Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  95 Vaill, So Young, p. 232.

  96 Forel, report, 15 Sep. 1931, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  97 FSF, Ledger, summary of year Sep. 1930–Sep. 1931.

  98 While house-hunting they stayed downtown at Jefferson Davis Hotel.

  CHAPTER 19

  That fall Judge Sayre’s health failed. No one doubted the gravity of the situation. Minnie, outwardly stoical, daily more anxious, relied on Marjorie, Clothilde, Anthony and now Zelda, a difficult role for the frail haggard-looking Sayre ‘baby’. Scott’s attitude towards Zelda ‘was that of an anxious parent toward a sick child. He sent her to bed at 9.30.’1 Slowly Zelda recovered in safe Southern territory perfumed by magnolias and tea-olives. Livye Hart, glad to see her again, commented: ‘She seemed to love everybody and they loved her right back.’2

  In November 1931 death stalked another of Zelda’s friends. Gerald’s father, Patrick Murphy, died before his son could reach him. Gerald and Esther were each left half the wealthy Mark Cross Company, but control went to their father’s longterm mistress.3 Though Gerald had left the company a decade ago he couldn’t stand his position of subservience, so he resigned as Vice President and sailed back to France. His mother wished he had stayed to look after Esther, whose marriage to John Strachey was foundering. Zelda wished he had stayed, for he was one of the few friends who understood her.

  Sadly she watched over her father, helped her family, felt remote. The Sayres’ disapproval of Scott weighed on her. The Judge advised her to divorce him. It was impossible for her to make a good life with ‘a fella like that’, he pointed out. But as Zelda told Sara Mayfield, she and Scottie were economically dependent, her father was dying, and though her health was broken her psychic bond with Scott was not.4

  As she already had a small public literary reputation she decided to build on that professionally; hoping, though not entirely trusting, that Scott would support her endeavours.

  Then Scott broke the news that Hollywood’s MGM had offered him $1,200 a week for six weeks to rewrite the screenplay Red-Headed Woman, to be directed by Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer’s husband, as a vehicle for Jean Harlow. The movie industry had changed drastically since Scott’s last trip. Al Jolson had appeared in The Jazz Singer with synchronized sound effects, music, even dialogue. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco were heading for stardom. Greta Garbo too had made the transition from silent films to talkies. Scriptwriters now had to write credible-sounding dialogue.

  He would be home by Christmas, Scott reassured Zelda. Before he left he knelt by the Judge’s bed and begged him to say he believed in him. ‘I think you’ll always pay your bills, Scott,’ said the Judge wearily.5

  Zelda felt bereft. Scott had become her anchor, a translator between her and the world outside. It was his optimism, his confident presence she missed. She regretted their quarrel before his departure. ‘It makes me so sad to sit at your desk … Your cane is still on your bed. It’s unbearable to think that I was mean to you … Scottie cried all the way home because she said she knew we were quarrelling. Goofo please love me … I want you back – You can choose your own terms.’6 In Scott’s absence she worked in Minnie’s garden, composed a fugue and a nocturne à la Bach and Chopin and played tennis with Noonie, her niece.7

  She re-established her lost rapport with Scott by reading one of his stories every night, admiring their consummate skill, learning fresh ways to construct her fiction. She was engaged on seven new stories, one revision, a children’s play and her novel. Though she set only two tales in the Deep South – locating the rest in the smart societies of Europe and New York – the sexual frustrations, violence and aberrations which accompanied her car crashes, shootings and attempted incest had a passionate macabre Southern feel. Reading Faulkner had intensified the heat of her prose.

  While writing fast with great professionalism, simultaneously Zelda sent Scott more than thirty letters filled with low self-esteem about her fiction. Interrupting her work on ‘All About the Downs Case’ and ‘Crime Passionnel’,8 she wailed: ‘“Home to Babylon” is a fine and moving story … I want to write like you some day.’ She told him she could feel him in every place, feel his cheek, hear his feet on the stairs, every time a car drew up she could see him standing there saying ‘Well I’m going to Hollywood’.9 She finished another story: ‘It is another flop I’m afraid. I do not believe I can write.’10 She read his ‘Absolution’. It was one of the best stories she’d ever read; his ‘Baby Party’ too was wonderful; she would ‘never be able to write like that. Help, Deo’.11 Deo, however, was not around to help, so briskly (and significantly) without showing Scott her stories, she mailed them to Ober.

  None of her unpublished stories survive in manuscript; only Ober’s summaries offer clues to their content. His memo on ‘All About The Downs Case’ reads: ‘Difficult – cleverly written but doesn’t get anywhere. Reminiscent of Nixon-Nordlinger case. Woman married to very rich man who gives her everything but treats her as part of his possessions. She and a musician fall in love and he sees them kiss each other. He takes her to Europe and won’t let her speak to anyone. She shoots him in the end. Strong language on p. 20.’12 Zelda’s strong language may have been related to her fierce feelings about men who treat their women as possessions.

  At high speed she finished ‘Cotton Belt’, ‘Sweet Chariot’, ‘Getting Away from it All’, ‘Gods and Little Fishes’ and ‘The Story Thus Far’.13 Ober cabled: ‘Sweet Chariot is beautifully written. I am immensely pleased with it.’14

  No one recognized that her extraordinary productivity might prove dangerous to her health. At the end of November she told Scott ‘Cotton Belt’ was fine, as was her Southern story ‘à la Faulkner’. Then, re-assessing her progress, she lamented: ‘With some ruinous facility junk just flows and is utterly worthless.’ She reworked ‘One And, Two And’ and ‘Duck Supper’, while another woebegone note said ‘It’s so gloomy that my story should be no good.’ This she followed up with ‘[I] can’t write a line’ and ‘I do not believe I can write’ while battling with ‘There’s A Myth in a Moral’, which she probably rewrote as ‘A Couple of Nuts’.15

  The previous November Scott had urged Ober to submit a batch of Zelda’s stories under the title ‘Stories from a Swiss Clinique’ to Century magazine or to Edmund Wilson at The New Republic. On 6 January 1931 Wilson had agreed to keep the stories for possible use. Now, however, Ober was unable to place any of Zelda’s fiction except her two finest, ‘A Couple of Nuts’ and ‘Miss Bessie’, later retitled for publication ‘Miss Ella’, both of which had been drafted in Prangins.

  Perkins declined the first version of ‘Nuts’, asking Zelda to revise it, telling Fitzgerald: ‘I think there is no doubt that Zelda has a great deal of talent, and of a very colorful, almost poetic kind.’16

  Zelda revised it quickly; Perkins praised its metaphorical freshness and the way the career of the American cabaret entertainers, Lola and Larry, cleverly represented their time and viewpoint. It was published in Scribner’s Magazine in August 1932. Several critics assessed it as Zelda’s most accomplished short story.17 A St Paul reviewer likened it to Gatsby, suggesting that a dual egotism sustained the protagonists in both Zelda’s story and Scott’s novel.18

  The story line is simple. Lola and Larry star in French decadent café society in the Twenties, then become corrupted. Lola sabotages their marriage by an affair with their wealthy amoral promoter Jeff Daugherty. Larry takes a mistress, Daugherty’s former wife, with whom he drowns in a yachting accident. Having started out believing life was a romantic adventure, they finish as dissipated adventurers.

  Once again Zelda uses an unnamed female narrator-participant, who moves in the same world as the Nuts and watches their metamorphosis from innocence to dissolution. The atmosphere is sinister. Romance is illusory, magic destroyed at the touch of a predator. Zelda sustains an ominous air of loss and destruction. Like the Fitzgeralds, the young couple had ‘possessed something precious that most of us never
have: a jaunty confidence in life and in each other’.19 For the real as well as the fictional Nuts those dreams had been crushed. With bitter irony Zelda replaced her former themes of love, success and beauty with destruction.

  Waste and devastation, of the kind imaginable only in the Deep South, also haunt Miss Ella, a faded Victorian spinster, whose story ‘like all women’s stories was a love story and like most love stories took place in the past’. As a young belle she jilted her respectable fiance Mr Hendrix in favour of Andy Bronson, a Southern scoundrel, who roused her sexually by lighting a firecracker which set fire to her dress, then gallantly smothering the flames with his hands. Images of fire, the noise of gunshot flare through this tale of sound and fury as the discarded Hendrix malevolently shoots himself in her grounds on the day of her proposed nuptials to Bronson. Hendrix’s brains splatter the earth in a bloody mess. As Miss Ella mournfully cancels her wedding, in effect she cancels her happiness. ‘Years passed but Miss Ella had no more hope for love.’ She exists only as a burnt-out case. Now ‘bitter things dried behind the eyes of Miss Ella like garlic on a string before an open fire’. Her memories have ‘acrid fumes’.20 Reduced to guilt and despair, she rocks in her hammock, rides in a carriage with her elderly aunt, knowing she has thrown away her life merely because a trigger-happy beau threw away his.

  Suicides and stifled sexuality were the backdrop to Zelda’s youth. Miss Ella, foreshadowing the memorable characters of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, sprang from the same roots as did the fictional heroines of Zelda’s Southern contemporaries, novelists Caroline Gordon and Sara Haardt. Zelda’s recent reading of fiction by that other Southerner William Faulkner, as well as some psychological studies in repression, informs her story of Miss Ella. Her antagonistic-affectionate conflict with her own Southernness is remarkably similar to Faulkner’s, whose Quentin Compson cries: ‘I don’t hate the South.’21

  Her technique in ‘Miss Ella’, as in her College Humor stories – little dialogue, much description, the point-of-view focused through an observer-participant – is similar to Scott’s style in Gatsby and ‘The Rich Boy’. Zelda’s narrator, though genderless and ageless, is suggestive of a young girl, receptive to Miss Ella’s tragic past yet intimate with her in the present. What makes this story work is the impassioned sense of sympathy, even identity, between the narrator and Miss Ella. The narrator makes the reader feel she is Miss Ella, she too is repressed, she too is suffused with guilt, she too is riddled with self-denial.

  Perkins told Scott Zelda had achieved ‘a very complete strong sense of a character in this Southern old maid. It was moving in that way, but it had another quality that was still more moving … it made the reader share the feelings of the young girl through whose eyes Miss Bessie was seen, so that she was not only real, and in some degree was not real, but was as the young girl saw her.’22

  The control of her narrative viewpoint meant the structural problem Zelda had formerly encountered – her insouciant intolerance of plots for instance – was solved. In ‘Miss Ella’ she strictly disciplined her material of carnage and sacrifice. Written in the clinic, grounded in her own misery, it sounded the note of ruin currently characterizing the lives of both Fitzgeralds.

  Scribner’s accepted it for the December 1931 issue for $150 dollars, provided Zelda revised what Max called her ‘too numerous’, ‘too remote’ similes. Perkins believed Zelda would accept these revisions as she ‘probably knows just as much about writing as anybody hereabouts, but few writers can get sufficiently away from their own work to know how it will strike a reader’.23

  Despite her two successes, Ober’s failure with her other stories rankled. ‘Please tell me your frank opinion … I wish we could sell something. Can’t we give them away?’ she moped.24

  Her depression rendered her letters to Scott more childlike: ‘Without you I can’t weigh and balance and be intellectually curious: I’m too afraid I might discover the truth all alone … Aren’t you scared of such an utterly dependent Baby?’25 Those baby letters were written in a small less well-formed childish scrawl.

  She called herself Scott’s ‘stupid wife’ and added an ironic postscript: ‘Excuse me for being so intellectual. I know you would prefer something nice and feminine and affectionate.’26

  To celebrate Thanksgiving, Scott sent her a recording of his voice. ‘Dearest that is the sweetest loveliest voice I ever heard. It made me feel all safe in the centre of things again and important.’ His voice, she said, filled the house with assurance, vitality, excitement and love. Then nervously she added: ‘You are sure you are my own, aren’t you? Because when anyone is perfect other people have to be very careful.’27 That day, putting nerves aside, she wrote a thousand words, assuring him she would finish another two stories before his return. Her next letter recorded: ‘I have finished my one-act play and got all the rest of my things off to Ober.’ But still she fretted: ‘I will never be so foolish as to think I can get on without you again … I will let you play with my pistol and you can win every golf game … you can always be the one that’s perfect.’28 Then she added: ‘I want to write like you some day.’29

  What are we to make of these letters which reek of overstated dependency and affection? How can we account for the fact that Scott said later this period was the happiest of his and Zelda’s life?30 Were those notes Zelda’s intellectual attempts at supreme irony? Or were they written in another private code which amused them both yet neither took seriously? Was the language of passivity Zelda’s determination to be seen as sane, using dependency as the measuring stick? Or did acting passive make her feel more feminine, therefore more likeable?

  The letters do not sound as if they were written for fun, as Zelda was becoming more apprehensive about her father’s illness and more insecure in Scott’s absence. Zelda told Sara Mayfield that she would never forgive Scott for immuring her in Prangins, that she still didn’t know whether Scott had called in psychiatrists to help her or to protect himself. Sara Mayfield believed the dependent letters were ‘obvious flattery’ as a means of temporary survival, while Zelda’s stories were an effort to overcome her financial dependence and gain her release. This is a reasonable view, but it omits the complexity of Zelda’s love–hate feelings for Scott, which mirrored precisely her love–hate feelings for the South.

  There was another curious and contradictory aspect. At the same time as writing Scott such exaggerated lines as ‘we are like a lot of minor characters at table waiting for the entrance of the star’, Zelda was investigating divorce. She went to see Peyton Mathis, who had recently persuaded the husband of a friend of Zelda’s to give her an uncontested divorce. Peyton, though willing to help, pointed out that Scott would never allow the public humiliation of losing Scottie. He would fight for custody, and on the basis of the Prangins report would claim she was mentally unfit as a mother. Zelda’s family had already sampled the vengeance Scott could reap with ‘Babylon Revisited’. What neither Zelda nor Peyton knew was that after refusing to allow Scottie to live with Rosalind in Brussels, Scott had written to his cousin Ceci that if anything happened to him while Zelda was still deemed ‘sick’, she was to take care of Scottie.31

  Seeing no solution, Zelda concentrated her energies on her daughter, to whom in Scott’s absence she had become closer. She told Scottie she was ‘safer here [in Montgomery] than you’ve ever been in your life’.32 Although Scott did not want Scottie educated in the South, or to acquire any of Zelda’s effete Southern attributes which he felt were partly responsible for her breakdown, Zelda had insisted Scottie attend Margaret Booth’s, where she was doing well.

  The Judge, charmed by ten-year-old Scottie’s shy manners and French, Yankee and Confederate patois, frequently asked to see her. Then came a change: ‘Daddy is … as oblivious to his surroundings as he always was when he is himself,’ Zelda reported, ‘and when he is not he is tormented by imaginary prisons.’33

  On 17 November Judge Sayre died. On 18 November Zelda sent Scott a reassuri
ng telegram: ‘DADDY DIED LAST NIGHT DO NOT WORRY ABOUT US LOVE ZELDA’, which the same day she followed with: ‘YOU CANNOT ARRIVE FOR FUNERAL DO NOT WORRY ABOUT US WITH DEAREST LOVE ZELDA.’ Initially, though sad and lonely, she accepted her father’s death with great self-control.

  Her letter on the 19th told Scott: ‘Daddy seemed so elegant and concise. I have never seen anything so beautiful. The Capitol flag is flying at half-mast and old grayheaded men seem terribly sad. But Daddy seems young and beautiful and somehow master of everything. He looks very little in his clothes.’34 The entrance to the Supreme Court chambers was hung with black crepe. Miss Minnie wore mourning with a widow’s veil around her black hat. Zelda did not take Scottie to the funeral but reported her mother was ‘absolutely amazingly courageous’. The State of Alabama sent a large wreath while the Capitol employees sent all the roses from the grounds. Zelda bought a blanket of flowers for the coffin, and decided that she and Scott should pay most of it, about $50, as Marjorie was crying because she could not afford a black dress and Anthony was very poor. ‘I knew how you felt towards Daddy and that you would have wanted us to.’35

  As the sun set behind the Capitol dome, on a bleak November day, her father was buried under an ancient oak in Oakwood Cemetery, where the young Zelda had taken the young Scott to show him the Confederate graves, their iron crosses now overgrown with clematis. Zelda stood by the low wall crumbling under faded roses and ancient ivy and realized her father, who had guided her life, had left her no final word. She had searched through his papers in his Capitol office but there was nothing personal except the first three nickels he had earned, stuffed into a mildewed purse. ‘He must’, she told Sara sadly, ‘have forgot to leave the message.’36

  She drove out frequently to sit by her father’s grave, recalling his good name, his high principles and intellectual doubts. She told Sara Mayfield she’d never entirely thrown those off despite her decadent life. She was a carrier, she said, a Typhoid Mary of Confederate tradition.37