Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (45 page)

Honoria Murphy recalls her parents ‘were always very fond of her but that year when she started with Egorova they worried more about her. She was still very affectionate with that sense of magic that drew them to her … but suddenly she’d turn strangely silent. My father always blamed her breakdown on the dancing. I’ll never forget his pacing up and down as he said: “She’s overdoing it dammit! … In Russia they start at age seven and she’s nearly thirty! She’s killing herself.”
20

Zelda’s friends Dick and Alice Lee Myers felt the same. Fanny recalls her parents saying ‘It was good for her to have an occupation of her own, but she took it too hard. She wanted to be a creative person in the public eye but she pushed too hard. She overdid it. She was so determined. Yes, she was driven.’ Fanny believes Zelda ‘was desperate to make up for the time she hadn’t been dancing’.
21

It became a summer of drinking, boredom and rows. Scott’s anger about the ballet increased week by week. He wrote miserably: ‘drinking and general unpleasantness’, followed by: ‘general aimlessness and boredom’, which led to him landing in jail twice.
22
Later Zelda reproached him for his behaviour: ‘You were constantly drunk. You didn’t work and you were dragged home at night by taxi-drivers when you came home at all. You said it was my fault for
dancing all day. What was I to do?’
23
Zelda confided to Sara Mayfield, who was at the Sorbonne: ‘Scott and I had a row last week, and I haven’t spoken to him since … When we meet in the hall, we walk around each other like a pair of stiff-legged terriers spoiling for a fight.’
24

Scottie suffered from complete lack of parental attention and was left alone with her French governess Mlle Delplangue, whom Zelda disliked.

Scott had promised Perkins he would post two chapters a month, but when he did force himself to work it was not on his novel but on the Basil Duke stories. These stories reveal Scott had become much affected by remembrances of things past.
25
The first, ‘The Scandal Detectives’, was based on a club he had founded in St Paul where he and his schoolfriends had gathered in the magical Midwestern dusks. After the second story, ‘The Freshest Boy’, still attempting to recover the past, he tackled ‘A Night at the Fair’ in May, managing ‘He Thinks He’s Wonderful’ in July and in September ‘The Captured Shadow’ to coincide with the publication of the first Duke tale. But he ‘passionately hated [that work] and found [it] more and more difficult to do. The novel was like a dream, daily farther and farther away.’
26

Zelda too made a shot at recapturing the past, but hers was rather more sinister. She and Sara Murphy attended a Paris luncheon together at which several people came up to them courteously. Zelda smiled, took their hands, then muttered under her breath ‘I hope you die in the marble ring.’ Sara recalled how charming and polite Zelda was. ‘No one suspected that she was saying anything but the usual pleasantries; I heard her because I was standing right next to her.’
27
Previous biographers have failed to find any meaning in Zelda’s statement; but in discussions with remaining Montgomery friends and family a reasonable suggestion emerged that this was a childhood taunt relating to the area of the State Capitol, where Zelda, Sara Mayfield and the others played in a ring around the marble rotunda circular staircase.

A great many friends in Paris that summer helped the Fitzgeralds escape their own desperation. They saw the three Murphys and Cole Porter constantly, and Zelda was thrilled when Sandy and Oscar Kalman returned. They spent time with Thornton Wilder, his companion Gene Tunney, and John and Margaret Bishop, in Paris while renovations were completed on their château in Orgeval. Margaret chattered more them ever; Scott and Zelda disliked her more than ever. She was not the only acquaintance to upset Scott,
who found it hard to look as pleased as Zelda did when Dick Knight visited. Zelda recalled later that even when Scott himself was ‘entangled sentimentally’ he would forbid her to see Dick.
28

At a dinner given by Sylvia Beach on 27 June
29
they met James Joyce, after which Scott hosted a dinner for him and his wife Nora at their apartment. Zelda, however, did not share her husband’s adulation for Joyce which drove another wedge between them.

Unable to placate each other or find any harmony of spirit, they began to look around. Both began to notice and pay attention to Esther’s exotic friend Emily Vanderbilt, who according to Scott’s Ledger dallied with members of the Ballets Russes as well as with a number of ‘fairies’.
30
The artistic homosexual set was unleashing Zelda’s emotions. Although she continued to row with Scott about his sexual inadequacy, she was in fact coming slowly to terms with her own sexual loss of interest in him. Zelda’s devotion to Egorova began in her mind to have a sexual component. Fantasies followed. In a letter to Scott in which she tried to unpick the summer patchwork that Scott called ‘Ominous’ (which he underlined three times)
31
she wrote:

At that point Scott denied the mounting importance of Egorova – or perhaps he simply didn’t see it, being more concerned, as his birthday approached, with the fact that he had made ‘no real progress in
any
way and
wrecked
myself
with
dozens
of
people’.
33

Attempting to leave the wreckage behind them, the Fitzgeralds made a stormy crossing back to the US in September 1928 on the
Carmania.
During the boat trip Zelda, increasingly anxious, told Scott she was disturbed at the nature of her devotion to Egorova. ‘I was afraid that there was something abnormal in the relationship and you laughed.’
34
He dismissed her remark, but they were taking the wreckage home with them.

On their return to Ellerslie in September 1928, their lives in a mess, Scott took to drink … as was to be expected. Zelda took to her paintbrush and ballet bar … what else? Hemingway meanwhile took to blaming Zelda. Everyone was being predictable.

Hemingway wrote to Perkins that every stupid action Scott had taken had been influenced by Zelda. Scott might have been the world’s best writer had he been married to someone else. Zelda was to blame for everything.

Perkins held a higher opinion of Zelda. ‘[She] is so able and intelligent,’ he replied, ‘and isn’t she also quite a strong person? … I’m surprised she doesn’t face the situation better, and show some sense about spending money.’
1
But Hemingway’s critical attitude to Zelda had by now become obsessive. He was not prepared to recognize any evidence to the contrary, no matter which of their friends produced it.

Unaware equally of Hemingway’s diatribe or Perkins’ praise, Zelda mixed her paints thicker and thicker, and danced on the carpet, wearing it thinner and thinner, as if she could paint over or stamp out her turbulent thoughts. Scott may have shared some of his uneasy reflections with his new drinking companion, Philippe, a former French taxi-driver and boxer whom Scott had brought back to Ellerslie as a chauffeur/butler. Zelda, who found him stupid and insubordinate, despised him, Mademoiselle fell for him and Scott’s tolerant lawyer friend John Biggs frequently bailed him and Scott out of jail.

Zelda, who had not seen Hemingway for two years, had not missed him, but Scott felt his friend’s absence keenly and was delighted they were meeting in
November. Pauline had given birth to baby Patrick, who according to Ernest was built like a brick shithouse, slept through the night and laughed constantly. Hemingway informed the Fitzgeralds he was available for hire as a sire of perfect children: a remark calculated to make Zelda and Scott feel inadequate.
Though their sexual relationship was fast deteriorating and Zelda repeatedly told Scott he was a poor lover, both were still anxious to give Scottie a sibling. Hemingway, aware of the Fitzgeralds’ marital problems, would have known his remark had a bitter edge. If Mayfield overstated the view that the terrible troubles that would crack the Fitzgeralds apart had their roots in quarrels with and over Hemingway, nevertheless Hemingway’s methods of baiting and bad-mouthing Zelda, and undercutting Scott while still keeping him on a faithful string, accelerated the Fitzgeralds’ vulnerability towards Hemingway and each other.
2

The Fitzgerald–Hemingway reunion occurred on the 17th, the weekend of the Princeton–Yale game. Scott and Zelda were already ensconced at the Cottage Club when Ernest, Pauline and a painter friend, Henry Mike Strater,
3
arrived. Princeton won the game, Ernest was polite, Pauline friendly, and Zelda engaged the artist in conversation. Strater found Zelda ‘a lovely person, a lovely, lovely person’ who was having a tough time dealing with Scott’s drinking, which in his view ‘was out of control’.
4

Zelda’s easy relaxation with Strater was ruthlessly interrupted when trouble started on the post-game journey from Princeton to Philadelphia. Scott raced up and down the train asking vulgar questions of total strangers. To Zelda’s embarrassment he accosted a passenger reading a medical book by shouting: ‘Ernest I have found a clap doctor!’ At Philadelphia they were met by Philippe, whom Scott forced to drive his overheating Buick without stopping for oil or water. As the Buick steamed so did Zelda. She and Scott rowed all the way to Ellerslie where they paused in their recriminations to offer Pauline and Ernest six bottles of excellent burgundy over dinner. Unfortunately Scott soon started a stream of insults aimed at their friendly black maid. ‘Aren’t you the best piece of tail I ever had?’ he asked her repeatedly. ‘Tell Mr Hemingway.’
5

Another version of this dreadful Ellerslie weekend was given by Zelda to Sara Mayfield who later reported:

The subsequent publication of those letters indicates their indisputable vulgarity. Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s favourite banter was about their book titles. One Hemingway riposte, ‘The Sun Also Rises (like your cock if you have one)’, provoked Fitzgerald’s crude rejoinder: ‘This tough talk is not really characteristic of me – it’s the influence of All The Sad Young Men Without Women In Love … “Now I Lay Me” was a fine story – you ought to write a companion piece, “Now I Lay Her”. Excuse my bawdiness but I’m oversexed.’
7
Scott’s established reputation for the reverse suggests his puerile jokes were a defence.

When those two overgrown schoolboys continued their raunchy behaviour that weekend, Zelda, reared on Southern gentlemen’s verbal courtesy, would have been shocked or disturbed. Her awareness of her growing emotions towards Egorova would have increased her sense of being threatened by Scott’s and Ernest’s lewd intimacy with each other.

Mike Strater, who felt that after the weekend he never wanted to see Fitzgerald or Hemingway again, spoke for all the guests. ‘A bullfight is sedative in comparison … Those two … brought out the worst in each other.’
8

Though Strater was referring to Ernest and Scott, the remark was equally apt in reference to Zelda and Scott. The Fitzgeralds still remembered the best in each other, but in 1928 they had lost the way to find it.

Bunny Wilson was also having marital problems. Admitting ‘I had found it impossible to be married to an actress,’
9
he had separated from Mary Blair and was now subject to severe bouts of depression, though he still managed to start a book of essays,
Axel’s
Castle,
and a novel,
I
Thought
of
Daisy.
10
Wilson soon afterwards entered Clifton Springs Sanitarium for three months’ treatment for a nervous breakdown, which made him highly sympathetic towards Zelda’s depression. He was given hydrotherapy, electric shock and an addictive amount of paraldehyde.
11

In November 1928 Scott had sent the first two chapters of his novel to Perkins, who enthusiastically replied that the first was ‘excellent’, the second contained ‘some of the best writing you have ever done’. He eagerly awaited more.
12
He waited in vain. Scott stalled again, returning instead to his ‘lousy Post stories’ about Basil Duke Lee. He supplemented his income in other ways, too. During
1928 and 1929 he garnered $1,500 by lending his name to a soap beauty contest.
13
He also took out a life insurance policy for $60,000 which he found hard to maintain, but ultimately it constituted the majority of his estate.
14

At Ellerslie, Christmas 1928 was cold in every sense. Scott’s Ledger reported: ‘Xmas night with family & Mlle & Phillipe. Coldness Amy. Car freezing. Mother there Xmas.’ Even Amy Thomas, who had warmly tolerated Scott’s drinking, had a chill air matched sadly by that of her host and hostess.

Zelda resumed both her painting and dance lessons in Philadelphia. She had a new dance instructor, thirty-six-year-old Alexandre Gavrilov, former dancer with Diaghilev’s ballet, stand-in for Nijinsky and leader of New York’s Ballet Moderne.
15
Again she threw herself into ballet with Gavrilov as she had with Egorova. Perhaps he was less protective of her (or of himself), for she once found herself in a potentially dangerous situation with him.
16
‘My dancing teacher was a protégé of Nijinsky. I ate lunch with him and went with him to his apartment. There was nothing in the commercial flat except the white spitz of his mistress and a beautiful collection of Léon Bakst. It was a cold afternoon. He asked me if I wanted him to kill me and said I would cry and [he] left me there. I ran to my lesson through the cold streets.’
17
Gavrilov and Zelda spoke French together so it is possible that the phrase ‘if I wanted him to kill me’ might refer to the French expression ‘the little death’, meaning orgasm.

Her description evokes a surreal film echoed in several paintings. At this stage she protested that her art was too personal to be shown in public but over the next three years, though her paintings continued blatantly autobiographical, she became as keen to exhibit as she was to publish.
18

Using thick, turgid brush strokes she attempted highly emotional canvases, repetitiously returning to ballet themes. Her aim was to blast the viewer into an appreciation of the ballerina’s physical-emotional reality, irrespective of its ugliness; so many canvases displayed hardworking ballerinas caught in a ‘frozen movement’ which became her particular trademark. This concept is also found consistently in modernist images. As the art critic Giles Neret pointed out: ‘Artists transformed the notion of speed – particular to the decade – into a stereotype of “frozen movement”.’
19
That element was frequently used by Léon Bakst, a painter Zelda met through the Murphys, who may have influenced her dance figures. Later Zelda told Henry Dan Piper: ‘What I do is paint the basic,
fundamental principle so that everyone will be forced to realize and experience it – I want to paint a ballet step so all will know what it is – to get the fundamental essence into the painting.’
20
This was highly significant because it was a huge departure from the way most
male
artists of that period, influenced by Degas, portrayed the same subject. Their ballerinas hardly seemed to work and were largely objects of exquisite femininity.
21

As Zelda’s dancers collapsed on the canvas, so she too began to collapse as she held the brush hour after hour. She lost 15 lb in weight, and her nerves stretched like elastic. Snapping point never seemed far off. But despite her exhaustion from dancing and painting, that winter of 1928–9 she returned ferociously to writing, beginning a series of six stories about the lives of six young American women. Initially all six were commissioned by H. N. Swanson of
College
Humor
magazine who bought five, though the sixth was ultimately sold to the
Saturday
Evening
Post.

These stories were accompanied by new sketches and new ballet routines. What is most striking about Zelda’s three arts is that they first come to fruition within a period of five years from 1929 to 1934 and these, the years of her most single-minded discipline, coincided with the start of her mental breakdown and her initial hospitalization. It was as if she was living only through creative work and everything else in her life was either on hold or dead. That included her husband and daughter. Her relationship with seven-year-old Scottie became even more distant, as though she was loving her through a veil of muslin. Often Scottie was left in the charge of her governess whom both her parents disliked. But though Scott’s November 1928 Ledger recorded ‘Delplangue gets on our nerves’, the governess in fact lasted until the following April. This left Zelda free to work on her six stories, which were united by a common theme: women’s failure to achieve a balance between work and marriage.

Collectively, Zelda’s fiction at that point makes a public statement about women’s need to work professionally if they are to survive.
22
Privately, the stories may have conveyed to Scott the strength of her aspirations and her anger over her frustrations.

The six tales concern a poor working girl, a girl liked by a prince, a millionaire’s girl, and three near to Zelda’s heart: an original Follies girl, a girl with talent as a dancer and a Southern girl.

Zelda began the first, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, that winter, finishing it by March 1929, the month their lease expired on Ellerslie. By now the Fitzgeralds’ restlessness had an almost pathological
quality and they were determined to set off with Scottie again for Europe. This time the reason they offered friends was that Zelda could continue ballet with Egorova and fit her writing and painting in between classes. Their plan was to see Genoa first, then move on to Nice before going to Paris in April.

They sailed on the
Conte
Biancamano
where, Zelda recalled, Scott ‘paid absolutely no attention of any kind to me’.
23
Scott did pay attention to other women and embarrassed Zelda by asking a woman passenger if women liked men’s penises small or big. Zelda interrupted: ‘Shut up, Scott, you fool,’
24
but her humiliating experiences were not over. In Genoa, perhaps fired by fears of his own impotence, he attempted sodomy. Zelda was disgusted and not a little afraid. ‘I think the most humiliating and bestial thing that ever happened to me in my life is a scene that you probably don’t remember even in Genoa … You were constantly drunk.’
25

Scott himself, depressed at his inability to finish his novel, had written to Perkins before leaving that he was sneaking away just like a thief, failing yet again to give Perkins further chapters. He swore he would write them on the boat and he begged Max to trust him a little longer. Neither Max nor Scott could foresee that this trust would be forced to endure for several more years.

Despite Scott’s novel-writing block he managed to produce seven short stories for the
Post
in 1929, dealing, inevitably, with marriage problems. They included three fine fictions: ‘The Rough Crossing’, ‘The Swimmers’ and ‘Two Wrongs’. He did mail Perkins ‘The Rough Crossing’ in March from the Hôtel Beau Rivage, Nice. Almost certainly based on the Fitzgeralds’ recent crossing on the
Conte
Biancamano,
it involves a young couple, Eva and Adrian Smith, whose marriage disintegrates as they cross the Atlantic. Both playwright Adrian and his jealous wife have foolish affairs with people they despise whom they ditch by the end of the voyage. The woeful conclusion is that the Smiths agree to deny that anything sordid took place by pretending the affairs happened to two other Smiths. Unchanged by events, they are as ill at ease with each other as Zelda and Scott had been at the end of
their
voyage.