Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (44 page)

As Zelda’s self-discipline strengthened, Scott’s grew weaker. He later recalled 1928 as the year he started drinking as a stimulant for his writing. Previously he drank when he wasn’t working; now he drank to write. Zelda had no influence over him and he had no control over himself. Mixed loyalties beset her. In the eyes of her Deep South community and family, she had gone out on a limb to marry Scott. Her parents had never thought highly of him, but once he had made a name for himself as a novelist, Zelda felt her marriage was justified. At the time it had not occurred to her that she might justify her own existence. Although Scott, at present, could hardly be termed a successful novelist, their household still revolved around his role as ‘the writer’.

Scott remained her closest friend, but as a friend he failed her daily. He had usurped her narrative, he took credit for her writing, now he resented her dedication to ballet. As much as she needed him, she needed also to get away from him. Living inside his orbit stifled her. Living with a drunk terrified her.
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Her release she saw through ballet, which she practised ferociously; when not dancing she continued to paint, though at a steadier pace.

In his Ledger Scott misspelt (thereby characteristically devaluing) Zelda’s dance teacher’s name as ‘Katherine’ for Catherine (Littlefield), an act consistent with his misspelling of every name significant in their joint lives. Angry that Zelda chose to dance rather than join him in bars, Scott drank with men he hardly knew.

Scott’s resentment of Zelda’s productivity, a dark reminder of his own minimal progress with the novel, underlay their fierce rows. Better at inventing titles for the book than developing chapters, he swung through a variety:
Our
Type,
The
World’s
Fair,
The
Melarky
Case
(when its hero was Francis Melarky, a film technician who murders his mother) and one dreamed up by Zelda,
The
Boy
Who
Killed
His
Mother.

If Scottie was frightened by the severity of her parents’ quarrels
that year – and many children would have been – she never admitted it. She remembers instead her first formal education which took place at Ellerslie. ‘Every week a packet would arrive from the Calvert School in Baltimore,
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complete with wonderful stickers to be pasted in workbooks and red and gold stars to be dispensed when a poem was memorized or a dictation properly taken down. I had a tutor named Miss Miller, about whom I remember nothing except she was young and pretty.’ She was one of the few household members with whom Zelda felt at ease but unfortunately she left in March 1928. The Calvert School, ‘heavy on the temples of Cambodia and the jungles of Africa’, enthused Scottie with a love of geography. ‘I wanted to go everywhere that Calvert took me.’
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In February the Fitzgeralds left Scottie for a few days to go to Quebec as guests of the Canadian tourist office. Despite besieging six-year-old Pie with postcards, illustrated by Zelda, signed Easter Bunny, Jupiter and A. Rhinoscerous, they were unable to ease the tension between them. They stood shivering outside the Château Frontenac which Zelda described as ‘built of toy stone arches, a tin soldier’s castle’. She remembers their voices ‘truncated by the heavy snow, [as] the stalactite icicles on the low roofs turned the town to a wintry cave’.
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The photos of the couple also have an icy air. Zelda, in fur coat and hat, looks especially stern and gloomy.

On their return, Rosalind and Newman Smith visited them for a weekend in February which Scott’s Ledger describes as a ‘catastrophe’. Scott had been invited to speak at a Princeton Cottage Club dinner but was so drunk with nerves that after a few incoherent sentences he gave up. He returned home, hurt and humiliated, on a drunken crying jag. He picked a fight with Zelda in front of their guests, throwing a favourite blue vase of hers into the fireplace. When she retaliated by calling his father an Irish cop he hit her across the face. Her nose bled and she suffered a black eye. Newman intervened while Rosalind, shaken and appalled, decided that her sister’s marriage was far worse than the family had suspected and advised her to leave Scott. Zelda’s loyalty was severely tested: despite her ambivalence she still wanted to prove she had made a good marriage. She told Rosalind she and Scott chose to live in that manner and she would brook no family interference. The Newman Smiths, outraged, left the next day.

On 25 February Scott invited Thornton Wilder, one of his new literary heroes, who unfortunately had witnessed Scott’s Princeton debacle, for the weekend. Scott also invited Wilson to the gathering he described as small but select. The selection included Esther
Murphy, Gilbert and Amanda Seldes, John and Anna Biggs and two actresses, Zoe Atkins and Laurette Taylor, in Wilmington for the tryouts of the play
The
Furies,
plus some of their theatrical staff including a temperamental set designer. At dinner Wilson decided Zelda was at ‘her iridescent best’.
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But she then left the party to take a nap, and on re-emerging her iridescent best turned rapidly to her acid worst. When the moody stage designer told her to go away because he was thinking, Zelda’s instant riposte, ‘Oh, you’re not really thinking, you’re just being homogeneous!’, upset him so much that he and his team departed in a huff. As Wilson later reported: ‘The aftermath of a Fitzgerald evening was notoriously a painful experience.’
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Desperate about their life in the US, the Fitzgeralds decided to return to Europe, worrying as usual about the cost. In March, however, Scott suddenly produced a highly profitable short-story project based on the adventures of Basil Duke Lee, a bossy Midwestern boy who longs for a New York life. Harold Ober sold ‘The Scandal Detectives’, the first story in the series which follows Basil from fourteen-year-old stripling to Yale, for $3,500 to the
Saturday
Evening
Post.
Between March 1928 and the following February Scott wrote eight Basil Duke tales, which brought him $31,500 and financed their Paris trip.

Before they left Scott saw both Ober and Perkins, to whom he promised to deliver the new stories regularly. Secretly he hoped that Europe would work the same magic on his new novel as it had on
Gatsby.
Perkins reported to Hemingway (in Key West) that though Scott had got over his nervous ‘Stoppies’ he was very depressed. Hemingway, sympathetic about the nerves, was hardline about Scott’s lack of progress. He felt because Scott was frightened he used defence mechanisms such as writing stories
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to make money. Ernest felt Scott should have written three novels by now. Even if only one was
Gatsby
standard it would have been worth it.

On 21 April Zelda, Scottie and Scott sailed on the
Paris.
They hadn’t much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills, but were simply glad to be going. In the photo taken on board ship, Scottie smiles as she cuddles a doll into her furry jacket, but Scott looks as though it would be too much effort to smile; he even holds his hat with a depressed gesture. As for Zelda, her photo is one of the harshest taken in the twenties: the scowling severity of her face matches the severe grey cloak and tight cloche hat restraining her ears.
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The Murphys eagerly awaited their arrival. Gerald had written to
Scott: ‘We are very fond of you both … The fact that we don’t always get on has nothing to do with it … To be able to talk to people after almost two years is the important thing.’
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After the couples reconciled Scott wrote to Ernest: ‘We are friends with the Murphys again. Talked about you a great deal.’
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Initially the Fitzgeralds stayed at the Hôtel de Palais, but the Murphys, who had taken one apartment on the quai des Grands-Augustins and a second at 14 rue Guynemer overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, offered to lend them their second apartment while they were in Antibes that summer.
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Zelda told her Montgomery friend Eleanor Browder that the décor reminded her of a setting for one of Madame Tussaud’s gloomier figures.
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Scottie recalls her first school, the Cours Dieterlin. ‘You went two days a week and the rest of the time you did your lessons at home with your “institutrice”, in my case Mlle Serez to whom I was devoted.’ Scottie’s education was that of privileged French girls: mainly memorizing whole scenes from plays by Corneille or Racine. ‘[We also learnt] the names of not only the French kings but their wives … I have been trying to remember whether we also committed the names of the mistresses to mind.’ Scottie said she had had a speaking acquaintance with Mme de Pompadour and Mme de Montespan long before she understood their professional proclivities.
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From Paris Zelda wrote to Eleanor Browder, recently married, apologizing for not sending a wedding present and describing her restlessness: ‘We are vaguely floating about on the surface of a fancy French apartment … It looks as if we’ll never stay anywhere long enough to see how we like it.’
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Scottie liked it at once, partly because she had a safe play area. ‘When we were not in school,’ she remembered, ‘we would meet each other at the Luxembourg Gardens to sail the toy boats or ice skate at the Grande palace or roll hoops … under the Eiffel Tower … It was a delightful time.’
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Zelda liked it better when the Kalmans visited, and she confided in Sandy her new plan of becoming a professional dancer. She had told Gerald, who had deeper reservations than Sandy, feeling that at Zelda’s age there were limits to her potential achievement. Nevertheless, impressed by her determination, he arranged for her to study with Madame Lubov Egorova, director of the Ballets Russes school, whom Zelda had already met. Egorova had previously taught Alexandra Danilova, Anton Dolin and James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia.

Zelda worked to Lubov’s demanding schedule of eight to ten hours a day with absolute seriousness. As a Southern Belle, it had been a big leap for her to accept the idea that women’s need for professional achievement rather than amateur ‘self-expression’ was essential if they were to have a healthy identity. But she had made it and the six stories she wrote that year and the next mirrored this very notion: that women need to work. The Murphys, who empathized with this view, resolved to support her despite their growing misgivings. Scott of course believed in the work-as-a-profession ethos, but for himself rather than for his wife. Some of their friends later thought he believed in it if necessary at the expense of his wife.

What Zelda had not told Gerald, doubtless because he was a joint friend, was that her desire to perfect this art was also rooted in the belief that it would release her from dependence on Scott. To this end, like Alabama in
Save
Me
The
Waltz,
Zelda drove herself mercilessly, dancing to ‘drive the devils that had driven her’, believing that ‘in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self’. She felt ‘that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow.’
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One afternoon Zelda invited the Murphys to Egorova’s studio to watch her dance. The studio floor was raked to resemble a stage so that spectators had to gaze upwards at the dancers, which was a most unflattering view. ‘It made her [Zelda] seem taller, more awkward than she was. There was something dreadfully grotesque in her intensity – one could see the muscles individually stretch and pull; her legs looked muscular and ugly … One held one’s breath until it was over. Thank God, she couldn’t see what she looked like.’
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In fact Zelda knew exactly what she and the other practising dancers looked like and how they felt: exhausted. Streaming with sweat. Muscles bulging. Limp and drained. Yet withal on fire with the passion of the dance. Later in one of her most successful oil paintings,
Ballerinas
Dressing,
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which she gave to Sandy Kalman, she attempted to draw precisely that experience, those emotions, that appearance. The limbs of the five naked ballet figures are again elongated in a quasi-mannerist style, feet are enlarged, big hands knotted with muscles, several heads sag with fatigue. This characteristic distortion of extremities is reminiscent of American artists Thomas Hart Benton or Paul Cadmus or, like her paper dolls, could have been influenced by the popular illustrator Maxfield Parrish.
When Zelda was asked why she painted her dancers, typically depicted as graceful and delicate, with alarmingly exaggerated limbs, she said ‘Because that’s how a ballet dancer feels after dancing.’
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She believed strongly the depiction of the swollen physical flesh had to reveal psychological emotions, and by creating her forms in this way Zelda consciously rejected traditional feminine shapes. Her nude figures in this oil painting, as in many of her dance paintings, appear strong and asexual despite two figures with what look like stuck-on breasts. This could be related to Zelda’s preoccupation with dance as work and may be trying to show that female dancers strive as hard professionally as men.

The close links between Zelda’s visual and verbal arts are shown especially in the area of dance. In
Save
Me
The
Waltz
she recreates in words the vision of
Ballerinas
Dressing
and the experience which horrified Gerald Murphy. ‘Alabama’s work grew more and more difficult. In the mazes of the masterful fouetté her legs felt like dangling hams; in the swift elevation of the entrechat cinq she thought her breasts hung like old English dugs. It did not show in the mirror. She was nothing but sinew. To succeed had become an obsession. She worked till she felt like a gored horse in the bull ring, dragging its entrails.’
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