Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (48 page)
Read Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise Online
Authors: Sally Cline
There is a third view, to which this biographer subscribes. That Zelda was
not
surprised at the deal that had been struck, for when you live intimately with a famous artist you become accustomed to a life in the shadows. The only experience Zelda had to set against this prevalent attitude was that of her fellow writers Sara Haardt and H. L. Mencken. Though Mencken was better known than Sara he never at any point took credit for Sara’s work and attempted constantly to get Sara a place in the sun. Zelda, perhaps because of this
awareness, was resentful and frustrated. The original manuscripts of all six stories show her vigorous black handwriting scrawling out Scott’s name on every by-line. Words like ‘No!’ and ‘Me’ are inserted where appropriate.
In this third view Scott did not act malevolently, because he had no need to. His actions fell within the gender expectations and conventions of the period, which gave full rein to his need to control their literary endeavours (and his wife) while allowing Zelda’s reasonable resentments no outlet. That Scott acted with a strong self-focus is not in question. That he could
not
afford to act generously towards
this
fellow writer struggling to maintain her professional identity is interesting in view of his acknowledged generosity towards many other writers, including Sara Haardt whose work he praised. But Zelda was his wife, she was straying on to his territory, albeit often with his own muddled encouragement, and must be contained. The feminist framework that would have given Zelda the strength to resist was not in place in her circle, nor was it sufficiently acknowledged publicly in 1929 to give her a context for resistance.
By the time ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’ was published under Scott’s name, Zelda was in hospital. But previous biographies have made no link between the damage to Zelda’s professional ambitions and her sudden breakdown. One lone literary voice in the years between 1928 and today has been that of Alice Hall Petry, who pointed out that Zelda’s was a constant story of ‘frustration and denial of thwarted ambitions and usurped achievements’.
70
In 1929 that story, that struggle to acquire both a coherent sense of her personal identity and to maintain a sense of her professional identity, was only just beginning and would be forced to continue inside a series of asylums.
There was another crucial incident before Zelda’s collapse which she said helped to trigger it. Zelda and Scott’s sexual problems had steadily worsened. Scott, jealous of Zelda’s attentions to Egorova, saw the dance teacher and himself in a contest to dominate his wife. ‘I’ve seen that everytime Zelda sees Egrova and me in contact, Egrova becomes gross to her. Apart, the opposite happens.’
71
Zelda had become increasingly jealous of Scott’s attentions towards Hemingway despite the sour note that had entered the men’s relationship. Zelda’s own sexual fears, as well as her disgust at the idea of her husband being homosexual, made McAlmon’s taunts about the two men being ‘fairies’ more disturbing to her than she admitted.
The climax had occurred in Paris one night in June 1929 when Scott and Ernest had been out drinking without Zelda. Scott stumbled home drunk, crawled into bed, passed out, then in his sleep he muttered: ‘No more baby’. Zelda took this as complete vindication of her suspicions that Scott and Ernest were having an affair.
72
Later she listed this event as among the causes of her breakdown. ‘We came back to the rue Palatine and you, in a drunken stupor told me a lot of things that I only half-understood: but I understood the dinner we had at Ernests’. Only I didn’t understand that it matterred.’
73
Scott was shocked, perhaps terrified. She had forced him to wonder if there was any truth in her words. Later he admitted: ‘The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you thot I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine.’
74
It is plausible that Scott and Ernest at some level had sexual feelings about each other, but Ernest’s hostility to his mother’s lesbianism, and Scott’s awareness of how other men found his appearance camp, would have been enough to make them back off. The McAlmon accusations had so disturbed Scott that when Morley Callaghan in Paris had offered his arm to Scott to cross a street Scott, believing that Morley had slightly resisted, drew back and said: ‘You thought I was a fairy, didn’t you?’
75
Scott and Ernest came from a generation hypersensitive about homosexuality to the point of paranoia. Gerald Murphy’s lifelong fears about his own ambivalent nature, and the way that Fitzgerald, MacLeish and Hemingway talked about certain men as fairies, meant they all saw sexuality in absolute terms: either men were ‘queer’ or they were not.
76
If they were, it was a hideous matter.
In Scott’s Notebooks, referring to Hemingway, he wrote wistfully: ‘I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have spoiled all that.’
77
But though McAlmon, in Scott’s view Chief Fairy, asserted the two writers were homosexuals, he never made the leap from that to suggesting they were lovers. Zelda, who made that leap, continued to taunt Scott while he continued to neglect her. On two occasions Scott left her bed saying ‘I can’t. Don’t you understand?’
78
But she didn’t. During the summer he came into her room only once. But blindly involved with her dance teacher, she no longer minded. She knew if she looked around in Paris she could find actual or potential lovers. There were at least three other ‘solutions’ as well as ‘the whole studio’ who were all women.
79
‘In Paris again I saw a great deal of Nemchinova after classes, and my friend at the Opera.’
80
These women helped to stabilize
her. As Scott recognized this he recalled the number of incidents relating to her women friends which had happened during 1929 leading up to their present point of hostility, then he began to throw Zelda’s accusations of homosexuality back at her.
1
MP
to
EH
, 2 Oct. 1928,
The
Only
Thing
That
Counts:
The
Ernest
Hemingway/Max
Perkins
Correspondence
1925–1947,
ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1996, p. 81.
2
Mayfield,
Exiles,
p. 142. Mayfield was referring especially to quarrels that year and the following year.
3
Strater, an early Princeton hero of Scott’s, is the role model for Burne Holiday, the campus radical, in
This
Side
of
Paradise.
Strater and Father Fay had been very impressed with each other when Fitzgerald introduced them.
4
Robert Taylor, ‘A Strater Retrospective: No Faces of Fame’,
Boston
Globe
Magazine,
6 Aug. 1981, pp. 22–4.
5
A. E. Hotchner,
Papa
Hemingway,
Random House, New York, 1966, p. 121.
6
Mayfield,
Exiles,
p. 133. There is another version: on 6 Dec. 1928 Hemingway was
suddenly
informed his father had died. He wired Scott and also Perkins for money so that he could go West. Most reports say Scott delivered the money in person in December. Scott’s Ledger says he delivered it in January.
7
‘The Sun Also Rises’:
EH
to
FSF
,
c.
24 Nov. 1926,
EH
,
Selected
Letters,
p. 231; ‘This tough talk’:
FSF
to
EH
, Dec. 1927,
The
Letters
of F.
Scott
Fitzgerald,
pp. 302–3.
8
Quoted in Donaldson,
Hemingway
vs.
Fitzgerald,
p. 122.
9
Wilson,
The
Twenties,
p. 354.
10
The Daisy novel would be published by Scribner’s the following year.
11
Wilson entered the sanatorium in 1929. On leaving he went to live on Cape Cod for the summer; there he became involved with Margaret Canby, who had been the lover of Ted Paramore in the early Twenties when Wilson and Paramore had shared a flat on Lexington Avenue, New York, and Wilson had courted Edna St Vincent Millay. Mellow,
Invented
Lives,
pp. 100, 372.
12
MP
to
FSF
, 13 Nov. 1928,
Dear
Scott/Dear
Max,
p. 154.
13
Together with co-judges Cornelius Vanderbilt Jnr and John Barrymore.
14
Scott took out the policy in Feb. 1929.
15
Gavrilov had graduated from the Maryinsky School in 1911 and left the Imperial Ballet that year to join Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where he understudied Nijinsky and
alternated
several roles with him.
16
Zelda ate with him at Reuben’s lunch bar then returned to the apartment he shared with his mistress at 5–20 Chestnut Street.
17
ZSF
, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, 16 Mar. 1932, Johns Hopkins Hospital records. In Zelda’s address book (
CO
183, Box 6, Folder 1,
PUL
) there is a listing for Gavrilov at the Cortissoz studios in Philadelphia.
18
Carolyn Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 45, and author’s correspondence with Shafer, 2001.
19
Giles Neret,
The
Arts
of
the
Twenties,
Rizzoli, New York, 1986, p. 14.
20
Interview between ZSF and Henry Dan Piper, 1947. See also Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 96.
21
Degas admitted that he had painted dance classes without ever having attended one. Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 98.
22
Alice Hall Petry makes a fascinating case along these lines in her article ‘Women’s Work: The Case of Zelda Fitzgerald’,
Literature-Interpretation-Theory,
vol. 1, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers S.A., USA, 1989, pp. 69–83.
23
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall, 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 193.
24
Diary of Geneva Porter, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.
25
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall, 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 193.
26
ZSF
, ‘The Original Follies Girl’,
Collected
Writings,
p. 294.
27
Ibid., pp. 294, 296.
28
It was however the last to be published (Jan. 1931).
29
ZSF
, ‘Poor Working Girl’,
Collected
Writings,
p. 342.
30
ZSF
, ‘Southern Girl’,
Collected
Writings,
pp. 305, 304, 301, 307.
31
Ibid., p. 299.
32
It was published in March 1929, four months before Zelda’s story.
33
FSF
to Ober,
c
. Aug. 1929,
As
Ever,
Scott
Fitz–,
ed. Bruccoli with Jennifer McCabe Atkinson, p. 142.
34
Sara had been in Hollywood in 1927. On her return she began work as Joseph Hergesheimer’s researcher on his Southern novel
Swords
and
Roses.
35
Rodgers,
Mencken
and
Sara,
and Carl Bode,
Mencken,
Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1969, both discuss this in detail.
36
FSF
to Haardt, 6 Nov. 1928,
PUL
, copy lent to the author by Vincent Fitzpatrick, Curator, H. L. Mencken Collection, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore.
37
Djuna Barnes,
Ladies
Almanack
(1928), Dalkey Archive Press, Illinois, 1992.
38
Barney called Esther a ‘brilliant, didactic’ woman. Joan Schenkar,
Truly
Wilde,
Virago, London, 2000, pp. 158, 353.
39
ZSF
, Autobiographical Sketch, 16 Mar. 1932, Johns Hopkins Hospital Records.
40
Mellow,
Invented
Lives,
p. 337.
41
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 194.
42
FSF
, Ledger, June 1929.
43
Scott felt snubbed that Hemingway did not show it to him before it was in galley proofs ready for serialization in
Scribner’s
Magazine.
44
FSF
to
EH
, June 1929, John F. Kennedy Library.
45
Ibid. More than 20 years later Hemingway was still angry. In 1951 he told Scott’s
biographer
Arthur Mizener that Scott’s letter was ‘one of the worst damned documents I have ever read and I would give it to no one’ (
EH
to Mizener, 11 Jan. 1951).
46
Mayfield,
Exiles,
p. 138.
47
Ibid., p. 139.
48
Ibid., p. 140. McAlmon was married to British heiress Winifred Ellerman who wrote under the name Bryher. It was a marriage of convenience, as Bryher was bisexual and wanted freedom from her upper-class family and McAlmon was homosexual. McAlmon used his father-in-law’s wealth to set up Contact Editions, a vanguard publishing company in Paris, which published among others Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams and Nathaniel West.
49
FSF
to
MP
,
c.
15 Nov. 1929,
Dear
Scott/Dear
Max,
pp. 158–9. Though McAlmon had
published
Hemingway’s first book
Three
Stories
and
Ten
Poems,
its author agreed with Scott that McAlmon was a poisonous piece of body fungus.
50
Morley Callaghan,
That
Summer
in
Paris,
Coward-McCann, New York, 1963, pp. 152, 160–3.
51
ZSF
, ‘The Girl The Prince Liked’,
Collected
Writings,
pp. 309–10.
52
FSF
, Ledger, July 1929.
53
Gerald Murphy to Milford, 26 Apr. 1963, Milford,
Zelda,
p. 155.
54
Julie Sedowa, Naples, to
ZSF
, 13 Sep. 1929,
CO
183, Box 5, Folder 22,
PUL
.
55
Rosalind Smith, unpublished documentation on
ZSF
, Mayfield Collection, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
56
ZSF
, ‘The Girl With Talent’,
Collected
Writings,
pp. 324, 325.
57
Quoted in Petry, ‘Women’s Work: The Case of Zelda Fitzgerald’, p. 82.
58
Milford,
Zelda,
p. 156.
59
Some of Scott’s biographers considered ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’ a story that approached Fitzgerald’s standard. Mellow,
Invented
Lives,
p. 340.
60
ZSF
, ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’,
Collected
Writings,
pp. 328, 336.
61
Ibid., p. 329.
62
Ober’s notes on Scott’s deal with
College
Humor
stated that ‘as he remembered, they paid $200 for one article that Zelda did and $250 for another. He said we had better leave the price until they did the first article … I should think they ought to pay $500 for them, if they are 4 or 5 thousand words in length.’ 14 Feb. 1929,
As
Ever,
p. 127. (Ober often uses the term ‘article’ both for features and for stories.)
63
FSF
to Ober, received 8 Oct. 1929,
As
Ever,
pp. 146–7.
64
FSF
to Ober, received 2 Mar. 1929,
As
Ever,
p. 130.
65
FSF
to Ober,
c.
Aug. 1929,
As
Ever,
p. 142.
66
A wire from New York told Scott: ‘Millionaires Girl can sell Post four thousand without Zeldas name cable confirmation’, 12 Mar. 1930.
67
Ober to
FSF
, 8 Apr. 1930,
As
Ever,
p. 166.
68
FSF
to Ober, received 13 May 1930, ibid., p. 167.
69
FSF
to
ZSF
, 13 June 1934,
CO
187, Box 41,
PUL
.
70
Petry, ‘Women’s Work: The Case of Zelda Fitzgerald’, p. 69.
71
FSF
, Notebooks, No. 1293.
72
Mellow,
Invented
Lives,
p. 359.
73
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 194.
74
FSF
to
ZSF
,
c.
summer 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 189.
75
Callaghan,
That
Summer
in
Paris,
p. 207. Callaghan and the bisexual writer Robert McAlmon had each been challenged to write stories about two homosexuals for
This
Quarter.
Callaghan’s entry, ‘Now that April’s Here’, dealt with a gay man leaving his lover for a woman. This commission may have made Scott over-sensitive.
76
Vaill,
So
Young,
p. 228.
77
FSF
, Notebooks No. 62.
78
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 194.
79
Ibid., p. 195.
80
ZSF
, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, 16 Mar. 1932.