Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  2 FSF to Dr Mildred Squires, 14 Mar. 1932, Johns Hopkins Hospital records, Life in Letters, p. 209.

  3 FSF to MP, 16 Mar. 1932, PUL.

  4 ZSF to FSF, Mar. 1932, ZSF, Collected Writings, pp. 466–8.

  5 ZSF to FSF, c. Mar. 1932, ibid., p. 468. In Tender Is The Night the Pershing incident, where Scott’s character Abe North stands in the lobby of the Paris Ritz pretending to be General Pershing, was also one line, and would not have been missed either.

  6 ZSF to MP, 27 Mar. 1932, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald 1921–1944, PUL.

  7 MP to ZSF, 28 Mar. 1932, ibid., PUL.

  8 ZSF to FSF, c. Mar. 1932, ZSF, Collected Writings, pp. 468–9.

  9 Milford, Zelda, p. 253.

  10 ZSF to FSF, c. Mar. 1932, ZSF, Collected Writings, p. 468.

  11 Each of the two galleys has a duplicate worked over in Zelda’s handwriting.

  12 FSF to MP, end Apr./early May 1932, Life in Letters, p. 217.

  13 FSF to MP, c. 14 May 1932, ibid., pp. 218–19.

  14 MP to ZSF, telegram, 16 May 1932, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald 1921–1944, PUL.

  15 MP to ZSF, letter, 16 May 1932, ibid., PUL.

  16 ZSF to MP, c. 19 May 1932, ibid., PUL.

  17 James R. Mellow certainly holds this view. Invented Lives, p. 401.

  18 FSF to Richard Knight, 29 Sep. 1932, quoted in ibid.

  19 Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 192.

  20 ZSF, Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 40.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Ibid., p. 67.

  23 It is in four chapters each subdivided into three sections.

  24 ZSF, Waltz, p. 23.

  25 This is definitely not a sexual affair.

  26 ZSF, Waltz, p. 105.

  27 Ibid., p. 196.

  28 Ibid., p. 130.

  29 FSF, Ledger, Apr. 1932.

  30 During April–May 1932 he also wrote for the Post ‘Family in the Wind’ and ‘The Rubber Check’.

  31 In an unpublished sketch he blatantly discloses his resentment. A professional dancer Nikitma, about to create a major role La Chatte in London, has delayed her performance in order to support her sick sister, a less experienced ballet dancer who has secretly been rehearsing the same role. Nikitma is livid: Nikitma: ‘That’s out … Rehearse anything else and I’ll back you but not that. If your London performance comes before mine, with the name I’ve made I’m done …’ Sister: ‘But I want to express myself.’ Nikitma: ‘Nevertheless that’s out.’ Sister: ‘But I saw the script the same day you did.’ Nikitma: ‘But I chose it and bought it and paid for it.’ Sister: ‘But I would if I could.’ Nikitma: ‘But I did.’ … Sister: ‘I’ve seen you rehearse so many times I think I could do it nearly as well as you.’ Nikitma: ‘When I’ve tried it you can try it. Not till then.’ Sister: ‘But I’m going on rehearsing.’ Nikitma: ‘Not on this stage. Not with these lights and this music.’ … Sister: ‘But I want to express myself.’ Nikitma: ‘All right. Whatever that means. But you can’t exploit your relation to me to do me harm.’ Scott called this revealing trifle ‘Analogy’. Unpublished MS, PUL.

  32 Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 257.

  33 ZSF to MP, undated, 1932, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald 1921–1944, PUL.

  34 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 193, 194.

  35 FSF to Dr Squires, 20 May 1932, quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 257.

  36 ZSF to John Peale Bishop, undated, c. summer 1932, John Peale Bishop Papers, CO138, Box 21, Folder 4, PUL.

  37 Mrs Bayard Turnbull to Milford, 12 Oct. 1963, Milford, Zelda, p. 259.

  38 Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 265.

  39 By August 1932 Scott was able to note in his Ledger: ‘The novel now plotted & planned never more to be permanently interrupted.’

  40 All MS drafts of this contentious novel have disappeared. Kendall Taylor suggests that the novel on which Zelda was working in 1932 was Caesar’s Things but this author has found no supporting evidence for this early date.

  41 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 195. Carolyn Shafer says the crucifixion painting has never been found.

  42 Ibid., pp. 195–6.

  43 Ibid., p. 196.

  44 Ibid., p. 197.

  45 Mayfield, Constant Circle, p. 179.

  46 Though Mencken and Sara were highly sympathetic to Scott’s unannounced drunken visits to discuss Zelda’s plight their patience gradually wore thin until one evening in fall 1933 Scott disgraced himself at the home of Mencken’s friend Joseph Hergesheimer. Drunk as usual he dropped his trousers publicly at the dinner table, after which Mencken told Sara to stop seeing him.

  47 He utilized his stay to write a doctor-nurse love story called ‘One Interne’.

  48 ‘Of the Jazz Age’, New York Times, reproduced in Romantic Egoists, ed. Bruccoli et al., p. 190.

  49 Dorothea Brande, The Bookman, ibid., p. 189.

  50 William McFee, ‘During the Jazz Age’, New York Sun, 8 Oct. 1932.

  51 New York Herald Tribune review, reproduced in Romantic Egoists, ed. Bruccoli et al., p 189.

  52 Review in a Baltimore paper, reproduced in ibid., p. 190.

  53 MP to ZSF, 2 Aug. 1933, CO101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald 1921–1944, PUL.

  54 Malcolm Cowley to FSF, 22 May 1933, CO187, Box 39, PUL.

  CHAPTER 21

  Fall came. The leaves drifted, so did Zelda, anxiously waiting as several New York producers rejected Scandalabra.1 She hid in her roof-top eyrie, writing, dancing and painting. Down below, Scott, nerves frayed, endlessly redrafted Tender Is The Night.2 Isabel Owens recalled him in 1932 slouching in his smoke-filled study wrapped in an ancient towelling robe, clutching his gin bottle like a security blanket. Zelda and Scott, who both craved privacy and peace, could not leave each other alone. They trawled from room to room, rowing, repenting, screaming, making up. Mrs Owens remembers: ‘She took a lot from him … and I never remember her criticizing him. Of course she had no say.’ Zelda didn’t want him in her workplace but never refused her help. Scott, who protected her from drink and visitors, never understood that she also needed protection from him. ‘He would go up to her room and ask advice about things they had done together, conversations they had.’ Scott, Mrs Owens said, ‘couldn’t write about anything he didn’t know … Zelda’s memory was good.’3 In an interview in the Saturday Evening Post Scott admitted that, though highly professional, he now experienced feelings of ‘utter helplessness’. Where were his fresh themes or new plots? ‘We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives. Then we learn our trade … and we tell our two or three stories – each time in a new guise … as long as people will listen.’4 That year he feared people had stopped listening.

  The New Year of 1933 rang in with sadness and continued miserably through to September. January brought ‘Quarrels’ with Scottie,5 February saw a severe quarrel with Ernest, but neither proved as depressing to Scott as Ring Lardner’s death in September which he told Max was ‘a terrible blow’.6 Earlier in the year, looking for cheer, Scott met Lois Moran in New York. It was but a temporary palliative. He turned to luminal and drink which necessitated further treatment at Johns Hopkins. Dr Meyer told Forel that Scott’s alcoholic deterioration was ruining Zelda’s slight improvement.

  Weekly for six months the Fitzgeralds had visited Phipps for discussions with Doctors Rennie and Meyer. Scott, who found Meyer’s attitude disagreeable, decided these conferences were futile. Initially, Scott said, the Phipps discussions had worked because Zelda was ‘still close to the threat of force and more acutely under the spell of your [Meyer’s] personality’. Once again Scott needed the authority to control her. He wanted the ‘power of an ordinary nurse … over a child; to be able to say “If you don’t do this I shall punish you.”’ Meyer should authorize him to tell Zelda ‘when she is persistently refactory to pack her bag’ and return to hospital. Scott accepted that possibly Zelda ‘would have been a genius if we had never met’, but felt ‘In actuality she is now hurting me and through me hurting all
of us’. Her Iowa schoolgirl ambitions to write made her think ‘her work’s success will give her some sort of divine irresponsibility backed by unlimited gold’. The gold was provided by him, while she worked ‘under a greenhouse which is my money and my name and my love … she … feels she can reach up and knock a piece of glass out of the roof at any moment, yet she is shrewd to cringe when I open the door of the greenhouse and tell her to behave or go’. Scott knew ‘the picture of Zelda painting things that show a distinct talent, or Zelda trying faithfully to learn how to write is much more sympathetic and, superficially, more solid than the vision of me making myself iller with drink as I finish up the work of four years’. Eventually, he fantasized, he might ‘be carried off … by four strong guards shrieking manicly that after all I was right and she was wrong, while Zelda is followed home by an adoring crowd in an automobile banked with flowers, and offered a vaudeville contract’. But was Zelda more worth saving than he was? As the wage-earner he must be worth more. Zelda had merely the ‘frail equipment of a sick mind and a beserk determination’, whereas he ‘was integrated – integrated in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that I might have two counts against me to her one’.

  Scott believed a point had been reached where he would have to ‘resort to legal means to save myself, my child and the three of us in toto’. If Meyer didn’t agree that Zelda should be told she had exhausted everyone’s patience, that Meyer would not always be there as a prop for Zelda to lean on, then the Fitzgeralds would go ‘out in the storm, each one for himself, and I’m afraid Scotty and I will weather it better than she’.7

  Meyer, too, felt their conversations were futile. He pointed out that Zelda was not merely a patient as far as he was concerned and that Scott too was a potential patient, albeit an unwilling one. This opener did not go down well with Scott. Nor did Meyer’s line: ‘The question of authority is simple. We have decided to relieve you of having to be the boss … But you have the right to say when things are to be referred to us … That saves you from having to be boss and psychiatrist.’ Meyer reassured Scott he was not trying to emasculate him; nevertheless his ‘instability with the alcohol’ prevented them from handing Zelda over to Scott. For progress there must be ‘a conjoint surrender of the alcohol’.8

  Incensed that drinking had contributed to his poor image with Zelda’s doctors, Scott in an undated pencil draft raged at Meyer’s suggestion of ‘a dual case’. Until recently he had the strong drink matter in hand; he still needed no help; if Meyer checked with their friends and business associates he would find that though a good percentage liked Zelda better than they liked him, ‘on the question of integrity, responsibility, conscience, sense of duty, judgement, will-power … 95% of that group of ghosts would be as decided [in Scott’s favour] as Solomon pronouncing upon the two mothers’. Scott acknowledged his note was his ‘old plea to let me sit apon the bench with you instead of being kept down with the potential accomplices on the charge of criminal associations’.9

  The Fitzgeralds and their doctors were at an impasse.

  Finally, on 28 May 1933, Zelda and Scott decided to hold a discussion at La Paix with a stenographer and Dr Rennie as a moderator to try to reach the root of their troubles. The transcript runs to 114 pages.10 They began to talk at 2.30 on Sunday. Darkness fell before they had finished wounding each other.

  Scott aimed the first shot. At seventeen Zelda was merely boy-crazy whereas at seventeen Scott wrote the Princeton Triangle shows. The whole equipment of his life was to be a novelist. He struggled. He sacrificed. He achieved. From age ten his life was a professional line towards writing. This made him artistically different from Zelda. ‘Her theory is that anything is possible, and that a girl has just got to get along, and so she has the right, therefore to destroy me completely in order to satisfy herself.’

  Zelda, appalled, interrupted: ‘Dr Rennie, that is completely unfair and it is not my theory. And I have never done anything against you, I have absolutely nothing to reproach myself with. And as far as destroying you is concerned I have considered you first in everything I have tried to do in my life.’

  Ignoring her, Scott dismissed her writing as a few ‘nice little sketches’ but as for being a novelist, ‘Did she have anything to say? No, she has not anything to say. She has certain experiences to report, but she has nothing essentially to say.’

  Defensive about his own eight-year publishing delay – swiftly reduced to ‘seven years – six years’ – he blamed Zelda. ‘Three of those years were directly because of a sickness of hers, and two years before that … for which she was partly responsible, in that she wanted to be a ballet dancer; and I backed her in that.’

  Zelda quietly interjected: ‘You mean you were drinking constantly … It is just one of the reasons why I wanted to be a ballet dancer, because I had nothing else.’

  Any mention of drink infuriated Scott. ‘She wanted to be a ballet dancer because when we went out to Hollywood … I got interested in a girl … [who] seemed to me to be more honest and direct than Zelda, who … was trying to be just an average flirt, standing in my way every way she could … I never drank till I was 16 years old. The first time I met her I saw she was a drunkard.’

  Scott accused Zelda of egotism, self-love, and feeling responsible only to herself: ‘the mentality of a very cheap prostitute’.

  The transcript does not read like a ‘discussion’ between two people trying to work out their problems but as a trial, with Zelda as defendant. Scott allotted himself the role of prosecuting lawyer, using terms like ‘admission’ or ‘I have the documents’. Zelda in defence was forced to say: ‘Dr Rennie, I will have to interrupt that’, then wait for Rennie’s agreement.

  Zelda explained Scott had restricted her mothering role. ‘He made it impossible for me to communicate with the child … [he refused] to take any of my judgments or opinions of people who were in charge of her … there was nothing in my life except my work.’ Later, when Scott said, ‘you know that Scotty relies on me utterly and completely,’ Zelda responded: ‘She has got nobody else to rely on. You alienated her affections from me years ago … [by] refusing to allow me authority on the job.’

  Zelda, appalled at Scott’s accusation that she had called out nearly a hundred doctors to administer morphine injections, pointed out he was lying. Scott said: ‘I am trying to tell the truth. What you say does not happen to come in my story.’ Zelda’s perceptive response, ‘Oh, I see, you say the truth is your story,’ was lost on her husband.

  The focus of their quarrel became Zelda’s novel. Scott considered it ‘plagiaristic, unwise in every way … should not have been written, because I have a certain public weight’. When Zelda asked: ‘Didn’t you want me to be a writer?’, first he said flatly ‘No’, then aggressively: ‘I do not care whether you were a writer or not, if you were any good … [but] You are a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer.’

  Quietly Zelda said: ‘You have told me that before.’ Though Scott admitted ‘You may be a good painter’, he invoked Hemingway to attack her fiction: ‘But as far as writing is concerned, if I told you the opinion that Ernest Hemingway had …’ Zelda did not care a damn what Hemingway thought. By now Scott was beyond curbing his arrogant vitriol. ‘If you want to write modest things, you may be able to turn out one collection of short stories … [but] you as compared to me is just like comparing – well, there is just not any comparison. I am a professional writer, with a huge following. I am the highest paid short story writer in the world.’

  Zelda, feelings concealed, said: ‘It seems to me that you are making a rather violent attack on a third-rate talent then … Why in the hell you are so jealous, I don’t know. If I thought that about anybody, I would not care what they wrote.’

  Scott’s violence stemmed from his belief that because he supported Zelda, her entire life belonged to him for literary purposes.

  ‘If you ruin me, what becomes of you?’ he shouted. ‘You could not sell a story … You could not
make 50 dollars on your writing … You are just a useless society woman.’

  ‘That’, said Zelda, ‘is what you want me to be.’ But what Scott wanted was more than that. He was after complete capitulation. ‘I want you to do what I say. That is exactly what I want you to do, and you know it.’ Zelda did know it. ‘I have done that often enough, it seems to me,’ she said.

  Scott fumed over the forty-thousand-word manuscript on Nijinsky and insanity she had been ‘sneakingly writing’ for months.11 ‘You have tried to take every sneaking advantage of me, always, working behind my back.’ To Zelda it was almost laughable. ‘Oh, Scott I cannot accept that. That is silly.’ Scott stubbornly said he didn’t care whether or not she accepted it. ‘You damned well do care, it seems to me.’

  Scott had indeed cared sufficiently to ‘sneakingly’ read parts of her new novel which he handed to Dr Rennie. ‘I have not opened it or read it, except just enough to check what you are writing about … I don’t want you … to write a novel about insanity, because you know there is certain psychiatric stuff in my books, and if you publish a book before me, or even at the same time, in which the subject of psychiatry is taken up, and people see “Fitzgerald”, why, that is Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, they read that, and that spoils the whole central point of being a novelist, which is being yourself. You pick up the crumbs I drop at the dinner table and stick them in books.’

  Zelda, icily calm, retorted: ‘you have picked up crumbs I have dropped for ten years, too.’ But Scott was reluctant to acknowledge that Zelda had been his muse or his own writing difficulties related to her decline in that role. He needed to possess everything they had shared. Maybe experiences Zelda had used creatively would have her magic touch or give him back his.