Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (40 page)

During Zelda’s stay at the American Hospital in Neuilly, Scott accidentally met Sara Mayfield in the ladies’ bar of the Paris Ritz.
23
As soon as Scott saw the writer Michael Arlen with Sara he left his Princetonian companions and joined them. Aware that Arlen’s book
The
Green
Hat
was currently outselling
The
Great
Gatsby,
Scott patronizingly told Arlen he would probably be his successor as the most popular novelist of the day. Arlen winced at the backhanded compliment, then made the mistake of criticizing Hemingway’s
In
Our
Time.
Scott jumped angrily to Ernest’s defence, called Arlen ‘a finished second-rater that’s jealous of a coming first-rater’. When Sara had calmed him down Scott insisted that she accompany him to visit Zelda in hospital because ‘it would cheer her up to see someone from home’.
24

However, before they reached the hospital Scott insisted they
stopped at Harry’s New Bar to check if Hemingway was back from Pamplona where he had taken the Murphys to the bullfighting fiesta. Unable to find a cab, Scott commandeered a hearse to take them to his apartment to rescue books for Zelda. He toured Sara around in the hearse, becoming steadily drunker and more argumentative until finally it was too late to visit Zelda.

In Pamplona the Murphys, watching bulls being gored, also watched an anxious Hadley and a tense Pauline move uncertainly in Ernest’s wake. After the Spanish trip Hemingway made a decision and called on the Murphys at Villa America to tell them he had asked Hadley for a divorce.

Both Gerald and Sara, despite their traditional view of marriage for themselves, took Ernest’s side. They even offered him Gerald’s studio on rue Froidevaux in Paris. Sara thought Hadley had been wrong to confront Ernest as it had made him feel guilty. Gerald held the odd view that Hemingway’s divorce decision was related to his artistic integrity. Scott told Ernest the news ‘depressed and rather baffled me’.
25
Zelda, unlike the rest of their circle, was sympathetic to Hadley and told Sara Mayfield so.

After her operation Zelda’s physical health improved but her mental well-being was shaken. From childhood Zelda had always taken enormous physical risks, but she had done so for fun. Now she took wildness to dangerous extremes in a desperate plea to be noticed.

Early one morning after a party Zelda threw herself down in front of their car and challenged Scott to drive over her.
26
During another late party evening at the casino with the Murphys an unforgettable incident occurred. Zelda rose from the table, lifted her skirt above her waist and began to dance. Scott sat motionless, staring at her. The orchestra began to play as she took her first dance steps. Gerald Murphy said: ‘It was spectacular … She was dancing for herself; she didn’t look left or right, or catch anyone’s eyes … not even at Scott. I saw a mass of lace ruffles as she whirled – I’ll never forget it. We were frozen. She had this tremendous natural dignity … so self-possessed, so absorbed in her dance … she was incapable of doing anything unladylike.’
27
Sara Murphy said: ‘Her dignity was
never
lost in the midst of the wildest escapades – Even that time at the casino – at the end of an evening when she danced alone in the middle of the floor – she was cool and aloof; and unconscious of onlookers. No one ever took a liberty with Zelda.’
28
She later told Sara Mayfield that no matter what Zelda did, ‘even the wildest, most terrifying things – she always managed to maintain her
dignity. She was a good woman, and I’ve never thought she was bad for Scott, as other people have said.’
29

Ada MacLeish confirmed that Zelda would ‘do these things … But there was no mirth. No fun. “This is what we do and now I’ll proceed to do it.” Those were the Fitzgerald Evenings which we learned to avoid like the plague. They seemed intent upon living this lurid life; the ordinary evening wasn’t enough.’
30

Some nights Scott did not return home at all. Some evenings he filled their villa with strangers abhorrent to Zelda. Ada MacLeish said Zelda was not seen much on the beach and rarely with Scottie, who sat alone with her nanny on the sands.
31
Zelda later recalled: ‘I wanted you [Scott] to swim with me at Juan-les-Pins but you liked it better … at the Garoupe with … the Murphys and the MacLeishes … You left me lots alone … I swam with Scottie except when I followed you, mostly unwillingly.’
32
Although Zelda’s memory differs slightly from Ada’s, one thing is clear: beneath the Fitzgeralds’ vitality, misery formed the undercurrent.

Gerald described the Fitzgeralds as a ‘pair of conspirators’ who would stay out all night waiting for something to happen. ‘Something had to happen, something extravagant. It was that they were in search of and they went for it alone.’
33

During this summer, the most memorable quality was Zelda’s eerie self-absorption. Ada recalled how distant she was, how often a strange small smile would flit over her face, how she displayed not a vestige of humour.
34

If Zelda’s aloof actions awed their friends, Scott’s over-intimate actions irritated them. His worst habit of asking personal questions intensified. Ada MacLeish remembers an evening when suddenly Scott began to trail two young men round the dance floor asking if they were fairies. One of them was Ada’s dance partner.
35

Scott, who had once enchanted the Murphys, now annoyed them. He seemed incapable of leaving them alone, having a most particular absorption with Sara. He would stare at her across the dinner table, then if she momentarily ignored him would shout: ‘Sara, look at me.’
36
One day in a taxi with Sara and Zelda he stuffed filthy hundred-franc bank notes into his mouth.
37
Even more obsessed with hygiene than Zelda, Sara, who washed coins before handing them to her children, was appalled.
38
Gerald was convinced Scott was ‘in love with her. She fascinated him, her directness and frankness were something he’d never run into before in a woman.’ Sara, not attracted by Scott’s pretty, boyish looks, scoffed at the notion. ‘He was in love with all women,’ she told a friend years later. ‘He
was sort of a masher, you know, he’d try to kiss you in taxis … But what’s a little kiss between friends?’
39

Zelda observed that Scott seemed determined to behave at his worst before their friends. In June 1926 when the Murphys gave a stylish party for Hemingway, Scott became so jealous of the attention guests were paying to Ernest he threw ashtrays at other tables, roundly abused Gerald, then goaded him until their urbane host left his own party in disgust. At a dinner given by the Murphys to honour the Princess Chimay, Scott first threw a ripe fig down the back of the princess’s décolletage, then began to throw Sara’s delicate handblown Venetian glasses over the edge of their terraced garden. After the first two Gerald banished him, though not Zelda, from their villa for three weeks.

Finally the Murphys could bear no more of Scott’s impertinent questions and crude scrutiny of their personal life. Sara wrote disapprovingly: ‘you can’t expect anyone to like or stand a
Continual
feeling of analysis + sub-analysis + criticism – on the whole unfriendly – Such as we have felt for quite a while. It is … quite unpleasant… + Gerald, for one, simply curls up at the edges … It’s hardly likely that I should Explain Gerald, – or Gerald me – to you. If you don’t know what people are like it’s
your
loss.’ Sara added acutely: ‘it is more probably some theory you have, – (it
may
be something to do with the book). – But
you
ought
to
know
at
your
age
that you
Can’t
have
Theories
about
friends
– If you Can’t take friends largely, + without suspicion – then they are not friends at all –.’ At their age and stage in life she and Gerald could not be bothered with Sophomoric situations. ‘We are very simple people … and we are
literally
+ actually fond of you both – (There is no reason for saying this that I know of – unless we meant it.)’
40

Zelda, aware of Scott’s appalling behaviour, did acknowledge the Murphys’ deep affection. But her passionate loyalty to Scott in public never allowed her to side with the Murphys, whom she saw as their joint friends. Her private concerns about her own relationship with Scott were hinted at only to Rosalind or to
her
friend Sara Mayfield.

That summer was indisputably one of turmoil, yet when any of their circle rewrote that summer in their memoirs it became one of gaiety, entertainment and high-spirited dissipation. Even Zelda wrote to Perkins that it had been a fine season, filled with gay and decorative people who offered Antibes a ‘sense of carnival’, though she did add with honesty, ‘and impending disaster’.
41

After two and a half years abroad, the Fitzgeralds had saved no
money; their domestic life had disintegrated; their daughter, though loved by them both, was not well parented; Scott had become an acknowledged alcoholic who had hardly written for over a year; Zelda had started purposefully to paint, but Scott saw this as frivolous. Zelda moreover still relied on Scott, the ‘expert’, to validate her work.

Sara Mayfeld said Zelda ‘now realized clearly that her marriage was headed for the rocks … she was plainly tired of being a successful novelist’s wife, who provided the copy for his stories and books … she wanted to make a life of her own, to achieve … intellectual and financial independence.’
42

But Zelda was having more profound conflicts than Sara recognized. In an interview with a journalist Zelda remarked that she hoped Scottie would grow up to be a flapper, ‘because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful’, rather than a career woman, because careers call for ‘hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness’.
43
This shows clearly the extent to which Zelda was still engaged with the destructive image created for her by Scott, which she tried to live up to at great cost to her self-identity.

These years, 1925 and 1926, were critical for Zelda’s self-development despite a deteriorating marriage and constant ill-health. It is possible that the time she spent on her own
because
of these two factors allowed her an increased measure of artistic growth.

The Fitzgeralds had rushed away from the wild distractions of New York to seek refuge in Paris. Now they were returning to America to flee the profligacy and recklessness of France.

They sailed in December 1926 on the liner
Conte
Biancamano
to discover that Ludlow Fowler and his young wife, Elsie Blatchford of Winnetka, Illinois, were fellow-passengers. Zelda took Ludlow aside and said gravely: ‘Now Ludlow, take it from an old souse like me – don’t let drinking get you in the position it’s gotten Scott if you want your marriage to be any good.’
44
Only six years earlier Fowler had been best man at Zelda’s wedding. Now he stood with her watching the waves and witnessing her disillusion. Zelda’s later recollection was in line with her remark to Fowler: ‘we were back in America – further apart than ever before.’
45
Not even Christmas in her beloved Montgomery could repair the damage.