Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (37 page)

Hemingway seemed able to drink all day, half the night and still work well the next morning, whereas after three cocktails Scott was ‘off on a spree that left him shot for a week’.
25
Ironically, in 1925, when Scott’s writing began to suffer more severely from his alcoholism, Hemingway blamed Zelda, and later hand-wrote a sketch to show her again in a bad light.
26
In the sketch Fitzgerald frequently turns up drunk at the Hemingways’. Ernest’s son Bumby asks his father whether M. Fitzgerald is ill. Ernest replies that Scott’s sickness derives from too much alcohol and therefore too little work. Young Bumby wonders whether Scott still respects his own art. Caustically Ernest points out that it is Zelda who does not respect Scott’s art and may well be jealous of it. Bumby the true son of Ernest suggests Scott should chastise Zelda

This was exactly what Ernest thought Scott should do. He thought Zelda should play out a traditional role like his wife Hadley. Despite a private income, Hadley did the cooking and cleaning whilst Ernest
fixed bottles for baby Bumby and dramatized their reduced circumstances. Zelda of course always employed nannies and wherever she and Scott lived they lived extravagantly, while Hadley and Ernest lived frugally in a sparsely furnished apartment over a sawmill off the Latin Quarter at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Zelda’s clothes came from Patou or Chanel, Hadley’s from Au Bon Marché. Hemingway minded that more than did either Zelda or Hadley.

The Fitzgeralds took cocktails at the Ritz or the George V while the Hemingways drank at zinc bars in the Latin Quarter. The Fitzgeralds regularly dined on pressed duck at the Tour d’Argent or sampled
pâté
aux
truffes
at Maxim’s, while Ernest and Hadley had been known to borrow money from their friend Sylvia Beach, who owned the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore, to eat at the local brasserie. As the Hemingways possessed no evening clothes, if the Fitzgeralds met them after dinner outings had to be tempered to the Hemingways’ tastes. These were primarily dancing at
bals
musettes,
attending boxing matches or touring decadent and homosexual bars in the rue de Lappe.
27
Hemingway’s fondness for these lends a certain irony to his accusation that year that Zelda was consorting with lesbians. Zelda in fact preferred to accompany the Murphys to a Diaghilev première, or one of Etienne de Beaumont’s
‘Soirées
de
Paris’,
than to haunt bars with the Hemingways. Zelda confided in Sara Mayfield that she hated the friends Scott had picked up at the Dingo Bar. ‘All they talk about is sex – sex plain, striped, mixed, and fancy. Nice life, sitting in a café all day and a
bal
musette
all night. You have to drink yourself blotto to keep from being bored to death.’
28

The couples’ friendship was largely based on Scott and Ernest’s shared interest in writing. Hadley and Zelda were merely writers’ wives who did not particularly get on. Hadley found the Fitzgeralds ‘inconvenient friends’, as they called on the Hemingways at four in the morning: ‘We had a baby and didn’t appreciate it very much. When Scott wrote I don’t know.’
29

Temperament and marital goals were more serious differences between the two women. Hadley felt Zelda was fundamentally frivolous, though ‘a charming, lovely creature … [who] lived on what Ernest called the “festival conception of life”’.
30
Hadley admired Zelda’s beauty and style but recognized they had little in common. Zelda was bold and free spirited, Hadley shy and still insecure.

Born Hadley Richardson in 1891 in St Louis, the youngest of four,
she was delicately reared and overprotected because of a childhood injury.
31
When she was twelve her beloved father committed suicide, as Ernest’s father would do later. It was a cheerless household for a timorous adolescent. Musically talented like her domineering mother, she retreated into her music until she entered Bryn Mawr, but was forced to leave college because of illness. Her life became still grimmer when her oldest sister died giving birth to a stillborn child; then her mother contracted Bright’s Disease, so Hadley nursed her until she died in 1921. At twenty-nine Hadley saw herself as a spinster. On a visit to Chicago an excitable twenty-one-year-old, ‘hulky, bulky, something masculine’,
32
noticed her diffidently playing the piano at a party. This hulky creature was Ernest Hemingway, unproven writer. Her shyness dissolved. Within three weeks Hemingway talked of marriage. Hadley adored the fact Ernest was devoted to his art. Ernest adored her red hair, sense of fun and her appreciation of him, his adventures, his writing. Before they married she wrote Ernest letters similar to those Zelda had written to Scott: ‘I love your ambitions. Don’t think I am ambitious except to be a balanced, happy, intelligent lady, making the man happy.’ But Hadley, who understood Ernest’s fears (which paralleled Scott’s), assured him that though she had had a girlhood friendship with a lesbian he ‘needn’t fear on that side’.
33
Hadley’s nurturing instinct suited Ernest. Hadley’s trust fund suited him more.
34
Hadley decided she would use her fund to back Ernest’s career. They married on 3 September 1921, after which Ernest saw himself as a teacher with Hadley as his brightest pupil, who would never be allowed to dominate him as his mother had dominated his father. Zelda, aware of Hemingway’s determination, worried that he would further influence Scott in that direction.

Observantly she said to Hadley: ‘I notice that in the Hemingway family you do what Ernest wants.’ Hadley was honest enough to admit that although ‘Ernest didn’t like that much … it was a perceptive remark. He had a passionate, overwhelming desire to do some of the things that have since been written about, and so I went along with him – with the trips, the adventures. He had such a powerful personality; he could be so enthusiastic that I became caught up in the notions too.’
35

Hadley did not tell Zelda that what she observed in the Fitzgerald marriage was two kinds of jealousy: Scott’s jealousy of Zelda and Zelda’s jealousy of Scott’s work.
36
The fact that Hadley’s ambitions were to service Ernest’s skewed her view of Zelda so that she loyally echoed Hemingway’s view that Zelda ‘was more jealous of his
[Scott’s] work than anything’.
37
Zelda’s letters and fiction show clearly that at this time she was not jealous of Scott’s achievements, but was growing resentful that her part in Scott’s success was neither credited nor paid for; her attempts at independent writing were subsumed under Scott’s name, while her painting was seen as frivolous.

When Hadley noticed that Zelda was not swept along by Ernest’s charisma, she suggested: ‘He was too assured a male for her. Maybe she … resented it … He was then the kind of man to whom men, women, children and dogs were attracted.’
38
Hadley was right about men liking him. Unlike Scott, who found male friendships difficult because he made heroes of his male friends, Hemingway inspired male companionship. But not all women liked him. One woman friend said he was ‘in every way a man’s man. I think he disliked women heartily; and in most cases they disliked him – excluding sex, of course.’
39

Zelda was now painting steadily. What is more, she had a direct entry to Natalie Barney’s rue Jacob art enclave, for she had already met Barney’s lover, the painter Romaine Brooks. Now, through Esther Murphy and Esther’s sister-in-law Noel, Barney’s friend, Zelda met other female artists and writers. Gerald Murphy, irritated by the group’s openly homosexual antics, distanced himself from his sister, particularly when Esther was fictionalized as Bounding Bess by novelist Djuna Barnes in her lesbian satire
Ladies
Almanack.
Noel, married to Gerald’s brother Frederick, found Gerald’s attitude inexcusable, partly because she accurately suspected that Gerald was being dishonest about his own submerged homosexual feelings.
40

Zelda found the group’s artistic camaraderie stimulating and their willingness to take her art seriously a change from Scott’s attitude, which vacillated between suggesting she did something for herself and giving her little credit when she did.

During 1925 she started on a self-portrait which she worked on for a year. She was using watercolour and gouache on paper, a medium which suited her life of travel. It would have been hard to transport and store vast stretchers, bulky canvases and oil paints whereas small gouaches on paper were easily portable.
41

Zelda dated few of her paintings so it is difficult to be precise about which watercolour she worked on during 1925. The most likely is
Girl
With
Orange
Dress
because it shows influences of Larionov and other Cubists and has some links with Murphy’s paintings.

Zelda was thoroughly exposed to the work of Mikhail Larionov
in 1925, when she viewed his sets, scenes and curtains for the Diaghilev ballet, all in the same intense powerful colours she used in
her
early paintings.
42
Like Larionov, Zelda uses a Cubist perspective to fracture pictorial space without allowing the scene to disintegrate. In
Girl
With
Orange
Dress
her two main subjects, a girl in billowing skirts and a zany dog, are seen from different viewpoints on different planes. Then to achieve wild vibrations she explodes a bright orange colour on to the picture.
43
The girl’s body sways off-centre, her billowing skirt makes the picture move, while the dog leaps about in the right foreground. Zelda’s cockeyed angles and compositional movements force our gaze to move too, with an effect akin to an earthquake. Zelda’s craft, still in its early stages, allowed her partially to restore the painting’s balance by splashing reddish-orange on the fireplace and vase of flowers, to move the viewer’s eye to the right of the composition.

The first impressions that Zelda’s friends derived from her paintings were like their first impressions of the artist: no one quite knew what was going on in Zelda’s head. Characteristically, Zelda produced ambiguities. It is not clear if the girl dressed in orange is dancing or just swaying like a plant. It is not clear if she is merry or sad.

Zelda had also seen many of Gerald Murphy’s paintings. Though he was never a direct influence on her there are at this point some similarities in their work. Gerald used shifting perspectives to represent real objects together with abstract forms to achieve a haunting emotional intensity that unsettles viewers, much as Zelda’s paintings do. In 1924 he had painted a remarkable picture,
Razor,
which influenced the Murphys’ set.
44
He crossed a fountain pen and a safety razor like heraldic quarterings against a gigantic matchbox, balanced the matchbox on three other boxes and gave them oddly angled perspectives. When Zelda and other friends looked at it, they saw the matchbox top presented flat as if viewed from above; the part that held the matches receded from their gaze, while the razor was drawn in profile and in section from three viewpoints. What Gerald’s and Zelda’s dissimilar paintings had in common was the odd angles and strange brooding quality which gave them their sense of power. But while Gerald’s work has precision, brevity and control, Zelda’s is untamed.

Already painting and writing, Zelda now returned after a seven-year gap to her old love, ballet. According to Mayfield, in spring 1925 in Paris both Fitzgeralds met Lubov Egorova, the Princess Troubetskoy, who would become the single most significant artistic
influence on Zelda.
45
Egorova, formerly a leading ballerina with the Russian Imperial Ballet, had emigrated to Paris and at Diaghilev’s suggestion opened a studio in 1923, where she excelled as a ballet coach. One version of how Zelda and Egorova first met is that Scott, who thought Zelda needed something to do, suggested that Murphy arrange an introduction; more probably Zelda, who knew Egorova was teaching young Honoria Murphy, asked Gerald to arrange dancing lessons for her. Because of the Fitzgeralds’ constant travelling Zelda did not begin her serious dance work until 1927. However, as Mayfield later remarked, the seeds of the Fitzgeralds’ discord over Egorova were sown before Zelda and Scott left Paris to visit the Murphys in Antibes in August 1925.

Sara Murphy recalled that during that year ‘She [Zelda] worked so
hard
at her painting and writing and dancing,’ but added, ‘We … only
wish
she had been happier.’
46

Despite her fruitful activities Zelda was increasingly unhappy about the role of Hemingway in her marriage, while Scott certainly felt torn between his wife and his new friend. But he continued to advance Ernest’s literary progress with great generosity. As self-appointed talent scout for Perkins, Fitzgerald successfully masterminded Ernest’s move to Scribner’s. He even lent money to Hemingway, who exaggerated his poverty.
47
Zelda objected to Scott’s constant loans to Ernest. ‘He’s a pain in the neck – talking about me and borrowing money from you while he does it,’ she said angrily to Scott. ‘He’s phony as a rubber check and you know it.’
48

Hemingway accepted but never forgave Scott’s benevolence.
49
His manipulative skill shows when after finishing
Gatsby
he wrote that he was suddenly aware that no matter how badly Scott behaved, he would regard such behaviour merely as sickness. Moreover Ernest would try, as a good friend, to help him. Those lines effectively established Hemingway as Scott’s benefactor when it was largely the other way round.
50

That spring and summer of 1925 Scott, with Hemingway’s encouragement, and an assertive style not unlike Hemingway’s own, completed a significant work, ‘The Rich Boy’.
51
Scott wrote to their wealthy friend Ludlow Fowler that it was ‘in large measure the story of your life, toned down here and there and simplified’.
52
In one of his most famous literary passages Scott divulges a deep-held belief: