Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (36 page)

At the first sight of Zelda, Hemingway behaved no differently from many of Scott’s male friends. He found Mrs Fitzgerald, the woman ‘worth seeing’, intensely physically attractive.

During the first lunch Ernest and Hadley Hemingway shared with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway displayed his attraction to Zelda.
1
It was a gloomy lunch party which took place soon after Scott and Hemingway’s first meeting, supposedly at the Fitzgeralds’ ornate, badly furnished apartment, according to Sara Mayfield a ‘depressing flat over a brasserie … a fifth-floor walk-up, with strange purple-and-gold wallpaper’.
2
In fact, documentation shows the famous lunch took place not at the Fitzgeralds’ curious apartment but at the Hemingways’ humble flat.
3
Perhaps it was its humble location that made the inventive Ernest change it to the Fitzgeralds’ superior one!

Zelda remembers an ornamental turtle on the lunch table brimming with white violets. Ernest remembers Zelda. But exactly what he remembers depends on which of his versions you read.

In his earliest manuscript version of that lunch he gives this picture of Zelda: ‘very beautiful and … tanned a lovely gold color and her hair was a beautiful dark gold and she was very friendly. Her hawk’s eyes were clear and calm.’ Her skin is smooth and tawny, her legs light and long as ‘nigger legs’, she is not drunk nor is she jealous of Scott’s work. Though Hemingway sees her as spoilt and as saying curious things he admits to an erotic dream about her the following night. ‘The next time I saw her I told her that and she was pleased. That was the first and last time we ever had anything in common.’
4

Maybe. Or maybe not. There is counter-evidence which shows that at the start of the two couples’ friendship, when Hemingway writes to Scott he regularly sends affectionate greetings to Zelda: ‘And how is Zelda?’, ‘Best love to Zelda’ and similarly pleasant if perfunctory remarks.
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When Zelda was sick, Hemingway demonstrated concern.
He wrote to Scott that he understood how hard pain was and what a shame it was for Zelda to be ill.

Hemingway during this short early period was confident that Zelda as well as Scott would be fascinated by him. But Zelda, who often responded flirtatiously to male interest, did not respond to Hemingway.

Far from it. Cynical about Hemingway’s display of aggressive manliness, she thought Scott’s romantic admiration for his hard-boiled manner demeaning. Attracted to deferential, civilized, more polished men, Zelda felt menaced by Hemingway’s brutish behaviour. Seeing his influence as a threat to her marriage, she shrewdly queried Ernest’s sexual prowess. First she remarked to Gerald: ‘Nobody is as male as all that!’ Then she taunted Hemingway to his face: ‘No one is as masculine as you pretend to be.’
6
She told Sara Mayfield and wrote to Perkins that Ernest was ‘a sort of materialist mystic’,
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rather than a gentleman in their Southern sense. Indeed Hemingway was not a gentleman in any sense. Mayfield remembers Ernest derided polite conversation between men as ‘damn women’s talk’. His method of commending one male friend to another was to announce: ‘You’ll like him – he’s tough.’ Zelda told Sara this was suspicious camouflage, that beneath Hemingway’s integrity as a writer there was base metal in the man that never rang true. She felt that under Ernest’s well-publicized ‘healthy’ interest in sports, tippling and war, there was ‘a morbid preoccupation with offbeat sex and the sadism and necrophilia that go with it’ which she found ‘repugnant’.
8

One afternoon at the Deux Magots café Sara listened to the Fitzgeralds arguing about Hemingway. Scott reprimanded Zelda for insulting Hemingway. Zelda retorted: ‘“I didn’t insult him. I just said he was a phony.”’

Sara, as amazed by the word ‘phony’ as Gerald had been at the word ‘bogus’, repeated incredulously to Zelda: ‘“A phony? What makes you say that?”

‘“She’s jealous,” Scott said.’
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If Zelda was jealous, Hemingway was certainly vindictive.

In his later published version of
A
Moveable
Feast,
Hemingway carefully contrives to rewrite that first lunch scene in the purple-and-gold wallpapered apartment to put both Zelda and Scottie in a very bad light. Three-year-old Scottie is portrayed with a strong Cockney accent acquired from an English nanny. Zelda is hung over with a drawn face, tired eyes, suffering a poor permanent wave which has ruined her ‘beautiful dark blond hair’. Hemingway
focuses on how Zelda encourages Scott to drink, calls him ‘kill-joy’ and ‘spoilsport’ when he demurs and smiles smugly as he drinks so much he will be unable to write later.
10

Neither account – the version portraying Zelda as dissipated and manipulative, nor the version in which she is erotic and dreamworthy – is entirely to be trusted. But the rewriting to Zelda’s detri ment in that late account in
A
Moveable
Feast
after her death was the last in a long series of attacks which continued throughout her life.

Hemingway fired off the first of his charges in 1925.

Zelda was too independent. She was jealous of Scott’s work. She didn’t put Scott and his writing first. She encouraged Scott’s
drinking
to further destroy his talents. Her greed was behind Scott’s decision to devote more time to best-selling stories, less to literature. As for their luxuriant lifestyle (for which Hemingway held her responsible), it was shamefully brash compared with his and Hadley’s. Hemingway paused. Breathed. Took aim again. This time he spotted signs of a lesbian orientation, well if not
that,
or not
that
quite
yet,
Zelda certainly mixed with women who mixed with women. Worst of all, Hemingway noticed definite signs of instability.

Legend suggests that on first meeting Zelda, Hemingway drew Scott aside and said brutally: ‘She’s crazy,’ shocking Scott deeply.
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Hadley, when questioned, had no memory of Ernest saying this though it is possible that Ernest spoke out of her hearing. Hemingway still insisted in conversations with Scott as late as 1934 that he had known in 1925 that Zelda was unstable. ‘I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course, you’re a rummy.’
12

During 1925, Hemingway ensured Zelda heard his tales of her supposed craziness. Zelda said angrily to Scott in front of Sara Mayfield: ‘He [Hemingway] thinks I’m crazy and says so. Why shouldn’t I say anything I choose to about him?’ To which Scott replied that if she said scandalous things about his big new friend she
was
crazy.
13

The following year on the Riviera, when Zelda said ironically: ‘Ernest, don’t you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?’, Hemingway saw this as confirmation of Zelda’s insanity.
14
Neither Hemingway nor his biographers recognized Zelda’s remark as typically idiosyncratic. In this case she repeated it: Gerald Murphy also recalls her saying, ‘Don’t you think that Al Jolson is just like Christ?’ Gerald did not push Zelda further as other people were present, but he said such startling remarks ‘gave her conversation a freshness
and a certain edge that was part of her charm’. Honoria Murphy said that Gerald considered neither Hemingway nor Scott ever fathomed Zelda’s complexity: ‘her mind operated in a different way from other friends, she quite simply made different connections.’
15

Sara Murphy thought that though Zelda’s ‘wit was sometimes barbed, it derived from the surprise of incongruity and from searching, humorous observation’.
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Many of the Fitzgeralds’ friends did not believe Hemingway’s canards. They told Arthur Mizener, Scott’s first biographer, that Zelda saw more sanely than Scott how seriously their lives were getting out of hand. During 1925–6 Zelda had more stability than Scott and a greater strength of character to resist dissipation. Mizener suggested: ‘A good deal of injustice has certainly been done to the Zelda of the twenties because she later went insane and it is difficult not to let the knowledge that she did so affect one’s view of what she was like before 1930.’
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Some of the reasons for Hemingway’s focus on these particular ‘flaws’ in Zelda can be seen in his childhood, early manhood and in his choice of marriage partner and style of marriage.

Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, on 21 July 1899, the second of six children. Like Scott he had a dominant mother and a father given to depression, who was passive with his wife but strict with his children, all of whom were regularly spanked. Dr Clarence Hemingway was an outdoor person who taught his children to hunt and fish. Strong-willed Grace Hall, Ernest’s mother, was an indoor person, musical, artistic, determined to remain independent. A good soprano, she worked with a famous voice coach, auditioned for the Met and when married continued to give singing lessons, earning ten times more than her husband earned as a doctor. Grace treated her two first-born, daughter Marcelline and son Ernest, in an unusual manner that had a lasting effect on Ernest – and on his relationship to Zelda. Grace dressed them like female twins, in gingham dresses or fluffy lace tucked frocks with picture hats. She had their hair cut similarly in a Dutch dolly style with bangs across the forehead hanging prettily below the ears. Ernest wore dresses until he entered kindergarten, twice as long as any contemporary boy might have been attired in female garb. Moreover no boys in that period had girls’ haircuts as well as girls’ clothes.
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Both Ernest and Marcelline felt scarred by their father’s mental illness and their mother’s intimate companionship with Ruth Arnold, Grace’s former favourite pupil, who was only three years
older than Marcelline and had long lodged with the family. As she and Clarence became estranged, Grace decided to use an inheritance to build a cottage a mile away from the family summer residence. Ruth visited there constantly after Dr Hemingway forbade her to enter his family home. Dr Hemingway began to act ‘insane on the subject’ of Ruth, just as Ernest would begin to act insane on the subject of Zelda.
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Ernest consistently depicted his mother as a villain in fiction and letters, but it seems Grace’s greatest crimes were her artistic independence and her unapologetic unwillingness to become an ordinary housewife.
20
In this she was very like Zelda.

During the 1920s Ernest’s hatred of his mother had intensified. He felt she had emasculated his father and later felt she drove him to his suicide in 1928, after which young Ruth moved in to live with Grace.
21
Incensed, Ernest would then forbid his sons to visit his mother on the grounds that she was ‘androgynous’.

So by the time Zelda encountered Hemingway his hostility to domineering women, his anxieties about mental instability and his aggression towards lesbianism were strongly formed. All he needed was a target.

Towards male homosexuals he was less aggressive than intensely curious, as Scott was. Gerald Murphy noticed Hemingway would frequently say: ‘I don’t mind a fairy like so and so, do you? … He was extremely sensitive to the question of who was one and who wasn’t.’
22
The teasing homoerotic letters Ernest and Scott wrote each other showed their shared attitude of antipathy yet attraction towards ‘fairies’ which escalated into crude banter when they drank.

But of course neither of them wished the outside world to view them as ‘fairies’, and Scott in particular was protective of Ernest’s manly reputation. Zelda however had no such reservations. When Scott accused her of being jealous of Hemingway she shrieked: “‘Of what? A rugged adventurer, big-game hunter, sportsman, and professional he man, a pansy with hair on his chest?”’

Scott’s face went scarlet and his eyes bulged as he shouted.

“‘Zelda! Don’t ever say that again … it’s slanderous.”’

Zelda, calmer than Scott, pointed out that if calling Hemingway a pansy was slander, then Scott should sue the homosexual American writer Robert McAlmon, who was currently spreading the rumour that Scott and Ernest were homosexuals. Zelda told Sara that Scott and Ernest both fell out with McAlmon because of these – in their terms – unsavoury accusations.
23
Scott, deeply distressed, began to question his masculinity, which in turn had negative implications for his marriage.

Perhaps in retaliation for these rumours, Hemingway charged Zelda with seeking out lesbian company in Paris salons as a method of impeding Scott’s work. He believed Scott was frightened that spring that Zelda would get so drunk that she would lose control. Hemingway admitted that Zelda did not encourage those who pursued her but the pursuers amused her and also made Scott so jealous he insisted on accompanying Zelda everywhere. That meant he could not work.

As Hemingway recalled and wrote about the incident many years later, several of Scott’s biographers think he misremembered the date and that Zelda entered Natalie Barney’s lesbian artistic set in 1929, a date which
is
substantially documented. However, if we consider the women Zelda mixed with in 1925–6 it is plausible that Hemingway was correct. Through the Hemingways and Murphys, Zelda met Pauline Pfeiffer, a
Vogue
journalist from Arkansas, rumoured to be on a husband-hunting expedition in Paris, who had become attracted to Ernest, and her small exotic sister Jinnie, who, by taking more interest in women suitors than in men, may have introduced other artistic lesbians into Zelda’s circle.
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However, during 1925 and 1926 Zelda would almost certainly have been drawn to these women because they were
artists.
Although her marriage was suffering sexually, both through her own lingering illnesses and through Scott’s by now addictive alcoholism, she was not in search of specific sexual adventures with women. She was, however, angry with Hemingway who, she felt, ruthlessly encouraged Scott’s drinking.