by Sally Cline
Wilson, who had broken up with Edna Millay, decided to visit her in Paris that July and discovered that she had been his one romantic passion. ‘She was tired of breaking hearts and spreading havoc … she can no longer intoxicate me with her beauty or throw bombs into my soul … but … some glamour of high passion had gone out of life when my love for her died.’99
The Fitzgeralds glossed Venice from 26 May, Florence by 3 June and Rome by the 22nd, where ‘Zelda and I had an appalling squabble’.100 Zelda laconically took photos in each place with such labels as ‘Me and Goofo in a Gondola’ and ‘Goofo at Fiesole’, but their facial expressions show little enthusiasm for their surroundings. Italy brought some fierce words from Scott: ‘God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest.’101
Their last European stop was a return to London on 30 June, where they drifted from a gloomy room at Claridge’s to the Cavendish. Scott wanted to see if This Side of Paradise, published by Collins on 26 May in Britain, had been well received. He was disappointed to find most English critics dismissed it as trivial.
From London they went to Windsor, then on 4 July to Cambridge, where they sought out Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester haunts and took snapshots of each other. Scott took one of Zelda in sedate hat and long plaid skirt outside Trinity College. Zelda shot Scott in three-piece suit strolling down a leafy Grantchester path and labelled it with a Brooke quote: ‘The men observe the rules of thought’. Under her own Grantchester photograph she scribbled: ‘And is there honey yet for tea?’102
Mencken describes how Scott had confided to him and Nathan that their
coming child deserved to be born in some historic … romantic place. Paris seemed a likely choice, but when they got there they found it dull and shabby… Algiers and Tunis turned out to be even worse … Spain and Italy also disappointing, they began a frantic chase over Europe, looking for an ideal place for the nativity. In the end Zelda approached her time without any such ideal place being found, and in a sudden panic they sailed for home.103
Mencken depicted the Fitzgeralds’ feelings of ennui correctly as they scampered through Europe establishing one temporary base after another, Zelda’s restlessness increasing. As they migrated from America to Europe, and within the States from Northeast to South, then from Midwest to West, in search of Utopia, their marriage resembled nothing so much as a twenty-year odyssey. Zelda and Scott’s rootless wandering existence was a significant contribution – both a symptom and a cause – to Zelda’s later instability.104
For Scott this relentless travelling felt familiar, for his childhood pattern had never included security. His constant moves with parents searching for improved residences led him to expect in adulthood psychological and practical improvement with every move. But for Zelda their transitory life, albeit exciting, made her feel displaced. She came from an area where place is important, but so is standing still. As Eudora Welty and William Faulkner emphasized, Southerners move around less than Northerners, often remaining rooted to land, family and community. Faulkner said he would never live long enough to exhaust the stories that sprang from his ‘little postage stamp of native soil’. Zelda and Scott, who rarely stayed long enough in one place to till its soil, achieved their stories by obsessively mining their own lives and each other’s for material and created their fiction almost entirely from personal experience.
They travelled back to the USA in July on the Celtic, going first to Montgomery, where they felt a new confidence as proud parents-to-be. Scott, proud of Zelda’s new form, showed it off to Katharine Elsberry, who later told Zelda’s granddaughter the story. Zelda posed in a new handmade French slip from Paris. ‘Scott said: “Katharine, look at that.” … [I] looked and there was the bulge: Scottie was on the way.’105
Scottie herself recalled: ‘I was supposed to be born in Montgomery, Alabama, but there was a terrible heat wave in September of 1921 … and my father – I’m sure it was my father because he seems to have made all the decisions at all times – decided to wait for the event in St Paul, Minnesota, instead.’106
Zelda told Sara Mayfield’s mother: ‘Scott’s changed. He used to love to go to the cemetery to see the Confederate graves and say he loved the South, but now he wants to get as far away from it as he can.’107
Scott demurred, but after less than a month in Montgomery he and Zelda moved to Minnesota. Like New York it was, as Zelda had feared, a world away, psychologically as well as geographically, from Alabama.
Notes
1 They were so financially unprepared for motor bills that Scott had to send Bunny Wilson an emergency letter asking him to wire money ahead of them.
2 ZSF to Ludlow Fowler, 16 Aug. 1920, CO183, Box 5, Folder 4, PUL.
3 In Greensboro they stayed at the O. Henry Hotel.
4 FSF, ‘The Cruise of the Rolling Junk’, Motor, Feb. 1924.
5 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 61.
6 Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 410.
7 Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 411. The Montgomery friend was Julia Garland, who was with Zelda the day Scott died.
8 In Zelda’s story ‘Southern Girl’ Harriet, like her creator, sees bathing as an invitation to love. Wrapped only in a bath towel, she answers the front door to an unknown man who becomes her lover. When he eventually throws her over, again wrapped in a bath towel she throws open her front door, this time more effectively to a stranger who becomes her husband.
9 This would become The Beautiful and Damned.
10 FSF, The Beautiful and Damned, Penguin, 1966, p. 155.
11 Ibid., p. 111.
12 ZSF to Ludlow Fowler, postmarked 16 Aug. 1920, CO183, Box 5, Folder 4, PUL.
13 Sara Mayfield says that the incident is portrayed in Save Me The Waltz exactly in the way Zelda described it to her (Exiles, p. 57).
14 ZSF, Waltz, p. 51.
15 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 59.
16 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 100.
17 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 20.
18 ‘I had lost my job in a Dayton, Ohio bank’, Stewart told Zelda’s friend Sara Mayfield, ‘and that is how I became a writer instead of a banker.’ Mayfield, Exiles, p. 65.
19 During the next few years when Scott met Ring Lardner, journalist and humorous writer, and Ernest Hemingway, he would go to even greater lengths than he had with Stewart to promote their talents.
20 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 450.
21 Anderson’s stories and character sketches became Winesburg, Ohio (1919), preceded by Windy MacPherson’s Son (1916), Marching Men (1917) and two others. His best writing occurs in several volumes of short stories, including Horses and Men (1923).
22 At the height of his career Dreiser wrote An American Tragedy (1925), for which he was ultimately paid $90,000 for the film rights.
23 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 183 and original sources in endnotes.
24 James Drawbell, An Autobiography, Pantheon Books, New York 1964, p. 173.
25 Members sometimes also met for Saturday evening poker games. This group was known as Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club.
26 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 45.
27 Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, Minerva, London, 1991, p. 90.
28 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 45.
29 Ibid.
30 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 33.
31 FSF, Notebooks No. 314.
32 Marion Meade in correspondence with the author, Oct. 2000.
33 Dorothy Parker to Milford, 26 Aug. 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 68.
34 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 59–60.
35 Wilson, The Twenties, pp. 79–80.
36 ZSF, Autobiographical Sketch written 16 Mar. 1932 while in Phipps Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital.
37 Carl Van Vechten to Milford, 17 Apr. 1963, Milford, Zelda, pp. 98–9.
38 Carl Van Vechten, Parties, 1930, p. 224. Arthur Mizener is useful on Zelda’s distress when Scott was lionized (Far Side of Paradise, p. 133).
39 Van Vechten, Parties, p
. 78. Jeffrey Meyers makes an interesting comment (Scott Fitzgerald, p. 102).
40 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 52.
41 McKaig, Diary, 15 Sep. 1920.
42 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 62–3.
43 McKaig, Diary, 15 Sep. 1920.
44 ZSF to FSF, undated c. 1920, CO187, Box 42, Folder 32, PUL.
45 Gloria, miserable and lonesome, writes to Anthony Patch: ‘I can almost look down the tracks and see you going but without you, dearest, dearest, I can’t see or hear or feel or think. Being apart – whatever has happened or will happen to us – is like begging for mercy from a storm, Anthony; it’s like growing old. I want to kiss you so – in the back of your neck where your old black hair starts. Because I love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have said, you’ve got to feel how much I do, how inanimate I am when you’re gone. I can’t even hate the damnable presence of PEOPLE, those people in the station who haven’t any right to live – I can’t resent them even though they’re dirtying up our world because I’m engrossed in wanting you so. If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me – how absurd this sounds – I’d still want you, I’d still love you, I KNOW my darling.’ FSF, Beautiful and Damned, p. 293.
46 ZSF, Caesar, ch. V, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 6, PUL.
47 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 113.
48 George Jean Nathan to ZSF: ‘Fair Zelda’, 12 July 1920; ‘Prisoner’, undated, 1920, CO183, Box 5, Folder 18, PUL. Both Arthur Mizener and Kendall Taylor suggest Zelda’s relationship with Nathan was sexual. This author finds insufficient evidence for this.
49 Nathan to ZSF, c. Sep. 1920, CO183, Box 5, Folder 18, PUL.
50 ZSF to Ludlow Fowler, 16 Aug. 1920, CO183, Box 5, Folder 4, PUL.
51 This film was so popular that six silent versions preceded the successful talkie.
52 Nathan to ZSF, 13 Sep. 1920, CO183, Box 5, Folder 18, PUL.
53 ‘Beginnings of coldness’ he records in his Ledger, Oct. 1920.
54 FSF to Mr and Mrs Philip McQuillan, 28 Dec. 1920.
55 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 64.
56 Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1987, p. 4.
57 One evening the Fitzgeralds drove to have dinner with Mencken and Nathan at the Plaza, but by the end of the evening were far too drunk to drive their car. Their anxious friends suggested they sleep at the hotel but Scott refused. Mencken thought they would never reach home alive. To his surprise Scott telephoned next day to report they were recovered and whole.
58 This quotation is from the ‘Sententiae’ section of A Mencken Chrestomathy, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1949, pp. 619–21, quoted in Rodgers, Mencken and Sara, p. 1.
59 Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs. A Critical Edition, ed. Ray Lewis White, University of North Carolina Press, 1969, p. 369.
60 The stories in Flappers and Philosophers had all been previously published in magazines so it seemed like extra money. They were: ‘The Offshore Pirate’; ‘The Ice Palace’; ‘Head and Shoulders’; ‘The Cut Glass Bowl’; ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’; ‘Benediction’; ‘Dalyrimple Goes Wrong’; ‘The Four Fists’.
61 Reviews were a mixed bunch, some critics finding it a letdown after This Side of Paradise.
62 Six printings (total 15,325 copies) by November 1922.
63 Mencken’s review called it ‘a sandwich made up of two thick and tasteless chunks of Kriegsbrot with a couple of excellent sardines between’. The Smart Set XLIII, Dec. 1920.
64 H. L. Mencken to James Branch Cabell, Mar. 1922, Between Friends: Letters of James Branch Cabell and Others, ed. Padraic Colum and Margaret Freeman Cabell, Harcourt Brace & World, New York, 1962, p. 25.
65 Metropolitan Magazine took ‘The Jelly Bean’, ‘His Russet Witch’, Two For a Cent’ and ‘Winter Dreams’ between 1920 and 1922.
66 To repay an advance for an unwritten story.
67 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 65.
68 They would not be due to him till January 1921.
69 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 65.
70 André Le Vot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Warner Books, New York, 1984, p. 90.
71 Fitzgerald, Ledger, July and Nov. 1920.
72 ZSF to James Branch Cabell, Dec. 1920, CO183, Box 5, Folder 2, PUL.
73 McKaig, Diary, 17 and 12 Oct. 1920.
74 FSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, 15 June 1940, Letters, ed. Turnbull, p. 97.
75 FSF to Ober (received 2 Feb. 1928), As Ever, Scott Fitz-: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Agent Harold Ober, 1919–1940, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Woburn Press, London, 1973, p. 109. ‘The Jelly Bean’, written May 1920, Metropolitan Magazine 52, Oct. 1920.
76 ‘The Lees of Happiness’, written July 1920, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 12 Dec. 1920, Blue Ribbon Fiction Section.
77 FSF, Beautiful and Damned, p. 343.
78 In his Ledger Scott summarized the year that brought him both Zelda and literary recognition as: ‘Revelry and Marriage. The rewards of the year before. The happiest year since I was 18.’
79 It contains what he himself called ‘a touch of disaster’. FSF, ‘Early Success’, The Crack-Up, New Directions, New York, 1945, p. 87.
80 Lawton Campbell, ‘The Fitzgeralds Were My Friends’, unpublished Memoir.
81 McKaig, Diary, 12 Oct. 1920.
82 Zelda in Caesar’s Things established Jacob as a ‘pouting’ Scott figure who says mildly: ‘I want to be totally unpredictable but I never can prevent wondering … what should be done about the suit at the cleaners.’
83 ZSF, Caesar, ch. IV, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 5, PUL.
84 FSF to Perkins, 10 Nov. 1920, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 32.
85 Le Vot makes this point strongly. He says McKaig fell ‘hopelessly’ in love. F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 91.
86 McKaig, Diary, 27 Nov., 4 Dec. 1920.
87 Ibid., 4 Dec. 1920.
88 Zelda recalls the bathroom incident and hurt eye during a winter of dissipation, probably Nov./Dec. 1920, in a letter to Scott, late summer/early fall 1930. Scott writes up the incident in his Ledger, Jan. 1921.
89 McKaig, Diary, 11 Dec. 1920.
90 Ibid., 18 Dec. 1920.
91 ZSF, Caesar, ch. V, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 6, PUL.
92 Lawton Campbell, Memoir.
93 ZSF, Waltz, pp. 47–8.
94 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 190.
95 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 67.
96 At Grove Lodge.
97 Mellow, Invented Lives, pp. 136, 137. The other two writers were Conrad and Anatole France.
98 FSF to Shane Leslie, 24 May 1921, CO188, Box 4, Folders 33–4, PUL.
99 Wilson, The Twenties, p. 94.
100 FSF to J. F. Carter, spring 1922, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, Random House, New York, 1980, p. 99.
101 FSF to Edmund Wilson, quoted in Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 138.
102 Bruccoli et al., eds., Romantic Egoists, pp. 84–5.
103 H. L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993, p. 258.
104 I am indebted to Koula Svokos Hartnett for the notion of an odyssey. Even in Zelda’s decade of hospitalization she would be moved nine times, never to have the benefit of continuity and familiarity of one particular setting such as she had experienced in Montgomery. Hartnett, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 78.
105 Katharine Elsberry Haxton tells Scottie the story in Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 410.
106 Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 21.
107 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 71.
CHAPTER 7
Zelda, seven months pregnant and steadily gaining weight, arrived with Scott at St Paul, Minnesota, in August 1921. ‘There were the Indian forests and the moon on the sleeping porch and I was heavy and afraid of the storms.’1 She felt acutely miserable in the cold North that seemed perpetually wet. Everywhere she looked she saw water, for Minnesota lives up to its Sioux name ‘land of
sky-tinted water’. Now-extinct glaciers had gouged out more than 15,000 lakes, so that with the major rivers running along the eastern and western borders 95 per cent of its population live within ten minutes of a body of water. Abundant waterways and dense forests made it an ideal breeding ground for beavers and muskrats, ensuring that fur-trading, fishing and lumbering flourished from the sixteenth century.
When Zelda arrived with Scott, St Paul had grown from a frontier outpost to great prominence.2 From 1870 the railroads that augmented river craft had used St Paul as a railhead, so Zelda saw a significant example of the continuing transformation of America from a rural to an urban culture, from a society based on breeding and inherited wealth to one built up by salaried executives with images fostered through the new advertising industry, in which several of the Fitzgeralds’ circle worked. Though St Paul is a beautiful city, Zelda saw it permeated by Ibsenesque melancholy and perpetual chill. Its lack of ancestral roots felt alien. St Paul was only a three-generation town – though proud of the fact, like the town in Scott’s ‘The Ice Palace’ where ‘everybody has a father, and about half of us have grandfathers. Back of that we don’t go … Our grandfathers … founded the place, and … had to take some pretty queer jobs while they were doing the founding.’3 When Scott’s Irish emigrant grandfather, Philip Francis McQuillan, settled in St Paul in 1857, the Minnesota Territory was only in its eighth year. As it expanded, with a speculative boom that attracted 500 immigrants a day, McQuillan prospered by trading his first ‘queer job’ of bookkeeping for, in Zelda’s view, the more peculiar one of wholesale grocery. Scott, the grocer’s grandson, always retained a homey feeling about St Paul. Later he wrote to his former sweetheart Marie Hersey that ‘in spite of a fifteen year absence, it is still home to me’.4 Zelda, the grocer’s granddaughter-in-law, never saw St Paul as home, not least because Scott had a shared history with Marie Hersey from which she was excluded. Marie and Scott, dancing partners at Professor Baker’s dancing class, had acted together in the Elizabethan Dramatic Club and in 1915 Marie had accompanied Scott to a Triangle Club dance.
