Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (32 page)

Jozan himself went even further than denying the divorce confrontation: he emphatically denied having an affair with Zelda. He told Sara Mayfield firmly that Zelda had merely flirted with him to make Scott jealous, and that Zelda’s account of their romance in
Save
Me
The
Waltz
was an almost exact report of what happened in St Raphaël – a mere summer flirtation, romantic, decorous and slightly comic.
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He also told Nancy Milford that he was at no time involved in any scenes between the Fitzgeralds. He was unaware that Zelda was
being forced to make choices, if indeed she was. He left the Riviera without knowing what had passed between Zelda and Scott. He never saw either of them again. ‘They both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination.’
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This seems the most accurate analysis. The forgotten tale of the fallen Montgomery aviator who had died for love of Zelda was revived once more with a Riviera setting. It provided both Fitzgeralds with fictional material, heightening their anecdotal performances.

Hemingway recalls Scott telling several versions. The first version Hemingway recalled was a genuinely moving story of Zelda falling in love with a French aviator. The later versions, according to Hemingway, were less sad and seemed to be created as useful fictional material. Hemingway’s first wife Hadley, a more unbiased source with reference to Zelda, recalls their duo-performance: ‘It was one of their acts. I remember Zelda’s beautiful face becoming very, very solemn, and she would say how he had loved her and how hopeless it had been and then how he had committed suicide. Scott would stand next to her looking very pale and distressed and sharing every minute of it.’
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Sara Mayfield described this alleged suicide as ‘an absurd invention’. The tragic hero stood before her in the flesh, explaining that far from dying, he had held a long distinguished career in the French Navy; served in Indochina in his youth; commanded a flotilla at Dunkirk after the outbreak of World War Two; subsequently had been captured and interned by the Germans. On release he had returned to service, in 1952 becoming Vice Admiral of the French fleet in command of France’s Far East naval forces. Far from collapsing into suicidal depression due to his failed romance he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Grand Croix du Mérite de l’Ordre de Malte, the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, and had retired in 1960 as full Admiral to live splendidly in Paris, where he read the Fitzgeralds’ fabrications about his lost youth.
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The reason why Scott fictionalized and heightened the romance to include these fabrications was that he was then able to share it, thus once more take over an important piece of Zelda’s life. That she allowed him to do so illustrates her intense emotional dependency on him. As she says later: ‘Then Janno grew indomitably loyal and devoted to Jacob … Jacob somehow was the center of the whole business.’
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Though Scott recovered from the blow to his ego and Zelda from the blow to her heart by using the incident as material, neither of them ever recovered completely. The Murphys recalled, albeit forty years later, an alleged suicide attempt of Zelda’s. Gerald said that around three or four o’clock one morning Scott banged at their door having driven miles. He was trembling, green and carrying a candle. He said Zelda had taken an overdose. They returned with him and Sara walked Zelda backwards and forwards to keep her awake.
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If this suicide attempt
did
happen that year it would have taken place at the point Scott wrote ‘Zelda and I close together’, and therefore would challenge the idea of reconciliation and reinterpret how deeply Zelda was affected. But whether it
did
take place in 1924 is open to question. Mayfield debunked as ‘equally incredible’ the idea that Scott had driven the 52 kilometres from St Raphaël before dawn to get help from the Murphys.
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Amanda Vaill, the Murphys’ biographer, tries to make sense of it by suggesting that the incident might have occurred on a night when the Fitzgeralds were actually staying at the hotel.
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However, set against all such speculations is the fact that Scott himself does
not
mention Zelda taking an overdose that year in his Ledger. This biographer believes the Murphys may have misremembered the date, for it is the
following
August (1925) that Scott’s Ledger entry says ‘Zelda drugged’. Honoria Murphy in an interview with this author said it was not impossible that her father Gerald had got the year wrong because so many Fitzgerald anecdotes had been overlaid with newer versions and memories.
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It is quite possible that Scott was less affected by the Jozan incident than has been supposed. In his article ‘How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year’ written for the
Saturday
Evening
Post
during the crisis,
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he writes amusingly about his family relaxing on the Riviera and concludes with a description of the visit of René and Bobbé to the villa. Scott dwells affectionately on their romantic white uniforms growing dimmer ‘as the more the liquid dark comes down, until they … will seem to take an essential and indivisible part in the beauty of this proud gay land’. Although Scott doesn’t mention Jozan, it is certainly
not
the description of an emotionally wrecked betrayed husband. Or if it is, then Scott’s supremely professional style could be read as unnervingly cool.
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Few of Scott’s biographers however seem willing to accept that the ‘big affair’ was nothing more than a summer flirtation. One, adamantly opposed to any such idea, assumes Zelda guilty of
‘infidelity’ with its ‘agonizing aftermath’. He states that ‘Jozan, using his French charm … invited Zelda to his apartment and seduced her.’ He goes further and fantasizes that Jozan ‘found Zelda a delightful lover’.
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Bold and dramatic words but founded on sand. There is
no
concrete evidence that Zelda slept with Jozan. What we do know is that for the morbidly jealous Scott, who still had mixed-up Irish Catholic monogamous feelings for Zelda, the fact that she was entertaining a
desire
to commit adultery would be almost as much a sin as actually committing adultery. This is borne out in Zelda’s
Caesar’s
Things
where Janno quotes from the Bible: ‘“He who looketh on a woman to lust after hath committed adultery with her in his heart already” – in his heart already – in his heart already –.’ Janno says: ‘Adultery was adultery and it would have been impossible for her to love two men at once, to give herself to simultaneous intimacies.’
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More significant is the fact that for the first time in their marriage Zelda seriously took away her attention from Scott. That he more often than not was focused on his writing and sometimes on other women was not the point. He expected her to focus on him and his work. To remove her attention could be more important than to remove her body. It was enough of a blow to an egotistic writer to make him write: ‘That September 1924, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.’
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In a later letter Zelda wrote to Scott: ‘Then there was Josen and you were justifiably angry.’
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She too misspelled her supposed lover’s name. The fact that neither Scott nor Zelda ever managed to spell the name of the alleged adulterer was probably due to their poor literacy skills, but it would be a neat touch if it was also a psychological indication of their marital faithfulness.

The crisis behind them, they placidly renewed work on Scott’s novel, telling Max: ‘Zelda + I are contemplating a careful revision after a week’s complete rest.’
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On 25 October Scott told Ober that he was posting
The
Great
Gatsby
for serialization. Two days later he sent a copy to Max, writing: ‘I think that at last I’ve done something really my own.’ He wanted to call the novel
Trimalchio
in
West
Egg
or
Gold-hatted
Gatsby
or
The
High-bouncing
Lover
but Zelda plumped for
The
Great
Gatsby
and Scott took her advice.

Zelda, who had been reading Henry James’s
Roderick
Hudson,
decided they should winter in Rome followed by a trip to Capri. During 1924 she recognized that acting as Scott’s editorial assistant was insufficient to satisfy her. Her Southern upbringing had led her initially towards the lure of an alternative lover; however, when this
failed, the models of hardworking artists with whom they now associated finally struck a chord. By 1925 she would be published again, though not in her own name, and she would take her first painting lessons and her first ballet lessons.
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