Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (62 page)

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Me
The
Waltz
is a searing portrayal of a woman’s search for identity within a tangled marriage, both a particular woman and any woman. Because of its deeply autobiographical links, it is often read as a companion piece to
Tender
Is
The
Night.
The critic Dan Piper suggested that ‘together, these two chronicles of the same marriage seen from the wife’s and husband’s viewpoints, form one of the most unusual pairs of novels in recent literary history’.
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But in its own terms, this moving novel has the hallmarks of Zelda’s best and worst stylistic points. There are her characteristic wit, her skill in making unexpected connections between ideas, and her idiosyncratic metaphoric descriptions with their sensual
illumination
of small details. Inanimate objects spring into life with a
menacing
air. Severed parts of the body abound: ears, eyes, limbs. When Alabama Beggs, her autobiographical heroine, falls in love with blond lieutenant David Knight, Alabama focuses on David’s ear:

An ear is a mundane object. But this is a fantastic journey into and out of it. Zelda is not writing an ordinary romantic description. For
Alabama and David’s relationship will be no ordinary romance. She has piled up, like cars hurtling into each other behind one that has crashed, a series of crazy dissimilar elements in order to achieve an an unforgettable richness. It works here because she stops the
surrealistic
method in time and brings readers down to earth with David’s sudden decision to marry the girl.

Throughout the book Zelda offers the material of myth, where many of the narrative connections are deliberately cut. Diametrically opposed to Scott’s shaped orderliness, some sections have the nightmare quality of Angela Carter’s fiction. Others, lush and associative, reach into the unconscious, and read like a
distinctly
Modernist novel. When David asks Alabama to say she loves him and Alabama replies: ‘I never say anything to anybody. Don’t talk’,
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Zelda points to her stylistic intention: to express what cannot be expressed.

Where Zelda’s work is flawed is where she fails to heed her own red light. She overloads the prose and it races out of control. Take this: ‘A shooting star, ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebulous hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality.’
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The reader is stranded amongst muddy lines encrusted with too many images.

The plot, in four sections, has overwhelming similarities to Zelda’s life.
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It faithfully captures, in the first section, Alabama’s Southern family home, pinpointing the influential authority of Alabama’s father Judge Beggs, the devotion of her mother Millie, the affection of her older sisters, Dixie (who resembles Rosalind and like her is society editor of the town newspaper) and Joan, blessed with ‘an unattainable hue of beauty’.
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We watch Alabama’s
rebellious
girlhood, and her marriage to David Knight (a painter not a writer) whom she met during World War One.

The second section follows David’s early celebrity in New York, the birth of Bonnie/Scottie, their Riviera trip, Alabama’s
infatuation
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for French naval aviator Jacques Chevre-Feuille, who
discourages
her from leaving David, their move to Paris where David has a retaliatory romance with movie actress Gabrielle Gibbs of the blancmange breasts and blue veins. ‘David opened and closed his personality over Miss Gibbs like the tentacles of a carnivorous
maritime
plant.’
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After this revelation Alabama determines on a ballet career to bring order into her chaotic lonely existence.

The third section recreates the Paris ballet years, where Madame usurps the central place in Alabama’s life. In the final section
Alabama accepts the role with the San Carlos Opera Ballet Company, Naples, which Zelda had turned down, and briefly and successfully lives in Italy without her husband and daughter, which Zelda never managed to do. But Alabama too is forced to give up her dance career. Blood poisoning from an infected foot necessitates an operation that will sever her tendons and make dancing impossible. David, with renewed devotion, comes to the hospital. Together they return to the Deep South, where she sees her father die. She is left with David, dumping ashtrays, as their guests depart. When David scolds her for starting her chores before the guests have vanished, she says: ‘It’s very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled “the past,” and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.’
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Though all psychiatric episodes and all mention of
homosexuality
have been expunged, the novel is a transparent reworking of the Fitzgeralds’ early years.

The establishment of the interior lives of her characters, as well as the atmosphere of the places they visit, is achieved partially through a suffusion of flower images. Zelda was also painting daily, and while imprisoned in this Baltimore clinic she recreated on canvas the same wild Montgomery blossoms that flourished in her novel. Whether in print or oils, plants explode with emotion. In the
paintings
geometric, angular flowers allow the viewer to feel Zelda’s spikiness, while curled, layered flowers are uncontrollably
sensuous
. Most flowers are magnified so that, impossible to ignore, they startle the viewer. The mounds and buds have both the fragile beauty of those Zelda picked as a girl, but also the iron strength she had drawn on during the previous two years. There was a cyclical process between the flowers she gathered in armfuls, the flowers that hurtled from her paintbrush on to canvas and the flowers in her richly descriptive prose which synthesized the senses.

In chapter 3, in Paris, dancer Alabama’s fatigued feet are too sore to wear new shoes which she would have liked to buy, nor does she feel comfortable purchasing new dresses, so in a moment of wild extravagance she spends every cent of the hundred franc notes in her purse on flowers. Most of them are for Madame. As Alabama endows the flowers with the qualities of the material possessions she might have bought, Zelda pours out a rich surrealistic litany whose metaphors would ambush the most jaded reader.

During April, a month when Scott described Zelda as ‘strange’,
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  he wrote a decidedly fictional response to the crisis over Zelda’s novel in the guise of a
Post
story, ‘What A Handsome Pair’.
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The protagonists are a young sporting couple who become bitter rivals, counterbalanced by a second couple where the man is a musician and his wife ‘merely’ a homemaker. Scott posits the idea that for a creative man to enjoy a good marriage he needs a non-competitive, unambitious wife. Scott does not deal with the needs of a creative woman.

He wrote two more stories that year, but the
Post
cut his fees from $4,000, first to $3,500, then to $3,000, then to $2,500, his 1925 rate. Again the
Post
complained about the low level of his stories to Ober, who subsequently found it impossible to sell ‘Nightmare’, set in an insane asylum, to any reputable magazine. That year Scott’s
earnings
dropped to $15,832.40, his lowest annual total since 1919.

In mid-April Scott visited Zelda daily at Phipps, where they
quarrelled
constantly. Often their rows were rooted in Zelda’s refusal to show him her latest story. Scott retaliated by providing her
psychiatrists
with his views on Zelda’s breakdown, focusing particularly on what he considered her detrimental relationship with Minnie Sayre. He saw mother and daughter unhealthily attached by a silver cord. Zelda objected to her husband trying to play Dr Fitzgerald. Scott objected to the patient continuing to write.
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Dr Meyer, meanwhile, was having severe problems
communicating
with Zelda, who still refused to moderate her desire to work (‘My work is not a strain. All I ask to do is to work’
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), and getting Scott to see that his drinking and dictatorial attitude was further damaging Zelda.

On 20 May 1932 Scott, who had been house-hunting from his base at the Rennert hotel, rented La Paix, a house set in 28 acres on the Bayard Turnbull estate in Towson, Baltimore, where the Fitzgeralds lived until November 1933. Zelda told Max the house was soft and shady like ‘a paintless playhouse abandoned when the family grew up … surrounded by apologetic trees and meadows and creaking
insects.
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Sara Mayfield described the ‘fantastic exterior’ as a
veritable
Mad Hatter’s Castle, rusty grey, with gingerbread arches, bays thrown at random and a porch decorated with jigsaw scrollwork. Scott, said Sara, ‘had outdone himself this time’. Zelda remarked wittily to Sara that had she named the house she would have called it ‘Calvin Coolidge, Jnr because it was so mute’.
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Initially Zelda spent mornings there, returning to Phipps after lunch. Scott was determined that when Zelda rejoined them
full-time
she would follow a disciplined schedule, ordered by the doctors but controlled by him. He believed a strict routine would tire her less, but he also felt that as he would be blamed for any
mistakes
he ‘should be able to dictate the conditions’.
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Zelda wrote to Bishop:

Zelda startled visitors by floating through La Paix in a tutu, for she still practised ballet regularly. Eleven-year-old Andrew Turnbull (later Scott’s biographer) saw Zelda, biting her lip, picking at her face, dancing round the living-room table to the tune of her gramophone. He felt she was not quite wholesome. Though Scott’s drinking bothered the teetotal Turnbulls, Mrs Margaret Turnbull affectionately recalls the patience he exercised with her three
children
, Eleanor, Frances and Andrew, who became firm playmates of Scottie’s. Scottie also made another local friend, Margaret ‘Peaches’ Finney, daughter of Scott’s Princeton classmate Eben Finney. Peaches and Scottie both attended Calvert School, then became day students at Bryn Mawr. Whenever tension arose in the Fitzgerald household Scottie would stay with the Finneys.

Margaret Turnbull thought Scott felt guilty about Zelda, needed her approval, talked warmly of her charm, brilliance and appeal to men. But, said Mrs Turnbull, ‘she was his invalid’, and it was as an invalid Margaret viewed her. ‘She struck one like a broken clock.’
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At La Paix Zelda’s relationship with Scottie worsened as Scott tightened his hold on his daughter’s education and social routines. Though fiercely authoritarian he gave Scottie a great deal of
attention
,
thereby cutting Zelda out of the family picture while
upbraiding
her for her lack of interest in Scottie’s progress. By treating Zelda as ‘sick’, Scott effectively prevented Scottie from turning to her mother for help or advice.

A new young doctor, Thomas Rennie, with whom Zelda felt some rapport, had taken charge of her case. Zelda confessed to Rennie she feared her child was growing away from her. ‘I can’t help her at all … I’m like a stranger in the house.’ She admitted she was unable to control temper outbursts against Scottie. ‘I lose my temper when I get up. It’s awfully unfair to my husband and child.’
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In May, Scott hired his first fulltime secretary, Isabel Owens (who worked for him until 1938), for $12 a week. She quickly became a surrogate mother to Scottie and a companion to Zelda. She
chauffeured
them everywhere, swam with them, bought Zelda’s art materials and, carefully chosen by Scott as the kind of woman with whom he would not fall in love, she never became embroiled in the Fitzgeralds’ emotional tangles.

On 26 June Zelda was discharged from Phipps to join the family. As Squires, Meyer and Rennie did not see her as cured, both she and Scott attended regular sessions at the clinic. Despite Zelda’s release from hospital disciplines, to her chagrin Scott predictably began to wield authority over her. Aided by Meyer, who had angered Scott by encouraging Zelda’s creativity, Scott also put restraints on her writing. He feared Zelda would write about psychiatry which he intended to keep for exclusive use in
Tender.
He had dropped both the Melarky matricide and the Kelly shipboard plot and had
constructed
a draft centred on the ruination of an American psychiatrist by his marriage to a rich mental patient. Entwined with this plot were his recent emotions of loss and damage.
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