Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  The Fitzgeralds’ friends enjoyed the book not least because several saw themselves inside it. Nathan was Maury Noble; screenwriter Ted Paramore, whom Zelda labelled fun to be with,48 did not even get a name change when fictionalized.

  Some believed the novel was an accurate portrait of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. Edmund Wilson felt ‘It’s all about him and Zelda.’49 Others felt it was a cleverly vamped up version.

  In several significant ways it did mirror their life.

  Gloria discovers Anthony is ‘an utter coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination’. Anthony discovers Gloria is ‘a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness … almost completely without physical fear.’50 Gloria, suckled until she was three, nervously chewing gumdrops, is reminiscent of Zelda chewing gum or her lip. Film magnate Joseph Bloeckman’s courtship of Gloria is based on Nathan’s wooing of Zelda; Gloria’s movie test on an offer made to Zelda to star in a film version of Damned; and Gloria has a fling with aviator Tudor Baird, who suffers the habitual aviator fate in Scott’s novels: ‘Afterwards she was glad she had kissed him, for next day when his plane fell 1500 feet … gasoline engine smashed through his heart.’51

  There are some distortions. While Scott’s ambitions were closely defined, Anthony wastes his days over ill-defined goals. Whereas Zelda’s thoughtfulness was constantly remarked on in Montgomery52, Gloria is utterly thoughtless. But one scene showing Anthony as a dilettante and Gloria as an obstruction has a wicked authenticity: ‘“Work!” she scoffed. “Oh, you sad bird! You bluffer! Work – that means a great arranging of the desk and the lights, a great sharpening of pencils, and ‘Gloria, don’t sing!’ … and ‘Let me read you my opening sentence’ … Two weeks later the whole performance over again.”’ It is razor-sharp in its depiction of Scott’s expectation that ‘Gloria would play golf “or something” while Anthony wrote.’53

  Over time, Scott vacillated about how close a marital portrait the book was. In 1920 he had written: ‘I married her [the flesh and blood Rosalind-Zelda] eventually and am now writing a … more “honest” book about her.’54

  Years later he wrote to Zelda: ‘I wish The Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves – I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.’55

  Later still, Fitzgerald told Scottie that Gloria had a more frivolous and certainly more vulgar nature than Zelda. Though Scott admitted he had drawn on events in their married life he denied any real resemblance between Gloria and Zelda except in facial beauty and style of speech. He told Scottie the focus was quite different. For instance, he said reassuringly, he and Zelda enjoyed their life together much more than Gloria and Anthony had.

  The ‘truth’ lurks in the interstices. The Gilbert-Patches were not the Fitzgeralds, rather they were Scott’s internal fears of what they could become.

  Several critics saw the relationship between Gloria and Zelda as merely superficial. John Peale Bishop felt Scott had created ‘a Fitzgerald flapper of the now most famous type – hair honey-colored and bobbed, mouth rose-colored and profane … he has as yet failed to show that hard intelligence, that intricate emotional equipment upon which her charm depends, so that Gloria … remains a little inexplicable, a pretty, vulgar shadow of her prototype.’56

  Zelda pasted Bishop’s review in her scrapbook.

  Lawton Campbell told Sara Mayfield: ‘The Beautiful and Damned was pure Zelda.’57

  Scott had sent a manuscript copy to Wilson, who said it represented an advance over his earlier writings but, curiously, ignored the crucial influence he knew Zelda had on Scott’s work. He suggested that the three significant influences on Scott’s writing and character were firstly that he was Irish (romantic but cynical about romance); secondly that he came from the Midwest, so overvalued the East’s sophistication; thirdly that he drank heavily.58 Scott asked him to delete the reference to alcohol and to add in Zelda: ‘The most enormous influence on me … since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.’59 It was a cold remark that captured an unnerving, even bleak, facet of Zelda’s nature, the antithesis to the effervescent artist who had drawn the champagne nymph.

  In the last quarter of The Beautiful and Damned Scott used passages from novels and projects aborted in 1919. One project, ‘The Diary of a Literary Failure’, included the fifty-page ‘Diary of a Popular Girl’ based on Zelda’s journal, which Scott, without consulting Zelda, had not permitted Nathan to publish. Scott’s biographers who state that key passages in his novel were inspired by Zelda’s letters60 overlook the fact that it was not a matter of ‘inspiration’ but a direct borrowing of Zelda’s lines, which were then revised with the minor transposition of a few words. Scott admitted his practice to Perkins: ‘I’m just enclosing you the typing of Zelda’s diary … You’ll recognize much of the dialogue. Please don’t show it to anyone else.’61

  Without acknowledging Zelda as his primary source Scott had sanitized one letter from spring 1919. Zelda had written that she and Scott were ‘soul-mates’ who had been mated since the time when people were ‘bi-sexual’, an idea Zelda had absorbed from her mother’s theosophical doctrines. Scott redesigned it: ‘“We’re twins! … mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and – and in love before they are born.”’62

  In Scott’s novel the ‘Diary’ section rushes through in precisely Zelda’s style. Take these lines:

  April 11th … I’m gradually losing faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries …

  April 21st … Anthony … called and sounded sweet on the phone – so I broke a date for him … I feel I’d break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck …

  April 24th … What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one.63

  Quickwitted Zelda, though somewhat slow to catch on to the implications of this practice of unacknowledged ‘borrowing’, had begun to do so by the time she was asked by Burton Rascoe, the New York Tribune’s book critic, to review her husband’s book.

  In her first published signed article, ‘Friend Husband’s Latest’, she remarked acidly: ‘on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar.’

  In her review Zelda pointed out pleasantly: ‘Mr Fitzgerald … seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.’ Though Zelda’s review was partly a joke she made a serious criticism: ‘The other things I didn’t like … I mean the unimportant things – were the literary references and the attempt to convey a profound air of erudition. It reminds me in its more soggy moments of the essays I used to get up in school at the last minute by looking up strange names in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’64 Matthew J. Bruccoli says Zelda’s ‘criticism is just, for the novel is intellectually pretentious’.65

  Scott, amused and proud of Zelda’s review, ignored any serious undercurrent. Edmund Wilson wrote to Scott: ‘Convey all my recommendations to Zelda, whose review of The Damned I thought fine and whose thing in The Metropolitan I liked less.’66 Wilson was referring to Metropolitan Magazine which together with McCall’s had been sufficiently impressed by Zelda’s review to invite her to contribute articles on the Flapper. She wrote four features: ‘Eulogy on the Flapper’, ‘Does A Moment of Revolt Come Sometime To Every Married Man?’, ‘The Super-Flapper’ and ‘Where Do Flappers Go?’ All four were paid for, three were published.

  It was the slow small start to her professional writing life, though it was hard for both Fitzgeralds to see it like that yet. However, Scott did devote a page of his 1922 Ledger to ‘Zelda’s earnings’, which totalled $815. She was paid $15 by New York Tribune for her review; $50 by Metropolitan Magazine for ‘Eulogy on the Flapper’ (June 1922), $250 by McCall’s
for ‘Does A Moment of Revolt Come Sometime To Every Married Man?’ (March 1924) and $500 for ‘The Super-Flapper’, which remains unlocated, presumably unpublished. The articles appeared under Zelda’s by-line, but alongside ran the explanation that she was Scott Fitzgerald’s wife.

  McCall’s commissioned her to write a 2,500-word article on the Flapper at ten cents a word. In October 1922 they sent her $300 for a feature, ‘Where Do Flappers Go?’, but did not publish it. There are two curious points: firstly, this $300 is not listed in Scott’s careful notes; secondly, McCall’s in October 1925 did publish ‘What Became of the Flappers?’, possibly the same article, with Scott’s piece ‘Our Young Rich Boys’, under the joint title ‘What Became of Our Flappers and Our Sheiks?’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.67

  It is worth examining ‘What Became of the Flappers?’ to see how similar Zelda’s writing style was to her speech: witty, rhythmic, highly descriptive. Each sentence is balanced, with substantial repetition and a jaunty edge. ‘The flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva, from the head of her once-déclassé father, Jazz, upon whom she lavishes affection and reverence, and deepest filial regard … The best flapper is reticent emotionally and courageous morally. You always know what she thinks, but she does all her feeling alone.’68

  In ‘Eulogy’ Zelda held that the Flapper was deceased. Her outer accoutrements had been bequeathed to girls’ schools, shop girls, and small-town belles. Nothing could replace ‘the dear departed … who will live by her accomplishments and not by her Flapping’. Never again would a girl say ‘“I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive.”’ Never again would a girl arrive at the knowledge that ‘“boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most”’ or that ‘“men will marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa”’.

  Zelda lamented the death of the Flapper who bobbed her hair, put on ‘a great deal of audacity and rouge’, ‘flirted because it was fun to flirt’, ‘refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring’.69

  Above the ‘Eulogy’ article is a marvellous sketch of Zelda by Gordon Bryant, who caught both her intense gaze and the flicker of regret in her eyes. The regret was about to intensify.

  Notes

  1 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 191.

  2 St Paul itself, the state capital, known as ‘the last city of the east’, which housed many Fitzgerald residencies, was originally called Pig’s Eye after a shifty French-Canadian fur trader who sold whiskey at a Mississippi river landing in the 1840s.

  3 Scott wrote the story in 1919 before Zelda visited St Paul, FSF, The Ice Palace, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1971, p. 10.

  4 FSF to Marie Hersey Hamm, 28 Oct. 1936, CO187, Box 49, PUL.

  5 Owned by Mackey J. Thompson.

  6 ZSF, ‘The Girl The Prince Liked’, Collected Writings, ed. Bruccoli, pp. 311–12.

  7 Held at Ramaley Hall on Grand Avenue. Scott had joined in 1908.

  8 Xandra Kalman to Lloyd Hackl; Hackl to the author, 1999.

  9 Born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, 13 May 1813, Daniel A. Robertson became an editor and a US Marshal in Ohio. In Minnesota he founded the Horticultural Society, was editor of the Minnesota Democrat and served as a member of the Minnesota legislature 1859–60.

  10 481 Laurel Ave: Scott’s birthplace. 623 Summit Ave: Scott’s grandmother Louisa McQuillan’s home. Scott visited for one month in summer 1899. 294 Laurel Ave: Louisa McQuillan’s next home. Scott and Annabel stayed there in 1908 when the family moved back to St Paul. Their parents stayed at the home of John A. Fulton at 239 Summit Ave. 514 Holly Avenue: Scott and family moved there September 1909. 509 Holly Ave: Scott and family moved to this rowhouse September 1910. 499 Holly Ave: Scott and family moved there in late 1911 and stayed until 1915. Between 1915 and 1922 the Edward Fitzgeralds lived at 593 Summit Ave and 599 Summit Ave.

  11 FSF to Sinclair Lewis, 26 Jan. 1921, Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Turnbull, p. 487; to Burton Rascoe, Dec. 1920, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Bruccoli and Duggan, p. 73.

  12 ZSF to MP, 1921, Scribner’s Author Files, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald 1921–1944, PUL.

  13 This phrase, used by Minnesotans about their key characteristic of kindness, was explained by Lloyd Hackl to the author.

  14 Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 150.

  15 David Knight calls Alabama this in Save Me The Waltz. ZSF, Collected Writings, p. 39.

  16 Once Zelda began painting seriously in 1925 she gave Xandra many of her favourite paintings.

  17 Xandra Kalman to Lloyd C. Hackl, St Paul, as reported by Hackl to the author, St Paul, 1999. Hackl uses this in ‘Fitzgerald in St Paul: An Oral History Portrait’, Minnesota Historical Society.

  18 In the early days of their marriage Zelda affectionately called Scott Goofo or Goofy. In later letters she called him Deo, or D.O. or Do-Do possibly from the Latin word for God.

  19 FSF, The Great Gatsby, Abacus, London, 1992, p. 20.

  20 Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 22.

  21 ZSF to Ludlow Fowler, winter 1921, CO183, Box 5, Folder 4, PUL.

  22 Bruccoli et al., eds., Romantic Egoists, p. 87.

  23 ZSF, Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 57.

  24 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 191.

  25 Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 151.

  26 Bruccoli et al., eds., Romantic Egoists, p. 92.

  27 Until June 1922. The street was named after Aaron Goodrich, Xandra’s great-grandfather. St Paul historical researcher Lloyd C. Hackl calls it Goodrich Street in his ‘Still Home to Me’: F. Scott Fitzgerald and St Paul, Adventure Publications, Cambridge, Minnesota, p. 52.

  28 This is curious because before Scottie’s birth, as they drove past the Catholic Church, Scott had muttered to himself: ‘God damn the Catholic Church: God damn the Church; God damn God.’ Reported by Scott’s friend Arthur Hartwell to Mizener (Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 151) and to Mayfield (Mayfield, Exiles, p. 74).

  29 Barron had always encouraged Scott’s writing and had engaged with him in philosophical discussions.

  30 Her family nickname was Scottie. The Fitzgeralds had initially thought of calling the baby Patricia and on a few occasions Zelda called her Pat but it never stuck.

  31 Author’s conversations with Lloyd Hackl, 1998, 1999.

  32 Hackl, F. Scott Fitzgerald and St Paul, p. 13.

  33 ZSF, ‘The Girl The Prince Liked’, Collected Writings, p. 313.

  34 ZSF to Ludlow Fowler, winter 1921, CO183, Box 5, Folder 4, PUL.

  35 Hergesheimer had become suddenly famous for Cytherea.

  36 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 77–8.

  37 FSF, ‘The Ice Palace’, written Dec. 1919, published Saturday Evening Post, 22 May 1920; Flappers and Philosophers, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, Sep. 1920.

  38 The novel was initially called ‘The Demon Lover’ (1919), then ‘Darling Heart’ (1920), then ‘The Flight of the Rocket’ (Aug. 1920), then at Christmas 1920 ‘The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy’ and finally (Feb. 1921) The Beautiful and Damned. An abridged version in seven instalments was published in Metropolitan Magazine (Sep. 1921 to Mar. 1922). The Smart Set bought an excerpt from Book 2 ch. 2 (Feb. 1922).

  39 MP to FSF, 27 Dec. 1921, Dear Scott/Dear Max, pp. 49–50. Due to Zelda’s suggestions the book ends on a sardonic note as the broken hero whispers to himself: ‘“I showed them … It was a hard fight, but I didn’t give up and I came through!”’ The Beautiful and Damned, p. 364.

  40 FSF to Charles Scribner II, 12 Aug. 1920, Life in Letters, p. 41.

  41 Mary Gordon, Introduction, Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, p. xxiv, is very perceptive on this point.

  42 Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 112.

  43 Alexander McKaig, Diary, 17 Apr. 1921. Years later Zelda revealed in her letters the intellectual detachment Scott had depended upon: ‘Nobody has ever been able to
experience what they have thoroughly understood – or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating that experience.’ ZSF to FSF, Mar. 1932, PUL.

  44 FSF to MP, c. 31 Jan. 1922, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 52.

  45 Carolyn Shafer compares Zelda’s crayon sketch thematically and in terms of its composition to Botticelli’s 1482 The Birth of Venus. Each work celebrates a particular era’s emerging female image. But whereas Botticelli’s Renaissance goddess rises from sea foam, nude but modest, hands held gracefully over breasts and vagina, Zelda’s naked Flapper figure rises from champagne bubbles, bold and brazen.

  46 FSF to Charles Scribner II, 12 Aug. 1920, Life in Letters, p. 41.

  47 H. L. Mencken, ‘Fitzgerald and Others’, The Smart Set, vol. XLVII, Apr. 1922, pp. 140–1.

  48 He had called in at St Paul to see them during her pregnancy.

  49 Wilson to Stanley Dell, 19 Feb. 1921, Letters on Literature and Politics, p. 56.

  50 FSF, Beautiful and Damned, p. 132.

  51 Ibid., p. 300.

  52 Montgomery relatives and friends to the author, 1999.

  53 FSF, Beautiful and Damned, pp. 175, 149.

  54 FSF to Phyllis Duganne Parker, fall 1920, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 71.

  55 FSF to ZSF, ‘Written with Zelda gone to the Clinique’, c. summer 1930, Life in Letters, p. 189. He may not have sent this letter.

  56 John Peale Bishop, ‘Three Brilliant Young Novelists’, Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1948, pp. 229–30.

  57 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 62.

  58 Wilson was preparing an essay about Fitzgerald for The Bookman.

  59 FSF to Wilson, Jan. 1922, Yale University.

  60 Critic André Le Vot suggests ‘there are the passages directly inspired by Zelda’s letters, which are attributed to Gloria [author’s italics]’. Le Vot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 98.