Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (33 page)

Italy, during winter 1924 and spring 1925, proved damaging for Zelda’s health but surprisingly beneficial for her awakening creative spirit. In November their first hotel, Rome’s Quirinal, was rated fetid by Zelda: ‘The sitting rooms are hermetically sealed and palms conceal the way to open the windows. Middle-aged English doze in the stale air.’ Rome itself was a city of ‘jonquils and beggars’.
1

Her letter to Max Perkins acidly suggested that Roman ruins were better in France.
2
Her next note thanked him for sending Galsworthy’s
The
White
Monkey,
then described Rome’s comic-opera streets ‘jammed with men in sky-blue cloaks with faces like dentists and under-nourished priests and students. I do think, since the Church largely rests on a theatrical basis, that they should cast their parts better.’
3
Her antipathy to Rome intensified as she fell ill. Abortions frequently impair the ability to conceive and this appears to have happened to Zelda. In late 1924 she had an operation to help her conceive. It infected her stomach and ovaries and damaged her reproductive organs. As she later sadly recalled: ‘Dr Gros said there was no use trying to save my ovaries. I was always sick and having picqures [injections].’
4
After this operation Zelda was plagued with painful attacks of colitis throughout 1925. More important, there seemed little hope of more children.

There were other tensions. She and Scott had not resolved their difficulties following the Jozan conflict. Scott acknowledged in his November Ledger there was still ‘ill feeling with Zelda’, exacerbated by his nervous state following months of work on
Gatsby.
Zelda knew her advice would be expected at the proof stage. Though stimulated by being part of Scott’s literary progress, she needed an independent
public
achievement separate from Scott – to recover the dynamic she had lost since leaving Alabama. This desire had acted as an undercurrent to the
private
Jozan romance. Now she felt more confident.

Zelda’s ‘confidence’ was a complex issue. In Montgomery she did
exactly what she wanted and was applauded for brains, beauty, physical prowess. She wrote her own lines and audiences loved them. In New York, Minnesota, Paris and on the Riviera, Scott wrote the script, she acted it. She played the arrogant flapper of his fiction, the famous author’s proud wife. She still radiated assurance but Scott exuded authority.

If she was to achieve parity it must come from an area that deeply interested her. Honoria Murphy and Sara Mayfield always said Zelda had a lifelong passion for painting,
5
and Zelda’s time in France with the Murphys, watching international artists design scenery for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, mixing with Picasso, Braque and Léger, had increased her appreciation of some of the finest art forms then available. She knew Gerald had leapt from dilettante artist to professional painter. She knew Sara, who like herself had leisure and a nanny, had taken painting lessons from the Russian émigrée Natalia Goncharova, and Goncharova’s strong shapes and flamboyant colours appealed to Zelda. Honoria Murphy believed her parents had a strong influence on Zelda’s decision to formalize her interest in art.

The Fitzgeralds moved to the less fashionable Hôtel des Princes near Piazza di Spagna where, according to Zelda’s article on hotel life, they lived on Bel Paese cheese and Corvo wine and suffered damp sheets.
6
For these privileges they paid $525 a month for full board for three, including wine and service. The $7,000 the Fitzgeralds had brought to France had gone before they moved to Rome, so Scott telegraphed Perkins for a $750 advance, making his debt to Scribner’s $5,000.

Financial imperatives meant Scott speedily wrote more short stories while Zelda trawled the city. ‘It was exciting being lost between centuries in the Roman dusk and taking your sense of direction from the Coliseum.’
7

Before the
Gatsby
proofs arrived, Perkins wrote on 20 November praising the novel but suggesting Gatsby’s character was ‘somewhat vague’.
8
Scott acknowledged on 1 December that ‘Zelda also thought I was a little out of key’.
9
On 20 December Scott admitted to Max that Gatsby was vague because he himself hadn’t known what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in. Zelda, he said, had been instrumental in putting this right. ‘After having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child.’
10

The subsequent rewriting exhausted Scott, so to calm him Zelda read aloud from Will James’s novel
Cowboys
North
and
South. 
‘Zelda’s been reading me the cowboy book aloud to spare my mind + I love it – tho I think he learned the American language from Ring rather than from his own ear.’
11
Ring Lardner’s racy idioms were one of the characteristics which had endeared him to Zelda.

Despite Scott’s reluctance to re-embark on ‘short stories for money (I now get $2000.00 a story but I hate worse than hell to do them)’
12
he wrote the bulk of three new ones. ‘Love in the Night’, published in the
Saturday
Evening
Post
in March 1925, employed an exotic Riviera setting, a forerunner for the backdrop to
Tender
Is
The
Night,
‘Not in the Guidebook’ and ‘The Adjuster’, also stories of marital discord, reflected the aftermath of the Jozan incident.
13

In ‘Not in the Guidebook’ the young, spoilt, moneyed wife, modelled on Zelda, has her inheritance stolen by her husband who deserts her in France. Charles Hemple, the hero of ‘The Adjuster,’ has a nervous breakdown attempting to please Louella,
his
spoilt discontented wife. Confronted with her invalided husband, Louella is given instructions by a mysterious Dr Moon which read like a lecture from Scott to Zelda. ‘We make an agreement with children that they can sit in the audience without helping to make the play,’ he said, ‘but if they still sit in the audience after they’re grown, somebody’s got to work double time for them so that they can enjoy the light and glitter of the world.’
14
As Zelda read all Scott’s fiction she would have absorbed the message.

While Zelda was still suffering severe abdominal pains, Scott caught influenza and his drinking escalated. One evening, exploring the nightlife with Zelda, he became embroiled in a drunken row with some cab drivers who demanded an extortionate 100 lire to take them home. Scott struck out and knocked down a plain-clothes police officer who intervened. His version, colourfully rewritten for
Tender
Is
The
Night,
was that two
carabinieri
beat him up as they hustled him off to jail. Zelda, aided by $100 and the US Consulate, freed him the next day. She was accompanied by journalist Howard Coxe, a Princeton graduate who had become attentive towards her. Scott, slow to recover from illness and from his humiliation, resented Coxe’s attentions towards Zelda.

Zelda had met Coxe when an American movie crew, filming
Ben
Hur
in Rome, had invited the Fitzgeralds and several journalists to join the movie’s social life. Scott’s professional interest in Hollywood scriptwriting was aroused, as was his interest in the film’s young star, Carmel Myers, daughter of a San Francisco rabbi. Scott openly flirted with Carmel, whose film career had started in 1916 as the protégée of D. W. Griffith and who subsequently starred
as a vamp with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and John Barrymore. Scott saw her immediately as ‘the most exquisite thing I have met yet … as nice as she is beautiful’, as he wrote about her later. Perhaps in retaliation, Zelda allowed Coxe his inconsequential but gallant gestures. At the movie company’s Christmas Ball Zelda, feeling ill again, asked Coxe to take her home, but made her indifference clear. This rejection might account for Coxe’s extraordinary gaffe in front of Scott in a bar. Scott, about to return to their hotel with a Christmas present for Scottie, heard Coxe boast to the assembled drinkers: ‘I could sleep with Zelda any time I wanted to.’ Still recovering from the Jozan incident, Scott was enraged. When Coxe told Wilson about it later, Wilson wrote reflectively: ‘Afterward [Coxe] couldn’t imagine what on earth had made him [say that], felt terribly about it … Actually – my own comment – Zelda was not so loose nor Howard so dangerous as this implied. He was envious of Scott … the drinks had brought this to the surface.’
15

Scott’s December 1924 Ledger reported before the movie party ‘depression’, after the movie party a ‘row in café’, an ‘Xmas row’ and a ‘reconciliation’ followed by a period on the water wagon in order to be sober for revising the
Gatsby
proofs.

This Christmas, always a significant celebration for them, they had a glittering tree in their hotel room hung with silver bells.
16
But they expected too much from Christmas, tried too hard, drank too much, destroyed their festivities.

In January 1925 Scott as well as Zelda was sick but despite his influenza he managed the final revisions to
Gatsby
which would be published in April. He had already converted a discarded portion of
Gatsby
’s
opening into ‘Absolution’, a story which dealt sensitively with the sensuous experiences of an imaginative boy, Rudolph Miller, who lies in the confessional to Father Schwartz, an ageing priest, who then faces his own sexual temptations.
17

‘Absolution’ had been published the previous June by Mencken and Nathan in their newly founded
American
Mercury.
Sara Haardt, who had accompanied Mencken to the launch party after her recovery from pleurisy and bronchitis,
18
was suddenly taken seriously ill with tuberculosis. While Zelda battled with ovarian attacks, Sara was forced to give up her doctorate and spend most of 1924 isolated in Baltimore’s Maple Heights Sanitarium. Her illness served to increase Mencken’s devotion and when Peyton Mathis, one of the Gold Dust Twins, returned enthusiastically to wooing Sara, Mencken competitively stepped up his courtship. Romantic feelings had not stopped Mencken earlier from rejecting Sara’s story,
‘Miss Rebecca’, for
The
Smart
Set
on the ‘dubious ground’ that it dealt with old maids. Editors, he said, were tired of old maids and their moonings. However one prestigious female editor, Emily Clark, immediately accepted it for
The
Reviewer.
19
Mencken and other male critics at that time had a specific analytical approach to good fiction which favoured writers like Scott and penalized writers like Sara and Zelda. To meet standards of Northern male literary gurus, fiction had to be simultaneously a psalm and a criticism of life. Zelda and Sara with their shared Southern background wrote fiction that more often probed Southern passions and resentments through description and surface tracings; that revealed convoluted emotional relationships through appearances rather than through analysis.

During summer 1925 both Zelda and Sara had work published. In June, Zelda’s ‘Our Own Movie Queen’ (written in November 1923) appeared in the
Chicago
Sunday
Tribune.
In September, Mencken
did
publish Sara’s ‘Alabama’ and
did
accept her story ‘Mendelian Dominant’ for the
American
Mercury,
both written whilst she was very ill in Montgomery. Yet again Sara’s work appeared under her own name. Yet again Zelda’s appeared under her husband’s name.

During 1924, nineteen-year-old Sara Mayfield married the other Gold Dust Twin, John Sellers. Zelda’s attitude towards Sellers, curiously in view of his abusive behaviour, had a fierce push-and-pull intensity. She never entirely lost interest in Sellers. When she met young Sara in Paris a few years later her first question was: ‘What’s going on at home? Tell me about John Sellers.’ Sara explained that in 1924 she hadn’t known that Sellers, like Scott, drank heavily. ‘I married him – in the time of my innocence … and divorced him when I came of age.’
20
In 1924 Sara’s innocence shielded her from the problem of Sellers’ drinking while Zelda, no longer innocent, daily faced Scott’s alcoholism.

Scott’s drinking and Zelda’s fragile health caused winter in the Holy City to turn sour. In January 1925 they took excursions to Tivoli, Frascati and Naples, then in February, with Zelda still sick,
21
they decided to flee to sunny Capri. They took a suite in the Tiberio Palace high on a hill overlooking the sea. The sun shone, their hopes were high, but frequent rows spoilt much of their two months’ stay. Scott wrote to Bishop:

After five weeks in bed with her abdominal infection, Zelda recovered and began daily climbs up to the ‘scalloped … high white hotel’ through ‘devious dark alleys that house[d] the island’s Rembrandt butcher shops and bakeries’.
23
Her solitary walks were broken by Scott’s Aunt Annabel, who arrived in Capri to spend time with them.
24

Scott finally met his former literary idol Compton Mackenzie, whose influence on his work according to Wilson ‘can’t be over-estimated’ and whose influence on Zelda’s style, also according to Wilson, was considerable.
25
Scott told Bishop that the author of the much-admired
Sinister
Street
was merely polite, handsome and pleasantly monotonous. Scott felt Mackenzie had been wrecked by the war in the way Wells had been. Yet Mackenzie appeared not to be aware his work had degenerated.