Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (20 page)

Zelda was a reckless driver with few automotive skills and defective vision. Scott was equally incompetent. During the July 1920 trip their broken axles, flat tyres, speeding fines and high garage bills
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gave Scott sufficient material for ‘The Cruise of The Rolling Junk’, a witty travel series. Zelda told Ludlow Fowler their inability to read maps meant Connecticut to Montgomery (1,000 miles as the crow flies) ‘took us a week … The joys of motoring are more or less fictitious.’
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In Virginia their matching white knickerbocker suits were considered so shocking that a good hotel initially refused them entry. By Greensboro, North Carolina, Zelda felt obliged to pull on a skirt over her knickerbockers.
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As they finally neared Montgomery, the floral Southern scents and the sight of young belles in organdie dresses filled Zelda with nostalgia. Scott understood: ‘Suddenly Zelda was crying, crying because things were the same and yet were not the same. It was for her faithlessness that she wept and for the faithlessness of time.’
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Predictably, they were locked out of the Sayres’ house as Zelda’s parents were away. Swiftly they drove to Livye Hart’s, where Peyton Mathis gawped at Zelda’s knickerbockers. ‘What’s happened to you?’ he asked. ‘You went away in long skirts and you’ve come back in short pants.’
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Though displaced in the North, Zelda found, like Thomas Wolfe who also left the South for New York City, that on returning there is a deep sense in which you
can’t
go home again.

In the Sayres’ temporary absence they stayed initially at the Country Club before moving on to Katharine Elsberry’s in prestigious Felder Avenue. Zelda wandered through Katharine’s garden amongst familiar camellias, magnolias and roses before characteristically monopolizing Katharine’s bathroom. Before breakfast Katharine heard Zelda call out: ‘Scott, what did you do with the toothbrush?’ Later Katharine told Zelda’s granddaughter: ‘Didn’t
have but one. I thought that was the sweetest, most romantic thing I had ever heard of.’
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Sharing a toothbrush was strangely untypical of Zelda, who was obsessive about cleanliness. ‘Zelda … looked like she’d always just had a bath,’ said one Montgomery friend.
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Bathrooms for Zelda were often a context to romance. Before she saw Katharine, she had already held court publicly from her own bath and preferred to have Scott nearby when she was bathing.
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Zelda believed that women who bathed constantly were morally pure, a symbolism borrowed by Scott for the novel he was writing about marriage.
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His heroine Gloria Gilbert cries: ‘I loathe women … They never seem clean to me – never – never.’
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When Gloria’s fiancé Anthony Patch asks why she is prepared to marry him, Gloria, modelled on Zelda, replies: ‘Well, because you’re so clean. You’re sort of blowy clean, like I am. There’s two sorts … one’s … clean like polished pans. You and I are clean like streams and winds. I can tell whenever I see a person whether he is clean, and if so, which kind of clean he is.’
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In 1920 Zelda felt most men were more likely than women to be ‘blowy clean’, which might be why she felt able to share Scott’s toothbrush.

On the Sayres’ return Zelda re-settled into her baby role, noticing Scott’s coolness towards her parents. Scott felt Zelda’s home town no longer appreciated him, while her parents still saw him as unreliable. Feeling ill at ease in Montgomery, after only two weeks they sold the broken-down Marmon and departed by train. Zelda, sad to leave her parents, persuaded them to visit Westport later.

Scott returned North determined to work seriously on his novel, for which he had already signed a contract with
Metropolitan
Magazine
for serialization. He told Harold Ober he would deliver the manuscript by October.

In mid-August Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler: ‘Scott’s hot in the midst of a new novel and Westport is unendurably dull but you and I might be able to amuse ourselves – and both of us want to see you dreadfully.’
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Though Zelda told Ludlow how glad she was to see her parents when they visited that month, they were less happy. Collected from New York by Zelda and Scott, they discovered two drunken friends of Scott’s asleep in the hammock who arose and danced drunkenly at the dinner table. Zelda was forced to borrow $20 from her mother to send them to a roadhouse. To her dismay they returned at 3 a.m. whereupon Scott began drinking gin and tomato juice with them. When Zelda appeared the kitchen was in a shambles; she tried to
remove the gin bottle from Scott, he fended her off and her face caught in the swinging door. Her nose bled and her eyes swelled up. At breakfast when her parents saw her the Judge was stony with disapproval.

Matters worsened when the Sayres, having expected Zelda and Clothilde – who lived nearby in Tarrytown – to visit each other regularly, discovered Zelda had not seen her sister since Clothilde had borrowed Zelda’s new pigskin suitcase to carry away her baby’s wet diapers.
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Zelda, who even as a child had never wanted to share her toys with her siblings, was disproportionately annoyed. But there were also underlying reasons for the sisters’ estrangement: Clothilde was still seething over Scott’s treatment of the Sayres at the wedding, while the Fitzgeralds were angry that she had subsequently reprimanded them for overspending.

When the Sayres left in late August, a week earlier than planned, to visit their ‘good’ daughter, Zelda realized ‘she hadn’t been absolutely sure of how to go about anything since her marriage had precluded the Judge’s resented direction’.
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But despite the Judge’s disapproval, Zelda told Sara Mayfield she was ‘desolate’ at their departure.
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Scott renewed serious work on his novel in the Wakeman cottage while Zelda instigated a whirlwind social life in New York. First they saw Bunny Wilson and John Peale Bishop, who both still coveted the poet Edna St Vincent Millay. Edna was a brilliant, beautiful woman around whom clever men flocked but who, unlike Zelda, had learnt to escape from romantic messes by using her intellect. Whilst being courted by Wilson and Bishop, she carefully ensured they printed her poems in
Vanity
Fair.
The two men were not above giving public displays of three-cornered heavy petting with Millay, who complained that her two ‘choir boys of Hell’ managed to maintain their joint affair with her without splitting up their own friendship. Sober observers noted that when petting on a couch Wilson, despite his Puritan rearing, ‘was assigned the lower regions of the poet, while Bishop was entrusted with the top half’.
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Edna and Zelda shared the quality of elusiveness, forceful personalities and serious natures beneath their wild frivolity. But when they met in 1920 Edna, already focused on her writing, drew male professional admiration, a possible obstacle to friendship with Zelda.

Though Bishop was attracted to the volcanic Millay, as a Southern aristocrat it was Zelda rather than Edna whom he understood. Bishop’s Southern background ensured he was never entirely at home in New York, but merely masked his insecurities by witty discourse, as did Zelda.
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In St Paul in 1919 Scott had read his work aloud to Donald Ogden Stewart, who, newly arrived in Manhattan, engaged Zelda with his wit. Scott introduced him to Wilson at
Vanity
Fair,
where Stewart was subsequently offered work.
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Scott’s introduction of one friend to another who might prove useful professionally was characteristically generous.
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That season in New York Zelda and Scott met most of the established literati: popular novelist Edna Ferber (who later numbered Fitzgerald amongst her ‘Ten Dullest Authors’ in a
Vanity
Fair
article);
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critic Burton Rascoe, who had given
This
Side
of
Paradise
an excellent review in the
Chicago
Daily
Tribune
;
James Branch Cabell, author of
Jurgens
and in 1920 among the most famous of living American novelists, with whom Scott entered into a correspondence. They also met 44-year-old Sherwood Anderson, who like Scott had moved from advertising to acclaimed fiction which exposed the damaging passions that underlay outwardly ordinary Americans.
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A friend of Anderson’s, Theodore Dreiser, eminent author of
Sister
Carrie,
was giving a quiet publication party for a recent novel.
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Though Dreiser was another of Scott’s heroes, Anderson couldn’t procure him an invitation so the Fitzgeralds gatecrashed the party at St Luke’s Place. Scott, tipsy, waving a bottle of champagne, sang out: ‘Mr Dreiser, my name is Fitzgerald. I have always got a great kick out of your works.’ Dreiser curtly put the bottle and his disorderly guest on ice.
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Scott and Zelda kept up this constant round of party-going even though Scott told a journalist: ‘Parties are a form of suicide. I love them but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves’.
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They met members of the Round Table, known as the Vicious Circle, the infamous weekday lunch club for irreverent humorists including Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, dramatic critic of
The
World.
The Fitzgeralds frequented their gatherings at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street.
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Sherwood and Kaufman were writing a string of successful musical comedies, and Tallulah Bankhead was one actress associated with the group.

When Parker got fired from
Vanity
Fair
for a contentious dramatic review her colleagues Benchley and Sherwood had resigned in protest. The vacancy was filled by Edmund Wilson, the solitary son of a moody melancholic lawyer father and deaf mother, who had turned to books for comfort from his oppressive background. Wilson saw the group as shallow and incestuous because they had
all read the same children’s books and ‘all came from the suburbs and “provinces’”
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, which of course enabled them successfully to promote each other’s literary reputations. Their caustic queen, Dorothy Parker, exemplified their tone of debunking bitchy wit which mocked their own or other people’s provincial upbringings.

Parker’s first glimpse of the Fitzgeralds was the now legendary one of Zelda riding on the hood of a taxi while Scott hung on to the roof. Parker, seven years older than Zelda, was a talented satirist whose barbed aphorisms delighted New York journalists. A short-story writer, playwright and essayist, her lasting work has been her light verse which cleverly mocked at failure, loneliness and despair, themes currently engaging Fitzgerald’s imagination. Parker said that after glimpsing the zany honeymoon pair she was introduced to them by Robert Sherwood. But Wilson claimed that
he
was the first to arrange a meeting because Parker, who had already met Scott briefly in 1919,
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‘was beglamoured by the idea of Scott Fitzgerald’.
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 Wilson said he arranged dinner at the Algonquin where they all ‘sat at one of those Algonquin tables, too narrow to have anyone across from you, so that one sat on a bench with one’s back to the wall’, and Parker quipped: ‘This looks like a road company of the Last Supper.’
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Wilson found Dorothy ‘fairly pretty’ but with a vulgarity which came from using too much perfume,
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less to his taste than Zelda, whom no one ever considered vulgar. Scott however was flattered by Parker, three years his senior. He did not mind her lethal drama reviews in
Vanity
Fair
or her habit of warmly greeting presumed friends then later making acid comments about them. He did, however, record a joke about someone asking whether Parker had injured anyone that day. The answer was: ‘No, but don’t remind her. Maybe she hasn’t done her bad deed for the day.’
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Though Parker was later kind to Zelda, in general she had no use for dependent women. ‘Her view of Zelda,’ said Parker’s biographer Marion Meade, ‘formed in 1920 … was negative – and I don’t believe she ever changed her mind … She was also put off by Zelda’s foreign [Southern] accent which to a rabid Manhattan chauvinist meant the person must be a hillbilly.’
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Parker also disliked Zelda’s looks: ‘I never thought she was beautiful … candy box face and a little bow mouth … something petulant about her. If she didn’t like something she sulked.’
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Parker’s poisonous wit caught only part of Zelda’s personality. Momentarily Zelda
would
sulk, as she did when she noticed the fulsome attention Parker paid to Scott, but then with a strange shift
of direction she would lose interest in what had gripped her and a remote evasiveness would subsume the petulance.

After the summer Scott wished to write seriously for the theatre, so the Fitzgeralds began to see more of playwrights Lillian Hellman and Charles MacArthur (a former journalist), film and stage actresses Lillian Gish (a year older than Zelda) and Helen Hayes (Zelda’s age), and screenwriter Anita Loos (born 1893), who in 1925 would write
Gentlemen
Prefer
Blondes.
Gish, more positive than Parker about Zelda, said: ‘They were both so beautiful, so blond, so clean and clear – And drinking strait whiskey out of tall tumblers … Zelda could do outlandish things – say anything. It was never offensive when Zelda did it, as you felt she couldn’t help it, and was not doing it for effect.’
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Zelda’s particular friend was rough-haired Carl Van Vechten, then in his forties, a hulking, highly successful novelist, critic and photographer. The writer Djuna Barnes told Edmund Wilson she thought Carl was a ‘prissy’ literary name-dropper,
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but Zelda found Carl a ‘divine’ party host. Despite his devoted marriage to Russian actress Fania Marinoff, Carl had several well-established homosexual relationships, which possibly accounted for Zelda’s lasting non-flirtatious friendship with him. ‘Our relations were very impersonal,’ she said years later, ‘but Carl was a fine friend.’
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