Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (46 page)

In Nice Zelda began ballet classes with the Russian dancer Nevalskaya, ballet coach at the Nice Opera, while Scott drank and gambled at the casino. Her productivity must have fired Scott with resentment, but they did not discuss the issue. It surfaces, though, in Zelda’s newly-completed story ‘The Original Follies Girl’ with its focus on achievement.

Zelda’s sad heroine, ironically named Gay, who receives $5,000 a
year alimony from an ex-husband ‘with a gift of fantasy’,
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has little need to work or marry, a state Zelda judges harshly. Without those two anchors that can lend women purpose or order, Gay drifts abroad as a New York showgirl, dreaming she can become a London theatre actress yet never settling to serious work. Instead she falls into aimless alcoholism and dies in childbirth. There is a sense of sin in Gay’s highly decorated dilettantism and Zelda’s heroine, like the style in which she is depicted, is evasive, elliptical and polished.

This story, like the others, is written in Zelda’s characteristic associative ‘spoken’ language. There is a guarded singular tone predicated on alienation from the familiar. There is a sense in which all six heroines wear masks, as Zelda does. Never sufficiently plot-driven and rather impressionistic, the stories are distinguished by trademarks similar to those in her paintings: an overload of visual metaphors, fragmentation, descriptive non sequiturs, caustic observation and bubbling non-linear ideas. They leave the reader with more questions than they answer. Zelda’s sensuous descriptions allow readers to smell the flowers in her writings, just as viewers can feel the texture of flesh in her paintings. Zelda never labelled herself a Southern writer in the way that she felt she was a Southern painter, yet in both arts her intensely Southern temperament focused on the dissolution of form into colour and the representation of emotion through colour.

There was already a startling congruence between Zelda’s untamed paintings and her tumultuous ballet life. Then came her sudden determination to extend this verbally in stories with the same focus on appearances. In her six ‘Girl’ stories, as in her painting, she looked at people’s souls through their appearance. ‘The Original Follies Girl’ is suffused with sounds, scents and scenery. Gay, a ‘very kaleidoscopic’ girl, who ‘made the rest of the chorus look like bologna sausages’, lived in a ‘silver apartment with mulberry carpets and lots of billowing old-blue taffeta’, which allowed the narrator and readers to ‘see how bored she must have been with her Louis XVI tea service and her grand piano, the huge silver vase that must have calla lilies in it and the white bearskin rug’. When the narrator last glimpsed Gay before she died tragically, leaving a small baby and an empty blue velvet trunk plastered with hotel labels that symbolized the activity of isolation, ‘she looked like a daffodil. She was taking a yellow linen sports thing for an airing and she reeked of a lemony perfume and Bacardi cocktails.’
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If the financial security in which Gay was embedded was one
impediment to fulfilling work, Zelda saw poverty as another. In ‘Poor Working Girl’, the second story to be written between winter 1928 and April 1929,
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twenty-year-old Eloise lives in a newly industrialized community with which she is as out of touch as she is with solid rural values. The possessor of a downstate college education, a talent for the ukulele, a fumbling grasp of shorthand and a flawless skin, she yearns for a Broadway career.

As Zelda is consistently ironic throughout all six stories about acting careers, which she proposes as the goal only of shallow young women, it is hard not to view the irony in ‘Poor Working Girl’ as a barbed attack on Lois Moran.

Eloise works as a babysitter while saving up for drama school in New York but never earns enough for the financial independence she needs (and Zelda herself craves). Inevitably she gives up the job, fails to achieve stardom, and we leave her working as a ‘pretty girl in the local power plant … [who] couldn’t really imagine achieving anything’.
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In a third story, ‘Southern Girl’, Harriet, Zelda’s heroine from Jeffersonville (modelled on Montgomery), is unique among Zelda’s aspiring heroines in that she holds two authentic remunerative jobs: one as a schoolteacher, the other supervising her family’s lodging house. Though single, she also has a more realistic appraisal of the compromises needed for marriage. Engaged to Dan, a laughing Northerner, she gives him up when she realizes, like Sally Carrol Happer in Scott’s ‘Ice Palace’, that she can never fit into Northern society or live up to a life of ‘leagues and organizations and societies for the prevention of things’ stipulated by Dan’s mother, a woman as formal and black and white as a printed page. But Zelda sees Harriet’s return to her patchwork of mundane responsibilities in the vine-clad smouldering deep South as ultimately unfulfilling, because her determination about ‘sticking to things’ meant she never attempted to ‘turn them into one bigger unit of a job’. When later Harriet meets Charles, a replica of Dan, she agrees to the compromise of a life ‘working for leagues and societies’ alongside Charles’s black-taffeta-clad widowed mother.
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‘Southern Girl’ is remarkable for its sensuous description of long clay roads, straggling pines, isolated cabins in sand patches and ‘far off in the distance the blue promise of hills.’ The city where ‘wistaria meets over the warm asphalt’ is a young world that every evening moves out of doors, a world where ‘telephones ring, and the lacy blackness under the trees disgorges young girls in white and pink, leaping over the squares of warm light toward the tinkling sound
with an expectancy that people have only in places where any event is a pleasant one’.
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It is the world in which Zelda grew up, the world in which she flourished, the world of pink and white and organdie events, now a world rewritten from an entirely different place where many events have become unpleasant ones.

Zelda was not alone in trying to recapture Southern magic in her fiction. Both Scott and Sara Haardt had been attempting it.

In November 1928 Scott had written ‘The Last of the Belles’, set in Tarleton, his version of Montgomery. Like Zelda’s ‘Southern Girl’ it has a nostalgic mood of loss. It offers a similar narrative of a popular Southern Belle jilted by a Northern soldier.
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That Scott might have felt anxious about Zelda following so closely on his heels is shown by a strange slip of his pen. In summer 1929, Ober asked Scott to choose one of his stories for a
Literary
Digest
anthology. Scott, we assume inadvertently, suggested Zelda’s ‘Southern Girl’. Hastily he wrote again to Ober: ‘When I suggested story for Lit Digest I accidentally said Southern Girl meaning Last of the Belles.’
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Sara Haardt’s Southern fiction, which covered similar territory to Zelda’s, had struggled into print while she combated illnesses even more serious than before. When Sara, who had missed Montgomery on a recent trip to Hollywood,
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returned home she found Mencken had missed her.
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They mended their temporary rift and she, like Scott and Zelda, began to recreate in her fiction the Southern homeland about which both she and Zelda felt so ambivalent. But in October 1928, before the Fitzgeralds had left for Europe, disease had once more shattered Sara’s hopes. Mencken rushed her into Union Memorial Hospital, Baltimore, for emergency surgery for gynaecological problems exacerbated by appendicitis. In November, Scott, perhaps linking Sara’s operation with Zelda’s surgery in Paris, wrote Sara a curious note. He congratulated her as he often did, on her ‘absolutely lyric’ writing, and added: ‘Terribly sorry to hear you’re sick. Please get well. Name it after me. Yours with insatiable Passion. Old Hot Shot Fitzgerald.’
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Sara did not get well. By July 1929 tuber culosis had infected her left kidney. There seemed no hope of total recovery. The doctors told Mencken she might live at best three years. Shocked and unutterably saddened, Mencken told Sara Mayfield he had vowed to marry his Sara as soon as she was strong enough, to make her last years the happiest of her life. He asked little Sara to be discreet; thus it was more than six months before Zelda and Scott or any Baltimore friends suspected they were engaged.

In hospital that summer, believing death was imminent, Sara repeated her final wish to be buried in Baltimore far from Alabama. Yet ironically, despite or perhaps because of her love-hate relationship with the sweet flowering tyrannical South, which only Zelda and Sara Mayfield fully understood, when she emerged from hospital in late 1929 she determined to rush out her Deep South novel
The
Making
of
a
Lady.

The Fitzgeralds reached Paris in April 1929 and settled into an apartment on rue Mézières near St Sulpice, to be greeted by several old friends. Esther Murphy had a surprise for them. For some years Esther’s sexual inclinations had led her towards women. Wickedly portrayed as the lesbian Bounding Bess in Djuna Barnes’s chronicle
Ladies
Almanack,
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she had been a rival for Natalie Barney’s sexual affections with Dolly Wilde, and had ended up in bed with Barney.
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But suddenly in March Esther had become engaged to the English economist and political writer John Strachey, and was eagerly planning her May wedding.

The Bishops now had an apartment in Paris as well as their Orgeval château, so the Fitzgeralds saw John as often and Margaret as little as possible, and met frequently with Townsend Martin. That spring Zelda met the English art critic Clive Bell whose avant-garde ideas impressed and influenced her. Sandy and Oscar Kalman were in Paris and Zelda instantly took them off to her ballet classes, where she had resumed rigorous group sessions in the mornings and a private class every afternoon with Egorova at the hot studio in rue Caumartin. ‘I worked constantly and was terribly superstitious and moody about my work, full of presentiments,’ she wrote. ‘I lived in a quiet, ghostly, hypersensitized world of my own. Scott drank.’
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Zelda saw herself as a priestess who had found an impersonal escape into a new world of self-expression.
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Egorova had become the focus of Zelda’s life, for whom she practised every evening and most of Sunday. ‘I had to work,’ wrote Zelda later, ‘because I couldn’t exist in the world without it.’
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Idealizing Egorova, seeing her as poor, pure and dedicated, she presented her daily with a symbolic bouquet of white gardenias. One evening in June, however, the intense Madame appeared to Zelda in a less pleasing light. The Fitzgeralds had taken her to dine at the luxurious George V restaurant. During dinner when Egorova responded with appreciation to Scott’s flirtation, Zelda moved from shock to anger.

Pauline and Ernest were now living at 6 rue de Ferou, but Pauline had begun to disapprove of the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway had
given Perkins strict instructions not to give Scott their address. The previous year Fitzgerald had insulted Ernest’s landlord, pissed on their front porch, almost broken down their front door at 4 a.m. and finally got Hemingway evicted. Ernest was determined Scott should not get them thrown out of this new apartment. Scott’s persistence persuaded Ernest to relent and invite them to dinner. Ernest and Zelda kept their mutual antagonism under wraps, but Scott registered a ‘certain coldness’ towards him from Ernest.
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Hemingway was completing
A
Farewell
to
Arms,
which Scott saw as another slight to his own slow progress.
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When Scott finally read it he wrote an officious undiplomatic letter admitting it was a ‘beautiful book’ but suggesting more than fifty cuts and corrections.
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Hemingway was furious. On the bottom of Scott’s letter he wrote ‘Kiss my ass. E.H.’
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Sara Mayfield, temporarily in Paris, stopped at the Deux Magots to find Zelda only just surviving a week-long party. ‘Nobody knows where it started, when it’ll end, or whose party it is,’ Zelda told Sara. ‘All of the people were white … But one of the women had slept with a Negro, a six-day bicycle racer, and a prizefighter that sniffs cocaine … Another one says she sleeps with men for money and women for fun.’
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Sara was disturbed at Zelda’s appearance. ‘There were triangular hollows under her cheek bones, and she was thin as a rail.’ Had her friend stopped eating? ‘No, I eat everything in sight,’ Zelda said. ‘But I work it off at the studio, straining and stretching and ending in nothing.’ She ached to begin life over again. ‘Really I do. I’d try so hard. Scott and I had it all – youth, love, money – and look how we’ve ended up, sitting around cafés, drinking and talking and quarreling with each other.’ Sara saw Zelda as ‘a soul lost in the mist on the moor’.
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Zelda admitted that most of their quarrels were about Hemingway. When Scott lurched over to join the women he told Sara that he and Ernest were quarrelling too, ‘like a pair of jealous prima donnas’, over the unsavoury machinations of Robert McAlmon.
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Scott, highly disturbed, had written to Max Perkins: ‘McAlmon is a bitter rat … Part of his quarrel with Ernest some years ago was because he assured Ernest I was a fairy – God knows he shows more creative imagination in his malice than in his work. Next he told Callaghan that Ernest was a fairy. He’s a pretty good person to avoid.’
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Morley Callaghan was a twenty-six-year-old Canadian writer, now published by Scribner’s, who with his wife met the Fitzgeralds
that spring. Callaghan, insufficiently deferential to Fitzgerald, found him cold and Zelda watchful and depressed. At an early meeting Scott read Morley one passage that had impressed him from
A
Farewell
to
Arms.
Morley, less impressed, said it was too deliberate, which annoyed Scott but pleased Zelda, who aired her view that Hemingway’s prose was ‘pretty damned Biblical’. Scott immediately told Zelda she was tired from dancing and sent her to bed, leaving the Callaghans startled at Zelda’s meek acquiescence. Later the couples dined together and Zelda talked animatedly about her writing, saying she wrote well; Scott offered no comment, and she disconcerted them all by laughing to herself until Scott again sent her to bed. On another occasion with the Callaghans Zelda again talked about her writing before suggesting they all went roller skating, whereupon Scott grabbed Zelda’s wrist and sent her home in a taxi. ‘It was if she knew he had command over her,’ Morley said, ‘she agreed meekly … suddenly she had said good night like a small girl and was whisked away from us.’ When Morley asked about Zelda’s dancing, Scott explained edgily that Zelda wanted to ‘have something for herself, be something herself’.
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