Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (10 page)

Janno proudly pretends not to care. She will try to be attractive, to ensure she is ‘well received’. She will strive for popularity, make the best of the broken circumstances. But in her mind something says: ‘But what you do is to suffocate the soul because you do care and it would be better to cry.’ Zelda believes that self-respect and survival ensure a traumatized woman forgets. She ‘relegates that sort of thing to the ash can until years later’.
49

Though this very strong evidence for Zelda’s early tragedy is
fictional
, it would seem to be autobiographically accurate; but it will
also have been influenced by later clinical traumas. Most significant incidents in Zelda’s fiction do have autobiographical triggers. Black moments patently clouded the well-documented Alabama
sunshine
. The Gold Dust Twins are substantial models for Dan and Anton, her imaginative creations.

Another piece of factual evidence relates to this very important incident. Zelda was known for her extreme coquetry, which can be explained in two relevant ways. To some extent Zelda was
influenced
by the Southern code that demanded flirtatiousness in women, and by the effects of World War I on modern American women which deterred them from exclusive commitment.
50
But her purposefully capricious sexual style could also be rooted in the violent girlhood incident Scott refers to. Recent research shows that most girls who have been sexually abused grow up sexualizing their friendships, sometimes physically, usually emotionally and often verbally through heavy sexual banter. As Janno in Zelda’s novel explains, the original trigger for this behaviour is often
suppressed
for many years.

It is also relevant that the young beaux’ code of courtesy and honour in a town where the Bible was read and memorized was set against their knowledge that possum hunting, military escapades, adulation of male violence and lynchings were as routine as
courting
and weddings.

These of course were to be abruptly changed by the war, as indeed was Zelda. She recalled how before the war ‘there was scarcely a ripple in our lives; life itself seemed serene and almost smugly secure.’
51
Montgomery, which she later fictionalized as Jeffersonville in ‘Southern Girl’, was a sleepy town: ‘Nothing ever seems to happen …; the days pass, lazily gossiping in the warm sun. A lynching, an election, a wedding, catastrophes, and business booms all take on the same value, rounded, complete, dusted by the lush softness of the air in a climate too hot for any but sporadic effort.’
52

Then on 6 April 1917 the USA declared war on Germany.

‘Suddenly, almost the next day – everything was changed. Life had suddenly become exciting, dangerous; a crazy vitality
possessed
us … the War came … we couldn’t afford to wait, for fear it would be gone forever: so we pitched in furiously, dancing every night and riding up and down the moonlit roads and even
swimming
in the gravel pools under the white Alabama moon … Oh, we did wild, silly things – often incredible things – but oftenest with a sense of tragedy.’
53

Montgomery was besieged by soldiers from nearby Camp Sheridan and aviators from Camp Taylor. ‘The war brought men to town like swarms of benevolent locusts eating away the blight of unmarried women that had overrun the South since its economic decline.’
54

Belles’ habits changed. They hurried through their self-conscious rituals of five o’clock swims when the sun went down followed by languid six o’clock sodas in order to join ‘the taller, broader, older youth in uniform’. According to
Caesar’s
Things,
‘the town smelt of khaki’, there was a ‘general air of the felicity of romance about. The girls were prettier than the shop windows … One had to be in love … the city staggered with the impact of love.’
55

Zelda’s circle entered new kinds of courtships. Katharine Elsberry recalled: ‘We had a date with a different boy each night of the week.’ By 1918 Katharine had eloped with a Canadian stationed at Camp Sheridan, partly because Northern soldiers were a novelty but also, as she told Zelda, because of ‘sexual curiosity’. Afraid to break the news to her family, she called Zelda and asked her to tell them.
56

‘There weren’t enough girls to go round‚’ wrote Zelda. ‘Girls too tall or too prim … were dragged from their spinsterly pursuits to dance with the soldiers … You can imagine how the popular ones fared!’
57

The most popular was Zelda. Admirers from Auburn University had already founded a fraternity based on her initials: Zeta Sigma. Zelda now added the military to fraternity boys and football heroes. Uniformed beaux swarmed her sagging veranda, which looked like a recruiting station. In her glove box she collected the soldiers’ gold and silver insignia which they threw down before her as tributes.

‘It was strange what things the war did to us … Of course I suppose, it goes back further than that, but it was as if everything in the air, in life, sort of led up to it.’
58
For Zelda war intensified the feeling of life’s fragility. A youth spent in Montgomery is time spent in a past that is always present, where the only currency is the
imminent
possibility of death. Zelda had both always known it yet never known it until now. Once the war began, soldiers left and did not return. Aviators were flung from the skies and did not rise. Suddenly her particular Southern past had converged with the national wartime present.

But she was only seventeen. She did not yet want to think about it. In time she would acknowledge those feelings in her fiction and painting, but for now she is off to the wartime dances.

‘I danced every night‚’ she recalled, ‘… but the ones I enjoyed most were the privates’ dances down in the dirty old City Hall
auditorium.
Only a few girls went … it was supposed to be rough … there were no officers present – there weren’t even any
intermissions
because there weren’t enough girls to go round.’

At those dances she still could not dismiss that sense of tragedy. ‘We even danced by sad, wailing tunes, for it was just about then that the blues came in‚’ she said.
59
But there was a new element at the dances: something not tragic at all.

As the leading Belle at the Country Club, Zelda had the pick of the Montgomery bluebloods. But her romantic sensibility had attached itself to wider horizons, more sophisticated dreams of urban glamour, worldly success, swimming in a larger pond than Montgomery. When the Yankee army came to Camp Sheridan her attention was caught by new kinds of officers. There were
midwestern
Babbitts, Southern sharecroppers and rich Yankees. One night there was a young fellow from St Paul, Minnesota. He was a blond first lieutenant in the 67th Infantry whom she would later draw as a paper doll with pink shirt, red tie and brown angel’s wings.

Zelda was performing a solo, ‘The Dance of the Hours’. He stood at the edge of the dance floor and watched her.

She didn’t ask his name. But he told her anyway. He was Scott Fitzgerald.