Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (48 page)

Zelda started to work as she had never worked in her life. In between her three weekly classes with Littlefield, she practised for hours every day, converting Ellerslie’s large front room into a ballet studio, screwing a barre onto the wall and purchasing a full-length gilt mirror. Each day, as she sweated earnestly over her exercises, she cherished each precious increment of progress, the extra pliancy in her spine, the suppleness of her legs as she forced them higher into
battements,
developés,
attitudes.
Even when visitors came to the house, Zelda frequently continued to practise, working her body as she talked.

At times it seemed to her that she had never been so well. Dancing demanded a clean, orderly space in her life, and it demanded detachment. Zelda had always been dependent on the admiring gaze of an audience; now she cared only for the judgement of her mirror, studying herself critically against the standards of her new art form.

But if Zelda felt liberated, Scott grew increasingly irritated. The sound of her practice music, drifting self-righteously into his study, grated on his nerves. He hated the intensity with which Zelda gazed at herself in that ‘Whorehouse Mirror’, as if she had forgotten he and Scottie existed,
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and he was genuinely afraid that Zelda was setting herself up for disappointment. Her expectations seemed to Scott to be crazily high. Even though he knew nothing about ballet, he assumed that she must have started too late to achieve the greatness of which she spoke.

In the autumn, Celia, the daughter of one of Scott’s cousins came to stay with them for a few days, and after taking her on a sightseeing trip to New York it was agreed that they would break their return journey in Philadelphia, so that Zelda could take her class. Celia, who’d studied a little dance herself, asked if she might come and watch, and Scott agreed to accompany her, both curious and anxious to see how Zelda measured up in public. It was far, far worse than he feared. Surrounded by younger dancers, several of them more highly trained, Zelda appeared to Scott to be struggling badly. Ever since he’d met her, Zelda had always been the most striking woman in the room: in Littlefield’s studio, she looked shockingly stiff and exposed.

Celia was also disconcerted by Zelda’s performance, and her embarrassment was too much for Scott to bear. He left the studio in search of a drink, and by the time they met up to catch the train home he was weaving and staggering, barely coherent. To Celia’s surprise, however, Zelda seemed barely to notice Scott’s condition; she was still in a state of heightened preoccupation, musing over the class she had just left. More and more their marriage seemed to be surviving through distance as they hived off small parts of themselves, creating compartments for work, for drinking, for parenting, as well as for their separate dreams.

Zelda tried hard to live inside the space of her dancing, but the accumulating resentments of their marriage were always waiting for her. The flirtation with Lois still rankled. It was, as Scott later acknowledged, his own revenge for Zelda’s affair with Edouard, and back in May he had actually invited Lois to stay at Ellerslie, to join a weekend party of guests. Zelda had managed to maintain a veneer of politeness, but only by drinking as much as everyone else, which was a great deal. At one point the party was gathered around the radio, listening to news of Charles Lindbergh’s successful solo flight from America to France. It had been a heroic trajectory, and to Zelda it seemed to inhabit a sphere shamingly different from the ‘putrid drunkenness’ in which she and her guests were mired down below.
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The tension of holding her marriage together and being a good mother to Scottie, whilst also focusing on her work, took its toll on Zelda’s health. A raw itching rash spread over her neck and in the creases of her elbows, a warning flare-up of the eczema that would increasingly plague her. One night she wound herself into such a hysterical state that a doctor had to be called to administer a shot of morphine. Yet she would not admit to outsiders that anything was wrong. In February the following year, she and Scott stumbled into one of the worst rows of their marriage. He was drunk, unhappy and easily goaded, and they ended up trading insults so hateful that Scott, very unusually, hit her.

Zelda’s sister Rosalind was staying; and at the sight of Zelda’s bleeding nose and the purple bruise swelling around her eye, she tried to persuade her to leave Scott. Zelda refused to hear a word against her husband or her marriage, though. They loved each other, she said; they lived as they chose. And when they returned to Paris a few weeks later she still clung to the hope that the city might work some redemptive spell.

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Zelda’s hopes for Paris were not only for her and Scott. She believed she had made sufficient progress at her ballet barre to be accepted as a pupil by Lubov Egorova, the former Russian ballerina who had taught Littlefield. As soon as she and Scott had settled into their new apartment, close to the Luxembourg Gardens, Zelda went to Egorova’s studio to beg for admittance to her class. Egorova was tiny and perfect, with huge serious eyes and exquisite hands; she had danced for the Tsar’s Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg as well as for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but was now retired from the stage, living in Paris with her husband Prince Troubetzkoy. She listened quietly to Zelda’s petition and, moved by her determination as well as her money (Zelda was prepared to pay $300 tuition fees a month), she agreed to take her on.

From this moment on, Egorova’s bare, unheated studio over the Olympia Music Hall in rue Caumartin became the sacred centre of Zelda’s world. She believed she was undergoing a spiritual transformation in Egorova’s class, finally able to ‘drive the devils’ that had controlled her in the past,
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and to discipline herself into a pure conduit for her art. Later she tried to explain to Scott, ‘I wanted to dance well so that [Egorova] would be proud of me and have another instrument for the symbols of beauty that passed in her head.’
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Yet the higher Zelda aspired, the more frustrated she became with her own limitations. She hated her body for its gross physical resistance, its stupidity, its age: her ‘legs felt like dangling hams’, her breasts ‘hung like old English dugs’. Revulsion spurred her to work harder, and her body acquired a flayed, bruised look as she lost weight and accumulated small injuries. Even at night she continued to battle with her body, sleeping with her feet wedged through the bars of the bedstead, her toes ‘glued outwards’ in order to improve her classical turnout.
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Her friends grew afraid of the unreal expectations she was setting herself. That summer Gerald and Sara went to watch Zelda in class, and were as upset by her performance as Scott had been in Philadelphia. The Murphys understood something of ballet – they had spent a great deal of time among Diaghilev’s dancers – and they saw how disproportionate Zelda’s efforts were to her talent. ‘There was something dreadfully grotesque in her intensity,’ Gerald recalled. ‘One could see the muscles individually stretch and pull … It was really terrible. One held one’s breath until it was over.’
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Yet it was impossible to reason with her, for she said simply that she was no longer able to function without her ‘work’. At home she seemed to have become a phantom presence, uninterested in either her family or the world outside ballet. Even Zelda herself acknowledged the extent of her withdrawal into ‘a quiet, ghostly, hypersensitised world of my own’.
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Scott and Zelda’s quarrels, when they had the energy for them, no longer had the power to shift the stalemate of their marriage. Sara Mayfield, Zelda and Tallulah’s friend from Montgomery, was in Paris at this time, enrolled on a course at the Sorbonne, and she was one of the few people to whom Zelda confessed how things stood. After one fight Scott and she hadn’t spoken to each other for days: ‘When we meet in the hall, we walk around each other like a pair of stiff-legged terriers, spoiling for a fight.’
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Each felt betrayed by the other. Zelda was hurt by Scott’s refusal to take her dancing seriously; Scott felt he had been deserted. He had recently exulted over an invitation to meet his literary hero James Joyce at dinner; but although Zelda had compliantly accompanied him, she had participated little in the evening – her thoughts drifting back to the ballet studio. Scott barely recognized her as the woman he had married: ‘She no longer read or thought or knew anything or liked anyone except dancers and their cheap satellites. People respected her … because of a certain complete fearlessness and honesty that she has never lost, but she was becoming more and more an egotist and a bore.’
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That autumn they returned to Ellerslie, where the lease on the house still had six months to run. If Scott hoped that detaching Zelda from Egorova would diminish her obsession, however, she had no intention of giving up her studies. She simply transferred to the studio of Alexander Gavrilov, another former Diaghilev dancer, now based in Philadelphia. She was painting again, too, experimental oils in which she attempted to express in thick urgent brush strokes the sensations of ecstasy and exhaustion she experienced in the ballet studio.

Within the calm of Ellerslie, she also resumed her writing. The magazine
College Humor,
which had already published two of her articles, had approached her with a commission for half a dozen short stories, about ‘girls’ of the modern type. The fictions that Zelda began to write were in some ways variations of her own story: in each she portrayed a different woman whose attempt to fulfil herself was blocked by some essential failure of nerve, or by the constraint of her husband. But while she found character and dialogue difficult to master, her descriptions of place and atmosphere were a rich sensual swarm of words, evocations of velvety nights and organdie-dressed girls in ‘Southern Girl’ and of a vibrating New York in ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’.

Scott was generous in his appreciation. It was one of his more lovable traits that even when he despaired over his own gifts, he was able to recognize and nurture those of others. The following year he told Max Perkins that he thought Zelda’s style had ‘a strange haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new’. Later, he would even go so far as to admit that she was ‘a great original, her flame at its most intense burned higher than mine’.
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But having two writers at work in Ellerslie proved difficult. At one level Scott welcomed the feeling that their marriage was, once again, a shared project. He willingly involved himself in the practicalities of her commission, using his own agent, Ober, to write her contract. He gave Zelda advice in the shaping and focusing of her prose. But to see her writing so easily was a rebuke to his own struggles. While he was turning out his own short stories with profitable facility, his new novel continued to slip away from him ‘like a dream’.
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And if Scott couldn’t but be competitive with Zelda, she felt a comparable rivalry with him. Her editor, H.N. Swanson, was insistent that Scott’s name should appear as co-author. Part of her acceded to the financial logic, as it doubled, even trebled, the fee for each story, and at this point she required the money to pay for her ballet lessons. Even though Scott gave her a generous allowance, she wanted her dancing career to be hers alone, not something gifted to her by Scott. Yet another part of Zelda was furiously diminished by the sharing of her byline. On the original manuscripts of her stories she crossed out Scott’s name, writing in angry black pen, ‘No! Me.’ And when the last of the stories was sold to the
Saturday Post
in March 1930 and appeared under Scott’s name alone, it was a bitter blow. Scott’s agent argued that the
Post
had wanted to distinguish it from the stories published by
College Humor,
and had paid well for the privilege, but Zelda felt only the betrayal.

Trust and communication were fragile threads in their marriage now, hard to forge and easy to break. That autumn, when Hemingway came to stay at Ellerslie, it took very little time for him to inflict a great deal of casual destruction. He was no longer married to Hadley – somewhat counter to his own principles, he’d fallen in love with a lively, stylish American journalist, Pauline Pfeiffer, with whom he had recently had a son. To Zelda, his visit was an all-too-predictable violation as Ernest and Scott got drunk together and Scott lent Ernest money they could ill afford. But even more stressful was the presence of Patrick, Hemingway’s sunny, robust little boy.

The sight of this baby, and of Pauline’s maternal pleasure in him, was a painful reminder that she herself had failed to conceive again. It was months since she and Scott had made love, and often they were simply too exhausted and preoccupied to care. But when Ernest boasted about Patrick’s adorable temperament, and joked that he was always available to sire the perfect child, the issue became a treacherous one. They began to argue, dangerously, about sex. Zelda baited Scott by saying that he was unimaginative in bed and that his penis was too small,
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and in retaliation he said she could not possibly be satisfied by him or any other man because she was in love with Egorova and with half the women at rue Jacob.

These were wincingly sensitive areas, but by the time the two of them were headed back to Europe the following March, they had passed beyond all bounds of reticence. During one argument on board ship, Scott accosted a female passenger to ask if women preferred men’s penises ‘to be large or small’. Zelda furiously rounded on him, calling him a pathetic embarrassment, and he punished her shortly afterwards by forcing anal intercourse on her. It was the lowest point in their marriage, she later told him, ‘the most humiliating and bestial thing that ever happened to me’.
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And as she recoiled from Scott, Zelda also began, half consciously, to fulfil his fears.