Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (8 page)

As an adolescent Zelda embodied the ‘romantic readiness’, the
heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life which Scott Fitzgerald would one day write about.
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Her romantic qualities embraced a love of nature, a love of the past and – even in these early years – a primitive
imagination
. Her Southern schooldays always seemed to her to be fragile.

When she and Sara Haardt were living in the North many years later, Zelda reminded her friend: ‘It always seemed to be Spring … the whole town filled with the smell of kiss-me-at-the-gate … at night we were skating again, … or dancing violently. For us, life had become spectacular, bombastic, almost unbearably exciting … then … we had the inescapable feeling that all this beauty and fun – everything – might be over in a minute.’
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As Zelda blossomed into a young woman, many people remarked that there was something theatrical about her eyes. They changed colour: sometimes blue, sometimes green; most often Confederate grey. Young men stared at Zelda and she stared right back. Her appearance with its peaches-and-cream complexion was also archetypically romantic.

At Zelda’s co-educational school, Sidney Lanier High,
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to which she moved after graduating in 1914 from the Sayre Street School, when her classmates listed the qualities of a composite Ideal Senior Girl, Zelda rated top marks for a kissable mouth. In
This
Side
of
Paradise
Scott uses both Zelda’s peaches-and-cream complexion and her ‘eternal kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual, and utterly
disturbing
’ for his heroine Rosalind Connage.
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Zelda, with a figure that ‘fitted together with delightful precision, like the seeds of a pomegranate’,
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looked tall, an illusion of height due to her erect posture and her dancer’s grace.
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She had
finely-sculpted
strong bones, a hawk-like nose which gave her face great strength and a low voice with an attractive Southern drawl.

Adults remarked on her convoluted vocabulary. Her
idiosyncratic
speech pattern, bursting with high-flown metaphors and
disconnected associations, had become habitual and had never troubled her family. Scott, who met her four years and many
metaphors
later, found her unusual connections curious but copied them into his notebook for use in his fiction. Later, however, her language jolted her Northern doctors. Her sensuous Southern allegories became an integral part of the way psychiatrists diagnosed her symptoms as schizophrenia.

Zelda’s speech was in fact rooted in traditional Southern dialect which is characterized by that same concrete sensual detail, vivid dramatic imagery and sly humour. It arose from the mixture of both black and white folk speech which Zelda heard as she grew up tended by black mammies and overseen by white educators.

Zelda spent her high school years lightheartedly dashing off the classic curriculum of history, geography, English literature, French, Latin, physics, chemistry, maths and physiology. She had a
consistently
high B average and did even better in English and maths. Considering her low class attendance her aptitude was dazzling, but her long-term interest was nil. ‘We played hookey almost every day from school … Sometimes we’d stop at old Mr McCormack’s grocery store … and buy a lot of loose crackers and dill pickles and chocolate nigger babies … When we were tired … we would go in a picture-show and sit in the dark of the theatre while the janitor swept around us and picked up the peanut shells … [or] we went swimming in some inconceivably muddy hole.’
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What
did
interest her was art and ballet. She shone at painting lessons
in
school and
out
of school she enrolled in Professor Weisner’s dancing class.
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On her few days in school she inventively talked her way out of trouble. In her senior year she was chosen to represent England in a public wartime pageant. Sara Haardt remembers rehearsing Zelda in the dressing room. ‘She had recited her speech, letter-perfect: “Interrupted in these benevolent pursuits for over three years I have been engaged in bloody warfare” … [Then] with a shining helmet and sword, she marched on the stage and faced the tense, waiting crowd … her tongue was suddenly paralyzed. “Interrupted –” she began. “Interrupted –” she began again. “Interrupted –”. It was hopeless. Zelda went on repeating it like an irritating gramophone record until with supreme confidence she made an exit line that brought the cheering house to its feet: “Gentlemen, I’ve been
permanently
interrupted!”’
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Her schoolfriend Livye Hart recalls Zelda’s complete disregard for propriety. During the last part of their school years there was an unbreakable taboo on any mention of childbirth, especially out of
wedlock. Zelda broke it on Armistice Day 1918. A mixed crowd milled around scattered with confetti. Zelda said in a stage whisper to Livye so that the boys could hear: ‘I’m so full of confetti I could give birth to paper dolls.’ The men heard too and wanted to laugh but their wives were tutting. Days later, Zelda, fresh from a date, went further: ‘I liked him so much that he will probably be the father of my next child.’
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  Zelda pasted into her scrapbook a school magazine item that said: ‘What would happen if Zelda Sayre ever said anything serious?’
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Some evenings, when bored, Zelda would borrow one of the boys’ cars and drive past Madame Helen St Clair’s, the local
whorehouse
, flicking the spotlights on boys she recognized as they entered or left the establishment.

She was voted prettiest girl in class – but not the best dressed. The Belles who looked drab at school also looked dull in the evenings. The majority, who looked trim at school, looked elegant at nights. Their clothes were consistent. Zelda’s were not. As with everything else there was something slightly askew. Out of line. A beat away from the norm.

Her school clothes were deliberately careless, pleated skirt bunched up round her waist to shorten it so that her slip showed, tie hung the wrong way. But at night her melodramatic finery
outclassed
everyone else’s. Her mother was an excellent seamstress, so Zelda stood on the stage lending an air of importance to two yards of green tulle. The first thing you noticed was ‘that manner she had, as though she was masquerading as herself’.
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Zelda knew it was mandatory for Southern Belles to define
themselves
by their looks. Zelda’s daughter Scottie told
her
children: ‘In the South the sense of femaleness is implanted at a very young age … Southern girls [have] long hair in tumbled curls … high heels and fetching make-up.’
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Zelda’s set felt keenly their fashions were inferior to New York. ‘We were all little Alabama girls, kinda greenhorns, but Zelda was more up for the show‚’ commented Grace Gunter, two years younger than Zelda, who went to the same schools, became a Belle with her and would remain a friend when Zelda returned to Montgomery in 1940. ‘You felt as if you had to compete. I had
flannelling
pyjamas with feet in them but Zelda … soon changed to negligées with big lace. During the day we all wore middy blouses … but at nights we might wear lawn with lil pink roses. Alabama girls were meant to look very feminine. We all wore high heels … had long hair and didn’t smoke. Later some of us did bob our hair but our parents would be very fierce.’
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It was 1919 before Zelda cut hers, at which point she wrote to Scott: ‘I’m going to bob my hair, and that may evoke a furor.’
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Minnie Sayre told her daughters a lady was meant to create a quality of life, not question it. Zelda’s three attractive sisters never questioned it. What they
did
flout was the Old Montgomery
expectation
that they should not work before marriage. Both Marjorie and Rosalind chose interesting careers cut short by engagements. Marjorie was a good pen-and-ink artist and a schoolteacher before she married Minor W. Brinson in 1909 and resigned.
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On
graduating
from Sidney Lanier High School Rosalind worked as a teller at the First National City Bank, the first Montgomery girl of a ‘good family’ to hold a non-teaching job. Later Rosalind, always
pragmatic
, told Scott that she firmly believed in bourgeois values, but at the time she enjoyed the frivolous job of Society Editor for the
Montgomery
Journal
before she married Newman Smith in 1917. Two months later, dark and serious Clothilde, reputed to be almost as attractive as Zelda, married John Palmer who, like Rosalind’s husband, served as an officer in the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.

As Tony, the sibling she was closest to, was working in Mobile as a Mississippi River Civil Engineer, by the time Zelda finished high school in 1918 she was the only child left at home.

Zelda’s bedroom was the smallest of five. It was pink, white and magical. The white bed covered with a Marseilles counterpane looked on to starched white muslin curtains that let in the sunlight. Pink flowers climbed over white walls, matching the pink
chintz-covered
dressing table. Her grandmother Musidora’s desk and a slat-backed rocking chair stood near the bed.

Years later she recreated her bedroom colours in her first novel and suffused the pages with the smell of pear trees, for opposite their house was an orchard where overripe fruit tumbled down and split open.

In summer she had a perfect view of her mother’s pink
geraniums
, yellow peonies and purple verbenas. In spring she gazed on a lake of blue hyacinths edged by sunshine jonquils and Mexican primroses. Her bedroom also overlooked the grounds of the
landlady’
s estate in which grew camellias, boxwood and kiss-me-at-
the-gate
. Her particular love was for giant cape jasmines and voluptuous magnolias which would become memorable signatures in her paintings.
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But Zelda’s romantic relationship to flowers was edged with something strange. She watched her mother tame ferocious tiger
lilies and arrogant iris until they grew quietly alongside the crepe myrtle, then years later drew those lilies with petals like tentacles and a phallic arrogance. Later she said that beneath their surface beauty she saw an underlying fragmentation and despair. It was a grown-up viewpoint and a provocatively Southern vision.

If Zelda’s intuitive responsiveness to natural beauty was partly influenced by the profusion of Alabama flowers, it was also marked by some of North Carolina’s lushest landscapes where the Sayres took their summer vacations. Zelda accompanied the Judge and Minnie to a hilltop inn in Saluda, North Carolina.
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They picked blackberries and walked, dwarfed by towering mountains. Later, Zelda’s paintings braced those same mountains with highly coloured visible tension.

Though as an adult Zelda lived in the North, her creative insights were for ever Southern: there were no cold colours, her most
striking
landscapes were scorching.

Legend suggests that Zelda had few women friends but in fact she was extremely popular. Her friends were of course all white: Old Montgomery Belles were never permitted friendships with young black women. Even white Southern women were somewhat isolated from each other by the dictum of competing for male
attention
. Nevertheless Zelda moved with a strong female team as
vivacious
and beautiful as herself: Livye Hart, a dark gypsy, Eleanor Browder, a Modigliani portrait,
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Grace, ‘eldest of the six beautiful Gunter girls’ and daughter of Montgomery’s Mayor which gave her a slight edge. All had the characteristic Old Money appreciation of their own worth but Zelda’s belief that her way of doing anything was the best was even stronger than her peers’.

There is a photo of Grace, Zelda and their set leaning against a motor on their way to a picnic, all in regulation white middy blouses with neat black ties, all laughing except Zelda who stands taller than the rest, her tie knotted more carelessly, unsmiling. ‘We always moved around in groups‚’ Grace said holding the photo
nostalgically
. ‘That day the chaperone made a pass at my boyfriend so I’ve got my head down I was so furious … Zelda was our natural leader. It didn’t happen to her.’
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Zelda later reminded Sara Haardt: ‘We were never conscious of chaperones or disapproval of any sort. If we were criticized one place we simply went to another. We had … no sense of guilt … nothing seemed unnatural. It was only when the older generations made us conscious of what we were doing that we grew confused and wild.’
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On Friday nights Zelda’s set went out with their dates to teenage dances over May’s Confectionery shop because Zelda adored May’s pineapple drops and sugared perfume balls. Sometimes Zelda
suggested
dances at the pavilions in nearby Oak Park or Pickett Springs.
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Sara Haardt recalls the last Christmas dance she and Zelda attended at the ballroom of Montgomery’s Exchange Hotel where Mrs Jefferson Davis received visitors. ‘I saw her [Zelda] … wearing a flame dress and gold-laced slippers, her eyes starry and mocking, flirting an immense feather fan. Her bronze-gold hair was curled in a thousand ringlets, and as she whirled about, they
twinkled
enchantingly like little bells. Around her flashed hundreds of jellybeans … [with] pearl-studded fronts and hundreds of other flappers … but they seemed somehow vain and inarticulate beside her. Beauty, they had, and grace, and a certain reckless abandon – yet none of them could match the gleam of gay derision that
flickered
beneath the black edge of her eyelashes – and none of them could dance as she did, like a flame or a wind.’
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