Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  On 25 February Scott invited Thornton Wilder, one of his new literary heroes, who unfortunately had witnessed Scott’s Princeton debacle, for the weekend. Scott also invited Wilson to the gathering he described as small but select. The selection included Esther Murphy, Gilbert and Amanda Seldes, John and Anna Biggs and two actresses, Zoe Atkins and Laurette Taylor, in Wilmington for the tryouts of the play The Furies, plus some of their theatrical staff including a temperamental set designer. At dinner Wilson decided Zelda was at ‘her iridescent best’.5 But she then left the party to take a nap, and on re-emerging her iridescent best turned rapidly to her acid worst. When the moody stage designer told her to go away because he was thinking, Zelda’s instant riposte, ‘Oh, you’re not really thinking, you’re just being homogeneous!’, upset him so much that he and his team departed in a huff. As Wilson later reported: ‘The aftermath of a Fitzgerald evening was notoriously a painful experience.’6

  Desperate about their life in the US, the Fitzgeralds decided to return to Europe, worrying as usual about the cost. In March, however, Scott suddenly produced a highly profitable short-story project based on the adventures of Basil Duke Lee, a bossy Midwestern boy who longs for a New York life. Harold Ober sold ‘The Scandal Detectives’, the first story in the series which follows Basil from fourteen-year-old stripling to Yale, for $3,500 to the Saturday Evening Post. Between March 1928 and the following February Scott wrote eight Basil Duke tales, which brought him $31,500 and financed their Paris trip.

  Before they left Scott saw both Ober and Perkins, to whom he promised to deliver the new stories regularly. Secretly he hoped that Europe would work the same magic on his new novel as it had on Gatsby. Perkins reported to Hemingway (in Key West) that though Scott had got over his nervous ‘Stoppies’ he was very depressed. Hemingway, sympathetic about the nerves, was hardline about Scott’s lack of progress. He felt because Scott was frightened he used defence mechanisms such as writing stories only to make money. Ernest felt Scott should have written three novels by now. Even if only one was Gatsby standard it would have been worth it.

  On 21 April Zelda, Scottie and Scott sailed on the Paris. They hadn’t much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills, but were simply glad to be going. In the photo taken on board ship, Scottie smiles as she cuddles a doll into her furry jacket, but Scott looks as though it would be too much effort to smile; he even holds his hat with a depressed gesture. As for Zelda, her photo is one of the harshest taken in the twenties: the scowling severity of her face matches the severe grey cloak and tight cloche hat restraining her ears.7

  The Murphys eagerly awaited their arrival. Gerald had written to Scott: ‘We are very fond of you both … The fact that we don’t always get on has nothing to do with it … To be able to talk to people after almost two years is the important thing.’8 After the couples reconciled Scott wrote to Ernest: ‘We are friends with the Murphys again. Talked about you a great deal.’9

  Initially the Fitzgeralds stayed at the Hôtel de Palais, but the Murphys, who had taken one apartment on the quai des Grands-Augustins and a second at 14 rue Guynemer overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, offered to lend them their second apartment while they were in Antibes that summer.10 Zelda told her Montgomery friend Eleanor Browder that the décor reminded her of a setting for one of Madame Tussaud’s gloomier figures.11

  Scottie recalls her first school, the Cours Dieterlin. ‘You went two days a week and the rest of the time you did your lessons at home with your “institutrice”, in my case Mlle Serez to whom I was devoted.’ Scottie’s education was that of privileged French girls: mainly memorizing whole scenes from plays by Corneille or Racine. ‘[We also learnt] the names of not only the French kings but their wives … I have been trying to remember whether we also committed the names of the mistresses to mind.’ Scottie said she had had a speaking acquaintance with Mme de Pompadour and Mme de Montespan long before she understood their professional proclivities.12

  From Paris Zelda wrote to Eleanor Browder, recently married, apologizing for not sending a wedding present and describing her restlessness: ‘We are vaguely floating about on the surface of a fancy French apartment … It looks as if we’ll never stay anywhere long enough to see how we like it.’13

  Scottie liked it at once, partly because she had a safe play area. ‘When we were not in school,’ she remembered, ‘we would meet each other at the Luxembourg Gardens to sail the toy boats or ice skate at the Grande palace or roll hoops … under the Eiffel Tower … It was a delightful time.’14

  Zelda liked it better when the Kalmans visited, and she confided in Sandy her new plan of becoming a professional dancer. She had told Gerald, who had deeper reservations than Sandy, feeling that at Zelda’s age there were limits to her potential achievement. Nevertheless, impressed by her determination, he arranged for her to study with Madame Lubov Egorova, director of the Ballets Russes school, whom Zelda had already met. Egorova had previously taught Alexandra Danilova, Anton Dolin and James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia.

  Zelda worked to Lubov’s demanding schedule of eight to ten hours a day with absolute seriousness. As a Southern Belle, it had been a big leap for her to accept the idea that women’s need for professional achievement rather than amateur ‘self-expression’ was essential if they were to have a healthy identity. But she had made it and the six stories she wrote that year and the next mirrored this very notion: that women need to work. The Murphys, who empathized with this view, resolved to support her despite their growing misgivings. Scott of course believed in the work-as-a-profession ethos, but for himself rather than for his wife. Some of their friends later thought he believed in it if necessary at the expense of his wife.

  What Zelda had not told Gerald, doubtless because he was a joint friend, was that her desire to perfect this art was also rooted in the belief that it would release her from dependence on Scott. To this end, like Alabama in Save Me The Waltz, Zelda drove herself mercilessly, dancing to ‘drive the devils that had driven her’, believing that ‘in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self’. She felt ‘that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow.’15

  One afternoon Zelda invited the Murphys to Egorova’s studio to watch her dance. The studio floor was raked to resemble a stage so that spectators had to gaze upwards at the dancers, which was a most unflattering view. ‘It made her [Zelda] seem taller, more awkward than she was. There was something dreadfully grotesque in her intensity – one could see the muscles individually stretch and pull; her legs looked muscular and ugly … One held one’s breath until it was over. Thank God, she couldn’t see what she looked like.’16

  In fact Zelda knew exactly what she and the other practising dancers looked like and how they felt: exhausted. Streaming with sweat. Muscles bulging. Limp and drained. Yet withal on fire with the passion of the dance. Later in one of her most successful oil paintings, Ballerinas Dressing,17 which she gave to Sandy Kalman, she attempted to draw precisely that experience, those emotions, that appearance. The limbs of the five naked ballet figures are again elongated in a quasi-mannerist style, feet are enlarged, big hands knotted with muscles, several heads sag with fatigue. This characteristic distortion of extremities is reminiscent of American artists Thomas Hart Benton or Paul Cadmus or, like her paper dolls, could have been influenced by the popular illustrator Maxfield Parrish. When Zelda was asked why she painted her dancers, typically depicted as graceful and delicate, with alarmingly exaggerated limbs, she said ‘Because that’s how a ballet dancer feels after dancing.’18 She believed strongly the depiction of the swollen physical flesh had to reveal psychological emotions, and by creating her forms in this way Zelda consciously rejected traditional feminine shapes. Her nude figures in this oil painting, as in many of her dance paintings, appear strong a
nd asexual despite two figures with what look like stuck-on breasts. This could be related to Zelda’s preoccupation with dance as work and may be trying to show that female dancers strive as hard professionally as men.

  The close links between Zelda’s visual and verbal arts are shown especially in the area of dance. In Save Me The Waltz she recreates in words the vision of Ballerinas Dressing and the experience which horrified Gerald Murphy. ‘Alabama’s work grew more and more difficult. In the mazes of the masterful fouetté her legs felt like dangling hams; in the swift elevation of the entrechat cinq she thought her breasts hung like old English dugs. It did not show in the mirror. She was nothing but sinew. To succeed had become an obsession. She worked till she felt like a gored horse in the bull ring, dragging its entrails.’19

  Honoria Murphy recalls her parents ‘were always very fond of her but that year when she started with Egorova they worried more about her. She was still very affectionate with that sense of magic that drew them to her … but suddenly she’d turn strangely silent. My father always blamed her breakdown on the dancing. I’ll never forget his pacing up and down as he said: “She’s overdoing it dammit! … In Russia they start at age seven and she’s nearly thirty! She’s killing herself.”20

  Zelda’s friends Dick and Alice Lee Myers felt the same. Fanny recalls her parents saying ‘It was good for her to have an occupation of her own, but she took it too hard. She wanted to be a creative person in the public eye but she pushed too hard. She overdid it. She was so determined. Yes, she was driven.’ Fanny believes Zelda ‘was desperate to make up for the time she hadn’t been dancing’.21

  It became a summer of drinking, boredom and rows. Scott’s anger about the ballet increased week by week. He wrote miserably: ‘drinking and general unpleasantness’, followed by: ‘general aimlessness and boredom’, which led to him landing in jail twice.22 Later Zelda reproached him for his behaviour: ‘You were constantly drunk. You didn’t work and you were dragged home at night by taxi-drivers when you came home at all. You said it was my fault for dancing all day. What was I to do?’23 Zelda confided to Sara Mayfield, who was at the Sorbonne: ‘Scott and I had a row last week, and I haven’t spoken to him since … When we meet in the hall, we walk around each other like a pair of stiff-legged terriers spoiling for a fight.’24

  Scottie suffered from complete lack of parental attention and was left alone with her French governess Mlle Delplangue, whom Zelda disliked.

  Scott had promised Perkins he would post two chapters a month, but when he did force himself to work it was not on his novel but on the Basil Duke stories. These stories reveal Scott had become much affected by remembrances of things past.25 The first, ‘The Scandal Detectives’, was based on a club he had founded in St Paul where he and his schoolfriends had gathered in the magical Midwestern dusks. After the second story, ‘The Freshest Boy’, still attempting to recover the past, he tackled ‘A Night at the Fair’ in May, managing ‘He Thinks He’s Wonderful’ in July and in September ‘The Captured Shadow’ to coincide with the publication of the first Duke tale. But he ‘passionately hated [that work] and found [it] more and more difficult to do. The novel was like a dream, daily farther and farther away.’26

  Zelda too made a shot at recapturing the past, but hers was rather more sinister. She and Sara Murphy attended a Paris luncheon together at which several people came up to them courteously. Zelda smiled, took their hands, then muttered under her breath ‘I hope you die in the marble ring.’ Sara recalled how charming and polite Zelda was. ‘No one suspected that she was saying anything but the usual pleasantries; I heard her because I was standing right next to her.’27 Previous biographers have failed to find any meaning in Zelda’s statement; but in discussions with remaining Montgomery friends and family a reasonable suggestion emerged that this was a childhood taunt relating to the area of the State Capitol, where Zelda, Sara Mayfield and the others played in a ring around the marble rotunda circular staircase.

  A great many friends in Paris that summer helped the Fitzgeralds escape their own desperation. They saw the three Murphys and Cole Porter constantly, and Zelda was thrilled when Sandy and Oscar Kalman returned. They spent time with Thornton Wilder, his companion Gene Tunney, and John and Margaret Bishop, in Paris while renovations were completed on their château in Orgeval. Margaret chattered more them ever; Scott and Zelda disliked her more than ever. She was not the only acquaintance to upset Scott, who found it hard to look as pleased as Zelda did when Dick Knight visited. Zelda recalled later that even when Scott himself was ‘entangled sentimentally’ he would forbid her to see Dick.28

  At a dinner given by Sylvia Beach on 27 June29 they met James Joyce, after which Scott hosted a dinner for him and his wife Nora at their apartment. Zelda, however, did not share her husband’s adulation for Joyce which drove another wedge between them.

  Unable to placate each other or find any harmony of spirit, they began to look around. Both began to notice and pay attention to Esther’s exotic friend Emily Vanderbilt, who according to Scott’s Ledger dallied with members of the Ballets Russes as well as with a number of ‘fairies’.30 The artistic homosexual set was unleashing Zelda’s emotions. Although she continued to row with Scott about his sexual inadequacy, she was in fact coming slowly to terms with her own sexual loss of interest in him. Zelda’s devotion to Egorova began in her mind to have a sexual component. Fantasies followed. In a letter to Scott in which she tried to unpick the summer patchwork that Scott called ‘Ominous’ (which he underlined three times)31 she wrote:

  You made no advances towards me and complained that I was unresponsive. You were literally eternally drunk the whole summer. I got so I couldn’t sleep and I had asthma again … it made you angry that I didn’t care any more. I began to like Egorowa.32

  At that point Scott denied the mounting importance of Egorova – or perhaps he simply didn’t see it, being more concerned, as his birthday approached, with the fact that he had made ‘no real progress in any way and wrecked myself with dozens of people’.33

  Attempting to leave the wreckage behind them, the Fitzgeralds made a stormy crossing back to the US in September 1928 on the Carmania. During the boat trip Zelda, increasingly anxious, told Scott she was disturbed at the nature of her devotion to Egorova. ‘I was afraid that there was something abnormal in the relationship and you laughed.’34 He dismissed her remark, but they were taking the wreckage home with them.

  Notes

  1 She told Sara Mayfield this on several occasions. It emerged during discussions with Montgomery residents, including relatives of the Haardt family, and in conversation with Camella Mayfield.

  2 The school was aimed primarily at children of Americans overseas.

  3 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir, written for her daughters and owned by Cecilia Ross, p. 24.

  4 ZSF, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. To Number –’, Collected Writings, p. 425.

  5 Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light, New York, Farrar, Straus & Young, 1952, p. 379.

  6 Ibid., p. 382.

  7 Fitzgeralds’ photo album, PUL. Reproduced in Bruccoli et al., eds., Romantic Egoists, p. 160.

  8 Gerald Murphy to FSF, May 1928, CO187, Box 51, Folder 13, PUL.

  9 FSF to EH, July 1928, Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library.

  10 Vaill, So Young, p. 195. The apartment’s address was also 58 rue de Vaugirard as it was on the corner of Vaugirard.

  11 Milford quotes Zelda as saying ‘Madame Tausand’s’ which is patently a mistranscription or printer’s error. Milford, Zelda, p. 140.

  12 Scottie recalls she was placed in ‘the equivalent of third and fourth grade’. Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir, p. 24.

  13 ZSF to Eleanor Browder Addison, postmarked 29 May 1928.

  14 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir, p. 25.

  15 ZSF, Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 118.

  16 Gerald Murphy to Nancy Milford, interview, 2 Mar. 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 141.

  17 Ballerinas Dressing, c.19
41 though it could be much earlier, oil on canvas, 42” × 30”. Xandra Kalman had it on show in her St Paul house for many years. Owned by Kristina Kalman Fares; also CO183, Box 8, Fg. 23, PUL.

  18 Jerry and Robbie Tillotson, ‘Zelda Fitzgerald Still Lives’, The Feminist Art Journal, spring 1975, p. 32.

  19 ZSF, Waltz, p. 144.

  20 Honoria Murphy Donnelly to the author, New York, 1999.

  21 Fanny Myers Brennan to the author, New York, 1999.

  22 FSF, Ledger, July, Aug. 1928.

  23 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 193.

  24 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 131.

  25 He had been reading Proust. FSF, Ledger, Mar. 1928.

  26 FSF to ZSF, summer? 1930, Life in Letters, p. 188.

  27 Sara Murphy to Milford in 1963, Milford, Zelda, p. 142; to Calvin Tomkins who was writing a memoir of the Murphys.

  28 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 193.

  29 Other guests were Nora Joyce, Adrienne Monnier (proprietor of bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres and Sylvia Beach’s lover) and André and Lucie Chamson.

  30 FSF, Ledger, June 1928.

  31 FSF, Ledger, summary of year Sep. 1927–Sep. 1928.

  32 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 193.