Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (50 page)

Hellman, who remembered meeting Emily first after the opening night of her play
The
Children’s
Hour,
38
said: ‘Emily … was to marry Raoul Whitfield, a mystery story writer. A few years after the
marriage
she was murdered on a ranch they bought in New Mexico, and neither the mystery story expert nor the police ever found the
murderer
.’
39
Hellman slightly fictionalized these facts and got the date of their meeting wrong, for Emily killed herself with a pistol at Dead Horse Ranch on 24 May 1934.

Emily’s violent death followed a life led with both men and women which was of such extraordinary fascination to both Fitzgeralds that after her dramatic suicide, each of them unbeknownst to the other cut out the newspaper reports about the tragedy and folded away the cuttings in their separate scrapbooks. During research for this
biography
the two aged yellow cuttings fell out on the desk. Neither Fitzgerald had forgotten the fish that got away.

Emily’s ambivalent sexual desires may not have been as
‘muddled’ or ‘lost’ as Zelda perceived them, but they certainly
contrasted
with Natalie Barney’s belief that coming to terms honestly with your sexual feelings was a decided advantage. Zelda, who felt in need of clarity, revealed to Scott how much Natalie influenced her. She needed Scott’s help to come to terms with her own sexual feelings. She begged him to acknowledge ‘the Beauty of homosexuality as our marital relationship’. God, she said, had willed it as a means of requiting ‘the second of our sexual functions … Thus there will no longer be any necessity for the use of catatonic and
homosexual
controls which have sold too many of us into bondage.’
40
  Scott ignored all such pleas.

Rows about women, rows about Ernest, rows about Scott’s
drinking
escalated. For Zelda every day seemed ‘more barren and sterile and hopeless’.
41
She still had problems with staff. She had disliked intensely Mlle Bellois, the new governess, who had arrived in May 1929. If Scottie was with her Zelda consciously avoided them. Scottie disliked her too, but as Zelda pointed out to Scott: ‘You wouldn’t let me fire the nurse that both Scottie and I hated.’
42
  Thankfully, by fall 1929 Mlle Bellois had been replaced by the more popular Mlle Serez.

Zelda still had problems with Scott’s friendship with Ernest, though at the time of her accusation about the two men Scott’s
relationship
with Ernest was floundering. In June 1929 Scott,
timekeeping
for a sparring match between Hemingway and Callaghan, inadvertently allowed a round to run over time, during which Morley knocked down Ernest. Both men were furious and the event reaped great publicity, producing a major strain between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In August Scott wrote to Hemingway that he was ‘working like hell’.
43
Sceptically Hemingway responded that it was just as likely that Scott was sending friends glowing reports but not actually finishing his book.
44

Though anxious and confused Zelda continued to be creative, with bursts of dangerous energy. In Cannes that summer Scott tried to match her productivity. By early fall he was able to report to Perkins he had a new angle for his novel. He dropped the Melarky matricide plot and used a film director and wife, Lew and Nicole Kelly, who encounter Rosemary, a young actress, on board ship to Europe.
45
  Rosemary would be based on Zelda’s
bête
noire,
Lois Moran.

That September Ober left the Reynolds agency, struck out on his own, and asked Scott to come with him. His bribe was that he would ‘gladly make you advances when needed’.
46
After talking it over with Zelda, Scott agreed.

They saw the Murphys frequently in Cannes and Zelda’s
relationship
with them remained steady. But Scott’s deteriorated into a series of rows. This could not have happened at a worse time for the Murphys, who desperately needed support from their friends. Their son Patrick was ill all summer with what would soon be diagnosed as tuberculosis. Scott’s behaviour began to wear down their patience. Zelda recalled: ‘You disgraced yourself at the Barry’s party, on the yacht at Monte Carlo, at the casino with Gerald and Dotty.’
47
Scott, constantly tense and irritable, seemed unable to help himself. His anxiety over Zelda’s sexuality made him even more obsessive about ‘fairies’ than he had been
previously
. In one of his Notes he said ‘Fairies’ represented ‘Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them’.
48
This paranoid preoccupation with homosexuals daily infiltrated his writing and increased his anger towards Zelda. The strength of his obsession can be seen in several cancelled scenes from the early versions of
Tender
Is
The
Night.

The scene is Paris at night, a sleazy ‘last call place in Montmartre’, alive with hot American jazz: ‘suddenly we were in a world of fairies – I never saw so many or such a variety together. There were tall gangling ones and little pert ones with round thin shoulders, and great broad ones with the faces of Nero and Oscar Wilde, and fat ones with sly smiles that twisted into horrible leers, and nervous ones who hitched and jerked … self-conscious ones who looked with eager politeness … satyrs whose lips curled horribly.’
49

Sara Murphy felt Scott should forget fairies and concentrate on his wife and child. ‘You don’t even know what Zelda or Scottie are like –’ she wrote ‘– in spite of your love for them. It seemed to us the other night (Gerald too) that all you thought and felt about them was in terms of
yourself
… I feel obliged in honesty of a friend to write you that the ability to know what another person feels in a given situation will make – or ruin lives.’
50

Though Scott admitted that by now he was indifferent to Zelda,
51
  he taxed her with precisely his own emotions. ‘You were simply one of all the people who disliked me or were indifferent to me. I didn’t like to think of you.’
52
He was probably correct. Their estrangement and hostility heightened. Zelda’s health had become hazardous. She was creative in terrifying bursts of energy, followed instantly by bouts of reclusive fatigue, throughout the summer stay on the Riviera.

On 27 September 1929 Hemingway’s
A
Farewell
to
Arms
was
published
, which did not improve their tempers. Scott predicted it
would sell about 50,000 copies but it did considerably better. The first printing of 30,000 sold out; two more printings of 10,000 each were run in October. Reviews were excellent. The book topped the bestseller lists. Then the stockmarket crashed, affecting all retail business including books. But Hemingway had become a highly desirable commodity. The fires of literary rivalry between Scott and Ernest were set to blaze.

When Zelda and Scott returned to 10 rue Pergolèse in Paris in October, Gertrude Stein stoked the coals with some maliciousness. In November
53
she asked Hemingway, then her particular protégé, to bring Scott and the Southern poet Allen Tate to one of her Wednesday literary evenings. Wives were also invited but would as usual be handed over to Alice B. Toklas to be entertained, whilst the men challenged each other intellectually and Stein adjudicated.

Zelda had already met Tate and his Southern novelist wife Caroline Gordon at a party given by the Bishops. She felt at home with her fellow Southerner, so despite her by now almost constant state of nerves she consented to go with Scott. Allen Tate found Zelda ‘immensely attractive, with the Southern woman’s gift for conversation that made people feel she must have known them for years’, but found Scott – who at their first meeting asked him if he enjoyed sleeping with his wife – boorish.
54

So on a December evening Zelda found herself sitting with Caroline Gordon, Pauline Hemingway and Margaret Bishop at Alice’s tea table, whilst in a far corner of Stein’s salon Scott, Ernest, Allen Tate, John Bishop and Ford Madox Ford listened to Stein lecture on American literature. Zelda found nothing worth
concentrating
on and sat, withdrawn and silent, for several hours while Gertrude traced the path of genius from Emerson through Henry James to herself. She told Ernest that
Farewell
was good when he invented but less so when he remembered. Ernest’s literary ‘flame’ and Scott’s ‘flame’, she said, were different. Zelda and Hemingway deduced that currently Stein preferred Fitzgerald’s flame, yet Scott inexplicably converted this praise into a slighting remark, and en route home with Zelda and the Hemingways became aggressive towards Ernest. He behaved so badly that the next day, yet again, he was forced to tender apologies.
55

Zelda’s loneliness and confusion, presumably evident to the other guests at Stein’s gathering, led her into another of her
infatuations
, this time with the first of two redheaded women she became attracted to.
56
Scott and Hemingway were united in their disgust. It seemed that everywhere the two men looked that year they found
something from the fairy world to shock them, the most obvious centre being Stein’s own.

Until now Hemingway had tolerated Gertrude and Alice’s menage, which rather uncomfortably resembled a traditional
role-ridden
heterosexual marriage, because both he and Scott saw Stein as their mentor. But Stein began to repel Hemingway. First she lectured him: the male homosexual act was ‘ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves’. Women lovers however did nothing disgusting or repulsive, ‘and afterwards they are happy and can lead happy lives together’. Hemingway’s
education
at 27 rue de Fleurus continued. One afternoon he arrived there to be told Miss Stein would be right down. He heard ‘someone’ (he doesn’t name Alice) speaking ‘as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever’. Then Miss Stein’s voice begged and pleaded: ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’
57
So appalled was Ernest that he decided to end his useful friendship with Stein. Scott, however, decided to act more
strategically
and maintain his friendship with Stein, despite Zelda’s cold indifference to her.

In February 1930, resisting severe bronchitis and a high fever for two weeks, Zelda insisted on going to ballet classes. Only when dancing did she feel safe. She plied Madame with green silk for a dress, a bandanna filled with perfumes, and more bouquets: white lilacs, black tulips, carnivorous gladioli which she was also
capturing
on canvas.
58

Unlike her gestures, there was nothing sentimental about Zelda’s flower paintings. Her
Untitled
white flowers whose petals are like tentacles,
59
and her
White
Flowers
in
a
Vase
60
whose blossoms spring from the vase to snake across the table, have writhing
expressionistic
forms similar to Van Gogh’s. They appear mystical one moment, threatening the next. Zelda became aware of the parallels between her flowers and Van Gogh’s: ‘Those crawling flowers and
venomous
vindictive blossoms are the hallucinations of a mad-man – without organization or rhythm but with the power to sting and strangle … I loved them … They reassured me.’
61

Despite exhaustion from illness, painting and dancing, Zelda grew restless. So Scott suggested a trip to North Africa in late February for them to recover. In her article ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number–’ she later wrote: ‘It was a trying winter and to forget bad times we went to Algiers. The Hôtel de l’Oasis was laced together by Moorish grills; and the bar was an outpost of civilization with
people accentuating their eccentricities. Beggars in white sheets were propped against the walls, and the dash of colonial uniforms gave the cafés a desperate swashbuckling air.’
62

She took her sketch pad but for once photographs offer greater insights. Study Zelda’s eyes sharply. They seem caught in a remote iced-up expression, as if instead of seeing people she saw through them and trusted nobody.

In Biskra Scott photographed her on a camel, going up and up to visit the sculptor Clare Sheridan. Zelda is a tiny frail figure. Streets glare in the sun. Arabs sell ‘poisonous pink’ sweetmeats and cakes. There are two matching snapshots: Zelda forlorn in a vast empty desert which Scott captioned ‘Lost in the Sahara’, and Scott alone on another stretch of dunes peering into the horizon, labelled ‘Looking for a Mirage’. The sad truth is that both figures look lost and lonely.
63
  Zelda wrote letters to Madame, heard cries in the night, the bleak hills frightened her. She was desperate to return to dancing.

‘Then we went to Africa and when we came back … You did not want me … when I wanted you to come home with me you told me to sleep with the coal man.’
64
They did not make love, they did not talk.

As Zelda recalled:

‘The end’ was her first nervous collapse, which took almost two months to reach breaking point. During those eight weeks after their return to rue Pergolèse in Paris her confidence slipped through her fingers. Her friends noticed. The Murphys arrived to take Zelda to an art exhibition and found Bishop and Scott outside the
apartment
trying to calm Zelda, who was wildly insisting the two men had been talking about her during a lunch the three had shared. Gerald was shocked. How could they have been discussing her without her knowledge? ‘I mean, she was sitting right there with them!’
66
He and Sara, who soon had to return to Switzerland to be with Patrick, left deeply concerned about her.