Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (39 page)

1926 was a year of change and experiment for several of Zelda’s friends, but a year of sickness and danger for Zelda.

In Paris she discovered that three of her close friends also disapproved of Hemingway. Sara Mayfield, studying at the Sorbonne, frequently saw him strolling through the Luxembourg Gardens, Bumby at his hip and Hadley ‘following him as silently as an Indian squaw’, and told Zelda how much she disliked Ernest’s attitude to Hadley.
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Sara Haardt and H. L. Mencken were also furious with him, though for different reasons. Ernest had called Mencken ‘that shit’ and established him and Sara as permanent enemies.
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Both Zelda and Sara Mayfield assumed this was because the Sage had not initially recognized Hemingway’s talents. Though Mencken thought Hemingway ‘knew how to shock women’s clubs with dirty words’ and produced great dialogue, he saw his stories as melodramatic and obvious. At the time Mencken felt that he was ‘challenging, bellicose and not infrequently absurd’. Even later, Mencken wrote: ‘My view of his work was never exalted.’
3

Sara Haardt had recovered sufficiently from ill-health to leave Montgomery and divide her time between Baltimore and New York, where she freelanced for the Baltimore
Evening
Sun,
the Virginia
Quarterly
Review
and Mencken’s
American
Mercury.
Though Mencken still encouraged her, she was now well known in her own right. Her professional independence seemed to increase her deep reserve and Mencken mistakenly felt she did not fully care for him. During 1926 their letters became more distant, and with newspaper gossip linking his name with that of the Hollywood actress Aileen Pringle, their romance temporarily wavered.
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Zelda, beset with colitis, was now in worse health than Sara, which put a great strain on her marriage, already shaken by conflicts over Ernest. She was spared further hostile encounters with Hemingway after her decision in January to take the ‘cure’ at Salies-de-Béarn, a health resort in the Basses Pyrénées. In this drowsy spa
town they stayed at the Bellevue, where the boarded-up windows were splashed with bird-droppings and the residents according to Scott were ‘two goats and a paralytic’.
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Scott took a photograph of Zelda while she painted, in one hand a brush, in the other the watercolour self-portrait she had begun in 1925. She scribbled underneath it: ‘Portrait of the artist with portrait of the artist’. Several delightful photos show her and Scottie on banks of flowers and swinging in a play area.

During 1926 Zelda again tried vainly to conceive, for despite the rows between them she and Scott were still keen to have a second child. The idea that having more children might improve an ailing marriage is a popular though not necessarily accurate one, in which it seems the Fitzgeralds concurred. The failure to conceive that year was probably a consequence of previous abortions and her unsuccessful 1924 operation in Rome, but Zelda’s distress became connected in her mind with what she deemed Scott’s sexual inadequacies. Zelda would remain intensely emotionally attached to Scott, but sexually their problems were increasing. Scott had always exhibited a rigid Midwestern puritanism in the face of Zelda’s Southern sexual openness. Wit and charm, but not virility, were his strong suits.
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Scott is reputed to have told Hemingway that Zelda had complained his penis was too small to give her satisfaction, a story that has all the hallmarks of an insecure male author’s vivid invention.
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Scott’s apparent lack of imagination over alternative sexual pleasure, or his worsening alcoholism which may have caused occasional impotence, were more likely causes for Zelda’s frustration.

It is worth looking at Hemingway’s tale of Scott’s complaints of rejection because it impacts cleverly on the impression Hemingway was trying to give of Zelda’s unstable mental state.

Scott it seems first naively confessed to Hemingway: ‘You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.’ Yet in Scott’s account in
The
Crack-Up
he admits that at Princeton in 1917 he slept with prostitutes; and Rosalinde Fuller’s account of his sexual affair with her in 1919 convincingly throws doubt on the assertion that he had never slept with anyone except Zelda. According to Hemingway, Scott continued their conversation by saying: ‘Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make anyone happy and that was what upset her.’ Hemingway’s account records that the two men go off to inspect Scott’s penis in the toilet and are away a long time. At the end of the inspection Hemingway patronizingly reassures his friend: ‘You’re perfectly fine… You are OK. There’s nothing wrong
with you.’ In Hemingway’s version Scott then asks pathetically: ‘But why would she say it?’ to which Hemingway responds: ‘To put you out of business … Forget what Zelda said … Zelda is crazy … Zelda just wants to destroy you.’
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There is something curious here. Scott, a man who was extremely wary of intimacies with other men, was unlikely to have exposed and aroused his penis in front of a ‘real man’. Yet without an erection Hemingway’s calculations of penis size, which he terms for posterity ‘A Matter of Measurements’, is meaningless. It is far more likely, then, that the maliciously creative Ernest changed a lunch-table chat into a genital display in the toilets.

This ‘matter’ involves three major ‘measurements’. The first is the magnification of Scott’s confession from a small oral discussion to a mighty washroom performance. The second is the humiliating reduction of the size of Scott’s penis in the minds of readers from what they might have thought of as a usual size (had they thought about it at all) to an image of a tiny childlike member. The third, and by far the most significant, measurement is that of the state of Zelda’s mental health. What Hemingway was indisputably attempting to do was yet again to call Zelda’s emotional stability into question.

In early March 1926, after their return to Paris from Salies-de-Béarn, the Fitzgeralds suddenly decided to go back to the Riviera. They lunched and dined with Hemingway who was returning from New York, where he had successfully – with Scott’s help – negotiated a contract with Maxwell Perkins. He told them he was going to join Hadley and Bumby in Schruns, Austria, for a skiing break, but he did not go directly to see his family. Instead he started an affair in Paris with Sara Murphy’s close friend, Pauline Pfeiffer.
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Pauline, a clever journalist with an original mind, was more intellectually compatible with Ernest than Hadley. After Pauline had praised Ernest’s new book,
The
Torrents
of
Spring
,
10
he decided she was also an excellent literary critic who fitted into the Fitzgerald-Hemingway circle, which included the Murphys, the MacLeishes and Dos Passos, better than Hadley, who had never felt at ease with them. Pauline also had private means,
11
much of which she used to tour and stay with the Hemingways, for Hadley saw Pauline as a good friend.
12

Though Pauline, a practising Catholic who believed extra-marital sex was a sin, was terrified by the threat of pregnancy, she could not and did not resist Ernest. When Ernest, guilt-ridden, returned to Hadley in Schruns he did not confess nor did she ask any embarrassing
questions. But Hadley and Ernest felt deep relief when Dos Passos and the Murphys arrived for a week’s skiing and broke the tension.
13
The Murphys, becoming aware of the strained situation, did not overtly criticize Hemingway. Zelda, however, was incensed by Hemingway’s treatment of Hadley, and told Sara Mayfield later she thought it shameful of Hemingway to plan to rejoin the Catholic Church in order to have his marriage to Hadley annulled so he could marry Pauline.
14

The Fitzgeralds had arrived at Juan-les-Pins, where for two months from early March they rented the somewhat damp Villa Paquita. During that spring and summer Sara Murphy remembers Zelda as eternally ‘fearless’ in risk-taking swimming stunts. She felt that Zelda was ‘much better than Scott at these things’.
15
At a farewell party in Juan for critic Alexander Woollcott Zelda went further in her display of fearless pranks. After the speeches had been made she said boldly: ‘I have been so touched by all these kind words. But what are words? Nobody has offered our departing heroes any gifts to take with them. I’ll start off.’ Then daringly she stepped out of her black lace panties and threw them at the men.
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While Zelda was taking light-hearted risks, Hadley was going through black moments. In late spring, Pauline and her sister Jinnie invited Hadley to tour the Loire Valley. Pauline, patently uneasy, snapped at her nervously without explaining why. Hadley hesitantly asked Jinnie if Ernest was involved. When Jinnie replied that she thought the two were fond of each other, Hadley, shocked, retreated back to Paris, miserable and, like Bumby, suffering from a ferocious cough. She confronted Ernest who, enraged, indicated she shouldn’t have forced the issue. Then he left for Spain to tour the bullfights.

The Murphys had invited both Hemingways to their guesthouse in the grounds of the Villa America in Antibes. Hadley arrived alone with her sick son, grateful for Zelda and Scott’s company and that of the MacLeishes. Bumby was diagnosed with whooping cough and had to be quarantined. As Sara was terrified that her three children would catch it, the Fitzgeralds generously offered Hadley the last six weeks of their lease on Villa Paquita.

In May the Fitzgeralds found a larger, less damp residence, Villa St Louis, near Juan’s casino and beach. It was set among orange and lemon groves with a garden overgrown with pink oleanders, scarlet bougainvillaea and purple clematis.

The Fitzgeralds gave four-year-old Scottie a party and invited Fanny Myers and Baoth, Patrick and Honoria Murphy. Zelda, who
had formerly used her artistic skills to help Scott, now employed them to entertain her daughter. With Scott’s help she creatively staged a mock crusaders’ battle in the terraced rock garden of their villa. ‘Zelda must have spent days making the intricate cardboard battlements and [papier mâché] castle,’ Gerald said.
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There were turrets, a tower, even a moat along which swam toy ducks. The princess with long blonde hair, wearing a white satin dress, stood at a tower window, her arms raised signalling distress. Was Zelda recreating Scott’s fantasy of her as his princess carefully guarded in a castle? Scott lent his collection of two squadrons of lead soldiers, showed the children how the moats would have flooded during a siege, and captured a large black beetle which he cast as the dragon who guarded the fairy castle. Zelda, who had spent weeks sewing dresses for the princess, her lady-in-waiting and the witch, acted all three parts with verve. Honoria many decades later recalled it as a highlight of her childhood. ‘Zelda and Scott had been going through hard times that summer but we had a beautiful day in their make-believe world. Zelda looked beautiful like a princess and we all cheered.’
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Zelda and Scott drove over to the Hôtel du Cap to bring Sara Mayfield, who was staying there, back to Villa St Louis. They told Sara that Hemingway, who had now arrived in Antibes with Pauline, had lent them his manuscript of
The
Sun
Also
Rises.
When Sara asked what the novel was about, Zelda scoffed: ‘Bullfighting, bullslinging, and bull[sh]…’ Scott cut her short: ‘Zelda! Don’t say things like that.’ Zelda retorted: ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Scott, now very angry, growled: ‘Say anything you please, but lay off Ernest.’ Sara watched Zelda become increasingly furious: ‘Try and make me!’ she retorted.
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Zelda objected to the fact that since his arrival in Juan, Hemingway came daily to Villa St Louis, where Scott offered Ernest constructive criticisms on his manuscript while severely neglecting his own. During the last year Scott had sold only five stories and had made little progress on his novel. Sara Mayfield said ‘Zelda blamed Hemingway for Scott’s sprees in Paris as well as for interrupting his work in Juan-les-Pins.’
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When the Fitzgeralds’ lease was up at Villa Paquita, which they had lent to Ernest and Hadley, Pauline came to the Hemingways’ rescue by renting two rooms at the Hôtel de la Pineda in Juan and inviting Hadley and Ernest to be her guests. The intense trio became the focus of Zelda and Scott’s gossip. Pauline, an early riser, dressed in tomboy pyjamas, would knock on the Hemingways’ door and
rush in, unconcerned that Hadley and Ernest slept only in pyjama tops. Pauline ‘without her bottoms’ soon tumbled into bed with them. Initially Hadley was distressed, but relaxed when Pauline gave equally affectionate embraces to her and Ernest. One day on the beach where the trio at Pauline’s suggestion swam naked while Zelda and Scott swam in suits, Pauline told Hadley she was as much in love with her as with Ernest. She hoped the way the three of them were in bed could continue for ever. Desperate to save her marriage, Hadley suggested it to Ernest. To Hadley’s surprise, though not to Zelda’s, Ernest strongly declined. He reminded Hadley of Pauline’s convent upbringing where girls unthinkingly indulged in displays of affection which meant nothing. They were a substitute until ‘the real thing’ came along. Ernest believed he was the real thing.
21

In June Scott wrote to Perkins that they were making a quick trip to Paris to have Zelda’s appendix removed on the 25th. Whether this was the precise nature of Zelda’s operation is in dispute. According to Mayfield, who talked to Scott, ‘having her appendix removed’ was a ‘euphemistic description of the operation’ which she implied was another abortion.
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At first glance Sara’s belief does not appear to tally with the well-documented view that Zelda was extremely keen to become pregnant again. But Scott’s Ledger for June 1926 states ‘Operation’ but not ‘appendix’, whereas an entry seven months later in January 1927 records ‘appendix’. This would add to Sara’s evidence that it was another abortion. One other entry is of interest. For many months Zelda had been under Dr Gros’s care for her gynaecological problems, but in late May 1926 just before the operation, and for its purpose only, she switched to Dr Gluck, a new man, whom she never saw again.