’s to David shows genuine insight into the Fitzgeralds’ bond: ‘Our damned faithfulness … our clean “fidelity”, doesn’t get us very far. We follow each other around in circles, loving and hating and wounding. We’re both so sadistic.’39 Van Vechten has even replicated Zelda’s use of ‘clean’ to imply sexual purity.

  Certainly Scott and Zelda were intensely jealous of each other. Zelda felt excluded by the literary attention he received; Scott felt excluded by the male admiration she received. Before their marriage Scott had confided to Wilson that ‘I wouldn’t care if she [Zelda] died, but I couldn’t stand to have anybody else marry her.’40

  The rising tensions between the Fitzgeralds often exploded into heated disputes which either began in Westport, continued on the New Haven train and were sustained at friends’ Manhattan apartments, or began in New York and were maintained on the train journey home.

  Alex McKaig, who that August had returned to reporting the Fitzgeralds’ activities in his diary, recorded one row he witnessed on 15 September 1920: ‘In the evening Zelda – drunk – having decided to leave Fitzgerald & having nearly been killed walking down RR track, blew in. Fitz came shortly after.’41 Sara Mayfield takes up the story. ‘Fitzgerald had boarded the train without money or a ticket. The conductor threatened to throw him off but finally let him stay when Scott promised to pay him upon his arrival in Westport. After Scott tore into Zelda for walking the tracks, she refused to give him the money for his ticket, and they joined in a verbal battle that was to continue intermittently for two decades.’42 McKaig’s judgement was: ‘Fitz should let Zelda go and not run after her … he is afraid of what she may do in a moment of caprice.’43

  After this incident Zelda wrote Scott a letter which Mayfield considered a typical ‘passionate reconciliation’:

  I look down the tracks and see you coming – and out of every haze & mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me – Without you, dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think – or live – I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night. It’s like begging for mercy of a storm or killing Beauty or growing old, without you. I want to kiss you so – and in the back where your dear hair starts and your chest – I love you – and I cant tell you how much – To think that I’ll die without your knowing – Goofo, you’ve got to try [to] feel how much I do – how inanimate I am when you’re gone – I can’t even hate these damnable people – Nobodys got any right to live but us – and they’re dirtying up our world and I can’t hate them because I want you so – Come Quick – Come Quick to me – I could never do without you if you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper – if you ran away with another woman and starved me and beat me – I still would want you I know – Lover, Lover, Darling – Your Wife.44

  Though the letter idealizes the incident it also reveals Zelda’s dependency, an emotion that would have surprised their friends.

  If readers of Fitzgerald’s novels who have never read Zelda’s letters find this particular note familiar, it is because Scott reproduced it almost word for word in The Beautiful and Damned. Zelda herself had no idea that Scott had used both the episode and her exact words until she saw the published version of The Beautiful and Damned in 1922.45 She bit back her shock and, unable at the time to voice her resentment over this appropriation, later did express her increasing discontent with her status as Scott’s assistant-wife. In Caesar’s Things she immortalizes Scott as the painter Jacob: ‘Jacob went on doing whatever it was that Jacob did … He was more important than Janno; she always felt as if she should be helpful about his tinkerings; they were intricate enough to need an assistant. She didn’t really do anything but wait on his will. While Jacob painted she went to the hair-dresser and bought things … She stated and tabulated and compared the shoes of 42nd Street with the shoes of Upper Broadway.’46 In 1920 Zelda felt shoe-shopping was insufficient for a young woman with brains, but still she hid her frustration while flirting wildly to arouse Scott’s jealousy.

  She succeeded with George Jean Nathan, one witty constant visitor. Nathan, thirty-eight, short, dark and melancholic, was Scott’s model for the brilliantly original Maury Noble in The Beautiful and Damned whom Scott compares to ‘a large slender and imposing cat’. Nathan, according to biographer James Mellow, was also a self-acknowledged chauvinist who preferred under-educated women. He tested a woman’s capabilities by asking her directions to Grand Central Station. ‘If her answer was 50 percent correct she was intelligent enough for normal use.’47

  Zelda, confident of her own intelligence,
flattered by Nathan’s obvious interest, ignored this displeasing characteristic. Nathan soon addressed letters just to Zelda, beginning notes ‘Fair Zelda’ or ‘Dear Blonde’, signing them ‘Yours, for the Empire, A Prisoner of Zelda’.48

  Acknowledging the seriousness of Zelda’s addiction to chewing gum, Nathan wrote: ‘I am very sorry to hear that your husband is neglectful of his duties to you in the way of chewing gum. That is the way husbands get after five months of marriage.’49

  At one of Nathan’s excellent parties Zelda came to grief – typically when taking a bath. ‘At present, I’m hardly able to sit down owing to an injury sustained in the course of one of Nathan’s parties in N.Y.’, she reported to Ludlow Fowler. ‘I cut my tail on a broken bottle and can’t possibly sit on the three stitches that are in it now – The bottle was bath salts – I was boiled – The place was a tub somewhere.’50

  Scrutinizing Nathan’s bathroom, Zelda found other women’s golden hair in Nathan’s combs, then discovered to her chagrin that he spent time with at least two other ‘dear blondes’. One was Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos, the other Ruth Findlay, star of The Prince and the Pauper, a Mark Twain doppel-gänger tale of rags and royalty in sixteenth-century England.51

  Unabashed, Nathan continued their correspondence: ‘Dear Misguided Woman: Like so many uncommonly beautiful creatures, you reveal a streak of obtuseness. The calling of a husband’s attention to a love letter addressed to his wife is but part of a highly sagacious technique … It completely disarms suspicion … Why didn’t you call me up on Friday? Is it possible that your love is growing cold? Through the ages, George.’52 By October Scott’s jealousy of Nathan temporarily cooled his friendship with him.53

  Despite annoying Scott, Nathan enabled them to meet Scott’s ‘current idol’,54 the critic H. L. Mencken, who, disliking New York and its literati, only visited the Smart Set offices for a few days once a month from his home in Baltimore. He would book in at the Algonquin, then nip over to Nathan’s suite at the Royalton or share a hearty German lunch and beer at Luchow’s nearby. At the end of July Nathan laid in three cases of gin then invited Scott and Zelda to a New York party at his Royalton apartment to meet Mencken. The critic was enchanted by Zelda, whom he called ‘the fair Madonna’,55 but encountering the Fitzgeralds at their most extreme presented him with a challenge. All Mencken’s friends, according to his biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, led ‘sane, systematic lives, their own personal code of conduct, like Mencken’s, being based on the avoidance of extremes’.56 Mencken recalls that in 1920, when he and Nathan gave cocktail parties, Zelda and Scott would drive over then, despite being drunk, to Mencken’s horror would insist on driving home.57