Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise
Page 26
It is quite possible that Scott was less affected by the Jozan incident than has been supposed. In his article ‘How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year’ written for the Saturday Evening Post during the crisis,74 he writes amusingly about his family relaxing on the Riviera and concludes with a description of the visit of René and Bobbé to the villa. Scott dwells affectionately on their romantic white uniforms growing dimmer ‘as the more the liquid dark comes down, until they … will seem to take an essential and indivisible part in the beauty of this proud gay land’. Although Scott doesn’t mention Jozan, it is certainly not the description of an emotionally wrecked betrayed husband. Or if it is, then Scott’s supremely professional style could be read as unnervingly cool.75
Few of Scott’s biographers however seem willing to accept that the ‘big affair’ was nothing more than a summer flirtation. One, adamantly opposed to any such idea, assumes Zelda guilty of ‘infidelity’ with its ‘agonizing aftermath’. He states that ‘Jozan, using his French charm … invited Zelda to his apartment and seduced her.’ He goes further and fantasizes that Jozan ‘found Zelda a delightful lover’.76 Bold and dramatic words but founded on sand. There is no concrete evidence that Zelda slept with Jozan. What we do know is that for the morbidly jealous Scott, who still had mixed-up Irish Catholic monogamous feelings for Zelda, the fact that she was entertaining a desire to commit adultery would be almost as much a sin as actually committing adultery. This is borne out in Zelda’s Caesar’s Things where Janno quotes from the Bible: ‘“He who looketh on a woman to lust after hath committed adultery with her in his heart already” – in his heart already – in his heart already –.’ Janno says: ‘Adultery was adultery and it would have been impossible for her to love two men at once, to give herself to simultaneous intimacies.’77
More significant is the fact that for the first time in their marriage Zelda seriously took away her attention from Scott. That he more often than not was focused on his writing and sometimes on other women was not the point. He expected her to focus on him and his work. To remove her attention could be more important than to remove her body. It was enough of a blow to an egotistic writer to make him write: ‘That September 1924, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.’78
In a later letter Zelda wrote to Scott: ‘Then there was Josen and you were justifiably angry.’79 She too misspelled her supposed lover’s name. The fact that neither Scott nor Zelda ever managed to spell the name of the alleged adulterer was probably due to their poor literacy skills, but it would be a neat touch if it was also a psychological indication of their marital faithfulness.
The crisis behind them, they placidly renewed work on Scott’s novel, telling Max: ‘Zelda + I are contemplating a careful revision after a week’s complete rest.’80 On 25 October Scott told Ober that he was posting The Great Gatsby for serialization. Two days later he sent a copy to Max, writing: ‘I think that at last I’ve done something really my own.’ He wanted to call the novel Trimalchio in West Egg or Gold-hatted Gatsby or The High-bouncing Lover but Zelda plumped for The Great Gatsby and Scott took her advice.
Zelda, who had been reading Henry James’s Roderick Hudson, decided they should winter in Rome followed by a trip to Capri. During 1924 she recognized that acting as Scott’s editorial assistant was insufficient to satisfy her. Her Southern upbringing had led her initially towards the lure of an alternative lover; however, when this failed, the models of hardworking artists with whom they now associated finally struck a chord. By 1925 she would be published again, though not in her own name, and she would take her first painting lessons and her first ballet lessons.81
Notes
1 Gertrude Stein in Calvin Tomkins, Living Well Is the Best Revenge: Two Americans in Paris 1921–1933, André Deutsch, 1972, p. 25. Also quoted in Amanda Vaill, Everybody was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy. A Lost Generation Love Story, Little, Brown, 1998, p. 134.
2 ZSF to Perkins, May 1924, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald, 1921–1944, PUL.
3 Lawton Campbell to Milford, 19 Sep. 1965, quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 104.
4 FSF to Wilson, postmarked 7 Oct. 1924, Yale University.
5 Scott also owed Scribner’s $700 because they had purchased a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for their trip. In 1923 Scott reported in his article ‘How To Live On $36000 a Year’ that they spent $296 dollars a month on servants. That year at Great Neck he earned $28,759.78.
6 ZSF to MP, May 1924, Scribner’s Author Files, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald, 1921–1944, PUL.
7 ZSF, ‘Nanny, A British Nurse’, unpublished, CO183, Box 3, Folder 15, PUL.
8 ZSF, Caesar, ch. V, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 6, PUL.
9 The Murphys together with the Fitzgeralds themselves became models for Scott’s protagonists in Tender Is The Night.
10 ZSF, Caesar, ch. VI, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 7, PUL.
11 Quoted in Tomkins, Living Well, p. 10.
12 It was worth $2 million when Gerald inherited it in 1931.
13 Tomkins, Living Well, p. 11.
14 Sara Murphy to Calvin Tomkins, ‘Living Well Is The Best Revenge’, New Yorker, 28 July 1962, p. 50.
15 The MacLeishes summed up the Murphys’ success: ‘English, French, American, everybody – met them and came away saying that these people really are masters in the art of living.’ Tomkins, Living Well, pp. 6, 7.
16 Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) used the phrase ‘you are all a lost generation’ in talking about some of the young who served in the First World War. She borrowed the phrase in translation from a French garage mechanic whom she heard address it disparagingly to an incompetent apprentice. Ernest Hemingway subsequently took it as his epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926).
17 Archibald MacLeish, Riders On The Earth, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1978, p. 79.
18 It would become The Seven Lively Arts.
19 Donald Ogden Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck! An Autobiography, Paddington Press/ Two Continents, New York, 1975, p. 117.
20 Dos Passos confessed himself ‘eternally grateful’. Dos Passos, Best Times, p. 140.
21 Ibid., p. 146.
22 Hemingway was then correspondent for the Toronto Star.
23 Tomkins, Living Well, p. 6.
24 Dos Passos, Best Times, pp. 145, 146.
25 Ibid., p. 146.
26 Tomkins, Living Well, p. 6.
27 ZSF, Caesar, ch. VI, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 7, PUL.
28 Gerald Murphy to FSF and ZSF, 19 Sep. 1925, CO187, Box 51, Folder 13, PUL.
29 Gerald Murphy also said: ‘Her beauty was not legitimate at all.’ Murphy to Milford, interview, 26 Apr. 1963, Milford, Zelda, p. 124.
30 Sara Murphy to Milford, interview, 2 Mar. 1964, ibid.
31 Gerald Murphy to Milford, 2 Mar. 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 107.
32 Sara Murphy to FSF, 20 Aug. 1934 or 1935, CO187, Box 51, Folder 15, PUL.
33 ZSF to Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan, c. 1944, CO183, Box 4, PUL.
34 Zelda’s first painting lessons took place in Capri in early 1925.
35 FSF, Tender, p. 11.
36 In Tender Is The Night. The architects were Hale Walker and Harold Heller.
37 ZSF to MP, May 1924, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald, 1921–1944, PUL.
38 ZSF, Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number –’, Collected Writings, p. 421.
39 ZSF, Waltz, Collected Writings, pp. 71–2.
40 Fanny Myers Brennan to the author, New York, 1998. She gave the author a copy of the inscription. The Stopes book was published in 1928.
41 Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan to her daughter Eleanor Lanahan; Lanahan to the author, Vermont, 1998.
42 ZSF, Waltz, p. 82; FSF, Ledger, June 1924.
43 FSF, Ledger, June 1924.
44 ZSF, Waltz, pp. 81–2.
45 ZSF, Caesar, ch. VII, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 8, PUL.
46 Edouard Jozan to Milford, interview 11 Jan. 1967, Milford, Zelda, p. 108.
47 ZSF, Waltz, pp. 80, 81, 82.
48 Mayfield said that almost half a century after Zelda’s flirtation with him Jozan was still ‘unusually charming and handsome’. Mayfield, Exiles, p. 96.
49 Ibid.
50 Jozan to Milford, 11 Jan. 1967, Milford, Zelda, p. 109.
51 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 96–7.
52 Jozan to Milford, 11 Jan. 1967, Milford, Zelda, p. 109.
53 Scott constantly misspells the name as Josanne. FSF, Ledger, June 1924.
54 Gerald and Sara Murphy to Milford, 2 Mar. 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 110.
55 Jozan’s view, many years later, was ‘one day the Fitzgeralds left and their friends scattered, each to his own destiny’. Jozan to Milford, 11 Jan. 1967, Milford, Zelda, p. 109.
56 ZSF, Waltz, pp. 86, 89.
57 Ibid., p. 94.
58 ZSF, Caesar, ch. VII, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 8, PUL.
59 FSF, Ledger, July 1924.
60 Gerald Murphy, quoted in Tomkins, Living Well, p. 102.
61 Tomkins, Living Well, p. 42.
62 Jozan to Milford, 11 Jan. 1967, Milford, Zelda, p. 112.
63 ZSF, Caesar, ch. VII, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 8, PUL.
64 Sheilah Graham, The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1976, p. 61.
65 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 96–7.
66 Jozan to Milford, 11 Jan. 1967, Milford, Zelda, p. 112.
67 Hadley Hemingway (Mrs Paul Scott Mowrer) to Nancy Milford, 25 July 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 114.
68 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 96–7.
69 Janno also says: ‘Love is a funny thing: it says so in the advertisements, in the popular songs, on the radio and in the moving-pictures. Though it seldom says what to do about it. It always shows the havocs wrought.’ ZSF, Caesar, ch. VII, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 8, PUL.
70 Calvin Tomkins to Milford, 4 Jan. 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 111.
71 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 97.
72 Vaill follows a suggestion by Calvin Tomkins. Vaill, So Young, p. 147.
73 Honoria Murphy Donnelly to the author, New York, 1998.
74 The article appeared 20 Sep. 1924.
75 I am indebted to the perceptive James R. Mellow for this insight.
76 Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 116, 117.
77 ZSF, Caesar, ch. VII, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 8, PUL.
78 FSF, Notebooks no. 839.
79 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 191.
80 FSF to MP, 27 Aug. 1924, Life in Letters, p. 79.
81 An apt piece of awareness occurs in Save Me The Waltz (p. 79): ‘David worked on his frescoes; Alabama was much alone. “What’ll we do, David”, she asked, “with ourselves?” David said she couldn’t always be a child and have things provided for her to do.’
CHAPTER 10
Italy, during winter 1924 and spring 1925, proved damaging for Zelda’s health but surprisingly beneficial for her awakening creative spirit. In November their first hotel, Rome’s Quirinal, was rated fetid by Zelda: ‘The sitting rooms are hermetically sealed and palms conceal the way to open the windows. Middle-aged English doze in the stale air.’ Rome itself was a city of ‘jonquils and beggars’.1
Her letter to Max Perkins acidly suggested that Roman ruins were better in France.2 Her next note thanked him for sending Galsworthy’s The White Monkey, then described Rome’s comic-opera streets ‘jammed with men in sky-blue cloaks with faces like dentists and under-nourished priests and students. I do think, since the Church largely rests on a theatrical basis, that they should cast their parts better.’3 Her antipathy to Rome intensified as she fell ill. Abortions frequently impair the ability to conceive and this appears to have happened to Zelda. In late 1924 she had an operation to help her conceive. It infected her stomach and ovaries and damaged her reproductive organs. As she later sadly recalled: ‘Dr Gros said there was no use trying to save my ovaries. I was always sick and having picqures [injections].’4 After this operation Zelda was plagued with painful attacks of colitis throughout 1925. More important, there seemed little hope of more children.
There were other tensions. She and Scott had not resolved their difficulties following the Jozan conflict. Scott acknowledged in his November Ledger there was still ‘ill feeling with Zelda’, exacerbated by his nervous state following months of work on Gatsby. Zelda knew her advice would be expected at the proof stage. Though stimulated by being part of Scott’s literary progress, she needed an independent public achievement separate from Scott – to recover the dynamic she had lost since leaving Alabama. This desire had acted as an undercurrent to the private Jozan romance. Now she felt more confident.
Zelda’s ‘confidence’ was a complex issue. In Montgomery she did exactly what she wanted and was applauded for brains, beauty, physical prowess. She wrote her own lines and audiences loved them. In New York, Minnesota, Paris and on the Riviera, Scott wrote the script, she acted it. She played the arrogant flapper of his fiction, the famous author’s proud wife. She still radiated assurance but Scott exuded authority.
If she was to achieve parity it must come from an area that deeply interested her. Honoria Murphy and Sara Mayfield always said Zelda had a lifelong passion for painting,5 and Zelda’s time in France with the Murphys, watching international artists design scenery for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, mixing with Picasso, Braque and Léger, had increased her appreciation of some of the finest art forms then available. She knew Gerald had leapt from dilettante artist to professional painter. She knew Sara, who like herself had leisure and a nanny, had taken painting lessons from the Russian émigrée Natalia Goncharova, and Goncharova’s strong shapes and flamboyant colours appealed to Zelda. Honoria Murphy believed her parents had a strong influence on Zelda’s decision to formalize her interest in art.
The Fitzgeralds moved to the less fashionable Hôtel des Princes near Piazza di Spagna where, according to Zelda’s article on hotel life, they lived on Bel Paese cheese and Corvo wine and suffered damp sheets.6 For these privileges they paid $525 a month for full board for three, including wine and service. The $7,000 the Fitzgeralds had brought to France had gone before they moved to Rome, so Scott telegraphed Perkins for a $750 advance, making his debt to Scribner’s $5,000.
Financial imperatives meant Scott speedily wrote more short stories while Zelda trawled the city. ‘It was exciting being lost between centuries in the Roman dusk and taking your sense of direction from the Coliseum.’7
Before the Gatsby proofs arrived, Perkins wrote on 20 November praising the novel but suggesting Gatsby’s character was ‘somewhat vague’.8 Scott acknowledged on 1 December that ‘Zelda also thought I was a little out of key’.9 On 20 December Scott admitted to Max that Gatsby was vague because he himself hadn’t known what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in. Zelda, he said, had been instrumental in putting this right. ‘After having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child.’10
The subsequent rewriting exhausted Scott, so to calm him Zelda read aloud from Will James’s novel Cowboys North and South. ‘Zelda’s been reading me the cowboy book aloud to spare my mind + I love it – tho I think he learned the American language from Ring rather than from his own ear.’11 Ring Lardner’s racy idioms were one of the characteristics which had endeared him to Zelda.
Despite Scott’s reluctance to re-embark on ‘short stories for money (I now get $2000.00 a story but I hate worse than hell to do them)’12 he wrote the bulk of three new ones. ‘Love in the Night’, published in the Saturday Evening Post in March 1925, employed an exotic Riviera setting, a forerunner for the backdrop to Tender Is The Night, ‘Not in the Guidebook’ and ‘The Adjuster’, also stories of marital discord, reflected the aftermath of the Jozan incident.13
In ‘Not in the Guidebook’ the young, spoilt, moneyed wife, modelled on Zelda, has her inheritance stolen by her husband who deserts her in France. Charles Hemple, the hero of ‘The Adjuster,’ has a nervous breakdown attempting to please Louella, his spoilt discontented wife. Confronted with h
er invalided husband, Louella is given instructions by a mysterious Dr Moon which read like a lecture from Scott to Zelda. ‘We make an agreement with children that they can sit in the audience without helping to make the play,’ he said, ‘but if they still sit in the audience after they’re grown, somebody’s got to work double time for them so that they can enjoy the light and glitter of the world.’14 As Zelda read all Scott’s fiction she would have absorbed the message.
While Zelda was still suffering severe abdominal pains, Scott caught influenza and his drinking escalated. One evening, exploring the nightlife with Zelda, he became embroiled in a drunken row with some cab drivers who demanded an extortionate 100 lire to take them home. Scott struck out and knocked down a plain-clothes police officer who intervened. His version, colourfully rewritten for Tender Is The Night, was that two carabinieri beat him up as they hustled him off to jail. Zelda, aided by $100 and the US Consulate, freed him the next day. She was accompanied by journalist Howard Coxe, a Princeton graduate who had become attentive towards her. Scott, slow to recover from illness and from his humiliation, resented Coxe’s attentions towards Zelda.
Zelda had met Coxe when an American movie crew, filming Ben Hur in Rome, had invited the Fitzgeralds and several journalists to join the movie’s social life. Scott’s professional interest in Hollywood scriptwriting was aroused, as was his interest in the film’s young star, Carmel Myers, daughter of a San Francisco rabbi. Scott openly flirted with Carmel, whose film career had started in 1916 as the protégée of D. W. Griffith and who subsequently starred as a vamp with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and John Barrymore. Scott saw her immediately as ‘the most exquisite thing I have met yet … as nice as she is beautiful’, as he wrote about her later. Perhaps in retaliation, Zelda allowed Coxe his inconsequential but gallant gestures. At the movie company’s Christmas Ball Zelda, feeling ill again, asked Coxe to take her home, but made her indifference clear. This rejection might account for Coxe’s extraordinary gaffe in front of Scott in a bar. Scott, about to return to their hotel with a Christmas present for Scottie, heard Coxe boast to the assembled drinkers: ‘I could sleep with Zelda any time I wanted to.’ Still recovering from the Jozan incident, Scott was enraged. When Coxe told Wilson about it later, Wilson wrote reflectively: ‘Afterward [Coxe] couldn’t imagine what on earth had made him [say that], felt terribly about it … Actually – my own comment – Zelda was not so loose nor Howard so dangerous as this implied. He was envious of Scott … the drinks had brought this to the surface.’15