Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  ‘Southern Girl’ is remarkable for its sensuous description of long clay roads, straggling pines, isolated cabins in sand patches and ‘far off in the distance the blue promise of hills.’ The city where ‘wistaria meets over the warm asphalt’ is a young world that every evening moves out of doors, a world where ‘telephones ring, and the lacy blackness under the trees disgorges young girls in white and pink, leaping over the squares of warm light toward the tinkling sound with an expectancy that people have only in places where any event is a pleasant one’.31

  It is the world in which Zelda grew up, the world in which she flourished, the world of pink and white and organdie events, now a world rewritten from an entirely different place where many events have become unpleasant ones.

  Zelda was not alone in trying to recapture Southern magic in her fiction. Both Scott and Sara Haardt had been attempting it.

  In November 1928 Scott had written ‘The Last of the Belles’, set in Tarleton, his version of Montgomery. Like Zelda’s ‘Southern Girl’ it has a nostalgic mood of loss. It offers a similar narrative of a popular Southern Belle jilted by a Northern soldier.32

  That Scott might have felt anxious about Zelda following so closely on his heels is shown by a strange slip of his pen. In summer 1929, Ober asked Scott to choose one of his stories for a Literary Digest anthology. Scott, we assume inadvertently, suggested Zelda’s ‘Southern Girl’. Hastily he wrote again to Ober: ‘When I suggested story for Lit Digest I accidentally said Southern Girl meaning Last of the Belles.’33

  Sara Haardt’s Southern fiction, which covered similar territory to Zelda’s, had struggled into print while she combated illnesses even more serious than before. When Sara, who had missed Montgomery on a recent trip to Hollywood,34 returned home she found Mencken had missed her.35 They mended their temporary rift and she, like Scott and Zelda, began to recreate in her fiction the Southern homeland about which both she and Zelda felt so ambivalent. But in October 1928, before the Fitzgeralds had left for Europe, disease had once more shattered Sara’s hopes. Mencken rushed her into Union Memorial Hospital, Baltimore, for emergency surgery for gynaecological problems exacerbated by appendicitis. In November, Scott, perhaps linking Sara’s operation with Zelda’s surgery in Paris, wrote Sara a curious note. He congratulated her as he often did, on her ‘absolutely lyric’ writing, and added: ‘Terribly sorry to hear you’re sick. Please get well. Name it after me. Yours with insatiable Passion. Old Hot Shot Fitzgerald.’36 Sara did not get well. By July 1929 tuber culosis had infected her left kidney. There seemed no hope of total recovery. The doctors told Mencken she might live at best three years. Shocked and unutterably saddened, Mencken told Sara Mayfield he had vowed to marry his Sara as soon as she was strong enough, to make her last years the happiest of her life. He asked little Sara to be discreet; thus it was more than six months before Zelda and Scott or any Baltimore friends suspected they were engaged.

  In hospital that summer, believing death was imminent, Sara repeated her final wish to be buried in Baltimore far from Alabama. Yet ironically, despite or perhaps because of her love-hate relationship with the sweet flowering tyrannical South, which only Zelda and Sara Mayfield fully understood, when she emerged from hospital in late 1929 she determined to rush out her Deep South novel The Making of a Lady.

  The Fitzgeralds reached Paris in April 1929 and settled into an apartment on rue Mézières near St Sulpice, to be greeted by several old friends. Esther Murphy had a surprise for them. For some years Esther’s sexual inclinations had led her towards women. Wickedly portrayed as the lesbian Bounding Bess in Djuna Barnes’s chronicle Ladies Almanack,37 she had been a rival for Natalie Barney’s sexual affections with Dolly Wilde, and had ended up in bed with Barney.38 But suddenly in March Esther had become engaged to the English economist and political writer John Strachey, and was eagerly planning her May wedding.

  The Bishops now had an apartment in Paris as well as their Orgeval château, so the Fitzgeralds saw John as often and Margaret as little as possible, and met frequently with Townsend Martin. That spring Zelda met the English art critic Clive Bell whose avant-garde ideas impressed and influenced her. Sandy and Oscar Kalman were in Paris and Zelda instantly took them off to her ballet classes, where she had resumed rigorous group sessions in the mornings and a private class every afternoon with Egorova at the hot studio in rue Caumartin. ‘I worked constantly and was terribly superstitious and moody about my work, full of presentiments,’ she wrote. ‘I lived in a quiet, ghostly, hypersensitized world of my own. Scott drank.’39 Zelda saw herself as a priestess who had found an impersonal escape into a new world of self-expression.40

  Egorova had become the focus of Zelda’s life, for whom she practised every evening and most of Sunday. ‘I had to work,’ wrote Zelda later, ‘because I couldn’t exist in the world without it.’41 Idealizing Egorova, seeing her as poor, pure and dedicated, she presented her daily with a symbolic bouquet of white gardenias. One evening in June, however, the intense Madame appeared to Zelda in a less pleasing light. The Fitzgeralds had taken her to dine at the luxurious George V restaurant. During dinner when Egorova responded with appreciation to Scott’s flirtation, Zelda moved from shock to anger.

  Pauline and Ernest were now living at 6 rue de Ferou, but Pauline had begun to disapprove of the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway had given Perkins strict instructions not to give Scott their address. The previous year Fitzgerald had insulted Ernest’s landlord, pissed on their front porch, almost broken down their front door at 4 a.m. and finally got Hemingway evicted. Ernest was determined Scott should not get them thrown out of this new apartment. Scott’s persistence persuaded Ernest to relent and invite them to dinner. Ernest and Zelda kept their mutual antagonism under wraps, but Scott registered a ‘certain coldness’ towards him from Ernest.42 Hemingway was completing A Farewell to Arms, which Scott saw as another slight to his own slow progress.43 When Scott finally read it he wrote an officious undiplomatic letter admitting it was a ‘beautiful book’ but suggesting more than fifty cuts and corrections.44 Hemingway was furious. On the bottom of Scott’s letter he wrote ‘Kiss my ass. E.H.’45

  Sara Mayfield, temporarily in Paris, stopped at the Deux Magots to find Zelda only just surviving a week-long party. ‘Nobody knows where it started, when it’ll end, or whose party it is,’ Zelda told Sara. ‘All of the people were white … But one of the women had slept with a Negro, a six-day bicycle racer, and a prizefighter that sniffs cocaine … Another one says she sleeps with men for money and women for fun.’46

  Sara was disturbed at Zelda’s appearance. ‘There were triangular hollows under her cheek bones, and she was thin as a rail.’ Had her friend stopped eating? ‘No, I eat everything in sight,’ Zelda said. ‘But I work it off at the studio, straining and stretching and ending in nothing.’ She ached to begin life over again. ‘Really I do. I’d try so hard. Scott and I had it all – youth, love, money – and look how we’ve ended up, sitting around cafés, drinking and talking and quarreling with each other.’ Sara saw Zelda as ‘a soul lost in the mist on the moor’.47

  Zelda admitted that most of their quarrels were about Hemingway. When Scott lurched over to join the women he told Sara that he and Ernest were quarrelling too, ‘like a pair of jealous prima donnas’, over the unsavoury machinations of Robert McAlmon.48 Scott, highly disturbed, had written to Max Perkins: ‘McAlmon is a bitter rat … Part of his quarrel with Ernest some years ago was because he assured Ernest I was a fairy – God knows he shows more creative imagination in his malice than in his work. Next he told Callaghan that Ernest was a fairy. He’s a pretty good person to avoid.’49

  Morley Callaghan was a twenty-six-year-old Canadian writer, now published by Scribner’s, who with his wife met the Fitzgeralds that spring. Callaghan, insufficiently deferential to Fitzgerald, found him cold and Zelda watchful and depressed. At an early meeting Scott read Morley one passage that had impressed him from A Farewell to Arms. Morley, less impressed, said it was too deliberate,
which annoyed Scott but pleased Zelda, who aired her view that Hemingway’s prose was ‘pretty damned Biblical’. Scott immediately told Zelda she was tired from dancing and sent her to bed, leaving the Callaghans startled at Zelda’s meek acquiescence. Later the couples dined together and Zelda talked animatedly about her writing, saying she wrote well; Scott offered no comment, and she disconcerted them all by laughing to herself until Scott again sent her to bed. On another occasion with the Callaghans Zelda again talked about her writing before suggesting they all went roller skating, whereupon Scott grabbed Zelda’s wrist and sent her home in a taxi. ‘It was if she knew he had command over her,’ Morley said, ‘she agreed meekly … suddenly she had said good night like a small girl and was whisked away from us.’ When Morley asked about Zelda’s dancing, Scott explained edgily that Zelda wanted to ‘have something for herself, be something herself’.50

  Zelda ignored Scott’s antipathy to her ballet classes and also worked on her remaining three stories, ‘The Girl The Prince Liked’, ‘The Girl With Talent’ and ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’. All three heroines possess talent or energetic driving ambition but still have not found appropriate outlets for a satisfying career.

  Helena, heroine of ‘The Girl The Prince Liked’, has her father’s ambition, mystic deep-set eyes and eight million dollars. This allows her to dominate her husband, two children, people of importance ‘whom Helena wore like a string of glass beads’ and a golf course at which she collects second prizes.51 Ultimately she collects the Prince of Wales with whom she has an affair. Zelda satirizes England’s most romantic hero to reveal Helena’s triumphant story as essentially tragic. The Prince goes away, as princes do, leaving her a memory and a bracelet that she is acute enough to have valued. Inherently sharp, Helena realizes meaningful work, not money or contacts, might have given her life fulfilment.

  Encouraged by the Murphys, the Fitzgeralds decided to leave Paris and spend the summer on the Riviera. From July till October they rented the Villa Fleur des Bois on boulevard Eugène Gazagnaive, in Cannes, where Zelda finished ‘The Girl The Prince Liked’ while studying under Nevalskaya. She also danced professionally in several engagements in Nice and Cannes.52 Gerald, who constantly urged Zelda to meet prima ballerina Nemchinova in Antibes, reported Zelda looked haggard and had a strange laugh. On one occasion they went to see a documentary film about underwater life shot in an aquarium. When an octopus moved into view Zelda shrieked and threw herself against Gerald, screaming ‘What is it? What is it!’ Gerald saw nothing frightening and wondered whether Zelda saw it as a distortion of something horrific.53 Zelda, unable to explain, seemed to be withdrawing into a private world. Yet she completed the ‘Prince’ story in late August.

  On 23 September 1929 her ballet endeavours were rewarded. She received a formal invitation from Julie Sedowa to join the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples, Italy. Her Aïda debut at San Carlo, which Sedowa described as ‘a very worthwhile solo number’, would be followed by other solo performances as the season progressed. Sedowa wrote that if Zelda stayed for the whole season she would received a monthly salary. She told Zelda the theatre was magnificent, it would be useful experience to accept this offer, life in Naples was not expensive and she could have full board and lodging for 35 lire a day.54

  It was the chance Zelda had been waiting for.

  Inexplicably she turned it down. She had agonized over whether or not to accept. If she went to Naples she would go alone. The idea scared her, as did leaving Scottie, now almost eight, entirely in Scott’s custody. Since girlhood she had been dependent on Scott. Could she live alone on a meagre salary and succeed without his backing? Could she face his anger? She had worked for months to reach this point, only to be suddenly assailed by self-doubt. Her sister Rosalind vividly recalled not only Zelda’s ambivalence but also Scott’s implacable disapproval. ‘This frantic effort on Zelda’s part, towards a professional career in the thing she did best, was motivated by the uncertainty of their situation … perhaps also by unhappiness, which she refused to admit … beneath an always brave front, and by her desire to put herself on her own. She told me that she received an offer from one of the Italian Opera companies as a première ballerina, but that Scott would not allow her to accept it.’55 Only a few years earlier, Zelda would rebelliously have gone ahead and overruled Scott. Her strange passivity at this critical moment implies an emotional fatigue from many months of professional subservience to him.

  Scott never acknowledged, at the time or later, not only how close Zelda had come to a serious ballet career but how he had stopped her.

  The scorn Zelda had shown towards Helena in ‘The Girl The Prince Liked’ for not making use of her ambitions and skills turned inward on herself for not having the courage to take the long-awaited opportunity. Zelda’s guilt and confusion over rejecting the San Carlo offer are hinted at in ‘The Girl With Talent’, completed in October 1929 and sold only weeks later.

  Lou, the dancer heroine, has genuine talent, a good job in New York, a rich successful husband, a baby. Like Zelda she is not domestic so the baby is largely cared for by the nanny. She is the one heroine of the six whose dreams of stardom in the dance field are attainable. So what does she do? In the middle of an ‘unprecedented hit’ she runs off to China with a tall blond Englishman with whom she has a second beautiful baby. Her dream could have come true, as could Zelda’s. Only weeks before this event Lou told the narrator: ‘I am going to work so hard that my spirit will be completely broken, and I am going to be a very fine dancer … I have a magnificent contract in a magnificent casino on the Côte d’Azur, and I am now on my way to work and make money magnificently.’ The narrator did not believe her: ‘those were excellent defense plans that would never be carried out because of lack of attack.’ Is that what Zelda felt about her own self-destructive action? In the story Zelda makes one of her most characteristic comments: ‘To my mind, people never change until they look different.’56 Lou had looked exactly the same. The photos of Zelda in May 1929 and September 1929 also look much the same: tense and frozen-faced. But Zelda was a mistress of deceptive appearances and elusive effects.

  Zelda’s remorse over rejecting Sedowa’s offer turned to raging grief when she learnt that Sergei Diaghilev had died in Venice. ‘Diaghilev died,’ wrote Zelda. ‘The stuff of the great movement of the Ballets Russes lay rotting in a French law court … some of his dancers performed round the swimming pool of the Lido to please the drunk Americans … some … worked in music-hall ballets; the English went back to England. What’s the use?’57 For Zelda, whose dreams of dancing with the Ballets Russes had died with Diaghilev, nothing was of use.

  That October, while Scott was driving along the Corniche, the most treacherous stretch of road in that locality, Zelda grabbed the steering wheel and attempted to force the car off the cliff. She almost killed herself and her husband. Later she said the car acted wildly on its own.

  There is an obvious and illuminating connection, which has not previously been made, between these three events: firstly, Zelda’s rejection of the ballet company offer; secondly, Diaghilev’s death; and thirdly, the steering-wheel incident. One of Zelda’s biographers, Milford, omits Diaghilev’s death and even reverses the chronology of job offer and steering-wheel incident, so that no psychological sense can be made of it.58 There is also the highly significant fact that all three events occurred during a period of enormous literary productivity for Zelda, every piece of which was published under Scott’s name as well as hers or under Scott’s name alone.

  In October 1929 the Fitzgeralds returned to Paris where Zelda continued writing, working on her sixth story, ‘The Millionaire’s Girl’, which would be sold in March 1930. The story, Zelda’s witty answer to Scott’s fictionalized treatment of the Lois Moran romance, is generally considered her best.59

  Caroline, its heroine, is lower down the social register than her fiancé Barry. ‘You could see that he was rich and that he liked her, and you could see that she was p
oor and that she knew he did.’ But Barry’s father likes her not, tries to buy her off. When Caroline accepts his cheque without realizing she is expected to break her engagement Barry, furious, does it for her, at which point Caroline decides to become a Hollywood superstar! Her reason, however, is not to find remunerative fulfilling work but to bring back the errant Barry. Though her first film is a big hit he doesn’t return until she makes a dramatic suicide bid. As Zelda comments acidly: ‘She married him, of course, and since she left the films on that occasion, they have both had much to reproach each other for.’60 It sounded familiar even at the time.

  Throughout the ‘Girl’ series the narrator has remained unidentified either by name or gender. But there is a nice touch in this sixth story: Caroline and Barry drive out to see their narrator friend on Long Island. On arrival Caroline asks: ‘Is this Fitzgerald’s roadhouse?’, ensuring that readers now suspect that the narrator is either Zelda or Scott.61 Rereading the series, particularly ‘Southern Girl’, it becomes obvious the narrator, too, is a Southern Girl: Zelda.